Actress Gabrielle Drake (sister of musician Nick Drake) in character as Lt. Gay Ellis from UK television show, ‘UFO.’
 
Television program UFO made its debut in 1970, in the UK and Canada. It came out a bit later in the U.S. The show was the creation of dynamic husband and wife duo, Gerry and Sylvia Anderson—who were best known for their pioneering kid-oriented “Supermarionation” shows such as Thunderbirds. The futuristic storyline for UFO takes place in the not-so-distant year of 1980, and it was honestly pretty gnarly for prime time viewing as it presents the scenario of a ragtag fleet of dying aliens coming to earth to harvest human organs in order to sustain their existence. No big deal. Among the members of the large ensemble cast were Gabrielle Drake (the sister of musician Nick Drake), Polish actor, Vladek Sheybal (who is likely best known for his portrayal of chess master Kronsteen in the 1963 James Bond film From Russia with Love), and model/actress Shakira Baksh who would wed actor Michael Caine in 1973. The show had much in common with 1969’s Doppelgänger (AKA Journey to the Far Side of the Sun, its better known title)—the Anderson’s’ first project to use human beings—including many of the same props, sets and even actors.

UFO was an instant hit, due much in part to the special effects created by the talented Derek Meddings which took approximately a year to develop. Meddings would go on to do special effects for several James Bond films and the pyrotechnics for every live Pink Floyd show in 1975 during their Wish You Were Here tour. Another element of any successful TV show is the development and visual appeal of its cast of characters, and as I mentioned earlier, UFO‘s actors did not disappoint. Here, we are going to focus on the lovely ladies who were a part of SHADO (the acronym for Supreme Headquarters, Alien Defence Organisation) who always looked cool even in the face of an alien invasion. The most memorable characters got to wear badass purple-hued wigs and silver catsuits which made them look like go-go dancers from the future. There was also some risky looking fishnet worn by members of the cast during “underwater” sequences—a far cry from the basic turtlenecks, jumpsuits, and clerical-style jackets worn by the members of SHADO.

The show ran until 1973 and inspired a line of collectible toys and model kits based on the far-out vehicles and spaceships featured in the series, many still coveted by collectors to this day. If you had either forgotten about this television gem (which was a precursor to the Anderson’s last collaboration, Space 1999 starring Martin Landau and Barbara Bain) or were unfamiliar with it until now, you are going to love the groovy images of the fictional female members of SHADO posted below. 
 

One of the lovely ladies of SHADO.
 

Actress/model Shakira Baksh/Caine.
 

Fishnet shirts are futuristic.
 
More after the jump…

Artist Keith Haring painting Grace Jones in 1986 on the set of ‘Vamp.’
 
Grace Jones was 36 in 1984 when she, Andy Warhol, Robert Mapplethorpe, and pop artist Keith Haring all converged in Mapplethorpe’s studio in New York City. The reason for the epic get-together was to shoot photos of Jones covered in body paint done by Haring in his distinctive style. The session lasted a marathon eighteen hours during which Jones was photographed by Mapplethorpe adorned by Haring’s body paint, a towering headdress and an ornate “skirt.” Orchestrated by Warhol—who had introduced Haring to Jones a few years prior—Andy had been wanting to feature Jones on the cover of Interview magazine and believed that an artistic collaboration between Haring and Jones would be awesome. And he wasn’t wrong. However, Mapplethorpe and Warhol didn’t exactly click despite Mapplethorpe’s desire to be among Warhol’s ever-growing gang of muses, friends, and hanger-ons. In fact, during the photo shoot, it has been alleged that Mapplethorpe attempted to sabotage Warhol while he was taking photos of Jones by requesting Andy not use his flash in his studio. Meow.

Haring’s handiwork on Jones’ magnificent bodyscape was not the first time he used a live human as a canvas. In 1983 Haring painted Bill T. Jones, the legendary Tony Award-winning dancer, choreographer and cofounder of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company. This session was photographed by Tseng Kwong Chi, a prominent figure in the downtown NYC art scene.

Getting back to Haring’s work with Grace Jones, he would get to paint the Jamaican goddess more than once, including when Grace performed live at the Paradise Garage before the much-loved gay-club closed its doors. Perhaps most memorably Haring would use Jones’ body as his canvas when she landed the role of Katrina the Queen of The Vampires in the 1986 film Vamp. The look Jones cultivated for Katrina is said to be based on the character played by actress Daryl Hannah in the 1982 film Blade Runner—at least when it comes to Jones’ startling red wig and face makeup. For Jones’ 1986 video for the song “I’m Not Perfect (But I’m Perfect for You),” Haring was enlisted to paint the massive 60-foot white skirt Jones wears in the video. The video also includes time-lapse footage of Haring painting the giant skirt and a brief appearance by Andy Warhol—one of his very last before he passed away three months later on February 22, 1987.

I’ve posted images of Jones “wearing” her famous body paint done by Keith Haring as well as photos of Bill T. Jones looking like her muscular male doppelgänger. You can also watch footage of Grace Jones stripping down to her Haring body paint in a clip from Vamp and the video for “I’m Not Perfect (But I’m Perfect for You).” Much of what follows is NSFW.
 

Jones in body paint and adornments by Haring, photographed by Robert Mapplethorpe in his NYC studio in 1984.
 

Another shot of Jones by Mapplethorpe.
 

A cheeky shot of Haring and Jones.
 
Much more after the jump…

Paul McCartney.
 
John Wayne got all those cowboys wrong. So did Clint Eastwood, come to that. Most cowboys didn’t wear Stetsons or ten-gallon hats on two-pint heads but generally anything that came to hand. What came to hand for most cowboys in the late 1800s was the bowler hat. It was durable, strong, and didn’t fly off a cowboy’s head when galloping on horseback across the prairie.

That was partly the reason why the bowler was invented. London hatmakers Thomas and William Bowler were asked by a client, Edward Coke, in 1849 to come up with a hat that wouldn’t be easily knocked off or damaged by low-hanging tree branches when worn by riders or gamekeepers. Most people wore top hats when riding which weren’t very practical. The brothers came up with a design of a hard felt hat with a rounded crown and an upturned brim to give shade and keep off the rain. As the story goes, when Coke was presented with his new hat he threw it on the floor and stamped on it several times. As the bowler withstood his fearsome attack, Coke picked it up, dusted it off, and paid twelve shillings for it.

From that first sale, the bowler became the hat of choice among the working class. It was quickly exported across the world. It was soon being worn by cowboys, sheriffs, laborers, ditch diggers, snake oil salesmen, and politicians. In America, the bowler or the derby as it was called, became”the hat that won the west,” despite all what John Wayne and those American western movies tell ya.

Few hats have been as popular, or as successful, and even on occasion, as subversive, as the bowler. This old hat is the symbol of everyman. It has far-reaching associations with lowly workers and city traders; with the rogues of the Wild West like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid; the decadence of the Weimar Republic (see Cabaret); the Surrealist movement (the work and dress code of the artist René Magritte); iconic movie stars like Charlie Chaplin and Laurel and Hardy; deadly Bond villains like Oddjob and Nick Nack; the Ministry for Silly Walks and stand-up comics like Jerry Sadowitz; and literature like Waiting for Godot and A Clockwork Orange.

It also has links to more controversial groups like the Orange Order, the group of Protestants who march in their suits and bowler hats every twelfth of July to ironically celebrate a battle the Pope of Rome wanted their hero, William of Orange, to win. In South America, the bowler is now part of the dress of Quechua women after it was first introduced by British workers in the 1800s.

This rich mix of bowler hat wearers led me to collect together a brief gallery of suitably iconic and hopefully interesting pictures. Do feel free to add to with your own bowler hat suggestions below.
 

Anita Ekberg.
 

Malcolm McDowell as Alex in Kubrick’s ‘A Clockwork Orange.’
 

The iconic cover to Anthony Burgess’ novel ‘A Clockwork Orange.’
 

Liza Minelli as Sally Bowles from ‘Cabaret.’
 
More people sporting bowlers, after the jump….
 

 
The administrator of Bats Day in the Fun Park, widely known to many, unofficially, as “Goth Day at Disneyland” recently issued a statement declaring that the event, now in its twentieth year, would no longer be organized, citing rising costs and the extra tax burden caused by Trump’s new tax laws.

According to the Bats Day in the Fun Park press release:

The new tax laws going into effect in 2018 (and impacting every American’s returns when they’re filed in 2019) no longer allow small businesses to deduct anything from their taxes—and Bats Day would also be taxed on any money that comes into the event before anything gets paid out to the event’s vendors. Bats Day already barely breaks even, so adding this set of burdens makes things really tough for us. They force us to raise certain prices and otherwise jeopardize the event’s logistics. On top of this, we’ve been priced out of the hotel we held our events in for the past eight years, reducing our chances to keep this event happening for the community even further.

They did add that goths and deathrockers could still meet up on the scheduled weekend for one last Bats Day blowout—the 20th annual Bats Day in the Fun Park weekend will be held May 5-6, 2018, with an estimated 7,000+ people expected to attend.

Scheduled events include:
- The Bats Day Dark Park™: Concert event with performers to be announced soon.
- The Bats Day Black Market: A spooky shopping experience with over 75 unique vendors.
- The Bats Day in the Fun Park trip to Disneyland, CA: the world-famous event that wraps up the weekend, where attendees are encouraged to participate in as many photo opportunities and meet-up locations as they can, culminating in a “spooktacular Photo Event and Ride Experience through Disneyland’s classic Haunted Mansion attraction.”

Though certain official events are expected to cease due to the new tax laws and rising cost of operations, it is expected that goth meet-ups will continue to take place at Disneyland for years to come.

Trump, try as he might, can’t keep a good goth down.

 
Most young men in the sixties didn’t look like Charlie Manson in beads and a kaftan. Most wore button-down shirts, drainpipes, and sported short hair. Despite all those documentaries television likes to feed us (e.g. The Sixties), not everyone was at Woodstock. Not everyone was out of their tits on LSD. Not everyone looked like an unwashed extra from The Walking Dead. Most people looked normal. Lived average lives. Wore everyday clothes. It might be nice for the TV execs and the film studios and those with something to sell to make us all think kids in the sixties were far-out freaks who lived off a diet of mind-blowing drugs, sex, and rock ‘n’ roll—certainly a few did and many of them were wannabe or fully-fledged rock stars—but most were like the young men in these photographs—straight, average, happy, and quite dull. Just like the rest of us.

I look at these pictures and see most of my wardrobe—the narrow lapels, the straight-leg pants, the white tees, and the plaid shirts. Denim and cheesecloth ain’t something for me. Indeed, most of these outfits wouldn’t look out of place today, though I’m fairly sure future generations will look back at this decade and believe all young men had man-buns, waxed their beards into novel designs, wore tartan waistcoats with striped shirts and polka-dot bow ties and were master artisans who knitted their own yoghurt.
 

 

 

 
More real-life fashions from the swinging sixties, after the jump…
 

 
When you share a bedroom with a sibling you’re not too bothered about privacy, well, that is until you start growing hair down there or get tired of their taste in music/jokes/conversation or maybe just their lack of personal hygiene.

I shared a bedroom with my brother until I was in my teens when our parents moved up a rung to a quiet leafy terrace by the edge of a river. We then got rooms of our own. He was older so had first dibs and unselfishly picked the larger of the two. I got the six by ten study-cum-nursery-cum-guest room which still had some of its old yellow wallpaper of puppy dogs and cats and orange-winged butterflies.

Like every other brat, I soon covered the walls with posters and photographs and newspaper clippings—just like the kinda stuff youngsters keep on their smartphones today. I was under the mistaken belief I was expressing some unacknowledged aspect of my personality rather than just giving free advertising to rich people who didn’t really need it.

Yes, I was young and I was foolish (and probably far too serious for my own good) but I had a space to call my own. Just like these young boys and girls from the 1980s, who’ve got their rooms and their posters and growing sense of who they’re maybe going to be.
 

 

 

 
More teens in their rooms, after the jump…
 

A woman having her hair styled by Frans Van Oers in 1971.
 
The lovely lady pictured at the top of this post is getting the mother of all holiday hairdos by Dutch stylist Frans Van Oers in 1971. It seems that this kind of holiday hair was a thing in the Netherlands as Van Oers was not the only stylist creating these whimsical types of yuletide hairdos. Another Dutchman, Robert Engelander, was also known for coming up with extravagant holiday-themed hairstyles.

A different kitschy throwback when it comes to decorating your head for the holidays was the invention of the Christmas tree hat. The hats were popularized during the 1950s and 1960s—though you’ve probably seen at least a few festive folks wearing modern adaptations around town during December. However, nothing quite beats the vintage awesomeness of the Christmas tree hats/hair I’ve dug up for you today. Merry Christmas!
 

 

A Christmas-themed updo by Dutch stylist Robert Engelander.
 

YES.
 
More after the jump…

 
Seriously, the wealth of batty—pun intended—images from the 1960s never ceases to amaze me. Here we have the foremost pop artist of the era and the foremost German avant garde chanteuse of the era posing as Robin and Batman for Esquire magazine in 1966.

The Batman TV series had taken to the airwaves in the start of 1966. Before the year was out, it would spawn a feature movie. Almost certainly the caped crusader was on everyone’s lips that year; as we all know, the show is simply a supreme example of kid-friendly absurdism that even something like Pee-wee’s Playhouse can’t quite touch. Warhol was interested in Batman as a subject of pop art. In addition to the image above, there was also his 1964 movie Batman Dracula, which is said to be the first camp treatment of Batman.

The photographer who took the pics was Frank Bez. One of the images was used in an interesting little feature called “Remember the Sixties?” It seems likely that this was the introductory page for a series of photographs. The point of the feature was how incredibly much of note had been squeezed into just six years of our nation’s history, which is the exact thing that we all think when we think about that era. The really strange thing is that from our perspective, they were just getting going, the next five years or so would be incredibly active on the cultural front.

By the way, here’s the text. It’s by David Newman and Robert Benton, and it’s very good indeed:
 

What? Has it really been just six years, or are we all going crazy? It seems like it’s been the Sixties forever. Otherwise why is everybody so exhausted all the time? The Sixties have been so packed with hysteria, so intense and frenetic, so rocking and rolling, so pop and so op, that they have well nigh obliterated all that came before. Of course, one of the reasons for this is that nothing came before.

Nothing was known as the Fifties. It had…uh…Ike, remember? And…uh…J.D. Salinger…and, er…West Coast Jazz…(yawn)...come to think of it (pace Joe McCarthy), nothing happened in the Fifties. That’s why it seems that everything’s happening, baby, in the Sixties. Luminaries come and go faster than a speeding bullet. Fads and fashions flame up and burn out in a week. The last six years have been so filled with people, places and things you have already forgotten about that this seems like a good time to call a halt. We have had enough! Enough!

And so we benevolently announce that the Sixties are over. Let six years be a decade. Let the next four be a vacation.

 
It’s a very refreshing aspect of Warhol’s personality that he could so easily let Nico be the one in the Batman suit. Warhol was manipulative as all get-out and he certainly was interested in power, but the side of power that required him to be seen as the masculine rule-maker (and therefore Nico’s master) just didn’t interest him in the slightest, and the comfort with which he inhabits Robin’s duds is palpable.

On the Internet they are almost always identified as having been taken in 1967, but they weren’t, they were taken in 1966.
 

 

 
More after the jump…

 
A native of Dayton, Ohio, Patrick Nagel was a graphic artist who incorporated idealized images of women in lush, 2D settings that tended to call to mind a particularly sybaritic mutation of Art Deco. His images are well-nigh synonymous with the decade of the 1980s and are especially associated with the band Duran Duran, because the band used one of Nagel’s images on its 2nd LP, 1982’s Rio. His images frequently appeared in Playboy. There’s a vague mental association between Nagel’s work and über-yuppie Patrick Bateman, the protagonist of American Psycho, book and movie both.

Sadly, Nagel scarcely had time to enjoy the wider recognition that his association with Duran Duran brought him, as he was found dead of a myocardial infarction heart attack on February 4, 1984.

Success is seldom an unalloyed good. Even as it elevates an artist into widespread visibility, it might equally well consign the work to an artistic ghetto in the same act. You might get big, but there’s no saying that you won’t get typecast or pigeonholed or called tacky in the process.
 

 
The particular ghetto that Nagel’s work landed in is indisputably the general category of beauty salons, including nail salons and tanning salons. There’s something about Nagel’s frank invocation of conventional and affluent (and white) beauty that appears to have resonated with the advertisers within that sector, to the point that it has stopped being a signifier of the 1980s, at least in that setting. One might say that every beauty salon has a piece of Nagel art around somewhere—and if it doesn’t, it should have one.

Many of the “Nagel” images you see in beauty salons aren’t by Nagel at all, of course. Paying royalties to famous artists is nobody’s idea of a good time. In the middle of this post you can see an authentic product of Nagel’s artistry. I’m not a forensic art expert, but it’s clear enough that most if not all of the other images here are, erm, “heavily influenced” by Nagel. Indeed, it’s likely that an attorney insisted on it.
 

 

 
Sooooo much more after the jump….....
 

 
I’m pretty sure jokey Christmas sweaters produced in the last several years must by now outnumber the entire total of sincere (if ghastly) ones made since the invention of those oddly specific garments, but once in a while, it’s still possible for one to pop up and make me say “OH, SHIT, I WANT ONE!” It’s been a good two years since that happened (that was when Einstürzende Neubauten produced one, and that was really just a t-shirt), but I just stumbled across one that’s got me wondering if I can maybe cross a couple of giftees off of this year’s nice list so I can afford one for myself—a Motörhead Warpig Christmas sweater. An unofficial one was produced a few years back but promptly got yanked—at the time my DM colleague Martin Schneider called on the band to produce an official one, and it looks like his Christmas wish was granted.
 

 
The Warpig logo, sometimes spelled “War-Pig,” and also variously known as “Snaggletooth” and “The Iron Boar,” has graced all but two of Motörhead’s album covers and been on countless t-shirts, and has also inspired rings, pendants, bottle openers, and even a rubber mask by the celebrated Rick “SikRik” Fisher, also known for his line of DEVO Booji Boy masks. It was designed by Joe Pentagno, an erstwhile Hipgnosis associate who was previously best known for the Icarus logo he designed for Led Zeppelin’s Swan Song imprint. Shortly after Lemmy Kilmister’s death, Pentagno discussed the origin of the logo with Team Rock:

[Lemmy] wasn’t clear on exactly what he wanted, something like a knight or a rusty robot as I remember, a biker patch that could be displayed on the back of a denim vest.

On the way home I stopped off at the library in Chelmsford. Taking my cue from outlaw biker patches, I was looking for skulls and bones when I inadvertently came across a book of animal skulls, then it hit me; an animal skull would work better than a human skull. When I got home and began sketching, I thought; why not invent a new skull, a hybrid? I started playing around with mix and match sketches dog – lion, wolf and so on. In the end I settled on a dog or wolf and gorilla cranium and gave it over-sized wild boar teeth. I hung a chain from the horns left to right under it and a small human skull to designate size, adorned it with an iron cross as a sign of bravery and then topped it off with a few spikes.

When it was finished, I knew I had created something unique and timeless in Snaggletooth. It was the ultimate anti-everything symbol. I look at it this way, there’s is an inherent urge in most individuals to shout and be heard above the din and frenzy of life, and Snaggletooth is a great symbol for standing firm, resisting, rejecting, refusing and rebelling against anything and everything that is detrimental to one’s individuality.

If the $125 asking price for the sweater is too dear, $30 will get you a suitably profane Warpig Christmas tee, or a proper winter cap can be yours for just $20.
 

 
Continues after the jump…