From 1976 to the mid-1980’s, Linder Sterling (born Linda Mulvey) was the matriarch and muse of the Manchester, England punk and post-punk music and art scenes. She was part of the mortar that held these scenes together, based somewhat at her home in the Whalley Range area of Manchester. She knew everyone, and apparently inspired nearly everyone she knew. She was the inspiration for The Buzzcocks’ “What Do I Get?” and her long-time BFF Morrissey’s “Cemetery Gates.” She met Morrissey at the soundcheck at The Sex Pistols’ 1976 show in Manchester that Morrissey later described in disappointing terms. He interviewed her for a fanzine in 1979 and she has been a steadfast influence in his life since his pre-Smiths days.

But the lovely Linder is more than a muse. She is a musician, pioneering visual artist, and performance artist in her own right.

As early as her art school days at Manchester Polytechnic Linder created some of the most recognizable posters, flyers, 45 sleeves, and LP covers in the U.K. music scene. She also created her own art, music (with her band Ludus) and her own much imitated collage style. 

Ludus was formed by Linder and guitarist Arthur Kadmon, later joined by drummer Toby Tomanov and bassist Willie Trotter in 1978. They played the same Manchester venues as the burgeoning Smiths, such as Factory and The Haçienda. The Haçienda was the location of another of her art installations in conjunction with a Ludus show in November 1982, where a stained tampon and a stubbed out cigarette were placed on a paper plate on each of the tables at the venue. This piece, as well as her “menstrual jewelry,” is reminiscent of American artist Judy Chicago’s Womanhouse “Menstruation Bathroom” exhibit at the California Institute of the Arts in 1972, which managed to freak viewers out simply by including a trash can full of sanitary napkins painted red.

Also at this show, over twenty years before Lady Gaga, Linder was the first woman to wear a dress made out of meat. She wore a net dress with offal from a nearby Chinese restaurant sewn in. Members of The Crones distributed additional chunks of offal wrapped in pages from pornographic magazines to audience members. During the song “Too Hot To Handle” (video available here with no sound) Linder pulled up her skirt to reveal an enormous black dildo (an actual buzzcock!).

Her juxtaposition of men’s and women’s magazines, segregated by cars/DIYhome improvement/fitness/porn and beauty/fashion/homemaking/crafts, was used on the Buzzcocks’ “Orgasm Addict” 45 sleeve featuring a naked woman with her head replaced by a clothes iron and mouths in place of her nipples as well as Magazine’s debut LP Real Life. With the exception of a few upscale lifestyle magazines (most of which could easily be retitled Affluent Asshole Monthly), any media merchandiser with a corporate plan-o-gram can tell you that not much has changed since then as far as gender segregation. In fact, now we have the fitness magazines aimed at women (fitness always = weight loss) and more hot rod and hunting publications aimed at men than we did in the late 1970’s.
 

 

 

 
This ironic presentation of gender-specific media, particularly ubiquitous vintage images from the 1940’s to the early 1960’s, has been copied the world over in zines, flyers, and record sleeves. In fact, Linder and writer Jon Savage can be credited with literally inventing the now quite tired cut-and-paste zine aesthetic in their glossy fanzine, The Secret Public.

Curiously, Linder’s self-portraits using found media images (“I have always treated myself as a found object.”) almost always hide her mouth. When Morrissey asked her about this in an interview for Interview in 2010, she explained:

The mouth can betray in two ways—by what goes in and what comes out. I am not one of nature’s chatterboxes—but neither do I mumble. As time goes by, I have less and less desire to speak. And the number of people to whom I might address my select and diminishing group of words is likewise dwindling. My internal monologue keeps me busy enough. You once said that you felt as though you had read everything; I sometimes feel as though I have said and heard enough. I cheer the blank page. And central to my own work has always been the fact that women have more than one pair of lips.

She also described her self-image while she was growing up in Liverpool:

My mother was a cleaner in a hospital for nearly all of her working life. She used to have nightmares that she couldn’t get her windows clean, and so she couldn’t see through them. I grew up in that psychic force field. I can relate to the chill in Alan Bennett’s comment about a certain kind of Lancashire widow, who “tidied her husband into the grave.” But how might cleanliness look? Genteel? Pretty? Like art? As a child I begged for piano lessons, but pianos were dismissed as “dust harborers.” I wanted ballet lessons, too, but there weren’t any teachers in our part of Liverpool. Culture called—and Billy Fury answered via the radio. I grew up with pop, and pop will die as you and I die—if not before. When I was young, everything was neat and tidy, except for me. I have never felt clean inside, and I never felt beautiful.

Linder’s photography book, Morrissey Shot, was published in 1992. Her artwork has been displayed and/or performed all over Europe, including Paris’ Musee D’Art Moderne, the Cleveland Gallery in London, Sorcha Dallas gallery in Glasgow, the Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art, and the Tate St. Ives in southwest England.