BOY

The punk fashion shop BOY opened in March 1977 when John Krevine and Steph Raynor closed Acme Attractions and moved into 153 Kings Road London. While McLaren & Westwood were both the innovative punk fashion pacesetters and involved with the Sex Pistols to boot, BOY was in fact the fourth punk shop to open after KITSCH-22 had opened in November 1976 and Smutz in Beaufort Market.

‘BOYS opening in March 1977 was marked by the police removing parts of their shopfront but the shop soon became a fixture for punks making the trail down to Worlds End and Seditionaries and the 1977 summer of hate violence between teds and punks.

By 1979 however, Krivine was in trouble financially with BOY, but a deal with John Dove and Molly White who had closed their shop KITSCH-22, but were rapidly expanding the wholesale side, gave BOY access to a wide range of clothes that took it into the Eighties and the emerging punk, goth, psychobilly subcultures and saved the shop.

Raynor would then return and a deal done to take Seditionaries designs at a pittance and the rest is history. BOY as a brand from the mid-eighties would grow and grow and Raynor did genuinely take the shop and its ethos stratospheric on a wild ride that’s detailed in his his self aggrandising autobiography All About The Boy.

Started in 77/76 Kings Road

Is known as the shop that created ‘Punk.’ Amongst the blue and green hair it swept the pop industry from Great Britain to Japan. Handwritten BOY Biography by Raynor, All About The Boy

A typically modest (sic) and inaccurate statement from Raynor that causally re-writes history! 🙂 Seeing the success of punk and a whole new subculture requiring clothes and a place to shop for punk-related clothing and merchandise, John Krivine and Steph Raynor closed Acme Attractions to create what would be called BOY. A unit had become available at 153 on the King’s Road which was closer to the tube station Sloane Square. According to Raynor, the move was driven by wanting a new style of clothes and customers (sounds familiar ?😊)

While Don Letts opened the new store, he and Jeanette Lee soon quit around May 1977.

Don Letts It was the bastard child of Acme, created to capitalize on the tabloid punk and although I opened and ran the joint it just wasn’t my speed. I quit to manage the Slits and headed off on the White Riot tour with The Clash… I personally felt we were copying Seditionaries, and the magic of Acme Attractions was lost. Paul Gormann, The Look: Adventures in Rock and Pop Fashion

The shop was opened in March 1977 in controversial circumstances and it’s an unusual name and shop design which Raynor in his astonishingly self-aggrandising book attributes to his genius.

According to Raynor –

The idea was to create a scenario where a boy had died in a fire in the shop. To make it real I actually set fire to the fuckin walls then put what looked like a dismembered remains of the boy’s body in the medical cabinets in the window. A little old lady walked up to the window and peered in, screamed then fucking collapsed. That was the moment the police arrived and took me away. Job done. All About The Boy

The raid was conveniently captured by Don Letts in the Punk Rock Movie. It also captures Genesis P Orridge play-threatening with a knife but coming across as a bit of a knob. I don’t think Raynor was arrested either but the window artefacts were taken away by the police.

Raynor also neither designed nor named the shop. The name ‘BOY’ came from craftsman John Harwood and Chris ‘Sleazy’ Christopherson (right) who is in the band Throbbing Gristle and also works for mega-famous album cover/concept designers Hipgnosis. Sleazy incidentally had first photographed the Sex Pistols in early 1976 in a rent-boy style that McLaren thought too homoerotic. Gen and Cosi were friends of Krivine’s from Hull.

Harwood and Sleazy’s concept was around the William Burroughs book Wild Boys which depicts an apocalyptic gay youth movement whose aim was to topple Western civilization. The book inspired Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust character. They had accumulated lots of newspaper clippings mainly involving death with the word ‘boy’ in the headline. These would be published in a pamphlet called ‘Boy Research’ in 1977. Sleazy is also an expert in the simulation of wounds and casualties for training medical staff.

The original idea had been to open opposite Chelsea Football Club and the concept of the shop was to be linked to football violence and fashion with a gay football hooligan in bovver boots. Instead, that concept was reflected in the shop’s posters of a bloody beaten head of a prone man on the ground and 2 pairs of Doctor Marten’s next to it. Given the violence that was to come (and often around the shop) it’s arguable about the wisdom of this. The addition of a Nazi slogan ‘The strength of a nation lies in its youth’ added to the stupidity given the rising spectre of the National Front and soon to be very real violence from right-wing skinheads.

Anyway Sleazy and Harwood design the shop. On the wall were the pair’s framed newspaper stories each with ‘Boy’ in the headline.

Cosi Fanni Tutti When John opened BOY he had Sleazy make a window display that attracted police attention and investigation. They thought the contents were from a real crime scene. He’d created a forensic-like-display of what looked like dismembered, charred remains of someone who’d broken in. Sleazy loved that his work looked so authentic. Art Sex Music, Cosi Fanni Tutti

There are rumours as well that Sleazy designed the BOY eagle (based on the Nazi German eagle which in turn was based on the Roman eagle). Sleazy also contributes t-shirt themes and clothing designs with straps.

Outside & inside BOY – Picture credit right Homer Sykes

Like Acme was to SEX, so BOY was to Seditionaries. It was more commercial. While McLaren and Westwood’s creations were at worst controversy for controversy’s sake, the garments still had deft subversive touches and at best were groundbreaking couture garments involving a ‘commitment’ from the wearer.

No love was lost between the shops and both Don Letts and Jay Strongman were barred from Seditionaries because of working for Krivine & Raynor.

Raynor is typically dismissive.

You’d go down there (Seditionaries) and it would still be Billy Fury. We took our cue from the dance floor.

Their thing is very pure – it takes in hardly any influences. It’s almost tunnel vision. They didn’t look forward, only backward….They’d push the envelope, but they’re basically complete anal schoolteachers who never understood what us lads were all about. …they looked good turning up at places in Baader Meinhof T-shirts, whereas we’d turn up with Brighton beach riots on ours.

Peter York, writing in the upmarket glossy women’s magazine Harpers & Queen, in an article called “Post Punk Mortem” pretty accurately summed up the difference between the two shops. For York ‘Radical Displacement’ became Punk or New Wave and ‘THEM’ the key punk faces.

[Seditionaries is] a shop for the elite of radical displacement. To a remarkable degree, this elite and the sharp end of the people I have described as THEM wear its clothes.

Further down towards Sloane Square..at N0.153 is Boy (aka Acme Attractions), the straight commercial take-up of the New Wave. Boy specialises in Sixties Revival and quasi-military quasi-SM clothing with redundant zips. Things are turning over nicely. On the walls are the yellowing front pages of popular newspapers with headlines describing boys in military or murderous situations. ‘LONDON BOY MERCENARY FLIES HOME: I JUST WANT MY MUM.’

The shop’s T-shirts, price £5.50, are printed with extracts from a biography of Dean Corll, the pedophiliac Bluebeard who murdered thirty or forty boys in Houston, Texas. Boy’s PR poster shows a working-class affray, photographed in black and white. A boy lies unconscious, face bleeding, on the pavement framed by two pairs of legs in shortish trousers and rubber-soled Dr Martens. Skinhead. The motto on the poster reads ‘The strength of a nation lies in its youth’ (Hitler). Boy is, says its owner John Krevine, all about style and style differentiation and nothing else. The kids are aiming to look good and to shock, but in that order. Peter York, Harper & Queen, July 1977

The clothes at BOY were just a little too obvious and knocked out. Just who did the designing was unclear as was any ethos or design intent.

… the stock was reduced to a small range of uncompromising clothes, including a straightjacket top. The emphasis of the t shirt subject matter was also on outrage, with designs featuring outlaws such as homosexual serial killers John Wayne Gacy and Dean Corll… Phil Strongman…came up with a few designs, including one offs covered in paint pressed randomly through netting, and put together the shops Riot shirt. “I ripped a picture of mods fighting on Brighton beach and put the word ‘Riot across. Paul Gormann, The Look

Stephane Raynor We also made T-shirts with tyre prints over them – I used to park my huge Yankee Chevy up on the pavement, right outside surplus and I decided I would just ink up the tyres and drive up and down Portobello Road over the T-shirts. All About The Boy

McLaren & Westwood had bondage suits, parachute tops and swastika t-shirts, but John Krivine had T-shirts with dried animal blood, with mock up death pictures of Gary Gilmore …and jewellery made out of hypodermic syringes and contraceptive packets. Jon Savage, England’s Dreaming

Actually the Gary Gilmore t-shirts were designed by Genesis P-Orridge and were Throbbing Gristle band ones. The front featured Genesis, Monte Cazazza and Cosey Fanni Tutti blindfolded in a Gary Gilmore pose and named the ‘Gary Gilmore Memorial Society.’ In his autobiography, Genesis suggests that Krivine added “…zips and all that kind of crap to make it punk.”

The rest of the BOY items seemed like derivations on the Clash militaristic zipped designs made by Alex Michon. If you google BOY it’s very difficult to actually find any designs and credit for designs is also scant.

Genesis P Orridge's Gary Gilmour T-shirt design that he says Krivine added zips to.

Design post Police Bust on opening day featuring the PR poster designed by Peter 'Sleazy' Christopherson poster and quotes from the Police statement on the bust.

Jay Strongman's 'Riot' T-shirt dating back probably to 1976 pre-BOY

Shop staff were all pulled from punks who frequented the Roxy Club like various members of the all-girl band Muvvers Pride who recount some of their experiences below about working there and the Ted/Punk/football hooligan violence from the time.

Nina Spencer (Muvvers Pride) After a while I worked for BOY along with Sue B, and Dee Marsh from the Pride and we had to wear BOY clothes in the shop. Every second Saturday during the footy season we would get peed on, molested and sometimes beaten by Chelsea fans! Seditionaries would ring us and tell us they were coming down the Kings Road and we would try and lock up the shop in time. The police were always around but never helped.

Suby Barnes (Muvvers Pride) I loved working in BOY. Mark Mason was manager and went out with Dee Marsh for a while. We all worked there at some point. It was owned by Jon Krivine at the time; a lovely man. I also remember working with Grot (Gronia), Caroline and Yvonne. I used to dance to the Exodus [Bob Marley] album in the window and we filmed with Janet Street Porter for TV. That was fun.

Yvonne, Suby and Grot in BOY – Photo Sheila Rock

We had to fight off, not only Teds and Skinheads but also Chelsea fans. The window was always being replaced with stronger and stronger glass! We had regular run ins with the Teds; Tiny the Ted (Roxy Club bouncer) saved my life many times!

Mark the manager of Muvvers Pride and the shop for a while was also a designer.

Nina Spencer – Lol that’s me {below] with Mark Mason, Muvvers Pride manager on drums at the Roxy. Mark took me to Acme Attractions in Portobello Road one night, unlocked the building and in a couple of hours he had measured me up and tailor-made the zip jacket I’m wearing in the picture below (photo Derek Ridgers)! He made the first zip trousers that The Clash wore. He was such a good clothes designer and artist. Tampax is sitting on the stairs with Dee Hurley.

Principally it’s singer Suby Barnes who appears in most pictures. Photographers, eager to capture their shots of the punk phenomenon, didn’t have to do much more than wander down the King’s Road and take pictures of the crowds congregating outside BOY.

**Subie (Muvvers Pride), Caroline and John Krivine**

That said the ethos of the shop was pretty much the same as Seditionaries, just more inclusive, and was to provide a meeting place for like-minded kids. Raynor is typically modest.

Steph Raynor Most shops come and go…there are very few that actually changed everything and turned the world upside down, a revolution. We turned Boy into an experience, a place where kids went to get away from home, a space that spoke to them, where they could express themselves, a hedonistic mind fuck, a space and time to meet others, compete with them, dress like them, the kids could hardly wait for the weekend to be back there, be who they really wanted to be.

During my entire history seem to have created events and movements when opening my shops…they were places for kids to hang out, meeting places for the marginalised. All About The Boy

In early 1978, Raynor split with Krivine and created with his girlfriend Helen Robinson (also worked at BOY and did clothes designs) and others another store called PX (that looked a little like Seditionaries). This would provide the clothes and be a hub for the emerging new romantic scene (which Raynor typically claimed to have guided) and which hardcore Seditionaries punks about town like Steve Strange would gravitate to and end up working in.

In 1979, with the shop in financial trouble, not least with very few new designs coming through Krivine proposed to designers John Dove & Molly White who had run and closed the punk boutique KITSH-22 that BOY should become their main stockist. This saved the shop and gave retail access to the couple while boosting their wholesale orders. One of the main drivers of this was the BOY Blackmail catalogue that Krivine funded and the couple designed and which is predominantly their designs.

He would come back to BOY after being asked by Krivine in 1981 and in perhaps the weirdest one-sided business deal ever with Vivienne Westwood would license for £200 all their designs and even get the screens. Westwood was keen to bury the Punk past disgusted by what it had become and Raynor would make countless thousands from those designs. Raynor’s book interestingly has virtually no pages of BOY punk designs – but 10 pages of McLaren’s & Westwood’s designs and adverts from BOY selling (inferior BOY produced versions of) Seditionaries clothes. Weird!

John Krivine sold the company in 1984 but to be fair to Raynor he developed and expanded the brand.

When all is said and done, BOY filled a gap in the market which was for affordable alternative punk clothes to their rival Seditionaries and they did it very successfully.

The ‘BOY Blackmail’ catalogue is a unique document of the punk fashions from the late Seventies. Krivine financed it and John Dove & Molly White (KITSCH-22) designed it. The models included Wendy May from the KITSCH-22 shop, John Dove himself, Suby Barnes from all-girl punk band Muvvers Pride and BOY worker, Abe Lincoln who Suby would marry shortly after and even a young Sadie Frost (later became an actress) and her best friend Sarah Dove.

What is very noticeable about the catalogue, is it may be called ‘BOY Blackmail’ but 80% of it is KITSCH-22/Modzart designs so in effect it’s both them accessing the BOY clientele without the retail risk and a historical document of their clothes range and store.

The catalogue design was complete, the first designs to be photographed were set up with 2 photographers, Derek Hutchins, one of the top Hairstylists at “Smile”, Kings Road, whose individual style of photographic work was known to D&W and Sheila Rock an accomplished new fashion photographer well known on the Chelsea scene for her sharp black and white pictures – these would be perfect for the Mono format D&W had designed.

The pictures were cropped into sharp spacial compositions mostly ‘golden section’ design. Minimal type was used and the colour plates were printed on a crude laser copier. London Bridge Printers would integrate the colour pages with their offset print and bind with a black plastic spiral. The black covers were printed separately with a black ink – “Black On Black”. the first edition was about 600. The title for the catalogue – BOY BLACKMAIL. Flash Publishing, London Bridge Printing Co. John Dove & Molly White C V

A second, larger edition appeared in 1981 but was all in black and white.