Jordan

“Jordan, How’s your hair greased up ?” Jordan: “I’m gonna have cards printed very soon just with ‘its lacquer’ printed on it, ‘coz my vocal chords are rapidly wearing out over the years of this.” Fair Dukes Fanzine, December 1977

One of the strange things about Punk was the fact that it threw up so many personalities that didn’t necessarily have anything to do with the music but who became almost as famous as the bands themselves. Siouxsie, Debbie Wilson (of the Bromley Contingent) and Soo Catwoman to name three were original faces on the scene who became famous through their extremely photogenic shocking (female) looks, becoming virtually as it were alternative supermodels. These people were close to the originators of Punk like the Sex Pistols and the shop SEX and mutually bathed in the ensuing publicity/infamy. Strangely enough, they were all female.

Out of the names above only Jordan (except for Siouxsie whose life and times have been well documented) has had significant press and these pages are culled from interviews down the years. No stranger to dressing controversially, her comments are sometimes equally so, and caustic as well, but never dull. Obviously, an original and talented person she was lucky to be in the right place and the right time at perhaps the most exciting period of music and make her own contribution.

She was also the approachable face of McLaren and Westwood’s shop at 430 King’s Road and the perfect foil and expression for them, their clothes, ideas and attitude.

She got a job in the shop SEX, later to become Seditionaries and then World’s End, a pivotal meeting place in terms of style and culture where all the central protagonists in the punk rock story met.

Born Pamela Rooke in Seaford Sussex. Aged 18 she was already cropping her hair and dying it and calling herself Jordan before moving to London to find work. Moving back home to commute she dressed outrageously wearing rubber stockings high heels and little else.

“I used to have so much trouble on that train from Seaford, where I used to live. People used to swear at me, abuse me, the lot. I wouldn’t take any shit though and on one occasion I threw a tourist’s camera out of the train window. He flipped ! Eventually British Rail had to give me a first class carriage to myself.”

“I’d been dressing like that for ages so punk wasn’t a new thing for me. My mother had found me uncontrollable since the age of seven, through choice I had absolutely no friends at school – the clothes were an expression of that chaos.”

Julie Burchill “Why do you choose to look like you do?”
Jordan “Why did Picasso paint ?.. I always looked weird. My mother always told me I was repulsive” NME, 15/4/78

Jordan interview Tony Wilson 1978 – 2 years after being told off for wearing a swastika for the Sdx Pistols infamous debut TV performance, Jordan appears with Devo in the background

A two page fashion report in Honey by George Burn In September 1976 read “Go down to Sex, if not for the clothes then just to see the strange girl inside.” The feature was a day in the life of Jordan showing photos of her in PVC and commuters on the 60 mile commute to work with details of her outlook and experience.

And in the up-market magazine Harpers Queen International by Peter York

The shop changes its identity every eighteen months or so.The assistants now are got up in a kind of comic book manner, spiky blonde hair, Cat-woman eye black. One has face painting in direct diagonals. Peter York, Post Punk Mortem

Dressing for Pleasure by John Samson in 1977 is an intimate, candid film about people with a rubber fetish. Among other interviews, it features Jordan in SEX, the King’s Road boutique owned by Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood that openly sold latex and rubber wear and linked fetish wear to the equally scandalous punk scene. Dressing for Pleasure is not a film about people into S&M, but a portrait of an alternative lifestyle that embraces pleasure without shame.

“Malcolm McClaren was always very interested in how people looked and I loved everything that ‘Sex’ was about.” (apart from no doubt the having to hose down the rubber curtains after dirty old men had asked her to try out various outfits and then relieved themselves in the changing room!) 

Jordan worked on and off through the  versions of the shop from ‘Sex’ to ‘Seditionaries’ till 1980 when it became ‘World’s End.’ ” Not everybody can do a job they enjoy and I loved it there, believed in the things that Malcolm and Viv were doing.”

Jordan got a part in Jubilee, the Derek Jarman film, playing Amyl Nitrate, the singing, dancing historian. It was not well received by the press and looking back it’s a dark gloomy picture but worth watching in regard to its punk significance.

Jarman had first seen Jordan at Victoria Station travelling in to work at SEX and as recounted in a Guardian article on the film Jubilee by Stuart Jeffries said this in his diary

White patent boots clattering down the platform, transparent plastic miniskirt revealing a hazy pudenda. Venus T-shirt. Smudged black eye-paint, covered with a flaming blonde beehive … the face that launched a thousand tabloids … art history as makeup. A Right Royal Knees Up, July 2007

Jordan at Cannes

How do you describe the film Jubilee? Here’s a review from Amazon.

Derek Jarman’s 1977 film Jubilee, said to be the “first official punk film” is one of the most original and disturbing urban dystopias to emerge from that era of British film-making. Setting itself in a version of late 70s London where anarchy reigns and Judge Dredd-style police are as lawless as the gangs on the street, the film never fails to surprise and Punk rock experts can play a game of spot-the-cameo. Whilst all this takes place, there’s also the matter of Queen Elizabeth I, brought forward in time by the angel Arial to gain supreme knowledge…

Violent and twisted, Jubilee manages, however, to convince that destruction isn’t the only aspect of an anarchic society, and questions the meaning of life, love, history and even the violence itself in a world without balance.

A post-apocalyptic punk nightmare? Breakdown of law and order? Whatever you decide it’s a bleak film but has its moments. The Ants performing Plastic Surgery is excellent, the scene with The Slits destroying a car is good and the bit with Gene October of Chelsea being suffocated probably has its admirers. It was however given a savaging in the press and Vivienne Westwood was so incensed by the film she wrote a diatribe against it on a special t-shirt. Jordan however attended the premiere in Cannes in the Summer of 1978 and was photographed with David Bowie.

Jordan on Jubilee.

Jubilee pushed me to the limits mentally and physically. I had to dance on points on concrete – no ballerina has to do that they’ve got supple wooden floors. My toes bled.

She had learned ballet from age four to eighteen. She also sings…ish!

In the NME interview of 15/4/78, Jordan says Derek Jarman is “very, very clever” pointing out it was he that wrote her screen monologue on the merits of Myra Hindley. Jordan believed in the interview that Myra should be freed and it’s a very weird monologue. Something Steve Strange and the Moors Murderers took up.

She also has a different opinion of the film in that she thinks “It’s a laugh…that’s the point everyone misses. I’ve seen really straight people literally crying with laughter at it..Any other director would have done a…sensationalist sex and violence quicky…” Which is weird because it certainly has all the sex and violence elements!

Julie Burchill arguably summed up Jubilee the best. ” …The working class think art is wank, and the middle class think wanking is an art.” 15/4/78, NME

Adam, a regular visitor had become enamoured with Jordan and she became their manager.

“Adam used to send me love letters in the early days. I’ve still got them somewhere. He invited me down to a gig….everything went wrong, but in Adam I saw something very special. Anyway I got involved in the band – I nurtured and pushed them. I was a manager and yet more than a manager. I finished with Adam for a while when he insisted on signing to Decca. I thought it was a wrong move and I was proved right.”

On Adam Ant “He’s just an incredibly sexual person who’s mad about German girls.” ( NME 15/4/78) This probably explains why Jordan “scratched the word “fuck ” into his back with her nails, the scars prevented him from going topless.” Simon Price sleeve notes Radio 1 Sessions CD

We had a manager called Jordan…anybody that could get you a gig was qualified as a manager in those days. Anybody that could get a poster on the street was a manager in those days. Adam Ant interview June 96.

Jordan was a bit more though. Style manipulator, she forced new boy John Beckett to have his hair cut, change his clothes and renamed him Johnny Bivouac. Jordan wanted the band to…”look good and shocking…not really shocking but a bit different.. I didn’t mind…it was all fun” Johnny Bivouac interview, Zerox Antz Fanzine

She also sang one song with the band called Lou (otherwise known as New York Coke Joke). It’s a bit of a shock to the system with the lyrics howled over a dirge-like riff. It appears on the John Peel Antz sessions cd.

Actually, she doesn’t sing it, she bawls and bellows with an incredible throat-tearing screech and a total disregard for tune. Chris Brazier, Live Marquee review 1978.

Suddenly Jordan came on stage herself for one number: painted face, hair standing about one foot up in the air, and began to shriek; I thought, get that girl into the studio, and let her shriek to the nation! John Walters, ‘In Session Tonight’

Adam Ant, Jordan & Mark ‘ The Kid’ Ryan – Photo credit?

The band gets a session on John Peel and Lou is one of the songs done.

I felt out of my depth the moment I walked in there…to sing a song like that, which is meant to be sung out of control, in a controlled atmosphere, was very difficult for me…to have have to do it two or three times…was very hard on the voice, and the emotions. Jordan, ‘In Session tonight’

The song I sang on stage with the Ants was ‘Lou’, it was great doing it, but then there was absolutely no pressure – doing it for a whole 40 minutes is a different matter entirely.

So why didn’t she sing more or front a band? “To start a band would have been so obvious. So bland. Very early on Malcolm McLaren advised me to project and promote my own image and that is exactly what I have done.”

Jordan left the Ants in May 1978 to concentrate on films and acting while still working occasionally in Westwood’s shops on the King’s Road. But she would be back to help out the Ants again again.

Out of all the women in punk not in bands, Jordan had a lot of airtime both on TV and in the press due to her striking presence in the shop. Here are some random quotes and events in her history. Best read in conjunction with her autobiography Defying Gravity.

Remember the footage in the ‘Great Rock N Roll Swindle’ of the Pistols singing ‘Anarchy’ on the ‘So It Goes’ programme; It’s Jordan in 1976 wearing an “only anarchists are pretty shirt” and swastika armband throwing chairs and getting onstage with Johnny Rotten.

August 28th, 1976 “So it Goes” program on Granana TV with Tony Wilson

“76/77 was the most exciting period of my life – the adrenalin, the buzz, that is what it was all about for me. The Pistols used to really move me at that time, I just had to jump up and do things.”

“That was all a setup job. We planned it, like a lot of other things; the music business is still scared by the Pistols fiasco of three signings”

On gobbing

“If anyone does that to me they’re going get a microphone down across their heads!”

…I hated all that spitting and violence. To me punk was a fashion statement and a rebellion against the mediocrity of the times.”

Around the end of 1977 and into 1978 when the Sex Pistols split, Jordan seems to become embittered about the scene and lays claim to a much bigger influencing role as the following quotes illustrate.

“I remember standing at the side of the stage and booing The Clash…The Damned were the group that summed up everything that was wrong with punk”

On American Punk bands. “They’re all on the wrong track except the Ramones.” Vermillion, Search & Destroy 4, from the end of 1977

In the video below, she claims she discovered Johnny Rotten and got him to sing.

In her NME interview with Julie Burchill, she claims she and Vivienne created Punk and the Sex Pistols could have been any four kids.

“Who started punk..It was just kids everywhere influenced by Vivienne and me, the clothes, the fantasy Vivienne had of a country overun with kids…And there was me thinking it started with the Sex Pistols!”They could have been anyone; it was the way they were marketed that made them big. Steve just pulls girls and Paul comes from Hammersmith and Sid’s just been led up the garden path by his girlfriend – he’s just another wreck. And John just wanted to go down the pub before he came a Pop Star…do you believe that he wrote the lyrics to ‘Anarchy’?”

Who was it then? “Jamie Reid who works for Malcolm. He used to have a political magazine.” Julie Burchill, NME 15/4/78

Her role in the safety pin in punk fashion

Malcolm, Johnny Rotten and I were very close. Johnny always tells the story of how he went into ‘Sex’ one day – I had on this T-shirt with a big rip right across the front so I’d put in a safety pin to cover it up. Johnny thought it was great and the safety pin thing started there and then.”

On punk and Punks

On the Sex Pistols ” I’m also fed up with people like John Rotten who say how bored they are …The point is Johnny Rotten’s lyrics weren’t even written by him. Anarchy in The UK was written by an ex Angry brigade guy … The Pistols had something to say at one time but now they are finished.”

“This whole bit about the Adverts singing about Bored Teenagers, as far as I’m concerned they bore me to death.”

“Most of the punks you see are so ugly. All the girls are silly and ugly…most of the asexual scene stems from the fact that most of them are so ugly. I mean I wouldn’t look twice at any of the kids down at the clubs…I want more original people on the scene”

On drugs and her ‘heroin addiction.’

Jordan, discarded the scene, although Rotten says she was discarded. In a dark spot, on the stairs of a Liverpool club, I asked Jordan if it was true. “No, I left McLaren to manage the Ants. Is she a junkie, as Rotten said? “I was but I’ve reformed. I don’t use junk anymore.” Andrew Courtney, The Trouble With Johnny, Record Mirror, 6.5.1978

And finally, on Punk, post the Sex Pistols break up.

“Punk, really, died for me when the Pistols split up. It couldn’t have gone on – it was like an orgasm, there were a few seconds then ….pfft.”

“My prediction for the post punk state of affairs was that Sid would become a huge star. We were close friends and I was absolutely shocked when he died.”

Jordan’s film and TV career turned out to be a short one. As far as I know apart from Jubilee and a TV pilot ‘Nothing Special ‘on Punk bands and celebrities, that was it.

She worked on and off through the incarnations of Malcolm’s and Viv’s shop from SEX to Seditionaries till 1980 when it became World’s End. ” Not everybody can do a job they enjoy and I loved it there, believed in the things that Malcolm and Viv were doing.”

The video clip below has her outside the shop in 1979 commenting on Mods. Note also the tolerant friendly punks becoming just another vertical subculture who hated the next one.

She got involved again with Adam & The Ants and helped shape his successful pirate look before leaving at the height of his fame with sacked band member Kevin Mooney whom she had fallen in love with. She too was eventually sacked from the shop when they married in 1981 and the sacking by Westwood was a ‘present’ for being so bourgeoisie! For more info on this period, I suggest reading the excellent Kevin Mooney interview on the Ant Lib site. She also did a bit of modeling for Vogue and Zandra Rhodes.

Her marriage (and band) broke up after a couple of years and she moved back to her hometown in Sussex and became a veterinary nurse and a Burmese cat breeder!

Throughout the 2000’s,she made the occasional appearance in papers like the Daily Mail when they did those then-and-now stories. Around 2015 she suddenly started making appearances at punk gigs and a higher profile doing interviews. She auctioned off her punk clothes and her autobiography Defying Gravity appeared in 2019.

And today… “I am still unconventional. I never think twice before putting on a pair of kinky spike-heeled shoes for a night out, or mixing something wacky with more conventional clothes.”

Photo Credit Mia Mizuno

The last thing she was involved in was as an advisor on Pistol the Disney series adaption of Steve Jones’s book Lonely Boy. Maisie Williams, star of Game Of Thrones, played her and recalls

There was a particular day when she was on set and saw me on camera for the first time. She seemed to be transported back to that time in her life, watching this version of herself in her yellow rain mac standing in front of this shop [SEX] that meant so much to her. It was really special.

I was heartbroken that she wouldn’t get to watch Pistol, something she’d been really desperate to see. I feel like the universe has such strange ways of working because, maybe more than any other person [depicted in the show], she oversaw so much of what we created. Now I think, maybe she wasn’t supposed to watch it. She was there, she lived it and she was integral to how we told this story. I hope that anyone who watches Pistol and isn’t familiar with her wants to go off and learn more. Vogue

Sadly before the series aired Jordan, who knew she was terminally ill and had told the producer and cast, passed away in April 2022.

Jordan was certainly one of a kind, and her personality and look for that period in the late Seventies when music and fashion/look meshed perfectly made her the punk icon she was.

Jordan Mooney: I’ve sometimes felt uncomfortable with looking at myself in that way [as an icon] but sometimes also very touched, deeply touched, actually, in terms of how people have considered me to have helped them with in their lives in some way; people that have been genuinely very grateful for someone that they perceive as having been there at a time in their lives when they needed someone to bolster their confidence. Dazed Digital

This page is all about Jordan’s look. One of the great things about punk was the turning on its head conventional notions of beauty and how people dressed, wore make-up and did their hair.

Jordan was no lithe traditional beauty. She was pretty much like you and me, but where she differed was in her outlook and sense of style that was truly stunning, outrageous and groundbreaking. It was why she got so much press and why she was the perfect fit for SEX/Seditionaries because their clothes matched her style and attitude and she helped drive/create the punk look.

Below is a set of pictures from 1976 to 1979 that show her various looks from the latex and beehive to the no eyebrows black contact lens alien look of 1979 via the IMHO ill-conceived black and white minstrel look. What’s noticeable is you rarely look at the clothes (or at least I don’t); I’m always drawn to that striking face.

Arguably her defining look is the Mondrian style makeup and gravity-defying hair spikes together with the leotard and Venus t-shirt. The last image of her in 1979 at the Ants gig is noticeable in the gap between Jordan’s futuristic look and the young punks in the audience. She was done with punk and for them she was no longer relevant.

Where I know it I have credited the photographers but if the gaps can be filled I will amend.