She was the rubber-knickered peroxide bombshell who set the sexuality into the Pistols. Now shes written a memoir of her years causing outrage at the heart of punk
There’s a photograph of Jordan Mooney, standing outside the clothes shop Sex, that perfectly encapsulates her extraordinary impact. Sex was Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood‘s London boutique, which sold their designs along with fetishwear. It is also where in-house band the Sex Pistols were incubated.
Jordan was more than a shop assistant: she was the personification of the Sex aesthetic. In the picture, she’s rocking a peroxide beehive, with a leotard, fishnet stockings and a sulky bombshell attitude- stopping a occur tycoon in his tracks. The look on his face says it all: in 1976, the sight of someone like Jordan was astonishing.
” Men were confused by me ,” she says today.” They would wolf-whistle, shout all kinds of things, even offer me money, because they didn’t understand why I looked like I did. I was operating a gauntlet every day. People were scared of me. And the funny thing is, I was actually quite shy .”
Born Pamela Rooke in Seaford, a coastal township in East Sussex, Jordan wore jaw-dropping outfits and barbarian makeup, all of which attained her the first face of punk. Merely 19, she would leave the house wearing rubber knickers and stilettos, or sheer skirts without underwear- deconstructing her clothes to her own incendiary design. It made the daily commute on British Rail, from Sussex to Chelsea, a drama in its own right.” Some of the things I wore is a bit near the knuckle ,” she says.” People were apoplectic with fury. I had to be moved into first class for my own security .”
Long before punk ran mainstream, Jordan was tearing up the rulebook, forging an identity the world would later follow. She took her cues from the 1950 s- leather pencil skirts, dominatrix heels- and added her own touches of mayhem. Derek Jarman, who cast her in Jubilee, described the racoon-eyed rebel as” the original Sex Pistol “. Nobody was like Jordan, or would even dare. She was defiantly original, both terrifying and seductive.
Aware of her value, McLaren urged her to get up to mischief wherever the Pistols played. Whether crashing around on stage, baring her breasts or simply adding visual impact with her Mondrian-inspired makeup and vertiginous hair, Jordan soon became synonymous with the band’s “we don’t care” attitude. She set the sex into the Sex Pistols.
Defying Gravity, her candid new memoir, follows punk’s rapid rise and fall, as well as her own evolution from keen ballet student to the Boudicca of new wave. It’s the poignant narrative of a small-town girl who dared to be different.” My mother wanted a girly kind of girl and that was never going to happen ,” she says.” She perfectly disliked the route I looked and would walk several yards behind me on the street. I regret the anguish I caused .”
Why Jordan decided not merely to be different, but to cause chaos with her appearance remains largely unexplained by the book.” Ballet taught me a lot of things: how to be strict with myself, how to work through pain ,” she says.” It taught me how to dress up and express myself. I didn’t want to be scripted. I wanted to live my life in an impromptu and spontaneous way .”
When she applied for a task at Sex, garbed in nothing but sheer black tights and a belted mac, Westwood hired her on the spot.” I’m not particularly fond of the word muse, because I think we were a little bit more of a team really ,” Jordan says.” We tried to present a feeling that the store was a place that, if you had the intestines to walk in, you could just hang out. Like the coffee shop of the 1950 s, or the coffeehouses of Prague, where philosophers would go to chew things over .” Amid leather gimp masks, of course.
As the ground zero of a musical revolution, Sex has gone down in history. Handguns bassist Glen Matlock was the Saturday sales assistant, while drummer Paul Cook and light-fingered guitarist Steve Jones would frequent the premises, drawn to its subversive charms and easy pickings. When John Lydon( AKA Johny Rotten) auditioned, whining along to the shop’s jukebox, punk had discovered its HQ.
Jordan remains the Sex Pistols’ most ardent fan.” What I loved, especially in the early days, was that they were so unscripted. But then I witnessed the unravelling of Sid- and it hurt. I couldn’t watch[ the 1986 movie] Sid and Nancy for years. Can you imagine? A really good friend and suddenly they’re dead. Narcotics, murder, lurid headlines. What a nightmare .”
The demise of punk, a few ill-fated attempts to manage bands, plus a wedding that fell apart, all took their toll. Escaping London in the mid-8 0s, Jordan returned to the coast and reinventedherself in the mostun-punk fashion.” I developed as a veterinary nurse and began breeding cats. Things had become too hectic. It voices genuinely corny, but normality saved my life .”
She is, however, still a punk at heart, leather-clad with burgundy hair.” I will always wear my Tits T-shirt ,” she says.” I fill it out very nicely .”
* Defying Gravity: Jordan’s Story is published by Omnibus Press on 2 May.
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