The Times - UK (2022-04-08)

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hit God Save the Queen (the fascist

regime). By now, Jordan was growing

weary of the notoriety. “The papers in-

sisted on seeing punk as a political

movement but I hated all that spitting

and violence. To me, punk was a fashion

statement and a rebellion against the

mediocrity of the times.”

By then she was living in a flat near

Buckingham Palace (“a punk den at the

heart of the British establishment”)

with, among others, Rotten, the Sex

Pistols’ new bassist Sid Vicious and his

girlfriend Nancy Spungen, to whom

Jordan became close. The murder of

Spungen in October 1978, followed by

the death of Vicious from a heroin over-

dose some months later after being

charged with her murder, affected her

deeply. Eventually, she feared that she

would go the same way as her friends.

For someone who had lost her power to

shock, the “queen of punk” did the most

shocking thing she could do at the age

of 30 by moving back in with her

parents in Seaford and spending the

rest of her life living quietly as a

veterinary nurse.

Pamela Rooke was born in Seaford,

East Sussex, in 1955, one of three

children to Stanley Rooke, a Second

World War veteran, and his wife, Linda,

a seamstress.

The loving family home gave Pamela

little to rebel against, but she recalled

being quietly wilful about her fashion

choices from the age of seven. The child

was academically bright, captained the

Seaford Head secondary school hockey

team and was a keen ballet student;

pictures of Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf

Nureyev adorned her bedroom walls.

Being run over at the age of 14 and

Obituaries

Jordan Mooney

Punk muse known as ‘the original Sex Pistol’ who appeared on stage with them, guided their ‘look’ and then became a veterinary nurse

RAY STEVENSON; MIRRORPIX/GETTY IMAGES; SHEILA ROCK

Jordan with Johnny Rotten and in the doorway of SEX in 1976. Below, in 1994 with a Burmese cat

breaking her

pelvis ended

her dreams of

becoming a

ballerina, but it

started what

would become

a metamor-

phosis in terms

of her image and identity. First

she changed her name to Jordan, after

Jordan Baker the androgynous female

golf hustler in The Great Gatsby.

When she turned up at school with

red hair, the headmaster called her

“subversive” and forced her to wear a

headscarf. Jordan, who had won a

school debating competition, justified

her look eloquently. She recalled simply

being laughed at by her bemused

schoolmates, but stayed on to pass six

O-levels and A-levels in English and

law. Her mother instructed Jordan to

walk ten paces behind her in Seaford.

From 1970 Jordan attended a

“university of courage” by frequenting

the underground gay clubs of Brighton

and dodging the razor-blade wielding

“bovver boys” down from London for

the weekend to cause trouble.

Having first met McLaren and West-

wood in 1973, it would be six months

before she was offered a job. In the

meantime Jordan astonished her

mother by securing work at Harrods.

When a vacancy arose at SEX, a more

natural hinterland, she resigned from

Harrods and established herself as a

dominatrix-style saleswoman, wearing

latex, brandishing a whip, and generally

terrifying unsuspecting customers. “We

tried to present a feeling that the shop

was a place that, if you had the guts to

walk in, you could just hang out,” she

recalled. “Like the coffee shops of the

1950s, or the cafés of Prague, where

philosophers would go to chew things

over.”

If she did not think an item looked

good on someone she refused to sell it

to them. Anyone considered “uncool”

or with a bad attitude was ejected, in-

cluding Bianca Jagger. A young Boy

George recalled being “corrected”. The

ITV newsreader Reginald Bosanquet,

who bought fetishwear, was allowed in.

As a Pistol muse and early symbol of

the movement, Jordan attracted

attention from punk wannabes. One art

school student called Stuart Goddard

(aka Adam Ant) sent her letters with

lipstick marks on them and asked her to

manage his band. With the Sex Pistols

close to their inevitable implosion in

1978, she started managing Adam and

the Ants.

There was a hiatus when she

appeared in Derek Jarman’s seminal

film about the punk scene Jubilee,

playing Amyl Nitrate, complete with

Britannia helmet, trident and little else.

Jarman called her the “original Sex Pis-

tol” and she accompanied the director

to the Cannes Film Festival wearing a

figure-hugging la-

tex skirt that

inadvertent-

ly became a

live art in-

stallation as

it melted in

the heat.

She

created Ad-

am Ant’s sig-

nature Na-

tive Amer-

ican-inspired

warpaint

make-up.

After their ac-

claimed 1980

album Kings

of the Wild

Frontier, the band prepared to hit the

mainstream but Jordan jumped ship

when she felt they were “selling out”.

In 1981 she married the band’s former

bass player Kevin Mooney and they

formed Wide Boy Awake. The group

were signed to RCA but drugs wrecked

the band and her marriage. She and

Mooney separated after two years.

Her old teachers would bring their

animals to the veterinary surgery in

Seaford where Jordan later worked,

saying how much they had loved her

look back in the day. “A bit of history

has been rewritten,” said Jordan, who

noted wryly how the punk movement

had morphed into an exercise in warm

nostalgia, so much at odds with its

original icy mission. With her sister, she

bred Burmese cats and twice won best

in show at the Supreme Cat Show.

Despite finding contentment in a

somewhat reclusive life on the south

coast, Jordan continued to subvert the

genteel East Sussex resort with her

outre outfits. “I will always wear my tits

T-shirt,” she declared proudly. “I fill it

out very nicely.”

Jordan, punk muse and veterinary nurse,

was born on June 23, 1955. She died of

bile duct cancer on April 3, 2022,

aged 66

identityFirst

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it

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a

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ic

w m A c a o

b d

amid the pogoing, spitting and beer-can

throwing foot-soldiers of punk. As the

band played Anarchy in the UK, she was

not averse to baring her copious breasts

at the cameras, but often steered clear

of the debauchery that came with the

territory. “Men were confused by me,”

she told The Guardian in 2019. “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 running a gauntlet every

day. People were scared of me. And the

funny thing is, I was actually quite shy.”

In August 1976 she appeared with the

band on the ITV music show So It Goes

wearing a swastika armband. When

fellow guest Clive James took exception

to the Nazi reference on air, Jordan

called him a “baldy old Sheila”.

By the end of 1976 the Sex Pistols

were public enemy No 1,

exemplified by their foul-

mouthed appearance on

the early evening Toda y

show with Bill Grundy

when the band’s guitar-

ist Jones called Grundy

“a dirty f***ing

rotter” live on air.

With the band

now signed to

EMI, McLaren

dreamt up the ul-

timate publicity

stunt of hiring a

boat on the

Thames during

the Silver Jubilee

weekend in June

1977 on which the

Sex Pistols per-

formed their banned

Before the Sex Pistols scandalised
Britain in 1976, Jordan started her own
punk revolution on the 7.22am from
Seaford to London.
Commuters first noticed the vertigi-
nous peroxide hair, then the racoon
make-up. Closer inspection would
cause alarm. Jordan might be wearing a
net skirt with tattered black stockings
and suspenders underneath, but be
innocent of underwear. On days when
she did deign to wear some, they were
often see-through or bore legends such
as “Vive le Rock”.
As the train rattled through the
Sussex countryside, reactions ranged
from emptying carriages to her being
surrounded by furtive bowler-hatted
City gents pretending to read The
Times. One day a baying mob tried to
throw her off the train. In the interests
of public safety, British Rail reserved a
carriage for her in first class.
“People said I was brave, but it was
nothing to do with bravery,” Jordan re-
called. “Quite the opposite. It was about
feeling comfortable and at one with
yourself. I wasn’t a typical rebel. I simply
had this strong idea of how I wanted to
look.”
Safely unleashed in the capital,

Jordan found her spiritual home at
SEX, a boutique on the Kings Road run
by a young fashion designer called
Vivienne Westwood and her mercurial
partner and jack of many trades,
Malcolm McLaren. Amid fetishwear
such as gimp masks, the shop sold
Westwood’s proto-punk designs,
including bondage trousers and “tits
T-shirts” (which speak for themselves).
Recognising a kindred iconoclast,
the couple hired Jordan to work in the
shop. One photograph that has earned
its place in the punk pantheon shows
Jordan leaning insouciantly against the
doorway of SEX wearing a skimpy black
leotard while a male onlooker stares at
her with a mixture of incredulity
and rage.
As a provocateur-in-chief who
fancied himself as a modern-day Fagin,
McLaren wisely harnessed Jordan’s
input to create a band of disaffected
youngsters to be avatars of his and
Westwood’s anarchistic visions. With
Britain seemingly in terminal decline
and the Labour government heading to
its Winter of Discontent, the time
was ripe.
Jordan was propping up the jukebox
when a snarling Johnny Rotten audi-
tioned to Alice Cooper’s I’m Eighteen
and was recruited along with other
habituees of the shop, Steve Jones, Paul
Cook and Glen Matlock. Jones, an
accomplished petty thief, provid-
ed instruments.
Jordan helped to shape their
look of ripped T-shirts held
together by safety pins, tatty
mohair sweaters and black
suede creepers.
In grainy footage of
the band’s chaotic
early gigs, Jordan is
regally intimidating

She called Clive James

a ‘baldy old Sheila’ on a

live television show

Photographer who captured

Formula One’s golden era

Jesse Alexander

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