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“This was the first time I had ever travelled with Ultra Violet. She was still a big mystery; nobody knew what her scene was – she kept her life very secret (as opposed to everybody else we knew who were always telling you the most intimate things about themselves). I’d met her one day in ’65 when she walked into the Factory in a pink Chanel suit and bought a big Flowers painting that was still wet for five hundred dollars. Her name was Isabelle Collin Dufresne then and she hadn’t dyed her hair purple yet. She had expensive clothes and a penthouse on Fifth Avenue, and she drove a Lincoln that was the same as the presidential one. She was past a certain age, but she was still beautiful; she looked a lot like Vivien Leigh. Ultra would do almost anything for publicity. She’d go on talk shows “representing the underground” and it was hilarious because she was as big a mystery to us as she was to everybody else … she’d tell journalists “I collect art and love.” But really what she collected were press clippings. Gradually we pieced together that she was from a rich family of glove manufacturers in Grenoble, France, that she’d come to America as a young girl to visit the painter John Graham (coincidentally in the same building where the Castelli Gallery was), who introduced her around the New York Art world, and then when he died she met Dali, and then she met me, and then she became Ultra Violet. She was popular with the press because she had a freak name, purple hair, an incredibly long tongue and a mini-rap about the intellectual meaning of underground movies.”

/ From POPism: The Warhol Sixties (1980) by Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett /

Born on this day 90 years ago: Warhol Superstar and "art groupie" Ultra Violet (née Isabelle Collin Dufresne, 6 September 1935 – 14 June 2014). She was a true eccentric: there’s a great moment in the 1990 documentary Superstar: The Life and Times of Andy Warhol where mid-conversation, Violet pulls a beet out of her handbag, cuts it with a knife and rubs it onto her cheeks like rouge. Pictured: Viva, Andy Warhol and Ultra Violet photographed by Sam Falk, 1968.

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“Grace Jones began her stylish career as what else, a freaky black model in Paris. She has always loved Paris. So, in her high school, she wore line-for-line copies of the latest Paris originals. Dresses she and her mother executed from expensive Givenchy patterns. Her career as a diseuse extraordinaire began by lifting her skirts instead of her voice on a tabletop over dinner in the infamous gay nightclub of Paris, Club Sept. As she slashed her matchstick legs across dinner plates and sent filet mignon and champagne flying, she howled and lip-synched to the disco beat of the moment. She was like a navy blue she-wolf crossed with a lush orchid. A lust-filled Frenchman with jungle fever went insane, asked her to cut a disco record. And with her exceptional qualities outside of singing, her career as an extraordinary visual extravaganza came to life. Her first hit was the song “I Need a Man”, a real stomping disco dirge. But it was her revamping of the classic “La Vie en Rose” that the French loved …”

/ Andre Leon Talley writing in Mega-Star (1984) /

Released on this day (6 September 1977) by Island Records: Portfolio, the debut album by striking Jamaican fashion model-turned-chanteuse and everyone’s favourite stentorian futuristic dominatrix-from-outer space, Grace Jones. This was the disc featuring Jones’ outrageously campy disco-fied interpretations of showtunes “Send in the Clowns” (from A Little Night Music), “What I Did for Love” (A Chorus Line) and best of all “Tomorrow” ( Annie). Plus, of course, her evergreen bossa nova-tinged take on Edith Piaf’s “La Vie en Rose.” Virtuoso producer Tom Moulton has recalled their artistic differences: “Grace had a real problem with her voice. She sounded like Bela Lugosi: she’d sing “I Need a Man” and it sounded like: ‘I vant to suck your blood.’ I said: What’s with the accent? You been watching horror movies?” Portfolio’s cover was by Richard Bernstein (1939 – 2002), the pop artist responsible for the ultra-glamorous and idealized front covers of Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine in the seventies and eighties.

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Born on this day in London: morbidly beautiful actress Gloria Holden (5 September 1903 – 22 March 1991). The patrician Holden’s one big stab at major stardom was as the titular role in 1936 horror movie Dracula’s Daughter. Unfortunately, the film flopped and didn’t lead to other noteworthy opportunities (although she continued to act in lower profile roles until 1958). Nevertheless, Holden is haunting and memorable as the enigmatic Hungarian Countess Marya Zaleska. Accompanied by her sinister manservant and sporting a dramatic wardrobe of hooded capes and gowns, the countess arrives in fog-wreathed London following the death of her father Count Dracula (Bela Lugosi, of course!). Offered a glass of sherry, she quotes Lugosi (“Thank you. I never drink . . . wine”). Before long, she’s leaving a trail of drained corpses in her wake! While Dracula’s Daughter is never particularly scary, it is atmospheric and the most elegantly Art Deco of 1930s Universal Pictures horror flicks – and Holden is unforgettable as what must be the screen’s first lesbian vampire, long before Ingrid Pitt in The Vampire Lovers (1970), Delphine Seyrig in Daughters of Darkness (1971) or Catherine Deneuve in The Hunger (1983). Pictured: 1936 glamour shot of Holden.

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Hijinks from Bank Holiday Sunday (24 August 2025): we met up with Anne Kathrin and Knut in Greenwich - and it descended into an epic pub crawl! Here we are at Ye Olde Rose & Crown.

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“On the right side of the tracks … in the right homes … with the right people … there is a hidden rage to live … and when it explodes … it tears a small town apart!”

YES! Once again, the Lobotomy Room cinema club (devoted to Bad Movies for Bad People) is investigating the serious social problem and psychological condition of nymphomania! Join us to kiss goodbye to summer 2025 and sink some cocktails on Thursday 18 September at Fontaine’s bar (the jewel in Dalston’s nightlife crown!) for a FREE screening of sin-sational 1965 melodrama A Rage to Live! All you need to do is email bookings@fontaines.bar to reserve your seat! Full squalid details here.

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Released forty years ago today (2 September 1985): hypnotic, addictive single “Pleasure and Pain” by hell-raising Australian post-punk band Divinyls. The song would be the third single from Divinyls’ What a Life! album and their biggest international hit until the fluke breakthrough success of “I Touch Myself” in 1991. Glimpsing the accompanying video for “Pleasure and Pain” on Canadian TV as a teenager was my introduction to Divinyls – and what a vivid introduction! Lit by hot pink neon and clad in her trademark schoolgirl uniform, Divinyls’ late, great feral frontwoman Christina Amphlett (1959 -2013) turns the video into tormented performance art, writhing and flailing on the floor in a tantrum. (In her autobiography Amphlett confesses “My performance in “Pleasure and Pain” was so over the top I’ve never been able to watch it”). I immediately thought, “Who the hell is this?” and sought out What a Life! right away. (The album was on heavy-ish rotation on the Ottawa radio station Chez 106 at the time, alongside X’s Ain’t Love Grand – another life-changing record for me). The song – a paean sadomasochism – is delivered in Amphlett’s typically urgent tones (described by the New York Times as “a raw-throated rasp, somewhere between a sob and a snarl, bruised but defiant”) and feels like a soul-baring confessional, but “Pleasure and Pain” was written by Mike Chapman and Holly Knight rather than Amphlett herself. Record label Chrysalis had pressured Amphlett and guitarist Mark McEntee to collaborate with big-name professional songwriters to ensure a hit single, and Knight was the reigning queen of 1980s power ballads and female empowerment anthems, prized for what Creem magazine called “her aggressive femacho viewpoint” and responsible for the likes of “Better Be Good to Me” by Tina Turner and Pat Benatar’s “Love is a Battlefield.” “I was supposed to write it with her,” Amphlett admitted to Rolling Stone magazine. “But we fell out.” Crank up “Pleasure and Pain” in Christina Amphlett’s memory today!

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Born on this day: alluring and durable Canadian actress, dancer, singer and one of Vancouver’s finest exports, Miss Yvonne De Carlo (née Margaret Yvonne Kao Middleton, 1 September 1922 – 8 January 2007)! De Carlo is inevitably most fondly remembered as the serene vampiric matriarch Lily Munster in TV’s The Munsters (1964 -1966) (pictured) and for playing Moses' wife in the 1956 Cecil B DeMille Biblical epic The Ten Commandments, but my favourite film of De Carlo’s will always be the irresistibly lurid 1956 melodrama Flame of the Islands (seek it out!).

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Released on this day [1 September 1982] on the 4AD record label: the single “Some Velvet Morning” by Lydia Lunch and Rowland S Howard. The twisted musical union of No Wave death kitten Lunch and visionary Birthday Party guitarist Howard was a marriage made in post-punk heaven. The duo’s first collaboration was this radical cover version / art-punk deconstruction of “Some Velvet Morning”, the swooning psychedelic 1967 duet by Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra. This was a life-changing record for so many of us misfits: the lurching, queasy time changes! The despairing howling vocals! Howard attacking his guitar as if with an ice pick! The cover image of a seemingly post-coital and disheveled Lunch and Howard in bed together wrapped in black satin sheets! I’d argue the exquisitely gloomy poetry of the B-side “I Fell in Love with a Ghost” - the first original song Howard and Lunch ever wrote together - is even better. This was the first Lydia Lunch record I ever bought, and it stirred my brains with a spoon. In 1989, I interviewed Lunch for the first time backstage at the punk club Les Foufounes Électriques in Montreal for my university newspaper and was well and truly smitten. A few years later – when I’d relocated to London - Howard’s band These Immortal Souls played at the Underworld in Camden. At one point, we were both waiting side-by-side at the bar and when Howard ordered himself a drink, I said, “Let me get that for you …” One of my finest moments! In 1991 Howard and Lunch would reunite for the album Shotgun Wedding, an equally essential masterpiece. (Howard died in 2009). Now sing along with me: “Flowers are the things we know / Secrets are the things we grow …”

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Born 80 years ago today: trailblazing Black supermodel Donyale Luna (31 August 1945 – 17 May 1979). As a teenager in Detroit, gangly six-foot-tall Peggy Ann Freeman was mocked by the boys at school as “Olive Oyl”. But it was precisely those remarkably elongated gazelle-like proportions that later made her an in-demand fashion model on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1960s. Reinventing herself as the more exotic and ethereal “Donyale Luna” (complete with a wandering new vaguely Continental accent), she’d cast a spell on international tastemakers like Andy Warhol, Richard Avedon, The Rolling Stones (she appears in The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus (1968). Like her art-y “It girl” contemporaries Nico and Amanda Lear, Luna dated Brian Jones), David Bailey (who made Luna British Vogue’s first Black front cover model in March ’66), Salvador Dali (who called her “the reincarnation of Nefertiti”) and Federico Fellini (who cast her as a sorceress in Satyricon (1969)). Sometimes sporting piercing blue contact lenses and a shaven head, Luna cultivated a strikingly otherworldly (almost alien) persona that anticipated both Afrofuturism and Grace Jones. Luna’s fashion spreads still look like timeless high art, and she kicked the door open for Beverly Johnson, Iman and Naomi Campbell – but at a high personal cost. Unfortunately, her life was marked by family tragedies and fragile mental health (perhaps exacerbated by drug use) and she died of an overdose aged 33. Seek out the fascinating HBO documentary Donyale Luna: Supermodel (2023) for the full story. Pic: Donyale Luna modeling Paco Rabanne, 1967.

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Hijinks from Bank Holiday Sunday (24 August 2025): we met up with Anne Kathrin and Knut in Greenwich - and it descended into an epic pub crawl! 1) Me (cap via Dice magazine). 2) Surly punk couple Knut and Anne Kathrin outside Ye Olde Rose & Crown. 2) Rock chick Anne Kathrin outside Ye Olde Rose & Crown. 3) and 4) The gang outside The Trafalgar pub. 5) Me cutting through the tunnel en route home.

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“The one thing I don't think I could live without would be the soundtracks to horror films,'' she said. ''I love to play them in my car as I drive down the freeway.'' Miss Galás sees no contradiction in that she is as fond of grade-B horror movies and of the heavy-metal rock of AC/DC as she is of Verdi and her vocal idol, Maria Callas.”

/ From a 1985 New York Times profile of Diamanda Galás /

Happy 70th birthday to fierce operatic Greek American avant-garde diva, pianist, composer, performance artist and AIDS activist Diamanda Galás (born on 29 August 1955). Don’t let the resemblance to Morticia Addams fool you - Galás has SOUL! Once memorably described by The New Yorker as a “lounge singer in a world on fire”, she wields her remarkable bird-of-prey voice like a weapon and possesses the same kind of wraith-cheekboned, raven-haired beauty Walt Disney endowed his animated evil queens with. Galás reportedly got her first break singing in front of insane asylum inmates, has paid tribute to serial killer Aileen Wuornos and in performance used to take the stage stripped to the waist and smeared in fake blood. Appropriately, director Francis Ford Coppola enlisted her to provide eerie shrieks-of-the-mutilated for the sound effects of 1992 version of Dracula. I haven’t seen Galás perform in many years, but I vividly remember the last time: she was reinterpreting jazz standards like “All of Me” and “You Don’t Know What Love Is” at The Barbican in London in her own inimitable (blood-curdling) way, which lulled the uninitiated into a false sense of security. People were filing out in dismay all night! Keep doing what you’re doing, lady! If you’ve never dipped a toe into Galás’ wild, wild world, I’d suggest starting with the relatively accessible albums The Singer (1992) and The Sporting Life (1994), her collaboration with John Paul Jones of Led Zeppelin. Pictured: Galás by Paul Harris, San Diego, 1985.

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“That summer Jayne went to Germany where she made a movie called Heimweh nach St Pauli, or Homesick for St Pauli with a German rock star named Freddy Quinn, an Elvis Presley imitator. It is a musical in which Jayne sang a couple of songs in German with glockenspiels and accordion in the background. In this country the film was released only in a couple of theatres in Yorktown [sic: Yorkville], the German section of New York City. While Jayne was in Munich, she wrote to her friends that she was very upset, confused and unsure of herself. One thing that was one her mind was that she was pregnant.”

/ Jayne Mansfield and the American Fifties by Martha Saxton, 1975 /

“At the end of May Jayne, Mickey Jr and Zoltan flew to Hamburg where Jayne made her first and only German film, Heimweh nach St Pauli (Homesick for St Pauli) … St Pauli was directed by Werner Jacobs, whose long career included German versions of Heidi and The Merry Widow; it was based on a play by Gustav Kampendonk, who also wrote the script. Both men specialized in lightweight, whipped-cream movies and Heimweh nach St Pauli was no exception. The production company, Rapid Film, was not as squeaky-clean, with titles such as Swinging Wives, The Resort Girls and Carnal Campus to its credit, but Jacobs and Kampendonk rose above their producers’ rowdiness and made a film anyone could take their grandmother to see … St Pauli – which was shot very quickly for a big-budget musical – is a silly, enjoyable film with songs and dances crammed in approximately every five minutes … She looks great, with a huge but flattering wig …”

/ Jayne Mansfield: The Girl Couldn’t Help It by Eve Golden, 2021 /

(Barely) released on this day (29 August) in 1963: sex kitten-gone-berserk Jayne Mansfield’s little-seen German film Heimweh nach St Pauli (pictured). Thankfully her ultra-kitsch musical numbers (“Snicksnack Snucklechen” and “Wo ist Der Mann?”) are viewable on YouTube.

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“Take it easy, Grace! Think of a good lie to tell your husband. Tell him you’re late because the car broke down … tell him anything! Even make love to him … after all, you need him more than other men!”

“The sexual voraciousness of newspaper heiress Grace Caldwell threatens to destroy the reputation of her wealthy Pennsylvania family” is Wikipedia’s terse synopsis for 1965 melodrama A Rage to Live – which is the next Lobotomy Room film club presentation at Fontaine’s on Thursday 18 September 2025! Based on a 1949 novel by John O’Hara, this feverishly moralistic and overwrought soap opera is ostensibly a parable about the anguish of nymphomania. Seen today, it reads more like a treatise on the fear of female desire. Rage was also transparently inspired by the success of Butterfield 8 (1960) starring Elizabeth Taylor, the earlier torrid screen adaptation of another John O’Hara novel concerning female promiscuity. (Grace is played by husky-voiced Suzanne Pleshette (pictured). In Rage’s early scenes, the 28-year-old Pleshette is the most mature college student since Mamie Van Doren in Girls Town). With dialogue like “You’re going to worry yourself into a sanitarium over that daughter of yours!” and “You just found yourself another stud, now I’m supposed to get lost!”, A Rage to Live is THE perfect film to watch while slamming Fontaine’s excellent range of cocktails! Reserve a seat NOW by emailing bookings@fontaines.bar

Lobotomy Room is the FREE monthly film club devoted to Bad Movies for Bad People. Third Thursday night of every month downstairs at Fontaine’s cocktail lounge in Dalston. Numbers are limited, so reserve your seat via Fontaine’s site. Alternatively, phone 07718000546 or email bookings@fontaines.bar. The film starts at 8:30 pm. Doors to the basement Bamboo Lounge open at 8:00 pm. To ensure everyone is seated and cocktails are ordered on time, please arrive by 8:15 pm at the latest.

Suzanne Pleshette / production still from Walter Grauman’s A Rage to Live (1965)

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“Fills the screen with more adult entertainment than you dare to expect! The intimate story of a striptease goddess!”

Yes! Way back in June 2025, my free monthly Lobotomy Room cinema club (devoted to cinematic perversity!) screened the obscure 1963 French sexploitation flick Strip-tease (released in North America as The Sweet Skin) starring the eternally inscrutable German chanteuse and Warhol Superstar Nico (pictured). Strip-tease is a criminally unsung and fascinating movie and boy, do I have notes. So, I wrote a blog post about it! Read it here.

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Born 82 years ago (27 August 1943) today: Hollywood’s transgressive pouty, perverse and malevolent sex kitten / nymphette / wild child Tuesday Weld. I love the adorable Weld’s performances in Rock, Rock, Rock (1956), Return to Peyton Place (1961), The Cincinnati Kid (1965), Lord Love a Duck (1966), Pretty Poison (1968), Play It as It Lays (1972) and Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977). (As the ever-savvy Bruce LaBruce has noted, Weld is the rare actress to commit matricide twice onscreen: in Lord Love a Duck and Pretty Poison). Hell, she’s even beguiling in the otherwise execrable The Private Lives of Adam and Eve (1960). (I keep meaning to investigate Sex Kittens Go to College (1960) co-starring b-movie vixen Mamie Van Doren and Go Wild in the Country (1962), in which Weld is Elvis Presley’s leading lady). Interestingly, Weld is also famous for the parts she rejected: she was first choice for Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita (1962) ("I didn't have to play it. I was Lolita” she explained) (which went to Sue Lyon), Bonnie in Bonnie & Clyde (1967) (which went to Faye Dunaway), Rosemary in Rosemary’s Baby (1968) (which went to Mia Farrow) and Pherber in Performance (1970) (which went to Anita Pallenberg). Weld’s turbulent bad girl persona wasn’t restricted to the screen: as Slant website put it, “Weld dated men three times her age, drank heavily, smoked pot, and was surly and difficult with reporters, once appearing on a daytime talk show in a bathrobe and bare feet. Sam Shepard later wrote of the incident, “I fell in love with Tuesday Weld on that show. I thought she was the Marlon Brando of women.”” In the tradition of late-period Garbo or Dietrich present-day Weld lives in deep seclusion and hasn’t been seen in public in years.

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Born on this day in Peekskill, New York: comedic visionary Paul Reubens (27 August 1952 – 30 July 2023), the genius creator of madcap man-child character, adored kitsch icon and pop culture fixture Pee-wee Herman. If you haven’t watched it already, the 2025 documentary Pee-wee as Himself by Matt Wolf is an absolute must. (Not ashamed to admit I watched it through a veil of tears). Pictured: portrait of Reubens by Herb Ritts, 1987.

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It was deeply saddening to learn yesterday of the death of much-loved Santa Ana, California-based soul singer Vicky Tafoya, who died on 24 August 2025 after a short battle with cancer. Tafoya was my idea of total glamour: the jet-black mane of teased hair! The sequins! Those sensational trademark false eyelashes, like two black tarantulas glued to her lids! But even more important: her unaffected warmth, her belting, soaring Ronnie Spector-like voice and her musical imagination saturated in classic rhythm and blues and doo-wop. I’ve watched the mighty Tafoya perform at Viva Las Vegas Rockabilly Weekends over many years now, was always dazzled by her and it was gratifying to see her land a peak headlining slot this April - and absolutely slay! She was on radiant form and sounded great, which makes her death particularly shocking and unexpected. What an artist, what a woman, what a voice, what a loss. Investigate Tafoya’s music on Spotify and YouTube. Pictured: a shot I took of Vicky Tafoya at the Viva Las Vegas Rockabilly Weekend on Thursday 24 April 2025.