England – davidlatta

Chick Flicks: Rock Goddess Conquers All In The All-Female Heavy Metal Rock Scene

Shake a tree in any UK locale and it’s a pretty safe bet that a rock music connection or two will fall out. The most notable difficulty with the inner London borough of Wandsworth will be, firstly, to find a tree. However, once you do (having taken a breather with a pint of bitter, a pork pie and a cork-tipped Pall Mall or thirteen), the rock links come thick and fast. The Battersea Power Station and its association to Pink Floyd, for example.

Or what passes these days as a vaguely quaint medical centre nearby that, in 1973, was a storage building for The Who’s equipment. An out-of-work circus troupe were hired to transform it into a recording studio (as you do), initially named The Kitchen and then Ramport Studios.

It was there that Quadrophenia was recorded, although the control booth had not yet been completed. The Who positioned Ronnie Wood’s Mobile Studio in the street outside to facilitate recording.

Ramport Studios were later utilised by Bryan Ferry, Joan Jett, Sparks, Thin Lizzy, and the Sex Pistols. Supertramp recorded Crime Of The Century there.

The studio was located at 115 Thessaly Rd, on the corner of Corunna Rd, and these days it is known as the Battersea Fields Medical Practice. For a glimpse into the studio, check out The Who’s video clip for Who Are You, shot in 1978 for the documentary, The Kids Are Alright.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNbBDrceCy8

The UK release of Hell Hath No Fury, the 2nd album from Rock Goddess.

Wandsworth was also a hotspot (maybe THE hotspot, considering its rather limited reach) of the all-female heavy metal band movement. 1977 was the year in question and the band is Rock Goddess. Sure, the blank expression is perfectly understandable; Rock Goddess is barely remembered these days by even the most anally-retentive heavy metal genealogists.

But, surprisingly, in a genre where quality is generally in pretty short supply, this band was something special. Rock Goddess formed in 1977 when 13-year-old Jody Turner, influenced by The Runaways, decided to start a band. With Jody on lead guitar and vocals, she enlists schoolfriend Tracey Lamb on bass. While they search for a drummer, Jody’s nine-year-old sister, Julie, filled in and never leaves.

The Turner’s father, John, was a former musician who owned a record store on the Wandsworth High Street. It was in a back store room that the fledgling band initially gather to rehearse.

Years of hard slog, shitty gigs and frustration followed. Their talent, along with a dogged perseverance, began to pay off. They headlined the Marquee club, mounted their first UK tour and, in 1982, played the Redding festival where they were scouted by A&M and signed to a record deal. The first self-titled album was released in February 1983 with ten songs all penned by Jody Turner. The second, titled Hell Hath No Fury, appeared in the UK later that year.

Inbetween, a fourth member, Kat Burbella had been added but she didn’t last long. Tensions, which had been building between Tracey and Jody, finally came to a head and Tracey left the band. The bass spot for the recording of the second album fell to Dee O’Malley.

The UK release of Hell Hath No Fury contained ten original Jody Turner tracks. By the time, it appeared in the US the following year, the track listings looked a little different. Two of the UK release tracks were dropped. Replacing them was Hell Hath No Fury (not a bad idea considering it was the album title) and a cover of Gary Glitter’s I Didn’t Know I Loved You (Until I Saw You Rock and Roll).

The most successful singles of the period, Heavy Metal Rock’n’Roll and My Angel (from the debut album) and the Gary Glitter cover didn’t so much graze the charts as gaze longingly at them from across the abyss, waving forlornly.

They did, however, get lots of attention which led to gigs and offers of tour supports. The one problem they run into in the early 80s is that Julie, as a high school student (and technically a minor) could only play limited dates. Eventually, though, they toured as support to Def Leppard and Iron Maiden.

In the meantime, Tracey started her own band, She, followed by The Perfect Mothers, which never played live. And numerous other projects which, in the way of rock history generally, ended up like numerous other projects throughout rock history.

Eventually, Tracey joined Girlschool, another all-girl heavy metal band that started in Wandsworth in 1978 (hence the 1978 Wandsworth connection) but had a tad more commercial and critical success via its association with Lemmy from Motorhead and Lemmy’s own GWR Records.

The early 80s were the glory years of Rock Goddess. Despite developing quite a huge fan following, the band sputtered along as best they could before eventually breaking up in 1987. Since then, they’ve been on-again, off-again, on-again ad infinitum (with Tracey almost but never quite coming back).

Jody has been alternately pursuing numerous other projects which, in the way of rock history etc etc. Julie married, became a fitness instructor and relocated to Spain.

Around 2015, a big thing was made of Jody and Julie Turner reuniting with Tracey Lamb under the Rock Goddess banner. By 2018, Tracey was out; she later rejoined Girlschool. A mooted and heavily-publicised Rock Goddess album never eventuated although a three-track EP of new material became available in 2017.

That’s rock’n’roll, kids. The promise that burns so bright leaves a mountain of ashes. A third album, Young & Free, recorded while still under the A&M contract but never released at the time, appeared via a French label in 1987. It featured the Turner/O’Malley line-up.

If you want to experience a time capsule of prime early 1980s all-girl heavy metal exotica, you can’t go beyond Rock Goddess. For the historic progression, the trifecta of The Runaways, Rock Goddess and Girlschool will provide everything you need.

Tretchikoff’s Retro Legacy: The Man The Art World Loved To Hate

It was said, by the artist himself, that the only painter who exceeded him in wealth was Picasso and the two certainly had many other things in common, including an excess of self-confidence and an appreciation of the female form. But while Picasso was always the art world’s darling boy, revered and feted by critics, Vladimir Tretchikoff could never temper the derision of the establishment.

Yet, while critics maintained their apoplectic outrage, Tretchikoff quite happily turned his undoubted talents towards making money. In the process, he captured the imagination of the middle-classes throughout the western world in the 50s and 60s. His most famous image, Chinese Girl, sold in the hundreds of thousands and seemed to be on every suburban lounge room wall; by the late 90s, urban hipsters revived the craze, pushing the price of vintage prints to extraordinary levels.

And still the art world carped. While no major art gallery in his South African home ever acquired a Tretchikoff, the Iziko South African National Gallery in Cape Town drew sell-out crowds to a recently concluded retrospective of his work. The exhibition brought together 92 original works including Chinese Girl, on show for the first time in 50 years.

While the public were delighted, there were those who couldn’t resist the opportunity to put the boot in; South African art critic Lloyd Pollak, who spoke at a panel discussion during the exhibition, was quoted in the Cape Times as saying: “An academic recently stated that Tretchi’s paintings ‘represent the worst kind of prejudice, voyeurism, crass racial stereotypes, sexism, cultural paternalism and white colonialism’ and I heartily concur.

“[The exhibition] has resoundingly vindicated the judgement of critics of the 50s and 60s who dismissed Tretchi’s work as excruciatingly vulgar and beyond redemption. The general consensus is that his style was crass and without technical or artistic address and his content vapid and maudlin. The ideas underpinning his paintings are of a heart-breaking banality and his work has no intellectual significance whatsoever.”

Tretchikoff, who died in 2006 at the age of 93 and whose obituary appeared in the New York Times and a range of British newspapers, would hardly have been surprised.

Tretchikoff was born in Petropavlovsk, Russia. His family fled to northern China following the outbreak of the 1917 revolution. A gifted artist from an early age, at 15 he made his way to Shanghai where he worked as an illustrator. There, he met and married another Russian exile, Natalie Telpregoff, then moved on to Singapore.

With the outbreak of war in the Pacific, he loaded his family onto a ship headed for South Africa. He later followed but his ship was sunk by the Japanese. The survivors rowed first to Sumatra and then to Java where he was interned in a prisoner of war camp. While working in Jakarta, then still under Japanese occupation, he met Leonora Schmidt-Salomonson, otherwise known as Lenka, who became his mistress, muse and most famous model.

When the war ended, Tretchikoff was reunited with his family in South Africa and his career as an artist gathered full steam. He held his first exhibition in 1948 and his fame spread, first to the United States where he had sold-out exhibitions that attracted thousands of people, and to England, where similar scenes ensued.

The brightly-coloured, almost photorealistic Chinese Girl was painted using a local model, the daughter of a Cape Town laundry owner (who earned about R20 for her work), but the original was damaged in 1953 during one of his frequent absences touring and he repainted it with the inspiration of a San Francisco model. The blue-green tinged portrait struck an unconscious nerve, quickly becoming one of the best selling prints of all times.

Prints of other Tretchikoff works, including Miss Wong and The Dying Swan (featuring British ballerina Alicia Markova, who joined Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes at the age of 14), had similar success.

Tretchikoff’s Chinese Girl was one of the first fateful breezes in the far-off rumblings of pop culture. In terms of defining a popular zeitgeist, it achieved for the mid-20^th century what Howard Carter’s discovery of King Tutankhamun did 30 years earlier. To those closeted homogenous 1950s minds, Tretchikoff’s exotically-coloured Asian women were romantically erotic symbols of lands and cultures far away and beyond their understanding.

So pervasive is Tretchikoff’s better-known and widely-circulated works, it’s difficult to find a comprehensive example of his oeuvre. A prime resource for collectors is his 1950 self-titled book, published by Howard Timmons Cape Town for George Allen & Unwin Ltd London; aside from the inevitable nudes, often featuring Lenka, it includes skilful and exacting portraits, self-portraits, allegories (including a stunning Art Deco-like representation of a space-age aviator and an atomic bomb exploding on a modern city), landscapes and still lifes. Although never reprinted, it is possible uncover copies in good condition via the Internet and the illustrations in this blog are drawn from this volume.

And for the ultimate Tretchikoff collector, what better than a huge mural to decorate their achingly ironic 50s homestead? A 3.6m by 2.4m version of Lady Of The Orient is available from Surface View in the UK for a very reasonable £450 – www.surfaceview.co.uk/two/index.php?C=110&P=363&DESC=_Large_Murals/Lady_of_the_Orient_by_Vladimir_Tretchikoff

www.vladimirtretchikoff.com

http://tretchikoff-central.blogspot.com/