Obituaries

Jordan Mooney obituary: Icon of early punk

Former ballet student worked for Westwood and McLaren and exuded anarchic attitude

Jordan: ‘Men were confused by me. They would wolf-whistle, shout all kinds of things, even offer me money, because they didn’t understand why I looked like I did.’ Photograph: Mirrorpix/Getty

Fri Apr 15 2022 - 17:12

Born: June 23rd, 1955
Died: April 3rd, 2022

Jordan Mooney, better known as simply Jordan, a glowering, beehived Valkyrie in rubber and spiked heels who became an avatar of punk style when she presided over the transgressive London boutique that hatched the Sex Pistols and other provocations, died on April 3rd in Seaford, East Sussex. She was 66.

Her brother, Roger Rooke, said the cause was bile duct cancer.

Jordan was just 19 in 1974 and working as a shop girl at Harrods, but she was already a presence when she walked into the shop Sex, at 430 King’s Road, with a peroxide bouffant, green make-up and a belted Mackintosh.

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“You were like a little icon,” her new boss, designer Vivienne Westwood, told her years later, adding, “I’d never seen anything like you before.”

With its puffy pink vinyl sign out front, seditionary manifestoes, rubber and leather fetish wear and T-shirts emblazoned with fragments of text from S&M novels, the shop was also something not seen before. It was a laboratory for its proprietors: Malcolm McLaren, an art school dropout and music impresario, and his girlfriend, Westwood, who made the clothes to her own skewed, wildly original and sometimes problematic vision – they might include swastikas or photographs from pornographic journals.

The couple would later be known as the godparents of punk, and Westwood would earn an Order of the British Empire award for her contribution to fashion.

“Moral discomfort,” Cathy Horyn wrote in the New York Times in 1999, “was their pleasure.”

Jordan, a muscular former ballet student and track star, became the living embodiment of the store and also its gatekeeper, embracing its anarchic ethos – particularly its rubber wear – with gusto and flair. She was an imposing figure, her hair swooped up in a stiff bouffant, her eyes swathed in black like a superhero’s mask.

Commuting each day by train from her parents’ home in East Sussex, she invited outrage and often cleared entire cars, sporting outfits like a see-through ensemble with bra, underpants and fishnet stockings she had customized by burning holes in them with a cigarette.

Sex Pistols’ entourage

Sometimes the conductors would move her for her safety into the first-class car, where she would find herself surrounded by businessmen pretending to read their newspapers. When the commute became too onerous, she moved to London and roomed with a dominatrix who shopped at Sex for her work gear.

“Men were confused by me,” she told the Guardian in 2019, when her memoir, Defying Gravity: Jordan’s Story (written with Cathi Unsworth), was published. “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.”

The shop Sex was like a club or a salon, and when McLaren made a band out of fledgling musicians who hung out there, he named them The Sex Pistols to promote the place. McLaren had been inspired by the absurdist political theatre of the French Situationists, and he engineered The Sex Pistols’ concerts more like performance art or a happening than a proper rock gig.

The fearsome Jordan was part of an entourage that appeared onstage with them. She did not sing, but she might add to the general chaos by hurling chairs at the audience. At one early event, when the press arrived, McLaren yelled at her: “Do something, Jords! Take your clothes off, girl.” (She removed her shirt.)

To many, she was the first Sex Pistol.

“There are people who embody a time and a place,” said Jon Savage, the British cultural critic and author of England’s Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock and Beyond (1992). “They don’t leave a body of art or writing, but their image is such that they might as well have. Jordan was that impressive. Her physical presence was that powerful.”

Jordan was part of The Sex Pistols’ entourage and sometimes appeared onstage with them. She did not sing but might add to the chaos by hurling chairs at the audience.

Jordan also worked as a manager and stylist for the glam-punk band Adam and the Ants. She often performed with them, too, howling a song called Lou, a critique of Lou Reed she had written after being disappointed by one of his shows.

Jarman’s Jubilee

She was a muse to film-maker Derek Jarman, memorably appearing in his campy punk allegory Jubilee (1978), dancing on pointe in a fluffy Swan Lake tutu on a gritty backlot, in front of a bonfire in which the union jack sizzles.

Jarman filmed her wedding in 1981 to Kevin Mooney, who was for a short time the bassist for the Ants. She was 26 and Mooney was 18, and when Westwood heard the news, she fired her. (The shop, which had been renamed Seditionaries in 1976, was at that point called World’s End.) Marriage, Westwood felt, was a burdensome bourgeois construct, and for Jordan to enter into it was an unforgivable transgression of the shop’s philosophy and Westwood’s own beliefs.

The marriage was not a happy one, marked by the couple’s heroin habits – Kevin Mooney sold her clothes at one point, and once hurled her kitten against a wall – and Jordan escaped after two years. She detoxed on her own, at her parents’ house in Seaford, telling them she had the flu. She remained in her hometown and reinvented herself as a breeder of Burmese cats and a veterinary nurse.

In addition to her brother, she is survived by her sisters, Rosalind Jean Craven and Sally Reid; and her boyfriend, Nick Linazasoro, a music journalist.

Pamela Anne Rooke was born on June 23rd, 1955, in Seaford. Her father, Stanley James Rooke, was a clerk for the dental board of the National Health Service; her mother, Rosalind Winifred (Needham) Rooke, known as Linda, tended bars and was a seamstress and a saleswoman in a haberdashery.

Pamela studied ballet and was a school track star. When she was 15, she was hit by a car, leaving her with a fractured pelvis. It took her four months to learn to walk again, and many more before she could dance.

She gave herself a new name, Jordan, for Jordan Baker, the chilly Great Gatsby character. She did well in her school exams, particularly in law and English, but decided to explore London, then a city of possibility and reinvention, seeking out the kindred tribes she had found in Brighton’s nightclubs, particularly its gay clubs, where the transformative potential of costume seemed limitless.

“It was like seeing a unicorn on the King’s Road,” Michael Costiff, a designer and party host, told her, recalling the first time he saw her. “And then, just like Greta Garbo, at the height of your powers you disappeared.”

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

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