When I think back to my time as a punk, the seven stages of grief – shock, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, testing and acceptance – invariably cross my mind. Luckily I quit being one when I was still a teenager, turning to the deep peace of the twinset after the hurly-burly of the bondage pants. It was easy for me; I’d only ever pretended to be a punk to advance myself professionally as a 17-year-old keen to find a way of evading factory life. But Jordan – born Pamela Rooke in Seaford – was the real thing.
The position of women in punk was an interesting one – better than being a hippie girl, expected to put up and shut up, and more on a par with being a mod girl: a mate. What mod and punk had in common was their drug of choice, amphetamines, which tend to put sex on the back-burner. Girls were encouraged to be mouthy, and Jordan was an audacious young woman from the start. As a teenage Bowie fan she got close enough to her idol for him to notice an earring she had made “out of a starling’s feather, with pearls sewn into them… He took my hand and asked me if he could have it. I shook my head slowly and said, ‘No.’”
Content from our partners
