Sorcha Dallas

As an ex-punk (well, perhaps not even ex), I can safely say that Linder’s art launched a thousand collages, assembled on bedroom floors from carefully cut-up magazines, magically transformed by the still excitingly modern technique of photocopying (Rymans never had it so good), and disseminated in countless fanzines up an ddown dreaming England.

I know, dear reader, because at least three of those fanzines were born on my bedroom floor.

Linder – whose punk work goes on show for the first time this week at the Cleveland gallery in London – was a major inspiration to us provincial punks. Living in the sticks of suburban Southampton, hanging out in Virgin Records on a Saturday afternoon, it was the under-the-counter appearance of the Linder/Jon Savage collaboration, Secret Public, that showed us the way, taking up sixties Pop Art collage and ruthlessly injecting late seventies anarchy. Even the names Linder and Savage seemed invested in dark, Northern mystique. The art referred further back, to Schwitters and Hoch, buzz-words for a new Dadaist generation.

To us, Linder’s juxtapositions of hard-core porn and kitchen recipe shots were profoundly (and rewardingly) disturbing. They still are, when you see them in all their lurid glory. It makes an old punk’s heart beat faster to be faced with the original collage for the Buzzcocks’ Orgasm Addict: a glycerine-gleaming Penthouse nude, strangely scarred and contorted, her head a gleaming chrome iron, her nipples replaced by grinning mouths. It’s a vicious image made somehow androgynous.

Linder’s title for her show echoes a cri-de-couer chord for seventies survivors: What Did You Do In The Punk War, Mummy? The image sets her work neatly in historical context (especially in the wake of the announcement of an all-woman short-list for the Turner Prize). She’s the missing link between Tracey Emin and Yoko Ono; her relationship with Morrissey (whom she first met at a Pistols concert) has earned the pair the epithet the John and Yoko of the nineties. Indeed, the show coincides with a lavish new survey of feminist art by Liz McQuiston, From Suffragettes To She-Devils (published this week by Phaidon), which gives Linder’s work its due as seminal punk-feminist art.

Linder’s claim to punk icon status is further underlined by her friendship with Buzzcocks’ founder, Howard Devoto. Also at the gallery are the Symbolist alien heads she drew for the Real Life album and, intriguingly, a series of fetishistic masks based on lingerie, along with archive photos of a youthful Devoto modeling them. The “stripper’s bra” version, of shocking pink, padded satin eyeholes where nipples should be and black “tit tassels” hanging over the wearer’s cheeks, looks like a design for some Sadean orgy in the 21st century.

Linder went on to form the performance band Ludus. A tape loop of the band performing at the Hacienda reveals her in a costume consisting of raw meat and a 12-inch balck dildo. Ah, those were the days.

Fifteen years ago, I wrote to Linder inviting her to contribute to yet another arty fanzine. She obliged. Now, 15 years later, I meet my heroine. She’s still working as an artist (about to install 40 tons of salt in a disused Catholic school in Widnes), she remains one of the few intimates of the increasingly mythic Morrissey, and lives with the novelist Michael Bracewell. It is strange meeting such like-minds now, bound, in our third decade, by the shared experience of the punk club. She and Bracewell (and Morrissey) have mutated into a nineties perversion of fifties rockabilly, their slicked-back pomades an almost shocking gesture in a world constricted by the mores of fash-mag consumerism.

The millennial Teddy boy/girl look is made ironic by the memory of our old antipathy with the Teds. We’re all still punks, you see; in my late thirties, I’m still pushing up my hair and wearing green nail varnish.

In England Is Mine, Bracewell artfully diagnoses the black Gothicism and foment revolt in the North, calling it, in his chapter “Lucifer Over Lancashire” (a bravura text that swerves from Branwell Bronte to Mark E Smith), “a region of mythological darkness…a vernacular culture…quick-witted, yet steeped in despair and the history of protest”. The lure of the North, resonant with the sort of dark, subcultural credibility Linder’s art represents, remains magnetic to us soft Southerners – fellow foot-soldiers in the Great Punk War none the less.