Sorcha Dallas

I was born in 1954 in Liverpool, into a very traditional working-class family. We moved to a small mining village near Wigan when I was a teenager. In 1974, I went to study Graphic Design at Manchester Polytechnic – it was still a very novel discipline then, you could learn how to make a record-sleeve or maybe a label for a tin of peas.

I met Jon Savage(i) in 1976, at one of the very early Sex Pistols concerts. Jon would frequently drive up to Manchester from London, and he was the only person I knew who had a car, so he had instant glamour. At that time, we were all struggling for a new visual language. We hated the word ‘punk’ because it was a moniker thrown at us by the tabloids.

Jon and I created ‘The Secret Public’(ii) in early 1977. To publish a fanzine or release a single still felt like a very radical gesture – ‘fanzine’ itself was still a new word. With The Secret Public, Jon and I acknowledged that secrecy and anonymity were vital to the flow of culture. ‘The Secret Public’ would be anathema to the Twitter generation. We decided to use purely photomontage in the zine, no text. We had enormous problems finding a printer as they declared the content pornographic. I would say to them, ‘You’ve got Page 3 pinned to your wall but you won’t print this?!’ ‘The Secret Public’ finally appeared in 1978, printed for cash without receipt. Ironically, some left-wing book shops wouldn’t sell it because they decided that it was sexist.

Buzzcocks decided to use a very minimal photomontage of mine for their single, ‘Orgasm Addict’(iii). Most of my other collages contextualized the female form within claustrophic, domestic spheres. For the ‘Orgasm Addict’ sleeve, the female stands alone and inverted. She became the pin-up for a new generation and now she hangs in the Tate.

In early 1977, ‘Woman’s Own’ magazine featured a double page spread titled ‘DIY Punk for Your Daughter’, and it was probably also the moment that Howard Devoto left Buzzcocks. Months later, Howard formed Magazine, creating a gothic world far removed from punk. We would spend evenings in Salford looking at the work of the French Symbolists, especially Odilon Redon and Gustave Moreau. I began experimenting with monoprint and made a curious series of 100 heads. “I like these four,” Howard said. I collaged the quartet on to a black swirl of a sky and the sleeve to ‘Real Life’(iv) was born. Months later I moved to south Manchester, enshrined in song by Morrissey – “What do we get for our trouble and pain? Just a rented room in Whalley Range.”(v) I shared a house with Barry Adamson and John McGeoch from Magazine. At the time, it was still a notorious red light area, falling under the shadow of the Yorkshire Ripper. Morrissey lived there for a while, as did Nico.

Ludus(vi) became the perfect container for my anxiety, curiosity and exploration of all things female. The post-punk period was in some ways a far more fertile period in British culture than punk, there was a new arena for radical enquiry. For me, songwriting became a way to create a world through sound rather than visual imagery. Virgin Records expressed their curiosity about signing Ludus but we never responded. With the luxury of hindsight, I see how British culture was about to curdle and coagulate under Thatcherism, and I could never have survived. I made my exit, dressed in raw meat and with what the Sunday Telegraph recently called a ‘sex-toy’.

The last Ludus performance in Manchester took place in the Hacienda in 1982, on Bonfire Night. The Hacienda has now been culturally enshrined as a mythic meeting place of great northern minds but the reality was that it was cold, cavernous and empty, with an atrocious sound system – impossible to dance to. There were aesthetic blind spots too: how did selling cheap hamburgers and showing pornography fit with Kim Philby?(vii) Maybe perfectly, but it was lost on me. Bucks Fizz had recently won the Eurovision song contest and whipped off their skirts mid-song; it seemed like such a cheap trick. For the Hacienda, I made a protest dress decorated with raw meat and during my last chorus I took off my skirt and revealed a black dildo. I remember everybody in the audience taking a step back as one while I screamed with equal horror and delight at the appearance of my new appendage.

I moved to Brussels for a short period then to record with Les Disques Du Crepuscule. At that time, they were the most glamorous record label in the world. I was the guest of the head designer Benoit Hennebert and we wandered through Brussels searching for bottles of Carven’s obsolete Ma Griffe – we both shared a perfume obsession. Benoit and I dreamed of the perfect album with the perfect sleeve but it never happened.

As I stepped off the stage, Morrissey stepped on. There was never any need for me to sing ever again. Time passed by and I started to draw once more; started to take photographs – Christopher Isherwood’s mandate of “I am a camera” absolute sense. In the early 90s, Morrissey invited me to document his world tours and I photographed all that I saw – onstage and off.

In 1999, I photographed young rival gangs in north Manchester and middle-aged cowboys. The faux violence of the latter contrasted with the covert violence of the former. The photographs became part of a large body of work, ‘The Return of Linderland’. I made a four hour performance piece, ‘The Working Class Goes to Paradise’, using three local rock bands playing simultaneously for four hours. The noise levels were illegal, and I was deaf for three days afterwards.

More recently, I’ve been working with Richard Nicoll, making a series of collages for his A/W10 collection. We first met a year earlier when Stuart Shave had asked me if I would be photographed as part of his ‘art gang’ for Vogue and I borrowed some of Richard’s designs for the shoot. One week later, Richard rang me up and photomontages soon migrated on to dresses, skirts and coats. Eventually, the whole collection reflected my lifelong fascination with the cultural enshrinement of the female form. Richard was a dream to work with.

And everything eventually comes full circle. This month, I premier a new 13-hour performance piece, ‘The Darktown Cakewalk: Celebrated From The House Of FAME. The title and the time involved are deliberately unwieldy – I’m bored with a culture of instant gratification. All 13 hours will be improvised by both musicians and dancers. Richard Nicoll has constructed costumes that can be worn inside out and upside down, shared by one body or two. Confectionary, consumption, stereotype and discrimination vie for attention. The true star of the show is time itself – the one commodity that we all yearn for. In the cracks between time, maybe the ghosts of ‘The Secret Public’ will reappear, mute and faded, but speaking volumes – we can only hope.”

(i) Jon Savage is a broadcaster and music journalist. He wrote the celebrated Sex Pistols biography ‘England’s Dreaming.’ (ii) ‘Secret Public’ was a large-format photomontage fanzine created by Linder Sterling and Jon Savage published in a limited-edition of 1,000. (iii) The single was released in 1977 on United Artists, and featured a blue and yellow photomontage of a woman’s torso with an iron stolen from the Argos catalogue for a head. (iv) Sterling designed the cover for Magazine’s 1978 post-punk debut ‘Real Life’. (v) One of Manchester’s first suburbs, two miles south of the city centre. (vi) Sterling’s post-punk quartet that greatly influenced Morrissey. (vii) Below the dancefloors of the Hacienda lurked the Traitors Bar celebrating Kim Philby and Guy Burgess – the gay British men who betrayed their country to spy for the Soviet Union.