The In Crowd

Spending time in London and Brighton with Dennis Morris, Jenny Saville, Leigh Bowery!, Emily Kam Kngwarray, Edward Burra and the early Mod Stylists.

Aug 21, 2025

You don’t have to be living in or visiting London (or Brighton) to enjoy some of what’s currently showing at their galleries and museums; indeed, that’s what reviews and articles like the following are designed for, so we can all get a sense of what’s happening beyond our midst. However, should you happen to be living in or visiting London (or Brighton), I hope you will join me in enjoying at least some of the culture I viewed on my recent “holiday” in those towns. (I put “holiday” in “” because my idea of an ideal holiday includes soaking up as much pop culture as I can, much like my idea of the ideal job.)1 Read on, soak up, and, as always, feel free to comment.

DENNIS MORRIS: MUSIC + LIFE

Until Sept. 28, at The Photographer’s Gallery, 16-18 Ramilies Street, London W1,

Growing up West Indian Black in London’s Dalston in the 1960s, Dennis Morris took to photography the moment he witnessed the magic of the dark room, courtesy of his choir director, at age nine. Soon nicknamed “Mad Dennis” for sleeping with his camera, he set up a studio in his parent’s limited homespace – throwing up a white sheet on the wall of what passed as the living room and advertising his services around the neighbourhood. He also photographed his fellow Black kids on the local streets, all of which set him up well to effectively door-step Bob Marley on the Jamaican singer’s first visit to London, in 1973, at the Speakeasy on Wardour Street. (The “doorstepping” was necessary given that Dennis was only 14 at the time.)

Not only did Marley bring Morris into the Speakeasy with him and to the evening’s show, but recognizing a possible mentee, also invited the teen to join him and the Wailers on their tour – the next morning. The photograph that announces this Music + Life retrospective, which occupies three floors of the Photographer’s Gallery just off Oxford Circus, is Bob greeting Dennis in the van that next morning, asking “Are you ready?” as Dennis answered in the affirmative by clicking the shutter.

Over coming years, Morris would spend considerable time photographing and “reasoning" with Marley not only in the UK but also at the singer’s Hope Road headquarters in Kingston, Jamaica. His last photograph of the singer, below, shows Marley looking old before his time, in hindsight clearly suffering from the cancer that would soon take him prematurely, But the image remains magical for the fact that he is unveiling “Redemption Song” to the photographer in the process.

Morris’ world was never defined or limited by his skin colour. Johnny Rotten, recognising his fellow North Londoner’s talents from the Marley images, invited Morris to photograph the Sex Pistols, and similar adventures followed, at the Marquee back on Wardour Street, across the UK on the SPOTS “secret” tour and also on the ill-fated visit to the States at the start of 1978 (see below for his Pistols wall); Morris went on to become PiL’s favoured photographer, and he and Lydon served A&R recruitment duties for Virgin’s Front Line label in Jamaica. It is hardly an afterthought that Morris took the classic cover shot for Marianne Faithfull’s Broken English, nor some of the better-known images of The Stone Roses, nor that his earlier street verité saw him venture out to Southall where he appeared to have been welcomed by the Sikh community there; Morris evidently has the personality to put all sorts at ease

For those old enough to get a 60+ senior discount entry, who are familiar with the streets of London and the punk-reggae crossover that defined the 1970s - i.e., me! - Music + Life is like walking through a scrapbook of one’s own youth. For those who don’t share this background, it will hopefully serve like many of the other exhibitions I witnessed and which follow below: a view into a period of time and space by someone who knew how to capture it for posterity.

JENNY SAVILLE: The Anatomy of Painting

Until Sept. 7 at the National Portrait Gallery, St. Martin’s Place, London, WC2.

The National Portrait Gallery website pops up with the tagline “About people, for people,” and in fairness, admission to the vast percentage of its physical space at the north end of Trafalgar Square is free: indeed, if you plan your day right, you can go to Dennis Morris’s exhibition, take a nice walk through Soho to Trafalgar Square, and at the NPG view select retrospective re-analyses of Britain’s colonial history, before descending a floor to take a walk through pop culture memory lane with a wall of sound choices of some of the country’s finer pop, rock and soul stars. (No doubt, Morris even took a couple of these photographic portraits too.)

Unfortunately, the temporary exhibitions cost, big time. Jenny Saville’s career-stretching show, The Anatomy of Painting, will set you back a hefty £21, unless, like me, you are invited to use your host’s membership pass. So while I can’t tell you it’s “worth it,” I can testify that the space given over to the Glasgow artist’s wall-sized works – the same space at which I saw The Face magazine’s exhibit earlier this year – will likely blow your mind, whether you are highly familiar with her paintings of the human anatomy in its less “cinematic” forms, utterly new to them, or, like me, not particularly clued in but nonetheless sure you’ve seen them before.

Of course, if you’re a Manic Streat Preachers fan, you will face no such uncertainty. The Welsh band secured Saville’s permission to use her triptych Strategy for the cover of 1994’s The Holy Bible; indeed, when Richey Edwards sat down with Saville to explain how it related to the album’s lyrical themes, they were given use of the image for free. The Manics, sans Edwards ever since his disappearance after that album, later returned to Saville for 2009’s Journal For Plague Lovers only to find that corporate attitudes towards non-conformist portraiture had only hardened: the four biggest British high street record chains deemed Saville’s painting of a boy’s either bruised, bleeding or perhaps just birthmarked face “inappropriate” (the painting was simply called “Stare”) and stocked the album in plain slip sleeves instead.

Some of Saville’s newer work on display at the NPG appears less provocative than the above – assuming that was ever her intent - but perhaps more captivating as a result. Viewed from a distance, the images in my photo below contain such coherence as to suggest they are merely doctored photographs, when close-up inspection reveals her continued bold use of heavy oils on a vast scale. As much as anything, Saville’s contrary take on the imperfections of the human body serve, in their temporary display at the National Portrait Gallery, as a refutation of so much of what permanently occupies the other floors, in which people who were equally, if not more imperfect in their actions and manners and often their looks as well (royalty, aristocracy, military, captains of industry) were artificially rendered faultless by those whose job it was to depict them so.

LEIGH BOWERY! / EMILY KAM KNGWARRAY

Until Aug. 31/Jan. 11 at the Tate Modern, Bankside, London SE1.

Ever since the Tate Modern opened 25 years ago, no tourist trip to London has been complete without a visit to the old Oxo building at the eastern end of the South Bank, for which the Modern rewards these visitors with an impressive amount of art for free, including the building itself. [Update: I stand corrected in the comments.] As with the NPG, however, its featured exhibitions, of which there are currently three, each come with a hefty, and separate, mark-up. (Again, I took advantage of a friend’s annual pass.)

Nonetheless, on the busy Saturday afternoon that we visited, it seemed that many people had splurged for Leigh Bowery! (the Tate’s caps), whose various interchangeable roles as what the Tate refers to as “artist, performer, model, TV personality, club promoter, fashion designer and musician” could perhaps more simply be summed up as “a living art project” and has proven possibly London’s art hit of the year. For those, like my partner Paula, who came into the exhibit knowing nothing of Leigh nor having much interaction with that world, it is indeed enticing and visually rewarding, his life revealed as a fascinating, inspirational riot of colour, chaos and good-natured cultural provocation.

My own perspective, if not my overall appreciation, was somewhat neutralized by having had one foot gingerly in that milieu while never being a part of it – in as much as while I never even stepped inside Camden Palace in my old London days, I quickly found myself in the thick of the flamboyant, gender-bending nightclub world once I settled in NYC. Indeed, I regularly interacted with the likes of Michael Alig, who I maintain was a super smart, highly likeable and gifted young man until the bad drugs took hold of him, resulting in his sadly infamous killing and dismembering of fellow club kid Angel, who had been a regular at my own Communion night until Alig’s Disco 2000 became the Limelight’s cause célèbre.

Fortunately, Bowery! had no such apparent weaknesses for the darker side of nightlife, and while he cruelly died of AIDS-related illnesses on New Year’s Eve 1994, aged just 33, he packed several full lives into those limited years. The Tate exhibition can certainly be viewed as an insight into Australian-born Leigh’s personal creativity – which included costumes that defied the very word, a musical career in Minty, and a host of events and happenings that typify the free-wheeling club world where anything goes – but it can also be enjoyed as a general timeline of the wider club and fashion scene that he came to briefly dominate: I found myself waxing especially nostalgic over memorabilia from the annual Wigstock festival that took place every Labor Day in Tompkins Square Park on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, which my then partner Posie and I attended as often as we could, and at which Bowery performed in 1994.

Wordsmith posts twice a week on all aspects of pop culture and occasionally politics too. If you like what you read here, please subscribe. if you really like it, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription, with a wide range of bonus materials and archives; I promise not to spend your contributions on vintage modernist clothing.

All that said, I was more inspired at the other end of the same Tate Modern hallway by the space given over to another Australian, the Aboriginal artist Emily Kam Kngwarray, who grew up in the Northern Territory, not far from Alice Springs, in a desert area to which the white settlers nonetheless afforded the name Utopia. Though she came into middle age creating her art in the form of Batik textiles as per her culture, work that was primarily utilitarian rather than for display, her talents were recognized quickly once wider artistic groups began to patronize (in a positive sense) Aboriginal art, which enabled her to shift into larger Batik formats.

In due course, she expanded into acrylics at the ripe old age of 74, and the instant appeal of the form for her – and the immediate reaction she received from the art world outside her communal borders – saw her produce an enormous body of visually stunning work over the next eight or so years before passing away in 1996. (Reminder: you are never too old to start anew!)

I’ve been fortunate enough to have visited Aboriginal art centers in the south of Australia, and came to this exhibition with a basic understanding of the visual style and how its dots and curves often depict “The Dreamings,” as the indigenous people refer to their complex oral history and culture. That was enough for me to recognize that Emily’s work was above and beyond the standard level or such art, and to be captivated by her subtle use of local and personal motifs - yams, emus, lizards and more - some of which can only be observed by standing back, and/or at an angle. (Look closely below and you will see what I mean.) It says something that Kngwarray’s was the only exhibit from which I brought home a couple of print souvenirs

EDWARD BURRA

Until Oct. 19 at Tate Britain, Millbank, London SW1.

In comparison to the Modern, the long-standing Tate Britain now carries the stigma of stuffy, conservative uncle. That not only does its enormous permanent display of British art, spanning the centuries, a disservice, but similarly downplays the contemporary relevance of Edward Burra, the exhibition of whose life work could quite easily have occupied either building.

Part of a Bohemian group of dancers, photographers, painters, writers and stylists who followed on naturally from the Bloomsbury set of the 1920s but whose creative heyday was then cut short by the Second World War, Burra captured adroitly in his paintings the upbeat latter days of the jazz age as depicted by the openly gay and physically disabled artist’s travels through England, France, and New York’s Harlem in the early 1930s: while his paintings of the Savoy Ballroom dancers are almost equally alive with their own movement, the stand-out is probably Minuit Chanson, which depicts the exterior of a Parisian record shop of the same name using his typically humorous eye for character detail.

Sadly, Burra’s mischievous side was largely nullified by his personal exposure to the darker forces of the Spanish Civil War, an experience that carried him through depictions of World War II, and in later years, a prescient painted reflection of the environmental damage caused by corporate pollution and even the construction of the motorways that we car-owners tend to take for granted. As such, the exhibit has a firm yin-yang sense of extremes; even as one recognises the importance of his later work, it is a lot more enjoyable examining the Harlem-related rooms and excursions to Marseilles and Toulon while listening to the sounds of his personal jazz collection wafting from the speakers.

THE IN CROWD: MOD FASHION AND STYLE 1958-66.

Until Jan. 4 at Brighton Museum and Art Gallery, Royal Pavilion, Brighton.

No city outside of London would appear better suited to host this exhibition than the mod destination town of Brighton, and in turn no trip to the south coast would be complete for any fan of sixties culture right now without a visit to the Brighton Museum, hosted within the Royal Pavilion grounds just off the Lanes and Laines, a short hop from Brighton Beach, its infamous Pier, the many clubs dotted along the seafront, and the Brighton Centre where The Jam made their last stand.

What distinguishes this exhibition, The In Crowd, from prior visual archives of historical Modernism is its concentration on the actual clothing, each room taking us through a different period by way of multiple mannequins sporting almost exclusively original, vintage wear. For this we can thank curator Richard K Burton, a pioneering first-generation Leicester mod who developed a later career as a dealer in vintage clothing, in which guise he was hired as advisor to 1979’s Quadrophenia film, though in a video interview he readily admits that much of his advice was ignored, with the result that the movie focused much more heavily on the Army parkas than would have been seen in 1964 itself.

Adding insult to injury, his quotes on this video are subtitled by AI rendering the word “parkas” as “Parker’s.” This kind of disrespect to basic factual accuracy is a personal bugbear of mine, given that it’s not exactly difficult to assign someone to proofread subtitles. But such is the world we live in, where if attention to English language is utterly irrelevant, then we should hardly be surprised that obsession with sartorial detail has probably never been less important, at least to the wider youth of today.

Whether or not that is a good or a bad thing is perhaps moot: fashions change, youth styles come and go, and regardless of whether the style wars and violent confrontations of the mod revivalist period of the late 1970s and early 1980s are ever revisited, Burton will not be on hand to witness; tragically he passed away just this last month. The In Crowd is therefore his swan song, and the fact that our British obsession with mod imagery has outlived so many of the original mods themselves speaks to its lasting impact. And if not all of us could wear these clothes with grace and style in the 1960s, let alone render them relevant to the 2020s – well that, my friends, is why we have mannequins in the first place.

Thanks for reading Tony Fletcher, Wordsmith! This post is public so feel free to share it.