Author and film-maker Phil Strongman on the Chelsea “street couture” boutiques Acme Attractions and BOY, which rivalled McLaren and Westwood’s 430 King’s Road shops in the heady decade of 1975-85

Fashion, anti-fashion, photography, design, music, youth cults and culture… all these things overlap, often in a way best summed up by the word ‘chaotic’. Chaos and confusion are nouns that also spring to mind when discussing Acme Attractions and BOY – two ‘street couture boutiques’ that had a cultural impact out of all proportion to their size. Acme was always, in essence, a market stall and BOY started out as a very small and insignificant shop. The fact that these tiny fashion outlets eventually led to headlines, riots, shotgun raids and tank attacks is, even in the strange world of fashion, quite unique.

So chaos is thus the excuse for the mercurial format of this book. This isn’t a definitive, encyclopaedic type book. Instead, it’s a compilation of memories, memoirs, interviews, confessions, diary extracts, designs, sketches, stories and photographs – a mishmash that covers quite a few subjects and quite a few years (especially 1975 to 1981 and generally from 1975 to 1985 – by which time Acme founder, and BOY co-founder, John Krivine had left the King’s Road, fashion and England forever). There’s also a few rumours that have been included here, clearly signposted, as it’s sometimes good to know exactly what people believed at the time. But there are no outright lies and no wild exaggerations – the latter being something that seems to happen a lot in the internet age, especially when it comes to the 1970s and ’80s.

I’ve read several things recently that are just plain wrong; one is people citing The Clash’s ‘London Calling’ track as being a huge attack on The Beatles – because of its line about ‘phoney Beatlemania’ – when those words were actually The Clash’s sideswipe at the short-lived power pop phenomenon of 1978 and ’79, wherein Sixties revival bands like The Pleasers would hire teenage girls to wear mini-skirts and attend their gigs.

Part of the reason I wanted to do this book is because virtually no previous volumes – or even magazine articles – have gone into serious depth when it comes to Acme Attractions and the early days of BOY. And there are none that really examine the torrid tales of the deadly rivalry between Acme and the shops created by Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood at 430 King’s Road, Chelsea.

But the killer, ultimately, for me – the raison d’être – is the almost complete absence of words from John Krivine. A Hollywood habitué for a time, John was also the ‘jukebox baron’ who was the man behind Acme Attractions and who then went on to co-found BOY with the late Steph Raynor. Despite being absent from England for almost forty years there were still a few myths circulating about John earlier this century… namely that he was in Israel, building mosques for Arab tribesmen… or he was still, somehow, pulling the strings on what was left of the BOY empire, a fashion conglomerate that had once encircled the world… or no again, really he was living alone in a disused windmill – an old Oast-house – writing vast, thousand-page novels filled with famous names and pornography…

All of these turned out to be untrue, of course. And, after numerous emails and phone calls, I finally tracked him to the Middle East, to the sandy wastelands of the Negev Desert. Down a crackling phone line John then agreed to a week-long series of interviews… but only if I went out there – only if these interviews were to be done one-on-one, face-to-face. IRL, as young people today say. I eventually agreed and thus set off, not knowing the exact address – or how to get there, or when I would get back – and feeling not unlike the Captain Willard who goes ‘up river’ to find Colonel Kurtz.

I wished I’d had my own little crew with me – the four guys that helped me shoot Kyiv Unbroken, a 2017 film about Ukraine’s cultural explosion after the Maidan Uprising. It was a film that won awards but it was also a film that we couldn’t give away since – all the film distributors told us – it was far ‘too alarmist’ as ‘Russia isn’t that bad, Putin isn’t that bad, he would never really launch a full-scale invasion’. The distribution bureaucrats were wrong, of course, and we were right, and events since then have made this clear. But, hey, being an Oxbridge person means never having to say you’re sorry – and certainly not to plebs like us.

Speaking of movies, the producer Mike Wearing – known for his Edge of Darkness series and feature – once called my Anarchy! McLaren Westwood Gang film ‘the Apocalypse Now of art documentaries’. I wish Mike had lived long enough to see me on that day in early January 2024; setting off for the desert while clutching a battered note-book and an ageing tape recorder, a naive traveller somehow looking to find London fashion’s very own Heart of Darkness…

This is an extract from Acme Boy: The Birth of Punk and Anti-Fashion (Blurring Books, £21.99) by Phil Strongman. Buy a copy from bookshop.org here.

Or buy a copy from Blackwell’s here.

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