Original subtitles

I used to love the river

because of these boats that used to ply up and down.

I don't think there are as many of them now as there were then,

little tugs which were great and the riverbank.

This is in fact Shad Thames, a third of all the studios.

It sort of belonged to us, so we had

all that river frontage as our own.

And it was beautiful.

You looked out of the window and there was Tower Bridge.

This was the old bathroom of the Butler and Colonial Wharf,

a bit cold sometimes, in fact freezing!

I always liked these old work shirts.

I don't know what happened to them.

It's extraordinary when you see things

because there are lots of things that you liked...

and they're sort of gone.

This is what's so strange about a home movie.

You wonder where a shirt like that went.

Because it was very solid, it wasn't going to fall to bits.

I don't have it any longer.

It's a great window, you see?

Looking right down the Thames.

This was very set up,

this breakfast, a bit of formal filming.

And there's the view down the Thames.

You can't see very much, but it was great.

A year before, two years before,

I had a different studio.

This is in fact Bank side.

It was very glamorous, it cost two pounds a week.

I remember this was the first piece of film

I ever made.

And I edited it in the camera,

so there is no actual editing in it.

Really, this is a whole series of fragments of the room.

Painting for Ken Russell's film, Savage Messiah.

My friend Michael Pinny who published poetry

and the greenhouse bedroom.

This was an innovation.

It kept us warm because it was rather cold.

But you could put a fan heater into it and shut the door,

so you could get quite cosy.

No one ever broke the glass around it.

It seemed to be quite safe.

It arrived in a series of packets one afternoon

and we put it together.

My friend Patrick, who I'm afraid has died.

There are an awful lot of dead people in this film.

It's rather ghastly and it's not so long ago.

"I've always loved"My Tea Shop"."

It's great.

It was just at London Bridge Station.

I don't know if it's still there.

But it seemed such a nice name.

It was just underneath one of the arches.

She looked surprised, didn't she?

Am I doing alright?

This is Andrew, who is the life and soul of the party.

He kept us entertained through the decade,

organizing the Miss Worlds, parties and events.

This is the second one of the Miss Worlds, the one that Eric won.

That's Eric there, he got completely mad when he won it,

you'll see later on.

There were a lot of,

I don't know if they were called glitteratiin those days,

but whatever they were called,

fashionable young Londoners, dressing up for the evening.

It was very innocent, it wasn't an enormous event.

It was in Andrew's studio

in Balls Pond Road.

And everyone knew everyone,

so it was a very much sort of family event.

There wasn't one person

who didn't know all the rest.

There's Eric putting his wig on.

"T-shirt:"No Hope Without Dope"."

Catwalk.

Fran Fullenweider. A jolly good name for her!

This is Karl Bowen who was wearing Lindy Duffren's mink coat,

which he managed to mix up with Kevin Whitney's palette

and thereby ruining the mink coat.

It was all pro-fur in those days.

Everyone wore fur still.

I don't think anyone thought twice of it.

This is dear Eric going completely doolally having won the thing.

He looks quite mad, doesn't he?

There goes the crown.

This is another of Andrew's events.

It was to raise some money for a friend of his.

It was a garden fete

in which the model girls came and sold the clothes off their backs.

Really.

A lot of people and I

always thought it was somehow the last gasp of the sixties.

It was about 1974.

They were actually selling these clothes they were wearing.

It was like an auction.

This is little Nell, who was in the Rocky Horror Picture Show

and went on to run a very successful club in New York,

called Nell's.

This is Ula who the money was raised for.

It looks like a rather stylish afternoon.

I went with Liliana Cavani, the film director

who is somewhere in all this gang.

Nell's a great performer.

You can see that very well from this film.

That's another fashion designer.

Rae Mouse.

She dissappeared in America. I don't know what happened to her.

She went to America and no one ever saw her again.

There are a lot of minor celebrities, like Janet Street Porter.

There's always a camera somewhere.

This is a journey to Avebury, in Wiltshire,

one very beautiful sort of autumn afternoon.

It's really one of the most beautiful areas

where you can walk,

along the whole path to Avebury itself.

I did a whole series of drawings of Avebury.

I wonder what's happened to them all.

I often wonder, you know,

because you paint all these pictures, you give them away

and you forget who you've given them to

and you wonder where they've gone.

Because I painted an awful lot.

I suppose they're in various flats and places.

And this is Sebastian. In a beautiful cove...

at Cala Domestica.

The make-up brigade.

This is the setting off.

It was a big trek each day to do the filming.

Hard work.

The landscape was very difficult to cross. Sharp and thorny

and covered with slightly poisonous plants

which as you touched made you swell.

So, you had to be careful scratching your balls,

otherwise they'd grow four times bigger than they should be.

It gave you rather a shock. It didn't last very long but...

An awful lot of physical jerks going on.

I think we did have a good time.

I think it was quite fun,

although as I said,

it was very hard work.

This was our headquarters really.

We used to stay there at night, a sort of derelict...

This is my friend Anthony's flat in Sloane Square.

He lent it to me.

It was actually a bit of godsend in the cold, in the winter.

It was warm and pretty well empty,

there wasn't much in it.

It couldn't have been a better location,

in the block above the station,

the top flat, in Sloane Square.

Guy, mad as hatter, not in those days though.

They're all very young.

There's no one in this film much over thirty.

They're all fifty now!

This is Duggie Field's flat.

Incredible attention...

to detail.

This is the end party

when we left the flat.

The landlords went for me for this decoration.

It cost me a fortune in the end.

They sued me.

It's funny, Toyah was on the radio this morning.

She was described as the Princess of Punk,

but I'm not sure she was actually very involved with Punk.

It's funny how perceptions change over the years.

It's funny how perceptions change over the years.

I never thought of her as a punk.

Maybe Jordan was, but I don't think Toyah was.

She was an actress. Rather a good one, actually.

This is Jean-Marc taking photographs, publicity photos for Jubilee.

Jordan always reminded me

of Queen Victoria, for some reason.

Life masks.

I've still got one in my cupboard.

This is the policeman's son.

He sacrificed his hair for the film.

Art piece.

It was a lovely time.

What do you remember of all of this?

I oddly enough don't remember very much.

Even looking at the actual footage,

it seems quite arbitary,

as to what got somehow onto the film and what didn't.

And of course one tended to film events

because it was easier.

Because it was easier.

So, everyday life...

wasn't filmed very much.

William Burroughs signing autographs.

It's immensely funny, William Burroughs, reading his own work.

It's hysterically funny.

Boys Dansant.

Everyone's smoking. I can't believe it!

I doubt they'd be doing that nowadays.

There's not one who isn't.

Jordan's wedding.

That didn't last long.

She went back home to breed cats.

White Persian cats.

Very different to those wild punk days.

Meanwhile, in Florence,

the Italians are catching up with punk.

The kids playing here couldn't be more than 14 or 15,

in front of Santa Croce

and a dissaproving statue of Dante.

I met one of them.

"They said, "You must come over" "and film it. " So, I said, "Okay. "

It was strange

because I knew they'd never see the film.

But I suppose they liked the idea of being recorded.

Maybe they might see this.

Maybe they'll show it on Italian TV.

Look at that blue sky.

It's extraordinary, just sitting there.

They look like they've come out of some magazine.

I wonder who invented the Dante look.

I bet he didn't look like that.

It's just invented.

Spanish TV. Endlessly being made up.

A completely mad concert given by Genesis P-Orridge.

Thousands of TV screens

and so many armed guards in the auditorium, you couldn't believe it!

With machine guns.

You could never have done

a piece like this on British television.

He's always running into controversy.

He seemed determined to make his life difficult.

He succeeded eventually.

"It's a bit different to"My Tea Shop"," "Ma Pastaria"."

We've leaped a long way forward,

now we're in the early eighties.

We're at the I.C.A., "Institute of Contemporary Arts"."

We did a media event.

You never really see Michael Clark leap into the air.

He seems welded to the floor.

The charming David Dipnall,

who died of AIDS very quickly and a long time ago now.

He's not the only one in this film.

But I can't keep telling you that,

because it would get me all depressed.

But he was full of life.

Absolutely full of life.

He was a student at the Slade and rather bright.

And I still feel rather sad when I see this footage,

because he was just at the beginning of his life.

I think this is as near as we come to the present.

Tilda in 1985, probably.

This is not a scene fromOrlando!

This is a scene from real life.

Well, we were all young once.

I like this bit of the film.

I like the fact that everyone smiles in this film.

They don't look like they're under any specific pressure

to perform or not.

They all look rather happy,

even if a little sad.

A lot has changed

since these early days in the 70s.

I don't think life was recognisable.

The warehouses went,

they were all demolished.

That type of living disappeared.

It all just got left behind.

The furniture was too heavy to remove,

there was nowhere to put it.

We just walked out of the flat,

the warehouse.

We shut the door and that was it.

I went back for some months,

for a bunch of shoes I'd forgotten.