{"id":11192,"date":"2012-03-29T02:07:13","date_gmt":"2012-03-29T01:07:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/?p=11192"},"modified":"2012-03-30T03:59:43","modified_gmt":"2012-03-30T02:59:43","slug":"a-moment-of-inspiration-1983","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/2012\/03\/29\/a-moment-of-inspiration-1983\/","title":{"rendered":"A Moment of Inspiration, 1983"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"marc.jpg\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Marc Almond (1983) by John Coulthart.<\/em><\/p>\n

This, girls and boys, is how we occupied ourselves in the long nights before the advent of 24-hour television: we sat up drawing portraits of Marc Almond. A conversation on Twitter reminded me of this, a drawing that’s never before appeared in public but which is now added to the web collection<\/a>. For a quick piece of art it’s actually a lot more successful than many of the more laboured things of mine that were printed far and wide at this time. The portrait was copied from a magazine photo, I forget which one, possibly Flexipop<\/em><\/a> if it was still going, an increasingly wayward title that had a soft spot (so to speak) for Soft Cell. The Spanish hat identifies it as being from the Torment and Toreros<\/em><\/a> period while the lettering was taken from Val Denham and Huw Feather’s cover design for the first Marc and The Mambas album, Untitled<\/em><\/a> (1982). The padded-cell background refers, of course, to Marc’s former group, and was copied from the back of the Bedsitter<\/em><\/a> 12″. Most of the drawing is done in black Biro pen with the hat and shirt in gouache. On the back I happened to make a note of the date, something I seldom bother with.<\/p>\n

\"moment.jpg\"<\/p>\n

The Twitter conversation was prompted by the appearance of Soft Cell’s notorious Sex Dwarf<\/em> video<\/a> at Dangerous Minds; Flexipop<\/em> enjoyed the scurrilous side of Soft Cell so much they printed a still from this Bacchanal as a centre-spread in one of their issues. Meanwhile Marc himself was writing in the Guardian<\/em><\/a> this week about Bowie manqu\u00e9<\/em> Jobriath, one of the real-life inspirations for the Brian Slade character in Todd Haynes’ Velvet Goldmine<\/em><\/a>, and the subject of a feature-length documentary, Jobriath A.D.<\/em><\/a>, by Kieran Turner, currently showing at the BFI’s London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Previously on { feuilleton }
\n\u2022 Derek Jarman\u2019s music videos<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Marc Almond (1983) by John Coulthart. This, girls and boys, is how we occupied ourselves in the long nights before the advent of 24-hour television: we sat up drawing portraits of Marc Almond. A conversation on Twitter reminded me of this, a drawing that’s never before appeared in public but which is now added to … Continue reading “A Moment of Inspiration, 1983”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2,29,7,5,3,23],"tags":[3555,3553,3560,3556,3557,3310,3559,4529,3066,3074,3554,2472],"class_list":["post-11192","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art","category-electronica","category-film","category-gay","category-music","category-work","tag-dangerous-minds","tag-flexipop","tag-huw-feather","tag-jobriath","tag-kieran-turner","tag-marc-almond","tag-marc-and-the-mambas","tag-slade","tag-soft-cell","tag-todd-haynes","tag-val-denham","tag-velvet-goldmine"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pq7rV-2Uw","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11192","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11192"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11192\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11192"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11192"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11192"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}