Before there was David Bowie, there was Davie Jones, the mod.

Iggy Pop and his Leopard jacket, 1972

Only five of these Leopard biker jackets were made by Wonder Workshop in the ’70s, one of which would find its way onto Iggy’s back and the sleeve of The Stooges’ Raw Power, as shot by Mick Rock. That iconic image would later bestow a potent significance on the jacket, ensuring it a spot in rock ‘n’ roll immortality. Though by then, Iggy had already traded it off in a drug deal to Stan Lee of The Dickies, who was so proud to own it that he apparently wore it everywhere, including in a shoot for Rolling Stone. Quite some years later, he would then sell it to one Long Gone John, an eccentric collector of kitsch, label owner (Sympathy For The Record Industry), and a much-celebrated individual in the art and fashion underground. Recognising the jacket’s value, John willingly forked out $2,000 for the jacket and today, is honoured to be caretaker of what he considers to be “The Shroud of Turin of Rock ‘n’ Roll”.

“I used to walk around London, through the park and stuff, with this leopard jacket I had, a cheetah-skin jacket actually – it had a big cheetah on the back – and all the old men in London would drive by in their cars and they’d stop and try to cruise me. All I liked to do was walk around the streets with a heart full of napalm. I always thought ‘Heart Full of Soul’ was a good song so I thought, ‘What’s my heart full of?’ I decided it was basically full of napalm.” – Iggy Pop

Pat Place: “The most significant thing I remember about those sessions is that he said, ‘Why don’t you go in and warm up?’ We warmed up with ‘I Can’t Stand Myself’, which we’d never played before. And Eno recorded the warm-up and that’s what came out. That was the first time we’d played it, and he got it, and that was it.”

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

“The Sex Pistols were on Walter Cronkite every night! I mean, can you imagine the marketing, the hype! He would say, ‘They’re now arriving in America.’ I mean, who was this news for? It was news for the wrong reasons. It was like, here’s the Pistols making front-page news in England every time they burp and fart – which they did a lot – so it was reported in America, and it couldn’t help but define punk rock, because as soon as something is on the seven o’clock news and on the front page of the newspapers, then that is punk rock. It’s the Sex Pistols and what does it do? It burps and farts and curses. Does it make music? Do you think Walter Cronkite was going to listen to twenty seconds of the music? There was no music on the network coverage of the Sex Pistols. It was simply that this sociological phenomenon from England that happened to play music was playing here.” – Danny Fields

“That was the height of disco, you couldn’t not hear it. I went to the Paradise Garage a couple of times. Actually, we played as the Contortions once, we did a show with Richard Hell, Contortions, and Teenage Jesus. We had this huge confrontation with the owners. They didn’t want to pay us because no one showed up. They brought all these menacing black muscle bouncer guys, and at one point they were closing in on me. So I broke a beer bottle and slashed my face with it cuz I wanted them to think I was so crazy that they would leave me alone. Which they did. A lot of rock people had a knee-jerk hatred of disco, which I never really shared. There were things I liked about it, although there was a lot that I hated too. It was so bleached out and whitened, but I could see that it was taking the real funk rhythms and really straightening them out, submitting them to this tyrannical beat. I liked the idea of this hypnotic music that would literally put people into a trance. I thought that was cool.”
- James Chance

“I never heard anything avant-garde. To me it was just New York City Blues.”
- Alan Vega

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

“Yes, the urge to let our imagination run riot, and the need to dance to twisted sounds remains. The Mutant Disco, the haunted dancehall will never close down.”
- Kevin Pearce, liner notes for Mutant Disco