Jordan - 'Sex' The Shop

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" ...it was full of girls like me - girls in tiny, see through skirts with cropped, bleached white hair. I loved working there, I knew I was the centre of a new thing."

Born Pamela Rooke in Seaford Sussex. Aged 18 she was already cropping her hair and dying it and calling herself Jordan before moving to London to find work. Moving back home to commute she dressed outrageously wearing rubber stockings high heels and little else.

"I used to have so much trouble on that train from Seaford, where I used to live. People used to swear at me, abuse me, the lot. I wouldn't take any shit though and on one occasion I threw a tourist's camera out of the train window. He flipped ! Eventually British Rail had to give me a first class carriage to myself."

She got a job in the shop 'Sex', later to become Seditionaries and then World's End, a pivotal meeting place in terms of style and culture where all the central protagonists in the punk rock story met.

A fashion report in Honey at the time of the start of punk (1976) read "Go down to Sex, if not for the clothes then just to see the strange girl inside"

"Malcolm McClaren was always very interested in how people looked and I loved everything that 'Sex' was about." (apart from having to hose down the rubber curtains after dirty old men had asked her to try out various outfits then relieved themselves in the changing room !!) Malcolm, Johnny Rotten and I were very close. Johnny always tells the story of how he went into 'Sex' one day - I had on this T-shirt with a big rip right across the front so I'd put in a safety pin to cover it up. Johnny thought it was great and the safety pin thing started there and then."

"I'd been dressing like that for ages so punk wasn't a new thing for me. My mother had found me uncontrollable since the age of seven, through choice I had absolutely no friends at school - the clothes were an expression of that chaos."

Julie Burchill ."Why do you choose to look like you do ?"
Jordan. "Why did Picasso paint ?.. I always looked weird. My mother always told me I was repulsive" (NME 15/4/78)

Jordan worked on and off through the versions of the shop from 'Sex' to 'Seditionaries' till 1980 when it became 'World's End.' " Not everybody can do a job they enjoy and I loved it there, believed in the things that Malcolm and Viv were doing."