Tag: Too Much Too Soon

DROP DEAD CITY: The Dolls, Blondie and the Birth of Punk

Nina Antonia
https://onlyrockandroll.london/2023/06/05/johnny-thunders-in-cold-blood/

In Conversation with Gary Lachman, Nina Antonia and Travis Elborough

The Century Club, Shaftesbury Avenue, London

July 4th 2023

Torrential rain was not the best backdrop to trying to find an anonymous Soho doorway but once inside the fourth floor of London’s Century Club turned out to be an excellent space in which to eavesdrop on a three-way conversion between Nina, Travis and Gary – who you might know better as Gary Valentine, bass player with Blondie up until 1977. Now based in London, these days Gary is a writer specialising in consciousness, the esoteric and the occult. Nina shares many of these interests but the discussion tonight was about music – specifically about the New York scene in the mid-1970s.  Gary lived there as a budding musician, whilst Nina chronicled the rise and fall of the New York Dolls and their guitarist Johnny Thunders, the subject of her most recent book, In Cold Blood. Travis did well to keep the conversation flowing and we got some excellent anecdotes – who knew that Kung-Fu Girls on the first Blondie LP was written for Thunders? Nina hung around after the event to sign copies of her book  (Gary had been too modest to bring his book New York Rocker) and I learnt that guitarist Neal Whitmore and ex-Thunders drummer Chris Musto will be setting some of Nina’s poems to music. A very rewarding couple of hours.

‘The Chap’… Dark Angels: Darcy Sullivan interviews Nina Antonia

Nina Antonia

Prior to lockdown, I was interviewed by the sartorially splendid Darcy Sullivan for the equally dandified spring edition of ‘The Chap.’ Darcy asked some unusually pertinent questions that included a fine quota of Thunder’s related queries and also provided the opportunity to recollect seeing Quentin Crisp in conversation at the Royal Court in Liverpool. Crisp was the first author I’d seen address an audience and he was as you might expect, very witty and engaging. He was also most  gracious when the time came for me to get a copy of ‘The Naked Civil Servant’ signed. Pete Burns was also getting his copy signed. Both gone now in the twinkling of gloriously painted eyes that recall the mad decadent verse of Edmund Gosse: 

‘Prince-jewellers, whose facet-rhymes combine/ All hues that glow, all rays that shift & shine/ Farewell thy song is sung, thy splendour fled.’……….

Johnny Thunders – Complete Works – the Art of Cosa Nostra edited by Kadoi The Heartbreak and Hiroshi The Golden Arm

Nina Antonia

This informative and lavishly illustrated book is out now.

Includes the four versions of In Cold Blood, two versions of Too Much Too Soon and the Johnny Thunders Sleeve Notes by Nina Antonia as well as her interview with Brian Young. Thank you, Hiroshi and congrats!