Bowie: A Biography - JFK247

me banned from school. I was a straight-A student
until around this time.” After school in 1976, Strange
took up an offer from then–Sex Pistols bassist Glen
Matlock to come down to London and stay at his
apartment. He decided this was his way out. “After
school you were either going to be very athletic and
take up rugby and become a rugby player or you’d
have to do what your father and your grandfather did
before and go down the mines,” Strange recalls. In
London he fell in with the Pistols-following “Bromley
Contingent,” which included Siouxsie Sioux,
Generation X’s Tony James and Billy Idol, and future
Pistols bassist and junkie death icon Sid Vicious,
among others. Strange worked for Pistols manager
Malcolm McLaren, selling and modeling clothes at
Seditionaries, the shop he’d opened with Vivienne
West-wood. He also made paste-up posters for
Pistols gigs and roadied on the Anarchy tour. A
record collector, by punk’s flame-out, he’d amassed
an impressive collection of hard-to-find “new” music,
browsing in local bins along each tour stop. A local
scenester named Rusty Egan, also bored with punk,
had been doing the same, and one night while sitting
around the stereo in a friend’s flat, they determined
that the “new” music sounded excellent when mixed
in with the glitter “oldies.” “We’d play Nina Hagen,
Bauhaus, early Eno, Kraftwerk. We thought, ‘What if
we had a club and between this new futuristic music
we would mix in favorite Bowie tracks and glamperiod?’”
Strange had been ensconced in the punk
scene long enough to know that just about every