Pamela Anne ‘Jordan’ Rooke
Punk’s premier shop manager, icon and muse
BORN 1955
A ballet-mad girl from sleepy Seaford in East Sussex, Pamela Rooke reinvented herself after a near-fatal car crash at 15 and twirled into infamy as store manager of Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s SEX shop at 430 King’s Road. Naming herself after F Scott Fitzgerald’s Jordan Baker, with her shards of bleached hair and Mondrian-inspired make-up, she was the Sex Pistols’ most striking consort, accompanying the mayhem of their 1976 TV debut on So It Goes by introducing them as “even better than the lovely Joni Mitchell” and incurring the lifelong wrath of Clive James.
She had been provoking outrage long before, on her daily commute from Seaford to Chelsea, when her ‘work uniform’ of underwear and stilettos caused commuter chaos. Filmmaker Derek Jarman was stunned by his first vision of her at Victoria station: “White patent boots clattering down the platform, transparent plastic miniskirt revealing a hazy pudenda… the face that launched a thousand tabloids.” He cast her as Amyl Nitrate in Jubilee (1978) and she stole the show, dancing ballet en pointe on concrete, around a bonfire in a rubble-strewn disused dock in Deptford.
Jordan insisted Jarman cast Adam Ant, who had been leaving her secret love letters at 430, and whom she subsequently managed. When she handed those reins to McLaren and he made off with the
Ants for Bow Wow Wow, it was Jordan who masterminded Adam’s Kings Of The Wild Frontier comeback with Marco Pirroni. Following her marriage to Ants’ bassist Kevin Mooney in 1981 – for which Westwood gave her the sack – she developed a heroin habit that she only kicked by returning to Seaford. Here she remade herself as a veterinary nurse and prizewinning breeder of Burmese cats, only breaking her silence when we wrote her memoir together. Defying Gravity was published in 2018 and the nationwide readings she nicknamed the ‘Anarchy Tour’ were greeted with vastly more love than outrage. She died from bile duct cancer on April 3, aged 66.
Cathi Unsworth