This was what I was actually looking for in my sketchbook, from some point in the early 90s. A woman who seeped into my pores so thoroughly at such a tender age I cannot imagine what I would be like without her influence.
I encountered her for the first time, as a Durannie, aged about 13 or 14, staying up all night to watch Barbarella on the late movie. Her presence was electrifying, her sense of dangerous yet erotic malevolence. By the time I saw Performance, a film that was to become a personal favourite in my early 20s, I was already deeply smitten. I used to watch the tape over and over, just forwarding to her parts. She exuded a sense of mischief, of danger, of unapologetic wickedness that was like catnip to a repressed convent-school girl like me. I am aware that she may have been awful, even destructive, to many people around her, but oh! the freedom to be wicked and unapologetically so, in the face of that unrelenting 60s "under my thumb" misogyny! How I envied her freedom to be bad.
She was the first woman I had ever seen whose smouldering bisexuality seemed to be solely for her own pleasure. Her gender fluidity blew my mind. If I ever had a pointing at the television, "Yes, yes, it's me!" moment, it would be the scene in Performance where she projects her own breast onto her male lover's chest, and explains that everyone "has two angles, male and female angles". I was entranced by early photos where she seemed to have remade Brian Jones over in her own image. He slowly turned into her: hair colour, cut, clothes, until she left him, and he spent the rest of his short life turning every other girlfriend into her. There's a whole chapter of queer culture that could be written about her, her androgyny, her gender fluidity, the bisexuality that always gets erased in the "girlfriend, muse, mother" rock chick narrative. All the queer culture I encountered in the 80s that was cool, seemed to be all men. And yet, here was this unrepentantly bisexual woman who was deeply, dazzlingly cool. She triggered in me a wonderful, fluttering confusion, as to whether I wanted to be her, or whether I wanted to fuck her. This somehow gave me permission to be who I was, neither man nor woman, gay nor straight, but somehow all angles at once.
I read every scrap of information I could find about her. It's funny; I used to be notorious for keeping a huge collection of Rolling Stones biographies in my bathroom. What most people didn't realise was that it wasn't for Mick or Keef or even hapless Brian; my obsession was with Anita. Marianne Faithfull described her as fiercely intelligent and dazzlingly charismatic, speaking this hipsterese mash-up of three or four languages. She raved that "other women simply evaporated beside her" then confessed "if you went out for a night with Anita, you stood a very good chance of getting killed." For much of my devil-may-care 20s, I aspired to live like that. (Yes, it nearly killed me.)
It was that toughness, that daring, that utter recklessness that came with being a real survivor that drew me to her. I copied her shamelessly; Anita was like a magic cloak of protection I could draw around me that made me invincible. She survived things that would have knocked out any mortal woman; a decades-long drug addiction was the least of her troubles. On one of her first modelling assignments, she described having been raped, and yet she refused to let that cow her. Brian Jones beat her, badly - she turned around and destroyed her abuser in a fitting revenge. Not with violence, but by leaving him for his bandmate and close friend, and taking the balance of the band with her. That's the thing about Anita - any piece that describes her as a mere "groupie" gets the balance of power completely wrong. She shaped that band, moulded them, introduced them to art and culture (she was one of Warhol's Pop Girls before moving to London to join Brian) - and, much like Marianne, wrote, uncredited, one of their best riffs. (The howling witches' chorus on Sympathy For The Devil.)
Her clothes, her Style, her look... you need only look at photos of dorky Keef before and rock'n'roll Keef after Anita, to understand her influence. To call her a "model" is an understatement on the effect of her Style. What she did was create a visual vocabulary that translated femme into rock'n'roll and rock'n'roll into femme. You can still see her shining from so many hippie-boho-gypsy-rock-chick style blogs that it's become a total cliché, but even a cliché has an original, and she was that original.
The last, most surprising, and yet somehow least surprising thing I discovered about her, I found out this morning. A friend of mine, a style journalist who interviewed her more recently, told me that in the course of a two hour interview, the thing she enthused about most was her allotment. Like me, in her later years, Anita discovered gardening as the ultimate creative act. It amuses me to think somehow of this ultimate witch of the 60s becoming a weather witch of the garden. Such germinative powers seem fitting for such a germinal influence.
