The Glam Rock Kitsch of Adrian Street

Yesterday, I received a Facebook message from a wrestler friend of mine. Moments later, I saw the news confirmed on the BBC website. “Exotic” Adrian Street had died, aged 82.

What is there to say about Adrian Street? A true legend in an industry where that word is overused to the point of parody. A trailblazer, a trendsetter, a boundary-breaker, an incredible wit, loved, respected and feared in near enough equal measure by all who knew him. It’s difficult not to fall into the realms of trite cliché and platitude, if only because so many lesser lights have been praised for achieving in half-measure what Adrian served up by the gallon.

He was charismatic and flamboyant to the end - I met him three years ago, shortly before the Covid-19 pandemic, though in now feels a lifetime ago, and even then aged 80 he was captivating, quick witted, engaging, provocative and a true one-off. Close to a decade after calling time on a career that spanned almost sixty years, he was still in bodybuilding shape, and wouldn’t countenance the idea of appearing before his public in anything less than full regalia. Even when appearing over Skype or Zoom, you could expect Adrian to be in full spandex clobber, feather boa optional. You don’t pay to see Adrian Street in his civvies.

Pictured: Meeting Adrian Street at the Resistance Gallery, March 2020. A memory I will always treasure.

Before he donned make-up, pigtails and sequins, Adrian Street was the son of a Welsh coal-miner, a career path laid out for the young Adrian to follow, as he was taken out of school at 15 and sent to work in the local colliery. At sixteen, he ran away from home, like so many smalltown boys before and since, to London, seeking his fame and fortune as a professional wrestler, willing to transform his 5’7” frame into an Adonis-like ideal to achieve his dreams - anything to avoid going back down the pit.

Initially modelling himself on wrestlers like “Nature Boy” Buddy Rogers, Don Leo Jonathan and Freddie Blassie, Street attempted to ape their bleach blonde hair, immaculately groomed appearance, and showy ring robes, but rather the gasps of awe he expected, he was met with awkward laughter, and the odd homophobic heckle - “Oh, isn’t she pretty”, and the like. A lesser man might have turned red from embarrassment and run backstage to hide their shame, or at least have hang up their sequined robe, trimmed their hair, and aped the plain cloth trunks and high boots of his contemporaries. But Adrian was no ordinary man, had endured worse mockery from his father’s fellow miners, and was hellbent on fame at all costs. So he ran, stubborn and steadfast, in the opposite direction.

If audiences wanted to jeer him for being pretty, he’d be the prettiest wrestler in the land. Bleached hair wasn’t enough; he grew it out and styled it in pigtails, he smacked on lipstick and silver eyeshadow, and his entrance regalia became more and more elaborate. Once in the ring, he took to skipping and prancing around his opponent, even planting a kiss on the cheek of either his adversary or the referee. That the man behind the make-up was one of the toughest wrestlers in the country, capable of tangling his opponents up in knots, only made the display more infuriating to an audience who expected “men to be men”. To muddy the waters further, Adrian was accompanied to the ring by his wife, fellow wrestler Miss Linda, at ringside (in reality, Adrian and Linda, though together since 1969, only married in 2005) - at times, he would use her as a stepping stool to climb into the ring, at others she would get physically involved on his behalf. The subtext was clear - what was a woman like her doing with a man like him? He’s married? But surely…

There is, of course, a discussion to be had about queer panic, and the ethics of a straight man using audience’s homophobia to generate a negative reaction, but that must be taken in hand with the sheer bravery of both Adrian and Linda presenting themselves as something other in front of hostile audiences all over the world. In time, it made them as beloved and respected as they had once been hated and ridiculed.

Adrian Street and his father

Taken at Bryn Mawr Colliery in 1973, the newly crowned European Heavyweight Champion poses alongside his bemused father and fellow miners.

Framed by Adrian as a message to his father, a symbol of what he had escaped and who he had become, the artist Jeremy Deller described this iconic image as “possibly the most important photograph taken post-war”, for how vividly it depicts Britain’s “uneasy transition from being a centre of heavy industry to a producer of entertainment and services”.

Adrian Street, in 1973, wasn’t the only heterosexual man in Britain flirting with questions of gender, sexuality, and conventional expressions of masculinity. You might never have caught Mick McManus or Giant Haystacks glamming up, but the world beyond the ropes was changing.

In 1972, Adrian competed in what today is one of precious few matches of his on English soil to still be extant, a widely revered classic encounter with Jim Breaks. Here, Street’s appearance is subtle by the standards he’d reach later in his career, particularly after emigrating to America in the early 1980s, but his face is made-up, his long pseudo-mullet and sideburns perfectly styled and given a hint of purple rinse. In between brutal holds and vicious grappling, he preens, prances and minces around the ring, his persona already well-defined and well-established, and well on its way to going stratospheric.

Adrian had been playing around with lipstick and glitter since the late ‘60s, but in 1972 pop culture was catching right up beside him. Four months after Adrian mixed it up with Jim Breaks on World of Sport, David Bowie took his own coloured mullet, spandex tights and gender-play to the next level with the release of The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders From Mars - Spiders guitarist Mick Ronson’s blonde locks bearing more than slight resemblance to Adrian’s own do, and his and Bowie’s mock oral sex routine coming from the same school of provocation that Adrian Street had left with honours.

Meanwhile, the pixie-like Marc Bolan had abandoned the Tolkien-fueled hippy folk psychedelia of Tyrannosaurus Rex and gone electric, launching his own glittered glam rock odyssey with the retooled T-Rex. Lesser lights followed in their wake - Jobriath in 1973, Brett Smiley in 1974 - while others who couldn’t quite reach for androgyny or otherworldly beauty did their footstomping “brickies in glitter” best; former skinheads Slade, bubblegum rockers The Sweet and pub rock journeymen Mud all found their fame by picking up the glam rock mantle, until there wasn’t a face left on Top Of The Pops with its cheeks unadorned by glitter.

Adrian Street was more than just another heavily made up face in the crowd, he was a trendsetter, ahead of the curve, and many of the glam rock intelligentsia looked his way for inspiration - after all, if you’re looking to shock and provoke provincial audiences, where better to look than the man who made a career of it? Not only that, but Adrian quickly realised that keeping up a constant turnaround of new and ever-more absurd robes and capes was an expensive business, and that the easiest solution was for him and Linda to make them at home. The Street family home became a workshop, sewing and stitching their wrestling gear and, eventually, the gear for countless other grapplers - the chances are you’ve seen one of your favourite indie wrestling stars in a Bizarre Bazaar original without even knowing it. As ever, Adrian’s ambitions didn’t end with wrestling, and he found himself supplying his wares to some of the odder shops on London’s Carnaby Street, and the legendary psychedelic boutique Granny Takes A Trip - claiming, though perhaps to be taken with a pinch of salt - to have seen his clothes worn by Elton John, David Bowie, Marc Bolan, and Adam Ant.

Flirting with the fringes of pop music, it was only a matter of time before Adrian Street did what came natural.

Imagine What I Can Do To You

While usually little more than campy cash-in novelty records, it was the done thing for any TV star worth their salt in the 1970s to flex their vocal records and have a crack at the hit parade - Clive Dunn gave us Grandad, Benny Hill sung about Ernie (The Fastest Milkman In The West), and The Wombles had a surprisingly catchy line in glam-tinged footstompers, and so of course the stars of Saturday afternoon’s must-see wrestling programme couldn’t be left out. Jackie Pallo was perhaps first to cash-in, with a 1971 single Everyone Should Get What I Got (the B-side a cover of Herman’s Hermits One Little Packet Of Cigarettes), even Giant Haystacks, billed as “The World’s Largest Recording Artist”, had an unlikely side-hustle as a country crooner with 1981’s Baby I Need You, while Kendo Nagasaki preferred to stay the other side of the recording booth, managing the new wave band Cuddly Toys in the early ‘80s.

Pallo’s pseudo-Cockney barroom song was pretty appalling, while Haystacks’ turn behind the microphone showed a surprisingly sensitive side and a gentle singing voice lurking beneath the big man’s hulking exterior, but neither man exactly screamed “pop star”. For that, wrestling needing to turn to the nascent glam rocker already lurking in its midsts.

After a failed effort to release a novelty single with comedian Russ Abbott, a chance meeting with songwriter and producer Don Woods got Adrian into the studio. Don had been toying around with a song called Only Happy When I’m Stoned, a swaggering lounge number that he couldn’t find a home for in 1977, at the crest of the wave of punk rock. Retooling it to better suit his purposes, Adrian Street transformed it into a rollicking glam rock tune - albeit one let down by a tinny, unfinished feel to the production, lending it neither the foot-stomping backbeat of a classic Sweet number, nor the distorted, gritty edge of punk - called Breakin’ Bones; Adrian’s high camp vocals claiming that the “one thing that really turns me on” is the crunch of breaking bones, accented by a Max Ward-esque shout of “1-ah! 2-ah!”, a few moans and groans, and the unmistakable foley artistry of a snapped piece of celery standing in for the titular breaking bones. As far as novelty records go, it’s tremendous fun.

The B-side is the fairly execrable Mighty Big Girl, a bit more music hall comedy than glam rock floor-filler, with Adrian in his most 1970s high camp mode - this could have been released by any number of mincing repressed comics of the age and, short of the references to a handful of wrestling holds, you’d be none the wiser.

One single wasn’t enough, though, and Street and Woods redoubled their efforts in 1980 with a full album, released some years later, Shake, Wrestle ‘N’ Roll, credited to Adrian Street and The Piledrivers. It’s variations on a theme, as Breakin’ Bones sits alongside new songs like A Sweet Transvestive With A Broken Nose, in which Adrian sings of being a “bitch or a butch”, while borrowing a turn of phrase from The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Perhaps Street’s finest hour behind the microphone is the meaty Imagine What I Could Do To You, a swaggering list of threats and boasts that read like a manifesto for the “Exotic” Adrian Street persona and is by far the best constructed song in his repertoire. Once Adrian had moved to the United States, it was, rightly, this song rather than Breakin’ Bones that he took with him and released on an unsuspecting American record-buying public, abandoning the horrendous Mighty Big Girl for new B-side, the next track on the album, the mock doo-wop of I’m In Love With Me, a preening love song to - who else - himself.

Next up is The Krippler, which brilliantly marries a jerky, angular riff that wouldn’t feel out of place being played by an early ‘00s artrock band who listened to too much Television to a Glitter Band backbeat, while the lyrics are the most typical of novelty singles - instructions for a fictitious dance craze, in this case, one with directions like “forearm jobs, Tomahawk chops”.

A personal favourite, and one which Adrian used to great effect when wrestling in Texas, is his turn to the country and western. Not for Adrian Street the sincere balladry of a Giant Haystacks, however, as his take on the genre is the delightful There’s Something Very Strange About A Cowboy, in which Adrian idly wonders “how the west was won” given the typical cowboy’s affection for “fancy leather waistcoats”, and having “chaps around their legs for hours and hours”. After a solid three minutes of barely concealed euphemism and innuendo, Adrian concludes that of all the James Boys, “Jesse is the one I’d like the best”. You couldn’t make them like this any more, and that’s probably for the best.

By the next track we’re back in full-blown glam rock mode, a budget Bolan guitar intro paving the way for Adrian’s meanest vocals, for yet another mission statement song, Sadist In Sequins, which dare I say has an early Lou Reed in its brightest moments.

Shake, Wrestle ‘N’ Roll is a forgettable ‘50s rockabilly revival pastiche that, while obviously wrestling-centric in its lyrics, is perhaps the only song on the album that doesn’t allude to Street’s sexuality or gender-play, so really could have been sung by any wrestler, meaning it lacks some of the (admittedly problematic) charm of Street’s delivery elsewhere.

Violence Is Golden is another that, with a little more polished production, feels like it could have been something a bit more, and again makes me think of Sally Can’t Dance era Lou Reed in some perverse way.

Street Rap is the worst kind of 1980s novelty single - a “rap” track by somebody who has apparently never heard rap in their life. Adrian tries his best with it, but there’s very little you can do to elevate this kind of material. The less said the better.

Thankfully, Adrian and Don had the intelligence to close the album with one of its strongest tracks, the phenomenally named Merchant Of Menace. It’s another chance for Adrian to sing of his greatest attributes, this time with the framing of Shakespeare, with references to the Bard dropped in liberally while Street boasts of his accolades as both wrestler and thespian;

“I always play the leading man, and the leading lady too

You'll get it as you like it every time I hear the bell

I can be like Romeo, and Juliet as well

As for Antony and Cleo, I come somewhere in between

I'm what I would call, a Mid-Summer Night's Dream”

Lovely stuff.

Naughty But Nice

You can’t really call Adrian Street a one-hit wonder, as nothing he released ever troubled the charts enough to be considered a “hit” in the first place, but it might come as some surprise to hear that his musical ambitions didn’t end at one album. The follow-up, Naughty But Nice, was released in 1986, again credited to Adrian Street & The Piledrivers (though with a couple of US release singles, and in his appearance on a “wrestlers sing” compilation LP alongside the likes of Freddie Blassie and Jesse Ventura, sometimes he was billed as “Adrian Street & The Boston Crabs”).

With an opening track called simply “Exotic Adrian”, it’s clear we’re in familiar territory, with every song an effort to put over Adrian’s own character, though with his vocals lower in the mix and with less of his put-on camp lilt, songs like Dirty Work and King & Queen Of The USA are less glam rock novelty and more of a straight pub rock number; more musically accomplished and self-assured, but lacking in the charm of a Merchant Of Menace.

Elsewhere, Mutilation Mambo another stab at the novelty faux-dance craze, and title track Naughty But Nice sounds, lyrics-aside, like something taken from 1980s kids television, not the swaggering rock and roll image that Adrian, Linda and the band try and put over on the album’s cover art. Exercise With Adrian, a jab at self-help workout records that aims for parody but largely forgets the jokes, would be the worst song in the back catalogue of anyone who hadn’t already recorded Mighty Big Girl.

The Macho Trucker Song is another attempt at riling up Southern audiences by taking aim at macho stereotypes, this time through the very ‘80s fixation on long-haul trucks and CB radio, but it lacks the clumsy charm of Something Very Strange About A Cowboy, leaning further into barely concealed innuendo - recorded by a band like Lavender Country it might be worth talking about, but a straight man singing about truckers hanging outside men’s room doors and “pulling on their horns” has an unpleasant air that Adrian is usually able to skirt around, but is in full flow here.

Service With A Smile and The Grid Iron Boys take aim at tennis and American football respectively, and again are an exercise in finding cheap double entendres in sporting terms, and while the latter’s singsong chorus of “I wanna be one of the Grid Iron Boys” is admittedly catchy, they both feel rather lazy, assuming that you find nothing particularly original or interesting in finding comedy in the words “tackle” or “tight end”. Later track Prehistoric Puffter is, unsurprisingly, no more subtle or appealing.

On Behalf Of The Lads is the next track - a sexist comedy track in the “women, am I right?” vein - isn’t even sung by Adrian, written as it was by Don Woods for Liverpool comedian Tom Pepper. Skip this one.

Thankfully, Some Party, the album’s closing track, is something of an improvement, a new wave novelty rocker describing the aftermath of an absurd sex party, that with a little more polish wouldn’t sound out of place on a more wide-reaching than usual 1980s playlist.

Nobody is going to pretend that Adrian Street’s musical output belongs in your collection between Aladdin Sane and Transformer, and at its worst - in the case of much of Naughty But Nice - it can be downright unpleasant, but the highlights are no worse than some of the glam rock also-rans that fill junkshop glam compilations like Cherry Red Records’ Velvet Tinmine and All The Young Droogs, while the man himself unquestioningly deserves a spot in the glam rock pantheon of glittering, shining stars.

Rather than let the great man sing himself out, I will give the final word to the mighty Jon Langford’s Men Of Gwent, with Adrian Street…