With her bleach-blonde hair, scarlet lipstick and outrageous self-designed creations, Pam Hogg was the archetypal rock goddess. Even though she wasn’t one herself.
Most of her friends were; she always seemed to be hanging out with a collection of famous musicians and models, even before she started designing clothes for them.
She even had a few cracks at singing in a band. I remember some time in the late ’70s my friend Steve England bringing me along to Notre Dame Hall, where the Pistols had played one of their earliest gigs (Pam had been there, of course) to see her unveil her group – called Rubbish.
Pam had been a regular at my proto-punk friend Steve and Jo Hagan’s club Son Of Redneck, the place that somehow achieved the impossible of making old-time country music cool; if only for a select few from clubland’s seedy underbelly.
I remember her standing out from the crowd in a brightly coloured far-from-Nashville fluffy coat. Her band’s sound was predictably seedy too. Her next band, Doll, were a kind of narcotic electronic take on The Cramps, which is exactly what you would have expected a band of hers to sound like.
Pam was an ideal front woman, of course – how could she not be, looking like that? – but the songs weren’t there; more pastiche than invention. And I’m not sure her singing was ever going to put her up there with her friends like Siouxsie Sioux and Debbie Harry.
Not that she cared much. It always seemed like the music was a cool hobby that she used as an excuse to get all her friends together for an evening. I remember the audience for that Notre Dame performance was a who’s who of the punk and fashion worlds.
And fashion was always her first career, from the moment she left Glasgow for the Royal College of Art in London, arriving just as punk was starting to blow up on the streets of the capital: fertile ground for an inventive young designer.
She quickly built a reputation as a next-generation Vivienne Westwood, gracing the cover of iD magazine and being interviewed on TV by Wogan, until he remarked that her black PVC leggings looked as if they felt uncomfortable and she hopped on to his lap to ask: “Do they?”
Her creations were of course ideal stage wear for musicians, and her creations were worn by Siouxsie and Debbie, Björk and Kylie, Rihanna and Lady Gaga, and friends from the fashion world like Kate Moss, Naomi Campbell and Claudia Schiffer.
Despite a stop-start music career – her brief mid-’90s band Doll supported Debbie Harry and The Raincoats and more recently there was a band called Hoggdoll – she did at least get around to shooting a couple of music videos with Doll.
This one, for Opel Eyes, features some of her friends including kindred spirit Alison Mosshart of The Kills, who is being exactly the musician Pam might have been, had she not chosen fashion as her main medium.