Carnaby Street may have been synonymous with Swinging London, but the King's Road was swinging centuries before dedicated followers of fashion swarmed Carnaby and a good decade after that street warped into a Disnified version of itself. Henry VIII spent time in the King's Road area. So did Thomas More, Henry James, Noel Coward, Germaine Greer, Christopher Lee, Diana Dors, Aleister Crowley, Bram Stoker, Francis Bacon, and Karl Marx. But it was scene makers like Mary Quant, the Stones, Pete Townshend, and later, the Sex Pistols and The Damned, who really gave the road its character. The Rocky Horror Show debuted there. A Clockwork Orange was filmed at its Chelsea Drug Store, which Jagger immortalized in "You Can't Always Get What You Want". Judy Garland died there. It was where a box for keeping plants alive on long sea voyages was invented, where you could see a monkey ride a pony around a mansion's grounds (if you were around in 1843, that is), where a "mad idiot" was known to visit the night spots with a dyed-green rabbit he loaded up with LSD until the poor pet committed suicide, where a wombat suffocated in a box of cigars, and where the British Spaghetti Queen slipped into a dress comprised of thirty helpings of macaroni. Thirty!
I don't know how much of this material was in the first edition of Max Décharné's King's Road published in 2005, but it's all in the new expanded edition. Décharné's book is a walloping, weird, witty, winding ride through some five centuries of the road's history. The tale ends as the seventies do, and all that lies ahead is over-priced wine bars and Starbucks. The Chelsea Drug Store is now a fucking McDonalds. So there is an elegiac undertone to this story, but the overtones are crazy fun as the author trips from one historically significant or straight-up surreal tale to the next. By the time the late-sixties arrive, King's Road pretty much commits to being a rock and roll book, but there's a great deal about fashion, theater, film, politics, literature, photography, royalty, and fine art before that. Décharné does an exemplary job of convincing the reader that the King's Road was Britain's seat of all these things in as swinging fashion as could be imagined.
