Dorothy Max Prior, mainly known as just “Max,” gives us a firsthand recollection of her life growing up within the rise of the Punk movement in 1970’s London. She goes through her experience as a queer, creative, and outgoing young woman thriving in a space where everyone around her is also embracing the different, actively going against social norms to discover new forms of artistic and individual expression. It portrays everything you’d expect from the first punks of the world, but even better it realistically explains just how entangled this subculture was with queer culture and communities. I had never heard of this aspect of the punk movement before, and was immensely captivated by how much punk and disco overlapped throughout this era. Disco being a genre and space occupied by a large queer community, fed into the rise of the punk movement, and there would basically be no punks without this influence. This intersection depicts and reveals the “punks” as kids who were just having fun consuming and creating art, living a lifestyle overcome with curiosity and openness. As one of the first members of this punk crowd, Max proves how they lived as the least judgemental and most accepting type of people. While the world was occupied with censoring and criticizing them, the punks primarily focused on their artforms whether it was music, photography, or film, and letting anyone who wanted to join their community in with open arms. As a reader, I kept being constantly surprised by the positivity of the spaces they created in London, and eventually I couldn’t stop myself from thinking about this one saying I had heard somewhere before: Punks look like assholes but are actually nice, Hippies look nice but are actually assholes.

If there is anyone that should write a book about their lives, Max is one of them. She lived so many lives at such a young age. Working as a model, a go-go dancer, at the London Institute of Contemporary Arts, experiencing the first nightclubs opening in London, embracing and participating in a fashion revolution (running in the same circles with Vivienne Westwood), and her most notable passion and long journey as a drummer. She goes back and forth throughout this time reveling in all the eccentric people she met, lived with and played music with. 

I became fascinated by the stories of her time as a go-go dancer (partly because one of her go-to songs was “Lola” by The Kinks, one of my all-time favorites). I assumed it would be similar to what we consider as stripping today, but she actually expresses a moment when she noticed go-go dancers turned into strippers. Of course her role in the pre-stripper era as a go-go dancer was still driven by sensuality and seduction, but she details a distinct time when this was amplified past artistic performance. Max saw the men starting to get grabbier, the shows going on later into the night as opposed to her usual lunch rush of businessmen piling into the pubs in the middle of the day. Not to dub this as a technically negative shift in the world of women dancers, I was mostly intrigued as a reader in considering the root cause of what actually led to this shift. Either way, Max’s stories about her go-go dancing days are definitely a highlight of the book and set the scene for the wild parts of London throughout these years. 

69 Exhibition Road: Twelve True-Life Tales from the Fag End of Punk, Porn & Performance is essentially a collection of stories from Max’s time living in her characterful flat on 69 Exhibition Road, although the most riveting stories of the book are primarily about what happens outside of her apartment. I would recommend this book to both haters and lovers of the punks. For the ones who look down on them or just don’t get it, Max humanizes this subculture in the best way possible and will get you to understand where they’re coming from and how they’re shaping a new mindset. For the lovers, it offers an entertaining, realistic, and firsthand account of everything that initially drew you to the punk movement, with unexpected details sprinkled throughout that will continue to captivate you.