Look away: musings on Jimmy Savile

Sable Starr was punk’s Lolita. She was barely a teenager when she began attending shows in the early 1970s, quickly making her reputation as one of the leading groupies on Sunset Boulevarde. “Every rock star who came to Los Angeles wanted to meet her,” model Bebe Buell remembers. That was rather too polite: pleasantries weren’t all that were exchanged between Starr and Mick Jagger, Rod Stewart, Robert Plant, Marc Bolan, David Bowie and scores of others. Iggy Pop confesses baldly in the opening line of his song Look Away: “I slept with Sable when she was 13.”

Starr’s best friend at the time was Lori Maddox, another veteran of Rodney Bingenheimer’s English Disco, the notorious Sunset Strip club where strict ID checks at the door ensured the girls were under 18. After losing her virginity at 13 – to, legend has it, David and then-wife Angie Bowie – Maddox was a precocious 14-year-old when Jimmy Page left his LA girlfriend Pamela Des Barres, author of the classic self-proclaimed groupie memoir I’m With The Band, to be with her.

Page dated Maddox for about a year before leaving her in turn for Buell, who was at the time dating Todd Rundgren (as well as Iggy Pop).… Read more..

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