Adrian Street, ‘the sadist in sequins’ who brought camp glamour to the wrestling ring – obituary
Adrian Street, who has died aged 81, was a wrestler who relentlessly extended the boundaries of masculinity; the self-styled “sadist in sequins”, with his bruiser’s face and brawler’s body, wore enough make-up and lurex to sink a glam-rock band – indeed, Marc Bolan cited him as an inspiration – but fighting as a “heel”, or bad guy, he won countless titles, courting adoration and hatred with equal alacrity.
He decided a few years into his career that he had to mark himself out from the pack, and so out came the lipstick, glitter and gold lamé. And when the inevitable taunts came, in the dressing room from his rivals and in the arena from the crowd, he was unbowed: “My costumes started getting wilder. I kept pushing the envelope a little bit more, a little bit more. I would never let them rest – whenever they were comfortable with something I’d shake it all up.”
He was born on December 5 1940 into a mining family at Brynmawr in Brecknockshire; his father Emrys was a miner for 51 years, and expected young Adrian to follow him down the pit.
Street Snr had been a prisoner of the Japanese in the Second World War, an experience that had clearly scarred him: “He didn’t like me, and I disliked him very much too,” his son recalled. “I didn’t get the hero I thought I was going to get, the dad I expected to love me. Instead, I got a hateful bigot who never had a kind word to say about me in his life.”
Adrian was taken out of school at 15 to work alongside his father, but life underground had no appeal for him. It was, he said, “Too dark down there. I was born for the spotlight.”
With that in mind, he left home for London. A keen bodybuilder, he posed for magazines and boxed at a fairground booth for ￡1 a fight, but he was intent on a wrestling career, and in 1957 he made his professional debut as Kid Tarzan Jonathan, later fighting as “Nature Boy” Adrian Street.
He was soon firmly established on the circuit, but after a few years felt bored with the conventional boots-and-trunks image. Recalling how as a child he had enjoyed cutting up sweet wrappers to make costumes for his toy soldiers, he began to experiment – platform boots, rhinestone-encrusted gowns – and though his fellow grapplers were contemptuous, Street thrived on it: “I was purposely painting a target on my back because I knew the other wrestlers would resent it – and I wanted them to bring their best fight.”
He savoured the disconnect between how he looked and how he fought: “I’d go in the ring looking like a French poodle, and I’d carry on like a French poodle, but as soon as the bell went and I’d done my little bit of prancing about, and the time was right, I’d turn from a French poodle to a pit bull.”
“The Exotic One”, as he became known, met Linda Gunthorpe Hawker when he went into a shop in Croydon where she was working, to buy some tropical fish. She also became a wrestler, fighting as Blackfoot Sue, and in 1969 she became his manager and ring valet, known as “Miss Linda”; they eventually married in 2005.
One wrestler he came up against in a 1970s stunt was Jimmy Savile, though he said he was tricked into the bout, the promoters bringing the DJ in after Street had entered the ring. “He was wearing a gown and more or less aping me, which the crowd loved,” Street recalled. “But once the bell sounded, I kicked and punched him all over the place, tearing clumps of hair out until his head was bleeding. He never wrestled again after that.”
Having inspired Marc Bolan, Street sang several glam rock songs of his own, such as Sweet Transvestite with a Broken Nose (“I’m as tough as Marciano and as sexy as Mae West”), and Imagine What I Could Do to You, which became his entrance music.
In 1973, after Street won the European middleweight title, the Sunday People wanted to do a story on him. Street set up a photoshoot at his father’s mine, Beynon Colliery, ambushing him as he surfaced after a shift. The resulting pictures represent the collision of two visions of Britain, according to the artist Jeremy Deller.
In 2010 the Turner Prize-winner, acclaimed for his reconstruction of the Battle of Orgreave which took place during the miners’ strike of 1983-84, made a film for the S?o Paulo Biennial in 2010, So Many Ways to Hurt You (The Life and Times of Adrian Street). In it he spoke about one of the photographs of Street and his father (above). It “seemed to me possibly the most important photograph taken post-war. It encapsulates the whole history of Britain in that period, of our uneasy transition from being a centre of heavy industry to a producer of entertainment and services.”
Bored with the domestic wrestling scene, Street moved with Linda to Florida in the early 1980s, increasing his fame in the US and Canada and winning a long string of championship belts. They also opened a costume-making business, the Bizarre Bazaar, and a wrestling school, Skull Krushers Academy.
He went on to publish various volumes of autobiography, including The Merchant of Menace and So Many Ways to Hurt You, and a novel, Shake, Wrestle ’N’ Roll. He also appeared in several films, including Quest for Fire (1981), Grunt: The Wrestling Movie (1985) – and, somewhat improbably, in the opening scenes of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s avant garde masterpiece The Canterbury Tales. In 2019, two documentaries about him were released, Adrian Street: Imagine What I Could Do to You and You May Be Pretty But I Am Beautiful: The Adrian Street Story.
In later years Street moved back to Wales, and had recently undergone neurosurgery following a stroke. His wife Linda survives him.
Adrian Street, born December 5 1941, died July 24 2023
