the night is young, the mood is mellow...

July 30, 2008 9:00 AM

Vaughn Toulouse was not born Toulouse. He was born Vaughn Cotillard on the island of Jersey on this day in 1959. In the summer of ’78, he left home to tag along on tour with the Clash, which he chronicled in an early issue of The Face. Thus inspired, Toulouse formed a series of bands of his own including Guns For Hire and Department S, which scored a big hit with Is Vic There? (TOTP, Cheggers) and a lesser one with I Want.

Toulouse was a fixture on the 80s London club/music scene, writing for The Face, promoting clubs, performing as a DJ and in his own Main T Posse, posing for Wolfgang Tillmans and serving as cover boy for the Jam’s final record. Vaughn Toulouse died in 1991 of AIDS-related illness.

posted by grounded (5 comments total)

Vaughn Toulouse was not born Toulouse.

Nice.
posted by Floydd at 9:41 AM on July 30, 2008

Goodbye Toulouse

..sorry to digress.
posted by bonobothegreat at 10:05 AM on July 30, 2008

So what's the relationship of this guy to the character in "Rude Boy" that seems partly based on him? Am I right about that?
posted by mwhybark at 12:57 PM on July 30, 2008

Also, FWIW, the Black Market Clash site that hosts those The Face reprints is truly a labor of love, and quite staggering in depth. It's a .Mac site, so we might kill the bandwidth, though.
posted by mwhybark at 1:03 PM on July 30, 2008

Thanks for posting this round-up of his contributions and history.

I'm mostly familiar with him from reading the magazines of the day and hearing some of his projects on the local college radio station, but that was enough to make me sad that he lived such a short life.

Seeing his face again brought back a rush of memories of hunting down the latest club-centric magazines and looking to see what everyone in the more glittery cities were doing.
posted by batmonkey at 6:12 PM on July 30, 2008