[5] In the 1970s, earning money as a freelance journalist, including writing for Melody Maker, she became conscious of the zeitgeist change in youth culture which she christened the punk rock movement.

[8] Since the early 1980s, Coon’s primary focus has been her oil paintings which regularly feature women and men, both clothed and nude, in scenes that often contest the misogyny of patriarchy.

With reference points as varied as Pauline Boty, Lorenzo Lotto, Artemisia Gentileschi and Henri Rousseau, her work has been compared to that of Paul Cadmus, Tamara de Lempicka, Gluck and Christian Schad.

[12] As Coon told writer Christiana Spens in 2021; “…from an early age, I had this contrast between the patriarchal family home with the lies, and this other arena, where women worked as artists, and got paid for it.

After leaving the Royal Ballet School in London in 1961, the 16 year-old Coon took on a variety of jobs to earn a living as she continued her education to secure a place on a pre-diploma fine art course.

An incident with the police – she forged her father’s signature on a passport application form – necessitated Coon’s return to Northamptonshire where she lived with her grandmother, attending a secretarial course by day and completing her A-level Art by night.

In a way, I’ve pulled through many a psychological and financial crisis and kept on painting in her honour.”[20] Like Boty, as a fine art student Coon also did paid work in film and television.

In the early 1970s, on the recommendation of British sociologist and criminologist Baroness Wooton of Abinger, whom she met through her work with Release, Coon returned to education at Brunel University, studying Psychology, Sociology and Economics.

[24] In 1965, after seeing a friend, a young man from Jamaica, sentenced at the Old Bailey to three years in prison for possession of a negligible amount of cannabis, Coon understood drug prohibition to be significantly racist and prejudicial against the working class.

In June 1967, with Clive Godwin and Tariq Ali, she helped organise a demonstration outside the offices of the News of the World tabloid newspaper to protest against the demonisation of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards in coverage including the infamous Redlands police raid and arrest.

They began discussions that led to the creation of Release, a legal advice service to help young people understand their rights, with a 24 hour helpline for anyone who was arrested in possession of drugs.

[30] In 1967, while protesting on the King’s Road against the jail sentence of Brian Jones, Coon was arrested for damaging a police van in which several demonstrators, including Chris Jagger, were being held.

After being sentenced to two weeks in Holloway Prison for refusing to pay the fine, she was freed by broadcaster Bernard Braden, who immediately recorded an interview for a documentary he was making on the Swinging Sixties.

[35] In 1971, alongside comedian Marty Feldman, philosophers Edward de Bono and Ronald Dworkin, and musician and broadcaster George Melly, Coon was called as a witness for the defence in the controversial obscenity trial brought against Oz Magazine.

[37] Over the following years, she published landmark profiles of Patti Smith, Olivia Newton-John, Joan Armatrading and Lynsey de Paul, as well as significant early interviews with Freddie Mercury, Elton John, Lou Reed, and Kraftwerk.

[43] When a charge of obscenity was brought against the Sex Pistols in November 1977, following the promotion of their album Never Mind the Bollocks… in Nottingham’s Virgin Records’ shop, Coon once again acted as a witness for the defence.

[46] Towards the end of the decade, having read her book ‘1988: The New Wave Punk Rock Explosion’, American screenwriter Nancy Dowd enlisted Coon as creative consultant and costume designer for the film that was eventually released as Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains (1982).

The film was released to cable, ignored until it was discovered by a new generation of musicians, including Kurt Cobain as well as the wider Riot Grrrl movement, who recognised it as a feminist clarion-call and turned into an underground cult movie hit.

By 1983, faced with the threat of the bank repossessing her studio home, she began working at a ‘topless’ bar in London’s Soho and then some months in an escort agency, where she earned enough money to pay off her overdraft.

[53] In 1995, Coon was invited to include her painting ‘Mr Olympia’ (1983) in an educational pack to be produced alongside an exhibition of the work of Henri Matisse and other male artists in Tate Liverpool.

[62] She has also appeared regularly on television and radio, including a controversial episode of Dee Time (1969) where she stated that the Virgin Mary was an insult to women,[63] Read All About It (1976) with Melvyn Bragg,[64] Into the 80s (1979) on Granada Television with Russell Harty,[65] and a charged episode of BBC Two’s The Late Show in 1993 where she corrected Waldemar Januszczak for his denigration of Pauline Boty as a “bad painter, just a dolly bird.”[66] Many documentaries in later years have explored her work with Release and her association with punk rock.

The book contained allegations that anonymous young women who worked at Release offered sexual favours to major pop stars of the day, including George Harrison and Mick Jagger, in order to raise money for the organisation.

Since the 1990s, Coon has maintained her own independent publishing imprint Cunst Art, though which she releases material like the pamphlet “Calling Women Whores Lets Rapists Go Free” (2005, co-authored with Amber Marks), the book ‘Laid Bare’ (2016) and the “Art-errorist Thorns” series, individual graphic works and texts.