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Iggy Rose was a model and actress who was inmortalized by Mick Rock at Syd Barrett’s “The Madcap Laughs”, his first solo album after Pink Floyd, released in 1969. She was known as Iggy the Eskimo back then as it was rumored she was part Inuit.
She was born Evelyn Laldawngliani Joyce on the 14th of December 1947 in Rawalpindi (Pakistan) to a British father, major Harry Charlton Joyce, an officer in the British army, and a Mizo woman, Chawngpuii (known as Angela in English).
Evelyn’s parents had met at the end of the Second World War, when he was stationed in Mizoram — then, the the Lushai Hills (northeastern India
Iggy Rose was a model and actress who was inmortalized by Mick Rock at Syd Barrett’s “The Madcap Laughs”, his first solo album after Pink Floyd, released in 1969. She was known as Iggy the Eskimo back then as it was rumored she was part Inuit.
She was born Evelyn Laldawngliani Joyce on the 14th of December 1947 in Rawalpindi (Pakistan) to a British father, major Harry Charlton Joyce, an officer in the British army, and a Mizo woman, Chawngpuii (known as Angela in English).
Evelyn’s parents had met at the end of the Second World War, when he was stationed in Mizoram — then, the the Lushai Hills (northeastern India, then still ruled by the British). Evelyn’s middle name, Laldawngliani, means gift of the gods, in mizo, a language Iggy never spoke.
Evelyn had two younger siblings, Stephen Lalungmuana, who was born in Dhaka (Bangladesh) in January 1949; and Elizabeth, who was born in Worthing, Sussex, around 1959.
For decades there were political and military troubles in Mizoram, located in the North-Eastern part of India, bordering Myanmar and Bangladesh. Evelyn and family lived a luxurious and protected life in one of the British enclaves, politely ignoring that a civil war was raging around them. One day a mob invaded their house and burned it down.
The family flew to Aden, Yemen, another melting pot of colonial and religious problems. This was only a temporary solution as the family returned to England where they lived the upstairs life.
The Mizo branch had lost contact with the English family members in the sixties, when there had been a military conflict between India and Mizoram freedom fighters. In the aftermath of the conflict the Indian government censored all letters to and from Mizoram, and communication was lost between Chawngpuii and her family in north-east India.
For an unknown reason, Evelyn was nicknamed Iggy or Ig. After moving to England Iggy was briefly an art student. She lived in Brighton but she runned away from home in 1961, when she was fourteen, discovering boys, girls, booze, and speed. Iggy danced through life, her pretty looks and free spirit mostly assured her some food and a place to stay.
She worked at Granny Takes a Trip, the “first psychedelic boutique in Groovy London of the 1960s”, as a shop assistant, and was a regular at the Orchid Ballroom in Purley between 1963 and 1967. DJ Jeff Dexter, who regularly played at the Orchid, vividly remembers the beautiful girl who used to talk to him while he played his set. He first noticed her in 1963. He said: “Iggy was part of a group of very wonderful looking south London girls. She was very mysterious, she was unusual because she did not look like anyone else at the time.“
Iggy spent a brief part of the 60s living in Croydon with Dexter. She said: “The Orchid Ballroom was the place to be, the atmosphere was fantastic. I loved going there, I loved to dance. Jeff wanted to turn me and two other lovely girls into the English version of the Supremes, but that never happened.”
When her mixed-race appearance was exoticised in the London of the 1960s, she gave the name “Eskimo” to an NME photographer as a joke, although she always said she was “from the Himalayas”.
In the 1960s, she met The Beatles, The Who, The Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, The Yardbirds, Rod Stewart... She recalled: “I met so many people in the 60s – ... I was a free spirit.”
In the Swinging 1960s she was an iconic model.
In 1967 she became involved with film director Anthony Stern, who took many pictures of the model and also made a film of her called “Iggy the Eskimo Girl”. Stern said: “Iggy was my muse. I met her at a Hendrix gig at the Speakeasy. She was a lovely inspiration and free spirit. I never knew her real name. We used to hang out together, occasionally dropping acid, staying up all night, going for walks at dawn in Battersea Park. She entirely captures the spirit of the Sixties, living for the moment, completely carefree.”
The most iconic images of her appear on Syd Barrett`s solo album The Madcap Laughs, where she poses naked in the background, and were took by Mick Rock on the spring of 1969.
Iggy and artist Jenny Spires, ex-girlfriend and lifelong friend of Syd Barrett, met in the summer of 1966, and they met again at Biba’s in the spring of 1967. From then, they went clubbing in many occasions, and Iggy invited Jenny to a Dusty Springfield après-event. Jenny returned the favour and introduced her to Syd Barrett in January or February 1969.
Photographer Mick Rock recalls: “Syd was still in his underpants when he opened the door. He`d totally forgotten about the session and fell about laughing. Iggy the Eskimo was naked in the kitchen making coffee. She didn`t mind either. They both laughed a lot and it was a magical session.”
She stayed for a couple of weeks at Wetherby Mansions and she visited Barrett over the period of a few months.
The legend was that Iggy vanished all of a sudden after she broke with Barrett, but she just wasn’t traceable on the Floydian radar any more. In those days it was enough to move a couple of blocks where she frequented other, equally alternative and underground, circles. There were painters, musicians, actors, movie directors... She moved to Brighton soon after and left London in the 1970s.
In 1976 she acted in the experimental film “Central Bazaar” by the provocative avant-garde legend Stephen Dwoski, who gathered together a group of strangers and filmed them as they explored their fantasies over a period of five days. The ceremonial gowns and make-up here not only evoke the eroticism of European horror movies but also highlight the film’s interplay between performance and intimacy.
In the mid-seventies psychedelic tomfoolery was over and Iggy had to look for a job. She worked on a horse-farm for a while and met her future husband Andrew there. According to the painter Duggie Fields, Barrett’s old flatmate, she got married in 1978 to a rich guy from Chelsea and led a “decent” life after that. They relocated to a small village in the Horsham district of West Sussex, where she worked in a local supermarket.
In 2002, Mick Rock’s coffee-table book Psychedelic Renegades featured more shots of Syd and Iggy posing outside the Earls Court mansion block, alongside Barrett’s abandoned Pontiac. Rock’s photos found their way onto most Pink Floyd fansites, where Iggy had acquired cult status.
While researching for his Pink Floyd biography (2007’s Pigs Might Fly: The Inside Story Of Pink Floyd) author Mark Blake quizzed everyone about Iggy’s whereabouts.
In September 2008, the Croydon Guardian appealed for information about the model and, more than a year later, they managed to track her down. She inspired artist Anthony Stern, who filmed her dancing in Battersea Park and also took striking photographs of her on a houseboat in Chelsea. They were released at the City Wakes festival – a tribute to Syd Barrett – in October 2008, in Cambridge, in the short documentary “Iggy The Eskimo Girl”.
In March 2010, MOJO 196’s cover story on Syd Barrett’s The Madcap Laughs pondered the whereabouts of ‘Iggy The Eskimo’, the naked girl on the LP sleeve. It came as a shock to the object of Syd obsessives’ fascination; who contacted MOJO after reading the magazine. She was interviewed for Mojo and she learned there was some kind of Iggy fandom on the world wide web.
Iggy passed away aged 69 on December 13th 2017 at the United Kingdom, she was survived by her husband Andrew. Her funeral took place on the 27th of December 2017 at Worthing Crematorium, West Sussex, South East England.
After her passing, Iggy’s fansite “The Holy Church of Iggy The Inuit” (link below) found her Mizo connexion, and since then renamed their site to “The Holy Church of Iggy the Mizo”. It wasn’t until 2021, thanks to social media, that both sides of the family, the Mizo and the British, got in contact again.
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