From a Welsh coal-mining family, Street won his first fight
in 1957. Initially working under the name Kid Tarzan Jonathan, by 1961 Street
was touring the UK under his own name, working as a professional heavyweight
wrestler. Wrestling was a popular pastime, and televised bouts were big
business: in the mid-1960s Street began to make regular appearances on ITV’s
Saturday afternoon World of Sport programme. Although claims in the
press around that time that he was a former Mr. Universe title holder appear to
have been a little, shall we say, over-generous, he became something of a star,
and a popular live draw.
By the end of the 1960s, he was being billed as ‘Adrian
Street: the Blond Headed Glamour Boy’, and was being advertised as ‘Mr
Magnificent! Fabulous Gowns! Long Blond Hair! Lovely Body!’, but the
increasingly outrageous look hid a man with a conscience: in 1973 he became
involved in a political campaign to demand the release of Jewish civil rights
activist Sylva Zalmanson from a Russian gulag. The following year he starred on
TV in a drama penned by former wrestler turned actor and scriptwriter Bryan
Glover, A Drink Out of the Bottle.
By the beginning of the 1980s, he was working in the USA, and
it was here that he became Exotic Adrian, an outrageously-attired, effeminate ‘heel’
character. This gimmick was the result of his playing up to taunting from an
audience one evening, with Street saying that ‘I was getting far more reaction
than I’d ever got just playing this poof. My costumes started getting wilder’. In
January 1983 he caused outrage when he kissed Black wrestler Ira Reese during a
match. The Memphis TV station broadcasting the bout received a number of complaints
about this flagrant exhibition of interracial homosexuality.
Egged on by second wife Miss Linda, his signature move in
the ring was to kiss opponents to escape being pinned down and to put make-up
on then while they were disabled. Working primarily as a heel - a wrestler who
portrays a villain or bad guy and who acts as an antagonist to the ‘faces’, who
are the heroic, good guy characters - and occasionally with his wife and
manager (had wrestled in Britain as Blackfoot Sue) as a tag-team duo, the pair
travelled all over the world.
Now retired and back home in Wales, he’s certainly led a
colourful life, and thankfully during his career he took the time to lay down
some tracks for you lucky people, beginning in 1977 with the 45 Breakin’
Bones. Three years later he issued a second single, Imagine What I Could
Do To You before collecting those four sides, along with several new
recordings, on the 1986 album Shake, Wrestle and Roll. He would follow
this up with the cassette-only release Naughty But It’s Nice. Many of
Adrian’s songs were written by Cheshire-based musician (and former member of
the Four Dees) Don Woods, who has collected all of the recordings onto one CD, The
Full Hit: the Complete Collection, which is available now, from Don’s
website, for only £6:50.
Here are a couple of tracks from Shake, Wrestle and Roll
to whet your wrestling whistles: A Sweet Transvestite With a Broken Nose and
Breakin’ Bones. Enjoy!
Download Transvestite HERE
Download Bones HERE
