01/12/2025
good on ye mate fkn legend 🙀🙀
On November 2, 1974, photographer Dennis Hutchinson captured one of the most striking images in British cultural history. In a Welsh coal mine in Brynmawr, a man stood in full glam rock regalia—bleached hair clipped into pigtails, face painted with glitter, draped in sequins and satin—posing beside his father, a coal miner covered in decades of dust and labor. The contrast could not have been sharper.
The man in makeup was Adrian Street, 33 years old and at the height of his career as "Exotic" Adrian Street, one of professional wrestling's most flamboyant and controversial figures. Seventeen years earlier, at age sixteen, he had fled this exact world—the darkness of the mines, the expectations of his community, the weight of tradition—to become something no one in Brynmawr could have imagined.
Adrian Street was born on December 5, 1940, into a coal-mining family where the pit wasn't just employment but destiny. His father spent fifty-one years underground. Everyone expected young Adrian to follow. But even as a teenager, Street knew the mines weren't for him. "Too dark down there," he would later say. "I was born for the spotlight."
In 1957, at sixteen, Street ran away to London. He found work as a builder while training as a bodybuilder, spending evenings in clubs around gay men, absorbing their language, humor, and theatrical sensibility. He signed with a wrestling promoter who gave him the ring name Kid Tarzan Jonathan, after American wrestler Don Leo Jonathan. His first professional match took place on August 8, 1957, and he won.
For years, Street wrestled as a conventional tough guy. But everything changed one evening when an audience began taunting him, questioning his masculinity. Instead of getting angry, Street leaned into it. He played up to their jeers, exaggerating effeminate gestures, blowing kisses. The reaction was electric. "I was getting far more reaction than I'd ever got," Street recalled. "My costumes started getting wilder."
By the late 1960s, Adrian Street had transformed into "Exotic" Adrian Street, wrestling's most outrageous character. He wore pastel colors and glitter makeup. He entered the ring to his own glam rock song, "Imagine What I Could Do To You." His signature moves included kissing opponents to escape pins and applying makeup to dazed rivals. The persona was implied to be gay but never explicitly stated, playing with gender and s*xuality in ways decades ahead of mainstream culture.
British television wrestling filled arenas across the country, broadcast into millions of homes every Saturday evening. Among the wrestlers were legitimate tough guys and trained fighters, but also celebrity guests who appeared for publicity. One such celebrity was Jimmy Savile.
Savile was one of Britain's biggest stars—a BBC radio and television presenter, host of Top of the Pops and later Jim'll Fix It, and celebrated philanthropist who claimed to have raised forty million pounds for charity. He cultivated a "tough guy" image, telling people he'd trained with the Royal Marines. Promoters were pushing Savile as a legitimate wrestler, booking him in over a hundred matches and asking professional wrestlers to "throw" their bouts to make Savile look formidable.
In 1971, Street was booked to face Savile. Street was furious. He'd been building toward a major match with rival George Kidd, which he described as the "match of the century," and promoters wanted him to wrestle Savile instead—and let it end in a draw.
But Street had another reason to despise Savile. In the wrestling world, Savile made no secret of his interest in young girls. "Savile used to go on and on about the young girls who'd wait in line for him outside his dressing room," Street recalled in a 2013 interview. "He'd pick the ones he wanted and say to the rest, 'Unlucky, come back again tomorrow night'."
Savile's behavior existed as what would later be called an "open secret." His colleagues witnessed it. His 1970s autobiography referenced s*xual contact with teenage girls. In one infamous 1974 television episode of Clunk Click, Savile joked about "giving" young women to fellow guest Gary Glitter, draping themselves over the women on live television. A 1990 interview saw journalist Lynn Barber directly ask Savile about rumors he liked "little girls." Savile deflected with rambling explanations about teenagers gravitating toward him because of his celebrity connections.
But in 1971, decades before the full horror of Savile's crimes would be exposed—hundreds of victims aged five to seventy-five, systematic abuse at thirteen hospitals, BBC premises, and schools spanning from 1955 to 2009—the wrestling community knew enough. They knew Savile was bragging. They knew young girls surrounded him. And Adrian Street, standing in that ring, decided he wasn't playing along.
When the bell rang, Street ignored every instruction. Savile's cronies had warned him not to underestimate their man, claiming he'd trained with marines. Street didn't care.
"I kicked his legs from underneath him so he hit the deck," Street recalled. "Then I picked him up by his hair, held him upside down and dropped him on his skull."
For multiple rounds, Street battered Savile around the ring. He delivered a dropkick so powerful Savile landed directly on his head. He applied a near-back-breaking submission hold. And throughout it all, Street felt hair coming away in his hands—clumps of Savile's hair torn from his scalp.
"Then, when I looked down at my hands, I realised they were covered in hair—Savile's," Street said. "I'd torn huge clumps out of his scalp. I absolutely crucified the bloke and when I spoke to my wife afterwards, she said I'd looked like a hungry fox going after a chicken."
Street drew the beating out as long as he could because, in his words, "I was enjoying myself."
The match was so brutal that Jimmy Savile never entered a wrestling ring again. Out of his claimed one hundred and seven wrestling matches, one hundred and six supposedly sold out. But after facing Adrian Street, Savile's wrestling career ended completely.
Years later, after Savile's death in October 2011, the floodgates opened. An ITV documentary in October 2012 examined s*xual abuse claims against him. Operation Yewtree, the police investigation, ultimately identified 589 alleged victims, with 450 alleging abuse specifically by Savile. The youngest was eight years old. The crimes spanned fifty years. Police described him as a "predatory s*x offender" operating "on an unprecedented scale"—possibly Britain's most prolific.
When the full extent became public knowledge, Adrian Street reflected: "Had I known then the full extent of what I know about him now, I'd have given him an even bigger hiding—were that physically possible."
Street's motivations for the beating were complex. He was angry about the booking. He was insulted by the double-cross about entrance order. He was a professional wrestler who refused to throw matches for celebrity guests. But he also genuinely despised Savile for his bragging about young girls, and he took the opportunity to punish someone he found morally repugnant.
Three years after that match, Street returned to the Welsh coal mines where his father had spent fifty-one years underground. The photograph Dennis Hutchinson captured wasn't nostalgia—it was a performance, a confrontation, a declaration. Street stood in full Exotic regalia among miners who had known him as a boy, men who'd worked with his father, people who represented everything he'd rejected and escaped.
The miners in the photograph look stiff and stoic, some confused, some amused, some disapproving. And Adrian Street stands confidently, hands on hips, as if to say: "This is who I chose to be."
Street went on to wrestle for seven decades, performing over twelve thousand matches. He moved to North America in 1981 with his wife and manager Miss Linda, eventually settling in Florida. He designed his own elaborate costumes and even made outfits for Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler. In 2019, a feature-length documentary titled You May Be Pretty, But I Am Beautiful: The Adrian Street Story chronicled his extraordinary life.
In his final years, Street moved back to Brynmawr, Wales, where his journey had begun. He died on July 24, 2023, at age eighty-two, following complications from a stroke and sepsis. His wife Linda, who'd been by his side for over fifty years, called him "the kindest, most loving man you could ever meet."
The 1974 photograph endures as one of the most powerful images of cultural collision—tradition versus rebellion, darkness versus spotlight, conformity versus radical self-invention. And the story of Adrian Street beating Jimmy Savile remains a reminder that sometimes, in unexpected places and imperfect ways, people do stand up to predators.
Street's actions weren't purely heroic—they were motivated by professional anger, personal contempt, and moral disgust all at once. He didn't know the full scope of Savile's crimes. He couldn't have predicted that decades later, the world would learn the horrifying truth about Britain's most celebrated television presenter.
But on that day in 1971, Adrian Street—the coal miner's son who became wrestling's most flamboyant rebel—looked at Jimmy Savile and decided some people deserve exactly what they get. And for two brutal rounds, he made sure Savile got it.
