Iggy

Iggy Rose was a model and actress who was immortalized 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. One day a mob invaded Iggy's family home and burned it down. The family flew to Aden, Yemen, and later moved to England.

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 ran away from home in 1961, when she was fourteen. 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. She spent a brief part of the 60s living in Croydon. 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."