My life with the sadist in sequins

Beth Green

For an entire generation of wrestling fans he was as iconic as he was outrageous.

Yet, despite being decked in dayglo, plastered in make-up and sporting pigtails, his flamboyance belied a brutality in the ring that saw him dubbed ‘The Sadist in Sequins’ and ‘The Merchant of Menace’.

But, away from the screaming crowds, the infamous Brynmawr-born Adrian Street was also known by another name – Dad.

And now, a year after his death at the age of 82, his son Adrian Jr has revealed what it was like growing up with the grappler audiences loved to hate.

“To be honest, it never really dawned on me as a kid that having a wrestler for a father was weird in any way,” said the 62-year-old IT technician.

“In fact, it always struck me as odd why other kids parents elected to work in factories or drive buses.

“To my young brain, the option to make a living by putting other blokes in headlocks was open to everyone.”

Street had run away to London’s bright lights after realising that following his dad down the mines in Brynmawr was not for him.

“Too dark down there for me, I was born for the spotlight,” he once exclaimed.

“Dad met my mum Jean while they were still teenagers, during which time he was living in Notting Hill,” said Adrian Jr.

“She made a lot of his well-known earlier outfits, like the Union Jack one or the purple velvet number.

“He’d sketch something and she’d go and get the material to put it together.

“I can remember him sitting in the kitchen with big plastic bib round his shoulders while Mum pasted his hair with peroxide.

“I just thought that was just something most parents did of an evening.”

The eldest of three children the couple would have together he recalled how having a dad on the telly or in the tabloids wasn’t all you’d imagine it was cracked up to be.

“I’d go into school on Monday morning, Dad having been on ITV’s World of Sport that weekend, and some kid would try to take a swing at me or something,” said Adrian Jr.

“But it toughened me and, by and large, it was a good childhood.”

The nature of Street’s job meant he was rarely home, however.

“We didn’t see that much of him as youngsters because he was out on the road a lot,” said Adrian Jr.

“So it was Mum who mostly cracked the whip around the house – she could be just as scary as the old man if she caught us misbehaving.

“Whenever Dad did come home he always made the most of it though.

“He’d take us to the zoo or on long walks – he always was a big nature lover.

“One Christmas Eve he got home from touring really late at night and, like a big kid himself, was so excited to show us the toys he‘d bought us he woke us all up in the early hours.

“Mum wasn’t best pleased about that, I can tell you.”

After his marriage to Jean broke down after 11 years he met his future wife and manager, a female wrestler called Miss Linda, the pair eventually emigrating to America in 1981.

There, disillusioned by the state of the UK grapple scene, Street rediscovered his mojo and revelled in his audience-baiting bad guy persona.

Trophy after trophy followed, before Street settled down to life in Florida where he Linda set up a successful costume-making business and wrestling school.

A world away, you might think, from the life of his son in the UK.

But Adrian Jr’s love of words and music did draw direct parallels with that of his father.

Indeed, during the ‘70s reign of glam rock, Street recorded an album of stack-heeled stompers with such titles as Sweet Transvestite With A Broken Nose and Imagine What I Could Do To You – the latter becoming his entrance song prior to each match.

“With his dyed blond hair and bell bottoms a lot of people used to mistake him for a more muscular version of Brian Connelly from The Sweet, or a beefier Brian Jones from The Rolling Stones,” said Adrian, himself a veteran singer and guitarist on the UK rock and roll club circuit.

Similarly, just as Street penned a number of autobiographies, like the archly-titled Violence Is Golden, Adrian Jr. has also proved himself as an author.

His latest book, The World Belongs To Jane & Me, is the first of a trilogy loosely inspired by the golden age of British wrestling and the intrinsic part his dad played within it.

He explained that the professional nom de plume he goes by these days – AD Stranik – had been “stolen from a Czech barmaid I once met at a bar in Paris” and was in no way a means of distancing himself from the Street moniker.

“No, I’m proud of him and the fact he did something a bit different with his life,” said Adrian Jr., adding that his father moving back to Wales in recent years had helped cement the bond between them.

“He’d been out in America for decades so I never believed he’d ever come back.

“But I think getting very ill in the early Noughties really rocked him.”

Street was diagnosed with throat cancer in 2001 and given a bleak prognosis, yet he reportedly told his doctor he couldn’t die anytime soon as there were ‘still people in the world he’d not yet managed to p*** off’.

“It was all those years of wrestling in smoke-filled auditoriums that had done the damage,” said Adrian Jr.

“Goes to show what kind of a fighter he was that he’d go on to live for more than another two decades after that.”

However, in summer 2023, the grandfather-of-five faced his final and toughest opponent.

He suffered a stroke which resulted in a bleed on the brain and later, while recovering at home, developed chronic inflammatory bowel disease.

“It was sepsis that killed him eventually,” said Adrian Jr. “It all happened quite quickly.

“I’m just glad we resolved out differences and he got to meet his grandkids – my daughter Tallulah-Mae, who’s 10, and my son Reno, eight.

“Me and Dad became quite vocal about how we felt about each other and he’d regularly get emotional when we were talking, which was contrary to that hardman persona of his.

“It’s possible he felt like he’d missed out on quite a lot and had previously bottled things up because of who he was.”

Sadly though, Street’s relationship with his own father would haunt him until the end.

Grateful for surviving the horrors of a Japanese concentration camp during WWII, Emrys Street returned to Wales a strict Christian and an even stricter patriarch – “A Bible-bashing bigoted bully,” is how Steet described him in a 2013 interview.

“They never resolved their differences, and even when Dad was in the hospital himself he’d be on the phone to me ranting about how Emrys treated him,” said Adrian Jr.

“I recall thinking, ‘This could be the last call you ever make – do you really want to spend it banging on about bad stuff’?

“And, unfortunately, it did turn out to be the last time we’d ever speak to each other.”

But Adrian Jr. added he only has fond memories of his old man.

“He may have been absent for a lot of the time, but he was also a constant presence – that’s how large he loomed,” he said.

“Anyway, knowing how headstrong we both were we’d probably have fallen out had we been together for longer periods.

“It’s likely we’d have had more than a few wrestling matches of our own.”