1971–1975
‘Be Childish
Be Irresponsible
Be Disrespectful
Be Everything
This Society Hates.’
Malcolm McLaren, script for the film Oxford Street, 1969
After two and a half miles, his optimism flagging, McLaren turned the corner into World’s End. There the fashionable King’s Road quickly degenerated into inner-urban decay, tower blocks and pubs where drugs could be scored. As he passed number 430, a figure leaning against a bamboo façade beckoned him into the retro boutique Paradise Garage.
‘Where you going, man? I dig the drainpipes,’ began Bradley Mendelssohn, the Brooklyn-born store manager, referring to McLaren’s lurex-threaded trousers. McLaren explained that he was looking for a stall where he could sell his rock ’n’ roll records and memorabilia. Bradley suggested the back half of the shop, and an ecstatic McLaren returned home with plans to set up a business with his Harrow Art School friend Patrick Casey, another collector of fifties ephemera. Ever practical, Vivienne initially greeted the idea with scepticism, but as usual she eventually went along with McLaren’s wishes.
Pooling their dole cheques and raising additional finance by selling a film camera which McLaren had permanently ‘borrowed’ from Goldsmith’s College – Helen Wellington-Lloyd also lent them £50 – the partners patched up the back of the shop and bought more stock. On the pavement outside they erected a sandwich-board, illustrated with guitars and musical notes, which read ‘Let it Rock at Paradise Garage’, and commenced trading in November 1971. On the second day Bradley failed to turn up to man his half of the store, so Casey and McLaren covered for him. After three or four days Bradley still had not reappeared, and the till was bulging. ‘What were we supposed to do with the takings?’ McLaren wondered. ‘Keep the cash in the shop, tuck it under our beds, what?’ He requisitioned the shop.
Several weeks later, Trevor Miles, the proprietor who had left his emporium in Bradley’s care, returned from a Caribbean honeymoon, walked in and discovered the interlopers. After some haggling he agreed that they could stay, provided they paid a weekly rent of £40. Miles, like many of the young boutique traders at that end of the King’s Road, was into drugs, and just wanted some extra cash. McLaren decided to sit it out and claim ‘squatters’ rights’, calculating that even if Miles resorted to legal action they would have at least three or four months in which to trade before the court hearing. But a week later McLaren arrived to find the shop locked. Their stock had been tossed out on to the pavement.
Outraged by this ‘injustice’, Vivienne turned to their shopkeeping friend Tommy Roberts. ‘Oh, Tommy,’ she wailed down the telephone, ‘the landlord has chucked all our stock out on the street and locked the shop up.’ That was illegal, said Roberts, and she should seek redress from the law. He rang his solicitors in the City and made an appointment for Vivienne to see them. She arrived dressed like a slattern in laddered stockings and a mini skirt, with her spiked peroxide hair. After the meeting the non-plussed solicitor – ‘an old-fashioned kind of bloke’, Roberts remembered – told him: ‘Miss Westwood came to see me and we had to walk to court together with her great long winklepickers, the hair, the stockings, the lot!’ ‘He loved every minute of it,’ said Roberts, ‘despite the fact that his bill wasn’t settled for years.’
Let it Rock was back in business, and now occupied the whole premises. McLaren, Casey and Vivienne (when she wasn’t teaching) scoured the unfashionable outer London markets of Hackney, Streatham, Leytonstone and Hendon for merchandise. They amassed old bakelite valve radios, which McLaren restored and displayed on the pavement, a guitar-shaped mirror, of which they had copies made, old records, fanzines, post-war ‘skin’ magazines like Photoplay and Spick, postcards of period pin-ups and retro clothing. The booty was hauled back to 430 King’s Road.
In imitation of a kitsch fifties front room, the shop was decorated with authentic Festival of Britain-era wallpaper (from a fusty DIY shop in Streatham), a period fridge painted bubblegum pink and black, teak sideboards and formica display cabinets. Rock ’n’ roll blasted from a jukebox, and fluorescent pink letters announced the shop’s name and creed: ‘Teddy boys are Forever – Rock is our business’. Besides vintage records as mainstream as Billy Fury, Little Richard and Elvis Presley, and as esoteric as Hank Ballard and Johnny Guitar Watson, complementary artefacts were sold: Brylcreem, novelty socks decorated with musical notes, plastic earrings and black leather ties with see-through plastic pockets into which were slipped pornographic playing cards. Original, often unworn, fifties clothes were bought from warehouses in the Midlands and on the south coast. Photographs of Billy Fury, James Dean and Marlon Brando were pinned like holy relics onto fake leopardskin, along with Eddie Cochrane’s autograph, sent by friends to Shelley Martin, a sales assistant at Let it Rock, but which McLaren commandeered – just as he had taken possession of Paradise Garage, the film camera, books from Foyle’s and other people’s ideas. He had little respect for the concept of physical or intellectual property, arguing: ‘Plagiarism is what the world’s about. If you don’t start seeing things and stealing because you were inspired by them, you’d be stupid.’
‘Hippiedom is dead!’ was McLaren and Casey’s clarion call. McLaren claimed that he invented retro-chic, but in fact it had emerged back in the late 1950s. There were waves of fifties revivals throughout the sixties, but it was not until 1971 that the look became more than an esoteric backwater. Trevor Miles had traded fifties Americana such as Hawaiian shirts, college jackets covered in baseball or football logos and brightly coloured silk airforce jackets and overalls, some appliquéd on the back with maps of Japan or patriotic eagles. But McLaren’s fifties revival was unique in that it celebrated the fifties of Albion, not America. Unlike Americana – the look of the middle-class college kid or the gaudy tourist – McLaren’s fifties memorabilia celebrated the working class and the jingoistic instincts of the teddy boy. McLaren himself, remembered William English, one of the shop’s customers, looked ‘home-grown and working class, not adapted, just like a real old ted’. The merchandise and the accompanying credo had little to do with contemporary fashion. Nevertheless, within two months fashion features on the shop appeared in the Daily Mirror, the Evening Standard and Rolling Stone.
Let it Rock was not only a retro shop, but also a meeting place. Like Ossie Clark and Alice Pollock’s Quorum in Radnor Walk off the King’s Road in the late sixties, McLaren created a scene in which the like-minded could hang out. Location was vital – ‘Harrow or Streatham, forget it! … That street meant those media people came,’ he remembered – along with the popocracy (Jimmy Page, the Kinks, the Bowies, Marianne Faithfull), artists, dedicated followers of fashion and the hard-core teddy boys. Like Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco, Washington Square in New York and Saint-Germain-des-Prés in Paris, the King’s Road was a magnet for the young, the curious and the fun-seeking. At that time McLaren was receptive to customers’ comments and interested in their lifestyles, and would engage them in conversation rather than subject them to the monologues that were the hallmark of his later trading style. William English was struck that Let it Rock traded ‘in complete isolation’, surrounded by hippie emporia, and felt that this made them seem ‘very fresh, interesting’. He noticed that Vivienne and McLaren clearly felt more affinity with working-class provincials such as himself (he was from Leicester) than with their London neighbours: ‘They thought there was more going on in the provinces than in London – they both said as much.’ Ben Kelly, a Northern student at the Royal College of Art, was disappointed by the drabness of London until he discovered the shop, which he described as ‘a beacon … you could become part of their life. You didn’t have to buy anything, just get the vibes. It was exciting – better than drugs, really.’
Intoxicated by the attention and the modest commercial success the enterprise was enjoying, McLaren had even less time for family than before: many of his friends were unaware that he even had a child. In the spring of 1972 his grandfather died, leaving Grandmother Rose alone in her flat, only five minutes from