With the help of his London followers McLaren developed the American inspiration into a British phenomenon, while acknowledging the significance of Richard Hell: ‘Here was a guy looking like he’d just grown out of a drain hole … covered in slime … no one gave a fuck about him. And looking like he’d didn’t really give a fuck about you! He was this wonderful, bored, drained, scarred, dirty guy with a torn T-shirt. And this look of this spiky hair, everything about it – there was no question that I’d take it back to London. I was going to transform it into something more English.’ The Atlantic crossing transformed the nature of punk: even the title of one of Hell’s songs, ‘The Blank Generation’, metamorphosed into something more violent and dangerous. Whereas Hell used ‘blank’ to mean merely nameless, the British music press came to interpret it as vacant, or void.
Within Britain, working-class fans underestimated the role played in the movement by its middle-class, art-school leaders; while the largely middle-class commentators who have picked over the bones of punk in their writings have lent it a misplaced grandeur, over-intellectualising the raw, hormone-driven, adolescent instincts to shock one’s elders, exclude outsiders, get drunk, get laid and have fun. They have placed too much emphasis on McLaren’s half-baked situationist didactics, retrospectively according the movement an inflated political importance, and thereby flattering the pop Svengali’s conceit. Johnny Rotten made the point bluntly: ‘All that talk about the French situationists being associated with punk is bollocks!’ But while McLaren had only a limited understanding of the situationists’ philosophy (he could not read French), what he did grasp was the movement’s visual imagery.
Compared with their French counterparts, British youth was not attracted to philosophising in cafés. In the sixties, while young Americans protested against the Vietnam war, and the French conflated philosophy and trade union demands to create les évenements, the British only tinkered with protest. This absence of intensity meant that punk never acquired real political significance, though many hoped it would. Boy George felt that ‘it became political and all the things it was never meant to be. It was popular to pontificate about anarchy or socialism. All it was about in the beginning was dressing up and looking ridiculous and having fun.’ Keith Wainwright, hairdresser to the Bowies, Toyah Willcox and Vivienne, whose salon stood two doors down from punk’s shrine at 430 King’s Road, also remembered punk as ‘Fun. It was youth, it was dressing up,’ while Sebastian Conran, the art student who promoted the Sex Pistols’ chief rivals, The Clash, was adamant that ‘it was totally style- not politics-driven.’ How could a cult based on political protest ever appeal to the young? ‘To talk about depression, the way politicians do, is not a good idea,’ says Jordan. ‘It doesn’t sell! And Vivienne and Malcolm wanted to sell … Punk wasn’t political, it was just mayhem.’ Those closest to punk’s core were convinced that fun was their motivation, whatever the later tragic outcome.
The essential difference between the proto-punks of New York and the London punks was intellectual posturing. New York’s poetic poseurs, such as Patti Smith, Richard Hell and Tom Verlaine, were typically in their mid-twenties, middle class and educated. By contrast, the British punks – mindless of aesthetics, literary references or political prescriptions – were primitive, instinctive and self-destructive rather than self-aggrandising and cerebral. They were also far more aggressive.
One of the major traits of punk was to celebrate ‘working-classness’. And though it was the lower-middle-class denizens of the outer London suburbs – rather than solid working class – who constituted its core, it attracted individuals from all social strata. What held them together was a common sense of boredom and frustration. ‘It was a class mix,’ says punk’s chronicler Jon Savage. ‘You could come from a tower block or be the middle-class person who went to Cambridge … the whole point about punk is that it was a group of outcasts from whatever background, and that was the common bond.’ Many punks felt that they did not fit in, and ‘came together, all the mavericks, in camaraderie and recognition. It was to do with having an attitude and being human, not just part of the system.’ While some of the major players may have emerged from the educated middle class – McLaren, Jamie Reid, Glen Matlock, Sebastian Conran – without the raw talent of working-class kids like Johnny Rotten (né Lydon), Sid Vicious (né John Simon Ritchie, though he later changed his surname to his mother’s married name, Beverly) and Jordan, the look and the lyrics would not have been so compelling and potent.
Though McLaren and Westwood were at the helm, they did not mastermind – and could not have masterminded – the controversial, runaway success of the movement, or forecast the manner in which the media would respond so hysterically and persistently to their pranks. ‘That’s one of the great misconceptions, that Malcolm was a great manipulator,’ says Sex Pistols drummer Paul Cook. Despite McLaren’s retrospective claims in his 1979 film The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle that he planned and retained Machiavellian control of the whole phenomenon, he too was carried along by the tornado that he had unwittingly unleashed. Most of the scams with the Sex Pistols were accidental. He didn’t plan the ones that worked, and the ones that he did plan failed. But the movement was acutely aware of the media, performed in its spotlight, and in the end, for some of punk’s victims, it became their only reality.
The image of punk became so internationally familiar as to become an icon: as integral an image of London as the scarlet double-decker bus. Standard postcard images of the capital in the early 1980s included the official engagement picture of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer, the Houses of Parliament and a punk flicking a ‘V’ sign. The totemic markings of the look were savage self-mutilation, damaged and asexual clothing, a violent rejection of prettiness or naturalness, and a cacophony of clashing visual references, all wrenched from their familiar settings and fused into a shocking juxtaposition. The wearer was always young – ‘the members of the new British punk bands squirm if they have to tell you they are over eighteen,’ wrote Caroline Coon in Melody Maker.
Vivienne’s career was to be built on punk. ‘The clothes made the music seem more radical than it really was,’ believes rock critic Tony Parsons. In creating the Sex Pistols’ look – marketed under the label SEX and its successor, Seditionaries – she evolved in a few crucial months from a seamstress who copied past fashions and interpreted McLaren’s instructions into a designer. Although she still acted on McLaren’s directions, their professional relationship was now more equal. ‘Up until the Sex Pistols and punk rock I’d never thought of myself as a designer,’ she has said. ‘I just thought of myself as helping out Malcolm on his projects; doing research and things like that.’ At last her belief in her own creative abilities took root and began to flourish. She had identified her talent, and was determined to leave her mark on international fashion. In doing so, she found a way to bury the provincial girl from the Snake Pass.
Aside from Vivienne’s personal development, punk saw the birth of a powerful marketing partnership between music and fashion, sold by the same proprietor. Though the Beatles and Mary Quant emerged simultaneously in the 1960s, no one thought to market them in tandem. The Rolling Stones may have been dressed by Ossie Clark and Granny Takes a Trip, David Bowie by Freddie Burretti, Queen by Zandra Rhodes, and Bryan Ferry by Anthony Price, but no one promoted the clothes with the bands. McLaren brought the two markets together, exploiting the dual demands of youth for a ‘look’ modelled by their pop idols and a philosophy expressed in their music. ‘The Dolls had come into my shop’ – he never said ‘our’ shop – ‘several times in London,’ says McLaren, ‘and they were staggered by the store, because nobody in New York was selling rock ’n’ roll culture in the form of dress and music in one particular place.’
‘The clothes needed the groups,’ McLaren later explained to The Times. ‘When I went into the music business no one wanted to know about the fashion connection. Now it’s the biggest plus you can have. When a pop group signs up with a recording company today there’ll be a clause written into the contract that the group will have £1,000 a week to spend on clothes. The Sex Pistols got the ball rolling. As long as a group has the right look today,