The Sex Pistols were not only four youths pounding out a frenzied, adolescent attack on the status quo; they were also clothes dummies for McLaren and Vivienne’s shop. The lyrics of their hits – such as ‘Anarchy in the UK’ and ‘God Save the Queen’, written by Lydon in response to ideas fed to him by Vivienne and Jamie Reid – were printed across their chests, in a masterful stroke of saturation advertising and product placement. The clothes sold the records, and vice versa. Jordan says: ‘Malcolm had a great talent to see what he could make of people and to instil enough trust in them, like a very straight ordinary bloke, and dress them up. And it says a lot about {the band} that they put all their trust in Vivienne and Malcolm and let them dress them up.’
Vivienne retained her muddled socialist principles, now combined with McLaren’s anarchy. She admired the extremism of the IRA and the Red Brigade, going so far as to tell Nils Stevenson that she’d even understand if the IRA blew up her own children. She wanted to demonstrate that her commitment was so strong that her personal feelings were inconsequential. To McLaren, however, sloganising was simply a means of commodifying revolution: ‘Cash from Chaos’, ‘Destroy’, ‘Believe in the Ruins’.
For Vivienne and Malcolm, punk was both a continuation of their commercial exploitation of youth culture and a fusion of many previous post-war youth cults – rocker, teddy boy, mod, Rastafarian – into a Molotov cocktail of truculent protest. It was post-modern, borrowing symbols and clothing styles from other tribes to create its own collage, a formula Vivienne continued to use until the early 1990s. In this respect it was a reflection of the pluralism that had already killed the one season/one look of high fashion. ‘Punk,’ Vivienne explained, ‘was a great stand against authority … Where did all those things come from? They came from culture! … The motives for being anti-establishment were already in the culture … When Malcolm and I first started to do clothes before punk rock we were looking at our own lifetime culture and trying to express the rebelliousness while throwing out all the motives. Through our curiosity and research we created a cult of our own.’
In fact, none of the chief signifiers of punk originated from Westwood or McLaren. ‘Do-it-yourself’ was its clarion call. Drainpipe trousers and jeans were already being worn by those who wished to distance themselves from the hippie flares; the safety pin came from Johnny Rotten via Richard Hell, who also pioneered the shredded and ripped clothing; the ‘used’ tampon from Sid Vicious; the razor blades, bin-liners and bike or lavatory chain were introduced by punks on the street, as was the later Mohican cut; the dog-collar by Sharon Hayman of the Bromley Contingent; the elements of militaristic dress and the brazenly artificial make-up and hair by Jordan; the customised leather jacket (ideally from Lewis Leathers in Great Poland Street) was appropriated from the Hell’s Angels, and became associated with The Clash, not the Pistols, who preferred torn school blazers from charity shops like Oxfam.
Punk dress celebrated the sordid, the cruel, the inappropriate and the poor. If an item smacked of political bad taste (the swastika), sexual bad taste (the used tampon or condom) working-class shoddiness (the paka-mac), cheapness (the black bin-bag, popularised by club entrepreneur Philip Sallon), the macabre (kohl-bruised eyes, inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 film of A Clockwork Orange) or the morbid (the skinny black tie worn as a hangman’s noose), it was seized upon. In 1978 Vivienne told the punk magazine Search and Destroy: ‘Now that the death penalty has been abolished in England, everyone knows nothing that terrible will happen to them, so you can be as free as you like.’
The most articulate exponents of the punk style achieved a look that instantly communicated all the pain and anguish of the lost adolescent. Their sartorial obscenities celebrated their self-imposed exile from society. Though they did not conceive of it in such terms, their display was reminiscent of the storm scene in Shakespeare’s King Lear, in which Lear and the Fool, cast out into the tempest and shivering in their ‘looped and windowed raggedness’, reflect on the essential nature of man, necessity and luxury. The style’s strength lay in its visual embodiment of the unadorned human condition, stripped down to reveal the raw nerves of psychic pain. It was this recognition of suffering that punk unleashed which incited such extreme reactions in the viewer, because it drew attention either to the purposelessness that the young felt or to their ugly, up-yours attitude.
In the mid-1970s, Britain was suffering the worst economic recession since the thirties. Inflation reached 27 per cent in 1975. In 1976, to avoid devaluation, the government was humiliatingly forced to accept financial aid from the International Monetary Fund. Unemployment was climbing steadily, reaching a post-war high of 1.6 million in 1977. The country seemed ungovernable, and it was the uneducated young who bore the brunt of the necessary belt-tightening.
In contrast to their derided predecessors the hippies, who had enjoyed relative economic affluence, the punks cast themselves as figures from the real world of urban decay. They did not seek sanctuary in escapism, psychedelic drugs, utopian politics, rural Arcadias, communes, dreams of outer space, or idealistic liberalism and internationalism. Unemployed, depressed, poorly educated and feckless, how could the punks find solace in such abstract and impossible dreams, such luxuries? Instead they appropriated the rhetoric of crisis, ushering in a period of liberal-baiting, aggressive tribalism and apocalyptic anarchy. With no place to flee to, they stood their ground and fought, in a vague, unfocused manner, against the current system and conditions. But they did not know what they were fighting for, and so an inarticulate frustration combined with their demotic hedonism.
Outbursts of rioting at the Notting Hill Carnival of 1976, and in Lewisham, South London in 1977 and Ladywood revealed the bitterness of the prevailing inner-city strife. ‘In 1976 it all started falling apart really,’ remembers Michael Kostiff. ‘There had just been the three-day week, and the country was really going downhill. It wasn’t this children’s storybook country any more. It was no longer the Queen at the top and the judges, it was all very corrupt, and people started to see the corruption and to question the role of things … All those people who lived through the war have different views of life, so it was really quite shocking to put a safety pin through the Queen’s face.’
The source of punk’s vitriol was not only in the reaction to mid-seventies Britain, but also in the psychic damage inflicted during McLaren’s childhood, and in Vivienne’s overbearing bossiness and her hatred of the complacent establishment. Her emotional responses had a childish fervour to them. She was angry and opinionated without being informed – a dangerous mix. McLaren, on the other hand, was coldly amused, and just wanted to ‘dress up to mess up’, to take pranksterism to its most irresponsible extreme. The social conditions of contemporary Britain made it an ideal time for him to lead a cavalcade of disengaged, thrill-seeking teenagers, with stories of the romance of anarchy and the opportunities of do-it-yourself stardom or infamy.
Pied Piper McLaren could not play the pipe himself, so he needed someone else to lure his followers. He had realised in New York that because of their age, their chronic drug and alcohol abuse and their indifference to his political ranting, the New York Dolls could not be manipulated to his ends. Back in England, he set about constructing his own band.
Glen Matlock, an art student who worked as a Saturday assistant at SEX, introduced McLaren to Kutie Jones, a band which consisted of Paul Cook and Steve Jones, two working-class teenagers from a housing estate in Shepherd’s Bush who were regulars at the shop (Jones had thirteen convictions for theft). They could hardly play – a plus point as far as the anarchic McLaren was concerned – but they had the abusive raw potential that he required. He then cast around for a Richard Hell-like lead singer who would carry his message of trashy revolt with an ironic lack of professionalism. He was seeking a riposte, almost an antidote, to the big-stadium, capital-intensive super groups and their professional sound.
Matlock first encountered the