Sex Pistols

Poison in the Machine

John Scanlan

• Éditeur: Reaktion Books
• Année: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781780238005
• Sujet: Media & Performing Arts
• Sous-sujet: Music

The explosive story of the Sex Pistols is now so familiar that the essence of what they represented has been lost in a fog of nostalgia and rock 'n' roll cliché. In 1976 the rise of the Sex Pistols was regarded in apocalyptic terms, and the punks as visitors from an unwanted future bringing chaos and confusion. In this book, John Scanlan considers the Sex Pistols as the first successful art project of their manager, Malcolm McLaren, a vision born out of radical politics, boredom, and his deep and unrelenting talent for perverse opportunism. As Scanlan shows, McLaren deliberately set a collision course with establishments, both conservative and counter-cultural, and succeeded beyond his highest expectations.Scanlan tells the story of how McLaren's project—designed, in any case, to fail—foundered on the development of the Pistols into a great rock band and the inconvenient artistic emergence of John Lydon. Moving between London and New York, and with a fascinating cast of delinquents, petty criminals, and misfits, Sex Pistols: Poison in the Machine is not just a book about a band, it is about the times, the ideas, the coincidences, and the characters that made punk; that ended with the Sex Pistols—beaten, bloody, and overdosed—sensationally self-destructing on stage in San Francisco in January 1978; and that transformed popular culture throughout the world.

1 I Will Be So Bad

It was October 1964. Malcolm McLaren, then a few months shy of his nineteenth birthday and going by the name of Malcolm Edwards, found himself looking on in surprise as The Rolling Stones, laughing and puffing away on cigarettes, appeared in front of him. He was perched on Chelsea Bridge with an etching pad, looking over at Battersea Power Station, its four iconic chimneys pumping white smoke, and outlining its imposing presence on the south bank of the Thames.

He knew who The Rolling Stones were, of course; but it was only here, seeing them out on the street, in the daylight, that he was struck by the way they looked and how unlike pop stars they actually were. The way they were dressed they could have been Beat writers, or young French existentialist poets and philosophers. Bill Wyman, the least star-like of the group, was dressed in a knee-length black leather mac and standing in front of a wooden hut, plonked on the Battersea side of the bridge, that sold tea and hot dogs. He spoke to Charlie Watts as Keith Richards and Brian Jones ordered cups of tea. Mick Jagger was prancing around, posing for some photographers. Together, with their long hair and slightly unkempt appearance, they looked bad – they looked mean, dirty and possibly dangerous. It was an interesting look. But all that – pop music – was something that belonged in the past. McLaren had once had time for The Rolling Stones, and others, like The Pretty Things, but in the year or so since he had first started taking art classes at Saint Martin’s School of Art, he had more or less lost interest in it all. When The Beatles and the rest of the upbeat pop music that swept through the 1960s had taken over, something had been lost. The action was to be found elsewhere – possibly in art, and living the life of an artist. Why bother being some kind of spectator of popular culture, he thought, when as an artist you could reshape the future through your own actions.

*

The 1960s were a time of upheaval in Britain’s art schools and colleges, shaped both by events in the world outside and by the structures and relationships that then existed within the institutions, and which seemed to act as obstacles to the kind of freedom that young artists wanted. By 1966 Malcolm Edwards had made the first of many attempts to instigate events and situations that might ruffle the feathers of the authority figures he so despised. In July that year he appeared in the headlines of a national newspaper for the first time, when The Times reported that he and a friend named Henry Adler had been found guilty at Marlborough Street Magistrates Court in London of ‘insulting behaviour contrary to the Public Order Act’. Adler, a few years older and more woven into the life of the counterculture, would be the ‘conduit’ that linked the then Malcolm Edwards to radical politics, and to King Mob, a London Situationist group that he was later loosely associated with. The twenty-year-old Edwards – described by The Times as ‘a sculptor’ – was caught with 23-year-old Adler trying to set light to the Stars and Stripes outside the US Embassy, in a ‘symbolic act against American policy in Vietnam’. They were both fined and bound over to keep the peace for twelve months, as the magistrate explained, to ensure that there would be no more such incidents.¹

There would be no more headline-grabbing incidents in those twelve months, although the one-time sculptor later wrote that in 1968 – the year when a revolutionary fervour gripped students across Europe – he could be found scrambling through the South African embassy as all around him Molotov cocktails flew into the air. And he remembered spilling bags of marbles on the ground at a charge from the oncoming mounted police at Grosvenor Square, scene of the most famous confrontations with the police in 1968:

Suddenly it looked like these horses were on an ice skating rink, and then, like Agincourt, we ducked down and people behind us had catapults and started firing gobstopper marbles at the windows of the American embassy.²

Since 1966 Edwards had lived with Vivienne Westwood, sister of his best friend Gordon Swire. Gordon was connected to the capital’s music scene, and had been booking bands on the burgeoning London rhythm and blues (R&B) scene in the early days of The Rolling Stones, when Malcolm would sometimes follow him around the circuit, often with more interest in the beer than the music – unless The Pretty Things or The Rolling Stones were playing. He was impressed that the Stones would get on-stage wearing dirty collars and cuffs, and – like many others at the time – loved the whiff of danger that these small details communicated.

Westwood had been around then, too, working with her brother Gordon, handing out tickets and checking coats and bags into the cloakrooms at the gigs he organized. By 1966 she had already been married. She was a few years older than Malcolm Edwards, who fascinated her, but who also seemed strangely resistant to her attempts to woo him – there was always something occupying his mind that he didn’t want to be distracted from. At that time she was working as a primary school teacher, and she would come to realize that she saw the world through different eyes than the impish would-be artist. Malcolm, she later said, always hated the kind of authority figures who were representative of the adult world, including teachers. He always wanted to hold on to something of that adolescent outlook, to have a disregard for the rules, to be the leader of a gang.³ He understood it as a way to get on the outside of things, and that is where he wanted to be.

At the age of five, he was thrown out of school for tearing up all of the classroom exercise books, and then educated at home by his grandmother until he was nine years old, when he reluctantly returned to school. ‘I was never on time,’ he admitted, ‘and I always kicked everyone when I played soccer.’⁴ At the age of nine, he formed his first gang – a ‘box gang’, as he called it:

It was a gang that hid inside a box outside of the school, making sure they could not be seen . . . I liked that. I adored people calling me bad because it felt good. I think it felt important because when things were good, I seemed to feel terrible.⁵

Years later, during the peak of the Sex Pistols’ notoriety, not much had changed. Steve Jones, the Pistols’ guitarist, remembered that McLaren wasn’t happy until everybody absolutely hated what they were doing. Once, during a lull in the hostilities that had been directed towards the Sex Pistols with a ferocity that was unmatched, he thought it would be a good idea if Westwood went down to Madame Tussauds and set alight the wax statues of The Beatles that were on display; he reasoned that she would be less conspicuous than him, and it would cause a great outrage, so beloved were The Beatles.⁶ So in school when the teacher rumbled his box gang, it was a defining moment; as Westwood wrote later, ‘he never hated anyone more in his life than that teacher.’⁷

Malcolm Edwards’s tendency to upend whatever the accepted order had prescribed can be traced back to his enforced attendance at school, but it was all grist for the mill; it just inspired him to mutilate the emblem of the school’s authority that he had to wear every day on the pocket of his blazer:

I would go to great effort, picking the badge off the blazer and sewing it back on upside down in perfect position. I spent an entire evening doing that, in front of my grandmother, who would only praise me for sewing so brilliantly!⁸

Unlike Westwood, he could never have donned the cloak of respectability that being a teacher entailed. He had no interest in the kind of discipline and order that such a calling demanded, and that was then to be instilled in the young; but he could show, he could reveal, and he could get people to see things differently. Once, he took over Westwood’s class of eight- and nine-year-olds, and talked to them about how the random debris that they might find lying around on the streets or on the patches of wasteland that had been left behind where bombs had fallen during the Blitz – a broken toy, a bird’s feather, a tin can – could be the most fascinating materials for an artist. You could show these young kids a photograph of a Robert Rauschenberg junk sculpture, he thought, and they would think it was the greatest thing they had ever seen. What the child and the artist seemed to share was a fascination with the unformed and the deformed, with making and breaking and doing it over and over and over again. It was a way of seeking out the space where the imagination could be allowed to play out for hours, even days, in its slightly altered reality.

For those who had left childhood behind, yet had been captured by the romantic lure of the imagination – artists or writers for instance – and who felt, like Malcolm Edwards, increasingly marooned and out-of-time, the point was not to give in to the world, but to work in ways that would alter whatever unsatisfactory state of affairs had temporarily gripped the circumstances in which one had to live. As a student of art history, Edwards knew that the present had always extended backwards as well as forwards, and that artistic culture preserved ‘the memory of things past’, which meant that to be steeped in this culture would be to find the means of identifying the future’s promise.⁹ In so much of the rush towards the future following the Second World War, however, huge swathes of the past had been declared obsolete, and 1960s modernism – under the sway of what Britain’s then prime minister Harold Wilson termed ‘the white heat of technology’ – sought to find new corners of social life that might be remade. But Edwards knew that the past that had been cast aside in this process was not just a storehouse of dead matter or discarded looks or styles; it retained, in the right hands, an abundance of potential for change.

Becoming an artist was an obvious choice for an upsetter of expectations, and the country’s art schools were still accepting of activities that allowed their students a great deal of freedom. Edwards spent eight years, from 1963 to 1971, hopping from one art school to another on the back of the easily obtainable grants that London’s numerous local authorities disbursed for the students attending colleges in their area – thus making it a possibility for one to move around and collect cheques with each new enrolment. During this time he became ‘an art school dandy and aesthete’ with an eye to becoming a great artist.¹⁰ But the restlessness that saw him shifting between schools was matched by an inability to settle on a particular medium and work on it to the point where he might define an artistic vision. He pursued his objectives in painting and drawing, environmental and installation art and, eventually, film.¹¹

His first work to be exhibited was a combination of installation and environmental art, which took place at the Artists’ Own Gallery, located at 26 Kingly Street, just off Regent Street in London’s West End. The gallery had opened in late 1964, offering ‘painters and sculptors of standing and promise’ a new outlet for their work.¹² It was a large, generous space that occupied a couple of floors and had a pool on the lower floor. For this show, mounted in 1965, the space was transformed into a maze designed to ensure that visitors got lost; it was filled with corrugated white cardboard, as his friend Fred Vermorel recalled:

Malcolm had now decided he was an ‘environmental artist’, and persuaded this gallery owner to turn his premises over for transformation into an ‘environment’ . . . a kind of obstacle course made from rolls of corrugated cardboard, empty shoe boxes and other debris. You had to crawl through tunnels and negotiate false floors.¹³

As visitors clambered around, they caught occasional glimpses on the walls of the gallery of flickering outtakes from an old Audie Murphy western that Edwards had edited together from scraps found in the bin outside a nearby cinema he frequented. Everything was going well, Vermorel recalled, until two policemen turned up and started muttering about the display being a danger to the health and safety of visitors:

Just then a drunken soldier, one of a group of squaddies, crashed through a false floor on to some people below. There was cursing and pandemonium. The show was closed and everyone went home.¹⁴

It was like the box gang being rumbled all over again.

As far as his experiments with painting and drawing went, Edwards came to specialize in pieces that were heavily dominated by black – and with his desire to upend prevailing norms wherever he saw them, he found in black something strangely and unusually beautiful. His teachers instructed him that black was a colour that should be allowed to sink into the background, but for him it was the opposite: it was white that receded into the background, allowing black to give definite form to bold shapes and contours, or else it would form the basis of portrait drawings, which contained ‘so much graphite that they just ended up big, lumpen, granite blocks’.¹⁵

The fact that he had become obsessed with black undoubtedly reflected something else. Unlike blue or red the associations that black has accumulated in Western cultural history are extensive and exceptionally powerful: black has been associated with negativity, evil, anarchy and a host of other traits that would be easy enough to pin on the future Malcolm McLaren through what has been said of his activities and his association with the Sex Pistols. By the time Malcolm had started painting his own black ...