London Calling (60 page)

The walls of SEX were spray-painted with lines from Valerie Solanas’s anti-male SCUM Manifesto, and thick blobs of latex
hung down like an amateurish fairground ghost train; in fact the shop’s ambience reminded me of Jeff Nuttall’s 1965 sTigma
installation at Better Books. There was a noticeboard with photographs of Tom Verlaine and Richard Hell with his torn T-shirt
and safety pins, and a picture of Wayne County on the toilet. (Much of the King’s Road punk imagery was appropriated from
the downtown New York scene, particularly from Richard Hell.) The clothes were very expensive: a wet-look T-shirt cost £7,
a see-through T-shirt £5, a ripped T-shirt £30, an unravelling mohair jumper £60. As Boy George commented: ‘Anarchy in the
U K? More like Avarice in the U K. Still, I would have bought them if I had the money.’
¹¹
Only fifteen at the time, he had his mum run up copies. Only middle-class punks like the Bromley Contingent could afford
the clothes from SEX. That was not how Vivienne saw it; to her SEX was a revolutionary statement: she told the sex magazine
Forum
: ‘We were not here to sell toys and fashion clothing but to convert, educate and liberate. We are totally committed to what
we are doing and our message is simple. We want you to live out your wildest fantasies to the hilt.’
¹²
The Teds and rockers were outraged
at losing their source of winkle-pickers and studded jackets and made their displeasure known, but the rag trade always moves
on to the next big thing, and Malcolm and Vivienne were on a roll.

In keeping with their name, they made sex the theme. There had been an American T-shirt that had been sold in underground
newspapers since the early seventies that featured a life-size pair of breasts printed in their correct position, which caused
a double-take when worn by a woman, and confusion when worn by a man. Malcolm and Vivienne ripped it off and had a batch made
up. They took paragraphs from Alexander Trocchi’s Olympia Press lesbian pornography that McLaren stole from Trocchi’s bookshelf
and printed them on T-shirts. Growing more bold they did shirts with a naked black footballer sporting a huge cock and, late
in July 1975, they found a gay porn drawing in the style of Tom of Finland of two cowboys, naked from the waist down except
for their cowboy boots; one of them adjusting the other’s cravat, their large flaccid cocks almost touching, mirrored by the
suggestive shape of the gun that one carries in a holster. They printed it up on T-shirts, brown on pink and red on green.
Vivienne Westwood: ‘We were writing on the walls of the Establishment, and if there’s one thing that frightens the Establishment,
it’s sex. Religion you can knock, but sex gives them the horrors.’
¹³

Far more offensive was a young boy T-shirt that McLaren came up with, and his design for a shirt featuring the hood worn by
the rapist then terrorizing young women in Cambridge. The shop manager withdrew the Cambridge Rapist shirt when McLaren went
to New York, not for reasons of taste but worried that the shop would be busted. McLaren was outraged and on his return he
reprinted it with the words ‘Hard Day’s Night’ and a salacious piece of music business gossip about Epstein’s death. McLaren:

It just intrigued me from a fashion point of view, so I went forward and exploited other things, like printing voyeuristic
writing on T-shirts. I also turned the Cambridge Rapist into a pop star. I thought that was good. I thought, when they catch
this guy, they’ll put it on the front pages and proclaim him a terror to our society and make him a scapegoat. So I thought
great, why don’t I associate him with Brian Epstein and the Beatles.
¹⁴

He found an image of the type of mask that the Rapist wore and put it on a T-shirt with the words ‘Cambridge Rapist’ above
it in pop star letters and below he put a small picture of Brian Epstein and the words: ‘Brian Epstein – found dead Aug 27th
1967 after taking part in sado-masochistic practices / S&M made him feel at home.’ McLaren told Claude Bessy:

Suddenly Cambridge rapist T-shirts were being bought by all these 15 year old kids saying “this is a smart T-shirt”. I thought
it was fucking great… they saw them as slightly shocking and that’s all that was important, to annoy a few people, because
they felt so lethargic… I think all those kids are artists.
¹⁵

He claimed to be trying to shock people out of their apathy, but given his own sexually repressed youth, it probably told
us more about his own confused sexuality than he realized.

Vivienne’s statement about the British and sex was of course true. Alan Jones, who used to work at SEX, bought one of the
naked cowboy T-shirts the day they put them on sale, and also bought a Cambridge Rapist shirt. He changed into the cowboy
shirt in the shop and walked down the King’s Road to the West End. At Piccadilly Circus two plain-clothes policemen assumed
he was a male prostitute and asked him to accompany them to Vine Street police station, where he was charged under the nineteenth-century
offence of ‘exposing to public view an indecent exhibition’. McLaren promised to get him the best lawyer possible and get
him off. But it was an empty promise and Jones found himself in court with no lawyer and, not knowing what to do, pleaded
guilty. He was let off with a fine. The police, meanwhile, paid a visit to SEX, seized a selection of clothing, including
the complete stock of the cowboy T-shirts, and charged them with the same crime. McLaren and Westwood were found guilty and
also fined.

In another attempt to shock the public, McLaren and Westwood used swastikas on their ‘Karl Marx Anarchy’ and ‘Destroy’ T-shirts.
Jordan wore a swastika armband as part of her general plan to outrage. It did get her banned from the local pub but only when
she was wearing it; they knew she was a nice girl really. Her friend Siouxsie Sioux appeared to wear one all the time. Wearing
swastikas and dressing up as Nazis is very popular in Britain. Back in the sixties the staff of
International Times
, led by Bill Levy, once hired German uniforms and posed as Nazis for a staff photo. Various forms of Nazi garb have always
been popular items in the middle-class dressing-up box. In January 2007, two weeks before the sixtieth anniversary of the
liberation of Auschwitz, Prince Harry, third in line to the throne, appeared at a party while dressed as a member of Rommel’s
Afrika Korps, complete with a swastika armband.

SEX had a group of regulars which included all of the Bromley Contingent – not yet given that sobriquet – people from Louise’s,
El Sombrero and other similar clubs as well as the King’s Road itinerants. One very stylish customer was Steve Jones, who,
together with his school friend Paul Cook, had a rock ’n’
roll group. Jones, Cook and Wally Nightingale, all from the Christopher Wren school in White City, Hammersmith, first formed
a band in 1973 named ‘The Strand’ after the Roxy Music song. Jones was the local thief, the product of a broken home who already
had fourteen criminal convictions and had spent a year in a remand home, which he found more enjoyable than living with his
mother and stepfather. He later said that the Sex Pistols saved him from a life of crime. Next to join was Glen Matlock, a
friend of Wally Nightingale’s who had been working as a Saturday afternoon shop assistant in Too Fast to Live Too Young to
Die.

In the spring of 1975, Steve Jones, Paul Cook, Glen Matlock and Wally Nightingale played at a party held in the rooms above
Tom Salter’s café at 205 King’s Road. Their repertoire included ‘Twisting the Night Away’ and two other numbers with Steve
Jones on vocals. Steve had been pestering Malcolm to manage the band for some time to no avail; he said he might be interested
in managing them, but only if they sacked Wally. But when McLaren returned from a long stay in New York in the spring of 1975,
after unsuccessfully trying to manage the New York Dolls, he took up the offer, enthused by the downtown Manhattan punk scene
and determined to put his ideas about management into practice in London. Malcolm had always wanted to be an old-fashioned
Denmark Street-style Jewish manager in the tradition of Larry Parnes. The first casualty was Wally Nightingale, whom Malcolm
fired. He wanted someone who better expressed the transgressive style he was promoting at SEX. Malcolm was also not happy
with Steve’s vocals, so he gave him a Gibson Les Paul custom guitar brought back from New York and previously owned by Sylvain
Sylvain of the New York Dolls, and told him to learn to play it. Steve:

I guess I learnt properly about three months before we did our first gig… I still didn’t know what I was doing in those three
months really. I just used to take a lot of speed and just play along to a couple of records over and over again, ‘Raw power’
and the New York Dolls’ first album.
¹⁶

Mick Ronson, then with Bowie’s group, and Brian May were both an influence. Now they needed a new vocalist.

John Lydon was an old friend of Sid Vicious, who worked part-time at SEX – they shared a flat in Hampstead near the station
and once had a job working together in the kitchen at Cranks restaurant above Heal’s in Tottenham Court Road. Sid’s name was
not, as many people thought, one of McLaren’s Larry Parnes rename attempts: ‘Sid’ was the name of John’s particularly stupid
hamster, and ‘Vicious’ came either from the Lou Reed song, or possibly the
time that the hamster bit Sid so badly it drew blood. Lydon took to hanging out in the shop, visiting with Sid, but though
he wore punk-looking clothing, it was of his own invention. He had originally been thrown out of the parental home for chopping
his long hair off and dying it green ‘like a cabbage’. At SEX he wore chains and safety pins, torn clothing and badges:
it was a mixture of Richard Hell, Ian Dury and Lydon’s own inventiveness. Vivienne took many of her ideas from him, such as
the torn shirts and the unravelling sweaters. He later wrote: ‘There was a lot of Viv selling stuff that she took from everything
and everyone, particularly me. I was angry about that. I would put things together, and she’d have it in the fucking shop
a couple of weeks later – mass produced.’
¹⁷

One day he was in the shop wearing a Pink Floyd T-shirt that he had annotated in ballpoint pen to read ‘I hate Pink Floyd’.
He had his green hair and the T-shirt was ripped and held together with safety pins. Bernie Rhodes, one of Malcolm’s assistants,
was particularly struck by this, which, to him, was the right attitude, so he suggested he stop by the Roebuck pub on the
King’s Road that evening and meet McLaren, Steve Jones and Paul Cook to audition for their new band.
¹⁸
Lydon hesitated, but went along. After a few drinks they went back to the shop and Johnny mimed in front of the jukebox,
thrashing around and acting like a spastic, miming to Alice Cooper. This did the trick and he was invited to join the band.

Jones and Cook had been playing together for years before punk. The Strand was very much in the glam rock tradition, fast
and furious with lots of flash and style; however, they remained very restricted in their musical aspirations, which turned
out to be perfect for punk. As Johnny Rotten said in 1994: ‘It couldn’t have worked without Steve being as structurally limited
as he was. I found it absolutely thrilling to be next to him on a stage, the power that would come out of that poxy little
amp with usually three strings, because that’s all he could remember to hit at one point…’
¹⁹
Steve and his mates posed as road crew at a David Bowie concert and walked away with amplifiers, microphones and other expensive
stage equipment. Now the band was complete and fully equipped.

McLaren clearly saw the group as his own Monkees-style creation: ‘If I could be a sculptor, I necessarily needed clay. I suddenly
thought I could use people, it’s people that I used, like an artist, I manipulated. So something called the Sex Pistols was
my painting, my sculpture. My little artful dodgers.’
²⁰
Lydon, however, had his own agenda and challenged McLaren from the very beginning; he had no intention of playing Trilby
to McLaren’s Svengali. McLaren:

He didn’t even want to be called the Sex Pistols, he wanted just to be called Sex… I wasn’t having it, I was in control and
I wasn’t going to waste my time with a bunch of herberts going out with a name like Sex, I wasn’t going to allow it. I was
out to sell lots of trousers.
²¹

As far as Lydon could see, Jones and Cook were ‘two Cockney spivs who jumped at the chance of Small Faces-style fame’.
²²
That was fine. Lydon had nothing else going on, so he joined the band. And McLaren sold a lot of trousers.

We were very anti-establishment anything – music and art. We wanted to destroy anything that had ground rules, that kept everything
suffocating and safe. We were out to break all the rules any way we could.

COSEY FANNI TUTTI

Meanwhile Genesis P-Orridge,
¹
then still legally known as Neil Andrew Megson, had quit the Exploding Galaxy in October 1969 and returned to Hull, where
he started a commune, the Ho-Ho-Funhouse, and put together a performance art unit called C O U M Transmissions, a name open
to many interpretations which Genesis has always claimed came to him in a vision. The most obvious suggestion, given the Exploding
Galaxy’s interest in new spellings and language, is another word for ‘come’ – semen. He was still absolutely committed to
the reconstruction of behaviour, identity and imagination; this, however, eventually gave rise to problems with the fellow
Funhouse members who were more committed to having a good party than changing society.

By this time he was living with Christine Newby, who in 1973 was to become Cosey Fanni Tutti. They first met at an Acid Test
party in 1969. She was dressed in archetypal hippie gear of velvets, silks and heavy eye makeup, and Genesis stopped to look
at her closely because he thought she looked so much like a ‘pretty cartoon’. As he gazed at her, Cosey’s knicker elastic
snapped, which, as she was high on acid, seemed highly significant to her. C O U M Transmissions began as a free-form improvisational
group; in other words they couldn’t play their instruments. Genesis scraped the bow randomly over the violin strings. Most
live reports use words like ‘dreadful!’ Genesis has described it as being a bit like the Third Ear Band only with theatre.
From 1969 until December 1971 they concentrated on musical events, but with Cosey’s participation they moved in the direction
of performance art, eventually leaving the music behind. The culmination of this
was the infamous
Prostitution
exhibition held at the ICA in 1976. By then they had formed a new band, Throbbing Gristle, which played at the exhibition
launch party.