London Calling (64 page)

Punk rock couldn’t be sold… it was too much to do with do-it-yourself. As soon as you get a do-it-yourself force out there,
you spawn 5,000 other groups. The record industry never wanted 5,000 groups. They only want one
group. One group is more manageable. It’s one dictator telling you what the culture is about rather than 5,000. They don’t
like the socialist idea that everyone can do it.
²⁰

The punk attitude also went against commodification. ‘We’re not into music, we’re into chaos,’ Paul Cook told Neil Spencer
of the
NME
, an attitude that made people in organizations like the BBC hesitant to get involved. John Peel, later famous for promoting
obscure punk bands, never recorded Peel sessions with the Sex Pistols or with the Clash. As far as the Pistols went, he thought
the band had turned down his offer whereas in fact his producer, John Walters, had felt that he could not impose such an unruly
band on delicate BBC engineers. With the Clash, it was a simply a case of their lack of professionalism. Peel noted in his
dairy:

They actually got as far as recording backing tracks, but then they were so out of their heads they couldn’t finish it, and
decided the BBC’s equipment wasn’t good enough. It was one of those things where you thought: How do you argue with stupidity
on this level? Not a very punk attitude, I thought.
²¹

Given the circumstances, punk was quite a challenge to the marketing men but they responded with their usual brilliance: coloured
vinyl, strangely shaped records, picture sleeves, limited edition singles, 12” remixes; whatever small market there was for
each group was sold the same product in as many forms as the marketing departments could come up with. The other way to sell
records was to attract as much publicity to your group as possible. This McLaren attempted, but it was not his staged attempts
at outrage such as signing a recording contract outside Buckingham Palace that provoked a feeding frenzy among the more simple-minded
tabloids; it was a relatively minor incident on Thames Television’s
Today
programme, broadcast live on 1 December 1976. Arranged at the last minute as a replacement for Queen, who had cancelled,
the Sex Pistols and members of their entourage were invited on to the show to be interviewed by old school TV presenter Bill
Grundy, who clearly felt it was beneath his dignity to talk to such an unruly bunch of yobs.

At the studio they were given unlimited alcohol in the green room, which they enthusiastically drank. Then, with Johnny Rotten,
Steve Jones, Glen Matlock and Paul Cook seated, with the Bromley Contingent, Siouxsie Sioux, Steve Severin, Simon Barker and
Simone, standing behind, Grundy introduced the band by saying: ‘You see, they’re as drunk as I am.’ Grundy apparently didn’t
notice the first four-letter word, spoken by Steve Jones when Grundy asked
him where the advance money from EMI had gone: ‘We’ve fuckin’ spent it, ain’t we?’

This line was leading nowhere so Grundy changed tack to try and patronize them with comparisons to Beethoven, Mozart, Bach
and Brahms, but Johnny Rotten immediately claimed: ‘They’re all wonderful people… they really turn us on.’

Steve Jones: ‘But they’re dead!’

Bill Grundy: ‘Well, suppose they turn other people on?’

Johnny Rotten, muttering under his breath: ‘That’s just their tough shit.’

At last Grundy had something to work with: ‘It’s what?’

Johnny Rotten realized what Grundy was doing and tried not to be led: ‘Nothing. A rude word. Next question.’

Bill Grundy: ‘No, no, what was the rude word?’

Johnny Rotten: ‘Shit.’

Bill Grundy: ‘Was it
really
? Good heavens, you frighten me to death.’ Grundy then paid attention to the Bromley Contingent and addressed Siouxsie Sioux.
She told him that she’d always wanted to meet him.

Bill Grundy: ‘We’ll meet afterwards, shall we?’

Siouxsie played along by pouting.

Steve Jones realized that Grundy had to be dealt with the way you would humour a drunk in the pub: ‘You dirty sod. You dirty
old man!’

Bill Grundy: ‘Well keep going, chief, keep going. Go on, you’ve got another five seconds. Say something outrageous.’

Steve Jones: ‘You dirty bastard!’

Bill Grundy: ‘Go on, again.’

Steve Jones: ‘You dirty fucker!’

By this time the group were cracking up with laughter and Grundy goaded Jones into more and more obscenities.

Bill Grundy: ‘What a clever boy!’

Steve Jones ended with an inspired choice of words: ‘What a fucking rotter.’

Bill Grundy: ‘Well, that’s it for tonight… I’ll be seeing you soon, I hope I’m not seeing you [ gesturing to the band ] again.
From me, though, goodnight.’

As the signature tune began and the band began dancing, Grundy muttered an off-mic ‘Oh shit!’ to himself, as if he had only
just realized what he had done. His career was over, and the Sex Pistols’ had just begun.

‘Fuck’ had only been said twice before on British television: first by Kenneth Tynan in 1965, who took some time to stutter
it out, and again by
Sir Peregrine Worsthorne in 1973. The
Today
show in 1976 had three. The autocue operator had thrown up her hands in horror at Jones’s first expletive, sending her handbag
flying through the air, showering makeup across the sound stage. By the end of the show, the studio switchboard was lit up
with complaint calls; a Liverpudlian lorry driver, James Holmes, had been so outraged that he had kicked in the screen of
his new £380 television set. Siouxsie and members of the band grabbed the phones and told the callers to ‘Fuck off!’ Their
EMI driver, experienced in the ways of rock bands, quickly ushered them into the limo and drove them away just as the first
police car arrived.

Although the programme was only shown in the London area, the national tabloids picked up on the story and made it front-page
headline news: ‘The Filth and the Fury,’ screamed the
Daily Mirror
, a line that Julien Temple later used as the title of his Sex Pistols film, and the
Daily Mail
, the
Daily Telegraph
, the
Daily Express
and the
Sun
all fulminated with self-righteous indignation with front-page headlines. The
Mirror
particularly loved the group and between 1 and 3 December ran huge headlines proclaiming: ‘TV Fury at Rock Cult Filth’ and
‘Siouxsie’s a Punk Shocker’. The
Evening Standard
ran a huge front-page headline: ‘The Foul Mouthed Yobs’. The next day there were press reporters waiting outside the Pistols’
homes, and they were followed to their meeting at EMI. Workers at the pressing plant were refusing to sleeve ‘Anarchy in
the U K’. Bill Grundy had been suspended from the
Tonight
show for two weeks and the press were camped outside EMI headquarters in Manchester Square. Paul Cook: ‘I’ve never seen
Malcolm panic so much.’ When a badly hungover Paul Cook threw up at London airport, it became front-page news. For the press
it sold papers, but the self-appointed custodians of British morality took it all seriously.

The result was that it became almost impossible for the band to play anywhere without the local council, police or community
groups cancelling the booking. The Pistols, the Clash and the Damned with Johnny Thunders’ Heartbreakers as special guests
were booked to play an EMI-supported tour of Britain. By the time they set out to play their first date, at the University
of East Anglia, six of the dates had been cancelled. The U E A date was cancelled on the day by the vice-chancellor, prompting
a sit-in by the enraged students. By the time they reached Sheffield, thirteen out of the nineteen dates had been cancelled.
The BBC refused to play ‘Anarchy’ (except John Peel, who managed to get it on twice) and in Caerphilly, Wales, they had to
contend with local Christians holding a prayer meeting outside the gig. McLaren exacerbated the situation by telling the
Daily Mirror
:
‘It will be very likely there will be violence at some of the gigs because it is violent music.’
²²

Then, on 5 January 1977, the EMI board, in the face of opposition from the record division, sacked the band, paying them
the remainder of their advance to leave. That same month, Johnny Rotten insisted, with Malcolm McLaren’s connivance, that
Glen Matlock be fired and replaced by his old friend Sid Vicious; he didn’t get on with Matlock, who was too musical for his
taste, and Cook and Jones were old school friends and kept their own company. They never really accepted him. Now the band
had a bass player who couldn’t even play three notes and who was also a junkie, thanks to his new girlfriend, Nancy Spungen.
Glen Matlock had to be hired as a session musician to play bass on the records. It was the beginning of the end of the band.

Central to the Sex Pistols’ work was a reworking of the themes of nationality and the images of the state, particularly the
flag. This was a time when the dole queues were getting longer, particularly for the 16- to 24-year-olds, and the fantasies
of empire had not yet left the British establishment; perfectly described by Rotten as ‘England’s dreaming’. The Union flag
was incorporated into Pistols poster art and T-shirts and Rotten’s ‘God Save the Queen’ not only had powerful lyrics, but
almost accidentally exposed how the record charts were fixed to show what the record companies wanted them to show. Johnny
Rotten: ‘“God Save the Queen” is a very valiant record. But you’re under the powers that be; you’re supposed to just roll
over and salute the very forms that make you cannon fodder.’
²³
Its message was genuinely shocking. It was a message from the streets, from a younger generation who saw nothing for them
in the future except the dole or a dead-end job, literally ‘no future’, the original title of the song.

The designer Jamie Reid, who had been at art college with McLaren, defaced Cecil Beaton’s formal portrait of the Queen for
the record sleeve by adding a safety pin through her cheek, a pastiche of the May 1968 Situationist International poster
Une jeunesse que l
’
avenir inquiète trop souvent
of a bandaged head with a safety pin across the mouth. The blackmail style of lettering, with each letter cut from a newspaper,
was first used for Pistols graphics by Helen Wallington Lloyd, a friend of Malcolm’s from Goldsmiths school of art, and was
continued by Reid as the Pistols’ ‘brand’. It became symbolic of punk in general.

Though at the time Johnny Rotten claimed he was not consciously aware of the upcoming royal jubilee, this was precisely the
time when the record began to rise in the charts. The acquiescent population, bribed by a two-day
bank holiday, duly hung out tawdry bunting, flew the Union Jack (made in China) and sat down to street banquets and parties,
more than 4,000 in London alone. ‘God Save the Queen’ rose in the charts, selling twice as many copies as its nearest chart
rival. W. H. Smith, Woolworth’s and Boots the Chemist had all refused to stock the record. Radio and TV stations refused to
transmit an advertisement for it. Despite the establishment’s best efforts, by the end of Jubilee week, ‘God Save the Queen’
had sold 200,000 copies. Clearly they could not allow the number one record in the week of Queen’s jubilee to proclaim her
kingdom as ‘a fascist regime’ so they quite simply fixed the charts. CBS Records, who distributed Virgin, confirmed to Malcolm
McLaren that the Sex Pistols were outselling Rod Stewart, whom they also distributed, by two to one, but inexplicably the
Pistols stalled at number two while Rod went to number one.

The reasons were various: the primary one was that, for that week only, the BPI (the recorded music industry’s trade body)
had issued a secret directive to the British Market Research Bureau, the people who actually compile the charts from weekly
shop returns, that all chart-return shops with financial connection to record companies should be dropped from the weekly
consensus of record sales. The Virgin Megastore chain, which had been publicizing the Pistols heavily and was consequently
selling more of their records than anywhere else, was not allowed to add their sales to the census. The next week the directive
was rescinded. Even at number two, some shops, such as W. H. Smith, simply left that line blank in their in-store chart listings.
John Fruin, the head of W E A Records (Warner, Elektra, Atlantic), was the head of B P I at the time. In 1981 he lost his
job after irregularities were detected in the chart positions of several of W E A’s artists.
²⁴

The establishment reaction to the punks was far more extreme than it had been to the hippies: right-wing papers like the
Sunday Mirror
ran headlines like ‘Punish the Punks!’ and their dim-witted readers did just that. Johnny Rotten was attacked by thugs chanting
‘We love our Queen’ as they slashed his hands, severing two tendons so that he could never play guitar again. He also suffered
a bad slash down his thigh from a machete. In a separate incident Paul Cook was hit on the head with a metal bar. Anyone dressed
in punk attire became the automatic target for Teddy boys or drunken yobs.

The contradictions between the original punk attitude and the bands signing to major record labels was extreme, insurmountable.
‘Punk’ itself became a marketable commodity and the message was lost in advances from EMI, CBS and the other big labels
and their marketing men and women. Johnny Rotten has a slightly revisionist take on this but saw what was happening:
‘We never considered ourselves punk. It was a moniker put on us. The Sex Pistols were directly related to our culture in England
– the message of “Yeah, you can do it yourself ”… [ the ] street sense of ‘This is all fucked up, let’s change it.’
²⁵

Punk, a sobriquet bestowed on the movement by Caroline Coon, was a label he was never happy with. As early as 1978 he told
NME
:

I refute that term. It was ridiculous. I hate that name. I think it’s loathsome. And I particularly hated the people who took
upon themselves to go around calling themselves punks. They didn’t have the mentality to suss out that that was pure media
walking all over them. People always get it wrong.
²⁶