Or cash from chaos: Malcolm McLaren, The Sex Pistols and the Situationist assault on Seventies rock.
Malcolm McLaren once boasted he could create a sensation with four idiots and a dog. He didn’t need the dog.
The ginger-haired ringmaster’s maniacal grin looms over punk’s creation myth like the Cheshire Cat’s smile, an omnipresent phantom claiming to have orchestrated every shred of the chaos that ripped through the music industry’s complacent heart in 1976. The truth, like McLaren himself, is considerably more complex and perversely fascinating.
The impresario out of nowhere?
While the Pistols’ snarling frontman John Lydon (née Rotten) might dismiss his former manager as “just an old hippie with too many strange ideas,” McLaren’s strange ideas weren’t plucked from the ether. They were carefully pilfered from an obscure movement of French radical intellectuals whose theories McLaren absorbed during his fitful years at various London art colleges in the late ’60s and early ’70s.
“I left art school because it was becoming a prison,” McLaren once admitted in his peculiar drawl. “But I took what I needed from it. We wanted to create situations, not just artwork to hang on walls.”
That “we” refers to the Situationist International, a group founded in 1957 by French revolutionary Guy Debord and a small circle of artists, writers and political agitators. Their mission was nothing less than the complete transformation of everyday life through carefully engineered provocations designed to expose the empty spectacle of consumer capitalism. (Is this needed now?! SC)
Détournement and Rock ‘n’ Roll.
For the Situationists, “détournement” was the weapon of choice. The hijacking and subversive repositioning of existing cultural elements. What better place to plant this time bomb than in rock music, that most commodified of cultural forms?
While McLaren was stalking the corridors of Croydon Art School (and later, the more prestigious Goldsmith’s), absorbing these revolutionary theories between failed attempts at sculpture and film-making, he was simultaneously absorbing the nihilistic charge of American proto-punk acts like the MC5, Stooges and New York Dolls the latter he briefly managed – aka proto-Pistols, jet boys and girls.
“Malcolm was never the most talented person in the room,” recalled an early associate Bernie Rhodes, who would later manage The Clash. “But he was always the one most determined to turn his particular obsessions into some kind of theatre.” As they say, Bernie Rhodes knows.
The Situationists’ concept of “recuperation” how radical ideas are neutralised by being absorbed into mainstream consumer culture gave McLaren a framework for understanding how the rebellious energy of early rock’n’roll had been castrated by the music industry. Cliff anyone? His grand project became clear: create a band that would be a living détournement, a mockery of rock itself.
Sex, style & subversion.
The laboratory for these experiments was SEX, the King’s Road boutique McLaren ran with fashion designer Vivienne Westwood. Here, selling second-hand Teddy Boy brothel creepers and drapes amid rubber fetish wear and bondage trousers and the now infamous Seditionaries gear, McLaren cultivated his small circle of beautiful, damaged misfits including the core of what would become the Sex Pistols. The shop was a Soho destination for a coterie of Seventies musicians, aspiring rock journalists like Nick Kent (who also auditioned as ‘Pistols frontman) to North Kent punk rock groupies aka The Bromley Contingent.
The boutique’s slogan “Rubber Wear for the Office or the Bedroom” perfectly encapsulated McLaren’s Situationist approach. Take conventional items (office wear), corrupt them with forbidden elements (rubber, bondage), and send them back into society as walking provocations.
“What we were selling was a look for the disenfranchised,” Westwood would later explain. But McLaren was selling something more: an attitude that transformed the wearer into a walking scandal, a human détournement.
Steve Jones, the Pistols’ guitarist and an accomplished thief (Lonely Boy:Tales From a Sex Pistol) who nicked most of his equipment from David Bowie’s ‘Spiders’ was the first piece of McLaren’s human puzzle. Drummer Paul Cook and bassist Glen Matlock followed. They were raw, unpolished, and perfect for McLaren’s designs.
“The Pistols were terrible when they started,” recalls early punk scenester and contemporary Clash accomplice Don Letts. “But Malcolm understood that competence wasn’t the point. The point was disruption.”
A swindle, or Situationist triumph?
When McLaren spotted the green-haired, hunch-shouldered John Lydon wearing a modified Pink Floyd t-shirt (“I HATE” scrawled above the band’s name), he recognised the final element of his Situationist masterpiece. Lydon’s seething contempt for everything, including McLaren’s artsy pretensions gave the Pistols the authentic venom that transformed them from art project into genuine cultural threat. Steve Jones would have it that McLaren asked Vivienne Westwood to approach John Richie (latterly Sid Vicious) but she got ‘the wrong John’ which was lucky for us since Ritchie only looked the part, whereas Lydon was well read, a talented lyricist and an intellectual provocateur.
The Sex Pistols became the perfect Situationist intervention: a band that attacked the music industry from within, exposing its contradictions through calculated outrage. Their infamous virtually accidental appearance on Bill Grundy’s television program where Jones called the host a “dirty fucker” live on tea-time TV wasn’t necessarily an accident but a classic example of what the Situationists called “creating situations.” Jones was just likely to react if drunk and/or provoked and McLaren knew it.
McLaren’s manipulation extended to the band’s lyrical content. “God Save the Queen,” with its declaration that “there is no future in England’s dreaming,” was released during the Silver Jubilee celebrations, a perfect détournement of patriotic fervor.
“Malcolm didn’t write the lyrics,” Johnny Rotten would later insist. “But he created the circumstances where those lyrics became inevitable.” Now say that in Lydon’s disinterested tone.
When EMI signed and then rapidly dropped the band, McLaren celebrated. When A&M did the same after just six days, he was ecstatic. Each corporate rejection only proved his Situationist thesis: that the system could not assimilate true opposition without exposing its own hypocrisy.
The aftermath, a recuperation of Situationism.
The delicious irony one that would have delighted the Situationists is that punk itself was rapidly recuperated. What started as McLaren’s art-school prank became a Hot Topic fashion statement, and the manager’s Situationist theories were themselves commodified in the ironically titled film “The Great Rock’n’Roll Swindle.”
When the Pistols imploded spectacularly during their American tour, with Rotten walking off stage sneering, “Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?”, even that seemed part of McLaren’s grand design. The perfectly engineered self-destruction completed the Situationist circle.
Today, McLaren’s radical Situationist dream has been thoroughly absorbed into marketing textbooks. Virgin Credit Cards featuring “Never Mind the Bollocks” imagery represent the ultimate recuperation of punk’s revolutionary potential. Every CEO who quotes “cash from chaos” at boardroom meetings proves how completely McLaren’s subversive theory has been emptied of its power.
Yet something essential remains. For one brief, incandescent moment, McLaren’s Situationist experiment ripped open the fabric of popular culture. The rupture in the space 4/4 time continuum has been mended, papered over with commemorative plates and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductions, but the scar remains a permanent reminder that the spectacle can be momentarily shattered by the right combination of art-school theory and raw, untutored rage.
McLaren may not have changed the world, but he proved it could be jolted. As the Situationists might have said, that’s not everything, but it’s not for nothing either (in French).
Malcolm McLaren attended; St Martin’s, Chiswick Polytechnic, Croydon College of Art, Harrow Art College and Goldsmiths College, 1963-1971.
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Art Pop / Pop Art: a study of the influences of art school, famous artists and movements on pop and rock music. Those institutions where failure is motivation, where the eccentric and pretentious emerge into the fascinating space where art and music meet.