There had been a killing. But no one was quite certain where it had happened or where the body was hidden. Maybe it was in the library bludgeoned with a lead pipe? Or sprawled across the conservatory floor throttled by some rope? The press carried snippets. People were shocked by the news. How could this happen on our streets? How could this happen to our children when Abba was still number one? There was outrage. There was fear. There was a dread that this was only the beginning of far greater horrors to come.
They were right.
In some ways, it was a mercy killing. It had to happen. It was inevitable. It was putting the poor beast out of its misery. The old horse was now lame and blind and in constant pain and could barely perform its act. Yet still, they wheeled it out for one more turn for the rich people to ride and clap and cheer while the old nag bravely tried to canter around the ring.
But the children turned away. They wanted something different.
There had been noises of strange new things going on for months. Small signs in venues all across London. A growing sense that something had to change. The old horse was dead and the business was out of touch with its audience. The kids wanted something to happen.
A band called the Sex Pistols were playing gigs in and around London. Promoter Ron Watts saw them rip up the joint at a gig in High Wycombe in early 1976. It was like nothing he’d ever seen before. This was the start of the future. This was what everyone was waiting for. He booked the band to appear at the legendary blues and jazz 100 Club in London. He organized a weekend festival called The 100 Club Punk Special for September 20th and 21st, 1976. The line-up was the Sex Pistols, the Clash, Siouxsie and the Banshees, the Damned, the Buzzcocks, Subway Sect, Stinky Toys and Chris Spedding & the Vibrators.
When the Sex Pistols hit the stage, everything changed. “In one night,” Watts later wrote in his autobiography Hundred Watts: A Life in Music, “punk went from an underground cult to a mass movement.”
The Sex Pistols had killed off one generation’s music and announced something new.
...[T]his was the big one, the first day of a new era. Nothing could compare with it either before or since.
Onstage, Johnny Rotten was “insulting, cajoling everyone in the room, his eyes bulging dementedly as he made the audience as much a part of the show as the band.” The group tore through their set to a thrilled and enthusiastic audience. The Clash played their set, while Siouxsie and the Banshees had improvised a set around “The Lord’s Prayer.” A week later, a crowd 600 deep formed a line at the door of the 100 Club.
Smart enough to recognize the importance of what had happened, investigative reporter Janet Street-Porter fronted a half-hour feature on the Sex Pistols and co. called “Punk’ for local TV program The London Weekend Show . First broadcast on November 28th, 1976, “Punk” contained some of the very first if not the first television interviews with Johnny Rotten, Steve Jones, Glen Matlock, and Paul Cook, as well as Siouxsie, Steven Severin (aka Steve Spunker) and Joe Strummer, Mick Jones and Paul Simonon of the Clash. Here are the witness statements of the feelings and the facts. The whole show adds up to the reveal cards in Clue, as this small historic film discloses the who? what? when? and why? of the music that killed off the sixties.
Today saw Joe Corré burn £5 million of rare punk memorabilia, beginning with the destruction of an original acetate copy of the Sex Pistols’ ‘Anarchy in the UK’.
Corré, who is the son of Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McClaren, made headlines earlier this year when he vowed to burn his expensive collection in protest of Punk.London’s year-long celebration of 40 years of punk music. Corré also claimed that the celebration has been endorsed by the Queen, and criticised institutions like the BFI, Museum of London (where Corré appeared earlier this month for a Punk.London debate), and the Roundhouse for turning punk into “a museum piece.”
Fans have called out Corré on his actions, stating that the memorabilia should instead be placed in a museum or sold to help the homeless. In a new interview with Navaz Batliwalla, Corré has opened up about the stunt, saying; “It’s not about me. It’s about whether punk rock actually meant anything on one level.”
He continued; “It’s about trying to get people to get their head around the difference between price and value. It’s about drawing attention to the hypocrisy of these establishment institutions now making money out of these pastiche versions. How long’s it going to be before they put a Queen’s jubilee mug with a safety pin through her nose in the palace gift shop? It’s not long is it? Forty years to go from public enemy number one to everyone seeing the UK as the birth of punk, so that’s now a valued tourist attraction item that we can use. Well go ahead but people like me will have something to say about it.”
Asked whether he’s had support for the cause, he replied; “There’s been a hell of a lot of reaction and that’s what’s important,” before adding, “I didn’t start this with a master plan, this is someone giving me an opening goal and saying do you want to be a conformist and join this thing like everybody else and celebrate Punk London?”
Vivienne Westwood also made a speech about climate change at the event, stating; “My job as an activist is to try to make things clear so that we can understand things and find the solution.” You can see footage from the speech below.
Meanwhile, Corré also responded to a rumour that he had been burning fakes. Posting on Twitter, he responded to a tweet accusing him of using fakes, writing “no you will see photos to come and a doc too!”. He has also posted that “Julian Assange is the only punk left.”
Responding to those criticising him for not selling the merchandise to help the homeless, he wrote; “Stay tuned, it’s all to come” as well as “All will be revealed…” You can see those tweets and responses below.
Rock and roll’s turd in the punchbowl: An interview with John Lydon
John Lydon’s new memoir Anger is an Energy: My Life Uncensored is his second go round at chronicling his thoroughly fascinating life. His first Rotten: ‘No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs was published over 20 years ago so there was much new life to be written about and additonal elaboration and re-evaluation of his early years from the vantage point of now. He’s mellowed and aged quite nicely. Lydon has gone from rotten to nicely fermented. From snarly whine to barley wine.
In this interview conducted at my favorite bookstore in the world, The Strand, Buzzfeed Books editor Isaac Fitzgerald and Lydon have a grand old time shooting the shit as Johnny occasionally takes a chug from a bottle of cognac.
Anger is an energy. It really bloody is. It’s possibly the most powerful one-liner I’ve ever come up with. When I was writing the Public Image Ltd song ‘Rise’, I didn’t quite realize the emotional impact that it would have on me, or anyone who’s ever heard it since. I wrote it in an almost throwaway fashion, off the top of my head, pretty much when I was about to sing the whole song for the first time, at my then new home in Los Angeles. It’s a tough, spontaneous idea. ‘Rise’ was looking at the context of South Africa under apartheid. I’d be watching these horrendous news reports on CNN, and so lines like ‘They put a hotwire to my head, because of the things I did and said’, are a reference to the torture techniques that the apartheid government was using out there. Insufferable. You’d see these reports on TV and in the papers, and feel that this was a reality that simply couldn’t be changed. So, in the context of ‘Rise’, ‘Anger is an energy’ was an open statement, saying, ‘Don’t view anger negatively, don’t deny it – use it to be creative.
A couple of observations: the fellow in the background, to Johnny’s right, looks a wee bit like a Madame Tussaud waxworks version of Mark E. Smith. And why is Lydon dressed like a sous chef?
I bookmarked these videos of Malcolm McLaren being interviewed on the intersection of fashion, rock music and marketing to young people a while back but didn’t get around to watching them until this morning. Absolutely fascinating stuff. If you have any interest in the history of fashion or in the wiley Mr. McLaren himself, trust me this is most certainly worth an hour of your time.
What this is is three 20 minute Betacam camera reels (raw footage) of McLaren being interviewed for Rock Influence what is presumably a program firstly about fashion and secondly about music as it relates to and influences fashion trends, in late 1984. In the first of the tapes, he starts off talking about the birth of Parisian couture fashion, and how Christian Dior’s signature La Belle Époque-inspired silhouette ended up being adopted in the 1950s by American girls who “wanted to dance with James Dean.”
Throughout the hour-long interview, in which the interviewer gets to ask precious few questions—as anyone who ever met him can tell you, “conversations” with Malcolm McLaren were so decidedly one-sided that “monologue” would be a better term to use—the infamous trouble-maker who spun “cash from chaos” spends a lot of time talking about the Beatles and their influence on fashion and contrasting them, and what they stood for, with the Rolling Stones. He discusses clothes being marketed to post-war Britain’s youth for the first time beginning in the mid-1960s, gay fashion in London, Teddy Boys, the “Cinderella” women of Motown and Carnaby Street.
There's one particularly interesting section, I think it’s in part two, where he explains the sort of shops that were open on the King’s Road in London in the early 70s when he and Vivienne Westwood first opened their boutique (which had various names like Let It Rock, Too Fast To Live Too Young To Die, Seditioaries, SEX and World’s End). Basically it was stores catering to glam rock and glitter all around them, but what they were doing was simply buying up overstock on the togs of 1959 and reselling it for Teddy Boy and rockabilly revivalists. Consider that even a few years before this, there would have been NO “cool” or “fashionable” section of town, any town, even in a city like London, to begin with. That entire notion was just beginning to be expressed for the first time historically, but already, in one of the small handful of such stores in the capital city at the time, the marketing of nostalgia was starting to rear its head. Today there’s any number of “looks” one can choose in the supermarket of style… punk, hippie, Victorian, Edwardian, that fucking Jeremy Scott look that DAZED magazine always pushes, etc, but at that point and time, selling the clothes of 1959 to young folks was a fairly bold—almost counterintuitive—thing to do. Also, consider that selling 1959’s fab gear in 1972 would be comparable to selling the fashions of 2002 today, for a lil’ perspective.
Always remember that the distance from the doo-wop era to Sha Na Na aping it ironically at Woodstock was a mere decade. McLaren makes a pretty good case here—without intending to—that he and Westwood were among the very, very earliest pioneers of marketing “vintage” clothing. Because of the short distance from the beginnings of the modern fashion industry to the 1984 date of this interview, McLaren makes one great point after another that have retrospectively become even more true in the three decades since this was taped.
For the families of the striking fire fighters, Christmas 1977 was going to be a difficult one. With little or no money coming in, celebrations, presents, and even food were on ration. But something quite wonderful happened on that Christmas Day in Merrie England, when four of the country’s allegedly most reviled people brought happiness and festive gifts to the firefighters and their families.
This was Christmas Day 1977, when The Sex Pistols played a benefit gig for the families of striking fire fighters at the Ivanhoe’s club, Huddersfield, in the north of England.
As has often been recorded, The Pistols were the most hated and feared group in the country, portrayed by the press as the biggest threat to any nation’s children since Herod slaughtered the innocents. They had been banned from nearly every civic venue in the UK and were on an MI5 blacklist. For many a politician or council member, the very mention of The Sex Pistols could cause the veins to ominously throb on their sweaty, flabby brows.
But it wasn’t just The Pistols who these politicians and their obsequious press feared, it was the unions—in particular the fire fighters who were striking for a 30% wage increase.
For two years, the fire fighters had waited for the Labour government to negotiate a pay raise, but nothing had happened. As the cost of food, fuel and taxes skyrocketed, the pay-in-the-pocket of the average worker was worthless. Therefore, a ballot of the 30,000 strong Fire Brigades Union was held, which received 97.5% support for strike action. On the 14th November, 1977, the fire fighter’s strike began.
On Christmas Day, 1977, the Pistols quietly organized a benefit gig for the Fire Brigade Union. This was done as surreptitiously as possible, for if the council discovered the Pistols were playing (especially on the Lord’s birthday), the venue would be closed immediately. Two shows were arranged at Ivanhoe’s club: the first was a matinee for the children, at which cake, food, presents were distributed by the band, as John Lydon later said:
”Huddersfield I remember very fondly. Two concerts, a matinee with children throwing pies at me, and later on that night, striking union members. It was heaven. There was a lot of love in the house. It was great that day, everything about it. Just wonderful.”
While drummer Paul Cook recalled:
”It was like our Christmas party really. We remember everyone being really relaxed that day, everyone was getting on really well, everyone was in such a great mood because it was a benefit for the kids of firemen who were on strike at that time, who had been on strike for a long time.”
The Pistols paid for everything, and according to one young audience member “you could just have anything you wanted!” It was a Christmas Day to remember, as another young attendee Jez Scott later wrote about the gig in The Guardian:
Johnny Rotten came out in a straw hat and they had a cake with Sex Pistols written on it, the size of a car bonnet. He started cutting it up but it soon degenerated into a food fight. He was covered head to foot. It was fantastic. I took a photo of Steve Jones, who did a rock’n'roll-type pose. I took one of Sid and he asked, “Do you want to put Nancy [Spungen] in as well?”
Eventually the Pistols came onstage. I think they only played about six songs. I remember they did “Bodies,” but omitted the swear words because of the children. Steve Jones’s guitar sounded very raw and exciting. During “Holidays in the Sun,” Rotten held out the mic and people were shouting out their names, but because I was probably the only punk there I tried to shout the lyrics: “Cheap dialogue/ Cheap essential scenery.”
The gig itself was great. Sid had his leather jacket open and was hammering the bass. They were really on form and I was a bit overcome, really. I’d taken my album along but I was so excited talking to the Pistols, I forgot to get it signed. Sid was the easiest to talk to because he was like one of us, like a kid. I asked him what he was doing next and he said they were going to America. I’d like to think I said, “Don’t go, it’ll all go pear-shaped,” but I didn’t. Within a few weeks the band had split, Sid had been remanded for murdering Nancy and then he died. I wore a black tie with a Sex Pistols badge on it for a year in mourning.
The following clips are from a longer program, but contain the memories of the fire fighters and their families who attended, as well as some actuality from The Sex Pistols and a very prissy politician. The Huddersfield gigs were the final time The Sex Pistols played in Britain before going to America and splitting-up.
Kevin Eldon has one of the most familiar faces on British television today, working on virtually ALL of the A-list comedy programs of the past decade and beyond (I’m Alan Partridge, Jam, Black Books, Spaced, Attention Scum, Brass Eye, Big Train, Nighty Night, Smack the Pony, Green Wing, Look Around You, Nathan Barley, Saxondale, The IT Crowd), but he’s never had his own show until now, titled It’s Kevin, and it’s really fucking good.
Also featuring Matt Berry and Peter Serafinowicz, never mind the modern tecnology, here’s the Amish Sex Pistols:
The infamous clip of the Sex Pistols swearing at TV host Bill Grundy on the Today program in 1976, below, so you can see how note for note perfect this inspired sketch truly is. Bravo!
Film-maker and musician, Don Letts was working as a DJ at the Roxy club in London in 1977, when he filmed most of the Punk bands that appeared there, with his Super 8 camera. Letts captured a glorious moment of musical history and its ensuing social, political and cultural revolution. Letts decided he was going to make a film with his footage, and had sell his belongings to ensure he had enough film stock to record the bands that appeared night-after-night over a 3 month-period. Eventually, he collated all of the footage intoThe Punk Rock Movie, which contained performances by the Sex Pistols, The Clash, Wayne County & the Electric Chairs, Generation X, Slaughter and the Dogs, The Slits, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Eater, Subway Sect, X-Ray Spex, Alternative TV and Johnny Thunders and The Heartbreakers. There was also backstage footage of certain bands, and Sid Vicious’ first appearance with the Sex Pistols, at The Screen On The Green cinema, April 3rd, 1977.
You get more than an idea of that Tony Wilson in this compilation of the best of his regional tea-time TV series So It Goes. Wilson (along with Janet Street-Porter) championed Punk Rock on TV, and here he picks a Premier Division of talent:
Sex Pistols, Elvis Costello, Buzzcocks, John Cooper Clarke, Iggy Pop, Wreckless Eric, Ian Dury, Penetration, Blondie, Fall, Jam, Jordan, Devo, Tom Robinson Band, Johnny Thunder, Elvis Costello, XTC, Jonathan Richman, Nick Lowe, Siouxie & the Banshees, Cherry Vanilla & Magazine….. The tape fails there!
The uploader ConcreteBarge has left in the adverts “for historical reference” that include - “TSB, Once, Cluster, Coke is it, Roger Daltery in American Express, Ulay, Swan, Our Price, Gastrils, Cluster & Prestige”.
As part of the The Sex Pistols notorious tour of the America (mostly through the South) one of the venues they played was Cain’s Ballroom in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where they got a decidedly less than warm welcome. In this entertaining and fascinating video, several Tulsa locals who were involved in the Pistols’ show reminisce on what it was like to be in the middle of the punk rock tornado that touched down on T-Town one night in 1978.
Bliss was the opening act for The Pistols at Cain’s. A longhaired rock band with more in common with REO Speedwagon and Kansas than punk, one can only imagine what Mr. Rotten and the boys thought of this extremely odd pairing.
Bliss.
One of the more interesting outcomes of The Pistols’ performance at Cain’s was that it prompted the club to expand its booking policy from mostly country and western and classic rock to include punk and new wave. Cain’s is currently one of the best music venues in the USA and there’s an argument to be made that The Pistols helped trigger the evolution of the joint from something conventional into something much more adventurous.
Another thing I like about this video is the complete and utter coolness of the men being interviewed. They recognize that they didn’t quite “get” The Pistols back in 1978, but are more than willing to give the Brit punkers credit for bringing some much-needed change to rock ‘n’ roll and I think they respect the balls it took for Lydon and company to do it on such hostile turf.
The video is nicely done by the folks at This Land Press. Your host: Lee Roy Chapman.
British journalist and TV presenter, Janet Street-Porter has always had a finger on the pulse, been ahead of the curve, you know, has always been able to avoid a cliche. Her career as a TV journalist in the 1970s put most of her contemporaries to shame, as she brilliantly explored subjects and cultural trends the mainstream decidedly ignored. The week Chicago were at number one in the UK’s Top 40, with the vomit-inducing “If You Leave Me Now”, dear Janet was out making the first TV documentary on The Sex Pistols, The Clash and Punk Rock.
Broadcast on 22 November 1976 as part of The London Weekend Show, Janet’s film “Punk” featured interviews The Sex Pistols (still with Glen Matlock), a band called Clash (before they added a ‘The’) and Siouxsie Sioux. The Pistols also perform “Pretty Vacant”, “Submission”, “Anarchy in the UK” and “No Fun”.
There’s some drop-out, and the video tape is a bit mashed at the start, but otherwise, this is an important moment in pop culture history.
Just told a story about seeing this for the 1st time in London in the spring of 1980 the other day, and then seeing it's New York Premiere at the ROXY roller rink in NYC a few years later on a small TV in the middle of the skating floor... seeing the film a second time wasn't that exciting, but getting to see the Rock Steady Crew practice afterword once all the punks left (except me and a few of the Beastie's) with virtually no one around to take much notice in 1982 was something I'll never forget...
Julian Temple’s 1980 mockumentary The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle attempts to drain the last bit of blood from the corpse of The Sex Pistols. With Pistols’ Svengali Malcolm McClaren as his accessory in this crime against historical fact, Temple depicts the Pistols as a sham act with little or no bona fide talent foisted on an easily manipulated youth culture. Of course, he was wrong and would later do penance by directing the far more accurate documentary The Filth and The Fury 20 years later.
McClaren may have constructed The Sex Pistols but once his monster was out of the lab it was a genuine force to be reckoned with. The Pistols influence is as potent now as it was the day they were born. McClaren had a genius for promotion and anticipating/creating trends, but he was mad for thinking that the Pistols were solely a product of his own ego-driven machinations. The raw material was already there.
The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle may have been intended as a joke, but the joke ended up being on its creators, not the band or its fans. Temple may have been trying to make a satirical film about a rock band as pop culture product along the lines of Bob Rafaelson’s Monkees’ flick Head, but he did so without any of Rafaelson’s imagination, wit or charm. While Head was a surreal and entertaining romp, Swindle has the stench of something gone sour.
Chaotic, tiresome, but not without moments of brilliance (Temple is no hack) and great live music, here’s THE GREAT ROCK ‘N’ ROLL SWINDLE in its entirety. Very nice quality.
The complete final Sex Pistols show at Bill Graham’s Winterland, in San Francisco, 1978. For years all I’d ever seen was the B&W Target Video-shot version of this show, then this improved color version popped up on a quasi-legit Chinese DVD about ten or so years ago. Everyone always rags on their supposed shitty last performance… au contraire, folks, they’re incendiary here.
After this show, the supernova that was the Pistols was no more. Say what you will about John Lydon’s later career, in his youth, the man changed the face of music twice, first with the Sex Pistols and later with Public Image, Ltd. Who else can something like that be said about? Miles Davis is the only person who comes to mind.
"A tale of two cities, London and New York and the birth of punk. Each city created a bastard child that marked the biggest and fundamental shift in popular music since Elvis walked into Sun Studios. ‘Blank Generation’ examines the relationship between the bankrupt New York and the class and race-riven London of the mid- 70’s and explores the music of The Sex Pistols, The Clash, Ramones, Television, Patti Smith, The Damned and Buzzcocks."
