Читать книгу Vivienne Westwood: An Unfashionable Life - Jane Mulvagh - Страница 10

1965–1971

‘I was a coin and he showed me the other side.’

Vivienne Westwood on Malcolm McLaren

Vivienne never fell under the spell of the sixties, whose politics, music and clothes were not to be a significant influence on her. But her life did change during that decade. She met Malcolm McLaren, who, in tune with the times, channelled her latent creativity into fashion, a medium in which the pair could showcase his political and artistic posturings and her campaigning zeal. Manipulated by him, Vivienne evolved from a cussing, church-going housewife into a subversive seamstress of agitprop clothing.

It was within her brother Gordon’s circle of friends that Vivienne met Malcolm Robert Andrew Edwards (né McLaren) in 1965 at the Railway Hotel, Harrow and Wealdstone, where Derek was now managing the club and she served as hatcheck girl in the evenings. McLaren was amused by her waspish asides to her husband. The dyspeptic child of a broken home, he liked to witness marital discord, and may have speculated that her aggression was for his benefit.

Malcolm Edwards (as he was known until 1971) was born on 22 January 1946 in the family home in Carysfort Road, Stoke Newington, a working-class district of North-East London. His parents were Emily (née Isaacs), the daughter of lower-middle-class Jewish diamond-cutters, and Peter McLaren, a working-class Scot who had served as a sapper with the Royal Engineers during the war and then became a motor-fitter. Emily considered that she had married beneath her. They had two sons, Stuart and, two and a half years later, Malcolm. When Malcolm was eighteen months old, Peter abandoned the family. He eventually married five times.

Emily then married Mike Edwards, a tailor (who, probably to disguise his origins, had changed his name from Levi), and decided to call herself Eve. Eve Edwards was a good-time girl and a flirt, boasting a sexual intimacy with the millionaire tycoon Sir Charles Clore. McLaren loathed his stepfather and felt betrayed by his mother, who was permanently absent, by day helping to run the small family clothing factory, Eve Edwards Ltd, and by night out with her lovers. Her sons were brought up by their grandmother, Rose Isaacs, who lived next door.

Rose Isaacs was born in 1887. Wanting to become an actress, she had taken elocution lessons which made her sound pretentious and affected. She was separated from her husband and, frustrated by her circumscribed life, lived out her fantasies through her grandson Malcolm, with whom she shared a bed until he was ten years old: ‘She created her own world and I lived in it and was protected by it,’ he remembered in 1996. ‘She allowed me to do anything; anything, in her eyes, that was not boring. Her motto was, if you were bad you were good, and if you were good you were boring.’

Favouring Malcolm at the expense of his brother Stuart, Rose established a pattern that he was to repeat as a father and stepfather. He was encouraged to defy authority, particularly that of his teachers – egged on by his grandmother, he lasted only one day at the William Patten School in Stoke Newington. After a short spell with a private tutor, he attended a fee-paying Jewish school called Avigdor in nearby Lordship Lane. His final schooling was provided by the Orange Hill Grammar School in Burnt Oak, where he passed an unremarkable three O-levels in 1961. Spoilt by Grandmother Rose and ignored by his parents, McLaren developed a jaundiced view of family life. He became a troublemaker, attracted to any philosophy that incited anarchy and excused belligerence.

Following in Stuart’s desert-booted footsteps, McLaren became a mod, a youth style which by 1958 had ousted the teddy boys’ insular little Englandism. The mods were dazzled by sharp Italian tailoring and American casuals, such as windcheaters, check or intasia knitted shirts, and short, close-fitting, single-breasted, small-lapelled jackets. Mod tailoring recalled the sexual tightness of Italian Renaissance court dress: the short jacket, codpiece and hose. The sixties version revealed every flex of muscle. The boxy, waistless ‘bum-freezer’ jacket with narrow, notched lapels fell from unpadded shoulders. It was single-breasted and three-button (only the centre one being fastened), and ventless, or virtually so. A series of flapless ‘ticket’ and secret pockets were inserted into its plain dark cloth. The jacket was worn with American import denim jeans or slacks that were tight against the thigh and narrowed to a sixteen-inch hem. Trousers hung on the hips rather than being suspended under the armpits with braces, and the zip relegated the buttoned fly to the fashion scrapheap. A white drip-dry or woollen shirt, desert boots and short socks and short, tidy hair completed the look. The effect was hard, clean and modern.

By the autumn of 1964 McLaren, a puny, aggressive flâneur, had run away from home and found work with a vintner in the West End of London. The previous year he had taken evening classes at St Martin’s College of Art, and in 1964 he entered Harrow Art School, where he befriended Vivienne’s brother Gordon. Thanks to a series of student grants, he remained in higher education (Reigate, Walthamstow, Chelsea, Chiswick, Croydon and Goldsmith’s) for the next seven years. McLaren was one of a generation of British art school graduates who were to become prominent in the nation’s phenomenally successful pop music, pop art, advertising and media industries, which contributed significantly both to Britain’s gross national product and its cultural prestige.

By 1965 Vivienne could no longer sustain her dull marriage. Despite Derek Westwood’s kindness, good looks and dancing skills, she was bored. She did not share his simple interests, and resented the fact that, as she saw it, she ‘was not learning from staying with him’. A tempting world had opened up to her through her brother Gordon and his friends, five or six years her junior, at Harrow Art School. Despite Derek’s pleas, she strained to escape the marriage. After several attempts to leave, she finally broke away in 1965, taking three-year-old Ben to live in her parents’ flat above the post office. The couple divorced the following year. (In later life, Vivienne conceded that Derek had been a good husband and a kind man – ‘too kind for me’.)

Every day Vivienne would wheel Ben’s pushchair past Gordon’s Morris Cowley, parked outside the Swire flat, and peer through the steamed-up windows. There, hunched under an old coat, lay Malcolm McLaren, who had taken up Gordon’s offer to move from his previous abode – ‘under a tree in the Harrow-on-the-Hill cemetery’ – into the car. Dora Swire disapproved of this dosser, and refused to allow him into their home, but once she had taken her place behind the post office counter, McLaren would sneak upstairs to take a bath and cadge breakfast.

Vivienne admired this camp dandy in his makeshift home, and he was amused by her fiery temperament and Sunday school ways. His earliest memory of her, as a shy Christian out of Picture Post dressed in home-knits and kilt, was a caricature that served his storytelling. She remembered being ‘a mess’ when she met him: ‘I was into the dolly bird look. Wispy hair and fur coats. I looked dreadful.’ McLaren loved to expose her provincialism: ‘London seemed to her a city of snobs … she found the people frightening, arrogant and unkind and she could not deal with it.’ Though this curious provincial and this posturing metropolitan seemed poles apart, McLaren’s rebelliousness was simply a more aggressive expression of Vivienne’s discontent. As well as their fertile imaginations, they shared an inclination to conjure up idyllic notions of youth and childhood; he because he had not enjoyed his, she because she had. They also shared a low boredom threshold, and an unwillingness to mention their fathers. But in other ways they were very different. While Vivienne had an earnestness that bordered on the humourless, McLaren treated life as a game, and adopted an irreverent and sarcastic pose.

Like Vivienne’s Glossop schoolfriend Maureen Purcell, McLaren’s relatives were Jewish tailors. Just as Maureen had introduced her into new circles in Manchester and Leeds, so Vivienne believed that McLaren could provide access to a fascinating world: ‘I felt there were so many doors to open, and he had the key to all of them. Plus he had a political attitude and I needed to align myself.’ She sought out his company, impressed that ‘he was cultured. His family were Portuguese diamond merchants way back and had a whole cosmopolitan understanding.’ But McLaren was afraid of women: they were either unreliable, like his mother, or suffocatingly manipulative, like Grandmother Rose. He was unable to befriend them and, though his friends were lustily experimenting in that dawn of promiscuity, he remained a virgin.

Dissatisfied with her uneducated state, Vivienne determined to improve herself in the company of McLaren and her brother’s student friends. But for a time she remained suspicious that artists were ‘anarchists, time-wasters or vagabonds’, and her nature prevented her from sharing wholeheartedly in their lack of interest in the practical side of life. Torn between the self-improvement promised by higher education and the necessity to find a job, she enrolled for a Diploma of Education course at St Gabriel’s Teacher Training College in Camberwell, South London, reasoning that she could always be an art teacher. ‘I thought, if I can’t find a way to make a living at painting’ – which, under the influence of her brother Gordon and his art-school friends she had come to believe to be the most desirable way of life – ‘at least I can be a teacher, and teach someone else to paint.’

Gordon left Harrow to study at the London College of Film Technique. He rented a rundown house at 31 King’s Avenue, near Clapham North underground station in South London. Two fellow film students, John Broderick and Chuck Coryn, variously described by McLaren as ‘American draft dodgers’ or ‘Vietnam vets’, shared the house, and after a few months McLaren joined them.

To McLaren’s horror, Vivienne and her son moved in shortly afterwards, compromising his ‘boys’ domain’. He also found Vivienne attractive, and ‘a sexual threat’. But the attraction was not mutual. Vivienne liked pretty boys, and McLaren’s rail-thin physique, pigeon-toed stance, unruly ginger hair and rage-red face, which he optimistically tried to disguise under talcum powder (hence his nickname ‘Talcy Malcy’), were not conventionally handsome. Looks aside, his pent-up anger would from time to time explode violently, and this disturbed her. But slowly, over the weeks, a combination of boredom, curiosity and sheer proximity to this compelling storyteller broke down her indifference to him. While the others attended film school, they passed the hours hunched over an inadequate bar-heater, sharing beans on toast and tea, or smoking Woodbines and downing whiskies late into the night.

As McLaren lectured her on the political power of art and the appeal of cult fashions, Vivienne assembled the costume-jewellery crosses she had started to sell at the weekend in Portobello market to add to her modest student grant and social security benefit. The jewellery was to be their first joint venture. McLaren would watch his methodical companion set the stones in place – red, then orange, then purple, then red again – before intervening to rearrange the colours. ‘She started to be taken by me because of the way I put the beads together and made them less boring, and … I was intrigued by her … because she hung on my every word,’ he recalled, with characteristic egotism. Vivienne readily deferred to his suggestions, which she believed were ‘more like exercises, more balanced in the way modern art was, instead of what I was doing … all sort of bunged together. His were more artist {sic}, mine more crafts. I always thought his ideas were so much better than mine.’ During these weeks, their roles were established and set for the next decade: she as the student craftsman, he the opinionated art director.

McLaren, who was obsessed with fashion and style, also art directed Vivienne’s appearance. She abandoned the ‘dolly bird’ look. ‘He took me by the hand and made me more stylish. I was twenty-five and got heavily into the school uniform look,’ which she bought in the children’s department of the Oxford Street department store John Lewis and wore with ankle-socks. This formative lesson in style, and its associations with carefree romance, were to emerge two decades later in Vivienne’s collections.

Intimacies were exchanged. McLaren disclosed his hatred for his polygamous and absent parents, who had turned him into ‘an odd fish’, and his regular nightmares about his mother. ‘He had just left home very traumatically, a very Jewish home, and he felt he didn’t have any roots outside Jewish society.’ Vivienne says, romanticising his background somewhat. She in turn confided her relief that she had escaped her marriage to a ‘no-hoper’, in which she had been ‘saddled to the kitchen sink with a screaming brat round my ankles’.

McLaren’s anger was channelled into subscribing to any movement that incited anarchy. According to his first art teacher at Harrow, Theodore Ramos, he was ‘playing with art’, but Vivienne was intrigued by McLaren’s anarchist conceits, which suggested an outlet for her righteous indignation about ‘this horrible world’. Nevertheless, she was not in love with this ranting revolutionary, though his manic displays of hysteria did arouse her sexual appetite. ‘He seemed quite spectacular at the time, really. He had a very, very pale face {thanks to the talcum powder} and he had very slight hair on his skin and very, very close-cropped hair. But I once remember I said something to him … and he suddenly exploded in front of me … His lips were very red in the context of his pale face and I remember his mouth – he’s got a well-formed, well-shaped mouth, quite pointed it is – well, it just opened up and I could see all the gums inside. I’ve never seen anything quite like it. I respected this kind of intensity.’ No physical detail was missed by Vivienne, whose visual recall is exceptional.

When Vivienne mentioned her attraction for an Italian she had met in a Soho coffee bar and who had promised to take her to Italy, McLaren’s jealousy was excited. Posing as her disinterested friend, he warned her against this ‘Italian gigolo’. Couldn’t she see that his promises were just a ploy to get her into bed? Many years later he admitted that he ‘did fancy her’, and had ‘an ulterior motive’ for his self-serving advice.

Though McLaren felt secure in his mental domination of this awe-struck, to his mind sexually experienced older woman, he was uncomfortable when she provoked him by walking round the house naked. Unwilling to make a direct approach, he deployed an emotional cliché to seduce her – appealing to her motherly instincts. He slept on a mattress in the sitting room, and one morning he feigned a stomach ache, moaning and groaning until Vivienne surrendered her more comfortable divan and went to the chemist for medicine. On her return she nursed him until nightfall when, since he would not return to his own bed, she stripped and climbed in alongside him, unconvincingly claiming that she had no other recourse. Finally they consummated their two-year friendship, the twenty-five-year-old schoolteacher instructing the twenty-one-year-old virgin, who ‘refused to get out of bed for days’.

Habitually loath to acknowledge any emotional tie, McLaren jocularly dismissed the incident as the amusing sexual initiation of an innocent lad by a voracious nymphomaniac. Vivienne saw it differently: ‘He pursued me aggressively. It wore me out and finally I succumbed.’ Lust may have driven McLaren to lure her into bed, but her resistance was hardly staunch.

The loss of his virginity unsettled McLaren. He became possessive, insisting that Vivienne ditch her Italian friend. If a man came to tea or was seen in the street with her, he would ‘have a fit’. (He retains an extremely short and violent temper.) On one occasion, in despair, he shaved his head roughly, and theatrically emerged covered in blood. These masochistic poses appealed to Vivienne who, casting herself as the indispensable nurse to this lust-sick youth, reasoned that she could not leave him: ‘He thought I’d committed myself, but only because he’d been so confiding in me. He thought I’d just thrown him over and not realised the seriousness of the situation. He’d never had a girlfriend before me. And so I started to – I hesitate to use the right word – not fucking, and not making love, because I wasn’t in love with him – I guess you could say I started sleeping with him.’

Their sex life was irregular. Throughout their fifteen-year relationship, McLaren only sporadically indulged Vivienne’s appetites, partly in order to retain control over her. Though he became infamous for advocating sexual freedom and perversion, he was remarkably prudish about his own sex life. When pushed, the most he would say was, ‘I could never understand Vivienne’s attitude to sex,’ adding defensively, ‘As far as I know we had good sex and she was happy about that.’ Their working relationship dwarfed their sexual one.

Within weeks Vivienne discovered that she was pregnant. McLaren’s attitude to her changed immediately. He claimed to have been duped into thinking she was using contraception, and the prospect of imminent fatherhood distressed him. Since Vivienne was not in love with him, they discussed an abortion. In Britain in 1967, abortion was illegal. Most women who wished to terminate a pregnancy had to risk illness, even death, either from barbaric and dangerous do-it-yourself methods or at the hands of a backstreet abortionist, at considerable expense. An abortion was strongly recommended by the possessive Grandmother Rose, who disapproved of Vivienne, whom she dismissed both as a gentile and a scheming older woman from the wrong side of the tracks who was already burdened with another man’s child. She was determined to end the relationship.

Because Vivienne was close to her mother (‘perhaps everyone is except me, so maybe that’s normal,’ he conceded), McLaren tried to break communications between mother and daughter. Her parents were infuriated, regarding him as wilfully irresponsible. When he saw them approaching the house one day, he jumped out of the window to avoid a confrontation. His ‘benefactor’, as he referred to his grandmother, offered to pay for an abortion. ‘Vivienne was fairly for it,’ he says, but the deliberation continued for weeks, right up to the moment when, standing on the porch of a Harley Street doctor, Grandmother Rose’s cash in hand, Vivienne finally made up her mind and set off to Bond Street to buy a coat instead. McLaren felt trapped. He warned Vivienne that he would take no responsibility for the child, but by now she was too emotionally entangled to terminate her pregnancy.

In recalling his relationship with Vivienne now, McLaren describes an extraordinary parabola: from cold-hearted refusal that she ever meant anything to him, to the admission of deep fondness and even perhaps, in his own terms, love. What were his feelings for the woman who was carrying his child? ‘When she was pregnant I never saw her looking so beautiful … it was the time that I’d seen her look the most kind, the most open, the most centred and somehow as though she belonged … it was meant to be. I’ll never forget the vision of her being pregnant.’ This tenderly remembered vision of her is not typical of McLaren’s practised persona of cynical control.

Their child was two weeks overdue, and the stoic mother worked right up to the last moment, selling her jewellery and hoping that the baby would not arrive that day. Finally, she was summoned to the hospital in Streatham to be induced and, after an intense, short labour, her second son was born at teatime on 30 November 1967. She had been hoping for a daughter.

Grandmother Rose dissuaded McLaren from attending the delivery, and it was not until several days later that he went to the hospital to see his son. Having being quizzed about his absence by an officious nurse, he approached Vivienne’s bed. She recalls that his initial reaction was, ‘He’s not mine! He doesn’t even look like me.’ McLaren remembers, ‘I’ve never seen Vivienne look happier.’ Vivienne retains a poignant memory of her lover arriving in a snow-dusted Harris tweed greatcoat – bought on the way to the hospital at a second-hand shop on the Vauxhall Bridge Road – and often includes a description of it when sentimentally recounting her time in the maternity ward. The traditional Scottish cloth was to play an important role in her life nearly twenty years later.

The boy was christened Joseph Ferdinand Corré, the middle name after McLaren’s favourite Velázquez portrait, Archbishop Fernando de Valdés y Llanos in the National Gallery, and Corré being Grandmother Rose’s maiden name. While Vivienne called her son ‘Joe’, McLaren always referred to him as ‘Joseph’. In refusing to confer his own surname on his son he was distancing himself not only from paternity but also from his own parents, the former distance later underscored by Joseph being forbidden to call him ‘Dad’ or ‘Daddy’. The birth strained the relationship for McLaren, but it convinced Vivienne to commit herself to it.

In the autumn of 1967 McLaren had enrolled at Croydon College of Art and Design in South London to study painting, and he and Vivienne moved to a ground-floor flat in Aigburth Mansions, Hackford Road, near the Kennington Oval, which McLaren found from an advertisement in a sweet shop. The flat, in a terrace of three-storey pebble-dashed buildings, was in good condition by student standards, and the family was briefly happy there, entertaining Gordon and friends from Croydon on macrobiotic fare. Six weeks after the birth, Vivienne, needing money, reluctantly returned to work as a teacher, leaving Joseph in a crèche.

One of McLaren’s Croydon friends was Jamie Reid, the son of a radical Scottish family. Though his political commitment was temporarily debased by his association with McLaren’s disingenuous radicalism, Reid remained active, working after graduation for a community press in Croydon which served black, feminist, prisoner and trade unionist causes. At art school he stood alongside McLaren in the hope of changing the world; his companion was happy simply to play up and dress up.

In 1967, radical elements in the student communities across Europe were enthralled by a new publication, Guy Debord’s Societé de Spectacle. Debord was the chief theorist of the Situationist International, founded in Italy in 1957, which declared that artists should break down the barriers between life and art and, acting as provocateurs, create ridiculous situations in urban environments as a nihilist reaction to the status quo. Developing the Marxist critique that every aspect of capitalist life had been reduced to a commodity, the situationists fused it with the artistic agitation of dadaism, the absurdities of surrealism and the unrestrained hedonism of their times. The setting up of ridiculous spectacles was to be a modern expression of popular resistance.

Debord’s bestseller honed the arguments about the rampant commodification of cultural icons, and became the textbook behind les évenements de Mai the following year in Paris. From the Situationist International and Debord, McLaren absorbed the manner in which the media could be exploited through the production of manifestos, newspapers, collages and misinformation. Through a British offshoot of the movement, King Mob, he became acquainted with the writings of the Scottish Beat writer Alexander Trocchi and the American anarchist/feminist Valerie Solanas, author of ‘The SCUM {Society for Cutting up Men} Manifesto’, who gained notoriety by shooting Andy Warhol in 1968. Guided by situationism, McLaren perfected his skills as the great dissembler.

A friend from Harrow Art School, Fred Vermorel, who was living in Paris as a ‘hanger-on’ at the Sorbonne, corresponded with McLaren during the months preceding les évenements of May 1968. Like the 1965 race riots in the black Los Angeles ghetto of Watts and the anti-Vietnam war rallies, these French student demonstrations were vividly communicated on television, uniting the younger generation across the world in its condemnation of what it saw as heavy-handed suppression by governments.

It would be hard to exaggerate the importance of the student risings against de Gaulle’s conservative rule in France. Les évenements were the culmination of a protest march organised by the student Daniel Cohn-Bendit, ‘Danny the Red’, which began on 22 March at Nanterre, a university in the suburbs of Paris, and gathered support from students and workers alike until it culminated in fierce riots, centred on the Sorbonne, in the heart of the French capital. The protesters were brutally suppressed by the Compagnie Republicaine de Securité, the civil guard. Vermorel sent vivid reports of these events to McLaren and his fellow students who, wishing to claim solidarity, mimicked the French protests.

On 5 June McLaren, Reid, and other art students, including Robin Scott, who was to move into the Hackford Road flat in 1969, barricaded themselves into the Croydon College of Art and Design. Obeying the situationist dictum ‘Demand the Impossible!’, they issued preposterous demands, such as being allowed to sculpt in pure gold. The outside world was informed of their grievances through a series of press releases, and on 12 June Scott’s views were published in The Times. It was more fun to revolt than to study, and hedonism, as much as idealism, underpinned many student cries for revolution. The fervour of the protest waned with the onset of the summer holidays.

Participating in such pranks left McLaren little time for his family: ‘I was excited by this idea of taking culture to the streets and changing the whole way of life, using culture as a means of making trouble. These were not dead words, this was action!’ McLaren’s ‘actions’ now look like mere attention-seeking high-jinx. He joined twenty-four others in Selfridges toy department to give away toys. Their flysheet manifesto read: ‘Christmas: it was meant to be great but it’s horrible. Let’s smash the great deception. Light up Oxford Street, dance around the fire.’ On another occasion he pulled on black gloves to ‘steal steaks from the college canteen and cook them in the college kitchens late at night – no fingerprints! It was fun. It felt like the best years of your youth.’ Vivienne shunned these antics, focusing on the essentials of motherhood and earning a living.

McLaren visited Paris in 1968, and retrospectively exaggerated his role in the ‘revolution’. Though he claimed to have marched with les enragés in May, he did not actually arrive until August. Accompanied by a friend from Croydon, he inspected the iconic debris of student protest with awe. Not a brick of the façade of L’École des Beaux Arts on the rue Bonaparte was visible under the wallpaper of posters and graffiti declaiming such situationist slogans as ‘It is forbidden to forbid’, ‘Under the pavements, the beach’, and ‘Imagination is seizing power’. Gallery owners were peeling these mementoes off the walls, aware that posterity would prize them (just as the avant-garde London art dealer Robert Fraser was to do a decade later, collecting punk posters and donating them on his death to the Victoria and Albert Museum). McLaren found refuge in the Left Bank cafés, imagining that the waiters ‘liked the anarchic idea and believed in it too’, especially as they did not present him with a bill. Unlike Vivienne, who was thrifty, he was mean.

Attracted by notions of Algerian freedom fighters and Black Panther revolutionaries, the two students headed south, aiming for North Africa. But prosaic bureaucracy thwarted the budding rebel; McLaren had not been inoculated. He was forced to kill time on the south coast of France, waiting for his friend, who had travelled on to Libya, to return.

It was not love but loneliness that prompted McLaren to miss Vivienne. He began to write to her, describing his life among matadors and gypsies, passing the time, he claimed, discussing communism with the local workers. It is unlikely that his pidgin French would have stretched to philosophical complexities, and after a few companionless days he summoned Vivienne. She borrowed her fare from her mother, left her sons in a crèche and headed south on her first trip abroad.

Together they bought a small tent, pitched it on Le Trayas beach and camped there for a few weeks, subsidised by money sent by Dora to the local post office. Austerity-trained Vivienne made their modest funds last by collecting discarded fruit from underneath the market stalls and cooking cheap sardines in the sand. Alone together for the first time, the couple were happy and relaxed. Vivienne, undistracted by children, was riveted by McLaren’s accounts of his imaginary exploits on the barricades in Paris, and he was happy to have an audience. His eccentricities amused her: he would insist she take off all her clothes to keep warm, and would refuse to leave the tent to urinate, preferring to use a bottle he would make her take outside to empty. In years to come, she would nostalgically recount these perfect weeks of happiness. ‘When she falls, she really falls,’ says fashion journalist and former Vivienne employee Caroline Baker, who remains a friend and admirer of Vivienne. ‘She really loved him and she talked about {the holiday} so romantically. Every little thing about Malcolm impressed her.’ Even the fact that he only had to pee once a day. She said she was in awe of his strong bladder.

August passed into September. One night, according to McLaren, the lovers under their canvas roof were woken by the thumping and crashing of pots and pans. A strong tide had swept their tent into the sea. They scrambled onto the beach, having lost everything: cooking utensils, clothes, passports and wallets. It was 3 a.m. Naked and shivering, they ran to the local village, where they persuaded the baker to let them crouch by the ovens to dry out.

The idyllic holiday had ended. They hitched to Marseilles, where they sat on the church steps in the main square and discussed how to get back to England. There was no point in contacting Dora and asking her to send the bus fare, it would take too long. Perhaps they should surrender themselves to the British Consul, in the hope that the Foreign Office would fund their return. According to McLaren’s implausible account, while they were dithering in the afternoon sun a mini-van pulled up alongside the steps and McLaren’s friend, returning from Africa, rushed up to greet them. ‘Great! You got my postcard then?’ he began. Apparently the friend, assuming that McLaren would still be hanging round Aix-en-Provence, had sent him a postcard, care of the university, instructing him to meet up on the steps of the church in the main square of Marseilles on that very day, 7 September, at 3 p.m. The three piled into the van and set off back to England.

Vivienne and McLaren came home to a shock. Joseph had slipped into what McLaren described as a ‘catatonic trance’. They took him to the park and tried to rouse him, cajoling him to react, but he just sat inertly staring into space. Finally Joseph responded to McLaren – ‘not to me, because I’d really let him down’ (by abandoning him), his guilt-ridden mother recalled. The following Monday she handed in her notice at the school, determined never to leave Joseph again. McLaren supported her decision.

Gradually, penury and McLaren’s lack of commitment tore the family apart. When the lease expired in Kennington he escaped back to his grandmother, who had moved into a council flat above South Clapham tube station. Since she refused to shelter Vivienne and the boys, they went to live with her parents, who had now retired and moved from Harrow to a cottage just outside Banbury in Oxfordshire. A former employee remembers Vivienne telling her matter-of-factly that her father made her sleep in the garden shed.

The relationship between Vivienne and McLaren was now, conveniently for him, in limbo, though Vivienne expected a reconciliation. McLaren kept in touch by taking the train to Oxfordshire approximately once a month to see Joseph (Ben does not feature in his recollections). He received short shrift from Dora, who referred to him as ‘the interloper’.

Despite her parents’ disapproval, Vivienne wanted to hold on to her man. On numerous occasions McLaren attempted to end the relationship. Since they were no longer lovers, he argued, and were not living together, surely it was a sham; and anyway, he wanted ‘to fall in love with a student – any student’, with whom he could live the free student life in London, rather than be shackled to a working-class single mother living in the country. But within an hour of arriving Vivienne would change his mind, partly because Joseph looked so content, and partly because McLaren could not find another lover: ‘It just didn’t happen, perhaps because I was rather odd, so the relationship carried on.’ Occasionally he got the better of Grandmother Rose and Vivienne would stay for the odd weekend with him at her flat.

In October 1968, while Vivienne cared for her two sons in Oxfordshire and read Thomas Hardy novels, McLaren moved on to Goldsmith’s College of Art in South London to study film and photography. There he met Helen Mininberg (later Wellington-Lloyd), a wealthy South African Jewess who became a soldier in his campaign to create havoc through art. Partly to escape Vivienne’s clutches, and partly because he was attracted by the fact that Helen was a dwarf, he began an affair with her. He relished aggravating Vivienne by insisting that, although Helen was plain, at least she was more interesting than she was, and taunted her with tales of other infidelities, claiming that, as an artist, he needed to experiment and be free. Neither their relationship nor their child should stand in the way of his destiny.

McLaren’s flaming hair and his anti-authoritarian actions at art school had won him the sobriquet ‘Red Malcolm’. His behaviour finally attracted the attention of the police, who attempted to arrest him but were barred from entering the college premises by school authorities.

Ben was now six and Joseph nearly two. Sharing the cramped Oxfordshire cottage with her parents became impossible for Vivienne, and so in the autumn of 1969, encouraged by McLaren, she took the children to live in her aunt’s caravan at the Tan-y-Rogo Farm caravan park, near Prestatyn on the north coast of Wales, for eight months. McLaren was delighted that Vivienne was removed from her mother’s influence, and for the next ten years her formerly close ties with Dora were weakened. It was not until McLaren’s final departure that mother and daughter were to be reconciled.

In Vivienne’s absence McLaren married Jocelyn Hakim, a Turkish-French Jewish student he knew who wanted to remain in Britain, and who paid him £50 to marry her at a register office in Lewisham (it was to cost Grandmother Rose £2,000 to secure a divorce). The £50 he earned for his troubles was invested in his student project, a loosely situationist film entitled Oxford Street. The unfinished film highlighted the dehumanising absurdities of consumerism and fashion.

Vivienne’s aunt’s caravan was sited in a caravan park two miles from the town of Prestatyn, at the foot of the Clwydian hills. Without work, Vivienne was virtually penniless, save for meagre family allowance payments, and Ben recalls her feeding herself and her sons on ‘dandelion roots’ and simple fare. Much to Ben’s delight, he did not attend the local school, but was given an informal education by his mother, who conducted history and geography lessons in museums and markets and taught botany, geography and art along the beaches and hedgerows, nourishing his and Joe’s imaginations and sense of wonder. ‘She thought I’d get more from that than {from} a classroom of children. It was legal – she was a teacher,’ says Ben.

Released from the interference of Vivienne’s parents, McLaren was more inclined to visit Vivienne in north Wales. Here the countrywoman led the town-man and the boys on nature rambles up into the Clwydian hills, where McLaren would sit and sketch while Vivienne played with and watched her children. Away from the distractions of student life, McLaren felt at ease. But for Ben it was ‘an awful holiday’ as he began to realise the depth of McLaren’s antipathy towards him. McLaren had persuaded Vivienne that her first-born was retarded, and referred to him as ‘that snivelling little brat who’s always holding onto his mum’s apron strings’. McLaren also undermined Ben’s regard for his natural father, dismissing him as the offspring of a ‘no-hoper’: ‘Joseph’s part of me, and Ben’s part of someone she never had any respect for.’ Vivienne’s lack of confidence in her own genes and in her ability to nurture Ben demonstrated how fundamentally unsure she was about her talents and background.

Despite McLaren’s behaviour, Vivienne optimistically believed that by sharing a child, at least she had a hold over him. In fact her real hold on him was not his paternity of Joe, but her loyalty and the stable love, denied him in childhood, that she offered. She gradually weaned him from the suffocating hold of Grandmother Rose with steadfast and understanding love, and McLaren came to see that although she was more in love with him than he was with her, she did not pressurise him to make the commitment of marriage: ‘I don’t remember her ever discussing such matters.’ Despite her occasional outbursts of desperation, she gave him a free rein.

McLaren found a flat just around the corner from his grandmother in Nightingale Lane. Vivienne and her sons moved back to London and temporarily into a room McLaren found for them in Balham. After he and his friends had decorated Nightingale Lane, he summoned her, Joseph and Ben to move in. According to Helen Wellington-Lloyd, although McLaren found Vivienne extremely difficult to live with, ‘he was concerned to be around for the kid, so he wouldn’t be brought up in such a narrow, working-class way, like her family.’

Entering the flat, on the first floor of a thirties council block, was like boarding a train. A long, narrow, windowless corridor, made virtually impassable by stacked bikes, boxes and paraphernalia, led straight ahead. Off this lay a tiny galley kitchen, a primitive bathroom, a boxroom where the children slept in bunk beds, and a reasonably sized bedsitting room. One of the sources of tension between Vivienne and McLaren was household cleanliness. Vivienne was not only messy, but downright dirty – ‘The toilets, you know, filthy,’ says Helen Wellington-Lloyd. McLaren, by contrast, was almost fanatically orderly: ‘He’d fastidiously take off his clothes when getting into bed, fold them up – the routine was perfect.’ Still, McLaren and Vivienne were to live together in Nightingale Lane, with the exception of a few breaks, until he finally moved out in 1980. Vivienne chose to remain, and despite her affluence in recent years, she is still living there in 1998.

On returning to London, Vivienne enrolled in another teacher training course, at Goldsmith’s College. She was remembered by a fellow student, Peter Silverstone, as a ‘star pupil … potentially the greatest primary school teacher of her generation’. While his mother studied, Joseph was left at a local nursery and Ben joined a primary school. McLaren was still a student, so when Vivienne graduated she became the breadwinner of the household. She shouldered the burden of the £3.105. a week rent and most of the household expenses – McLaren spent the bulk of his grant on himself and his art. At one point domestic finances were so strained that Ben was sent off to live with his father, now remarried and living in Ashby de la Zouch, which he remembers as a bitter blow. Vivienne’s stoic practicality kept the family fed and clothed: ‘Vivienne comes from the Pennines, and she is one of those English hard-rock people with the ability to survive in the woods,’ says McLaren. She scoured neighbourhood gardens, Clapham Common and the local market gutters for herbs, fruit and vegetables: ‘I cooked macrobiotically, just rice, vegetables and a few nuts,’ she remembered.

As a mother, Vivienne was something of an old-fashioned disciplinarian. McLaren, however, claimed allegiance to the progressive teaching ideology developed by left-leaning educationalists in the 1960s and modelled on the theories of one of his heroes, A.S. Neill, who in 1921 had founded the famous Summerhill in Suffolk. Let down by his mother and mollycoddled by his grandmother, McLaren argued that a mother’s influence on a child could only be stifling and detrimental. He preferred a creative environment of chaos, which he believed would break down preconceptions about family life and instil self-reliance and independence from an early age. Dismissing Vivienne’s views as puritan, he was rarely around to care for the children or to deal with the consequences of his radical parenting theories.

Joseph was extremely close to his mother, and this affection would manifest itself in gallant gestures: ‘He used to want to go shopping for me when he was three,’ Vivienne remembered. ‘I let him go, but followed him surreptitiously a few paces behind. He was so careful that after a while I let him go by himself.’ The following year, Joseph and Ben were dispatched to boarding school. Joseph was four, which even by British public school standards was a harshly early age. McLaren claimed that the decision had been reached in order that the children ‘be politicised at an early age’, so they could flourish in ‘a fascist state’. But was the real reason simply to get them out from under his feet? Under McLaren’s influence, and despite her earlier promises, Vivienne had abandoned Joseph again. She witnessed the consequences when they visited him: ‘He looked like a little pink pig dressed up in a blazer, navy raincoat and peaked cap. All he would say in answer to any question was, “I suppose so,” in a little voice from the back of his throat with his head bowed.’ Upon being assured that he would not have to stay at the school ‘he burst into sobs and tears of relief’.

Ben pined for his mother when he was dumped at boarding school or banished to his father’s new family. Being a loving and faithful son, he insists that he enjoyed a ‘really happy childhood’, but he does acknowledge his stepfather’s hold over his mother at the expense of her sons: ‘One thing that wasn’t perfect was that Malcolm was her number one.’ Vivienne’s obsessive love for McLaren, and his disregard for the children, must have felt extremely excluding for the boys. Was Vivienne mirroring her own parents’ excluding love, which drove her to early independence?

Though careless of Vivienne’s love, McLaren was possessive of her attention. If he came home late at night and found her sleeping in their bed cuddled up to Joseph, he would fly into a rage and kick the boy into his own bunk. Perhaps as a result of the ten years he slept alongside Grandmother Rose, overt familial affection disturbed him.

Vivienne was gradually, under McLaren’s influence, adopting the garb of a street-smart Londoner. Indulging his fetish for fashion, he took her down the King’s Road to dress up, tutoring her with his mantra ‘the beauty of fearlessness’: ‘Once she had got that, her whole critique and sense of doing things fed through to her clothes.’ The rock ’n’ roll fashions of her youth that she had worn while with Derek were replaced by parodic retro-chic versions, in tune with the teds’ revival.

By the late sixties, hippies dominated the London scene. Fashion had gone limp. Backbones were out. When Ossie Clark scissored Celia Birtwell’s flower-strewn chiffons and voiles on the bias and lowered the hem two feet in 1967, wispy, whimsical ‘period’ dress ousted the strict, short look that had epitomised the energy of Swinging London. Fashion’s look moved anatomically south, down the leg from the upper thigh to the lower calf, and geographically west, along the King’s Road, from the optimistic, coltish modernism found at Glass & Black, Mary Quant and John Bates to the mawkish and nostalgic tatters of Granny Takes a Trip, opened by Nigel Weymouth in 1966, and Michael Rainey’s Hung on You. The name ‘Granny Takes a Trip’ alluded both to the use of hallucinogenic drugs and to the vintage costume favoured by Weymouth’s aristocratic, art school and music-business customers. Over the next two years an assortment of hippie and pop art boutiques, such as Tommy Roberts’s Kleptomania and Mr Freedom, and John Lloyd’s Alkasura, either moved to or started up in the World’s End vicinity of the King’s Road (the apocalyptic name derived from a local pub).

Dressed in widows’ weeds and under the influence of psychedelic drugs, there was an aura among those in the forefront of youth culture of languor and indolence. But after the high-water mark of idealism reached in the ‘Summer of Love’ in 1967, disillusionment characterised the end of the sixties. The Vietnam protest movement appeared to have little tangible impact on international politics, de Gaulle had crushed the student riots in Paris, confirming his right-wing regime with a landslide election victory in June 1968, while in Northern Ireland the Civil Rights movement polarised the Province into violent confrontation.

In Britain, Harold Wilson’s boom years gave way to devaluation in November 1967. 1970 brought back a Conservative government, and unemployment rose steadily, reaching a (then) post-war peak of 967,000 in the first quarter of 1972. In October 1973 the oil price soared as a result of the Yom Kippur war between Egypt and Israel. An economic malady which the Keynesians had not envisaged, stagflation, ensued. In February 1974 the coalminers demanded a 30 per cent pay increase in the average wage, and went on strike.

Wildcat strikes culminated in the three-day week and an entrenchment of class issues the like of which had not been witnessed in Britain since the General Strike of 1926. The situation was summed up by Brendon Sewill, a senior adviser to the government and special assistant to Anthony Barber, the Chancellor of the Exchequer: ‘At the time many of those in positions of influence looked into the abyss and saw only a few days away the possibility of the country being plunged into a state of chaos not so far removed from that which might prevail after a minor nuclear attack. If that sounds melodramatic I need only say that – with the prospect of a breakdown of power supplies, sewerage, communications, effective government and law and order – it was the analogy that was being used at the time.’

Drug-taking youth substituted mind-numbing opiates for the energy-inducing amphetamines they had favoured in the early sixties, heedless of the fact that a number of their pop icons – Brian Jones, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin – had died, or soon would, as a result of substance abuse. The energetic optimism of the earlier years of the decade gave way to hapless introspection at its close. Mary Hopkin had a hit with the wistful ‘Those Were the Days’ in the summer of 1967, reflecting the nostalgia for a better time.

Disillusion bred licence. The law’s gradual slackening of its harsh grip on ‘acceptable behaviour’ reflected, and to some degree fostered, increasing permissiveness. 1960 saw the end of the ban on D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Lawrence’s biographer Brenda Maddox describes the symbolic impact of the trial: ‘the verdict … virtually abolished literary censorship in Britain … There are those who consider that the circulation of a low-priced edition of Constance Chatterley’s discovery of the joys of warm-hearted fucking, to the accompaniment of her gamekeeper’s lavish praise for her cunt and arse, launched the permissive sixties all by itself.’

The liberalising process had started gathering steam in the late fifties. In 1959, the ground-breaking Obscene Publications Act ended the Lord Chamberlain’s centuries-old role as theatrical censor. In 1967 homosexuality between consenting adults was legalised, and in April 1968 the Abortion Act was passed, allowing women to terminate pregnancies legally. By 1969 the female contraceptive pill was widely available. Family break-up was facilitated by the 1969 Divorce Law, making it possible to divorce after two years’ separation if both parties were in agreement, five years’ if they were not. The following year, the Misuse of Drugs Act was passed. For the first time, premarital and homosexual sex, recreational drugs and family breakdown were openly discussed.

‘Retro-chic’ appropriately clothed youth’s ennui. Originating in New York as ‘vintage chic’ in the mid-sixties, the term – applied to fashion and films – was coined in France in the early seventies. Retro-chic is Janus-faced: it looks back to the past while keeping a keen eye on today. Retro-chic defied fashion’s traditional direction of influence: coming up from the streets and art colleges, rather than down from designers and mass retailers. It took root in disenchantment with commercial fashion, providing a cheap (second-hand), egalitarian alternative. To pull it off required time – foraging in attics or thrift shops – not money, and time was what the young had in abundance.

Style leaders like Catherine Tennant, a fashion editor at British Vogue, escaped from the present into an idealised past, ransacking their grandparents’ trunks for Cavalier plumed hats and capes and colourful old army uniforms. The impecunious scoured junk shops and markets such as Portobello Road and Petticoat Lane. Anna Piaggi of Condé Nast, Italy, and her companion Vernon Lambert were amongst the first stylists to reject the shoddily produced neophilia of sixties fashion in favour of the antique. They relished the quality and craftsmanship found in Victorian cut and panne velvets, Edwardian plumes, thirties bias-cut crêpes de chine, forties furs, and the affordable trinkets of bygone, and apparently better, days. The practice of dressing up in a cocktail of styles and periods spread throughout the youth of the West. By the early seventies, even mainstream designers were showing collections inspired by period costume, such as Yves Saint Laurent’s turbaned and shoulder-padded forties molls of 1970, and Thea Porter’s tiered chiffon maxi-dresses inspired by Visconti’s 1971 film Death in Venice.

McLaren and Vivienne, though, had no truck with either the farrago of costumes – second-hand or new – or the philosophical tolerance and relativism of the hippie era. They adopted a form of sectarian dress, the uniform of the teddy boy revival, to distinguish themselves from the hippie creed and to reflect their passion for fifties rock ’n’ roll.

The couple’s affiliations were doggedly reactionary, not progressive. Allying themselves to the teddy boys, they became customers of Tommy Roberts’s Mr Freedom, where they found teddy boy draped jackets, drainpipes, bootlace ties, ram’s head belts, ‘brothel-creeper’ lace-up shoes, circle skirts and cardigans. Unlike the originals cut in soberly smart Edwardian blacks and greys, mimicking their wearers’ social superiors’ City gent status, these modern impostors were scissored out of vermilion, neon-violet and beacon-orange gabardines and velvets. Yet despite the recolouring into Pop Art’s garish hues, they were still charged with the cocky defiance of the fifties: defiance against the restoration of the rigidities of inter-war privilege, against the ineluctably rising tide of American popular culture, and against racial and sexual inequality. Above all, they were indisputably British, working-class and proudly conservative in their sharp, tailored aggression. Set against the prevailing hippie values of inclusive – and, to Vivienne and McLaren, undiscriminating – internationalism, classlessness and tolerance (even this last was not as all-embracing as it seemed), they symbolised a romantic, nostalgic and selective tribalism. Their very tailored construction suggested macho, disciplined control, in contrast to the unkempt, unisex and uniclass hippie garb.

Tommy Roberts was one of the most lovable characters of the British fashion scene. This tough, plain-speaking Cockney was – unlike many of the other boutique owners – without affectation. He was there to trade, not to pontificate on possible utopias. As short as a jockey and as wide as a Sumo wrestler, Roberts led fashion into its first flirtations with retro-chic. Parody distinguished his manner, his humour and his creations. Lined up in his shop were the ephemera of fifties rock ’n’ roll, the kitsch excesses of thirties Hollywood and the gleefully simple images of Pop Art and American comic-strips.

Among Vivienne’s outfits from Mr Freedom were a lurid green dress printed with Pop Art silver stars, which clung to her lithe body from throat to ankle, and a hooped jitterbugger’s skirt. Moving along the King’s Road to Terry de Havilland, the rock star’s cobbler, she bought four-inch-heeled snakeskin sandals and, from Jane & Jane (Jean Muir’s first enterprise), a hot-tomato-red jersey baby-doll dress. Taking her cue from Mr Freedom, she would find cheap fabrics in unusually bright colours, such as neon orange and shocking pink, and transform them into teddy-girl circle or pencil skirts and rib-hugging blouses worn with bobbysocks and stilettos. ‘She was like a bright peacock, a walking traffic light, though she never thought of herself as beautiful,’ said McLaren.

Vivienne’s love of drawing attention to herself through dress, which had emerged in her adolescence, was emboldened by McLaren. Cocking a snook at contemporary hippie style, their clothes became more overtly allied to the fifties roots of rock ’n’ roll. Vivienne’s last vestige of provincial conformity was eliminated in 1971 when she had her hair dramatically cut. Persuaded by McLaren to go to the fashionable Mayfair salon Leonard, at twenty-nine years of age she relinquished her long hair, convinced by her lover that having it cropped would look more sexy, cool and urban. She then peroxided it herself, and razored it into layered fronds down the back of her neck and uneven short spikes which stood erect with hair gel on her crown. Vivienne claimed that she was the first to create the spiky, peroxide-dyed hairstyle, bristling with aggression and artifice, that was to become the hallmark of the punks. Simon Barker believes that David Bowie and his wife Angie copied it: ‘I’m sure they got it from Vivienne. Bowie has always been a style thief and she had that look in early 1971 before Ziggy Stardust came out. Can you imagine what the hairdressers must have thought? Kids cutting their own hair – brilliant! They {the hairdressers} did do what they called a “coup sauvage” after that, bringing it back into the fold and adapting it like that – otherwise they’d have been out of business.’ In the space of four years, the provincial aspirant in well-turned-out clothes had evolved into a modish city-dweller in hard cult fashion. The transformation of the girl from the Snake Pass was complete.

Though McLaren had scoffed at Vivienne’s rural upbringing for so long, it was the display of her ‘country heart’, and not her change of clothes, that drew him closer to her. On occasions he would join her, the two boys and the mostly Afro-Caribbean children from the Brixton primary school where she taught on jaunts into the home counties. The countryside was alien to this urban boy, but he accompanied them on their train trips to the green fields and woodlands of Kent. His relationship with Vivienne deepened during the delightful and uncomplicated hours of these idyllic afternoons – she trying to recapture her childhood, he hoping to experience something always longed for.

Gathered round a campfire in a field, the two adults would tell magic tales for the children. Leaping through the long grass like a demonic wizard, McLaren warned his spellbound audience that if they did not keep the fire burning the snakes – poisonous, of course – would attack. He was a mesmerising performer. His oratory could provoke mayhem as he built up the children’s natural restlessness, with his flaying arms and fire-bright eyes, into a conflagration of mischievous adventure. Here was an adult who thought like a naughty child. It was a trait he would trade on for many years. Both he and Vivienne would tap into memories of this wild-child Arcadia to create their fashions in the early eighties.

In between her lover’s performances, Vivienne enthused the children with her knowledge of flora and fauna. For once, she could be teacher rather than pupil to her lover, guiding him through the natural world and bolstering her feeling of self-worth. ‘I was a real rascal with these black kids,’ McLaren remembered, ‘and Vivienne was in charge of us all. I felt like a child in the childhood that I never had, and that made me care a lot for Vivienne because I felt safe and secure with her.’

Vivienne was deeply and irretrievably in love, but McLaren was emotionally incapable of applying the word ‘love’ to their relationship, spuriously arguing that ‘it was bigger than love’. Though he acknowledged his ‘responsibility to the child’ (making no reference to Ben), he claimed he was still searching for ‘an ideal love’, and kept his heart closed and his options open: ‘Vivienne, as all women are, was calmer and more collected in her thinking, and hoped that a formula would lay out rules, but we were finding our way and I was a more lonely character; a lot more lost and immature and more driven.’ Unlike Vivienne, who relished the chance to disappear into her own world as she crafted her clothes, McLaren feared solitude. But he was not content to settle down to family life, and still sought excitement through ‘the chance encounter’.

In the summer of 1971, aged twenty-five, McLaren finally ended his student days by graduating from Goldsmith’s, and promptly plunged into a depression. Was it time to grow up? What should he do? In tune with his mood, he painted the hall and floor of their flat black. He became obsessed by the perfection of this floor, and if it was not spotlessly clean when he came home to the flat at night, he would turn on Vivienne. The couple had to make ends meet, but at this stage they had no ambition to enter mainstream fashion. Music was his passion – perhaps he could make a living from it, starting out by setting up a stall and selling his collection of old forty-fives and rock ’n’ roll ephemera. And shopkeeping, of course, was in Vivienne’s blood. From the age of thirteen until she left home she had lived above her parents’ shops.

Sharing Vivienne’s knee-jerk aversion to received opinion, McLaren was determined to proselytise the purity and energy of rock ’n’ roll’s roots. He despised the hugely successful ‘super groups’ like Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Yes, Pink Floyd and others, that had emerged in the late sixties. Rock was now big business, and these bands, performing to vast audiences in enormous stadiums, shared neither the lifestyles nor the aspirations of their fans.

Claiming that his wares constituted an ‘art statement’, as well as a political indictment of the super groups and the glitzy dandyism of glam rockers such as Bowie and Roxy Music, McLaren, a quintessential trader in his winklepickers, posed as a square-toed evangelist, zealously preaching his creed. Since the name Edwards was sullied with a criminal record (he had been caught shoplifting a roll of linoleum, and been arrested for burning the Greek flag at a demonstration), Malcolm changed his name by deed poll back to that of his father, McLaren. In October 1971, wearing his new name, a teddy boy jacket and distinctive lurex-threaded drape trousers which Vivienne had run up for him, he stepped out down the King’s Road, in search of a chance encounter that would determine his future.