Читать книгу Vivienne Westwood: An Unfashionable Life - Jane Mulvagh - Страница 12

May 1975–1978

‘Successful demonstrations are not necessarily those which mobilise the greatest number of people, but those which attract the greatest interest among journalists. Exaggerating only slightly, one may say that fifty clever folk who can make a successful “happening” get five minutes on TV, can make as much political effect as half a million demonstrators.’

Pierre Bourdieu

‘When music moves from the music section to the front page of the newspaper, you’re in trouble.’

Danny Fields

‘Punk is like squeezing spots.’

Jamie Reid to Celia Lyttelton, 1986

Punk is a state of mind, and was a fashion. It had the greatest impact on Western popular culture – from music to fashion, from graphic design to politics – of any youth movement since the hippies in the 1960s. Yet the hard-core of the cult lasted a mere thirty months, from the summer of 1975 to January 1978, and was centred in London on, at most, two hundred teenagers. It was led by a handful of agents provocateurs in their late twenties and was spawned in a small, highly stylised shop in West London. Nevertheless, its reverberations continue today beyond Britain’s shores. Culling imagery and slogans from many cultures and epochs, it was post-modernist in its irony and fusion of disparate styles, and unmistakably English.

While the roots and impact of punk have excited much debate, it was a handful of exceptional individuals who made the movement so influential, idiosyncratic and seductive. And those individuals were all English. In its essential Englishness, punk was continuing a phenomenon seen in the 1950s with skiffle, and in the pop music of the mid-sixties (and perhaps in the 1990s in the worldwide success of ‘Britpop’). Colin MacInnes, in his essay ‘Pop Songs and Teenagers’, identified this Englishness:

The paradox is that the bearded skiffle singers with their Yankee ballads, and Tommy Steele and his ‘rock’-style songs, seem so resoundingly, so irreversibly English. I don’t at all deny an {American} influence (which, incidentally, has been going on ever since ragtime hit this country before World War I). But the kids have transformed this influence into something of their own … in a way that suggests, subtly, that they’re almost amused by what has influenced them. Put an English teenager beside an American, and you’ll see the difference: our vision is less streamlined, less pattern-perfect and more knobbly, homely, self-possessed.

Competing claims – of nation and class – have bedevilled the debate over punk’s origins. ‘Punk’, the word, and ‘proto-punk’, the style, originated in New York, becoming common currency there when three high-school friends, Legs McNeil, John Holstrum and Ged Dun, set up a magazine called Punk in 1975. Its contents reflected their own interests: ‘television reruns, drinking beer, getting laid, cheeseburgers, comics, grade-B movies, and this weird rock ’n’ roll that nobody but us seemed to like: the Velvets, the Stooges, the New York Dolls …’

Those who argue that the movement originated in America cite garage bands and the performers at CBGBs in New York, particularly Richard Hell, the New York Dolls and Tom Verlaine, as the proto-punks. The first, small, British punk coterie – the Sex Pistols and half a dozen rival bands, their earliest fans, the ‘Bromley Contingent’ (christened by Caroline Coon of the Melody Maker) and their hangers-on – claimed that the movement was a peculiarly British, specifically London, phenomenon, and jingoistically downplay any transatlantic influence. Jordan, the female icon at the heart of the movement, insists that ‘punk could only have happened in England. I’m a great fan of the British people. I think we’re the forerunner in all things that are avant-garde in art and, in particular, fashion.’ This blunt chauvinism lay at the roots of the movement’s appeal, in much the same way that skinheads had drawn upon the emotional lure of ‘I’m Backing Britain’ in the 1960s. (The country in which punk has retained its strongest following in the 1990s is Germany, where some are still seduced by its most extreme aggressive, anti-liberal yobbishness.)

With the help of his London followers McLaren developed the American inspiration into a British phenomenon, while acknowledging the significance of Richard Hell: ‘Here was a guy looking like he’d just grown out of a drain hole … covered in slime … no one gave a fuck about him. And looking like he’d didn’t really give a fuck about you! He was this wonderful, bored, drained, scarred, dirty guy with a torn T-shirt. And this look of this spiky hair, everything about it – there was no question that I’d take it back to London. I was going to transform it into something more English.’ The Atlantic crossing transformed the nature of punk: even the title of one of Hell’s songs, ‘The Blank Generation’, metamorphosed into something more violent and dangerous. Whereas Hell used ‘blank’ to mean merely nameless, the British music press came to interpret it as vacant, or void.

Within Britain, working-class fans underestimated the role played in the movement by its middle-class, art-school leaders; while the largely middle-class commentators who have picked over the bones of punk in their writings have lent it a misplaced grandeur, over-intellectualising the raw, hormone-driven, adolescent instincts to shock one’s elders, exclude outsiders, get drunk, get laid and have fun. They have placed too much emphasis on McLaren’s half-baked situationist didactics, retrospectively according the movement an inflated political importance, and thereby flattering the pop Svengali’s conceit. Johnny Rotten made the point bluntly: ‘All that talk about the French situationists being associated with punk is bollocks!’ But while McLaren had only a limited understanding of the situationists’ philosophy (he could not read French), what he did grasp was the movement’s visual imagery.

Compared with their French counterparts, British youth was not attracted to philosophising in cafés. In the sixties, while young Americans protested against the Vietnam war, and the French conflated philosophy and trade union demands to create les évenements, the British only tinkered with protest. This absence of intensity meant that punk never acquired real political significance, though many hoped it would. Boy George felt that ‘it became political and all the things it was never meant to be. It was popular to pontificate about anarchy or socialism. All it was about in the beginning was dressing up and looking ridiculous and having fun.’ Keith Wainwright, hairdresser to the Bowies, Toyah Willcox and Vivienne, whose salon stood two doors down from punk’s shrine at 430 King’s Road, also remembered punk as ‘Fun. It was youth, it was dressing up,’ while Sebastian Conran, the art student who promoted the Sex Pistols’ chief rivals, The Clash, was adamant that ‘it was totally style- not politics-driven.’ How could a cult based on political protest ever appeal to the young? ‘To talk about depression, the way politicians do, is not a good idea,’ says Jordan. ‘It doesn’t sell! And Vivienne and Malcolm wanted to sell … Punk wasn’t political, it was just mayhem.’ Those closest to punk’s core were convinced that fun was their motivation, whatever the later tragic outcome.

The essential difference between the proto-punks of New York and the London punks was intellectual posturing. New York’s poetic poseurs, such as Patti Smith, Richard Hell and Tom Verlaine, were typically in their mid-twenties, middle class and educated. By contrast, the British punks – mindless of aesthetics, literary references or political prescriptions – were primitive, instinctive and self-destructive rather than self-aggrandising and cerebral. They were also far more aggressive.

One of the major traits of punk was to celebrate ‘working-classness’. And though it was the lower-middle-class denizens of the outer London suburbs – rather than solid working class – who constituted its core, it attracted individuals from all social strata. What held them together was a common sense of boredom and frustration. ‘It was a class mix,’ says punk’s chronicler Jon Savage. ‘You could come from a tower block or be the middle-class person who went to Cambridge … the whole point about punk is that it was a group of outcasts from whatever background, and that was the common bond.’ Many punks felt that they did not fit in, and ‘came together, all the mavericks, in camaraderie and recognition. It was to do with having an attitude and being human, not just part of the system.’ While some of the major players may have emerged from the educated middle class – McLaren, Jamie Reid, Glen Matlock, Sebastian Conran – without the raw talent of working-class kids like Johnny Rotten (né Lydon), Sid Vicious (né John Simon Ritchie, though he later changed his surname to his mother’s married name, Beverly) and Jordan, the look and the lyrics would not have been so compelling and potent.

Though McLaren and Westwood were at the helm, they did not mastermind – and could not have masterminded – the controversial, runaway success of the movement, or forecast the manner in which the media would respond so hysterically and persistently to their pranks. ‘That’s one of the great misconceptions, that Malcolm was a great manipulator,’ says Sex Pistols drummer Paul Cook. Despite McLaren’s retrospective claims in his 1979 film The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle that he planned and retained Machiavellian control of the whole phenomenon, he too was carried along by the tornado that he had unwittingly unleashed. Most of the scams with the Sex Pistols were accidental. He didn’t plan the ones that worked, and the ones that he did plan failed. But the movement was acutely aware of the media, performed in its spotlight, and in the end, for some of punk’s victims, it became their only reality.

The image of punk became so internationally familiar as to become an icon: as integral an image of London as the scarlet double-decker bus. Standard postcard images of the capital in the early 1980s included the official engagement picture of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer, the Houses of Parliament and a punk flicking a ‘V’ sign. The totemic markings of the look were savage self-mutilation, damaged and asexual clothing, a violent rejection of prettiness or naturalness, and a cacophony of clashing visual references, all wrenched from their familiar settings and fused into a shocking juxtaposition. The wearer was always young – ‘the members of the new British punk bands squirm if they have to tell you they are over eighteen,’ wrote Caroline Coon in Melody Maker.

Vivienne’s career was to be built on punk. ‘The clothes made the music seem more radical than it really was,’ believes rock critic Tony Parsons. In creating the Sex Pistols’ look – marketed under the label SEX and its successor, Seditionaries – she evolved in a few crucial months from a seamstress who copied past fashions and interpreted McLaren’s instructions into a designer. Although she still acted on McLaren’s directions, their professional relationship was now more equal. ‘Up until the Sex Pistols and punk rock I’d never thought of myself as a designer,’ she has said. ‘I just thought of myself as helping out Malcolm on his projects; doing research and things like that.’ At last her belief in her own creative abilities took root and began to flourish. She had identified her talent, and was determined to leave her mark on international fashion. In doing so, she found a way to bury the provincial girl from the Snake Pass.

Aside from Vivienne’s personal development, punk saw the birth of a powerful marketing partnership between music and fashion, sold by the same proprietor. Though the Beatles and Mary Quant emerged simultaneously in the 1960s, no one thought to market them in tandem. The Rolling Stones may have been dressed by Ossie Clark and Granny Takes a Trip, David Bowie by Freddie Burretti, Queen by Zandra Rhodes, and Bryan Ferry by Anthony Price, but no one promoted the clothes with the bands. McLaren brought the two markets together, exploiting the dual demands of youth for a ‘look’ modelled by their pop idols and a philosophy expressed in their music. ‘The Dolls had come into my shop’ – he never said ‘our’ shop – ‘several times in London,’ says McLaren, ‘and they were staggered by the store, because nobody in New York was selling rock ’n’ roll culture in the form of dress and music in one particular place.’

‘The clothes needed the groups,’ McLaren later explained to The Times. ‘When I went into the music business no one wanted to know about the fashion connection. Now it’s the biggest plus you can have. When a pop group signs up with a recording company today there’ll be a clause written into the contract that the group will have £1,000 a week to spend on clothes. The Sex Pistols got the ball rolling. As long as a group has the right look today, the music doesn’t matter too much.’

Emulating McLaren and Vivienne, the rival King’s Road boutique Boy dressed and funded the punk band Generation X, while McLaren’s friend Bernie Rhodes backed The Clash, who were dressed by Jasper Conran. In the wake of punk, Gianni Versace, for example, placed his products on the backs of pop stars like Elton John and Sting, while Jean-Paul Gaultier and later Dolce & Gabbana dressed Madonna. The major record labels and entertainment corporations began to merchandise music in tandem with the T-shirt, the cap, the video and the lifestyle.

The Sex Pistols were not only four youths pounding out a frenzied, adolescent attack on the status quo; they were also clothes dummies for McLaren and Vivienne’s shop. The lyrics of their hits – such as ‘Anarchy in the UK’ and ‘God Save the Queen’, written by Lydon in response to ideas fed to him by Vivienne and Jamie Reid – were printed across their chests, in a masterful stroke of saturation advertising and product placement. The clothes sold the records, and vice versa. Jordan says: ‘Malcolm had a great talent to see what he could make of people and to instil enough trust in them, like a very straight ordinary bloke, and dress them up. And it says a lot about {the band} that they put all their trust in Vivienne and Malcolm and let them dress them up.’

Vivienne retained her muddled socialist principles, now combined with McLaren’s anarchy. She admired the extremism of the IRA and the Red Brigade, going so far as to tell Nils Stevenson that she’d even understand if the IRA blew up her own children. She wanted to demonstrate that her commitment was so strong that her personal feelings were inconsequential. To McLaren, however, sloganising was simply a means of commodifying revolution: ‘Cash from Chaos’, ‘Destroy’, ‘Believe in the Ruins’.

For Vivienne and Malcolm, punk was both a continuation of their commercial exploitation of youth culture and a fusion of many previous post-war youth cults – rocker, teddy boy, mod, Rastafarian – into a Molotov cocktail of truculent protest. It was post-modern, borrowing symbols and clothing styles from other tribes to create its own collage, a formula Vivienne continued to use until the early 1990s. In this respect it was a reflection of the pluralism that had already killed the one season/one look of high fashion. ‘Punk,’ Vivienne explained, ‘was a great stand against authority … Where did all those things come from? They came from culture! … The motives for being anti-establishment were already in the culture … When Malcolm and I first started to do clothes before punk rock we were looking at our own lifetime culture and trying to express the rebelliousness while throwing out all the motives. Through our curiosity and research we created a cult of our own.’

In fact, none of the chief signifiers of punk originated from Westwood or McLaren. ‘Do-it-yourself’ was its clarion call. Drainpipe trousers and jeans were already being worn by those who wished to distance themselves from the hippie flares; the safety pin came from Johnny Rotten via Richard Hell, who also pioneered the shredded and ripped clothing; the ‘used’ tampon from Sid Vicious; the razor blades, bin-liners and bike or lavatory chain were introduced by punks on the street, as was the later Mohican cut; the dog-collar by Sharon Hayman of the Bromley Contingent; the elements of militaristic dress and the brazenly artificial make-up and hair by Jordan; the customised leather jacket (ideally from Lewis Leathers in Great Poland Street) was appropriated from the Hell’s Angels, and became associated with The Clash, not the Pistols, who preferred torn school blazers from charity shops like Oxfam.

Punk dress celebrated the sordid, the cruel, the inappropriate and the poor. If an item smacked of political bad taste (the swastika), sexual bad taste (the used tampon or condom) working-class shoddiness (the paka-mac), cheapness (the black bin-bag, popularised by club entrepreneur Philip Sallon), the macabre (kohl-bruised eyes, inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 film of A Clockwork Orange) or the morbid (the skinny black tie worn as a hangman’s noose), it was seized upon. In 1978 Vivienne told the punk magazine Search and Destroy: ‘Now that the death penalty has been abolished in England, everyone knows nothing that terrible will happen to them, so you can be as free as you like.’

The most articulate exponents of the punk style achieved a look that instantly communicated all the pain and anguish of the lost adolescent. Their sartorial obscenities celebrated their self-imposed exile from society. Though they did not conceive of it in such terms, their display was reminiscent of the storm scene in Shakespeare’s King Lear, in which Lear and the Fool, cast out into the tempest and shivering in their ‘looped and windowed raggedness’, reflect on the essential nature of man, necessity and luxury. The style’s strength lay in its visual embodiment of the unadorned human condition, stripped down to reveal the raw nerves of psychic pain. It was this recognition of suffering that punk unleashed which incited such extreme reactions in the viewer, because it drew attention either to the purposelessness that the young felt or to their ugly, up-yours attitude.

In the mid-1970s, Britain was suffering the worst economic recession since the thirties. Inflation reached 27 per cent in 1975. In 1976, to avoid devaluation, the government was humiliatingly forced to accept financial aid from the International Monetary Fund. Unemployment was climbing steadily, reaching a post-war high of 1.6 million in 1977. The country seemed ungovernable, and it was the uneducated young who bore the brunt of the necessary belt-tightening.

In contrast to their derided predecessors the hippies, who had enjoyed relative economic affluence, the punks cast themselves as figures from the real world of urban decay. They did not seek sanctuary in escapism, psychedelic drugs, utopian politics, rural Arcadias, communes, dreams of outer space, or idealistic liberalism and internationalism. Unemployed, depressed, poorly educated and feckless, how could the punks find solace in such abstract and impossible dreams, such luxuries? Instead they appropriated the rhetoric of crisis, ushering in a period of liberal-baiting, aggressive tribalism and apocalyptic anarchy. With no place to flee to, they stood their ground and fought, in a vague, unfocused manner, against the current system and conditions. But they did not know what they were fighting for, and so an inarticulate frustration combined with their demotic hedonism.

Outbursts of rioting at the Notting Hill Carnival of 1976, and in Lewisham, South London in 1977 and Ladywood revealed the bitterness of the prevailing inner-city strife. ‘In 1976 it all started falling apart really,’ remembers Michael Kostiff. ‘There had just been the three-day week, and the country was really going downhill. It wasn’t this children’s storybook country any more. It was no longer the Queen at the top and the judges, it was all very corrupt, and people started to see the corruption and to question the role of things … All those people who lived through the war have different views of life, so it was really quite shocking to put a safety pin through the Queen’s face.’

The source of punk’s vitriol was not only in the reaction to mid-seventies Britain, but also in the psychic damage inflicted during McLaren’s childhood, and in Vivienne’s overbearing bossiness and her hatred of the complacent establishment. Her emotional responses had a childish fervour to them. She was angry and opinionated without being informed – a dangerous mix. McLaren, on the other hand, was coldly amused, and just wanted to ‘dress up to mess up’, to take pranksterism to its most irresponsible extreme. The social conditions of contemporary Britain made it an ideal time for him to lead a cavalcade of disengaged, thrill-seeking teenagers, with stories of the romance of anarchy and the opportunities of do-it-yourself stardom or infamy.

Pied Piper McLaren could not play the pipe himself, so he needed someone else to lure his followers. He had realised in New York that because of their age, their chronic drug and alcohol abuse and their indifference to his political ranting, the New York Dolls could not be manipulated to his ends. Back in England, he set about constructing his own band.

Glen Matlock, an art student who worked as a Saturday assistant at SEX, introduced McLaren to Kutie Jones, a band which consisted of Paul Cook and Steve Jones, two working-class teenagers from a housing estate in Shepherd’s Bush who were regulars at the shop (Jones had thirteen convictions for theft). They could hardly play – a plus point as far as the anarchic McLaren was concerned – but they had the abusive raw potential that he required. He then cast around for a Richard Hell-like lead singer who would carry his message of trashy revolt with an ironic lack of professionalism. He was seeking a riposte, almost an antidote, to the big-stadium, capital-intensive super groups and their professional sound.

Matlock first encountered the street urchins John Lydon and John Beverly in the Roebuck pub near SEX in the late summer of 1975. Lydon, who hailed from a council estate in Islington, was nicknamed ‘Johnny Rotten’ by Steve Jones, who commented, ‘Your teeth are green. You’re rotten, you are.’ His clothes underscored his name. Rotten sported cropped hair, a defaced school blazer worn inside out, safety-pinned baggy trousers and open-toed plastic sandals (hence the original London name for punks, ‘plastic peculiars’). Matlock took McLaren to meet Rotten in the pub, and after some resistance an audition was staged in the shop, with Rotten mouthing to the jukebox. He was conscripted. According to Nils Stevenson, Vivienne had recommended a teenaged customer of the shop called ‘John’ to McLaren as a possible singer. McLaren had mistakenly assumed she meant Lydon; in fact she was referring to John Beverly, later to become Sid Vicious.

The original Sex Pistols consisted of Rotten, guitarist Wally Nightingale (replaced by Steve Jones for being too middle class and musically competent), drummer Paul Cook and Matlock on bass. When McLaren first heard a demo tape of their music in autumn 1975, he told Vivienne it was the worst he’d ever heard, ‘but it didn’t matter. What mattered is that they were so good at being bad.’ Every member of the band’s final line-up (Sid Vicious, the ultimate Sex Pistol, replaced Matlock in March 1977) contributed to the total image: ‘Jones was the lovable Cockney. John was not lovable but had real charisma – much more on stage than off, he came alight on stage. Sid: I loved him, didn’t let anything bother him. He never carried troubles on his shoulders. He was happy-go-lucky. He wasn’t as worldly as Steve or Paul. Everyone liked Sid,’ Jordan recalled.

The relationship between Vivienne and McLaren had been strained for some time, and it became worse as McLaren’s public life became increasingly frantic and he devoted more time to the band and less to the shop, Vivienne and the children. Steve Jones lived with the couple briefly, and Paul Cook remembers him remarking on how often Vivienne used to ‘bollock Malcolm – she was quite violent’. Nils Stevenson says: ‘Vivienne was obviously very tempestuous with Malcolm, and would boast that she’d given him a big slap over something the night before. And she’d lock him in the cupboard. But Malcolm loved that reputation. He got a kick out of it.’

Nevertheless, following a series of rows, in October 1975 Malcolm moved out of Nightingale Lane and into a flat in Bell Street, Marylebone, with Helen Wellington-Lloyd, who had recently returned from South Africa and suggested they share, on condition that he paid his share of the rent and the telephone bill – he lived on the phone. He intended to use Bell Street as an office as well as a home, and for Helen to be his secretary. During his time at the flat, Helen recalls, McLaren ‘blanked Vivienne. He didn’t want her on his parade with the band. He wouldn’t go down to Nightingale Lane for weeks on end.’ In retaliation, Vivienne refused to give him any of the shop’s takings. Lying alone in their double bed at night, Vivienne’s jealousy of women and her resolve to succeed professionally intensified.

McLaren moved back and forth at his convenience, usually spending the weekends with Vivienne, but they never really seemed to be a couple. ‘At the time you really thought that she and Malcolm were very separate people,’ says Steve Jones, ‘and to the outside crowd one didn’t feel that he had anything to do with the shop because of what he was doing with the Sex Pistols, which as far as press and media was concerned was much more important. The crossover was the T-shirts, and he was involved there.’ McLaren was able to cultivate the impression that not only the band, but also the clothing was his creation.

Vivienne and Jordan were allocated the task of ‘grooming’ the band and dressing them in clothes from the shop; a hard task, as each of them wanted to look different. ‘The band did a bit of input in the style,’ says Jordan. ‘They got into it, and it was all done with feeling. And as they didn’t have to pay {for the clothes}, they could mutilate them.’ (They were unaware that the cost was deducted from their royalties by McLaren.)

McLaren persuaded the band to write lyrics that promoted SEX, and later Seditionaries, with titles such as ‘Submission’, and soon they had a full repertoire of songs and he was ready to launch them. The first public venue, on 5 November 1975, was St Martin’s College of Art in central London. Cook, dressed in a ted jacket and drainpipe jeans, and Matlock in ted jacket and scarlet jeans with see-through plastic pockets on the bum from SEX, approached Sebastian Conran, treasurer of the union at the Central School of Art and Design, to give them a gig at the college. He booked them to support Brentford and the Nylons. A few days later Simon Barker, then a student in Bromley, South London, chanced upon the band playing at Ravensbourne Art College, his local art school. He was mesmerised, and told his friends that this was what they were looking for, a group of their own age that vocalised their dissatisfaction and boredom.

Within a month the band had a loyal following, centred on this Bromley Contingent, which comprised Barker, Siouxsie Sioux (née Susan Ballion) of Siouxsie and the Banshees, Billy Idol (William Broad), Steve Severin (Bailey), Sue Catwoman (Lucas), Little Debs (Debbie Wilson) and Juvenile (Tracey O’Keefe). These visually articulate suburban teenagers, some still at school, others unemployed, were the first hard-core punk fans, liberated by the movement’s do-it-yourself ethos. In their dress, wrote Peter York, they were ‘works of art – originals’, and many of them went on to become performers.

The Bromley Contingent shared a highly developed knowledge of pop culture and style references. Their rock idols had been David Bowie and Bryan Ferry, but once their heroes started dressing more conventionally – Bowie in black trousers and white shirt, Ferry in a tuxedo – they no longer admired them. The rock establishment was becoming richer, older and less accessible, while the plight of the British teenager became poorer and more hopeless. The fans could no longer relate to the stars’ gilded lifestyles and expensive dandyism. Hard-nosed confrontation and defiance, not limp foppishness and remote professionalism, were what set the young’s adrenaline pumping. Punks were as ironic and self-aware as the glam rock stars, but they found parody in poverty and malnourishment, as a means of condemning their lot within a declining Britain, and as a badge of group identity. To express their common bond they started to make and customise their own clothes, buying for example tight old jumpers from charity shops and striping them with household paint.

‘Don’t dream it, be it!’, originally a line from The Rocky Horror Show, was a rallying cry of punk. It was a reaction to the professionalism that had rinsed rock ’n’ roll of its hard-edged youthful appeal, and it was urged by Vivienne in particular, and taken up by punk followers and the punk magazines. Danny Baker’s Sniffin’ Glue, for example, published simple instructions and diagrams on how to play two chords, and encouraged readers to go away and form a band. Similarly, Vivienne was delighted if young fans who could not afford her wares went off and copied them.

One of the first venues to host the Sex Pistols, in February 1976, was a massive Thames-side studio rented by the artist Andrew Logan in Butler’s Wharf, just across the river from the City. McLaren had learnt that Logan was planning a St Valentine’s night party. Logan remembers McLaren ringing him and saying: ‘Ooh, Andrew, I’ve got this group, these boys, they’ll be bigger than the Beatles. Do you want the boys to play at the party?’ Without asking Logan, McLaren phoned up the whole of London and invited them. ‘There were hundreds of people, falling over my sculptures and smashing them. It was a nightmare.’