Vivienne Westwood: An Unfashionable Life. Jane Mulvagh
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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.’
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