‘They had the t-shirt off his back’: The 40th anniversary of the creation of the notorious Cowboys t-shirt + the obscenity debate it sparked in the pages of The Guardian
//Nicholas de Jongh’s front-page report, The Guardian, August 2, 1975//
//Sex Original-labelled Cowboys t-shirt courtesy Hiroshi Fujiwara Collection//
This month – specifically July 26 – marks the 40th anniversary of the introduction for sale of Malcolm McLaren’s notorious Cowboys t-shirt in Sex, the revolutionary boutique he operated at 430 King’s Road with Vivienne Westwood.
The shirt’s status as the most provocative of all punk designs is enhanced by the fact that it made waves immediately: the same day the shirt went on sale, the first customer to wear it in public was arrested. Within 24 hours, the store itself was raided for indecency.
Alan Jones, an openly gay member of the Sex shop coterie who ran the bar at the sleazy Portobello Hotel, bought a Cowboys top fresh off the racks (along with another controversial design, Cambridge Rapist) on July 26 and changed into it before setting off on foot to central London. Walking along Piccadilly he was stopped by a couple of policemen.
The thoroughfare was at that stage the locus of social tensions over its rent-boy population; just a few days earlier, on July 22, the UK national broadcast network ITV had shown Johnny Go Home, a documentary about sexual predators and teenage – mainly male – runaways. This had caused a nationwide moral panic and thrown the spotlight on the Dilly Boys’ trade.
It was in this atmosphere that the policemen decided that the brazenly worn Cowboys shirt (Jones had not noticed the consternation it was causing) was too much; they took him into custody and charged Jones with “showing an obscene print in a public place” under the archaic Vagrancy Act of 1824 .
//News story on MP Phipps’ protests about the arrests, The Guardian, August 5, 1975//
The exchanges between Jones and the arresting officers – as reported by Nicholas de Jongh – are worthy of Joe Orton (one of McLaren’s heroes):
Mr Jones says the tee-shirt was then taken from him “and it was a big laugh for all the police officers. Then one of them said, ‘It’s a very nice tee-shirt but the reason you are wearing it is that you’re sexually inadequate’.”
Mr Jones says that he was asked when he had last seen his parents and told them two weeks ago.
The following day – July 27 – 430 King’s Road was raided and 18 Cowboys shirts were seized. Indecency charges were levelled at McLaren and the affair became a free speech cause célèbre in the pages of national newspaper The Guardian when Labour MP Colin Phipps called on Home Secretary Roy Jenkins to review the outmoded law.
“It would appear to me to be more logical for a prosecutor to have to demonstrate a specific public hurt in matters of taste rather than being able to rely on antique laws,” Phipps wrote to Jenkins.
Despite the outcry, Jones was fined. McLaren was arraigned to appear in court on August 18, 1975, and was also later fined.
The response from the authorities to the Cowboys design was satisfying, McLaren later told me. The theme of the shirt, with its dialogue conveying boredom and apathy (“It’s all played aht”), was one of McLaren’s responses to the mid-70s cultural low into which Britain had sunk; the police reaction at least promised the engagement with the authorities he was hell-bent on provoking.
All in all this was a momentous period for McLaren and, as it turned out, music and the wider culture.
At the end of the week of his first arraignment over the Cowboys charge, the Sex Pistols line-up was completed when McLaren, Sex sales assistant Glen Matlock and two customers, Steve Jones and Paul Cook, were introduced for the first time to John Lydon in the main bar of The Roebuck pub in King’s Road.
I know, because I was there. I swear. Read a piece I wrote some time ago about that night here (please note the reference in this piece to “Philip” is an error; the person I was referring to was the model David “Piggy” Worth).
There has been some conjecture as to whether the meeting with Lydon was on August 23. Here‘s why I have a feeling it was a couple of days earlier.
I wrote about the roots of the Cowboys design here, showing how McLaren appropriated Jim French’s 1969 illustration to make a fresh artistic statement.
Having been the London Evening Standard’s long-standing theatre critic, Nicholas de Jongh is a writer and dramatist. Here‘s a review of his 2014 play The Unquiet Grave Of Garcia Lorca.
Alan Jones is a film critic specialising in horror movies. He talks about McLaren here:
Much amended, the Vagrancy Act 1824 remains in part today; section 4 is apparently used against so-called rough sleepers. See here.