Let It Rock was digging in the ruins of past cultures that you cared about. It was giving them another brief moment in the sun. It wasn’t about doing anything new. It was an homage. It was nostalgia.
Malcolm McLaren to Momus, 2002

Forty three years after its creation I can reveal the source of the Jerry Lee Lewis image which appeared on the Let It Rock t-shirt design “The ‘Killer’ Rocks On!”.

It is from a lobby card for Alan Freed’s 1958 rocksploitation flick High Street Confidential!; an original was just one of the pieces of 50s ephemera adorning Let It Rock’s premises at 430 King’s Road in 1972.

The design was produced by Malcolm McLaren in 1972 as part of a small range of shirts celebrating the American greats headlining that summer’s London Rock & Roll Show at Wembley Stadium (where he booked stalls for Let It Rock to sell its wares).

The others were titled “Rock ‘N’ Roll Lives” (featuring Chuck Berry) and “Vive le Rock!” (featuring Little Richard). Yet another was produced in green glitter on black for British horror-rocker Screaming Lord Sutch, who also performed at Wembley.

The movie lobby card – usually there were eight which showed individual stars and were posted in cinema foyers during the week of release –  featuring Jerry Lee was among those which McLaren used to dress the interior of 430 King’s Road to form a black-and-white backdrop for the recently introduced range of glitter-lettered tops.

Meanwhile, among of the selection of original movie posters for sale in the shop was one for Jeunesse Droguée (the Belgian release of High School Confidential!).

For the Jerry Lee shirt, McLaren drew on the graphic skills and understanding of photographic placement learned at art schools he attended in the 60s.

First he isolated the central image of Lewis hollering into the mike at the piano and tilted it. This dynamised the image and slotted it into the exuberant lettering applied to the phrase “The ‘Killer’ Rocks On!” (the exciting title of a staidly packaged 1972 Lewis LP release).

At this point Malcolm McLaren was making his first steps into fashion design by reconditioning found material from the collection of rock and roll ephemera he had amassed with original Let It Rock partner Patrick Casey.

Foreign language film posters, record sleeves, promotional stills, lobby cards, theatrical half-sheets (also used for display in cinema foyers), all were up for grabs as McLaren scavenged what he described as “the ruins” and meshed them into fresh composites which explored the links between untamed rock & rollers and the trouble-making political movements which had bewitched him in the late 60s.

//Poster details: The image of Lewis was repeated as a motif in the High School Confidential! promotional material when the movie was released in 1958//

This was in line with the Situationist technique of détournement, where new work is produced by the juxtaposition of pre-existing (and often mundane) elements.

And “ruins” was an important word for McLaren, since it plugged into the legacy of one of his literary heroes, the German philosopher Walter Benjamin, who believed that a coherent view of culture emerges from the accumulation and arrangement of fragments and detritus.

Benjamin’s political commitment – as explained here – led him to “focus on the everyday, the ‘refuse’ of a rapidly expanding mass culture, which was tied to industrialism. He often focused on the discarded fashions, seeing them as an emblem of an acceleration of everyday experience associated with industrial capitalism”.

This influence is important when considering the design practice McLaren conducted with Vivienne Westwood for a decade after it was formalised in October 1973, since it was primarily characterised by the combination of unusual and surprising elements and approaches to propose a series of social critiques.

It is also useful in appreciating the consistency of McLaren’s output from the early 70s to his premature death in 2010. McLaren’s final works, the films Shallow 1-21 and Paris, Capital Of The XXIst Century (itself a reference to Benjamin’s essay Paris, Capital Of The 19th Century) and the soundscape for Dries van Noten’s A/W 10 Paris show, were all constructed out of “found” and successfully compacted material.

And one of the unfinished projects McLaren left behind was  a 13-part BBC Radio Two series exploring his take on pop culture entitled – what else? – “The Ruins”.

The ‘Killer’ Rocks On design was itself subjected to détournement, first in 1973 when it was one of the Let It Rock rock & roll tribute designs which were reworked and adapted to make manifest a disregard for the 50s nostalgia and sentimentality expressed by McLaren and Westwood when 430 King’s Road was recast as rocker outlet Too Fast To Live Too Young To Die.

Then, like unsold Vive Le Rock! shirts, The ‘Killer’ tops were converted into pairs of knickers to which lace frills were attached.

And in 1978, when 430 was operating as Seditionaries, The ‘Killer’ Rocks On! design appeared on the back of the shirt Vive Le Rock/Punk Rock Disco, which combined this and other pieces of 50s ephemera with Anarchist and Situationist sloganeering and incendiary-making instructions.

This is Jerry Lee performing the title track in the opening scene of High Street Confidential!:

Coming soon; extracts from fashion graduate Imogen Hunt’s paper on some of the source material McLaren poured into Vive Le Rock/Punk Rock Disco.

Tags: Alan Freed, Chuck Berry, High School Confidential!, Imogen Hunt, Jerry Lee Lewis, Jeunesse Droguée, Let It Rock, Little Richard, London Rock & Roll Show, Masayoshi Sukita, Momus, Paris Capital Of The 19th Century, Paris Capital of the XXIst Century, Patrick Casey, Screaming Lord Sutch, Shallow 1-21, The 'Killer' Rocks On!, Walter Benjamin, Wembley Stadium