Extremely rare Sex Pistols/Smoking Boy shirt up for sale
//T-shirt from the first run produced by Malcolm McLaren in March 1976. Photo courtesy Bonhams//
“This was my first attempt at making a Sex Pistols T-shirt. I wanted to create something of a stir”
Malcolm McLaren, 2005
An extremely rare and controversial T-shirt from the first run produced by Malcolm McLaren in the early spring of 1976 for the new group he managed, the Sex Pistols, is up for sale tomorrow at London auctioneers Bonhams.
McLaren created the artwork, which became known as Smoking Boy, in order to amplify the Pistols’ outsider qualities. The design centred on a repeat monochrome print of a boy nonchalantly holding a lit cigarette close to his flaccid penis. The photograph came from a copy of the underground magazine Boys Express acquired by McLaren in a backstreet shop in Brixton, not far from the Herne Hill studio of the soon-to-be disgraced photographer Don Busby (Boys Express No 4 was among magazines featuring Busby’s work which were found to be in contravention of New Zealand obscenity laws that year, as recorded in NZ Gazette, March 18, 1976).
Over the multiple boy images was an outline of Pistol Glen Matlock’s bass screened in red, around which McLaren stencilled the group’s name in capitals containing musical notations referencing the Let It Rock era of the shop at 430 King’s Road he ran with partner Vivienne Westwood (it had been trading as Sex for well over a year by this time).
“This was my first attempt at making a Sex Pistols T-shirt,” said McLaren in the 00s. “I wanted to create something of a stir. All I needed was to announce the group’s name and outline a guitar.”
The shirt’s content was intended to spark outrage; this was just a few months after McLaren and Westwood had been fined for selling the notorious naked Cowboys t-shirt. Among those who objected to the Smoking Boy was McLaren’s sidekick and screen-printer Bernard Rhodes, who eventually balked at helping to produce it.
“Bernie was a bit frightened,” McLaren recalled. “It was too much for him. He used to perspire as he printed at the kitchen table, as if somebody was about to break down the door, arrest him and charge him with being a paedophile, and haul him off to prison. That would have been all my fault.”
Unappreciative that the Smoking Boy was but the latest manifestation of McLaren’s campaign to make public the seamy sexual underbelly of Britain’s repressive society, Rhodes – who soon moved on to manage The Clash – remained furious decades later at McLaren for having involved him in the escapade. ‘Look, I’m saying this only once,” asserted Rhodes in 2007. “I worked on a few of those shirts but wasn’t interested in naked little boys, not because I’m square, but because it’s dull. Vivienne and Malcolm come from repressed, Victorian, middle-class backgrounds so they get a kick out of that stuff.”
This is one of the reasons why there were so few produced initially. “We didn’t make very many, 40 or 50 at most, and they were in quite small sizes,” said McLaren. “They were supposed to be sold in the store but at first I gave them away to people who looked cool.”
One of the recipients was the author and anthropologist Ted Polhemus, who came by his via the Sex superstar sales assistant Jordan Mooney at a sparsely-attended gig by the Pistols at Soho’s El Paradise strip club.
“Jordan had a pile of them slung over her arm,” recalls Polhemus. “She gave one to my first wife (now deceased, sadly) Lynn Procter but Lynn didn’t like it, so gave it to me.”
//Photo courtesy Bonhams//
In the style of the period Polhemus adapted the shirt by tearing the neckline and subsequently wore it once, at another Pistols gig a month later at the Babalu disco in Finchley Road, north London. Since then it has been carefully stored, so is in amazing condition for a 43-year-old garment.
“Jordan has told me that she doesn’t have an original Smoking Boy herself and was a bit envious,” adds Polhemus. “She clearly remembers having a number of them slung over her arm at that gig.”
And now Polhemus has contributed the shirt as well as an equally rare flyer for the gig at El Paradise to Bonhams’ Entertainment Memorabilia sale which takes place tomorrow (December 17) at the auctioneer’s Knightsbridge premises.
The Smoking Boy listing is here.
The El Paradise flyer lot is here.
My biography The Life & Times Of Malcolm McLaren, with an introduction by Alan Moore and an essay by Lou Stoppard, is published by Constable and Robinson in April 2020.