In October 1974 Malcolm McLaren conjured an unusual group name for four young musicians who congregated at his shop at 430 King’s Road.

//The group name as it appeared on the ‘right’ side of the You’re Gonna Wake Up t-shirt//

At the time the transition from the premises’ previous incarnation as Too Fast To Live Too Young To Die to Sex was nearing completion; in fact the teenagers Paul Cook, Steve Jones, Glen Matlock (who was also a sales assistant on Saturdays) and Wally Nightingale assisted McLaren in applying the finishing touch with the erection of the pink vinyl shop sign constructed at his direction by carpenter Vic Mead.

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Tags: Alan Moore, Archie Shepp, Bernard Rhodes, Bob Marley, Bryan Ferry, Continental Keyholes, Continental Kuties, Eddie Cochran, Gerry Goldstein, Glen Matlock, Iggy Pop, James Brown, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, King Tubby’s Sound System, Kutie Jones and his Sex Pistols, Lou Stoppard, Marianne Faithfull, New Musical Express, Nick Kent, Paul Cook, QT, Sam Cooke, Steve Jones, Vic mead, Wally Nightingale

//From The Times, September 24, 1974. Courtesy Matthew Worley//

//Mrs Scully features on the “right” side of the shirt after a reference to George Dangerfield’s book The Strange Death Of Liberal England//

//A 1970s issue of Mistress magazine//

I’m grateful to British academic Matthew Worley for having enlightened me as to the identity of “Mrs Scully”, whose name was among those printed on the You’re Gonna Wake Up us-and-them t-shirt first sold in Sex at 430 King’s Road in the autumn of 1974.

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Tags: bernie Rhodes, George Dangerfield, Gerry Goldstein, Joan Scully, Joe Orton, Matthew Worley, Search magazine, The Clash, The Strange Death Of Liberal England, The Times, You're Gonna Wake Up One Morning And Know What Side Of The Bed You've Been Lying On!

Sixty years after Blast, the You’re Gonna Wake Up t-shirt adopted the same truculent tone and diffuse dialectic to ring the alarms amid a culture rendered flaccid by the failure of the 60s dream.

You’re Gonna Wake Up – which went on sale in SEX in the late autumn of 1974 – was conceived by Bernie Rhodes and realised with contributions from friends Malcolm McLaren (who wrote the slogan) and Gerry Goldstein.

Of course, it is best known for carrying the following band name: “Kutie Jones and his SEX PISTOLS”.

I investigated its history in THE LOOK and also here. By publishing the list with links today I aim to dive deeper to demonstrate the tract’s range beyond popular culture.

Hence the references to artists David Holmes, Mel Ramos and Patrick Heron (and his campaign against The Tate), the literature of Alfred Bester, David Cooper, George Dangerfield, Konstantin Paustovsky and Bernard Wolfe, the work of  radical journalists Alexander Cockburn and Mervin Jones and the campaigning of political activists Pat Arrowsmith and Marian and Doloures Price.

Such content dates the compilation to October 1974: The Guardian published Heron’s 14,000-word Tate critique over consecutive days between the 12th and 14th of that month; the shirt itself mentions a piece by Jones in the New Statesman on October 4 and also an Elton John interview in the NME on September 25 (in fact the issue was dated September 28).

Alongside the call-girl phone number taken from local newsagents there are such quizzical references as that for former Playboy Club UK head Victor Lownes: “To be avoided first thing in the morning”.

Is this because one of the contributors had encountered him leaving his club Stocks, just a few hundred yards from SEX along the King’s Road?

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Tags: Alexander Cockburn, Alfred Bester, Bernard Wolfe, bernie Rhodes, David Cooper, Elton John, George Dangerfield, Gerry Goldstein, Konstantin Paustovsky, Kutie Jones & his SEX PISTOLS, Malcolm McLaren, Mel Ramos, Mervin Jones, Monty Modlyn, October 1974, pat Arrowsmith, Patrick heron, SEX

Wyndham Lewis’ 1914 publication Blast 1 is the daddy of the modern aesthetic manifesto.

It’s also a Modernist objet d’art.

Iconoclastic and satiric, at times inchoate and irrational, Blast’s aim was to establish Vorticism‘s endorsement of the machine age and and simultaneous disavowal of the stultifying Romantic legacy of the Victorian era.

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Tags: 1914, Blast 1, Edward Wadsworth, feng shui, Filippo Marinetti, Ford Madox Ford, Gerry Goldstein, Jacob Epstein, Malcolm McLaren, Picasso, Rebecca West, Suffragettes, Wassily kandinsky, Wyndham Lewis, You're Gonna Wake Up