This is something of an exclusive.
Not published in the 36 years since appearing in the issue of the New Musical Express dated December 27, 1975, this is the very first media mention of the Sex Pistols (just seven weeks after their live debut).
These sentences were written by NME staffer Kate Phillips in her review of the All Night Christmas Ball on November 27 1975 at Queen Elizabeth College (then in Campden Hill, Kensington, west London).
“Maybe somehow the desire for knowledge is back, and to be glamorous will be to have a big brain.
That’s why I believe that the stars of the future aren’t designers or musicians, they’re teachers. Because people are searching for answers, they’re searching for content. A college professor is much more glamorous than an actor.”
Malcolm McLaren, 1995.
Thanks to Steven Daly for sending me Holly Brumbach’s interview with Malcolm, Being And Nothingness And Kate Moss, New York Times, May 21, 1995.
I am currently working with Tommy Roberts on a book about his life and career in fashion. Tommy has been assembling a selection of anecdotes and stories which will feature as occasional tasters here over the coming months.
This reminiscence stems from the period in the early 70s when Tommy operated City Lights Studio. Situated at 54 Shorts Gardens WC2 with a darkly glamorous interior design realised by Electric Colour Company’s Andrew Greaves + Jeffrey Pine, City Lights was the first fashion store in London’s Covent Garden, the neighbourhood then dominated by the capital’s fruit and veg market.
City Lights Studio, which came into being at the end of 1972, was a fashion emporium I created in tandem with Willy Daly, a colleague and friend since we had worked together at Mr Freedom.
City Lights was situated in an imposing high-ceilinged loft atop a building in Covent Garden. Our studio designed, wholesaled and retailed an extremely stylish and tasty array of men’s and women’s wear, shoes, hats, jewellery and other fashion accessories.
For this story I’m concentrating on the menswear.
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This sleeve for Joseph Beuys’ 1982 single is featured in Son Of Vulgar, the latest “scratch” catalogue from Maggs Bros’ counterculture department.
With 24 lots, it’s a typically eclectic affair.
Here is a selection, from a Malcolm McLaren promotional brochure for Bow Wow Wow and a Roxy Club membership card through US transgender photography of the early 20th Century to the LAPD’s report on the Symbionese Liberation Front and a book by Japanese artist Tadanori Yokoo:
Thanks to Neal Purvis for alerting me to these captivating photographs taken in London in the hot summer of 1976 by German holidaymaker Klaus Hiltscher.
As Neal points out, Hiltscher captures the mood of the city in that specific period; I don’t believe my recall is playing tricks on me when I write that every day – from May through to September – was glorious in terms of the weather, and more often than not eventful in a variety of ways.
This composition of images by Derek Harris from Christopher Gray’s Situationist text Leaving The 20th Century makes plain the significance of the visual vocabulary of the 60s anarchist movement on punk in general and Malcolm McLaren & Vivienne Westwood’s Anarchy Shirt in particular.
Continue reading Blessed & Blasted: Roots of the Anarchy Shirt part 3
Two “manifesto” designs which emanated from 430 King’s Road – the You’re Gonna Wake Up t-shirt and the Anarchy Shirt – share a reference to “The Black Hand Gang”.
I had long assumed that both referred to Spanish anarchists La Mano Negra, since the group’s name was listed with that of their fellow countryman and revolutionary Buenaventura Durruti.
But on the t-shirt, the absence of an “and” or connecting device had me pondering the possibility this was another Black Hand Gang; maybe the secret society dedicated to Serbian unity (linked to one of the events which triggered the First World War, the assassination of Franz Ferdinand on June 28, 1914)?
Continue reading Blessed & Blasted: Roots of the Anarchy Shirt part 2
My investigation into the multifarious strands which fed into the creation of the 1974 t-shirt You’re Gonna Wake Up has, in turn, ignited a convincing set of new theories about the genesis of another “manifesto” design, Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s so-called Anarchy Shirt.
Continue reading Blessed & Blasted: Roots of the Anarchy Shirt part 1
Excerpt from 1983 BBC documentary Beat This: A Hip Hop History.
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?
