 from the affluence of inner London. Melody Maker magazine would in due course quote Jones: “Ordinary life is so dull that I get out of it as much as possible.” Getting out of it meant avoiding or evading the drabness of routine, and it meant milking whatever opportunities came their way. Jones and his bandmates were chafing against received notions of good looks and good taste. They were kicking, too, against the idea of the rock millionaire, most visibly embodied at that time by the Rolling Stones.
The gig at the Marquee wasn’t the Sex Pistols’ first. That had been the previous year, in a fifth-floor common room at St Martin’s College of Art, where Matlock was doing a foundation course. There they’d supported Bazooka Joe (whose bassist was Stuart Goddard, later Adam Ant) and played for twenty minutes before Jeremy Diggle, the president of the student union, terminated the performance by cutting the power to their amps.
In England’s Dreaming, his hefty history of punk, Jon Savage suggests that the initial reaction to the band was “fifty per cent indifference, twenty-five per cent hostility, twenty per cent hilarity and five per cent immediate empathy”. Over the next few months, “to most of their small audiences, their music was just scraping and gnawing sounds”. But for the five per cent, to see and hear them was to become part of their oppositional energy. If one feature of this was a rebellion against suburban greyness, another was a refusal to explain the nature of that rebellion.
By the time they appeared at the Marquee, the Sex Pistols had performed on eight or nine occasions—in Chelsea and Kensington as well as Watford and Chislehurst—and the King’s Road boutique owner Malcolm McLaren had been nurturing them for six months. McLaren, a one-man ideas factory, had previously managed the New York Dolls, who combined flamboyant androgyny with a preening self-destructiveness. The experience had alerted him to something that was missing from British music. In Manhattan, he’d encountered an arty proto-punk scene: at the East Village club CBGB he’d seen Richard Hell (real name Richard Meyers), a spiky-haired musician whose torn clothes were sometimes held together with safety pins. Hell’s style owed something to the dishevelment of the city’s rent boys, and his air of numbness had more than a little to do with his drug use, but McLaren immediately recognized the potential of an attempt to replicate his blank look and choppy style.
According to one school of thought, John Lydon’s look was modelled on Hell’s. Others, among them Glen Matlock, have argued that Lydon arrived at his image independently. What’s for sure is that the Pistols, seen by McLaren as “young, sexy assassins”, became a vehicle for his dreams of an explosive mixture of music and fashion. Later accounts, often excitable in tone, would represent them as his Dada experiment. According to Jon Savage, they were a means for McLaren to “act out his fantasies of conflict and revenge on a decaying culture”. He had “programmed” them for confrontation.
From the moment of that Marquee appearance in February, the Sex Pistols were in demand. Ron Watts, a former teddy boy who now promoted acts at the 100 Club, booked them to play. The Oxford Street venue had history—as a haven for jazz enthusiasts and later for fans of rhythm and blues. Its bloodshot intimacy suited the Pistols, but the gig, on 30 March, was a mess.
John Lydon’s familiar truculence nearly caused the band to split up that night, but over the next three months they returned five times. By late June their performances had taken on a new tautness and bite. The audience gobbed and pogo-ed, and Lydon showered them with sarcasm, which was precisely what they wanted.
At the 100 Club the Sex Pistols spoke to a young and disaffected audience, many of whom traipsed into London from torpid dormitory towns. Queueing on Oxford Street, the fans attracted appalled scrutiny. Were they a circus troupe, a despondent indictment of dole-queue Britain, a cadre of fascists, the flotsam and jetsam of the baby boom? In their own eyes, the punks were mostly just kids having fun. Some, it’s true, struck an explicit note of political subversion, but for most what mattered was the present; they were the enemies of bombast.
The band’s appearances at the 100 Club gratified Malcolm McLaren’s sense of history. Since the late sixties he had wanted to make a film about Oxford Street. It was a project that also appealed to his art school friend Jamie Reid, who would later create artwork for the Sex Pistols’ records and play a crucial role in defining the visual language of punk. McLaren had started work on the film with the £50 he received as a result of marrying Jocelyn Hakim, a French-Turkish Jew who needed to stay in the country, and it had stuttered along for eighteen months before being suspended, a victim of the very transience it had set out to document. It didn’t help that the main Oxford Street shops were reluctant to grant him access. Only Selfridge’s had let him in.
That reference to the “fun palace” was pointed. In 1961, theatre director Joan Littlewood and architect Cedric Price had given this name to a utopian space they hoped to create, a modern counterpart to London’s eighteenth-century pleasure gardens. Littlewood would manage a couple of times to try out her model of melding performance and public engagement—at Bubble City near St Paul’s in 1968, and at the Stratford Fair of 1975. Yet the period saw Britain’s cities fill up with blank space of a very different kind; its new landmarks were banks and shopping centres. To McLaren’s jaundiced eye, the idea of the fun palace was a symptom of the fizzy optimism of the early sixties, which had been superseded by crisis, bureaucracy, vapid consumerism and a sense of national inadequacy.
Eventually McLaren would get to make his film and articulate in his own terms the desire to “light up” this portion of central London. In The Ghosts of Oxford Street (1991) he revisited his fascinated dissatisfaction with a stretch of town which, quoting the nineteenth-century essayist Thomas De Quincey, he likened to a “stony-hearted stepmother”. Serving up a characteristically weird and militant take on the past, he channelled an uncomfortable ambivalence as he associated Oxford Street’s dazzle with misery, boredom and loneliness, while celebrating its darker, more heroic yesterdays. He cast Welsh singer Tom Jones as retail magnate H Gordon Selfridge, John Altman (the villainous Nick Cotton from EastEnders) as an opium-addled De Quincey, and singer-songwriter Kirsty MacColl as Kitty Fisher, the high-class prostitute who is sometimes alleged to have eaten a slice of buttered bread topped with a £100 note.
McLaren’s disciples and admirers have tended to trace his ideas back to an interest in the Situationist International (1957-72). The Situationists’ leading light Guy Debord had argued that modernity and specifically capitalism had lured people away from reality; their lives were instead hopelessly passive, dominated by commodities and bereft of any sense of history. The solution they proposed, much to the liking of McLaren, was a mass awakening from consumerism.
Cultural historian Roger Sabin has observed that the link with Situationism was seized on only by a handful of cognoscenti and “never had a deep impact”. In similar vein, journalist Nick Kent is withering about the Sex Pistols’ svengali, regarding him not as a re-interpreter of Situationist rhetoric, but as a mere scene-stealer. For Kent, the essence of the band “didn’t miraculously emanate from Malcolm McLaren’s crackpot art-college concepts”. Instead it derived from Steve Jones, who was annihilating the memory of years of abuse he’d suffered at the hands of his stepfather.
Listen to the Sex Pistols now and you can’t fail to hear what made them, more than forty years ago, seem fresh and unsettling: a self-lacerating glee and festive despair. That they sometimes sounded terrible when playing live only deepened their appeal; they made their fans feel that they had licence to sound terrible too. Their enduring achievement is, of course, their sole studio album Never Mind the Bollocks. Not released till October 1977, it’s a relentless thirty-eight minutes of anthems, be it the feral singalong of God Save the Queen and Anarchy in the UK or the riffy majesty of Pretty Vacant (with its more than passing resemblance to ABBA’s SOS).
But it took McLaren, in Glen Matlock’s phrase “the great enabler”, to turn the Sex Pistols into a project—and one shaped less by his ear than his eye. In September 1976, as a grey autumn clouded memories of the parched summer, he and punk had their perfect Oxford Street moment when the 100 Club hosted a two-day festival. McLaren disliked that term, which he thought tainted by its association with hippies, so it