The Sex Pistols and the London Mob
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The Sex Pistols and the London Mob Michael Ewen Kitson Doctor of Philosophy University of Western Sydney, 2008 From my point of view it’s got nothing to do with music. And you could build up a whole thesis just on that thing. Marcus Lipton MP Johnny Rotten? Sid Vicious? Aren’t they characters from a Dickens novel? Kenny Rogers, country music singer1 1 Barry Cain, 77 Sulphate Strip, Ovolo, Cornwall 2007: p.101. Thank you to my brother Max for your hospitality in London and generous assistance (financial and intellectual); to my father Michael for unstinting encouragement and for our regular Tuesday meets; to my mother Jill for your support and excellent editorial advice; thank you to Sally Joy for her many gifts; to Dr Linda Hawryluk for your friendship; to David Brazil, Tyswan Slater, daughter, Kahlila, and Briana McLean who all welcomed me into your extraordinary lives and kept me from loneliness in the mountains’ Blue. Finally, thank you to Gary Scott and Eva Kahans, Michael Francis and especially you, Joe – who never failed to remind me that a PhD was a very boring subject for discussion with a five-year old. For the punks I’ve known: Cressida, Josh, Ken, Sean and Matt, John and Shane, and A.J. I wish to warmly acknowledge the invaluable assistance of Dr Jane Goodall, whose wit and humour combined with infinite patience, transformed my ideas and tested my theories, while Dr Glen McGillivray’s eye for the whole, combined with his detailed editorial advice, saw this thesis become the thing it is. I wish to acknowledge the financial support of the ABA Scholarship and the generous assistance of the University of Western Sydney, especially the Performing Arts Department, which made my research trip to England in June 2005, possible. The work presented in this thesis is, to the best of my knowledge and belief, original except as acknowledged in the text. I hereby declare that I have not submitted this material, either in full or in part, for a degree at this or any other institution. ……………..………………. Michael Ewen Kitson Table of Contents Chapter 1 Introduction 1 1.1 IT’S NOT ABOUT THE MUSIC 4 1.1.1 Punk and the mob 9 1.1.2 Theory and methodology 10 1.2 THESIS OUTLINE 16 Chapter 2 Punk’s Milieu 20 2.1 HOW PUNK BROKE 20 2.2 GENERAL LANDSCAPE, HABITAT AND TIMES OF PUNK 25 2.2.1 ‘Anarchy in the UK’ 25 2.3 DRAMATIS PERSONAE 29 2.3.1 430 The King’s Road, World’s End 29 2.3.2 Principal players 30 2.3.3 The Sex Pistols 34 2.3.4 Punk converts 36 2.3.5 Nancy Spungen: A Necessary Footnote 38 2.4 THE SHORT LIFE AND CRIMES OF THE SEX PISTOLS 40 2.5 EXISTING PUNK RESEARCH AND COMMENTARY 50 2.5.1 Chronology of major works on punk: introduction 50 2.5.2 Chronology of major works on punk: body 52 2.5.3 Other punk texts that require citation 72 Chapter 3 The London Mob 74 3.1 LITERARY EXAMPLES OF THE LONDON MOB 75 3.1.1 The Gordon Riots as described by Dickens and Hibbert 75 3.1.2 Barnaby Rudge: exegesis 79 3.1.3 Cruikshank: illustrating the London mob 82 3.1.4 ‘Oliver introduced to the Respectable Old Gentleman’ 88 3.2 THE TALE OF THE TWO BAD MICE 90 3.2.1 Differentiating mobs and gangs 90 3.3 ‘THE DESTRUCTORS’ 94 Chapter 4 King Mob 103 4.1.1 The Great Revolt, 1381 106 4.1.2 Differentiating the crowd from the mob 108 4.1.3 Theorising the mob and its activity 114 4.1.4 The Paris mob and mob theory 124 4.2 THE SEX PISTOLS AS AUTOBIOGRAPHERS OF THE LONDON MOB 131 4.3 MCLAREN AS CROWD THEORIST 136 4.4 PROSELYTISING THE MOB 138 Chapter 5 John Lydon’s Negative Capability 146 5.1 BRIGHTON ROCK 149 5.2 YOU DON’T CREATE ME, I AM ME 152 5.3 NEGATIVE CAPABILITY 159 Chapter 6 Jubilee and Misunderstanding Punk 173 6.1 430 THE KING’S ROAD 173 6.1.1 Rehearsing punk 173 6.1.2 Punk’s manifesto 175 6.1.3 Wearable statements 177 6.2 PUNK’S FIRST BIOGRAPHER 180 6.2.1 London dystopia 182 6.2.2 Punk puritans 185 6.2.3 Westwood’s critique 187 6.2.4 Punk’s muse 189 6.3 JUBILEE: MISUNDERSTANDING PUNK 194 6.3.1 Defying gravity 194 6.3.2 Amyl nitrate makes history 198 6.3.3 Murdering the arts 200 6.3.4 Regicide 202 6.3.5 The uncertainty of art in a fallen world 204 Chapter 7 The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindler 212 7.1 BECOMING MALCOLM MCLAREN 214 7.1.1 Early years 214 7.1.2 Jewishness 222 7.2 MALCOLM’S GANG 227 7.2.1 ’Peter Pan’ and ’Wendy’ 227 7.2.2 Recruiting the artful dodgers/Sex Pistols 232 7.2.3 Malcolm’s manifesto 233 7.3 THE GREAT ROCK ‘N’ ROLL SWINDLE 237 7.3.1 Who Killed Bambi? and other false starts 238 7.3.2 The anti-rock musical movie 243 7.3.3 Swindling the swindler 244 7.3.4 Ten lessons or how to cook up a rock ’n’ roll swindle 245 7.4 WHAT HAD MALCOLM LEARNED? 261 7.5 RECEPTION 262 Chapter 8 Punk’s Legacy 264 8.1 POST PISTOLS 265 8.1.1 Post Sex Pistols: where to draw the line 266 8.1.2 The public image 268 8.1.3 Post punk: 1978 to 1984 270 8.1.4 Punk’s legacy in Thatcher’s Britain 274 8.1.5 The mob and the crowd under Thatcher 277 8.1.6 Hard drugs, despair, apathy 279 8.2 NIGEL KNEALE AND THE LONDON MOB 280 8.2.1 Quatermass and punk 283 8.3 LIPSTICK TRACES: A SECRET HISTORY OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 289 8.3.1 Displacing International Situationism 290 8.3.2 Rock ‘n’ roll is dead: go start a band 294 8.4 GOOD NIGHT 299 References 302 Bibliography 307 Abstract The London Mob and the Sex Pistols This thesis concerns the invention, improvisation, and right to ownership of the punk patent and questions the contention, put by the band’s manager, Malcolm McLaren, and other commentators, that the Sex Pistols and English punk were a Situationist prank. This challenge to what, in the majority of punk literature, has become an ‘accepted truth’ was first raised by McLaren’s nemesis, the band’s lead singer, John Lydon. McLaren and Lydon did agree that the London punk movement took its inspiration from the anarchic and chaotic energies of the eighteenth–century London mob. This common crowd could switch instantly and unpredictably from a passive state to an anarchic, violent and destructive mob, or ‘King Mob’: one that turned all authority on its head in concerted, but undirected, acts of misrule. Through his own improvisation with punk tropes, Lydon came to embody English punk and functioned, on the one hand, as a natural mob leader; and on the other, as a focus for the mob’s anger. I argue that, in following McLaren’s reduction of the Sex Pistols to a Situationist- inspired prank, one of the earliest and most influential analyses of the punk phenomenon, Greil Marcus’s Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century, misunderstood how fundamental the culture and semiotics of the London mob was to McLaren, Lydon, the Sex Pistols and the performance of London punk. I take seriously, then, the idea that the cultural signifiers the Sex Pistols drew upon to make their punk performances, and which accounted in no small way for their ability to ‘outrage’, were exclusively British and unique to London’s cultural topography and the culture of the London crowd. After the implosion of the Sex Pistols on their 1978 American tour, with Lydon quitting in disgust, McLaren attempted to take ownership of the punk legacy: both actually, through attempting to assert his copyright over the Sex Pistols’ brand; and symbolically through re-writing the Sex Pistols’ story in his 1980 movie The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle. Curiously, and most notably, the mob is foregrounded in the film through its opening sequence, which draws heavily from the events of the Gordon Riots in 1780. This thesis contests the paradigm put in place by McLaren’s version of events as portrayed in The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle and reconsiders punk as a cultural object trouve. In particular, I consider literary influences on its protagonists: Graham Greene on John Lydon and Charles Dickens and J. M. Barrie on Malcolm McLaren. Chapter 1: Introduction 1 All that phoney Beatlemania has bitten the dust. On the morning of 15 January 1978, one-week-shy of his twenty-second birthday, John Lydon, a boy with a home in Gunter Grove in the Borough of Chelsea, woke up a long way from that home, destitute and abandoned by his management, on the west coast of America. Twenty-four hours earlier he had represented the spearhead of the latest British music fad since the Beatles, The Who and The Rolling Stones to take America by media storm – punk rock. Less than twelve hours earlier John Lydon, in his stage persona Johnny Rotten, had fronted the Sex Pistols as their lead singer, entertaining over 5000 new American fans in the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco.