(I volunteered a few days ago to do the next instalment of Abahachi’s Great Musical Controversies which is certainly up my street as an idea. A couple of people said go ahead, silence from everywhere else so here I am. Like Abahachi I found it a lot harder to write than I thought. I was going to argue my case much more strongly with supporting evidence but at the last minute I decided to leave it a bit more open to debate. So go ahead and debate the Sex Pistols. Or boy bands. Or in fact anything else you want to draw out of my waffle below. The idea is step in with musical knowledge of your own and pick up on whatever interests you. And if anyone else wants to write one for next Friday…?)
“What did I do to this kid? I sprinkled him with stardust. But you have to appreciate: no one wants to know they have been manufactured.” – Malcolm McLaren’s response to John Lydon describing him as evil.
We all have an opinion on the Sex Pistols. If you don’t think they single-handedly ruined music, then surely you know that they were one of the most important bands in history. They kicked off the punk revolution, sent Rick Wakeman and his wizard hat packing, and rescued rock n roll for the kids! Unless of course you think they are just a rock band. Maybe a very good one in the line of classic British rock bands , or maybe a disappointingly mundane , conservative one. Whatever, it seemed that their place in the history of rock in general, and punk in particular was settled by the 90s. And yet a few years ago there seemed to be a backlash online. I noticed them frequently sneered at as “just a boy band”. This didn’t seem to come so much from crusty old Led Zep fans as it did from a younger generation of punk fans, frequently comparing them unfavourably to The Clash.
According to Wikipedia a boy band is “loosely defined as a vocal group consisting of young male singers, usually teenage ….singing love songs marketed towards young women….usually giving highly choreographed performances……”. No then! But obviously what these Pistols bashers are saying is that they were manufactured. Nothing new there actually, this one has been around for a long time. As early as 76 the right wing press were pointing the finger at the music business as the ones to blame for pushing the Pistols’ “filth” in order to make money (ironic!). In 1979 The Great Rock N Roll Swindle mockumentary claimed that the Pistols were Malcolm McLaren’s creation , part of a scam at the expense of the music business. The film was so stylised , with such a blatantly unreliable narrator, that surely no one would treat it as a true account? But apparently people did. Oi bands frequently saw the Pistols as some kind of art school con job to sell trousers from McLaren’s shop and anarcho bands like Crass held them up as the ultimate sell out, fake anarchists lining their own pockets. Views seemed to balance out somewhere, but this idea has persisted. To put an extreme version, the Pistols were a fake band, a bunch of puppets put together by McLaren and / or the music industry to make money; unable to play , their music crafted in the studio by producers and session musicians; idiots with no talent and nothing to say other than the words put in their mouths by McLaren.
So what’s the truth? Steve Jones and Paul Cook formed The Strand with Wally Nightingale. Jones then pestered fetish wear salesman McLaren to manage them and eventually McLaren relented. McLaren and future Clash manager Bernie Rhodes then did a lot to shape the band – manoeuvring to remove Wally, push Jones from vocals to guitar, recruiting shop hand Glen Matlock as bassist, spotting the potential of John Lydon/Rotten as frontman and naming them The Sex Pistols. Does this make them a “boy band” in the very loosest sense of the term?
Interestingly what McLaren appears to have had little to no interest in was their music. The perception that the Pistols couldn’t play is arguably as much because McLaren himself pushed this line as anything else. How did their sound come about? Was it a product of the chemistry of the band themselves or did McLaren direct it in some way. It seems to be well established that they played in the studio, despite persistent rumours of Chris Spedding recording the guitar parts (“Chris Spedding couldn’t play that good” retorted Jones at the time), but what role did producer Chris Thomas have in shaping their sound? And does it matter?
Of course McLaren always maintained that the Pistols appeal was nothing to do with the music (and some of their detractors agreed) – it was about image and outrage. If so who created that outrage? McLaren was always happy to pull a stunt to provoke a reaction, but he appears to have had next to nothing to do with the Bill Grundy incident which was the moment they became infamous overnight. By all accounts he was furious with them and in a state of panic. All accounts apart from his own, of course
How much of the Pistols appeal was down to Lydon? Did McLaren really “manufacture” him.? Arguably Lydon, the intelligent but angry working class kid who felt undermined and frustrated by the system he was growing up in, was already the real deal. Or does the slightly pantomime version we see of Lydon today suggest that actually there was never much substance and that without McLaren’s “stardust” he would have gone nowhere? He frequently seemed to be pushing against him even then. McLaren asked him to write a song called Submission about BDSM – Lydon took the title and wrote about a “submarine mission” seemingly to wind him up. And the photo at the top was from a photo session where Lydon deliberately turned up dressed in mocking homage to McLaren’s past as a purveyor of Teddy Boy gear, much to the manager’s annoyance. “The public image belongs to me” as he later said.
Eventually of course Matlock was ousted , replaced by the much more malleable Sid Vicious and eventually Lydon left leaving and the band effectively seemed to become just bit parts in McLaren’s Swindle movie. Maybe the band’s credibility issue ultimately is down to McLaren putting himself front and centre
So are the Pistols really that different to other bands with strong managers who influenced their direction – The Beatles, Stones and the Who for example? Or bands whose work was shaped partly in the studio by a producer – the Beatles again. They arose was at a time when rock valued artistry and virtuosity but pop was very manufactured – perhaps they were partly a continuation as well as a break with that. McLaren said that his initial idea was for them to compete with the Bay City Rollers!
Personally I would argue that the Pistols were as “real” as any big band, a band who created a distinct sound and style, and who were confrontational by nature, not just because they were acting a part. The wider question for me is does it matter if they were put together by a clothes salesman? It seems to me that the people shouting “boy band” are angry to find a band had a central role in the foundation of their sceneto were not completely what they first appeared, that they were chancers with an eye on the big time not angry outsiders with a point to prove. Except that surely they could be both at the same time. Does it matter if the artists making the music we like don’t live up to the myth. Interestingly these young punk fans seemed to respect The Clash, despite the fact that they were put together and guided by Bernie Rhodes in their early days. Stiff Little Fingers , often hailed as more authentic as they were Belfast kids growing up in the troubles, in fact only started writing about the troubles because their manager, a Daily Express journalist told them to. He even helped them write the lyrics. I’m back on the subject of authenticity again.
Would you feel cheated if it turned out that a favourite artist’s back story was really just a piece of PR? Seasick Steve anyone? Maybe we’re a bit older and wiser now, but in our younger days did authenticity matter to you? Does the music still mean the same to you once you’ve peered behind the curtain.
The 'Spill 
Yeah! This is great, Wyngate – exactly the sort of thing I had in mind, a debate which matters enormously to some people and appears quite trivial to everyone else until you actually start thinking about it properly.
I think you’re right that this tends to revert to a ‘Sex Pistols v. Clash’ stand-off – at any rate that’s what I remember from the 80s, and it re-emerged in the early 90s as a journalistic trope for ‘Blur v. Oasis’. It’s interesting that you focused so much on the Pistols, as if – until your penultimate paragraph – we could take the Clash at face value as authentic alienated voices of rebellion, and it’s just a question of whether the Pistols can live up to that. Or at any rate implying a Platonic ideal of a punk band, and the Clash come so much closer to it that they might as well be taken as the model.
But we could equally well see the comparison of the two as a struggle for defining what punk is or should be, on a set of very familiar axes. Art (and art school artifice) v. craft (and the equally artificial aura of gritty authenticity). Pop music v. Serious Rock. Self-aware irony v. furrow-browed sincerity – or the Sentimental v. the Naive, in Schiller’s terms. Capitalism v. communism, or genuine anarchy v. anarchy as a political programme.
Yes, of course I’ve totally loaded the dice in that summary, because I love the Pistols and never particularly cared about the Clash. In my youth, authenticity mattered enormously – but they both seemed equally authentic, and the Pistols had vastly better songs to my taste. Now, I can see authenticity as a lure and a construct, so am less inclined to care (though MacLaren was such a total arse that I still want to attribute much of the Pistols’ greatness to the felicitous combination of Jones, Matlock and Lydon, coming together at the right cultural moment).
Basic principle: don’t invest all your hopes and dreams unconditionally in anything, let alone a much of musicians, because at some point you will get the feeling you’ve been cheated. And what matters is not what the Pistols *actually were*, but what they meant, and even Lydon’s latter-day descent into self-caricature cannot destroy that.
Thanks very much Abahachi, glad this was the sort of thing you had in mind because as the last minute I almost didn’t post it.
My view on The Clash vs Pistols (and I will say from the outset I’m a massive Clash fan in case anyone didn’t already no) is that there’s not a lot of difference in terms of authenticity. It struck me as quite ironic that these (I presume) kids were holding uo The Clash as the ideal against which The Pistols fell short. The Clash were initially formed by Mick Jones but then Bernie Rhodes put the rest of them together; Bernie came up with their look and attempted to cash in by selling Clash-style clothes; Bernie told them to write about their “real life” experiences (at least selectively – living in tower blocks, unemployment etc – not going to boarding school and art college); and like the Pistols the band resisted and subverted his control at the same time as they went along with it. The difference is that Lydon left the Pistols whereas The Clash sacked Bernie , only to later allow him back again and let him seize control via the sacking of Jones, The disastrous Clash mk 2 is perhaps their equivalent of the post-Lydon Pistols.
Some hold up the Pistols as more herioc for imploding rather than pursuing greater commercial success. Others hold The Clash up as more heroic for never reforming (conveniently unaware that they were about to reform and play at their Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame induction of all places , but Strummer’s death prevented it).
“I still want to attribute much of the Pistols’ greatness to the felicitous combination of Jones, Matlock and Lydon, coming together at the right cultural moment”
I think you’d be right. The thing was you had a band where the guitarist and drummer wanted to be The Who or The Faces; the bassist had a pop sensibility and liked The Beatles and ABBA: and the singer was into Captain Beefheart and Van Der Graff Generator and could never quite take the rock star role seriously. That’s what made the Pistols what they were musically. McLaren vagely acknowledged this but the music was never really his concern,and I would suggest played a much bigger part in their success than he ever recognised.
“And what matters is not what the Pistols *actually were*, but what they meant,”
Yes, they inspired 1000s of people to form bands , punk or otherwise. Even if they were fake the impact was real.
Ooh, a interesting question, Wyngate! At the risk of annoying various readers, I have a problem with both the Pistols and the Clash. I seem to have been just the wrong age for both of them. When God Save the Queen came out I was eating jelly at a Silver Jubilee street party in my plastic union jack bowler hat. The first song I heard by the Clash sounded like pub rock to me and I have probably spent more time reading about the adventures of Sid Vicious than I have listening to the Sex Pistols music.
I think some songs by both bands still sound good, but early exposure to Richard Hell makes them sound a bit less exciting in comparison.
Consequently I usually just stay quiet when people wax lyrical about the wonder of Rotten or go on about how great Sandinista is. So in some ways I am not qualified to have an opinion, but given that you’ve asked, yes, to some extent the Pistols were manufactured. You could say they were a boy band, but they weren’t very pretty, so not a perfect one.
Lots of artists I like have been given a helping hand by more experience managers/svengalis. Compared to the slog of self promotion, selling poorly photocopied cassette singles to friends, playing every toilet in the local area and spending all your non working time practicing in the garage and teasing your hair, being picked up by a manager isn’t so bad. It gives the artists something to moan about later on when they’re well off and well known.
Like Abahachi I think the search for authenticity may be a false path, many artists have had piano lessons, used a professional photographer and had quite a nice childhood, but write songs which don’t suggest that. ‘For real’ is just a momentary thing, isn’t it? If listening to the Sex Pistols makes someone feel authentically rebellious or emotionally strong then the band worked, I guess.
That sounds like I don’t value authenticity at all, I do, but perhaps with the benefit of experience, I think that if I’m hearing a band who’ve been produced in a studio, their authenticity has already had to be compromised, so it comes down to if the music speaks to me or not.
In 1977 I was also at the Jubilee street party , dressed as the Tom Baker Doctor! So I was also born at the wrong time, but I’m one of those people whose musical taste is slightly out of synch with the times.
Brave admitting to me you don’t like The Clash, but it’d be boring if we were all the same, etc. Pub rock is true in places – large chunks of London Calling. You’ve made me think that maybe there’s three versions of The Clash – the punk version; the pub rock version; and the adventurous / experimental version.
I like the idea that having a manager is beneficial because it gives the artist something to complain about – Lydon is probably the best example ever of this but I’m sure there must be others.
I had an encounter with a very passionate Clash fan who was so unequivocalable about their greatness that I dared not argue, but seeing her bounce around to Should I Stay or Should I Go failed to convince me that my less than excited feelings about them were incorrect. I suspect there is an entry song for me ( I believe every creditable band has a song which will hook in new listeners, it’s just finding the right one for the potential fan, it works with Nick Cave anyway), but I have missed the boat probably. Thanks for not shouting at me about my ambivalence.
p.s I’m having a thought about a debate for next week, but I haven’t posted on the Spill for ages and I’ve forgotten how to do it, plus it overlaps with this a bit, may have to ponder further.
Go to the bottom of the page and it says in small letters “blog at Word Press”. Click on that and it takes you to the WordPress site. Log in , make sure you are on The Spill, rummage around until you find Posts and it should be simple from there. Ask if you have any problems. I think there’s bound to be overlap so don’t worry too much about that.
Thank you for the advice on posting, I will give it a go, but am happy to step aside if anyone has a better idea 🙂
I am writing some twaddle about something irrelevant for posting tomorrow. I have a question: how do I add pictures? Also is it better to embed a youtube link or just post the web address? Also if anyone else wants to post, I’m sure it would be better than mine.
I am now happily imagining the Pistols’ pop-group nicknames. Sneery Pistol, Gobby Pistol, Junkie Pistol and Laddish Pistol, maybe. Or was that the Ramones?
That would be after Glenn left of course. He was, er, Beatles Pistol?
Nice Pistol
Musical Pistol?
Pop Pistol?
Or The Collaborator, The Crook, The Gimmick and The Tea Maker as McLaren (The Embezzler) had it in the film – nice.
Funnily enough there was a plan to give them all aliases early on – McLaren was going to call Paul Cook Slave Cook. In the end it was only Johnny Rotten and that was Jones came up with that.
“McLaren said that his initial idea was for them to compete with the Bay City Rollers!” Yes, well, he said a lot of contradictory things over the years. I am guessing he just wanted them to get a young following and make a lot of hit singles. Which I’m sure Cook and Jones would have liked too.
You know, I’m sure, the story that McLaren and Bernard Rhodes were driving in Scotland in the mid seventies and spotted the young Midge Ure. Asked him if he would like to join the band they were putting together but he declined because his band Slik were already beginning to get some attention from other music business “Machiavellis. And they did end up competing with The Rollers.
The fact seems to be that Malcolm and John both want us to believe that “it was all me” and the other guys had nothing to do with the band’s success. Lydon plays down the fact that he obediently mouthed a lot of toss about utterly rejecting the past, year zero, “I hate hippies” etc. Plus Ian Dury well remembered the young John Rotten being taken to a KIlburns gig to get style and stage presentation ideas.
Malcolm liked to make out that he had a master plan from the start when he clearly hadn’t got a clue what he was doing much of the time.He was shocked by the Grundy debacle and thought they had ruined everything. He had no input into their music at all. At one point wanted the band to write loads of songs about fetishes and S/M. Which was why John and Glen wrote the misleadingly titled Submission, just to wind him up.
It was a bit of everyone’s talents, a bit of bluffing, a lot of serendipity and a music press that desperately wanted a “next big thing”.
Sums it up quite well I think. I know the Midge Ure story, I can’t imagine how a Ure fronted Pistols would have had anything like the same impact.
I suppose I’d just question re Lydon and the “I hate hippies” line – he of course famously got spotted by McLaren wearing a customised “I Hate Pink Floyd” t-shirt.Apparently he didn’t hate them really but I guess he was a contrary character from the outset who was bored of hearing about them!
You’re right of course about Lydon being as bad as McLaren for rewriting history. At both of his Rebellion appearences he’s made comments to the effect that everyone there is just copying what he did years ago. I gues it’s just his usual goading but if he’s taken a look around he would have seen a huge variety of bands under the punk banner that showed little direct influence from him.
Hmmm, interesting question. It seems to me that Punk is probably the greatest area of self-mythologising in popular music. Possibly the only thing that comes anywhere near to Punk in this respect is Hip Hop. Now, I am not suggesting that building up a mythology in any way devalues the music, but it does make trying to work out what was actually going on pretty difficult.
Were the Pistols manufactured? Well yes, up to a point, but one might argue that all bands are manufactured to some degree. It doesn’t matter whether the band has an éminence grise behind the scenes, telling them to ditch the leather and Brycreem and get into these suits and ties, or whether the band decides that beads, loon pants and cheesecloth are the way to go because Beat Music is so over now and Flower Power is the thing.
There was definitely something going on in mid-70s Britain, London especially, I think. Glam had died off, pub rock was dominating the small venues and disco was taking off. Despite what the mythology tells us, the big venues were still the habitat of the million-selling dinosaurs that punk was supposed to slay. Aggression was a big thing at, ahem, street level. The skinheads might have grown their hair, but they were still around and the Police were always coming down heavily on young black people. Reggae had already gone down the road of militancy and there was definitely something stirring.
To be honest, I think that it was all pretty haphazard, rather than an organised “movement”. Rebellion via Rock had been around since the mid-60s. Anyone remember Mick Farren’s Social Deviants? The anarchist side of 60s music tends to be forgotten these days, but people like the Deviants, Pink Fairies, Hawkwind and others weren’t really selling the hippy dream. You could, if you felt like it, put bands like The Groundhogs into that camp too. It was all much harder-edged.
Anyway, the Sex Pistols. I think that the band happened because the people involved wanted to be in a band but didn’t have much clue what kind of a band it should be. Malcolm McLaren, a man with a background in Situationist agit-prop and the use of social isolation and disillusion for revolutionary protest, was a not hugely successful entrepreneur who had latched on to the idea of selling Teddy Boy clothes and 50s retro but later ditched that in favour of fetish wear, because the controversial aspect of that brought headlines and notoriety, and notoriety means money, so long as you get the publicity. I think that McLaren used the Pistols and pushed them into being more and more outrageous because he saw profits coming from it, but I think that the band members were willing accomplices. In many ways, McLaren manipulated an existing burgeoning situation to create a fertile environment for his Situationist ideas to flourish. I seem to remember that Cash From Chaos was one of his slogans. There were others working on the anarchist fringes too, people like Genesis P. Orridge, whose ideas were overlapping. Punk was already there in bits and pieces, but it took McLaren and Bernie Rhodes to turn it into a Thing. The NME was a willing participant in this campaign. It was the biggest voice in the music press for Punk.
So, were the Pistols any good? Musically, derivative and adequate, but yes, they definitely shook things up massively. The first three singles were terrific, the fourth one OK. The fact that they were simple and unflashy was pretty much unimportant. The only thing that mattered was That Sound. To be honest, by the time that the album actually came out, the Pistols were over. The album itself is OK. Apart from the four singles, I think that they only other decent track is EMI. The thing that destroyed the band was the band themselves. They only really had a few songs in them, but that wasn’t the point. They had already done the thing that they existed for when God Save The Queen came out. Sid Vicious replacing Glenn Matlock was kind of irrelevant. He was just a sad and pathetic coda to a story that was already over.
Great summary , I think you’ve pretty well hot the nail on the head with most of that. The whole thing was very haphazard, a lot of it shaped into a narrative afterwards by McLaren and others, and there’s no doubt that there were a lot of things feeding into it. Year Zero was only ever rhetoric.
You’re right about Sid. Perhaps the prime piece of evidence for the “boy band” argument by people who don’t know much about The Pistols. His involvment had very little relevance (at least musicially) as their creative period was almost over by then, with most of their songs written. Perhaps that was because of Matlock’s departure, but the band seem to think being in the eye of a media storm with a manager continually sabotaging them was a bigger issue.
I actually like Never Mind The Bollocks , although if I’m honest it’s a long time since I’ve played it due to overfamiliarity, but I wouldn’t really argue against anyone who thinks it’s a disappointment either. It’s got a great sound, at the same time you could hardly claim it was the most revolutionary album ever released.
Actually, compared to a lot of the first wave of punk albums, Never Mind The Bollocks is pretty decent. Most of them were dreadful.
Depends what you mean by the first wave of course but I don’t actually own many of them – I rate the first Clash album, tinny though it is, but I’ve never owned Damned Damned Damned, the first two Stranglers albums, Ramones, or a Buzzcocks album beyond the great singles collection. I do rate the first Slaughter & The Dogs and Lurkers albums , being terminally unfashionable as always.
Do you remember the ‘Sacred Cows’ section in the music press, possibly NME? They took an album/band/much loved artist and trashed it mercilessly. There are some big names amongst those mentioned in ‘classic punk’ I could treat that way, but it’s probably just my sneery inner teenager being all goth and controversial.
Yeah, the First Clash album, which I like (although I unfashionably like Give ’em Enough Rope too), The Stranglers, a band I really dislike, The Damned, who I don’t like either, Buzzcocks, OKish and bands that were just jumping on the bandwagon like The Boomtown Rats, who were awful. I am really thinking about 1977-78. To be honest, for me punk was more about individual songs rather than albums, and some of those songs stand up better if you haven’t got to hear the whole album. I am ignoring the US bands here, because I think that Patti Smith’s Horses is a more lasting achievement than anything that came out of this country in the same period, although can we really call her a punk? I love The Ramones, but even when they were playing dumb, you knew that there was stuff going on there that the London punk scene was missing.
Living in Granadaland in the seventies meant I also lived in Tony/Anthony/Anthony H Wilson territory. I saw the Pistols on So It Goes and also the Bill Grundy interview, as they happened. The two fingers they raised at the world in general and music in particular was very entertaining.
But it wasn’t a music phenomenon, imho, it was a social rebellion. Punk seemed to me more about fucking things up than making music, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
It was like The Stones’ entry into the pop world over a decade earlier, without the need for catchy tunes. The bad boys were now badder, to the point that actual musical ability wasn’t required.
McLaren echoed Loog Oldham in his desire to make his charges famous; being a fashion guy, he designed the Pistols in his image, physically and temperamentally.
It obviously couldn’t hold for long and it didn’t. But it did bust a hole in the pop scene that was rather beneficial in the long run, despite all the insults thrown around.
No, they weren’t a boy band. They weren’t really musicians. They were a social phenomenon.
This is where I disagree, I would say they did have musical ability , even if it was basic compared to the big rock bands of the time. I don’t think it would have had the same impact without the music to back up the outrage and publicity stunts – see Sigue Sigue Sputnik a few years later to show how publicity isn’t enough. There seem to be broadly two types of people into punk back then – people who thought it was great because it was shaking things up and effectively blowing the music scene open for others to have ago, but didn’t actually think the music itself was any good; and people who liked the music.
I don’t think the Pistols would be remembered if it wasn’t for the sense of outrage they generated, they may not have made it out of the pub circuit. At the same time I don’t think they would have been remembered either if they didn’t have the music to go with it.
Interesting that the Bill Grundy controversy was sort of caused by a comment about/to Siouxsie Sioux, but I don’t think the Banshees really benefitted from the notoriety. Please correct me if I’m wrong about that.
Watching now it feels a bit like that whole sleazy underbelly that we now know about coming into the open. Either that or at that moment Grundy was just trying to be nice. Not sure which,, It feels a bit sleazy.
No, this was December 76, Banshees didn’t get signed until late 78 so I don’t think it helped much. She had the whole “Siouxsie’s a punk shocker” tabloid spread, but the Banshees were barely up and running at the time.
To be honest, Siouxsie, as a musical performer always seemed to me to be decidedly not a punk. Art rocker probably, angular and spiky in musical terms, but apart from Hong Kong Garden, not really a punk act. I would say, with the benefit of hindsight that the acts who went on to do interesting things after 77-78 were much more art rockers than post-punks. In fact, what does “post-punk” really mean anyway? There were people around in 77-78 who never got much attention, but who were very interesting. People like This Heat, The Residents, Pere Ubu and Doll by Doll spring to mind.
Yes, Pere Ubu were slightly pre-punk. Proto-post-punk perhaps.
There was a balance between the art rock elements and the “street” elements of punk in the early days before they went their seperate ways. Banshees were definitely on the art side – big Bowie and Velvets fans. I’d still think of The Scream as punk but nudging over into post punk. I think they were probably closer to straight forward punk in 77 , because they weren’t signed they had time to develop their own style.
I’ve not listened to a lot of Patti Smith. I saw a Whistle Test clip a few years ago , I think it was Horses, but it definitely sounded pre punk to me, more directly descended from The Doors
By ‘They weren’t really musicians’ I don’t mean they were incapable of making music, just that they weren’t especially talented or wanted to be regarded as great musicians. Like hundreds of bands. They made records that caught a zeitgeist, like The Who and The Stones did over a decade earlier, and were an arresting visual act.
Fair enough, they weren’t aspiring tobe virtuosos
Another thought seeing as I’ve mentioned Sigue Sigue Sputnik. I think we all agree that McLaren’s master plan was actually a product of hindsight. But he seemed to then believe his own hype and went on to put together another band, Bow Wow Wow and to create a subculture around them (Sun , sea and piracy?). It failed. He certainly generated some outrage which I don’t want to go into here , and it certainly leaves a nasty taste (further reading – the chsapter on McLaren in Simon Reynolds’ Rip It Up And Start Again) and Bow Wow Wow had a couple of hits, but there was nothing like the impact. But could McLaren’s supposed tactics ever work? Have they ever? Sigue Sigue Sputnik tried it – a lot of hype, but ultimately the impact was very little. Any other examples?
I feel sorry for bands who have one hit because their song is used in an ad for a soft beverage or trousers, they never live it down and never seem to produce anything which appeals to the audience who bought the single. See The Rasmus, Babylon Zoo, Nick Kamen…
Babylon Zoo is a band I’ve looked up recently for some reason, probably lockdown boredom. That was a funny one because people who bought it claim they were cheated by the ad that only played the speeded-up rave section. But the record kept on selling well for weeks afterwards.. I’ll always remember them for the Brass Eye interview though – at least he seems to twig it’s a wind up unlike some https://youtu.be/m3XgouVH9-Y
All hype, no content? Transvision Vamp, perhaps.
Good call! All the cheesy bits of 70s punk and none of the good bits!
I think KLF were quite McLarenesque in their stunts and self-mythologising, and took it a bit further in many ways. More situationists
Can you imagine McLaren actually burning a pile of money?
It’s another really interesting question. Yes, there seems to be a lot of parallels in the underlying philosophy – society of the Spectacle and all that. But also key differences: punk’s “Everything is plastic and fake so destroy it” pose versus “Everything is fake and plastic so just revel in it”. Maybe that’s just the difference between the 70s and the late 80s, pre- and post- Thatcher, pre- and post- post-modernism – or just the advent of cheap sampling technology.
Perhaps their most McLaren inspired gesture was the manual they published onhow to get a number 1 single that they’d supposedly followed in order to get a number 1 with Doctorin; The TARDIS. I think I’m write in saying the manual was actually written after the fact much like Swindle. I think you’re rigfht though , there was always an earnest .taking-it-very-seriously-for-the-kids element in punk (The Clash again) that wasn’t there with KLF.
No. Although his son did recently cause a stink by burning a load of punk memorabilia of a similar value in protest at the punk 40th anniversary celebrations.
Only if it was monopoly money.
I love the whole KLF phenomenon. Bill Drummond worked with Ken Campbell on his stage production of the Illuminatus books. Definitely Situationists, and working in the whole tradition of the Illuminatus! books too, as self-described Discordians. They never really took themselves seriously, but I think that they fooled a lot of people along the way. The music was great too.
I don’t know a massive amount but I find Bill Drummond quite entertaining. I always liked the story that he was questioned about an idiosynctating tour schedule he’d organised when managing Echo & The Bunnymen. He pointed out that the schedule made perfect sense – if you joined the venues together on the map it made a rabbit’s head!
Sacking Glen Matlock & replacing him with someone who couldn’t play, but had the right image was a boy-band play.
After that they became a cover band circus. Entertaining for a while until things spiraled out of control.
All true which is why I only skimmed over that stuff – by that stage they seemed to fully become the McLaren hit factory. Official histories these days seem to end with Winterland just as with the Clash they end with the sacking of Jones.
Did Punk get rid of Rick Wakeman and his wizard’s hat? Punk actually co-incided with FM radio in the States, which had happily played long tracks and whole sides of albums, all being bought out by big syndicates that changed the format to a very strict playlist, nothing over four minutes, fade out at any guitar solo and play album bands but only the single from the album.
The record labels went along with this and insisted their rosta of 70′ dinasours must abandon prog and guitar solos with no track over 4 or 5 mins. Some bands had to comply for contractual obligation, some deliberately seeming to put the fans off buying the outcome, such as ELP’s cheesey album photo for ‘Love Beach’ or Yes with an album cover plastered with rotten tomatoes.
Then as soon as possible the bands split. Some after ten years together had one too many arguments anyway.
So many bands split, Zep, Purple, Sabs, Floyd, Tull, Yes, ELP, Crimson that for a while it looked like a game of musical chairs would make some great new bands ( half of yes & half of zep tried and gave up ).
The P of ELP got a band together with a plan to do a quick tour of the UK with a spot on the Whistle Test to let the fans know the bands existed.
That’s when punk had its effect. Even though they’d had a 2 hour Whistle Test special in 77, by 79 he was told they wouldn’t have old farts on anymore and all the student venues said the same. England was out of bounds for old farts.
That very Mr Wakeman was approached by the Geffen label to join a band, the company had already chosen a name and knew what the band would sound like even though none of the tentative members had yet to meet. Radio friendly soft rock as directed by the accountants. Wakeman didn’t join, but others did and were very successful for a few years pretending to be teenagers and having hit singles, nice videos for MTV.
It was the Sex Pistols and their concentration on singles that gave record companies an excuse to turn their dinasours into boy bands.
Much like the BBC not wanting to deal with the new alternative comedians but get the Oxford & Cambridge lot to spike their hair and carry on as before, the labels stuck with what they knew, just with new hairdo’s. Much of the New Wave looked suspiciously Old.
Yes, it was definitely a case of “Meet the New Wave, same as the Old Wave” as far as the music industry was concerned.
I wondered if anyone would take the wizard’s hat bait? I was being tongue in cheek there, the standard BBC 4 documentaries showing Rick Wakeman in wizard’s hat followed by “and then punk came along”.
Very interesting background that I wasn’t aware of though. Having lookedat a load of old clips there was obviously a big change with Whistle Test when Annie Nightingale was made the new presenter
Would that manufactured prog supergroup be Asia by any chance. They didn’t make much impact over here from what I remember but sold loads in the US.
Ironic that The Clash relented to record company pressure in 1982 and reduced their double album Rat Patrol From Fort Bragg to a single album with most of the songs cut in length, resulting in Combat Rock.. “Does everything have to be as long as a raga?” as Bernie Rhodes famously said.
I think the supergroup may have been UK, which featured Bill Bruford and John Wetton and which Rick Wakeman was asked to join.
The first UK album, recorded before Bruford and Holdsworth quit, is excellent. I play it a fair bit.
Funnily enough I’ve just had an article recommended on my browser , seemingly at random, about Rick Wakeman – “The Yes keyboardist defined Spinal Tap–esque excess, until he staked everything on his eccentric dream of an Arthurian rock opera on ice”.