Farewell, you grumpy old twat
Another week, another pop culture moment that makes you feel old. This week, it’s been the sad news that Malcolm Mclaren, the manager of the Sex Pistols, has lost his fight with cancer at the age of 64. My god, Malcolm Mclaren was 64? My first thought on reading that was surely that can’t be right?
But it was. The Silver Jubilee was a long, long time ago, kids. There’s teenagers alive to whom Punk Rock means Fall Out Boy, or the Offspring, or something. Strange indeed.
Let’s just take a moment, then, to remember that back in the seventies, Britain was screwed, both musically and culturally. Bin bags piled up in the streets, no-one had anything, rock music had disappeared up its own arse and was staring at the Dark Side of the Moon or Journeying to the Centre of the Earth. It was something done by rich people, or aliens. Society was stagnant and things were terrible.
And then came the Sex Pistols. A glorious, ranting, enraged mess of noise, filth, profanity and bodily fluids who hated everything around them, hated themselves, hated the establishment, hated their own audience. Where they went, anger, noise, barbarism, energy, change, anarchy, rebellion, shock and outrage followed in their wake.
They signed their record deal in front of Buckingham Palace and openly expressed their contempt for the monarch. And behind them (usually at a safe distance), Malcolm Mclaren stood smirking.
Just look at this picture of that signing:
Must We Throw This Sick Filth At Our Kids?
Notice who’s standing there, staring at the camera like he knows this picture is going to be on the front of every paper in the country the next day? Yup. He knew what he was doing, did McLaren. He looks like one of the band in that picture, and it’s clear that they were, in a lot of ways, his carefully selected weapon of choice. I’m not wanting to take anything away from John Lydon and the rest (I suspect if I did, Lydon would find me as I slept, rip off my head and gob down my throat, kick my sorry corpse till it stopped twitching, using my head as a kind of twisted glove puppet to make me apologise for my disrespect), but I think that everyone knows that McLaren’s flair for publicity was a vital part of the Sex Pistol’s success.
As England lay Dreaming, languished in the depths of suburban misery, McLaren gave the Sex Pistols a chance to wake it up, and reminded us that Rock and Roll could still be truly shocking. That means Punk Rock, if not his idea, is at least partly his fault.
For that, I for one salute the grumpy old cunt.
