The man who launched the Pistols - and got rid of elephant flares

Malcolm McLaren, who died this week, claimed too much credit as the Svengali of punk, but he was still a key cultural figure of modern times, writes HUGH LINEHAN

LOOK AT THE colour picture above, taken on London’s King’s Road in the summer of 1976, when punk rock was a phrase that had yet to appear in any newspaper. It’s a lovely day. Everyone looks very happy. The reaction of the “normal” people to left and right, all flares and Purdy haircuts, is indulgent, amused, bemused. Who are these strange creatures? And why are they wearing these ridiculous clothes? The smiling young people in the middle of the picture are probably thinking this: “We have come from the future, and we’re here to fucking kill you.”

If Malcolm McLaren’s sole achievement had been the elimination of elephant flares, then he would deserve the thanks of a generation but get a very small footnote in the history of popular culture. If his achievement was measured by the sales performance of The Sex Pistols (one Number One single, one chart-topping album over the course of 12 months or so), then he wouldn’t rank much higher.

So why should this rather absurd figure, with his endless self-aggrandising, his prating, grating voice, his inability to ever just shut up, deserve to be regarded as one of the most significant cultural figures of the late 20th century? Because in his own ridiculous, haphazard way, he did as much as anybody to invent the world in which, for better or worse, you and I still live.

It’s 35 years since McLaren latched on to a gaggle of oiks who were hanging around the shop he and his girlfriend Vivienne Westwood ran on the King’s Road, decided to call them The Sex Pistols, dressed them up in Teddy Boy suits, bondage trousers and sloganeering T-shirts, and launched them on a Britain as remote from us now as the Blitz was then.

The Sex Pistols were an incendiary device thrown in the face of a consensus culture that was on the point of falling apart. They accelerated and articulated that process perfectly. Anything that followed, in music, design, fashion, art, ideas, would be different because of that moment. (Better? Who knows? But definitely different.) McLaren didn’t actually invent or originate very much himself, but he was essential to making it all happen.

His ideas were often awful; before punk started, he had hastened the demise of The New York Dolls by dressing them in red leather and putting a hammer and sickle behind them on stage.

But he filched some considerably more interesting ideas (and the word “punk“) from a then little-known underground New York subculture, married them with his own background in 1960s artschool pranksterism, worked with Westwood to mash up 1950s British street style with S&M bondage outfits – and voilà! It all might have amounted to not very much, a minor chapter in the obscure annals of the long hangover of the 1960s counterculture, if the times had not been so ripe for some kind of change.

McLaren’s claims to Svengali status were patently ridiculous. He was no Colonel Tom Parker or Simon Cowell; his “puppets” were always lurching offstage and out of his control. His supposedly brilliant media manipulations were largely accidental.

Perhaps the biggest accident of all, he later acknowledged, was that The Sex Pistols were actually good. This wasn’t really part of the plan, and he soon managed to sabotage it by sacking Glen Matlock, who had written the tunes, replacing him with a photogenic young car wreck of a human being called John Beverly, who became Sid Vicious. As a manager he was a disaster; the whirlwind of violence and excess which he whipped up around The Sex Pistols damaged some people irretrievably and contributed to the sordid deaths of Vicious and Nancy Spungen. Somehow, though, other people’s talents kept coalescing around McLaren: Westwood’s fashion, Jamie Reid’s graphics, John Lydon’s performance style.

"He and Westwood had planned a hype which had become a real culture, through the collective effort of the people with whom they worked," wrote Jon Savage in England's Dreaming, the best account of the whole thing. "The burst of freedom that ensued could never have been predicted. In stating that this was no accident, but just the calculation of one author, McLaren unconsciously replaced freedom with a programmatic cynicism, which would infect English popular culture throughout the 1980s."

So what did it all amount to? The movement itself lasted barely two years; self-destruction, internal conflict and messy collapse were built into its DNA, after all. McLaren went on to have a couple of mildly successful pop moments in the early 1980s, then accepted the mantle of British National Treasure, with its accompanying media sinecures and consultancies (the mind does rather boggle at the fact that he was hired by Steven Spielberg as an adviser on The Color Purple).

Punk never sold that many records, although it spawned a thousand offshoots that did. The aesthetic devised on the King’s Road swiftly calcified into a banal tribal uniform and a philosophy of nihilistic mediocrity. But it sent an electric shock around the world whose lingering effects, for good and ill, can be seen to this day, in media, art and pop culture and behaviour. Malcolm McLaren flicked that switch.