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There was a bit in the piece about Jamie Reid, the artist responsible for the ransom-note typography on the Pistols’ record sleeves and for the image of the queen with a safety pin through her nose.
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Sharply written by Michael Watts, it covered the aftermath of the Pistols’ split at the end of a disastrous American tour the fitful struggle to make a Sex Pistols movie McLaren’s dalliance with managing the Slits the fatal stabbing of Nancy Spungen, holed up with Sid Vicious in the Chelsea Hotel, and Sid’s death after a heroin overdose a few months later and the court case in which Rotten, eventually joined by Cook and Jones, sued McLaren for misuse of their earnings. I’d missed the first two instalments, but it didn’t matter: I read and reread the piece that summer. What clinched it for me was a profile I read in Melody Maker in June 1979, the third part of ‘The Rise and Fall of Malcolm McLaren’. Certainly it was the non-musicians involved in the project – McLaren and Johnny Rotten – who captured my imagination. McLaren liked to claim that Pistols fans had been far more excited by the media provocations and shock headlines he had conjured than by the band’s recordings.
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Publicity and presentation could be an art form in their own right. Throughout his career in pop, as manager of the New York Dolls, the Sex Pistols and Bow Wow Wow, and then as an unlikely recording artist himself, McLaren continually insisted that ideas were more important than music. The Swindle film laid out his purported plan as a how-to guide: ‘Remove any members of the group who show signs of developing musical ability … replace them with gimmicks designed purely to upset people.’ As a kid, I somehow enjoyed both the sensation of chaos transmitted by the Sex Pistols and the seductive idea that the whole thing had been a con masterminded by McLaren. The idea of the manager as band spokesman, an artist in his own right, was an innovation of the punk era, pioneered by McLaren and his one-time associate Bernie Rhodes, who represented the Clash. But he hadn’t featured so prominently in the coverage of his clients as McLaren did. (It was Matlock who wrote nearly all the group’s best tunes, only to be pushed out for being a Beatles-loving middle-class namby.) Andrew Loog Oldham, who managed the Rolling Stones, was the crucial precursor in grasping that bad publicity was useful – something to be actively sought, even fabricated. McLaren always seemed as crucial to the Sex Pistols as Johnny Rotten or Sid Vicious, eclipsing the group’s musical muscle: drummer Paul Cook, guitarist Steve Jones and bassist Glen Matlock. How I pored over the gatefold sleeve of The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle, covered in stills from the movie: the corpse of a freshly slaughtered baby deer (‘Who Killed Bambi?’ was the final track on the album) the Pistols associate Soo Catwoman staring down the camera, with feline spiked hair and make-up, naked but for the graffiti on her torso Vicious as a cartoon character, leering menacingly in a swastika T-shirt and McLaren himself, wearing a kilt, tartan jacket and ‘Cash from Chaos’ T-shirt. The façade cracks only at the end, as McLaren croons the final lines about entertainers’ need for applause: ‘But the hands we love so dear/are the hands we love to hear/are the hands that you give to us.’ He drags out the vowel sound in ‘us’ so that it becomes ‘the hands you give to arse’. But on ‘You Need Hands’, McLaren took a different tack: fidelity pushed to the point of parody, his smarmy delivery of sickly lyrics clad in schmaltzy orchestration. Elsewhere on the record, Sid Vicious too defiled showbiz with his punk take on ‘My Way’, twisting Sinatra’s swagger into psychopathic solipsism. We didn’t know the song had originally been written and performed by the light entertainer Max Bygraves, but intuited that McLaren’s version was an assault on the middle-aged and middle of the road. ‘You Need Hands’ was a perverse highlight on a double LP that my younger brothers and I listened to obsessively, despite the number of duds that had to be skipped along the way. I knew that rock managers didn’t usually sing on their bands’ records, but McLaren’s performance was in keeping with the aberrant profile of the Pistols, who broke the rules in every department: swearing on their records, vomiting at airports, cutting themselves onstage. The film itself, which came out fourteen months later, was a fable charting McLaren’s orchestration of the rise and fall of the band he managed, the Sex Pistols. His was the oily voice on ‘You Need Hands’, which appeared on The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle, a sort of soundtrack album released early in 1979. I first knew Malcolm McLaren as a singer.