Contents

In Memoriam

Introduction

The Dates

Chapter One: Vive le Rock … ’N’ Roll

Chapter Two: Anarchy In The UK

Chapter Three: Nothing, A Rude Word

Chapter Four: See You In The Mirror

Chapter Five: The Filth And The Fury

Chapter Six: Who Are These Punks?

Chapter Seven: From Norwich To Nowhere

Chapter Eight: Sex Pistols Will Play

Chapter Nine: We Are Ruled By None

Chapter Ten: A Day At The Circus

Chapter Eleven: Sinners At The Cinema

Chapter Twelve: Our Friends Electric

Chapter Thirteen: Plymouth Ho!

Epilogue: The Last Supper

What Happened To …?

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Copyright

In Memoriam

Malcolm McLaren
1946 – 2009

Joe Strummer
1952 – 2002

Johnny Thunders
1952 – 1991

Jerry “Niggs” Nolan
1946 – 1992

Rolf “Nils” Stevenson
1953 – 2002

Dave Goodman
1951 – 2005

Tracie O’Keefe
1960 – 1978

Bill Grundy
1923 – 1993

Sid Vicious
1957 – 1979

Vive le Rock … ’N’ Roll

Contrary to Sex Pistols legend, the destination board on the coach that pulled away from the kerb outside the Pistols’ W1 HQ on Denmark Street on Friday, December 3, 1976, didn’t read “Nowhere” or “Boredom” like the twin coaches adorning the back of the ‘Pretty Vacant’ picture sleeve the following July, but was – with no irony intended – left blank. But while such portentous overtones make for interesting reading, it is worth remembering that any chartered coach would leave its destination board blank if it wouldn’t be stopping off en route to pick up paying passengers. That said, however, following the Sex Pistols’ now-legendary appearance on the Today show two days earlier, it’s a wonder Sir Reg Goodwin, the residing leader of the Greater London Council, didn’t order Sex Pistols’ manager Malcolm McLaren to daub red crosses on the coach’s side panels to warn the soon-to-be outraged citizens of the towns and cities on the tour’s original 19-date itinerary of the foul-mouthed Sex Pistols’ impending approach.

Edgar Allan Poe’s Prince Prospero staged elegant masquerade balls to keep the “Red Death” away from his castle walls, but Goodwin and the rest of Britain’s outraged councillors resorted to less fanciful means in their determination to do everything within their collective powers to keep the Sex Pistols and their pogoing, ill-mannered ilk away from their cosy realms. Indeed, Glasgow’s reigning Lord Provost, Peter McCann, drolly declared that “Scotland had enough hooligans of its own without importing them from across the border”, and was so resolute in his determination to keep the Sex Pistols away from his fair city that he revoked the Glasgow Apollo’s entertainment licence for the night in question.

Had it not been for the Sex Pistols’ now legendary appearance on Today that wintry Wednesday evening in early December 1976, it’s likely no one would even remember Thames TV’s early evening regional news magazine programme which followed directly after the national ITV news at 6p.m. As with every other weekday, the line-up for that evening’s show would have been mapped out in advance at a production meeting earlier in the day. As ever, it focused on the national news topics of concern to Londoners, specifically the passing of the Criminal Law Bill aimed at doing away with jury trials for minor offences such as disturbance of the peace or petty theft, and covered prominent local issues from the pages of London’s flagship newspaper, the Evening Standard. Given that Today immediately preceded Thames’ early-evening light entertainment schedule, the show would usually end with a warm-hearted tale or a music clip to put the viewing public in a more relaxed mood.

That particular evening’s show was set to end with an extended clip of the promo video for Queen’s latest single, ‘Somebody To Love’, which was already riding high in the pop chart. However, Today’s producer, Mike Housego, was looking for somebody to blame on being made aware that owing to an oversight the video hadn’t actually been given clearance for broadcast by the all-important Musicians’ Union. Other reports on an evening eternally steeped in controversy suggest that Queen had been forced to pull out because their flamboyant frontman, Freddie Mercury, was still recovering from major dental treatment. But this doesn’t really stand up under scrutiny because it implies that Queen were to perform their latest single live in the studio, and a group busy rehearsing for their first world tour – set to commence in the US the following month – was surely beyond miming on tea-time television.

Regardless of the reason for Queen’s eleventh-hour withdrawal, the clock was ticking and Housego suddenly found himself with a three-minute hole to fill. As Queen were signed to EMI, which had a 50 per cent stake in Thames TV, he put a call in to EMI’s offices in Manchester Square to speak with the label’s head of promotions, Eric “Monster” Hall. While Hall was anxious to help – if only to make amends for the glaring omission in forgetting to get the video cleared for broadcasting – there was little he could realistically do at such short notice.

“Queen and Freddie Mercury cancelled their appearance on Today, so the programme came to me looking for someone else,” confirmed Hall later. “I suggested trying the Sex Pistols who’d just signed to EMI. I never liked the Sex Pistols’ music, but I always knew they were going to be ‘monster’”

Another enduring urban myth surrounding the Pistols is that it was the desperation of the hour which led Eric Hall to propose the Sex Pistols as a possible replacement but according to Brian Southall’s highly informative book Sex Pistols: 90 Days At EMI, it was in fact Housego who enquired about the group’s availability. EMI held significant shareholding in Thames and he would have been privy to the insider gossip at Manchester Square where everyone at the label who was involved in promoting the Sex Pistols believed the group was capable of becoming the next Beatles.

At first glance – and given what we all now know about the Sex Pistols’ short-lived turbulent career – this may seem like an idle boast. Nevertheless, it’s worth remembering that prior to taking the world by storm The Beatles were just another rough and ready beat combo cutting their musical teeth on Hamburg’s notorious Reeperbahn – and enjoying everything that the city’s red-light area had to offer. Back in Liverpool, too, they wore leather jackets, cursed on stage and adopted an all-for-one gang mentality that in hindsight seems not unlike the punk credentials of the Pistols.

Malcolm, however, hadn’t the slightest inclination of grooming the Sex Pistols to become the new “Fab Four” or England’s answer to The Monkees (who were of course America’s manufactured answer to The Beatles). While there is a strong argument that he wanted to create the Bay City Rollers of outrage – “Shang-a-lanarchy in the UK” – the only real design he had for the Pistols was one which would enable him to promote SEX (as his shop was now called), and sell lots of T-shirts and bondage trousers into the bargain. But of course, how Malcolm found himself managing the group in the first place is a necessary diversion to understanding the origins of the Anarchy Tour.

“It was fate that I stumbled upon a hole in the wall at the darkest end of the King’s Road that they called the World’s End,” McLaren would state in Q magazine’s Never Mind The Jubilee Punk Special. “There I ran a shop which sold vestiges from the past, ruins from the fifties, records and clothes that were truly authentic, that were indebted to pop culture but also soon became pop culture themselves.

“To begin with that shop was just a haven for myself and a few friends. But soon under a variety of names and guises it attracted a whole group of people, who were disenchanted with the world around them. They would come and sit in the shop. They wanted to be a part of this thing we were creating.”

At the time of the Anarchy Tour, Malcolm Robert Andrew McLaren was 30 years old, and an experienced trouble-maker. He was born and raised in Stoke Newington, north London, which at the time was a respectable, solid Jewish neighbourhood. His parents had separated when he was just 18 months old, his mother Emily preferring to spend illicit weekends in Monte Carlo with the new man in her life – Selfridge’s supremo, Sir Charles Clore – while Malcolm and four-year-old brother Stuart were being raised by their maternal grandmother, Rose Corre.

Other than seeing him develop an effete ‘Little Lord Fauntleroy’ persona, the absence of a father figure appears to have had no adverse effect on Malcolm. Although both boys were largely ignored by their mother, Malcolm enjoyed the greater share of Grandma Rose’s affections, and rather than follow Stuart into primary education he persuaded Rose to teach him from her cosy front parlour.

The old adage about leading a horse to water perfectly sums up Malcolm’s early schooling, for although his mother managed to wrestle him from her mother’s clutches and deliver him to a “proper” place of learning, she was left powerless when he failed to take any interest in the school’s curriculum. In a last desperate attempt to get him through his 11+ exam, which in those days was the only means for those from a less-than-privileged background to advance to grammar school, she hired a private tutor. But the plan backfired as taking on double helpings of something he already despised with a passion was anathema to a firebrand like Malcolm, who deliberately frustrated all attempts to further his learning and duly failed the exam.

Malcolm McLaren outside Let It Rock

When Malcolm left school in the summer of 1961 he had just two O levels to show for his efforts. There followed shorts stints having to work for a living – first at Sandeman’s Port & Sherry wine merchants in Orange Street, Piccadilly, and then as a retail clerk at a West End haberdashery in the Burlington Arcade – before he swallowed his resentment at the education system and returned to schooling in the spring of 1963, enrolling as a part-time student at St. Martins School of Art where the Sex Pistols would make their live debut some 12 years later. In order to return to full-time education he would require another two O level passes, and so having gained the necessary qualifications by taking a summer “booster” course at a school in Edgware, he enrolled at Harrow Art School where he befriended Gordon Swire, whose striking elder sister, Vivienne, was of course to play such a significant role in his life.

Following on from Harrow – by which time he’d become a father – Malcolm enrolled at the Croydon College of Art and Design to study painting. Whilst there, he participated in the so-called “Croydon Student Sit-In” of June 1968, in which he and 300 or so of his fellow students barricaded themselves within the college’s South Norwood annexe in imitation of their Parisian counterparts who’d brought France to a virtual standstill, and forced De Gaulle into dissolving the National Assembly.

His next school was Goldsmiths, where aside from studying film and photography, he embarked on an affair with Helen Mininberg¹* – later Helen Wellington-Lloyd – and married a Turkish-French student called Jocelyn Hakim so she could remain in Britain and continue with her studies. Malcolm supposedly used the £50 Hakim had paid him to ensure that he arrived at Lewisham Registrar Office at the appointed hour to fund his Goldsmiths student project, while the £2,000 it would subsequently take to secure a divorce inevitably fell to Grandma Rose.

During the summer of 1969, Malcolm attempted to ingratiate himself with his fellow Goldsmiths students by unveiling plans to stage a free music festival – to be staged in the amphitheatre situated to the rear of the college’s art annex – with an impressive line-up boasting both The Pretty Things and King Crimson. Not surprisingly, news of the festival spread across London’s college circuit and come the day of the festival some 20,000 students descended on Goldsmiths. As the disgruntled masses grew more restless when each and every one of the named acts failed to show, those in authority tried to maintain order as best they could, but with thousands of lager-fuelled freeloaders helping themselves to whatever they could stash and carry, the day quickly descended into chaos.

Having miraculously escaped expulsion over the festival debacle, Malcolm decided to keep a low profile and concentrate on his student project – a conceptual film based on London’s Oxford Street, and the dehumanising effect of the consumer market – for which he borrowed Goldsmiths’ one and only functioning camera. Although a film of sorts was slowly taking shape, Malcolm inevitably lost interest in Oxford Street’s anarchic history, and instead focused his attention on his all-time rock ’N’ roll hero Billy Fury, who’d been managed by Larry Parnes, and had enjoyed run of UK Top 10 hits between 1960 and 1965.

The ideas may have flowed freely, but Jocelyn Hakim’s £50 had long since been spent. After one last desperate – and fruitless – attempt to raise finance from Larry Parnes, Malcolm shelved the film and drew a finite line under his art school wanderings by walking away from Goldsmiths. Though a lack of funding had forced Malcolm to put his film project on ice, those closest to him fully expected him to reactivate his filmic passions at some point in the future. He just needed another vehicle to finance his ambitions.

The Sex Pistols and others have gone on record saying how the not-so-Svengali-like Malcolm panicked in the immediate wake of the Today show. His immediate thought, however, would have been, “How does this affect me?” for despite the group having secured a recording contract and released a single, the shop was still his main priority. While Vivienne was a dab hand with a needle and thread, they still needed the raw materials with which to make their clothes, and there was a possibility that their suppliers might cease deliveries – in a fit of moral indignation on learning he was the Pistols’ manager.

In the Never Mind The Sex Pistols DVD, Malcolm claims to have been unmoved when EMI terminated the Sex Pistols’ contract in January 1977 as there was “always another whore further down the street”. This, of course, was his view three decades after the event, and if the music industry had deigned to close its collective legs on the Pistols then he’d have been forced to go cap-in-hand to an independent label such as Stiff or Chiswick – which would have been anathema to Malcolm. Even if – though neither Malcolm nor EMI Records MD Leslie Hill made any mention of it at the time – Richard Branson is to be believed and he did make an offer to take the Sex Pistols off of EMI’s hands the day after the Pistols’ appearance on Today, having to do business with “Mr Pickle” – as Malcolm referred to Branson – at such an early stage in the Sex Pistols’ career without the sizeable A&M advance shoring up his defences, would have been equally unbearable for Malcolm.

Though McLaren was undoubtedly guilty of gilding the lily in his self-aggrandisement of his role in the Today saga, not even he could have predicted the societal backlash against the Pistols. It wasn’t so much a knee-jerk reaction as a tectonic shift. His fascination with the Paris riots of May 1968 – which he subsequently claimed to have witnessed first-hand – is of course well documented. While he was under no illusion that the British government would follow France’s lead by bringing in the Army to quell a major riot, his active participation in the Croydon sit-in, coupled with the Goldsmiths festival fiasco, would had given him an insight into how those in authority reacted in the face of youthful belligerence.

It was Malcolm, after all, who christened the group in the knowledge that the name alone would inspire – at the very least – a degree of disdain or – even better – outrage. “Taking their name partly from the shop, SEX, I then added the word Pistols,” he told Q magazine. “I was looking for something with sexual implications, a name that could act as a metaphor. Here was a group, the Sex Pistols, that would and did shoot down anything we didn’t like, which in our case was absolutely everything.”

SEX wasn’t your average high street fashion boutique, at least not in mid-seventies Britain. It tended to attract an unusual clientele, one of whom was a 19-year-old Shepherd’s Bush reprobate called Steve Jones. When Steve – a self-confessed kleptomaniac – wasn’t on the lookout for a “five-fingered discount”, he could more often than not be found badgering Malcolm to manage Swanker (or The Strand, depending on whose account you believe), the group he and his mates Paul Cook and Warwick “Wally” Nightingale formed shortly after leaving school. Aside from a manager the trio were also in need of a bass player as Paul’s brother-in-law Del couldn’t be relied on in this capacity.

Though Malcolm hooked the trio up with his Saturday lad Glen Matlock, who just happened to be teaching himself bass, and was happy to occasionally put his hand in his pocket to pay for them to rent a rehearsal room at the Covent Garden Community Centre, it wasn’t until the summer of 1975 that he began to pay attention to what they were doing. The reason for this sudden surge in interest was due to his having witnessed the musical revolution that was rapidly taking shape on the other side of the Atlantic.

Having been seduced by the New York Dolls’ “awkward, trashy vibe” when the brash five-piece group – whom he subsequently described as being “the worst striptease rock act you could imagine” – visited 430 King’s Road while in London during a European jaunt the previous November, he’d left Vivienne to mind the store – and his old friend and business associate, Bernard Rhodes, to keep an eye on Steve’s group, while he jetted over to New York to try and reinvigorate the Dolls’ ailing career.

Despite being hailed the “Queens” of New York, the Dolls’ collective appetite for drink and drugs had exacted a heavy toll, and their once-promising career appeared to be in freefall. Indeed, the Dolls were little more than dead men walking on Malcolm’s arrival, and his decision to have them trade in their thrift store threads for the red patent leather ensembles Vivienne had crafted back in London, and play in front of a backdrop bearing the hammer and sickle at a time when American boys were coming home from Southeast Asia in body bags draped in the Stars and Stripes, would prove a red flag to an already bullish audience.

Unsurprisingly, Malcolm’s initial foray into music management wasn’t the success he might have hoped, but at least his American adventure had allowed him a glimpse into the future. Elton John, Fleetwood Mac, and The Eagles might still be packing them in at Madison Square Garden, but the next generation of rock fans was flocking to a seedy club called CBGBs situated on New York’s Lower East Side, where exciting new bands such as Television, Talking Heads and The Ramones – who cared little for musical proficiency – were taking rock ’N’ roll back to its roots. Naturally enough, Malcolm’s haberdasher’s eye wasn’t slow in taking note of the scene’s equally stripped-back fashions – particularly Television’s Rimbaud-esque bassist Richard Hell, whose hacked hair and ripped-up clothing would soon inspire a cultural revolution. After all, this was music by the kids, for the kids, and of the kids – and watching it all unfold in front of his eyes reminded him of what Steve Jones and his friends were doing back in London.

Steve Jones, Alan Jones, Chrissie Hynde, Sue Catwoman and Vivienne Westwood at the SEX shop

Malcolm knew he would have a limited time-frame – six months at the most – before news of what was happening across the pond filtered through to London. Having convinced the Dolls’ corkscrew-haired guitarist Sylvain Sylvain that his future lay in London fronting Steve’s group, he returned to London armed with Sylvain’s much-cherished cream-finish Gibson Les Paul guitar. Unbeknownst to Sylvain, however, when Malcolm boarded his plane at JFK Airport, he did so with a slip of paper bearing Richard Hell’s contact number nestled in his wallet. Indeed, by the time he’d gone through passport control at Heathrow he’d already decided that Sylvain was surplus to his requirements.

Malcolm’s first executive decision on taking the soon-to-be-rechristened Sex Pistols under his wing was to hand Sylvain’s Les Paul to a bemused Steve, thus indicating that Wally Nightingale’s days in the group were numbered. What Malcolm didn’t know, however, was that Richard Hell was using heroin as a stimulant for his poetry and songwriting, and that regardless of whatever promises Malcolm had made before leaving for the airport Hell soon opted to remain in New York where heroin was easily obtainable. Malcolm couldn’t even revert back to his original intention of bringing Sylvain over in Hell’s stead, as the guitarist had reunited with the Dolls’ singer, David Johansen, for a revamped New York Dolls’ tour of Japan.

New York Dolls

However, Malcolm wasn’t too disheartened. With Steve furtively learning guitar, he let it be known that his errant charges were on the lookout for a charismatic frontman.

Not long after he and Malcolm visited Glasgow to meet with leather and rubber suppliers, Bernie Rhodes made Malcolm aware of a bunch of tearaways who were making a nuisance of themselves by terrorising the tourists on the King’s Road, and whose leader was a kid with hacked-off green hair and a manic-eyed, 1,000-yard stare. Vivienne had also seen the kid in question in the shop. Though Malcolm had yet to see this “Spiky John” character for himself, he instinctively knew Steve’s group had found their ideal frontman.

As it turned out Malcolm didn’t have to wait long before coming face to face with John Lydon, the acerbic 19-year-old north Londoner who would ultimately become his bête noire. Glen, who’d encountered John and his Clockwork Orange-esque coterie of friends in the shop one August Saturday afternoon, cajoled John into meeting up with Steve, Paul and Malcolm at the Roebuck Pub²* – situated a couple of blocks further down the King’s Road – later that same evening.

Years later, when interviewed for The Filth & The Fury movie, Steve Jones – who inadvertently gave John his “Rotten” moniker owing to the state of his “dog-end teeth” – would opine that Malcolm and John’s constant butting of heads throughout the former’s tenure as Sex Pistols manager was due to their both being Capricorns. Of course, Steve’s astrology was obviously a little hazy as John and Malcolm were in fact born under Aquarius – which may account for the hot air both were known to spout on occasion.

That night at the Roebuck John drove Malcolm to distraction with his feigned disinterest. Steve was equally riled at John’s obtuse manner and came within an E-string of kissing his subsequent career goodbye, but Malcolm persevered and pressed John, whose singing he likened to an out-of-tune violin, into agreeing to an ad hoc audition at the shop. As there were no instruments to hand, Steve, Paul and Glen sat watching as John warbled along to Alice Cooper’s ‘I’m Eighteen’ from the SEX jukebox, with a plastic showerhead serving as a surrogate microphone. “Rotten looked the part with his green hair, but he couldn’t sing,” Steve later told Punk. “Then again, we couldn’t play, so it was OK.”

Bernie Rhodes was an interested observer. “Steve, Paul and Glen weren’t sure about John at first, but I said to them, ‘Well, can any of you write lyrics? You need him,’” he recalls. “Steve and Paul were already thick with each other, and Glen – being middle-class – thought that he and John could form a similar alliance … if John liked The Beatles.”

Accompanying John that night was his sidekick, the mild-mannered John Gray. “We’d only gone to the Roebuck to meet with Steve and Paul,” he told the author. “And as Glen had told us the group was rehearsing somewhere over Bermondsey Wharf, it never crossed my mind that John would be expected to audition.”

Malcolm returned to the flat on Nightingale Lane where he, Vivienne and their two boys were living at the time and no doubt regaled Vivienne with a rundown of the evening’s events. But when Vivienne subsequently met John, she told Malcolm he’d got the wrong guy. She had another “Spiky John” in mind who would enter the picture soon enough.

Gray was also on hand to accompany John to the Crunchy Frog pub in Rotherhithe in south-east London for a live rehearsal. Glen and Paul were happy enough to give John his chance, but Steve was still unmoved and he’d convinced the others that John was a timewaster who probably wouldn’t even show up. But show up John did, and his doing so is testament to how much he wanted the gig. Walking around Bermondsey – Millwall territory – dressed as he was, and his and Gray’s being “Gooners” (Arsenal fans) to boot, was literally risking life and limb. Malcolm had been beside himself on hearing the planned rehearsal hadn’t gone ahead, but designated peacemaker Glen made the requisite call to John, and having withstood a tirade of abuse, he convinced John that his, Steve’s and Paul’s failure to show up on the night had just been a simple misunderstanding.

With the clock ticking Malcolm was anxious to get the group to the next stage, and so rather than have them wasting time schlepping across London to short-term rehearsal rooms, he handed over the £1,000 deposit for a two-storey rehearsal space at the rear of Denmark Street in the West End. Back in the fifties and sixties, Denmark Street – colloquially known as “Tin Pan Alley” – had been the hub of England’s vibrant pop scene, and it was from here that pop impresario Larry Parnes – who’d managed Malcolm’s ultimate musical hero, Billy Fury – had run his musical empire.

Anarchy In The UK

On Thursday, November 6, 1975, after three months of solid rehearsing, the Sex Pistols were unleashed onto an unsuspecting audience when they played support to a rock’n’roll revivalist combo called Bazooka Joe – featuring a future Adam Ant on bass – at St. Martins School of Art on Charing Cross Road where Glen was enrolled as a student. To commemorate the 30th anniversary of this particular slice of musical history, Glen would one day return to his alma mater to unveil a blue plaque, but on the night itself, the Pistols’ “don’t-give-a-fuck” attitude ruffled a few feathers and someone from either the college – or more likely Bazooka Joe’s entourage – pulled the plug midway through their 30-minute set.

“We was going really mad cos this was our first gig, and we was all really nervous,” Paul Cook said in Sex Pistols: The Inside Story. “And suddenly you had this great big hand pop out, and someone pulled the plug out like. Someone switched the power off.”

The Sex Pistols, however, remained unbowed, and at their second outing at the Central School of Art & Design in Holborn the following evening they were allowed to complete their set without interruption. Yet while Glen was responsible for booking these debut shows, once the group was active it was Malcolm who busied himself with either booking or blagging them support slots at various colleges on the London circuit, both in the run-up to Christmas and into the New Year.

Andy Czezowski, who would go on to open London’s seminal punk haunt, the Roxy, some 12 months later, was already aware of the Sex Pistols owing to his being Malcolm and Vivienne’s accountant. He subsequently said in Jon Savage’s punk opus England’s Dreaming that at the early Sex Pistols shows the audience reaction was “50 per cent indifference, 25 per cent hostility, 20 per cent hilarity, and five per cent immediate empathy”.

Amongst that insightful five per cent were some who were instantly attuned to what the Sex Pistols were doing and – though not having yet bought the T-shirt – were astute enough to know it was time to roll over to the other side of the bed.

Of course, the Sex Pistols playing in and around London didn’t impinge too much on Malcolm’s time but when the group began making noises about playing further afield – or “Bumblebeeland” as he referred to the provinces – to further enhance their reputation, he co-opted an acquaintance, Nils Stevenson, into serving as road manager.

The Pistols in the studio, left to right: Johnny, Paul, Steve and Glen

“Malcolm managed to push himself between Vivienne and me and I found myself much more interested in him,” Nils said in Punk. “We talked and talked drunkenly about doing this club together. Then, one night, he mentioned that he managed this group who he said were going to be the next Bay City Rollers. I thought ‘That sounds like shit. What are you talking about?’”

Dalston-born Nils, who at the time was running a second-hand clothes stall on Beaufort Street market further along the King’s Road, first came onto Malcolm’s radar owing to his infatuation with Vivienne. Nils says that he and Vivienne went out on a couple of dates, but even had Malcolm been the jealous type then Vivienne’s being some 13 years older than Nils meant the would-be lothario’s ardour would go unrequited.

Like Malcolm, Nils was an art school dropout. Neither was he averse to living on his wits whenever the situation arose, which of course made him the perfect candidate for what Malcolm had in mind when offering him the job. An added bonus of Nils’ acceptance came with his bringing along his older brother Ray, a professional rock photographer of some renown having served an apprenticeship of sorts on the mid-sixties scene, who came out of self-imposed exile working as a cab driver to serve as the Sex Pistols’ in-house photographer.

Nils’ first exposure to the Sex Pistols live experience came when they got an unexpected break supporting current media darlings Eddie & the Hot Rods at the Marquee Club on Wardour Street on Thursday, February 12, 1976. For everyone in the Pistols’ camp, the support slot was seen as a means of paving the way to their getting a shot at headlining the prestigious Soho venue. But an altercation with the Hot Rods’ management over John’s wilful mistreatment of the headliners’ PA led to their being banned from the club – the first of several expulsions the group would accrue in the months ahead.

Having only previously met with Steve and Paul – whom he subsequently described as being “just a couple of football hooligans” – Nils wasn’t entirely sure why Malcolm was so excited about the group, but from the moment John walked on stage at the Marquee he was utterly transfixed – and by the end of the first song, he knew he just had to be involved.

In one of those rare quirks of fate that can never be properly explained away, the Sex Pistols’ “break” came about not because of their performance – as electrifying as it undoubtedly was – but rather due to Steve inadvertently grabbing the attention of NME staff writer Neil Spencer (who was there primarily to review the Hot Rods), with his now-legendary “We’re not into music, we’re into chaos” comment. The banner headline to Spencer’s subsequent review in the February 21, 1976 edition of NME, which tellingly made no mention whatsoever of the Hot Rods, was the first to gave notice that things were perhaps never going to be the same again: ‘Don’t Look Over Your Shoulder But The Sex Pistols Are Coming’.

The Sex Pistols were indeed coming – and were doing so with all guns blazing. Aside from playing London’s familiar rock’n’roll haunts such as the Marquee and the Nashville Rooms – where they first encountered their soon-to-be-in-house sound engineer Dave Goodman – they were also content to play strip clubs, ballrooms and the occasional disco. The most significant breakthrough, however, came with their being offered a Tuesday night residency at the 100 Club on Oxford Street.

Away from the capital, they put in plenty of legwork traversing the highways and byways of the land, taking their “Do-It-Yourself” message to the provincial masses. Of course, the majority of said masses remained largely unmoved – in some venues the group was asked to stop playing because it was interfering with either billiards or bingo – but there was always a smattering of kids in the audience who were fed up of hearing about how great rock’n’roll had been back in the day, and who were waiting for something new that they could latch onto and call their own. Amongst these cliques there would be one or two aspiring musicians who – like their clued-up counterparts in London – latched on to the Pistols’ message and changed their own game plan accordingly. Though no one would have guessed it from listening to Radio One, or watching Top Of The Pops, ever so slowly a scene began to develop.

Somewhat apocryphally, the first indication that a counter-cultural revolution was underway came on Sunday, July 4, 1976, when the then five-piece Clash made their live debut supporting the Sex Pistols at the Black Swan in Sheffield. On discovering that Malcolm had no intention of offering him a co-management deal with the Pistols – a deal he believed was his rightful reward for having looked after the band in Malcolm’s absence – Bernard Rhodes had put The Clash together to rival the Pistols.

“I loved Malcolm, but he fucked me over on the T-shirts, and then he fucked me over on the Pistols,” Bernard Rhodes says today. “I was the one looking after them whilst he was in New York with the New York Dolls. When he came back to London he was like, ‘It’s my group’.

“I thought, ‘Right, if that’s the way you want to play it,’ I’m gonna fuck you over. And I did it by planting a bomb with a slow-burning fuse under his chair. A green-haired bomb called John. Because I knew immediately that John would fuck Malcolm over. He was obnoxious and southern Irish, so he had a chip on his shoulder.”

Like Malcolm, Bernard – or Bernie as he was known during his tenure as The Clash’s manager – was of Jewish descent. He’d been raised in London’s East End by his Russian émigré mother who, unlike his father had managed to escape the Jewish pogroms in the mother country. Within weeks of arriving in London, she’d purchased a forged birth certificate on the black market to establish citizenship in the UK, as well as escape possible deportation back to Russia. During the late fifties and early sixties, she worked as a seamstress for several tailors on Savile Row, including Huntsman & Co and Hawes & Curtis. It was while she was working at Hawes & Curtis that John Pearse – who a decade or so later would found the renowned King’s Road psychedelic fashion emporium Granny Takes A Trip – was apprenticed to her.

“I grew up on the streets with prostitutes and black blues musicians keeping an eye out for me whilst my mother made suits for people like Cary Grant,” says Bernard. “Being from the streets as they were is why I got on so well with John and Steve.”

By the summer of 1963, having emulated Malcolm by enrolling at art school, Bernard moved into a flat with Pearse in St. John’s Wood, which – thanks to Mick Jagger having one of his mistresses ensconced in the flat above – became a hangout for a colourful coterie of flower-powering misfits such as Donovan, The Who’s Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey, and the soon-to-be-famous Marc Bolan.

Malcolm and Bernard first encountered and befriended each other on London’s so-called sixties Soho coffee bar scene – particularly the 21’s Coffee Bar on Old Compton Street where Britain’s rock’n’roll pioneers Cliff Richard and Tommy Steele had first started out. When Malcolm and Vivienne first set up stall at 430 King’s Road, Bernard, who among his many ventures was running a stall in the nearby Antiquarius Antiques Market selling second-hand leather jackets, would put forward ideas for T-shirts, the most notable being one with the slogan ‘You’re Gonna Wake Up One Morning And Know Which Side Of The Bed You’ve Been Lying On’, which became the UK punk scene’s early manifesto.

“Malcolm and Vivienne were jealous of me because my second-hand clothing was shifting as fast as I put it out on the stall, faster than theirs,” he says. “They didn’t like that, and that’s why they brought me in.”

Needless to say, while Malcolm was happy to assimilate Bernard’s ideas into his own agenda, he’d flatly refused to make Bernard a partner in either SEX, or the Sex Pistols.

Two days after The Clash made their debut, The Damned supported the Sex Pistols at the 100 Club, which owing to the Pistols’ residency was by now regarded as the as yet unnamed scene’s spiritual home. “The gigs at the 100 Club were good because they were regular gigs,” Paul Cook reflected in Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs. “We relied on it each week as a regular place. I suppose that’s what actually started the punk movement going.”

In the Never Mind The Sex Pistols DVD Malcolm states that he hadn’t wanted to sign the group to a record label – or indeed, even to release any records. However, once Melody Maker and Sounds began devoting significant column inches to the nascent UK punk scene – in which both were lauding the Pistols as the scene’s kingpins – Malcolm couldn’t allow one of the bandwagon jumpers to take over the reins. The first step in exposing “London’s best-kept secret” to a wider audience came in arranging for Dave Goodman to record some demos with the group so that he might then go out and solicit interst in their wares.

The Sex Pistols’ debut demo session – staged at renowned pop mogul Mickie Most’s Majestic Studios back in May – hadn’t produced the required results, so it was decided to record the group at Denmark Street, this being their natural habitat, so to speak. At the end of August, having despatched a tape of Goodman’s efforts to the leading lights in the music industry, Malcolm arranged a show at the Screen On The Green Cinema in Islington, north London, to showcase the Pistols’ live talents. “All the dates until then had been building up to the Screen On The Green,” Nils Stevenson told Punk. “That was when it all came together – the group, the audience, the event.”

Aside from screening a couple of Kenneth Anger movies, Malcolm invited The Clash, and Manchester’s proto-punksters, Buzzcocks, to augment the billing. However, what was initially viewed as a show of altruism on Malcolm’s part was soon seen for what it really was – a means of showing the assembled A&R teams that the Sex Pistols were the only real game in town. For while both The Clash and Buzzcocks’ sets suffered from poor sound, the problems with the PA were magically rectified for when the Pistols took to the stage. While sabotaging the PA to undermine the opposition is something of a time-honoured trick in the industry, Malcolm humiliated The Clash further still by having them provide the materials for – and erect – the makeshift stage, as well as go out and fly-post the posters.