Rock Is Sick and Living in London

So what about all the reports of teddy boys (1957-style greasers) fighting punks on King's Road? "The scene has been going on long enough to attract the idiots who believe the papers," he shouts in my ear. "They're just tryin' to live up to their image. Regular violence is a lie!" Perfectly on cue, the kid is slammed into my chest as another scuffle erupts on the dance floor. "'ere it comes again," he says, happily jumping back into the fray.

The Slits draw an encore and invite their opening act, Prefix, a male group who shave their marble white bodies in emulation of Iggy Pop, to jam on "Louie Louie." The audience likes it so much that several of them storm the stage and nearly succeed in toppling the eight-foot stacks of PA speakers before the security men beat them into submission.

Heading for the exit, I recognize the Sex Pistols' drummer, Paul Cook, also weaving his way outside. Unaccompanied, he is wearing a sleeveless T-shirt, straight-legged blue jeans and dilapidated sneakers. The nose is wide, the skin pallid. Conditioned by six months of reports about the Sex Pistols' proclivity for violence, I half expect him to assault me. But his hand is limp as we shake and his eyes do not meet mine when I introduce myself. He is, of all things, shy.

"It's just a laugh, not really that violent," he says when I ask about their dancing. "You can take ft which way you want: some laugh, some get paranoid. They want to prove they aren't posing."

"A lot of people have missed the satire," I say. "Some of the press are even trying to link you with the fascists."

"I can't be bothered with that shit," he replies. "It's just what they want to read into it. When we first started playing, before all the articles came out, people would come up and say they'd never seen anything so funny in their lives."

The next afternoon I spend reading clips in the Sex Pistols' office — two dingy gray rooms on the top floor of a small office building a few blocks from Piccadilly Circus. McLaren's assistants are also dingy and gray and do not introduce me to anyone. When they say hello, they do not shake hands or give a peck on the cheek; they choke each other. The three-foot clip file reflects a band so clouded in mythology that the truth is impossible to discern. This appears to be in everyone's interest — the press prints anything they can think up, the people are titillated in the midst of excruciatingly dull economic stories by reports that the younger generation is renaming itself Johnny Rotten and throwing up on old ladies, and the Sex Pistols' image as Forbidden Fruit is enhanced. This summer, however, the Pistols have been careening into overexposure in their homeland. The four major music weeklies — Melody Maker, New Musical Express, Record Mirror and Sounds — have mentioned them on the cover of almost every issue for months. Taking punk lyrics at their literal word, the dailies regularly proclaim the movement the end of Western Civilization. McLaren has since denounced them for "killing" the New Wave, which may have something to do with why he is letting me languish in my hotel room waiting for his phone calls rather than talk to the band.

All this for a group that has released three singles?

In the history of rock & roll, there is no stranger tale: in late 1971, Malcolm McLaren, then a 24-year-old art student, and his wife Vivian Westwood, who was either teaching or working for Social Security (she doesn't remember which), opened a boutique for teddy boys called Let It Rock. They started with little money, but the shop proved an enormous success because of their shrewd buying of vintage rock records in discount bins and unused stocks of old clothes. The teds' rigid conservatism proved boring, however, so McLaren and Westwood changed the name of their store to Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die and catered to the rockers, another cultural fragment that favored chains, black leather and motorcycles.

McLaren was not, he says, at all interested in contemporary rock music, but was greatly impressed by the swagger of the New York Dolls when they visited Too Fast one afternoon in 1974. He followed them to a Paris performance and, from November 1974 to June 1975, tried to manage them when their old management and record company were mired in feuds. Burying their old image as trendy transvestites, McLaren dressed them in red leather, draped their amplifiers with hammer and sickle flags and asked the question in their advertising, "What are the politics of boredom?" This proved less than a hit with both public and critics. The dolls hung it up forever in the middle of a gig in Florida, and McLaren flew back to England a sadder but wiser rock & roll manager.

Meanwhile, Westwood had changed the name of the boutique to Sex and was selling bondage clothes and T-shirts decorated with large rips and grotesque pornography (the government actually prosecuted them for their pictures). It became a hangout for budding punks who listened to the jukebox and stole the clothes. Among them were four proletarian kids — Steve Jones, Paul Cook, Glen Matlock and another guitar player — who wanted to start a band. McLaren suggested the name Sex Pistols. Jones began as the singer (Cook played drums, Matlock bass) but didn't know what to do with his hands, so they gave him a guitar, which he learned to play proficiently in two months. The other musician was given the boot, leaving an opening for a singer.