\u201cThere was a chap called Johnny at the Virgin branch in Marble Arch,\u201d Peel told me. \u201cHe used to let me take records out on approval, and I took the first Ramones LP out, just \u2019cause it looked interesting. The idea of tracks that were a minute and 20 seconds long \u2013 what? You know, having spent the last two or three years trying to avoid listening to Genesis and Yes and all that kind of stuff, it was just so refreshing.\u201d<\/p>\n
At the first gigs I attended, no one quite knew what to wear. Most had ripped-up or spray-painted their old clothing, stencilling band names, song lyrics or slogans on them in imitation of the self-made gear worn by bands such as the Clash and Generation X. The key thing was not to look like anyone else \u2013 my own favourite example being the person who stood in front of me at a sparsely attended 1977 X-Ray Spex gig in Portsmouth wearing an ancient fireproof protective suit made of heavy asbestos fabric, complete with visor, who of necessity remained immobile and no doubt stiflingly hot throughout the performance. Down on the south coast, we never saw anyone wearing the wildly over-priced punk clothing sold by McLaren and Vivienne Westwood<\/a> from their shop, Seditionaries in Chelsea, and couldn\u2019t have afforded it anyway. When I interviewed TV Smith, the lead singer of first-generation punk band the Adverts, and asked about the clothing of those days, he stressed the importance of things that were home-made rather than bought.<\/p>\n \u201cThe whole ethic was the do-it-yourself thing, whether it was clothes or records,\u201d said Smith. \u201cIf you were wearing something you\u2019d done just one thing to, then that\u2019s your thing, it\u2019s not the thing out of the shop anymore, you\u2019ve made it your own. I don\u2019t think you make your statement off a coat hanger.\u201d<\/p>\n Similarly, Barry Miles \u2013 then writing for the NME, and the first person to interview the Clash \u2013 later told me: \u201cI was always very suspicious of the Pistols, and McLaren\u2019s relationship to fashion and the King\u2019s Road. It just seemed to me that you\u2019re never likely to get a revolution starting in a dress shop.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n McLaren and Westwood were trying hard to stir up an extreme reaction, creating deliberately provocative designs involving swastikas, pictures of Karl Marx, naked gay cowboys or leather \u201cCambridge rapist\u201d masks, baiting \u201crespectable\u201d society and daring it to take offence. In this, they succeeded, probably beyond their wildest dreams. Jordan, their shop assistant, would commute daily to London wearing see-through clothing, and in a 1976 fashion interview for the short-lived newspaper Bailey and Lichfield\u2019s Ritz, said that what she was wearing was \u201cthe only outfit I have that really has much meaning to it and really gets me into 100 per cent trouble every time. It\u2019s got Nazi stuff all over it. I get thrown out of pubs wearing this outfit.\u201d Given that the average 50-something pub-goer would have been old enough to have fought in the war, that was hardly surprising.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cThere was a chap called Johnny at the Virgin branch in Marble Arch,\u201d Peel told me. \u201cHe used…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":48347,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[2],"tags":[13,956,5460,24273,4680,12412,24274,24271,330,24272,333],"class_list":["post-48346","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-britain","tag-britain","tag-culture","tag-culture-wars","tag-john-lydon","tag-non-fiction","tag-pop-music","tag-rock-music","tag-sex-pistols","tag-standard","tag-the-who","tag-us-content"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@UnitedKingdom\/116635950449345759","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48346","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48346"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48346\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/48347"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48346"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48346"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48346"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}