Suits You, Sir!

 1984 1992 2006

  

I. 

 

The modern suit - regarded in the early days as informal daywear comprising of jacket, trousers and, if a three-piece, a waistcoat  - has been around since at least the late 19th-century. 

 

Indeed, some fashion scholars trace the history of the suit back to the 17th-century and credit Charles II with being instrumental in bringing together the key components. Others think the main man was Regency dandy Beau Brummel, who helped establish Savile Row as the home of bespoke men's tailoring. 

      

Personally, I tend to think that the suit as we know it owes more to the rise of the Victorian business class and the industrial revolution. And what really interests me is how the suit developed in the 20th-century, particularly in the United States in relation to youth-driven popular culture - but that's a story for another day, another post. 

 

Here, I just want to briefly reflect on the memories triggered by the three suits I can be seen wearing in the image above: the first by Jane Khan, one half of Birmingham's best and brightest designers Khan & Bell; the second from the Italian high-end fashion house of Armani; and the third by punk Dame Vivienne Westwood. 

 

 

II.

 

Kahn & Bell was a fashion label and boutique established by Jane Kahn and Patti Bell in Hurst Street, Birmingham, in 1976; much loved by those who simply had to dress up in order to mess up.

 

By the mid-'80s, however, they'd decided to go their separate ways and Khan sans Bell was trading at the Great Gear Market [1] under the brand name of Khaniverous. 

 

And it was at Khaniverous, in April 1984, that I bought my first suit; a loud and colourful check design featuring a teddy boy style jacket with padded square shoulders and black velvet lapels. 

 

It was the kind of theatrical (some might say clownish) punk look that I adored. The suit also reminded me of one worn by Johnny Rotten when fighting his High Court case against Malcolm McLaren in February 1979. 

 

According to my diary from the time, Miss Khan was very friendly and the suit cost £75 (which is about £300 in today's money).  

 

I'm not sure I was ready to take on the world in that suit, but wearing it always made very happy. It was given it's final outing on my wedding day (20 October 1988); after that, the jacket was appropriated into my wife's wardrobe (along with my favourite Zorro style black hat).  

 

 

III. 

 

By the beginning of the 1990s, not only was I approaching 30 and so no longer to be fully trusted, but I was increasingly tired of the tartan-clad Jazz persona invented ten years earlier. And so, whilst still pretty much subscribing to the same anarcho-nihilistic philosophy of punk, it was time for a radical change of image, beginning with the purchase of a heavy linen suit bought from Giorgio Armani.

 

In other words, the Armani suit was not a belated attempt to become a yuppie and I had no desire to turn rebellion into money [2]. Indeed, part of the joke was to look rich whilst being poor; to be dressed as if keen for success whilst all the time celebrating failure.

 

I remember once wearing the suit to Warwick University for a meeting with Nick Land, in an attempt to make the point that being a mad Deleuzian doesn't necessarily oblige one to always dress in oversized black jumpers. 

 

Of course, Land was no more persuaded by my arguments in favour of expensive designer fashion than he was taken by my suggestion that the Ccru should retitle their magazine ***collapse as Stand Up! [3] 

 

To be fair to Nick, however, I don't think I was ever entirely convinced by my own arguments on this point either and, ultimately, this new Armani look never really worked. Thus, I almost inevitably drifted back to more avant-garde designers, including Vivienne Westwood ... 

 

 

IV.

 

This brings us to the final suit pictured above; an unstructured, linen/cotton design featuring a Prince of Wales check, from 2006. 

 

This suit always reminds me of happy days spent with my beautiful friend Dawn Garland, hanging around a bar in Bloomsbury (see photo below) before attending a series of lectures at Birkbeck by the (hugely over-rated) public intellectual Slavoj Žižek, on topics including Lacanian psychoanalysis and neo-Marxism. 

 

The suit - far more sober than the two drunken suits (one wool, the other silk) that I'd also purchased from Vivienne Westwood during this period - nevertheless always attracted attention when worn (particularly if I was accompanied by Miss Garland, who had her own unique style); some negative, but mostly positive and that's always welcome. 

 

For one doesn't wish to be too flamboyant and standoutish, but neither does one want to fade into the background or be just another face in the crowd; imperceptible, yes - indistinguishable, no thanks. 

 

 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] The Great Gear Market was located at 85 King's Road, London. It was a place known for its punk and alternative fashions and was where many young designers started out and many musicians shopped for outfits. Long closed now, it's perhaps not as well-remembered (nor as well documented) as Kensington Market.

 

[2] As Ian Trowell writes of Heaven 17's decision to wear expensive suits at the start of the 1980s, it was a look designed to confuse those whose anti-conformity simply meant conforming in another direction to another sartorial code or subcultural uniform. 

      See Trowell's article in SIG News #4 (UAL, September 2025); 'Let's All Make a Bomb: Heaven 17 and the Yuppie 1980s'. To read my take on this article, see the post on Torpedo the Ark dated 2 July 2025: click here. 

 

[3] The Cybernetic Culture Research Unit - styled as the Ccru - was an unorthodox, unsanctioned, experimental (and in-part imaginary) collective growing like some malignant tumor in the philosophy department at the University of Warwick in the mid-1990s, whose posthumous reputation far exceeds its actual accomplishments. Key members included Nick Land, Sadie Plant, and Mark Fisher. 

      The Ccru published a zine entitled ***collapse for which I once provided some artwork, even though I didn't particularly care for (or fully understand) much of the content. My idea was that we were already among the ruins - that pretty much everything that might collapse had collapsed - so it was time to build new little habitats and encourage people to stand up and find a way beyond the ruins: We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen, as Lawrence once put it. 

      I suspect I was seen as a bourgeois reactionary - in an Armani suit - hoping to reterritorialise on old ideas at a time when the Ccru wished to radically accelerate the process of deterritorialisation; although, to again give Land his due, he was always friendly with me and his suggestion about the direction my Ph.D should take (less philosophical and more literary in character) was extremely helpful.

 

 

For a follow up post to this one - on enclothed cognition, etc. - please click here.  

 

Thoughts on Ian Trowell's Article on Heaven 17 and the Yuppie 1980s in SIG News 4 (Sept. 2025)

Ad for the album Penthouse and Pavement by Heaven 17 

Artwork by Ray Smith (Virgin Records 1981)

 

 

I. 

 

It's interesting to ask why some musicians who might have strapped themselves into a pair of bondage trousers in 1977, suddenly started wearing formal business suits in the early 1980s and subscribing to an entirely different sartorial code ...

 

One possible answer, put forward by punk stalwarts The Clash, is that new groups were not particularly worried about récupération, i.e., the process whereby the radical ideas, images, and practices of punk were absorbed into mainstream culture and commodified for the market place. 

 

Dressed for success, these new groups embraced the idea of transforming rebellion into money and laughed all the way to the bank [1].     

 

 

II. 

 

However, if that's true of many new groups who preferred to be thought of as post-punk, it wasn't true, argues Ian Trowell, of Heaven 17 ... An English band, from Sheffield, who combined "Yorkshire awkwardness, conceptualist pranking [...] and an attention to visual detail" [2] with a commercial electronic dance sound [3].           

 

Not wanting to be pigeonholed and hoping to subvert clichéd ideas of what a band in 1981 should look like, these socialist synth-popsters wore expensive-looking suits "designed to confuse the expectations of anti-conformity-conformity ushered in by a 'cookie-cutter' punk uniform" [4]. 

 

By deliberately styling themselves as businessmen - albeit with a certain youthful swagger - they emphasised that the music business is a business and that recording artists are simply cogs in a money-making machine. 

 

This idea is further reinforced, as Trowell reminds us, by the cover design for Heaven 17's debut album, Penthouse and Pavement (1981), shown above, which amusingly hijacks the visual language of the corporate world [5]. 

 

 

III. 

 

So: Heaven 17 were not real yuppies - and, in fact, Trowell convincingly argues the case that they were not even parodying the yuppie look and ideology; that this is a contemporary misremembering. 

 

For although the word yuppie first appeared in print in 1980 [6], it was then just a neutral demographic descriptor for a class of young urban professionals. 

 

It wasn't until the middle of the decade that the term became fully conceptualised in the sense we understand it today and its use became widespread in the media to refer (almost always negatively) to a "fashionable go-getter who fetishises a luxury business suit and lifestyle" [7].   

 

As Trowell also amusingly notes at the end of his piece, in a Melody Maker feature on the band from October 1981, lead singer Glenn Gregory is compared to Michael Heseltine, not Bud Fox [8].   

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Récupération is a core concept in Situationist thought, particularly as developed by Guy Debord, and it is seen as one of the main methods by which dominant powers maintain control. 

      I'm referring here to lyrics (written by Joe Strummer) from the 1978 single by The Clash '(White Man) in Hammersmith Palais' (CBS Records): The new groups are not concerned / With what there is to be learned / They got Burton suits, ha! you think it's funny / Turnin' rebellion into money.

      There's an irony, of course, in being lectured on the perils of selling out by a band who signed the previous year to a major American label for $100,000.   

      

[2] Ian Trowell, 'Let's All Make a Bomb: Heaven 17 and the Yuppie 1980s', in SIG News, Issue 4 (UAL, September 2025), p. 4. 

      Ian Trowell is an independent writer and researcher who has published in the fields of punk and post-punk, fairground culture, fashion, photography and art. He recently published Throbbing Gristle: An Endless Discontent (Intellect Books, 2023). He also regularly publishes work on Substack: click here.  

 

[3] Heaven 17 were a trio consisting of Martyn Ware (keyboards, drum machine, supporting vocals), Ian Craig Marsh (keyboards), and Glenn Gregory (lead vocals). Ware and Marsh had originally been founding members of the Human League and Gregory had previously sung in a punk band with Marsh called Musical Vomit.

      The groups's name was taken from a fictional pop band mentioned in Anthony Burgess's dystopian novel A Clockwork Orange (1962). Whereas Phil Oakey's Human League went on to achieve major chart success, Heaven 17 struggled to make a similar impact. Their debut single '(We Don't Need This) Fascist Groove Thang' - taken from the album Penthouse and Pavement (Virgin Records, 1981) - was banned by the BBC but became a minor hit (reaching 45 in the UK singles chart). A remastered version from 2006 can be played on YouTube by clicking here. 

      The funny thing is, this was one of the few songs I remember taping off the radio at the time and I used to play it endlessly (even though synth-pop was never really my cup of tea and I wouldn't have considered for one moment actually buying the record).   

 

[4] Ian Trowell, op. cit., p. 5.

  

[5] Essentially, to employ another term drawn from the Situationist handbook, this is an act of détournement; i.e., one involving the appropriation, reimagining, and recontextualising of existing cultural elements in order to subvert their original meaning and expose their inherent ideology.  

 

[6] The first time the word yuppie appeared in print was in a May 1980 Chicago magazine article by Dan Rottenberg. He would later admit, however, that he had heard other people use the term and hadn't coined it himself.  

 

[7] Ian Trowell, op. cit. p. 5. 

 

[8] Michael Heseltine was then Secretary of State for the Environment in the Thatcher government; a somewhat flamboyant figure - always well-dressed with coiffed blonde hair - he had earlier enjoyed a long and successful business career. 

      Bud Fox is a fictional character in Oliver Stone's Wall Street (1987); a young, ultra-ambitious stockbroker played by Charlie Sheen.  

 

 

 

Punk's Dead Knot: Reflections on an Essay by Ian Trowell - Part 1: I Got You in My Camera ...

 

Sex Pistols on Carnaby Street 

Photo by Ray Stevenson (1976)

 

I. 

 

Ian Trowell's dead knot essay [a] provides a fascinating insight into how time and space are encoded in punk imagery and demonstrates how a photograph, for example, is not simply an objective or neutral representation of reality, but an artefact that is both constructed and constructive of the world as we know it.    

 

The essay analyses two visual artefacts: a photograph of the Sex Pistols from 1976 and a 30-second TV commercial for McDonald's from 2016. Here I shall reflect on the first of these, whilst in part two of this post I shall discuss the latter. 

 

 

II.

 

Ray Stevenson's famous photo of the Sex Pistols strolling along Carnaby Street in the spring of 1976 still makes smile almost fifty years later, due mostly to what Trowell terms the performative iconoclasm and punk theatricality that is here captured and preserved on film; a second of their lives ruined for life, as Rotten might say [b]. 

 

According to Trowell, whilst Paul Cook is perfectly content to eat his grapes purchased from Berwick Street Market and remain not only partially obscured but as anonymous as the brown paper bag containing his fruit - and whilst Steve Jones and Johnny Rotten are both happy to clown and pose for the camera - Glen Matlock looks uncomfortable and out of place:

 

"His comportment is akin to Wittgenstein's multi-stable rabbitduck illusion in that he is both relaxed and not relaxed at the same time. He has taken the relaxed pose of a pop star going through the motions of a publicity photograph but it clearly seems that he is out of step with the posed anti-comportment of the rest of the band." [183]

 

Matlock, with his buttoned-up jacket and persona, doesn't quite fit in with a band safety-pinned together or with the wider punk aesthetic and ethos; he's just a little too smart and sensible; the slightly nervous observer of the scene, always hanging back and looking on: 

 

"It is a disorienting picture since he appears to know his time is running out, but at the same time he gives the impression of lingering with admiration and anticipation, an adumbration of what is to come evidently with or without him." [184]

 

If, due to Rotten's "hogging of the frame" [185], locating the picture's true point of magic is made difficult, neverthless, for Trowell, it's not Rotten's ugly mug but the fastened button on Matlock's jacket that forms the pictures punctum - i.e., that troubling detail that disturbs and distracts from the more general field of interest (the photo's studium); that which pricks our attention and often moves us with a certain poignant delight [c]. 

 

 

III. 

 

Glen Matlock's button and Wittgenstein's duckrabbit aside, Trowell gives us many other interesting ideas to consider; about Carnaby Street as a subcultural epicentre; about the staging of photography; and about Rotten's performance for the camera.

 

He suggests, for example, that "Stevenson's photograph bears an uncanny resemblance to Roger Fenton's 1855 photograph Valley of the Shadow of Death" [184]. I don't quite see it myself, however, and might just as easily imagine the Sex Pistols "photoshopped into the immediate foreground" [184] of many an image containing a tapering path. 

 

For instance, here's Jones and Rotten following the yellow brick road:

 

 

 

I wasn't entirely convinced either by Trowell's suggestion that we might consider Stevenson's photograph as "a precisely posed document with the four punk musicians reminiscent of the generic crouched figures of Captain Kirk and his original Star Trek crew materializing on a hostile, alien planet with their phasers at the ready to deal with the subcultural detritus that might turn on them at any moment" [186], although it's certainly an original reading.  

 

These things aside, for the most part one agrees with Trowell's interpretations and marvels at his insights. Rotten's captioning of Stevenson's photo as forced fun at Malcolm's behest is pithy, but one needs Trowell's essay to provide the theoretical and cultural context without which it's just another snap. 

 

The band may never have had much clue as to what was going on or what was at stake, but Malcolm knew exactly what he wanted to do and how he wanted the band to look: "The photograph tries to set out McLaren's deliberate positioning of punk as against the process of accumulation of all music genres and stylistic connotations and manifestations that have gone before." [188]

Obviously, in due course every image loses its power and becomes just another stock photo filed away in an archive: cultural fodder, as Trowell puts it. Some truly great pictures, however, retain their abilty to shock or seduce or to scandalise for decades; others, like this one, now mostly rely on Matlock's button to provide a point of interest.

 

Ultimately, argues Trowell, even the Sex Pistols "cannot escape time and space" [188] just as punk cannot escape being co-opted and commercialised by the forces of capital, as McLaren and Reid conceded in The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (1980).

   

 

Notes

 

[a] Ian Trowell, 'Punk's dead knot: Constructing the temporal and spatial in commercial punk imagery', Punk & Post-Punk, Volume 5, Number 2 (2016), pp. 181-199. Page references given in the post refer to the essay as published here.  

[b] Somewhat surprisingly, Trowell doesn't refer us to the following lines in the Sex Pistols' song 'I Wanna Be Me': 'I got you in my camera / a second of your life, ruined for life'.

      He does, however, refer us to John Berger who argues that the true content of a photograph is invisible as it "derves from a play not with form, but with time ... it isolates, preserves and presents a moment taken from a continuum". See Understanding a Photograph (Penguin, 2013), p. 20. 

[c] Barthes's concept of the punctum raises a problem discussed by commentators such as Michael Fried and James Elkins; if it calls forth a highly idiosyncratic response on behalf of an individual viewer, then how can that experience ever be communicated and theorised? In other words, can Matlock's button ever intensely move anyone other than Trowell himself? I might understand what he says and appreciate what he writes, but is his experience of pleasure (as of pain) not uniquely his own?  

 

 

Musical bonus: Sex Pistols, 'I Wanna Be Me', b-side to 'Anarachy in the UK' (EMI, 1976): click here.  

 

Part two of this post can be read by clicking here. 

 

 

On Loverboy and the Politics of Queerness

LOVERBOY

 

 

I. 

 

Just a brief note of congratulations to Charles Jeffrey and his Loverboy label for notching up ten years in the world of fashion; a decade of "tartan, trash, animalism, anarchy, paganism and punk" as one appreciative critic wrote in a Guardian piece celebrating Jeffrey's achievement [1]. 

 

If almost inevitably one comes away from 'The Lore of LOVERBOY' exhibition at Somerset House [2] feeling that one's seen much of it before having grown up in the world of Westwood, Galliano, and McQueen, nevertheless one also comes away wishing that one was forty years younger and able to enter into Jeffrey's world unburdened by memory of the above.

 

And, to be fair, his aesthetic sensibility isn't simply a pale imitation of anyone else's; Jeffrey's designs do have something unique about them, even if they unfold within a certain tradition and fashion history. And I'm always going to love clothes that make smile like the outfits shown above ...  

 

 

II. 

 

However, if I were to be critical, then perhaps Jeffrey's work is just a little too much at times; too theatrical, too playful, too romantic, too rooted in a hedonistic club scene ...

 

For better or for worse, I belong to a generation that would rather see the word HATE than HOPE sloganised on a jumper and my politics do not exclusively revolve around questions of gender and sexuality.  

 

And as for the increasingly tired and tiresome concept of queerness - one which Jeffrey repeatedly refers us to - I'm almost tempted to echo what one (queer) writer says here: "Queerness does not ensure that we are more compassionate, more loving, or more fair, or that we are kinder, stronger, realer people." [3] 

 

That is to say, queerness doesn't make virtuous or morally superior - nor even more interesting, alas, when it has merely become another identity and commercial selling point. 

                 

 

Notes

 

[1] Ellie Violet Bramley, 'An absolute joy: 10 years of Charles Jeffrey's playful Loverboy', The Guardian (9 June 2024): click here.  

[2] For details of The Lore of LOVERBOY exhibition at Somerset House, click here. Thanks to Ian Trowell for bringing this retrospective to my attention. 

[3] See Queer is Boring, 'Why Queer is Boring: An Introduction' (21 Feb 2014), on medium.com: click here. 

Notes on SIG News Issue 3: From Bomber Jackets to the Joy of Punxploitation

It's all working well for him and it's all going smoothly for McQueen

 

NB: this post is a continuation from part one: click here. 

 

 

V. 

The MA-1 - or bomber jacket, as it is better known - was a popular fashion staple in the 1980s; particularly with skinheads, who loved both its utility and hypermasculinity (as did certain gay clones). 

 

However, as Ian Trowell reminds us, what imbued this garment with such great "subcultural crossover potential" [1] was the fact it evaded fixed meaning. This also helps explain its strange longevity.

 

That and the fact that what's good enough for Steve McQueen, is, as a rule, good enough for anyone (although, for the record, I never owned a bomber jacket and wouldn't have dreamed of wearing such). 

 

 

VI.

 

Mike Wyeld and Antony Price are both concerned with subcultural politics. 

 

The former asks whether punk or acid house, for example, has resulted in any long lasting political change. I think we all know the answer to this, even Wyeld, although he wants to keep the dream alive so can't quite bring himself to openly admit it hasn't.

 

Price, on the other hand, is adamant that rave continues to offer a form of "collective resistance to the oppressive pervasiveness of capitalist realism" [2]. 

 

Unfortunately, Jean Baudrillard has indicated how and why the very idea of resistance in a transpolitical era characterised by the techno-social immersion of the individual rather than their alienation, has become problematic and even a little passé. Speaking in an interview with François L'Yvonnet, Baudrillard says: 

 

"I'm a bit resistant to the idea of resistance, since it belongs to the world of critical, rebellious, subversive thought, and that is all rather outdated. If you have a conception of integral reality, of a reality that's absorbed all negativity, the idea of resisting it, of disputing its validity, of setting one value against another and countering one system with another, seems pious and illusory." [3]

 

Of course, that isn't to say that there cannot exist singular spaces which, at a particular moment, constitute themselves as alternative worlds with their own set of rules. And that's pretty much how Price describes nightclubs:

 

"At their best, nightclubs are places for experimentation, for inclusiveness and exclusiveness, a place to try out different personas, to challenge sexual identity and orientation through both individual and collective freedoms, a space to move outside of the confines of society." [4] 

The problem is, anyone who has actually been to a nightclub recognises that this is mostly bullshit. And even if nightclubs were (at their best) heterotopic wonderlands of transgression and otherness, they still wouldn't offer the kind of head-on socio-political resistance that Price imagines and advocates. 

 

 

VII.

According to Madeline Lucarelli, the practice of witchcraft has been transformed via the establishment of online communities. No longer concerned with the casting of spells and the harnessing of supernatural forces, witchcraft is now all about personal growth and spiritual freedom [5].  

 

Alas, if Lucarelli is to be believed, witchcraft has therefore become a depressingly tame affair; no sex, no scourging, no satanic ritual ... The Dionysian frenzy of the orgy and the blasphemous humour of the black mass appears to have given way to a New Age theology that upholds many of the same woke values that any good liberal might recognise. 

 

Wicca, I'm sorry to say, is now a humanism. And the witch, far from being a figure who inspires terror or offers resistance to hegemonic society, is now merely a Twilight-reading Barbie Goth hardly deserving of the name.

 

 

VIII.

 

Finally [6], we come to Russ Bestley's article on the joy of punxploitation and his deep fascination with Plastic Bertrand's international hit single 'Ça plane pour moi' (1977).

 

Whilst Bestley struggles to say what, exactly, first attracted him to this song, I think I understand (and to an extent share) his love of those songs which have all the energy of punk but which are not weighed down by the spirit of gravity; songs which privilege the joy and laughter of pop over the austere monarchy of rock [7].

Bestley recognises that fun is a vital element of popular culture, even if it is often valued negatively by those commentators whose language succumbs all too easily to moralising imperatives; i.e., the kind of people who are embarrassed by the crude and shallow entertainments enjoyed by the working-class and who will never accept the fact that 'Friggin' in the Riggin'' was a bigger selling-single than 'Holidays in the Sun'.

 

I agree with Bestley that 'Ça plane pour moi' amusingly manages to "embody so much of what 'punk' set out to achieve" [8]. So click the link above, roll around with your cat on the bed, and enjoy!

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Ian Trowell, 'Bomber Crew: Storying the Eighties Through the MA-1', SIG News 3 (1 September, 2024), p. 12.  

[2] Antony Price, 'Rave On', SIG News 3 (1 September, 2024), p. 30.

 

[3] Jean Baudrillard, Fragments, trans. Chris Turner (Routledge, 2004), p. 71.

 

[4] Antony Price, 'Rave On', SIG News 3 (1 September, 2024), p. 30.

 

[5] See Madeline Lucarelli, 'The Body, Broom and Sins of the Witch', SIG News 3 (1 September, 2024), p. 22.

 

[6] It should be noted that there are numerous other articles in SIG News 3 that I have not discussed. These include Rachel Brett's piece on fashion's relationship with the colour black (a dark history I have myself written on here); Isabella Chiara Vicco's piece on Jerry Rubin and his metamorphosis from yippie to yuppie; and Shijiao Kou's musicological analysis of 'Hong Kong Garden' (the debut single by Siouxsie and the Banshees). Oh, and there's also my piece on the revolt into red-trousered style.   

[7] The phrase 'spirit of gravity' is borrowed from Nietzsche (Thus Spoke Zarathustra) and the phrase 'austere monarchy' is borrowed from Foucault (The History of Sexuality 1). I have written on rockism contra poptimism and in defence of fun elsewhere on Torpedo the Ark: click here and here.

[8] Russ Bestley, 'Ça Plane Pour Moi': The Joy of Punxploitation', SIG News 3 (1 September, 2024), p. 27.  

 

 

But Malcolm, They'll Not Be Able to Find It ...

Fig. 1: Sex Pistols: Anarchy in the U.K. (EMI, 1976)  

Fig. 2: Kazimir Malevich: Black Square (1915) 

 

 

I.

 

It's hard to resist loving a paper that explores the links between punk, nihilism, politics and the arts, such as the one delivered by Ian Trowell at the Torn Edges symposium at the London College of Communication a few days ago [1].

 

Kazimir Malevich and Malcolm McLaren; Suprematism, Situationism, and the Sex Pistols - what's not to love? 

 

I don't want to say it was the best presentation on the day, but it was probably the one I enjoyed the most - and if Trowell had only thought to entitle his work 'Don't Be (Black) Square Be There', I would've loved it (and him) even more [2].

 

 

II.

 

Perhaps unsurprisingly to torpedophiles, the aspect of the talk that most excited concerned the plain black sleeve that 'Anarchy in the U.K.' - the Sex Pistols' debut single - was originally issued in on 26 November, 1976. 

I figure that McLaren would be more than familiar with Malevich's suprematist masterpiece painted sixty years earlier, though don't know if this directly inspired the 'Anarchy' packaging, or if, as Paul Gorman says, the insistence on such a sleeve was simply in line with McLaren's own aesthetic, as seen in his portraits of the 1960s and the clothes designs produced with Vivienne Westwood for Sex [3]. 

 

Either way, it was a great idea for a sleeve; one that not only captures the anarcho-nihilism of the band, but affirms the colour with the greatest symbolic resonance and meaning. 

 

And when EMI executives complained that an all black sleeve with no identifying information would make it extremely difficult for fans to find it in the record stores, Malcolm smiled and said: I don't want them to find it ... [4]

 

Notes

 

[1] Ian Trowell is an independent researcher and author exploring themes of popular culture and ideas around myth and memory. His presentation at Torn Edges was entiled '"Anarchy in the UK', 'Black Square', and Pop Nihilism: Exploring the Links between Punk, Nihilism, Suprematism and Situationism". 'Further details of this event and of the other speakers can be found here. Trowell's recently published book - Throbbing Gristle: An Endless Discontent (Intellect Books, 2023) - can be purchased here.

 

[2] The fact that he was wearing an Adam and the Ants T-shirt on the day makes it even more surprising to me that Trowell didn't think of this title. Still, never mind - the presentation was all good clean fun (whatever that means).*  

[3] See Paul Gorman, The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren (Constable, 2020), p. 331. Gorman goes on to say that McLaren was also thinking of the infamous 'black page' in Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy (1759-67).

 

[4] There were only a couple of thousand copies of 'Anarchy in the U.K.' issued in the black sleeve; after that, it was sold in the standard EMI sleeve with a hole in the middle so the label information could easily be read. 

      The record reached number 38 in the official UK Singles Chart, before being withdrawn by EMI following the Bill Grundy Incident (1 Dec 1976). The Sex Pistols were eventually fired from EMI on 6 January 1977, but they kept their £40,000 advance and had the last laugh when they included the track E.M.I. on Never Mind the Bollocks (Virgin Records, 1977). 

      To watch the band perform the single 'Anarchy in the U.K.' on the BBC's early evening current affairs show Nationwide (recorded 11 Nov 1976 and broadcast the following day), click here.

 

  

* I'm referring here - for those who don't know - to a track by Adam and the Ants entitled 'Don't Be Square (Be There)', from the album Kings of the Wild Frontier (CBS Records, 1980): click here. You may not like it now, but you will ...