A Little Slice of Post-Punk Music History: How Lieutenant Lush Became Boy George

Annabella Lwin and George O'Dowd (Lt. Lush)

Photo by Kevin Cummins (1981)

 

Sex gang children gang up on you, jump on top, on top of you 

Make love, make love, make love to you, one two three four five miles high

 

 

I.

 

Not a lot of people know - even among those who might possibly care to know - that before finding pop stardom as Boy George with the band Culture Club [1], 19-year-old George O'Dowd was briefly an associate member of Bow Wow Wow. He even twice performed on stage with them under the name Lieutenant Lush. 

 

To understand how that came about - and to uncover the origin of this rather odd-sounding alias - we must travel back to Paris in 1980. There we find former Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren trying to engineer his next move.  

 

Keen to discover a fresh sound, McLaren chances upon the Burundi beat. In his mind, this connects him to the primal origin of rock 'n' roll, just as images of Geronimo and Black Beard suggest the possibility of a new, more romantic look to go with the music - part Apache, part pirate, and - crucially - post-punk.  

 

At the same time, McLaren was also hoping to find financial backing for his own film company - Tour D'Eiffel Productions [2] - which would specialise in porn projects aimed at a pre-teen audience. Paul Gorman writes (disapprovingly) that McLaren's thinking in this area was shaped by his "radical political grounding" and the "countercultural conceit" [3] that children should be accorded full agency. 

 

These projects included 'The Mile High Club', for which he had written a speculative script "revolving around an orgy on an inflight plane" [4], featuring such colourful characters as Jimmy the Hoover and ... Lieutenant Lush [5].        

 

 

II.  

 

After agreeing in the winter of 1979 to act as a mentor and creative consultant to Adam Ant for a four-week period and receiving a fixed fee of £1000, McLaren worked closely with the Ants - guitarist Matthew Ashman, drummer Dave Barbarossa, and new bassist Leigh Gorman - soon bonding with them. 

 

In fact, McLaren grew so close to the three musicians and recognised their puppet potential that he decided they should "provide the backdrop for a younger and more easily manipulated performer" [6] than 25-year-old Adam. And so he persuaded the band "to announce to Ant that they no longer wanted to work with him" [7].

 

The band then embarked on a lengthy but fruitless and frustrating audition process in an attempt to find a suitable lead singer. Fortunately, fate lent a hand when talent scout Dave Fishel encountered 13-year-old Annabella Lwin singing along to the radio at a West Hampstead dry cleaners where she worked. 

 

Impressed by her vocal ability and her youthful good looks - her warm skin tone the result of her bi-racial heritage (Anglo-Burmese) - Fishel persuaded McLaren to audition her. 

 

Shortly after, despite the fact she was completely untutored "and was largely unaware of pop music beyond a liking for Stevie Wonder" [8], Annabella joined the group and suddenly - magically - everything seemed to fall into place. They had the sound, they had the look, and now they had the teenage singer that McLaren desperately wanted (his Eliza Doolittle). 

 

However, that old showbiz maxim about never working with children (and their interfering mothers) soon came back to bite McLaren and the older members of the band and it wasn't long before they began thinking of a possible replacement for Annabella ... Enter George O'Dowd ...  

 

 

III.  

George was always going to be a star. But it's also indisputable that meeting McLaren and briefly working with Bow Wow Wow in 1980-81 was an important stepping-stone for his career. For although his association with the band only lasted a few months, it catalysed the formation of Culture Club.

 

Apart from growing impatient with Annabella, McLaren hoped that by recruiting George to the band's lineup he could inject something extra into the mix; perhaps a little more visual drama and queer romanticism (McLaren was obsessed at this time with homosexuality as a challenge to heteronormative values). 

 

McLaren gave George the stage name Lieutenant Lush. His role was to provide a soulful, vocal presence that would contrast to the band's signature Burundi beat and punk energy. He only performed live at two of the band's shows, but immediately stole the spotlight - which didn't go down well with Annabella and the boys and it was immediately obvious to McLaren that either she had to go or George had to go.

 

Whether he tossed a coin to decide who should stay and who should leave, I don't know. But it was George who was shown the door in the spring of 1981. However, as in the case of Adam Ant, this dismissal was ultimately a blessing in disguise. 

 

Confident that he could hold a tune and command a stage - and keen to have his revenge on Malcolm and show him what a mistake he'd made in sacking him - George decided to form his own group. And this group - whom he considered at one point naming the Sex Gang Children [9] - would find global fame as Culture Club - once they found their own identity and stopped trying to sound like Bow Wow Wow [10].        

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Culture Club had their first big hit with the release of the single 'Do You Really Want to Hurt Me', which got to number one in the UK and number two in the US. The track was taken from their debut album Kissing to Be Clever (Virgin Records, 1982). It's not my cup of tea at all - but George looks good in the video directed by Julien Temple.   

 

[2] French speakers will point out that this is a misspelling (whether deliberate or otherwise) on McLaren's part; that the company's name should technically be 'Tour Eiffel', and not 'Tour D'Eiffel'. I reproduce an image of the company letterhead in a post titled 'From the Office of Malcolm McLaren' (26 Oct 2022).   

 

[3] Paul Gorman, The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren (Constable, 2020), p. 437. For Gorman, these and related projects to do with underage sexual activity "represented the development of the most tiresome, not to say misguided and divisive, aspect of McLaren's creative outpourings" (437).  

 

[4] Ibid., p. 436. Another of McLaren's proposed film projects mentioned by Gorman was 'The Adventures of Melody, Lyric & Tune' - "a musical about the three titular fifteen-year-old girls featuring songs written by McLaren" (437), including a track that Bow Wow Wow would later record, 'Sexy Eiffel Towers' (it's included on their debut mini-album Your Casstte Pet, (EMI, 1980) and features on various compilation albums). 

 

[5] As this is a post about Lt. Lush and not Jimmy the Hoover, I don't want to say too much about the latter here. Not that there is much to say and details are vague. Originally conceived by McLaren as a kids' comic character (and an expert in the art of oral sex), there was no person as such. 

      Later, McLaren would put together a band of this name intended as a support act for Bow Wow Wow. They joined the ranks of one-hit wonders thanks to the single 'Tantalise (Wo Wo Ee Yeh Yeh)', released in June 1983 (Innervision Records). Again, it's really not my cup of tea - and I'm not particularly taken with the band's look in this video directed by Derek Jarman.     

 

[6-7] Paul Gorman, The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren, p. 448. The only thing more creatively daring (if commercially reckless) than pushing Adam out of his own band, was making Rotten walk the plank in January 1978 at the end of the Sex Pistols American tour. 

      To his great credit, Ant licked his wounds, assembled a new band with the brilliant guitarist Marco Pirroni, and, putting all the ideas that Malcolm had given him into practice, he went on to find global success. His first big hit single in the UK - 'Dog Eat Dog' (the opening track on the Adam and the Ants' album Kings of the Wild Frontier (1980) - featured the Burundi beat and significantly outsold the debut single by Bow Wow Wow - 'C·30 C·60 C·90 Go!' (although, of course, selling records and becoming a successful pop group really wasn't the point as far as McLaren was concerned). Both are fantastic songs, though it's the latter - with lyrics by McLaren encouraging home taping - that has the more subversive political edge. Readers can decide for themselves which they prefer by clicking on the links provided.      

 

[8] Paul Gorman, The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren, p. 451.  

 

[9] This provocative phrase - sex gang children - was a favourite of McLaren's; one that he coined after reading The Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead (1971), a novel by William S. Burroughs. He incorporated it into the lyrics for the Bow Wow Wow track 'The Mile High Club', which can be found on several compilation albums, including I Want Candy (EMI, 1982).  

      Whilst I think we can all agree that George wisely chose not to go with this as the name of his new band - drummer Jon Moss was having none of it - it was picked up by his friend Andi for his own gothic punk outfit (at that time known as Panic Button). 

      The Sex Gang Children would not achieve the level of commercial success achieved by Culture Club, but they did establish themselves as Batcave favourites and influenced the later dark cabaret scene. Their only studio album - Song and Legend (Illuminated Records, 1983) - reached the top of the UK Indie Chart and produced the brilliant single 'Sebastiane' which is ten times better than anything Culture Club came up with - Eat your children baked in a pie! 

 

[10] As Paul Gorman says, Culture Club soon transcended their influences and we have to acknowledge that Boy George, like Adam Ant, showed huge strength of character (as well considerable skills as a songwriter and performer). McLaren later dismissed him as "strictly a commercial enterprise" lacking any subversive edge, which may be true, but it sounds a wee bit like sour grapes. See The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren, p. 476.   

 

 

No More Heroes 1: Malcolm McLaren - Stuckism and the Quest for Authenticity

No More Heroes (Malcolm McLaren)

(SA/2026) 

 

 

I. 

 

One of the things said by Johnny Rotten that has stuck with me for fifty years is his response to Janet Street-Porter's question about who he admires: "I don't have any heroes - they're all useless." [1]

 

Ironically, his anti-hero stance instantly made him a hero to me. However, my affections and loyalty later shifted to Malcolm McLaren once it became clear that he was the conceptual genius behind the Sex Pistols [2]. 

  

And I have continued to name McLaren - along with Nietzsche, D. H. Lawrence, and Larry David - as a primary influence on my thinking. However, I'm not sure I would call them heroes. And, if I'm honest, each has disappointed in some manner. 

 

Here, and in the posts that follow, I will attempt to explain why. Let's begin by raising concerns around what might be called the ideological stuckism of my punk mentor, Malcolm McLaren.      

 

 

II.

 

To be clear: when I say Malcolm was a stuckist, I am not suggesting he had any involvement with the international movement founded in 1999 by Billy Childish and Charles Thomson to promote figurative painting as opposed to conceptual art [3]. I am simply referring to the fact that McLaren was trapped in his past like a spider in its own web [4].

 

His entire career was an endless (if brilliant) recycling of the memories, radical ideas, and obsessive fixations drawn from his 1950s childhood and his 1960s art school days. Forever associated with the Sex Pistols and defined by the role he played in The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (1980), McLaren was stuck in a self-made loop of his own youthful mythology and his desire to live yesterday tomorrow [5].   

 

 

III.

 

Apart from the childhood tales told to him by his grandmother to do with Peter Pan and pirates and Dickensian street urchins, the first thing to really make a terrific impression on McLaren were the great balls of fires projected into popular culture by Jerry Lee Lewis and his fellow rock 'n' rollers. 

 

He loved the records and he loved the clothes and spent his entire life trying to perfectly recreate the look of music and the sound of fashion (a conceptual phrase coined by McLaren that he repeated in interviews and public lectures until his dying day). 

 

He may have experimented with many kinds of music in his career, but at heart he remained a rocker and it was the raw authenticity (and sheer fun) of the records he heard in the '50s that he wished to inject into his own projects and the various incarnations of the little shop at 430 King's Road, from Let It Rock to Worlds End. 

 

Ultimately, punk wasn't really an attempt to look forward - it was, rather, an attempt to strip rock 'n' roll of its bloated, progressive bullshit and recapture the excitement, danger and innocence of his childhood.      

 

 

IV.

 

If, on the one hand 1957 was a crucial year for eleven-year-old Malcolm McLaren [6], then so too was 1968 for the then twenty-two-year-old art student. For although not directly involved in the événements de mai [7], McLaren - the would-be revolutionary and Francophile - now fell under the influence of Guy Debord and the Situationists. 

 

Radical ideas to do with the société du spectacle and the staging of events in order to shatter such, thereby rescuing people from the boredom and inauthenticity of everyday life, remained important to McLaren throughout his life. A volatile character and natural born troublemaker, he was always attempting to mix the perfect Molotov cocktail: two parts art theory; one part political ideology; and one part cultural terrorism.  

 

It's certainly difficult to understand the Sex Pistols project without reference to McLaren and Jamie Reid's belief in the ruins, demand for the impossible, and wish to steal back happiness.  

 

The problem, however, is that avant-garde political theories relying on Marxism and surrealism don't adequately address the problems that emerge in a post-68 world. The revolution that happened was technoliberal in character and seems to allow not only no alternative but no outside space from which one might form a critical perspective or offer resistance. 

 

If McLaren had bothered to keep up with his reading - some Baudrillard perhaps - he might have understood that although the beach does indeed lie beneath the paving stones, it too is a constructed (artificial) reality that merely provides the illusion of depth and the false promise of authentic freedom [8].

 

As the conceptual artist Michal Martychowiec has shown, what were once believed to be natural grains of sand are actually cold and lifeless glass crystals ... [9] 

 

 

V.

 

If, then, McLaren retained a fixed model of style based on the look of music and the sound of fashion and a fixed politics that relied for the most part on subversive pranks and the technique of détournement [10], so too did he hold on to the same concept of sex throughout his life - one closely tied to his radical politics. 

 

Influenced by thinkers such as Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse, McLaren was of the view that liberating libidinal energies would outrage bourgeois society and threaten a culture founded upon sexual repression.

 

Thus, like so many other sex radicals and countercultural theorists, McLaren sought to weaponise desire, using pornographic images printed on T-shirts and a range of fetishwear sold in SEX and Seditionaries, for example, to provoke public outrage and incite his young clientele to insurrection.  

 

McLaren was (naively and mistakenly) convinced that by dragging the forbidden into the open, he was striking a blow against the state. However, this politics of desire relied entirely on what Michel Foucault famously termed the repressive hypothesis - i.e., the flawed belief that power functions primarily through prohibition, censorship, and denial. 

 

What McLaren failed to realise - and what Foucault brilliantly demonstrated [11] - is that modern power does not repress sex; it incites it, categorises it, and manages it. By remaining stuck in a sixties model of liberation, McLaren's radicalism was easily co-opted. He believed he was unleashing a dangerous, and authentic energy, when in reality, he was merely pioneering a highly profitable new market and the pornification of society.  

 

Decades later, he was still talking about bondage trousers with their zipper crotch with the exact same pseudo-academic earnestness and revolutionary zeal of a soixante-huitard [12]. 

 

 

VI. 

 

If there is one word that comes to define Malcolm McLaren's thinking, it's not sex, nor style, nor even subversion - it is rather authenticity. That's the thing that most intrigued him and which he set out to discover - authenticity in an age of artificiality and what he termed karaoke culture [13].

 

In an interview in 1999, McLaren describes authenticity as something dirty, horrible, and disgusting; something which "is to be found in the ruins" and involves "reclaiming the past"; something which is complex and "has built into it this uncomfortable idea of chaos"; something which contrasts with everything valued today as success [14].    

 

He certainly makes it sound attractive and almost has me sold on the idea. But then he goes and spoils it all by saying something stupid (or at the very least politically naive); "the authentic is something that isn't as easily assimilated by capital" [15] - something that can't conveniently be packaged and sold. 

 

At that point, one realises that ultimately McLaren is still a romantic idealist at heart who has failed to fully learn the crucial (Situationist) message at the centre of The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (1980). Namely, that even something like punk is very quickly recuperated - no matter how authentic it may be [16]; that even the most radical ideas and images can be stripped of their danger and turned into products or harmless forms of entertainment.    

 

 

VII.

 

So, to conclude ...

 

McLaren disappoints because of his inability (or refusal) to recognise that his ideals of sex, style, and subversion, had been rendered null and void by a radical neoliberal shift in the 1980s. 

 

His political and aesthetic strategy relied on a set of mid-century conditions that no longer existed, including a rigid, easily shocked, top-down Establishment that could be genuinely threatened by countercultural activity involving the look of music and the sound of fashion.

 

What Mark Fisher terms capitalist realism thrives on the revolutionary rhetoric and authenticity McLaren championed - the pursuit of individual expression, personal branding, constant reinvention, etc. 

 

During his Duck Rock and Nostalgia of Mud phase, McLaren operated under the optimistic delusion that paganism and primitivism were wild forces external to the market. He would insist that a man on a mountain side tapping two sticks together makes a much bigger sound than all the musicians playing electric instruments or programming their synthesisers. But the sound of two sticks can be just as easily commodified as techno-pop (file it under world music and allow it to be sampled by others).    

 

The fact is, in the twenty-first century, there is no Outside from which to launch an attack and desire is no longer (if it ever was) a wild revolutionary force; it is an entirely synthetic product engineered by the market. Capitalism does not repress our libido - it structures it through algorithms, infinite digital feeds, and consumer niches, pre-formatting what we want long before we even know it. 

 

Ironically, when McLaren made his critique of karaoke culture, arguing that young people had become timid consumers of an endlessly recyled past, he failed to realise that this digital landscape was the monstrous offspring of his own '60s ideology and that youth today are not lazy or complacent - many are acutely aware that things are fucked up - but they feel powerless to act (what Fisher terms reflexive impotence) in a way that McLaren's post-War generation of baby boomers were not. 

 

Notes

 

[1] The interview took place in late 1976 at the Denmark Street studio where the band used to rehearse and essentially squat. It was broadcast on the London Weekend Show, hosted by Janet Street-Porter, on 28 November 1976. It was one of the very first television features dedicated to the underground punk scene. To watch a clip on YouTube, click here. 

 

[2] Years later, during McLaren's Charisma Records period (1982-85), that love and loyalty paid off when he placed me inside the label's press office (acting as a kind of spy). I have written several posts about my time at Charisma: click here.  

 

[3] The name Stuckism was coined in January 1999 by Charles Thomson in response to a poem by Billy Childish in which the latter relays that his former girlfriend, Tracey Emin, had repeatedly said he was stuck with his art, writing and music. 

      After exhibiting in small galleries in Shoreditch, London, the Stuckists' first show in a major public museum was held in 2004 at the Walker Art Gallery, as part of the Liverpool Biennial. It was titled 'The Stuckists Punk Victorian'.  

      By 2017, the initial group of thirteen British artists had expanded to 236 groups in 52 countries and although painting is the dominant artistic form of Stuckism, artists using other media such as photography, sculpture, film and collage have also joined, and share the Stuckist opposition to conceptualism. 

      I would like to say more, but this is probably not the right time or place - I will endeavour to publish a post on Stuckism in the near future. 

 

[4] Interestingly, however, the first Stuckist manifesto issued by Childish and Thomson in 1999, opens with the line: "Stuckism is a quest for authenticity" [3] and that is something that McLaren fundamentally endorsed, frequently contrasting it with what he called karaoke culture, as we shall discuss.

      However, the manifesto also emphasises the value of painting as a medium and opposes what is seen as the superficial novelty and nihilism of conceptual art and postmodernism and McLaren, who often styled himself an artist without portfolio and whose final works were audio-visual in nature, would laugh at the statement: "Artists who don't paint aren't artists." I also like to think that, unlike the Stuckists, McLaren would always choose irony over sincerity, viewing art as a material practice rather than a form of spirituality. 

      The first Stuckist manifesto (1999) can be found on their website: click here.  

 

[5] To be fair, this idea of living yesterday tomorrow is not simply an exercise in bogus nostalgia and can be tied to Mark Fisher's thinking on retrofuturism and hauntology and the reclaiming of what he calls lost futures. In notes written in 2000, McLaren discussed how history might be reclaimed (and not merely pissed on): 

      "The question I find most interesting is how you reclaim history. This is a very different thing from repackaging it. It's not about nostalgia, which is basically dead tissue. Living yesterday tomorrow should be about reclaiming history then reversing it into the future. If you can discover how to do that, you are probably doing everything an artist genuinely wishes to be involved in. One must aim to use certain disruptive practices to challenge the dominant cultural forms and relax the grip of authority."

      Quoted by Paul Gorman, The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren (Constable, 2020), pp. 718-719.   

 

[6] An end-of-term Christmas concert in 1957 "provided the eleven-year-old with what he would later describe as 'an epiphanic moment'. Among those selected to provide entertainment was a young male teacher who performed an enthusiastic rendition of Jerry Lee Lewis's rollicking 'Great Balls of Fire'." McLaren, who had never seen or heard anything like it, was understandably blown away. 

      Not long afterwards, his older brother took him to see Buddy Holly & the Crickets and Malcolm was fascinated with rock 'n' roll subculture for the rest of his life. See Paul Gorman, The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren, p. 30.  

 

[7] McLaren failed to get to Paris in May '68 due to ongoing French rail and air strikes. He did, however, visit the French capital at the end of June and his political imagination was excited by the literature and graphics of the Situationist International (even if he couldn't read much French). 

      Back in London, and friends by this point with Jamie Reid and Fred Vermorel, McLaren got involved with the SI's (unofficial) British offshoot known as King Mob. See my post titled 'It Was Meant to Be Great But It's Horrible: Christmas with Uncle Malcolm and the King Mob' (21 Dec 2025): click here.     

 

[8] See the essay by Nataliya Atanasova, 'We Dreamt a Beach and Found a Desert: What It Means to Live in Post-Situationist Reality', Sofia Philosophical Review (1): 70-85 (2026). This essay can be downloaded as a free pdf via Academia.edu.   

 

[9] Sous les pavés, la plage! was a solo exhibition by Polish artist Michal Martychowiec, held at the De Sarthe Gallery in Beijing (16 July to 13 August, 2017). Creating a deceptively inviting beach setting, Martychowiec replaced natural sand with industrially produced glass crystals, in order to critique capitalist realism. For more details visit his website, michalmartychowiec.com 

 

[10] Détournement is a Situationist technique by which familiar images and texts are recontextualised or amusingly altered in some fashion, forcing people to question the original ideological meanings embedded within them. 

      It was outlined by Guy Debord and Gil Wolman in their Mode d’emploi du détournement, which originally appeared in the Belgian surrealist journal Les Lèvres Nues #8 (May 1956). An English translation by Ken Knabb can be found in the Situationist International Anthology (Revised and Expanded Edition, PM Press, 2024).     

 

[11] See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality 1: The Will to Knowledge, trans. Robert Hurley (Penguin Books, 1998). 

      Foucault persuasively argues in part two of this work that what most perversely characterises modern societies, "is not that they consigned sex to a shadow existence, but that they dedicated themselves to speaking of it ad infinitum, while exploiting it as the secret" (p. 35).   

 

[12] See the episode of Being Malcolm (Canal Jimmy, 2000) titled 'How To Make Subversive Trousers' in which McLaren discusses the design for bondage trousers, created in 1976 and sold in Sex and Seditionaries, the shops he operated at 430 King's Road with Vivienne Westwood. It was uploaded to YouTube by the Malcolm McLaren Estate in 2015. 

 

[13] McLaren first unveiled his Karaoke Culture thesis in an essay titled '8-Bit Punk' published in Wired (November 2003) He spent the final decade of his life expanding this concept, giving a 2010 TED Talk titled 'Authentic creativity vs. karaoke culture' shortly before his death.

      The manifesto is founded upon the idea that contemporary culture is a kind of desert of the real and that young people today are incapable of generating authentic and original art, prefering to 'mouth the words to other people's songs' - i.e., surrendering agency and living by proxy, whilst chasing instant celebrity and success (afraid of struggle and failure). Karoake culture, argued, McLaren, built a risk-free environment (or safe space) - the antithesis of 430 King's Road. To combat this, McLaren championed a romantic return to creative authenticity and real sex with real bodies in order to discover real pleasures, which had to be better, he said, than 'fucking an inflatable doll'. 

 

[14] Jefferson Hack, 'A Malcolm McLaren Moment', Another Magazine (7 May 2013) - revisiting an interview originally conducted in 1999. 

 

[15] Ibid.

 

[16] Récupération is the situationist term for the co-option and commercialization of radical ideas. Formulated by Guy Debord and the Situationist International in 1960, it describes the process by which subversive concepts are twisted and absorbed into mainstream consumer culture as harmless, innocuous commodities. 

 

 

Part two in this series - 'Nietzsche - The Man Who Failed to Die at the Right Time' (15 July 2026) can be read here.

 

 

Magic Moments (In Memory of Joyce Greenfield 1931 - 2013)

 Joyce Greenfield and Perry Como 

sharing a magic moment 

Time can't erase the memory of 

These magic moments filled with love 

 

 

Like many people, I associate the popular song 'Magic Moments' composed by Burt Bacharach, written by Hal David, and recorded by Perry Como in 1957 [1], with TV ads for Quality Street [2].   

 

But when I listen to it, I also think of my best friend's mother who loved the song so much she had it played at her funeral service in 2013 [3].  

 

At the time, I didn't quite understand the choice; didn't know if it primarily revealed her sense of fun, her passion for smooth American crooners, or her love of confectionery.  

 

But having just re-read a quote from Malcolm McLaren in Paul Gorman's biography, I think I finally understand why the song held such profound meaning for her generation. Recalling his own childhood in the late 1950s, McLaren explains how it captured the pure optimism of an era transitioning away from post-War austerity into a period of consumer affluence and joyful exuberance:

 

"As well as 'Rock Around the Clock' I heard Perry Como's 'Magic Moments', which our mother had bought. The sound became interesting to me, because it seemed to be a language that everybody emotionally felt in some way. They responded to it. It could have been absolutely inane if you sat down and thought about it, but that didn't matter because it was a train people wanted to get on. They all thought it sexy, and so did I." [4]  

 

 

Notes

 

[1] 'Magic Moments' was originally the B-side of Perry Como's 'Catch a Falling Star' (RCA Victor, 1957), released in December 1957. However, such was its popularity that the single effectively became a double A-side and the song charted in its own right, reaching number one in the UK thereby becoming Como's biggest UK hit. To watch Como and friends performing the song back in the day, click here. Or for audio only, click here. 

 

[2] For non-British readers, I should explain that Quality Street is a tin of mixed toffees and chocolates first manufactured in 1936 by Mackintosh's in Halifax, West Yorkshire and, since 1988, produced by Nestlé. A real Christmas favourite, it was named after J. M. Barrie's popular four-act comedy Quality Street (1901). 

     

[3] Born in Bethnal Green in 1931, Hannah Joyce Greenfield - known as Joyce by friends and family - was evacuated to Wales during the Blitz, returning to London towards the end of the War, finding employment in the rag trade having left school at fourteen. 

      After marrying, she and her husband, John, moved like so many other Eastenders to Essex, where they raised three children; a daughter, Lynne, and two sons, Peter and Andrew. The latter recalls that his house growing up was always full of the popular music from the 1950s and '60s and that his mother was particularly fond of singing along to Perry Como's 'Magic Moments'.

     Joyce - who in some ways was like a second mother to me, so much time did I spend at her house with my friend Andy - sadly passed away on 29 November 2013, aged 82. Her funeral took place (like my mother's ten years later) at South Essex Crematorium, on 13 December 2013.      

 

[4] Malcolm McLaren quoted by Paul Gorman in The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren (Constable, 2020), p. 31.     

 

 

She's Dead I'm Alive I'm Yours: The Story of Who Paid Sid's Bail

She's Dead I'm Alive I'm Yours (feat. Sid Vicious) 

Malcolm McLaren & Vivienne Westwood 

Seditionaries (1978)

 

 

I. 

 

Created in the sixteen-week period between Nancy Spungen's murder in October 1978 and Sid's death in February 1979, the 'She's Dead I'm Alive I'm Yours' shirt was one of McLaren and Westwood's final designs for Seditionaries. 

 

Showing Vicious surrounded by dead red roses (that give the impression of blood splatter), the design was often printed on white cotton T-shirts, but featured also on long-sleeved muslin tops [1]. 

 

For some, it reflects the tragic (if seedy) romanticism of punk. For others it shows an appalling lack of taste and human decency - even the website Punk77 feels obliged to note: 'It's not even shocking anymore, just a bit sad.' [2]      

 

At the time, however, the shirt was hurriedly produced for a practical purpose; namely, to raise funds for Sid's bail and future legal fees (Vicious was accused of inflicting the single knife wound from which 20-year-old Miss Spungen died). 

 

 

II. 

 

The oft-repeated claim that Mick Jagger secretly stumped up the cash - spread by Rotten many years after the event in order to portray McLaren as uncaring and unwilling to help - is essentially false [3]. As a matter of fact, Virgin Records paid the bail [4] and Malcolm did what he could in the circumstances (even though, technically, he was no longer managing the former Sex Pistol). 

 

It was Malcolm, for example, who immediately flew to New York upon hearing of Sid's arrest and it was Malcolm who hired a lawyer to represent Vicious at the arraignment. Not Jagger - and not Rotten, who was busy promoting his new band's debut single, released the day after Spungen's murder [5]. 

 

Even when McLaren's assistance to Vicious is acknowledged, "it is often interpreted as being not only exploitative [...] but opportunistic, in that keeping Vicious alive and out of jail would maintain what remained of the Sex Pistols' viability" [6].

 

That interpretation, says Paul Gorman, does Malcolm a great disservice. For "the strenuousness with which McLaren attempted to establish Vicious's innocence and survival belies a human resolve" [7] to do the right thing by Sid and display a virtue rarely associated with punk - compassion [8].  

  

 

Notes

 

[1] An example of such can be found in the MET Collection: click here. 

 

[2] Quoted from the page devoted to Seditionaries on the long-running independent website Punk77 operated by Paul Marko: click here.  

 

[3] In a 2013 interview with the Daily Record, Rotten claimed that Jagger had generously paid the legal fees. However, any offer of financial help that may or may not have been made by Jagger never materialised. Unfortunately, the story has been widely repeated and entered into punk legend. The full interview can be read here. 

[4] Mo Ostin, the boss of Warner Records - the Sex Pistols' American label - refused to help and, in fact, "used the murder case to terminate the recording contract with Vicious, Jones and Cook", whilst maintaining a good working relationship with Rotten. 

      McLaren also asked Billy Meshel, the group's US music publisher at Arista, but he too declined to cough up the cash. Left with no other choice, McLaren turned to Richard Branson and the Virgin boss agreed to pay the $50,000 bail (as a kind of advance on delivery of the soundtrack to The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle). 

      See Paul Gorman, The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren (Constable, 2020), p. 407.

 

[5] Rotten's new group, Public Image Ltd., who were signed to Virgin, released their first single, 'Public Image' on 13 October, 1978. Their debut album, Public Image: First Issue followed in December of that year. 

      For all Rotten's professed sadness and guilt over what became of his friend, he actually did nothing to help - essentially writing Vicious off as a lost cause. His claims that he was prevented by McLaren from helping are, one suspects, a lot of baloney.  

 

[6] Paul Gorman, The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren, p. 406. 

 

[7] Ibid. 

 

[8] Obviously, I'm aware that, for McLaren, human tragedy and brilliant branding were never mutually exclusive and that while it's legitimate to credit him for showing up in New York when others didn't, we should be careful not to mistake his actions as pure compassion. 

      If, on the one hand, he seemed to genuinely care for Sid and want to keep him out of prison, on the other hand he was not above making the most of events for his own artistic and commercial ends.   

 

More Tales from Charisma Records: Memories of Steve Weltman and Shelly Clark

 

First Floor, 90 Wardour Street, Soho, London W1. 

Tel: 01 434 1351 

I. 

 

Charisma Records was a small independent label founded in 1969 by the ebullient figure Tony Stratton Smith and is mostly remembered today as the home of a few old hippies and prog rockers [1] and for releasing various novelty records, which, depending on how one views these things, may or may not include Malcolm McLaren's Duck Rock (1983). 

 

For me, however, Charisma is a place I remember fondly not so much for the artists and acts associated with the label, but the equally talented and, in some ways, equally eccentric cast of characters who were running the company during its final years after it was bitten (and eventually swallowed) by the Virgin shark [2]. 

 

 

II.

 

These characters, for example, include Steve Weltman, who had left RCA to take up the role of Managing Director at Charisma in 1981, where he had previously worked in the early '70s and so understood the ethos and history of the label.  

 

I didn't have a personally close or even particularly fond working relationship with Weltman [3] and, as far as I remember, he only twice called me into his office for a serious chat.

 

On the first occasion, it was to warn me against visiting McLaren's office on 25 Denmark Street, as, due to ongoing legal wranglings between Charisma and McLaren, any and all future contact would be construed, he said, as a breach of trust (I was essentially accused of being a spy and of passing on confidential information) [4]. 

 

Needless to say, I didn't heed this warning. For one thing, I wasn't technically an employee of Charisma, so didn't feel under any legal obligation to do so and, obviously, my loyalties were very much to Malcolm, who had placed me in the Charisma press office in the first place. 

 

On the second occasion, it was to advise that I could, if I wanted, have a very bright future working in the music industry and that I should seriously consider my options and seize any opportunities that came my way. 

 

Again, needless to say, I didn't pay any attention to this careers advice and, in October 1985, with £1000 stuffed in an envelope, and carrying more books than clothes in an old suitcase, I set off on a bus from Victoria coach station to Madrid, with the intention of becoming a novelist and poet [5].    

 

 

III. 

 

Another Charisma character that I remember well (and with rather more affection) was the young woman heading the A&R department, Shelly Clark ...

 

Although I was primarily Lee Ellen Newman's right-arm in the Press Office, occasionally I'd be asked to help Shelly deal with the ever-growing backlog of tapes that were sent in by hopefuls and wannabes all aspiring to become successful recording artists. 

 

These tapes, rather sadly, were kept in a number of black bin bags, as if in anticipation of their fate. And to be fair, most were rubbish. It often surprised me to see the lack of care many people took with their submissions; sometimes forgetting even to include a return address or phone number, let alone a brief bio and photo [6].

 

Shelly was, I think, a generous soul. She did once throw a cup of coffee over me [7], but then, on the other hand, she gave me a big hug and a kiss on my 22nd birthday and we shared a couple of bottles of wine in her office listening to various outtakes from Duck Rock. We even once went to see a band together - The Opposition - at Camden Palace (25 June, 1985), on the orders of Steve Weltman.   

 

Unfortunately, I think she was a little ground down (or bored) by the job. And I'm not sure Shelly really knew or cared very much about music. I liked her though and think this photo taken of the two of us by Holly Fogg, the Charisma Secretary, shows that we enjoyed an affectionate and playful relationship: 

 

 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Historians of the British music industry tend to view Charisma in three distinct phases: the first phase between late 1969 and July 1975; the middle phase, from August 1975 to August 1983; and the final phase from September 1983 until Charisma's full assimilation into Virgin in 1986-87.  

      Whilst it is the first phase that is traditionally of most interest to historians and record collectors - this being seen as the golden period during which Charisma released records from artists such as The Nice, Genesis, Lindisfarne, Van Der Graaf Generator, et al, it's the final phase that interests me here and which I was a part of. 

 

[2] Stratton Smith sold Charisma to Richard Branson's Virgin Records in stages. A special relationship, which included a distribution deal, was agreed in September 1983 and this was (inevitably) followed by a full sale of shares in 1985. By the end of the following year, Charisma had been fully assimilated and ceased operating as an independent label; the last new release with the Mad Hatter logo appeared in October 1986.

      Sadly, Stratton Smith died shortly afterwards, of pancreatic cancer, aged 54, in March 1987. On the few occasions he and I ever spoke, he invariably misremembered my name - calling me James rather than Jazz - though he did once say he admired my 'lateral thinking'.   

[3] Having said that, Weltman did invite me to his birthday party on Saturday 1 June 1985, at his house in Esher, Surrey (one of the most affluent towns in the UK, popular with bankers, lawyers, corporate executives, celebrities, and so on). 

 

[4] Ironically, but also to his great credit, it had been Weltman who - undeterred by Mclaren's troublemaking reputation - had insisted that Charisma sign the latter and pay him an advance of £45,000 in order to make the album fusing "contemporary urban black sounds with world music" known as Duck Rock. 

      See Paul Gorman, The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren (Constable, 2020), pp. 494-95.  

 

[5] See the autobiographical fragment on my move to sunny Spain in October 1985 (18 Aug 2020): click here. 

 

[6] Just as surprising was the level of naivety displayed by those who sent in tapes containing a full album's worth of songs; did they really think anyone would continue listening beyond the first 30 seconds of the first couple of tracks? 

      More irritating, however, was the defensive arrogance that occasionally accompanied a submission: If you can't hear the musical brilliance of these highly original songs then please return them without delay.

 

[7] As recorded in a diary entry dated Tuesday 5 February, 1985. The coffee was thrown playfully, rather than in anger or with malice.

 

 

Granny Takes a Trip with Gorman & Bracewell

Poster for the Granny Takes a Trip book event at Foyles (11 Feb 2026) 

Photo of Paul Gorman live on stage taken by Melpomeni 

 

 

I. In Anticipation ...

  

Much anticipating this evening's event at Foyles on the Charing Cross Road: Paul Gorman in conversation with Michael Bracewell; i.e., two of the UK's most celebrated pop culture writers [1] under one roof - and all for the price of a tenner (which includes a glass of wine). 

 

Essentially, they'll be discussing the look of music and the sound of fashion in relation to Granny Takes a Trip; the groovy London boutique that was opened sixty years ago this month on King's Road, Chelsea, by Nigel Waymouth, his girlfriend Sheila Cohen, and John Pearse.

 

Gorman recently published his illuminating study of the shop as well as the cultural scene from which it emerged [2], so obviously he'll be there in part to promote (and sign) copies of this book, but I'm sure he'll be willing to discuss also McLaren and Westwood's store which opened nearby a few years later and for which Granny paved the way and provided a model (like McLaren and Westwood's shop, Granny Takes a Trip became famous for its changing façade, interior, and styles of fashion).    

 

At least I hope so, as it's the punk store at 430 King's Road rather than the hippie haven at 488 that really excites my interest.    

II. On Reflection ... 

 

Well, that was fun!

 

Gorman is an engaging speaker and it helps when the interlocutor is deeply knowledgeable of the subject being discussed. The event was also nicely staged and managed by the staff at Foyles, so kudos to them. 

If I had a time machine and could only make one return trip, I'd still use it to visit SEX in 1976 rather than Granny's in 1966, but, to be fair, the latter was a more culturally vital space than I previously realised (even if listed on the wrong side of the bed).    

Members of a receptive and fairly large audience produced one or two interesting observations and although I didn't ask at the time, I came away wondering whether a store such as Granny Takes a Trip or SEX would still be possible today ... 

 

Sadly, I doubt it. 

 

Although whether that's because socio-cultural conditions have changed, or we have fundamentally changed as a people - become less imaginative and less daring and more desirous of safe spaces in which to self-identify, rather than zones of indiscernibility in which to dress up so as to mess up and become-other - I'm not sure.

Time was, in the 1960s and '70s, when any suburban teenager could go up to London, stroll along the King's Road or cruise round Soho, and (momentarily at least) leave their mundane life behind; could visit magical boutiques and try on an outfit like Mr Benn and be transported into a fantasy adventure.  

 

Now the young go to Primark or spend the day in Westfield and talk about the importance of diversity and being themselves whilst all looking (to my eyes at least) exactly the same in their casual street wear (baggy, low-rise jeans, oversized hoodies, trainers, etc.); a look that is heavily influenced by social media trends rather than the politics of style.  

 

Notes

 

[1] Paul Gorman (b. 1959) is a writer it would be easy to envy, but whom I prefer to love and admire; particularly for his 2020 biography of McLaren, but also for his work in a variety of other areas as a brilliant curator and, indeed, pop cultural map-maker.  

      Michael Bracewell (b. 1958) is a writer with whose life and work I am far less familiar, but whose two collections of essays - England Is Mine: Pop Life in Albion From Wilde to Goldie (1997) and The Space Between: Selected Writings on Art (2012) - I plan on reading in the near future. 

 

[2] Paul Gorman, Granny Takes a Trip: High Fashion and High Times at the Wildest Rock 'n' Roll Boutique (White Rabbit Books, 2025). 

      The publisher's blurb reads: 

 "Granny Takes A Trip was more than just a shop and a fashion brand; it was the original rock and roll clothes boutique, the template for all that followed. What started as an odd retail venture/art installation in a depressed part of London known as World's End became an international byword for glam decadence in Manhattan and Hollywood, combining flamboyant style and all manner of countercultural activity ...

      Unfolding over a decade-and-a-half, this tumultuous story invokes a cast of often unique, sometimes entitled, unusually talented and troubled individuals on a collective mission to shake up austere, repressed, class-ridden Britain and white bread America." 

      The book can be ordered here.  

 

 

This post is for Paul and Charlie's dark-haired Angels: Maria, Meni, and Jennifer. 

 

 

And God Save Ronald Biggs

Jamie Reid promotional poster for the Sex Pistols' single 

'No One is Innocent' (Virgin Records, 1978)

 

Ronnie Rotten - he never sang for Scotland Yard, but he burst his lungs for the Sex Pistols ...

 

  

I. 

 

If you want to understand the Sex Pistols, then it probably helps to conceive of them more as an adolescent criminal gang, led by former art student Malcolm McLaren, who peddled anarchy and fetish fashion from their hideout on the King's Road, rather than simply a punk rock band fronted by Johnny Rotten [1]. 

 

Instead of chasing chart success and pop stardom, the idea was to generate cash from chaos, aestheticise evil, and celebrate the outlaw à la Jean Genet [2] who recognised in the ruthlessness and cunning of murderers and thieves a sunken beauty.  

 

Thus, for example, one of the earliest shirts sold at SEX featured the leather mask of the notorious Cambridge Rapist. And so it was that when Rotten was thrown overboard for collaborating with the record companies so as to establish a long-term, professional career in music, he was replaced not by some hopeless teen wannabe, but by Great Train Robber and fugitive Ronnie Biggs ... [3]  

 

 

II. 

 

Biggs, who had daringly escaped from Wandsworth Prison fifteen months into his thirty year sentence, was still wanted by the British authorities, but had immunity from extradition, having fathered a child in Brazil, where he had been living since 1970.

 

He and the two remaining Sex Pistols - Paul Cook and Steve Jones - got on well, writing and recording a new track together, entitled 'No One is Innocent' [4], which was released as a single on 30 June 1978, coupled with Sid's unique version of 'My Way'. Despite a (predictable) BBC ban, it reached number 7 in the UK Singles Chart [5]. Biggs also recorded a version of 'Belsen Was a Gas', which was included on the The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle soundtrack (1979) [6]. 

 

I know many people - including fans of the band - were either perplexed or pissed-off by McLaren's decision to replace Rotten with Biggs as the new singer with the Sex Pistols [8], but I tend to agree with Jamie Reid that it was a brilliant (and necessary) move which demonstrated an idea crucial to the pluralistic politics of The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle, namely, that anyone can be a Sex Pistol [9].

 

 

III.

 

In February 1978, McLaren joined Cook and Jones in Brazil. Filmmaker Julien Temple was also there to shoot the scenes with Biggs for the Swindle, including an expensive riverboat sequence to promote the new song, which had been recorded at a local 16-track studio with overdubs later added back in London at Wessex Studios, by audio engineer Bill Price. 

 

The thing is - and I think this is something even those who dismiss the track as simply a cynical attempt to stir controversy and grab headlines will admit - it does sound like a Sex Pistols track; even without Rotten on vocals. Thanks to Jones's distinctive guitar and Cook's solid work as always on drums, it has typical swagger and a huge amount of energy. 

 

And for those who, like me, appreciate the absurd anarchy of the Swindle rather than the austere monarchy of Never Mind the Bollocks, it's a fantastic single. 

 

To play 'No One is Innocent' (audio only) click here. 

 

To play (with official video using footage from The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (1980)), click here.

 

 

Sex Pistols (sans Rotten and Vicious): 

Jones / Rowland / McLaren / Cook /Biggs (1978)

 

      

Notes

 

[1] I think it's important to acknowledge that the key figure in the band was never really Rotten; it was Steve Jones, a semi-professional tea leaf with more than a dozen criminal convictions; someone described by Glen Matlock as resembling a character from a book by Jean Genet. 

 

[2] See the post 'God Save Jean Genet' (2 Feb 2026), in which the French writer is considered in relation to the Sex Pistols: click here. 

 

[3] Whilst I cannot go into too much detail here, I thought readers who are unfamiliar with the name and the robbery with which Biggs is forever associated, might appreciate a few lines of explanation ...

      Ronald Biggs was a petty criminal from South London who helped plan and carry out the Great Train Robbery on 8 August 1963 (his 34th birthday). Whilst in The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (1980) he is portrayed as the legendary mastermind behind the robbery, he actually had a very minor role. 

      The gang got away with £2.6 million (equivalent to around £70 million today), so a considerable sum of money then as now and the holding up of a Royal Mail train travelling from Glasgow to London was an enormous story in the British press, dominating headlines for weeks afterwards and remaining in the cultural imagination ever since. For some people it still remains the crime of the century and, despite what happened to the train's driver, Jack Mills, the robbers are often regarded as folk heroes who got one over the authorities. For even though Biggs and eleven other gang members were arrested just three weeks after the robbery and received long prison sentences, most of the money was never recovered.

      Biggs subsequently became notorious for his escape from prison in July 1965, living thereafter as a fugitive in foreign exile (and with a new identity) for thirty-six years. The money - as it always does - soon ran out (mostly on legal fees and other expenses relating to his exile, although £40,000 also went on plastic surgery), so Biggs was obliged to do whatever he could to secure and income - including the selling of his soul for punk.  

      In 2001, feeling increasingly homesick - telling friends that he longed to walk into an English boozer once more and order a pint -  he announced to The Sun newspaper that he would be willing to return to the UK. Still having twenty-eight years of his sentence left to serve, he was aware that he would be detained upon arrival in Britain and spend time in prison: which he did. However, due to his health rapidly declining, he was (eventually) released on compassionate grounds in August 2009 (two days before his 80th birthday and having served a third of his original sentence). 

      Biggs died in a North London nursing home on 18 December 2013. His body was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium on 3 January 2014. The coffin was covered with the flags of the UK and Brazil (and a Charlton Athletic scarf). An honour guard of British Hells Angels escorted his hearse to the crematorium.

 

[4] Before Virgin vetoed the idea, the track was originally to be called 'Cosh the Driver', tastelessly referencing the fact that during the robbery the driver of the intercepted train, Jack Mills, was blugeoned with an iron bar. Mills never fully recovered from his serious head injuries - nor overcome the trauma of what he had experienced - although he died of an unrelated cause (leukaemia), in 1970. 

      The 12" single - which I bought along with the 7" - came with a different sleeve, featuring a still from The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (dir. Julien Temple, 1980) in which the American actor Henry Rowland (dressed as Nazi on the run Martin Bormann; a role he had played in a number of Russ Meyer movies) is shown playing bass alongside Jones on guitar, Cook on drums, and Biggs on lead vocals. It also came with a different title: 'The Biggest Blow - A Punk Prayer by Ronnie Biggs' (Virgin Records, 1979).  

 

[5] The single was not released in the US and failed to chart in other overseas territories. 

 

[6] Readers might be surprised to learn that this was not Biggs's first outing as a recording artist. For Biggs, an avid jazz fan, had previously collaborated in 1974 with three musicians to make a musical narrative of his life entitled Mailbag Blues. The album was finally released in 2004 (whatmusic.com) and is "a fusion of experimental jazz, blues and funk, with echoes of Brazilian styles such as tropicalia and bossa nova" and although Biggs doesn't actually sing on the record, he is credited as inspiration and storyteller. See Alex Bellos, 'Ronnie Biggs: the album', in The Guardian (1 Sept 2004): click here. To listen to the title track - 'Mailbag Blues' - please click here. 

      Biggs also had a post-Pistols recording career; in 1991, he provided vocals for the songs 'Police on My Back' and 'Carnival in Rio' by German punk band Die Toten Hosen, and two years later Biggs sang on three tracks for the album Bajo Otra Bandera by Argentinian punk band Pilsen. You can find some of these songs on YouTube, but, frankly, I'd not bother.

 

[7] McLaren's original plan was for the group - including Rotten - to fly down to Rio de Janeiro after the final US show in San Francisco, so that they could be filmed performing with Biggs. Paul Gorman writes: "The combination of the UK's most wanted felon cavorting with the world's most hated group amid the favelas during Carnival was too good an opportunity to let pass, McLaren believed." 

      But Rotten wanted nothing to do with the idea and his refusal to comply with McLaren's latest scheme effectively brought the curtain down on his career as a Sex Pistol. Interestingly, Gorman is sympathetic to the singer here: 

      "With justification, Lydon viewed Biggs as a charmless nerk rather than an anti-hero deserving of glorification, not least since the train driver in Biggs's gang crime had suffered severe brain damage from injuries inflicted upon him during the raid."

      See Paul Gorman, The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren (Constable, 2020), pp. 386 and 388. 

 

[8] Jamie Reid would later explain:

      "'One of the things we were aware of was the need never to remain still, never to become stagnant. After three or four records have come out there begins to be a typical punk fan, who identifies with the band the way fans always do. When Rotten left and we put in Ronnie Biggs, they couldn't understand. It seemed a good idea to us.'"

      Quoted by Paul Gorman in The Life and Times of Malcolm Mclaren, p. 402. 

God Save Joe Orton

Joe Orton anachronistically wearing a 

Seditionaries Prick Up Your Ears T-shirt

in a photo by George Elam (1967) 

 

'The kind of people who always go on about whether a thing is in good taste 

invariably have very bad taste.'

 

 

I. 

 

Remembered primarily as a playwright who came to a sticky end at the hands of his lover, Joe Orton was a gay, working class English writer who, in a brief but brilliant public career lasting from 1964 until his murder in 1967, outraged and amused audiences with his scandalous black comedies, characterised by a mix of cynicism and sauciness [1].  

 

 

II. 

 

After leaving school, Orton got a job as an office junior whilst also developing an interest in the performing arts, joing a number of am-dram societies in his home town of Leicester. He obviously showed promise, as, in November 1950, he was offered a scholarship at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, which he took up the following spring.   

 

It was at RADA that Orton met Kenneth Halliwell, seven years his senior, and they formed a strong romantic relationship, moving into a West Hampstead flat together (shared with two other students). 

 

After graduating, they collaborated on a number of novels. However, as these failed to set the literary world alight (or even find a publisher), Orton and Halliwell decided it might be best to write separately, scraping by as best they could on benefits and monies earned from part-time jobs, whilst amusing themselves with various pranks; such as removing books from their local library in order to modify them (i.e., deface the covers with comically surreal images and additional text), before returning them to the shelves [2].   

 

They were eventually nicked by the police and charged with larceny and damage to property deemed to be wilfully malicious in nature. After pleading guilty at Old Street magistrates (in May 1962), each received a six-month custodial sentence (and a £2 fine). Interestingly, whilst Halliwell hated being in jail and attempted suicide, Orton seemed to enjoy himself and find inspiration. His career as a powerful and subversive writer arguably has its origins in his time behind bars and shortly after his release he wrote Entertaining Mr Sloane [3]. 

 

 

III.

 

The unduly harsh nature of the prison sentence, which Orton suspected was due to the fact that he and Halliwell were queers, brought home to him the fact that corrupt priggishness and hypocrisy still exercised its power and authority in the UK, even after the Chatterley Trial: 

 

"It affected my attitude towards society. Before I had been vaguely conscious of something rotten somewhere, prison crystallised this. The old whore society really lifted up her skirts and the stench was pretty foul." [4]

 

Orton's next performed work was Loot (1965); a dark two-act work that satirises social and religious attitudes to death, as well as the integrity of the police. It opened to severe criticism, but, after numerous edits and rewrites, a London production in the autumn of 1966 received rave reviews, several awards, and established Orton's reputation. He was even able to sell the film rights for £25,000 (that's over half-a-million nicker in today's money and was a record figure at the time).     

 

 

IV. 

 

Orton's final play, What the Butler Saw, was a clever modern farce that he completed writing in July 1967, one month before his death [5]. It opened at the Queen's Theatre, London, on 5 March 1969 and was met with a hostile audience reaction; boos and cries of rubbish were heard coming from the balcony and some people walked out, protesting the play's raunchy character and obvious contempt for authority.

 

There is, finally, one more work I would like to mention; Up Against It - an unproduced film script written in 1967 for the Beatles, who were then at the height of their fame. 

 

After submitting the script to their manager, Brian Epstein, it was returned to Orton following a long period of silence and without comment. It's anarchic, sexually explicit, and subversive tone was deemed too potentially damaging to the Beatles' carefully managed public image and inappropriate for a mainstream movie audience [6]. 

 

In fact, the dark and chaotic script might have better suited Malcolm McLaren's Sex Pistols ...

 

 

V.   

 

It's not wrong to consider Orton a defining figure (and diarist) of London in the 1960s; his work and lifestyle embodied the rebellious and sexually liberated spirit of the counterculture during that era. 

 

But, having said that, I can't help thinking of him as more of a trickster-punk than a peace-loving hippie - even if he did have a Beatles song played at his funeral. And Malcolm McLaren was a great admirer, considering Orton an inspiration for the punk aesthetic that he and Vivienne Westwood had created in their shop at 430 King's Road.   

 

Thus it is that Orton's name appears on the right side (literally and figuratively) of the 'You're Gonna Wake Up' manifesto (1974). And thus it is that, in 1979, McLaren and Westwood produced the 'Prick Up Your Ears' shirt for Seditionaries, which comes with a quotation taken from Orton's diary (I write in more detail about this shirt in a post that can be accessed by clicking here). 

 

As Paul Gorman notes, for McLaren, Orton was a "remorseless cultural provocateur" [7] and a kindred spirit; someone who drew inspiration (as he did) from the gutter and delighted in the prospect of fucking the rich up the arse.    

  

 

Notes

 

[1] The comparison with Oscar Wilde is often made and it's not an unreasonable comparison to make; both used wit to expose the moral hypocrisies of their respective societies, often focusing on the absurdity of authority. Writing in the more permissive 1960s, rather than the Victorian 1890s, allowed Orton to be more explicitly transgressive than Wilde, though I'm not sure he was more anarchic or provocative.

      For a critical essay on this pair of queer iconoclasts, see John Bull, 'What the butler did see: Joe Orton and Oscar Wilde', in Francesca Coppa (ed.), Joe Orton: A Casebook (Routledge, 2002), pp. 45-60. 

 

[2] In their defence, Orton and Halliwell were protesting what they regarded as an appalling selection of books; endless shelves of rubbish, as they put it. See Ilsa Colsell's Malicious Damage: the Defaced Library Books of Kenneth Halliwell and Joe Orton (Donlon Books, 2013). 

      And see also the excellent article by Jonathan Jones titled 'Joe Orton's defaced library books and the death of rebellious art', in The Guardian (14 Oct 2011): click here. Jones argues that their amusing (if somewhat juvenile) defacement of library books was "a glorious rejection of the austerity and ordinariness that still set the British tone in 1962" and anticipated the manner in which the Sex Pistols scandalised a moribund nation in the following decade.  

      Amusingly, the book covers Orton and Halliwell vandalised have since become a valued part of the Islington Local History Centre collection and some are exhibited in the Islington Museum (i.e., they have been recuperated by the Spectacle). A collection of the book covers is also available online at the Joe Orton Gallery: click here.  

 

[3] Joe Orton (1964) as quoted on joeorton.org: click here. 

 

[4] The three-act play Entertaining Mr Sloane premiered at the New Arts Theatre (London) on 6 May 1964, produced by Michael Codron. Reviews ranged from praise to outrage, with one critic for The Times declaring that it made his blood boil more than any other British play in the last decade. The play was transferred to Wyndham's Theatre in the West End at the end of June and then to the Queen's Theatre in October, and Orton was hailed as a promising new talent. 

 

[5] On 9 August 1967, Halliwell bludgeoned 34-year-old Orton to death at their home in Islington with multiple hammer blows to the head. Halliwell then killed himself with an overdose of Nembutal. It seems likely that Orton had wanted to terminate their relationship (albeit not in such a literal fashion). 

 

[6] The screenplay was filled with what was termed outlaw sexuality and it should be recalled that homosexuality had only (partially) been decriminalised in July of 1967. Paul McCartney would later admit that the Beatles didn't wish to do the film because it was gay and they were not.  

      Interestingly, in 1979, John Lydon initiated a High Court case against Malcolm McLaren and his management company, Glitterbest. While the primary goal was to reclaim misappropriated royalties and the rights to the Sex Pistols name, Rotten also wanted to make clear his objection to the salacious and immoral elements contained in the script upon which the film that eventually became The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (1980) had been based. Arguing that the script portrayed him and other members of the band in a defamatory and harmful light, Rotten also made it clear that he had no wish to be associated with infamous figures including Jack the Ripper, Myra Hindley and Great Train Robber Ronnie Biggs. Nor, indeed, did he approve of any scenes involving extreme sexual and violent content. 

 

[7] Paul Gorman, The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren (Constable, 2020), p. 426.  

  

 

To read a sister post to this one - God Save Jean Genet (2 Feb 2026) - please click here. 

 

Bonus video: a short clip of Joe Orton being interviewed on The Eamon Andrews Show (ABC Weekend TV, 23 April, 1967): click here. A decade later, Andrews' co-presenter on the Thames TV show Today, Bill Grundy, would interview the Sex Pistols, who weren't prepared to play along in such a charming manner as Orton.