Happy Birthday Julien Temple (and in Memory of Malcolm McLaren)

Film director Julien Temple

(the punk generation's Jean Vigo)

 

 

Born on this day, in 1953, the British filmmaker Julien Temple is - without ever really being part of the gang - crucial to the story of the Sex Pistols, which he began to document from the very early days, having come across the band rehearsing in an abandoned warehouse in Bermondsey, South London, whilst drifting around the area admiring the rusting hulks of ships and the general decay of what had once been a thriving centre of industry and trade. 

 

This chance encounter was before the band had played their first gig at St Martin's School of Art on 6 November 1975 (supporting Bazooka Joe), so Temple can effectively claim to have been involved with the band from day one and was certainly not some Johnny-come-lately on what would become known as the punk scene, even if he never quite escaped being thought of as a middle class cunt - his words, not mine [1].    

 

Be that as it may, he was young and clearly talented enough to capture Malcolm's attention, and so Temple was eventually given permission to become the Sex Pistols' in-house filmmaker. 

 

Initially, however, McLaren, had opposed such an idea. It was only when the band began to hit the headlines that he was persuaded it would be a good idea after all to document what was going on - particularly when Temple offered to do so for free, although Malcolm eventually put him on a retainer of £12 a week.       

 

When the idea of making a full-length feature film arose - originally to be called Who Killed Bambi? and directed by Russ Meyer - Temple was appointed as the latter's assistant. For one reason or another - actually, for many, many reasons - this film was never going to be made and the project eventually morphed into The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (1980), which is credited to Temple as director, although I'll always think of Malcolm as the film's auteur. 

Twenty years later, Temple then made The Filth and the Fury (2000) with the band's full cooperation, which is to say Rotten was on board and ready to put the record straight and tell the true story of the Sex Pistols (with tears of emotional sincerity welling up in his eyes). 

 

Whilst the latter rockumentary - not a term that Temple likes or uses - was critically acclaimed, I hate it for its attempt not only to give a more balanced account of events, but to humanise the band and perpetuate the ridiculous idea that poor Johnny was somehow a victim - even though he was also, apparently, the real reason for the band's success: A true star, honest!  

Temple claims he wanted to make The Filth and the Fury because he was annoyed with McLaren saying that the band members were essentially of no great import and that he was the artistic visionary who created everything. But, whilst that's not quite the case, neither is it entirely the fantasy of an egomaniac and, ironically, I think Malcolm's contribution to British popular culture is still hugely underrated [2].

 

Still, I don't wish to debate this here and now, nor say anything negative about Temple as a filmmaker. I simply want to take this opportunity to wish him happy birthday and thank him for the role he has played in recording an important period in British social and cultural history.     

 

 

Jamie Reid badge design 

vam.ac.uk

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Speaking with John Robb in 2022, Temple recalls the reaction of the band when he proposed they provide a soundtrack to a five minute film he was then working on as a student: "'Fuck off!' Middle class cunt basically being the subtext." Click here to watch the full interview on YouTube. The line I quote begins at 2:38.  

[2] Not by Temple, who, despite his issues with McLaren, had this to say in an obituary in The Observer (11 April 2010): 

 

"Malcolm was an incredible catalyst for my generation. To be in the same room as him in 1976 was to be bombarded with energy and swept up in a rush of ideas and emotions. [....] But his impact was not limited to music alone. Right across the creative spectrum Malcolm made young people - artists, designers, writers, film-makers - aware that they had a distinctive voice and encouraged them to use it right there and then." 

      

Temple concludes: 

 

"On a personal note, although I worked intensely with Malcolm for only a short period of time and managed to fall out with him pretty spectacularly too, the creative ideas he instilled in me have lasted a lifetime." 

 

 

Why I'm a Sex Pistol Rather Than a Clash City Rocker

A Seditionaries Destroy shirt 

McLaren and Westwood (1977) 
Victoria and Albert Museum Collection

According to Mick Jones, speaking in an interview with GQ in 2011, there were two types of punk: those who wanted to destroy and those who wanted to create ...

Clearly, the Sex Pistols wanted to destroy; they announced the fact on their first single and on the shirts that Uncle Malcolm and Auntie Vivienne designed for them. They were into chaos, not music. And when asked what he intended to do about the rapid post-War decline of the UK, I'll always remember with a smile Steve Jones saying: Make it worse.

Like Nietzsche, the Sex Pistols wanted to consummate nihilism by accelerating the process; to kick over that which was already rotten and threatening to fall; to go still further in the schizonomadic direction of decoding and deterritorialization. Certainly for McLaren, the most revolutionary of strategies was to unleash all kinds of forces and flows and push things to the extreme, which is to say, their exterior and absolute limit. 

The Sex Pistols, we might say, are rock 'n' roll's anarchic promise brought to fulfilment; and they are also the exterminating angels who came to destroy rock 'n' roll once and for all, exposing its complicity with capital and the manner in which the music business ultimately serves to keep young people under control.

Their final great act was not their astonishing self-immolation on stage at the Winterland, but the destruction of their own legend in The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle - a project that incriminates everyone, including the fans.  

The Clash, in contrast, were typical type two punks: "trying to create something better for everybody", as Mick Jones says. Social justice warriors with zips and safety pins; or nice middle-class boys pretending to be outlaws, as Sebastian Horsley memorably described them.

The problem is that those who speak about initiating a new wave, often secretly wish to shore up the old order and establish successful careers within it. Thus it was, for example, that for all their anti-American posturing and talk of phoney Beatlemania having bitten the dust, the Clash were desperate to make it big in the US and soon fell into all the usual rock star clichés. Indeed, they even ended up opening for the Who at Shea Stadium:

And all the young punks looked from Joe to Roger and from Mick to Pete; but already it was impossible to say which was which ...

Finally, in 2003, the surviving members of the Clash were all present and correct to meekly accept with gratitude their induction into the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of fame - an institution which Rotten amusingly branded a piss-stain on humanity.

Of course, it's true that - eventually - we have our fill of destruction and must turn again to the task of creation; that once all the old forms are shattered and all the old icons toppled, we need to find a new way of living beneath the open sky. Only an idiot mistakes the ruins as an end goal.

But - and it's an important but - we should be extremely wary of those idealists who appear overly keen to start building the New Jerusalem; especially when using the same old tools and materials.   

Notes

To read the interview with Mick Jones, by Alex Pappademas, in GQ (2 Nov 2011): click here. 

To watch the Sex Pistols performing Anarchy in the UK during their final show (Winterland, San Francisco, 14 Jan 1978), click here. They tweak the lyrics, but the message remains the same: Destroy. 

To watch a 7 min promo film for the Clash Live at Shea Stadium album (Epic, 2008), click here. The actual show took place on 13 Oct 1982. 

For Sebastian Horsley's take on the difference between the Sex Pistols and the Clash, click here. 

Two Poster Designs for the 14th International D. H. Lawrence Conference (July 2017)

Having been asked to come up with a poster for the 14th International D. H. Lawrence Conference, which is being held here in London next summer, I thought it would be interesting to rework two classic punk designs. 

The first refers us back to the Clash album released in 1979, the front cover of which famously featured a photograph of Paul Simonon smashing his bass on stage taken by Pennie Smith. But it wasn't the photograph that interested. Rather, it was the pink and green lettering used by Ray Lowry in homage to Elvis Presley’s eponymous debut album of 1956.

The second and I suppose more controversial design (in as much as it ties Lawrence not only to a musical genre, but to a history of crime), is in the style of Jamie Reid's brilliant God Save ... series of images created for the Sex Pistols film The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (dir, Julien Temple, 1980).

In both cases, the idea was to create an image that would indicate Lawrence’s own notorious and iconic status within the popular imagination: not only as a serious author, but also as an angry, working-class rebel who scandalised the authorities; a poet-provocateur whose work was often censored or banned; an urban Lawrence, more Edwardian hipster than Eastwood hippie, interested in causing chaos and defying social and literary convention, rather than in writing best-sellers; a Lawrence who knew, in the words of Malcolm McLaren, that it’s better to be a spectacular failure than a benign success; a Lawrence determined to live fast, die young, die game.

Note: the Conference Committee accepted the first idea and image, but rejected the second (make of that what you will).