Dancing in the Rain: Notes on The Wild Boys

Simon, John, Andy, Nick, and Roger - 

the (not so) Wild Boys of Duran Duran 

Photo by Mike Owen (1984)

 

I.

 

Just to be clear: I don't much like - and have never much cared for - Duran Duran [1].

 

Having said that, their single 'The Wild Boys', released in October 1984 [2], intrigues because of its controversial point of literary reference: namely, the novel of that title by cult American author William S. Burroughs.

  

 

II. 

 

The Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead (Grove Press, 1971) tells the story of a group of youths who, in a dystopian near-future, revolt against civilisation and embrace a life of savage violence, drug-fuelled hedonism, and sadistic homosexuality. 

 

As a piece of fiction, it isn't really my cup of tea: too experimental for my tastes [3].

 

Nevertheless, if one reads it as a work of radical (anti-assimilationist) queer theory akin to Monique Wittig's Les Guérillères (1969) [4], then it certainly has philosophical interest and it remains a favourite book among those who align themselves to the counterculture and wish to challenge heteronormative ideas and values.

 

 

III.

 

Apparently, the idea for the song came from the Australian director Russell Mulcahy, who wanted to make a full-length feature film based on Burroughs's surreal and sexually explicit novel. 

 

Mulcahy asked the band to produce a soundtrack and, excited by the proposal, Simon Le Bon immediately began writing some lyrics for a title track based on Mulcahy's brief synopsis of the book [5].  

 

Meanwhile, the rest of the group set about writing the music, taking inspiration less from Burroughs and more from Frankie Goes to Hollywood who had hit the number one spot in the UK charts earlier that year with their phenomenal debut single 'Relax' [6].    

 

'The Wild Boys' became one of the band's highest-charting singles, peaking at number two in the charts in both the UK and US. Naturally, Mulcahy directed the accompanying video which was filmed on the 007 Stage at Pinewood Studios and cost an outrageous sum for the time (over a million pounds).  

 

 

IV.  

 

Mulcahy originally intended his award-winning music video to act as a teaser for his proposed cinematic adaptation of Burroughs's novel. Unfortunately, however, this ambitious film project never came to fruition [7]. 

 

Well, I say unfortunately, but perhaps it's just as well ... 

 

For I worry, having seen how the Duran Duran video gives Burroughs's deliriously homoerotic vision a boring, hetero-masculine, Mad Max-style makeover, what else Mulcahy - despite being gay - would have done to straightwash [8] and tame the story of The Wild Boys.

 

Ultimately, despite his vulgar auteur tag, Mulcahy is very much a mainstream commercial director rather than an underground filmmaker and should probably be prevented from even considering certain projects. 

 

Any adaptation of The Wild Boys that stays even halfway true to the book is never going to be given the greenlight by a major studio, open in cinemas across the land, or find a wide audience - not even among Durannies and members of the MTV generation.      

Notes 

 

[1] When my girlfriend Gillian bought a copy of the Duran Duran single 'Save a Prayer' in August 1982 (taken from the album Rio) it caused a huge row. I regarded it as both a betrayal of everything punk stood for and a compromise with everything punk had sought to destroy. The fact that she was defended in her actions by my friend Kirk Field at the time - as he also liked this new wave ballad - is something I still haven't forgotten or quite forgiven to this day. 

 

[2] 'The Wild Boys' was the only studio track on the Duran Duran live album Arena (Parlophone, 1984), and was produced by Nile Rodgers, who gave it the same kind of energy as he had given 'The Reflex' - the number one single released by Duran Duran in April 1984, from the album Seven and the Ragged Tiger (EMI, 1984).   

 

[3] This is not to deny the writer's genius or the book's greatness. For an insightful (and appreciative) review of The Wild Boys by Alfred Kazin in The New York Times (12 Dec 1971), please click here. 

 

[4] For a discussion of Wittig's novel (and its influence on the thinking of Nick Land), see my post titled 'Fanged Noumena: On Nick Land and the New Amazons' (1 June 2026). 

      I'm aware that Burroughs wrote from a very different perspective to Wittig, but I think there's a similar political logic and an aesthetics of negation at play in their writings. For example, both authors reject notions of reform, explicitly calling for total revolution and the destruction of bourgeois institutions such as the family. They also both believe that this revolution against the straight mindset is something that must be fought at all levels - including (and not least of all) the level of language. 

 

[5] It might be noted at this point that Russell Mulcahy and the boys from Duran Duran weren't the first to be inspired by Burroughs's novel. Malcolm McLaren, for example, was a huge William Burroughs fan and before settling on the name Bow Wow Wow for the band he assembled and managed after the Sex Pistols, he considered calling them the Sex Gang Children - a phrase he coined based upon his reading of The Wild Boys. 

      And - predictably - David Bowie also credited The Wild Boys with aesthetically influencing the creation of his Ziggy Stardust persona, for which he thanked Burroughs when they met in person at an event in November 1973. This successful encounter, which was featured in Rolling Stone in February 1974, is recalled by Jon Savage in 'When Bowie met Burroughs', The Guardian (9 Mar 2013). 

 

[6] 'Relax', by Frankie Goes to Hollywood, was produced by Trevor Horn and released on ZTT Records in October 1983. It reached number one in the charts at the end of January 1984 and was one of the decade's most controversial records - far more so than Duran Duran's 'Wild Boys' - it was even subject to a BBC ban owing to the sexually explicit nature of the lyrics (and Mike Read's distaste for such). A different version of the song features on the Frankie Goes to Hollywood debut album Welcome to the Pleasuredome (ZTT, 1984). 

      The band were marketed by ZTT co-founder Paul Morley in direct opposition to their pop rivals; a quarter-page ad for the single appeared in the music press declaring that Frankie Goes to Hollywood were going to make Duran Duran 'lick the shit off their shoes'. 

      The original video for the song, directed by Bernard Rose, was set in an S&M themed gay nightclub and featured the band members interacting with several characters of the kind that one might expect to encounter in such a venue. Not surprisingly, this too was banned by both the BBC and MTV. I provide a link to it so that readers can compare and contrast it with the Wild Boys video made by Mulcahy (I think I know which Burroughs would have preferred). 

 

[7] Speaking of projects that never came to fruition ... Burroughs himself had, in fact, written a screenplay based on his novel, which he hoped to have produced as a low-budget, hardcore gay porn film. However, after negotiations with the notorious Fred Halsted came to nothing, Burroughs abandoned the idea. 

      On a happier note, in 2017 The Wild Boys was finally adapted into a full-length feature film titled Les garçons sauvages, directed by Bertrand Mandico. It's not what one would call a faithful adaptation - more a clever reimagining. Thus, while it adopts certain ideas and carries over a transgressive spirit from the novel, the film replaces Burroughs's fragmented, non-linear narrative with a continuous plot and introduces supernatural elements to do with gender metamorphosis that are entirely absent from the original work. However, while moving away from the sadistic cisgender male homosexual experience, it remains defiantly a queer, anti-heteronormative movie - just all a bit more dreamlike. Click on the link provided to watch the trailer.  

 

[8] Straightwashing refers to the manner in which fictional gay and queer characters are portrayed as straight in order to make their representation comply with heteronormativity. A common justification for such queer erasure includes a concern with mainstream audience reaction. 

 

 

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.   

 

 

Visions of Malcolm

Malcolm McLaren as played on screen by David Hayman (1986), 

Mark Gatiss (2010), and Thomas Brodie-Sangster (2022)

 

 

I. 

 

I am not an actor. Not in any professional sense, at least. But I imagine that portraying a well-known public figure whose persona is established in the cultural imagination is particularly difficult because the audience already knows how they look, move, and speak.  

 

Rightly or wrongly, viewers will scrutinise the performance in order to assess its accuracy and if something feels off - perhaps only in the smallest detail - this can make the whole thing seem fake and awkward. 

 

Getting the voice right - but without sounding like one is simply doing a comic impression - is perhaps the hardest thing of all. Nevertheless, there are some actors who enjoy the challenge and have an almost chameleon-like ability to play famous real-life figures; one thinks of Michael Sheen, for example, who has given legendary performances as Tony Blair, Brian Clough, and Kenneth Williams [1].  

 

Whether Sheen has some supernatural ability to get under the skin of others and channel their essence - or is just a consummate professional who does intensive research, works closely with voice coaches, and has the kind of features and physique that lend themselves well to different roles - I don't know. 

 

But he's an immensely gifted actor and it's a shame he hasn't played Malcolm McLaren as I think he'd do a great job. He even has the slightly goofy grin, naturally curly hair, and Aquarian-white complexion needed for the role. 

 

Still, who knows, maybe one day ... And in the meantime, we have three other actors to discuss who have given us their on-screen versions of Malcolm: David Hayman, Mark Gatiss, and Thomas Brodie-Sangster ...

 

 

II.  

 

Of the three, Scottish actor David Hayman faced perhaps the greatest challenge when preparing to play Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren in Alex Cox's Sid and Nancy (1986). For he had to embody someone who was a still living (and still notorious) cultural provocateur. 

 

Because Malcolm was such a distinctively animated character, Hayman could not rely on simply reading a standard script outline for his interpretation. He was obliged to meticulously study many hours of filmed interviews with McLaren in order to try and master his accent and intonation which was an amusingly camp mix of art school affectation and cockney [2]. Obviously, he also attempted to get McLaren's theatrical hand gestures and mannerisms spot on too. 

 

Primarily, however, Hayman focused on capturing McLaren's mercenary energy, portraying him as a scheming, detached observer of events who viewed human tragedy purely from the perspective of marketing and media. In Cox's film, he gleefully delivers a line describing Sid Vicious as a fabulous disaster rather than a mere bass player. 

 

That's not entirely unfair or inaccurate, but it does mean we are not shown anything of McLaren's greatest asset - his charm. 

 

Malcolm possessed a very powerful, highly contradictory kind of charisma that he used to captivate, influence, and, yes, manipulate people. There was a reason that so many individuals bought into what Johnny Rotten would dismiss as McLaren's bullshit and if he prioritised cultural provocation over the well-being and long-term success of the band, well, that's not something that troubles me.  

 

My main gripe with Hayman as McLaren is this: he looked too damn old! Malcolm was a young-looking 31-year-old when Sid Vicious joined the Sex Pistols in February 1977. But Hayman, aged 37, was a much more mature screen presence in 1985 when the film Sid and Nancy was shot, as can be seen in the above photo. (And note to wardrobe: McLaren never wore Lennon-style sunglasses.) 

 

Finally, it's interesting to discover that a planned meeting on set to film a promotional face-to-face between McLaren and his cinematic doppelgänger was abandoned after Malcolm saw some early footage from the film and was appalled by how the production was shaping up.    

 

III. 

 

Next on our list is Mark Gatiss, who played McLaren in the biographical drama Worried About the Boy (dir. Julian Jarrold, 2010) [3], about the rise to fame of the singer Boy George (played by Douglas Booth) who very briefly sang on stage with Bow Wow Wow (as Lieutenant Lush) [4].

 

With slightly unfortunate timing, the 90-minute film aired on BBC Two on 16 May 2010, just five weeks after Malcolm's death. 

 

Gatiss approached the role differently to Hayman and gives us a markedly different vision of McLaren, whom he portrayed as more of an old-school impresario and natural-born showman who was then shifting aesthetically from punk nihilism to a new romanticism.     

 

Hayman's McLaren was cruel and calculating: Gatiss tapped into the lighter side of his character; flamboyant and eccentric, a man with wild hair and waving hands who could charm the birds from the trees; less arch-manipulator and more a shrewd and inspiring mentor to young artists such as George (and before him Adam Ant).     

 

Reflecting on playing real public figures like McLaren, Gatiss later revealed that his philosophy is not to attempt an exact impersonation, but to try and convey a suggestion of the person without letting the truth get in the way of the story being told. 

 

In other words, whereas Hayman gave audiences a darker, perhaps psychologically more realistic version of McLaren, Gatiss delivered the performative, larger-than-life figure who wished to cause trouble and make cash from chaos in the name of fun rather than malice.

 

Critics and viewers rightly praised Gatiss's performance. Writing in the Financial Times (21 May 2010), John Lloyd described it as a "vividly cynical cameo". Again, my only issue would be that Gatiss was just slightly too old for the role and his McLaren seems to be based more on a mid-rather than an early '80s version of the character. 

  

 

IV.

 

The most recent actor to try on McLaren's tartan bondage suit is Thomas Brodie-Sangster, who played him in Danny Boyle's six-part miniseries Pistol (2022) [5]. Arguably, his was the standout performance of the entire show - salvaging an otherwise Disneyfied production - and he cleverly pitched it somewhere between David Hayman's hard-edged version and Mark Gatiss's high camp take on the character.

 

Rather than frame McLaren as a detached puppet master, Brodie-Sangster and series writer Craig Pearce actively tried to avoid making him a one-dimensional villain. Brodie-Sangster aimed to show why it was that young, working-class kids would willingly follow him in the first place, highlighting McLaren's genuine, infectious passion for a cultural and artistic revolution.

 

Because he has so much more screen time to develop the character, Brodie-Sangster is able to both experiment with the role and relax his way into it. He later admitted that he found playing the part not only a lot of fun, but liberating for him as an actor.  

 

Physically, Brodie-Sangster had a distinct advantage over the earlier actors who played the part. For he actually possessed the slight build, youthful face, and naturally boyish energy of the real McLaren. Also, during filming he was the exact same age as Malcolm in 1977 and that certainly helped. As does the fact that he pretty much nails the distinct, slightly high-pitched, breathless cadence of McLaren's vocal delivery [6]. 

 

There's a joy in his performance and no trace of tiredness. Having said that, McLaren's character isn't softened too much or emptied entirely of its more Machiavellian aspects. And whilst it's arguable whose performance is best - Hayman's, Gatiss's, or Brodie-Sangster's - the latter's is certainly my favourite.   

In sum: without possessing the uncanny power of Michael Sheen to transform into the character being played, each of the three captured a vital facet of a McLaren who spent his entire life ensuring that nobody could ever completely pin him down.

 

V. 

 

Finally, to end on an ironic note, it might convincingly be argued that the best performance by someone playing McLaren was given by McLaren himself in Julien Temple's The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (1980). 

 

In fact, so good was his hyper-stylised performance in this film that there are still people to this day who take it for an accurate representation - i.e., who miss the fact that McLaren was acting and that he wasn't aiming to expose the truth about himself but construct a self-satirising myth; that the film was a fictionalised narrative in which McLaren played the version of himself that he wished to be - not a documentary, ffs.    

 

The film's relentless cynicism was so perfectly tailored to McLaren's public persona that audiences completely fell for it - believing the lie that the Sex Pistols project was merely a manufactured, art-school scam used to sell bondage trousers from 430 King's Road. 

 

In later years, McLaren regretted being too good an actor. Being mistaken for his role as The Embezzler proved to be burdensome, when it meant that the public, the press, and cultural historians refused to see him as an avant-garde artist, but only as a fast-talking fraud and flamboyant failure.  

 

 

Malcolm McLaren as Malcolm McLaren (The Embezzler) 

in The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (1980)

 

  

Notes

 

[1] Sheen played Blair in three works written by Peter Morgan: The Deal (dir. Stephen Frears, 2003), The Queen (dir. Stephen Frears, 2006), and The Special Relationship (dir. Richard Loncraine, 2010). He played Clough in The Damned United (dir. Tom Hooper, 2009), and Williams in Kenneth Williams: Fantabulosa! (dir. Andy De Emmony, 2006). Sheen has also played other famous faces including David Frost, Chris Tarrant, and Prince Andrew.

 

[2] One could write an entire post trying to describe McLaren's unique accent and intonation. His voice bridged the gap between his Jewish North London roots and his art school education. Thus, he retained the flat vowels of Estuary English, but stretched them out theatrically. 

      Sometimes, he spoke breathlessly at speed; at other times he spoke quite softly and deliberately as if drawing you into a secret. The pitch would go up and down depending on his level of excitement and this gave the delivery its camp and comic aspects. The most notable thing, however, was how he spoke about popular culture with the elevated vocabulary and conceptual framing of a French intellectual, creating a surprising juxtaposition and making him a highly articulate and amusing storyteller.

 

[3] Click on the link provided in the main text and go to 1:02:22-1:08:10 to watch Gatiss's short but memorable performance as McLaren. 

 

[4] Bow Wow Wow were the band McLaren assembled and managed after the Sex Pistols. George O'Dowd - who would become known to the world as Boy George - was, at that time (1980), a nineteen-year-old "gender-defying club kid noted for his soulful singing voice, sassy demeanour and outrageous appearance". O'Dowd's relationship with McLaren and the band was, however, extremely short-lived and he made only a couple of appearances on stage with them. See Paul Gorman, The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren (Constable, 2020). The line quoted is on p. 471. 

  

[5] Don't get me started on Pistol ... Readers who want to know what I think of this show can see the post 'The Great Rock 'n' Roll Castration' (30 Mar 2021). 

 

[6] Brodie-Sangster noted in promotional interviews that he found McLaren's voice the hardest element to capture, describing it as a mix of a salesman's hustle and an intellectual's lecture, delivered with an almost childlike glee.

 

 

Echoes of the Punk Age - by Jimmy Jazz (In the Manner of F. Scott Fitzgerald)

 Echoes of the Punk Age (SA/2026)

 

It was an age of anarchy; it was an age of art. 

It was an age of gobbing, and it was an age of safety pins.

 

 

Editorial Note

 

The release in October 1976 of 'New Rose' by the Damned was the first signal of the coming youth revolution [1]. Caroline Coon gave the British movement a name: Punk Rock [2]. 

 

In this post, Jimmy Jazz, who remembers the time and observed the subcultural changes of the era first-hand, shares some thoughts in what is essentially a pastiche of a well-known essay written by F. Scott Fitzgerald, first published in Scribner's Magazine in November 1931 [3].   

 

Endnotes have been added to provide context and clarification of terms or references that may be unfamiliar to some readers.      

 

 

*************************************** 

 

I. 

 

It is now almost impossible to write about the Punk Age with genuine enthusiasm without being suspected of senile dementia. 

 

Many punk scholars still succumb to excited nostalgia when they happen upon any of its characteristic terms or images - even though these terms and images have long become familiar forms emptied of any meaning, magic, or menace and ultimately serve the Spectacle. 

 

Having passed over into the world of pure simulation where it exists posthumously as a marketable visual code that is fixed and forever circulating in media and fashion networks, the Punk Age is as undead as any other era in which complex history is replaced by a comforting myth.  

 

And yet, despite everything, the present writer still looks back to the mid-late 1970s with a certain fondness: for in a very real sense it shaped who he is today (for better or for worse).  

 

That brief six-year period, which began when SEX first opened its doors on King's Road in the autumn of 1974, ended when - as if reluctant to grow old or witness its own recuperation - punk signalled its own spectacular demise with The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle and the closure of Seditionaries in the autumn of 1980.            

 

 

II.

 

When a pair of burly policemen took Alan Jones into custody for wearing a Cowboys T-shirt and charged him with displaying an obscene print in a public space - and when SEX was subsequently raided by the porn squad, arresting Malcolm and Vivienne on indecency charges - it was the sort of measure bound to alienate the more intelligent and sexually liberated young people. 

 

We didn't know much about the history of free speech in the UK, but we did know that such fascist tyranny and harassment had to be opposed - even if, after the failure of the hippies, we were scornful of the effectiveness of passive resistance and non-violent protest. 

 

For the so-called Summer of Love left those old enough to remember cynical and disappointed rather than optimistic and it was characteristic of the Punk Age that it had no interest in Peace and Love, maaan. Theirs was the politics of boredom and the aim was to exit the twentieth century via a revolt into style; a sartorial attempt to flee the totalising logic of capital through a belief in the ruins.        

 

 

III.

 

It was an age of anarchy, it was an age of art, it was an age of gobbing, and it was an age of safety pins [4]. A cold and distant Queen sat upon the throne of the United Kingdom; her regime making morons of us all. 

 

Nevertheless, we were filled with destructive potential and, thanks to McLaren and Westwood, style belonged to us. Where once we had looked to Carnaby Street, now we assembled at 430 King's Road as the power to determine the look of music and the sound of fashion passed from one generation to another.  

 

The Bromley Contingent were by-far the best-dressed group of people in the world: who could tell them what was stylish and what was fun? They created their own look and their own pastimes. 

 

The punk revolution - even before it was called such - "created a sensation out of all proportion to its novelty" [5]. As far back as 1975, the Bowie-inspired youth of London's suburbs had discovered that to dress up so as to mess up was a form of empowerment and that, ironically, bondage straps can set free. In other words, by weaponising fetish gear, they transformed restrictive rubberwear into a sign of negative freedom.  

 

At first, punk was confined to a small underground scene, mostly consisting of the Sex Pistols and their friends and followers. Among other young people the old standards and old tastes prevailed. Long-haired hippies in their flared jeans were still regularly encountered on the high street. Only during the Summer of Hate did the Punk Age fully blossom, consigning Elvis, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones to the dustbin of history.  

 

Scarcely had the normally staid citizens of the UK calmed down after the Bill Grundy Incident and the media storm that followed, before the wildest of all generations - the generation which had been too busy playing with their dolls to know about the Summer of Love - brusquely shouldered anyone over twenty-five out of the way and pogoed into the limelight. 

 

This was the generation who dramatised themselves as anarchists, the generation that wanted to fuck the rich up the arse and eventually self-destructed less through a lack of ability and intelligence than through a lack of caring about long-term success. 

 

 

IV. 

 

Arguably, the Sex Pistols topping the charts with 'God Save the Queen' in June 1977 and playing on a boat on the Thames outside the Houses of Parliament was the highpoint of the Punk Age. 

 

For though the era continued even after the band split up in January 1978 [6], it became less and less an affair of rebellious youth and was now renamed (and repackaged) as the New Wave by the elders of the music business looking to regain control over punk's disruptive chaos and make money by promoting big-selling acts acceptable to the US market. 

 

New Wave was like an orgy staged by the impotent at the Cambridge Rapist Hotel tired of missing out on the action and ready to feast on young flesh. As MAMIE record boss Ed Bird informed Steve Jones: 

 

"The Sex Pistols are finished, over! We don't take risks in this business anymore - we don't need to. Anarchy has dropped out of the Top 20 - punk is dead! Rock 'n' Roll can mean anything we want it to mean - peace, love, bringing people together. It can get rid of politics - it can be art, big money, the normal promotion of records. And it's fun!" [7]

 

By 1980, New Wave itself was old hat - say hello to the post-punk world of New Romanticism! Even McLaren and Westwood decided that pirates excited more than rockers and that having gold dust in one's hair was preferable to gel.   

 

The hardcore punks who, in their black leather jackets with 'Punk's Not Dead' defiantly written on the back, refused to quietly fade away or accept that the world had moved on - who rightly pointed out that all the same forces of reaction and stupidity remained in place - soon became as boring as the old hippies that they used to sneer at (and perhaps even more pathetic). 

 

The fact is, once the hacks of Fleet Street made punk headline news the game was nearly over and when the glossy magazines started to celebrate it punk had long ceased to even be news. The songs and the fashions of the Punk Age had changed everything whilst at the same time changing nothing.    

 

 

V.

 

The cooler, more creative, more experimental members of the Punk Age - those who had been to art school and liked wearing makeup - divided into a wide variety of new post-punk subcultures. The more aspirational started wearing expensive suits and were assimilated into the corporate machine where they carved out well-paid professional careers in the media (some of these cunts are still on our TV screens today). 

 

Others, however, just settled back into the normal world; got a job, got married, bought a house, had kids, took up hobbies, and one day looked in the mirror and found they were fat and bald and would no longer dare say bip-bam-boogie and a booga rooga to a policeman [8]. Many of these people now go to punk nostalgia fests and retro events in the vain attempt to relive their younger days, or satisfy their longing for a past they never actually experienced first hand [9]. 

 

 

VI.

 

But what about poor Sid? 

 

That is often the refrain I hear from concerned liberals today. Poor Sid, allowed (and encouraged) to disappear into the dark maw of drug-addled violence. Charged with murdering Nancy (12 October 1978), Vicious found himself in jail on Rikers Island and then, released on bail and awaiting trial, fatally overdosing on heroin supplied by his own mother: too fast to live, but not, it turned out, too young to die (2 February 1979).  

 

Malcolm once said if the Punk Age had continued it would have become much more brutal and destructive and many don't approve of his (rather fanciful) terrorist posturing [10]. But I don't care for their retrospective moralising. 

 

It was fantastic to be young, pretty and vacant in such a nihilistic time: when the apple cart was up-ended just for the pleasure of seeing which way the apples would roll; to not give a shit about anything said by parents and teachers and to think criminals and other notorious figures were more inspiring than second-rate pop stars and boring politicians.  

 

To those who look back in horror on the follies of youth and the excesses of the Punk Age - I give two fingers: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times" ... and it seemed only a matter of time before the Grundy generation would step aside "and let the world be run by those who saw things as they were" [11]. 

 

Of course the Punk Age seems "rosy and romantic to us who were young then, because we will never feel quite so intensely about our surroundings any more" [12].     

 

 

Notes

 

[1] 'New Rose' was released on 22 October 1976 on Stiff Records, and is acknowledged to be the first UK punk single. The debut single from the Sex Pistols - 'Anarchy in the U.K.' - was released by EMI the following month (26 November). 

      Whilst it's impossible not to love Brian James's punk-pop ditty, the latter track, written by Cook, Jones, Matlock and Rotten, is in a different league: a genuine call to action rather than simply a song belonging to an exciting (but in many ways conventional) music genre. Click here for the astonishing live performance of 'Anarchy' on So It Goes (broadcast 4 Sept 1976).  

 

[2] Caroline Coon is widely credited with helping popularize the term 'punk rock' via her pioneering music journalism (although she didn't coin it). After attending early performances by the Sex Pistols in 1976, Coon recognised a revolutionary shift in youth culture was taking place. Coon is also credited with coming up with the name 'Bromley Contingent' for the stylish early followers of the Sex Pistols (which included Siouxsie Sioux and Billy Idol). 

 

[3] A reference to Fitzgerald's essay 'Echoes of the Jazz Age', which analysed the socio-cultural conditions that gave rise to a fascinating form of hedonistic youth culture in the 1920s. Tap on the link provided to read the essay online as a Project Gutenberg Canada ebook (2014).   

 

[4] This is a reworking of the famous opening line of Fitzgerald's essay: "It was an age of miracles, it was an age of art, it was an age of excess, it was an age of satire."   

 

[5] A direct quote from Fitzgerald's 'Echoes of the Jazz Age' (1931). 

 

[6] The Sex Pistols played their final show on 14 January 1978 at the Winterland Ballroom, San Francisco. 

 

[7] Dialogue from The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (dir. Julien Temple, 1980). The scene set at the (fictional) Cambridge Rapist Hotel is highly provocative to say the least, exposing how the music business exploits young flesh. The MAMIE record boss is played by actor Johnny Shannon.  

 

[8] This echoes the line in Fitzgerald's essay that reads "one day in 1926 we looked down and found we had flabby arms and a fat pot and couldn't say boop-boop-a-doop to a Sicilian". Obviously, the line suggests that he and his contemporaries had suddenly grown old and culturally irrelevant. 

      'Boop-boop-a-doop' was the playful baby-talk catchphrase of Helen Kane, the 1920s singer who inspired cartoon character Betty Boop. It symbolises the carefree, frivolous, and bubbly pop-culture slang used by the flappers of the Jazz Age. As for the phrase 'to a Sicilian', this refers to a tough, hard-working and down to earth breed of people - i.e., just the kind of people who were scorned by the Bright Young Things. 

      The phrase has been updated in the post by incorporating a line from the Bow Wow Wow song 'C30 C60 C90 - Go!' (EMI 1980) and replacing the Sicilian with an authority figure; the policeman who is shrugged off and ignored in the song by the teenage punk pirate.    

 

[9] In 2012, the writer John Koenig coined a neologism for this pseudo-nostalgia for a cultural era or historical period one didn't actually live through: anemoia. While it's not a clinically recognised psychological state, it refers to a genuine feeling experienced by a growing number of individuals - thus the growing interest in older music, vintage clothing, classic films, etc.

      Readers who are interested might like to see The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, by John Koenig (Simon & Schuster, 2021), or visit his official website of this name: click here.   

 

[10] In a piece by Michael Watts in Melody Maker (June 1979), McLaren said this when asked how things would have developed if the Sex Pistols had stayed together: "They'd have created serious mayhem. They'd have been an awful lot more brutal and evil. In the end it wouldn't have been puking at airports - it would've been much more to do with burning down buildings." 

      Commenting on this, Simon Reynolds says it is fanciful: "Punks were far more likely to be the victims of violence than its perpetrators. They were merely pretending to be monsters and psychopaths as part of their campaign of symbolic warfare." 

      Reynolds continues: "But the parallels with terrorism are there: escalating shock tactics, goading the authorities into repressive measures. The typical punk move was to commit some kind of outrage, through clothes, language or imagery, and then scorn the revulsion they had sought and achieved." 

      See his review of Paul Gorman's The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren (Constable, 2020), titled Serious Mayhem in - London Review of Books, Vol. 44, No. 5 (10 March 2022).

 

[11] The first phrase lifts from the famous opening of Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities (1859). The closing sentiment reworks a line from Fitzgerald's 'Echoes of the Jazz Age' (1931). 

 

[12] This is the final, poignant sentence of Fitzgerald's essay, presented almost exactly as written. It serves as the ultimate admission that the magic of any youth subculture is fatally tied to the transient intensity of youth itself.

 

 

Wild, Wild, Wild Youth: A Hundred Years of Anarchy

  

Philip Gibbs: Young Anarchy (Hutchinson and Co., 1926)  

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

 

'I have no tolerance with the spirit of anarchy which is threatening to destroy 

this country of ours; none with the open immorality of youth 

who are dancing their way to the Devil.' [1]

 

I.

 

As ageing punks across the land will know, this year marks the 50th anniversary of the release of 'Anarchy in the U.K.' - the debut single by the Sex Pistols; a four-piece rock group styled and (mis)managed by Malcolm McLaren, consisting of Steve Jones on guitar, Paul Cook on drums, Glen Matlock on bass, and frontman Johnny Rotten on vocals. 

 

Originally issued in a plain black sleeve [2], the single reached number 38 on the official UK Singles Chart despite EMI withdrawing the record and firing the band following the Bill Grundy Incident [3].

 

It remains one of the great pop songs: a clarion call to an entire generation of youth - or, more precisely, to that tiny minority of angry, alienated teens who aligned themselves with those described by Peter York as the "extreme ideological wing of the Peculiars" [4]. 

 

In other words, teens like me [5] who, even now, five decades later, still think it sounds fantastic: play here. 

 

(And some of you still naively imagine that The Clash are the only band that matters ...!)  

 

 

II.  

 

What ageing punks across the land will probably not know, however, is that this year also marks the 100th anniversary of the publication of Young Anarchy - a newsreel novel [6] by the largely-forgotten English journalist and author Philip Gibbs [7].   

 

Published soon after the General Strike (3-9 May, 1926) [8], the book explores generational divides and political tensions in post-War Britain, offering a fast-paced commentary on contemporary events. 

 

The punks of their day - so-called Jazz Age youth - are portrayed by Gibbs as rebels who reject old ideals of obedience and duty. Their rebellion - whether expressed through acts of cultural hedonism or radical left-wing politics - is framed as a desperate response to the horrors of the Great War.  

 

True to Gibbs's own political liberalism, the book's narrator acts as a well-meaning, moderate observer; one who expresses sympathy for workers fighting for fair wages, but at the same time strongly opposes militants who use industrial action to threaten national stability and young people seemingly out of control and happy to drink and dance their lives away. 

 

This, said of a group of what Gibbs terms Glad Young Things in 1926, might also have been written by some old fart observing the staff and customers of SEX in 1976: "Born into the beginning of a new epoch, with a new mentality [...] We of the older generation cannot catch them up or hold them back. They have escaped from us." [9] 

 

 

III. 

 

Ultimately, both the novel Young Anarchy and the single 'Anarchy in the U.K.' serve as vital, time-capsule dispatches from eras when British society felt precariously close to the edge. 

 

Whether processing the lingering trauma of the Great War through a mixture of decadence and hedonism in 1926, or venting the frustrations of economic collapse and cultural stagnation by gobbing and pogoing in 1976, both generations of youth terrified the establishment by refusing to inherit an untenable status quo. 

 

Gibbs's forgotten book reminds us that the instinct to tear it up and start again did not begin with safety pins and ripped t-shirts - it is, rather, a recurring British tradition born whenever the promises of the old order ring hollow. 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] This is the reactionary Bishop of Burpham speaking - a character in the novel who does not approve of the younger generation openly jeering at religion and expressing revolutionary ideas. He finds them perplexing, distressing and terrifying: "They seem to me lawless, anarchical, and utterly lacking in any sense of duty and discipline." This includes his own son, Jocelyn, studying at Oxford where he encounters socialism, and his daughter, Nancy, who has published a successful (if somewhat racy) novel. Whilst he disowns them both, his sister, Elizabeth, is far more positive about her nephew and niece and the young generally in whom she sees great future potential.  

      The lines quoted are on p. 7 of the US edition of Philip Gibbs's Young Anarchy (published by George H. Doran, 1926) and available free online thanks to the New York Public Library.  

 

[2] 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. See the post on TTA titled 'But Malcolm, They'll Not Be Able to Find It ...' (24 March 2024). 

 

[3] For those readers who aren't familiar with the details of the Bill Grundy incident, let me briefly summarise: After Queen cancelled their appearance on the live television show Today at the last minute, the Sex Pistols were offered the spot in order to promote their debut single, 'Anarchy in the U.K.', and explain what the new subcultural phenomenon called punk was all about. 

      Things started badly and quickly got worse when it was clear that Grundy was hostile and dismissive of the band and that the latter - particularly guitarist Steve Jones - was not prepared to take his bullshit, nor listen to his creepy sexual innuendo when speaking to a female member of their entourage called Siouxsie Sioux. Suggesting to her that they might 'meet afterwards' triggered Jones into calling him a "dirty sod" and a "dirty old man". 

      Stupidly, Grundy then challenged Jones to "say something outrageous" - which he did; calling Grundy a "dirty bastard" and a "dirty fucker". Grundy responded, "What a clever boy!" to which Jones hilariously replied, "What a fucking rotter!" 

      Predictably, the phone lines to the Thames switchboard lit up and the national press had a field day. Grundy was suspended by Thames and his career effectively ended. The Sex Pistols were fired shortly afterwards by their record label EMI (keeping their £40,000 advance) and branded by the media as public enemies. The interview - click here - has become one of the most requested TV clips of all time.

 

[4] Peter York, 'Them', Harpers & Queen (October, 1976). Quoted by Paul Gorman in The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren (Constable, 2020), p. 329. 

 

[5] I was thirteen when 'Anarchy in the U. K.' was released, but I didn't fully commit to the punk cause until the summer of 1977 around the time of the Queen's Silver Jubilee, when it became clear that one was either for the Crown or the Sex Pistols.    

 

[6] Newsreel fiction refers to a literary technique in which a writer splices actual news headlines, advertising slogans, and historical documents directly into the text with the aim of capturing the chaotic public consciousness of an era increasingly shaped by the media. The style is famously used by American author John Dos Passos in his U.S.A. trilogy (1930-36). 

 

[7] Philip Gibbs (1877-1962) served as one of five official British war correspondents during the First World War and was determined to be a writer just like his father and four of his siblings, producing an astounding number of books in his lifetime. 

      One extremely knowledgeable blogger writes: "In many ways Philip Gibbs is the archetypal male middlebrow writer of the inter-war period. Immensely prolific, he appealed strongly to the thoughtful decent middle class, worried about the way the world was going and wary of extremes." See the post Philip Gibbs and 'Heirs Apparent' (3 June 2013) on George Simmers' blog Great War Fiction Plus. 

      On a later post  - The Novels of Philip Gibbs - a checklist (17 Dec 2017) - Simmers writes that whilst today many of Gibbs's novels are largely forgotten and remain "of more interest to the historian than to the connoisseur of literature", he is, nevertheless, a very readable and interesting writer. 

 

[8] Called by the TUC in solidarity with the miners, around 1.7 million transport, printing, dock, and heavy industry workers walked out, bringing much of Britain to a standstill. It is worth noting that in Gibbs's novel the General Strike is something of a turning point; suddenly, the Glad Young Things rally round for king and country and do their scabby bit by driving buses and working at the docks. Gibb's writes: "That youth of ours [...] so careless of criticism, such rebels against authority, so reckless of convention [...] played the game according to the rules, and in the spirit of the old tradition." [Young Anarchy, US edition, 1926, p. 309.]

      Similarly, many punks proved to be right-thinking people when push came to shove - even Johnny Rotten is now seen as a national treasure, who loved his mother, loved his wife, and didn't really mean those nasty things he said about Her Majesty, describing anarchy as a bourgeois fantasy only ever subscribed to by people like McLaren. Young Anarchy suggests that the essentially peaceful and liberal spirit of England will always win out against more extreme, revolutionary ideologies and perhaps that is in fact the case. 

      See George Simmers's review of Young Anarchy (20 Oct 2025) published on Reading 1900-1950 - a Sheffield Hallam University blog site concerned with readerships and literary cultures in this period. And see also an earlier review by Simmers of Gibbs's novel published on his own blog (29 June 2008) - click here - upon which the later piece is largely based.   

 

[9] Philip Gibbs, Young Anarchy (George H. Doran, 1926), p. 134. 

      This marks the novel's thematic resolution; the narrator finally accepts that society has shifted permanently into a new era, leaving his generation behind. 

 

An Epitaph for the Avant-Garde: A Review of Stephen Alexander's 'No More Heroes' - By May Spear

No More Heroes (SA/2026)  

 

Editorial Note 

 

May Spear is a former contributing editor to the now defunct French literary magazine  Pourquoi es-tu un con aussi odieux? Her post published below is a revised version of a text originally submitted in the form of personal correspondence and can be read as a riposte to the post previously published by Mr. Jeff Francis: 'No More Heroes 5: Stephen Alexander - The Performative Punk Poseur' (22 July 2026).  

 

 

******************************************

 

 

Opening Remarks

 

Stephen Alexander's recent series of posts titled 'No More Heroes' (14-17 July 2026) offers a profound case study not just in personal disappointment, but in cultural exhaustion, centred on four main characters: the punk provocateur Malcolm McLaren; the Dionysian philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche; the priest of love D. H. Lawrence, and, finally, the comic assassin turned court jester Larry David. 

 

By examining the deeper theoretical architecture connecting these chosen figures, we can discern three underlying thematic currents that unify his analysis of des héros aux pieds d'argile ... 

 

 

1. Capitalist Realism and the Closure of the Outside 

 

The primary architectural pillar supporting Alexander's entire series is the diagnosis of spatial collapse - specifically, the systemic closure of any radical Outside from which to mount a critique. 

 

McLaren, for example, believed he was operating in a volatile, shockable mid-century landscape where cultural terrorism and the politics of desire could threaten the Establishment. In reality, his libidinal subversions merely prototyped a highly adaptive, flexible market format. 

 

Larry David, meanwhile, operates entirely within the hyper-insulated, hyper-monetised ecosystem of cultural elites. His rage is no longer authentic; it is a synthetic, domestic product pre-formatted by high-end production companies and packaged as low-risk partisan entertainment. 

 

Thus Alexander reveals a sobering truth: the contemporary iconoclast is a structural impossibility because capitalism has colonised the very space of transgression and resistance. McLaren's anti-fashion called punk was absorbed into the high street, while David's once outrageous comedy has become a regular feature on billion-dollar streaming platforms. 

 

 

2. The Illusion of Libidinal Liberation 

 

A profound philosophical continuity in the series is Alexander's deployment of Michel Foucault to dismantle the romantic myths of sexual and existential liberation from power. 

 

Both Malcolm McLaren and D. H. Lawrence are subjected to an identical post-structuralist autopsy: both fell victim to the repressive hypothesis, naively operating under the assumption that power functions solely through censorship, prohibition, and denial. 

 

Not for the first time on Torpedo the Ark, Alexander masterfully pairs these two figures to show how this philosophical error manifests across different eras. 

 

Lawrence transfigured sex into metaphysics, unaware that treating sex as the ultimate, hidden truth of human being is the exact mechanism by which modern power categorises and disciplines the subject. 

 

Decades later, McLaren repeated this exact mistake, naively assuming that flogging fetish-wear and bondage trousers on King's Road would provoke a state insurrection, failing to see that he was simply pioneering a frictionless new consumer market. 

 

By linking Lawrence's 'austere monarchy of sex' to McLaren's 'pseudo-academic earnestness', Alexander exposes the tragic irony of the sex-radical; by speaking of desire ad infinitum, they do not evade power; they simply map its coordinates. 

Today, in 2026 - when every identity is instantly tracked by digital algorithms, their 'liberation' and free expression simply provide free data and something new to be commercially exploited.  

 

 

3. The Hermeneutics of Failure and the Comedy of Decline

 

The deepest, most melancholic tier of Alexander's critique addresses the temporal vulnerability of the hero and the tragic reality that an artwork or a philosophy is entirely dependent on the physical, decaying body of its creator. 

 

This creates a fascinating thematic bridge between Friedrich Nietzsche and Larry David, both of whom suffer from a profound failure of narrative control. Alexander frames this through two distinct modalities of failure: the tragedy of biological over-ripeness and the comedy of decline.

 

Nietzsche’s failure to 'die at the right time' acts as a literal, physical catastrophe. His eleven-year vegetative decline stripped him of his authorial agency, transforming his body into a 'living museum exhibit' and leaving his raw notebooks open to the parasitic, proto-fascist splicing of his sister. The body's failure to expire corrupted the semantic integrity of the philosophy itself. 

 

Larry David's failure is also one of timing, but it manifests as a slow slide into the comfy accommodations of elite compromise. Like Nietzsche hanging on the tree like a worm-filled apple, 79-year-old Larry David outlives his sharp, misanthropic 'social assassin' persona, declining into a petulant, partisan 'court jester' who blacklists friends to appease former First Ladies. 

 

In both instances, the iconoclast fails Zarathustra's ultimate test: the sovereign exit. Whether corrupted by physical decay and a controlling sister, or diluted by the softening comforts of extreme wealth, both thinkers failed to maintain narrative control over their own legacies. 

 

  

Conclusion 

 

Ultimately, Alexander's 'No More Heroes' cycle is a masterclass in compressed, evocative writing that sparks the kind of immediate cultural dialogue that more formal academic prose usually smothers under its own weight. 

 

By methodically exposing how his own primary influences were digested by the very structures they claimed to combat, Alexander has elevated the series of posts from simple expressions of personal disappointment into a unified work of philosophical mourning - an epitaph for the avant-garde. 

 

The 'No More Heroes' series leaves the reader with a haunting conclusion: in a 21st-century landscape governed by capitalist realism and digital algorithms, the iconoclast no longer exists as a dangerous agent of chaos. They exist, rather, as a pre-approved, highly profitable aesthetic category.