Marking Geoff Dyer's Homework (Part Two: XIII-XXII)

 Geoff Dyer as a young teen in his bedroom

Photo from geoffdyer.com 

 

 

Part One of this post (sections I-XII) can be accessed by clicking here. 

All page references are to Homework: A Memoir, by Geoff Dyer, (Canongate, 2025). 

 

 

XIII.

 

More random words and phrases, brand names and TV shows, employed (effectively) by Dyer to trigger memories of an English childhood in the 1960s/70s: 

 

The Man from U.N.C.L.E ... Sekiden guns ... toy racquets ... flying ants ... dad having a wash and shave in the kitchen ... Babycham ... Lucozade ... Brasso ... Boxing Day leftovers ... Peach Melba ... Corgi cars ... Milk Tray ... Airfix models ... Humbrol paints ... superhero comics ... coal fires ... fireworks ... Panorama transfer sets ... day trips ... free school milk ... Imperial Leather soap ... paternal reticence ...   

 

 

XIV. 

 

That last thing feeds into something else that Dyer identifies as a defining characteristic of working class men of a certain generation - men like his dad and mine - namely, not just a reluctance to speak about themselves, but an impressive (almost stoical) indifference to the world. 

 

Dyer writes: 

 

"My dad had no interest in his past precisely because it was past [...] but I wonder if it might be simpler and more accurate to say that he had almost no interests at all. [...] Even  activities that might be termed hobbies [...] were not things that interested him; they were just tasks to be undertaken. He liked watching rugby and cricket on telly but he didn't follow either sport with the passion and dedication of a fan. If he had been denied any of the things that he took pleasure in he would not have felt particularly put out. A list of the thing he was indifferet to would constitute a mirror image of what, for many people, might constitute a rich and enjoyable life: books, beer, films, cars, music." [89-90] 

 

Dyer concludes (rightly I think): 

 

"I suspect it was not so unusual for someone of his class, his generation, to be like that. At the risk of putting it overdramatically, his interests were so tightly bound up with a kind of subsistence-level relation to the world [...] that there was nothing left over for the extraneous realm of culture or even leisure pursuits (drinking, holidays)." [90] 

 

Dyer's father was born in 1919; mine seven years earlier. What he writes here I could echo word for word. Although whether this paternal contentment is tied to the idea of accepting one's lot in life, I'm not so sure. As I say above, I think this indifference is quasi-stoical; not a sign of resigned passivity or fatalism. 

 

And I'm pleased to say it's a trait I've inherited from my father: I don't particularly want anything, because I don't feel I lack anything. And if this makes me a kind of Japanese soldier holding on to an older way of life in a world shaped by an economy of desire, I don't care.        

  

 

XV. 

 

Like Dyer's, my childhood was saturated in sugar and I too loved sweets: fruit sweets, mint sweets, cough candy, kola cubes, sweet peanuts, pear drops, humbugs, chews, toffees, gobstoppers, sherbert dips, liquorice allsorts, jelly beans, love hearts, black jacks "and all the other variously flavoured and manifested forms of sugar" [112].  

 

In fact, apart from those pink foam shrimps, I can't think of any sweets I didn't like. Of course, it was much easier to find an NHS dentist in those days and silver fillings (mostly made from mercury) were a small price to pay for the great joy afforded by sugar:

 

"Sugar, lovely sugar! Not the cause of obesity and harbinger of diabetes as we now think of it, but a source of pleasure, nutrition, energy and happiness." [113] [a]      

 

 

XVI. 

 

By the time I went to senior school, in 1974, it had become a comprehensive; the old secondary modern school - Broxhill, known locally as Boothill - having merged with the grammar school across the road and renamed Bedfords Park. So no eleven-plus exam for me; "the central event in the life of any state-school child in the 1960s" [122]. 

 

For Geoff Dyer, however, passing the eleven-plus was the most momentous event of his life; "not simply up to that point but for its duration" [123]. 

 

He explains: "Everything else that has happened couldn't have happened were it not for that" [123], continuing:

 

"On my head, invisibly, is the black cap with silver badge of Cheltenham Gramar School. I am a pure product of grammar school, a grammar-school boy through and through, to the core of my being." [124]

 

And that, of course, is where we radically differ: for whilst I wouldn't identify myself in such essentialist terms - don't think I possess a core being - if obliged to play this game I would say the defining moment came for me in 1977, when I was fourteen, and had nothing to do with my schooling:

 

On my lapel, invisibly, is a silver safety pin: I am an impure product of punk, a Sex Pistol man oh yeah! [b]  

 

 

XVII. 

 

Somehow, I knew that I wasn't going to enjoy the second part of Dyer's book as much as the first. 

 

Stories of a grammar school teen living in a three-bedroom house with bay windows and a conservatory simply don't interest me as much as those of a working-class child at Naunton Park Primary School, living in a two-up, two-down at Fairfield Walk [c].    

 

Perhaps this proves Dyer's contention that passing the eleven-plus is "the big divider" [125] ... Whatever the reason, from page 131 onwards, the possibility that Geoff and I might have been friends - had I been born four or five years earlier in Cheltenham - becomes increasingly difficult to imagine. 

 

Still, let's press on ...  

 

 

XVIII. 

 

I do like Dyer's recounting of his first kisses on the grass with a blonde American girl, a couple of years younger than himself, called Shane. These lines in particular made me smile:

 

 "After we had finished kissing we kept kissing for a while longer because we didn't know what else to do. We stood up like a fully clothed Adam and Eve after eating a sensationally normal apple, bewildered, not even dishevelled: unseen, uncaught and unpunished." [159]

 

Later, in the following weeks, he got to "feel her nascent tits" [159] and even to "slide a finger awkwardly inside her" [160], whilst at the pictures. 

 

Unfortunately for young Geoff, however, soon after this she and her family returned to the States (and perhaps, as he says, she only let him do this as a going away treat) [d].   

 

 

XIX.  

 

As indicated above (XVI), I was born of punk (and conceived to the sounds of glam) [e], so the fact that Dyer was a prog rock devotee is something I can neither overlook, accept, nor forgive. 

 

I find it incomprehensible that someone would actually think Creedence Clearwater Revival the most important rock band of all time. Groups such as Family, Hawkwind and Van der Graaf Generator are anathema to me. But then my musical tastes were never advanced, as Dyer claims his were; I was never a loyal viewer of The Old Grey Whistle Test and had no desire to wear hippie fashion [f]. 

 

When he was fifteen, Dyer went to a store called Driftin' on Cheltenham High Street, which sold "not just prog LPs and underground magazines but the loons, scoop necks and cheescloth shirts worn while listening to or reading them" [183]. In contrast, when I was fifteen, in 1978, I paid my one and only visit to Seditionaries at 430 King's Road.

 

Like Dyer in his hippie mecca, however, I couldn't really afford to buy anything and felt a little intimidated at punk central by the staff and other customers, who were older and way cooler and it was something of a relief to leave the shop and head back home with my only purchase bought on the day - not at Seditionaries, obviously - a large Public Image Limited poster (that I still have) [g].    

 

      

XX. 

 

Even more crucial than Dyer's discovery of sex and alcohol, was his encounter with English literature. Books were to become the decisive factor in his life; not birds and beer (though that's not to downplay his love of these things [h]).     

 

Again, it's a familiar story: though I don't think I was ever as taken with reading plays and poetry and works of fiction as Dyer; certainly not as a teenager (even if I studied English Lit. at A-level). My love of books only really began much later, when I discovered Barthes, Foucault, Baudrillard, etc. It was French theory - not English literature - that made a reader of me (at the age of 28). 

 

And I certainly didn't instigate a cultural revolution in my parent's home by bringing home lots of books and demanding display space for them in the front room. Dyer writes:

 

"Looking back I see this as the first incursion into our home [...] of a feature of middle-class life: the book as something not only to be used as tools to pass exams, to get an education, but as something to be displayed, to furnish a room." [223] [i]   

 

To this day, I don't like to have lots of books around me and dislike book cases (most of the books I have are - inconveniently - packed in boxes). 

 

 

XXI. 

 

I recently published a post here on Torpedo the Ark about a pair of brass candlesticks belonging to my parents: click here. And so I was delighted to discover that Dyer's parents also loved their brass ornaments, even if cleaning them with Brasso was more of a chore than a pleasure:

 

"On days when the brass was to be cleaned, all of it came out, from every nook and cupboard of the house, was cleaned on spread sheets of the Daily Mirror, and then put back in its place. Everything existed in order to be cleaned even though it was never really dirty." [223]   

 

Dyer's remarking that the "red, white and blue can of Brasso" was more pleasing to his eye, even then, "than any of the objects it was used to clean" [223], also makes smile. 

 

 

XXII. 

 

There is a third part to Dyer's memoir, which briefly touches on the nine month period between passing his A-levels and taking up his place at Oxford (Chorpus Christi College) and also paints a deeply moving portrait of his mother in the last two years of her life (2009-11) [j], when, in her mid-80s, she is diagnosed with lung cancer:  

 

"She was not so much dying as diminishing until there was so little left of her that there was not enough to summon up the effort required to die." [264].  

 

Again, I know exactly what Dyer means here and finish Homework with tears in my eyes, rather than a smile on my face.  

 

 

Notes

 

[a] As Dyer goes on to add: "We are talking exclusively of white sugar. Even brown sugar was too sophisticated; an acquired taste with suggestions of a health fad ..." [113]. Similarly, bread was something white and sliced - though I can't recall ever going so far as young Geoff and making a sugar sandwich! 

      As for tooth decay ... "Yes, the gnashers paid a price, but that was almost irrelevant since one's teeth were assumed to be in the process of corroding anyway; after a relatively brief honeymoon of painless and effective chewing, that's what teeth did." [113]  

 

[b] Surprisingly, Dyer makes only one mention of punk in the entire book; see p. 240. It's surprising because he has many of the background experiences and personal qualities that might have made him an excellent punk. He doesn't even express hostility to it; just dismisses it as something happening in London and thus far away from his life in Cheltenham as a pub-loving, badminton-playing, book-reading grammar school boy studying hard in the hope of gaining admission to Oxford. 

 

[c] This is not to say that Dyer's tales of romantic fumblings, schoolyard scuffles, and gig-going are not, in themselves, interesting - and it's certainly not to suggest they are any the less beautifully documented - but, for me, the fun has dissipated and I can no longer see myself so frequently reflected in the book. 

      Further, as Dyer himself admits: "The nice little boy in the blue sweater" seen in the photograph used for the book's front cover, "was well on the way to becoming ... a less than nice adolescent" [168] and who wants to spend time with a snotty and stroppy teen?  

 

[d] Those readers interested in Dyer's early sex life are encouraged to skip to p. 205 and his encounter with Mandy on the beach at Bourenmouth and, later, in her room at a local B&B while her parents are out. This initial interaction is followed by a couple of visits made by Mandy to Dyer's parental home, where, apparently, she and Geoff engaged in oral sex; see p. 206. See also pp. 220-221 and the story of Janice. 

      I have to confess, Dyer's erotic writing is my least favourite aspect of his work; not just here, but in his fiction too. I'm not expecting D. H. Lawrence, but Dyer's laid-back, rather droll style seems lacking not only in romantic embellishment, but even warmness of heart.  

 

[e] See the post of 24 July 2018: 'Notes on a Glam-Punk Childhood' - click here. 

 

[f] Dyer notes how by 1973 "a version of hippy style had percolated down to the third and fourth form of Cheltenham Grammar" and claims that on his Christmas wish list for that year he requested a pair of purple-coloured bell bottom loons [182]. He would later even persuade a girlfriend, Janice, "to change the way she dressed, from secondary-modern style to something more grammar-school hippy" [221].  

 

[g] Dyer was also a fan of the wall poster - but then, as he points out, posters of every kind "were all the rage back then" [186].  

 

[h] For Dyer's first taste of a pint of beer poured in a pub, see pp. 213-214. Unlike Dyer, I have never been a beer drinker; cider, yes; spirits, yes; wine, yes; but never beer. I can't say I'm as much of a pub lover as he is either (preferring the anonymity of hotel bars to the cosiness of a pub).    

 

[i] Dyer goes on to say: 

      "After a couple of weeks I took the books back upstairs to [...] my bedroom [...] I can't remember why [...] but mainly because it just didn't feel right. And so the separation of books from shared space was reinstated [...]" [224] 

 

[j] Dyer does speak of his father's death, also in 2011, but, somehow, the death of a father doesn't mean the same or as much - for a son at least - as the death of a mother. I don't know why that is, but one thinks again of the proverb of uncertain origin made famous by Hitchcock in Psycho (1960) : A boy's best friend is his mother. 

      I was pleased, however, that Dyer mentioned the "jars full of screws and nails" [275] kept by his father, reminding me of the tobacco tins in which my dad kept such things; see the post entitled 'Notes on the Material Remains of My Father' (6 June 2016): click here.   

 

 

Why Growing Up is So Problematic for an Artist

@artstoheartsproject 

(Instagram 3 July 2025)

 

'The first half of life is learning to be an adult and the second half is learning to be a child.' [1] 

 

 

I. 

 

The above cartoon is funny, as Homer would say, because it's true. 

 

Or, at the very least, it touches upon an idea that might possibly be true; namely, that in order to be an artist one must retain some quality (or qualities) associated with childhood.   

 

It's an idea worth investigating further, I think ... 

 

 

II. 

 

I have always remembered an interview with Sid Vicious in which he adamantly insists that he doesn't want to be a grown up and that he and his bandmates are, essentially, just a bunch of kids. According to many people's favourite Sex Pistol: 

 

"When somebody stops being a kid, they stop being aware. It doesn't matter how old you are; you can be ninety-nine and still be a kid. And as long as you're a kid, you're aware and you know what's happening. But as soon as you grow up ... The definition of a grown up is someone who catches on to things when kids discard them." [2] 

 

That, as Jules would say, is an interesting point. 

 

And I suspect it was genuinely Sid's own view, though it also reflects the thinking of the Sex Pistols' manager Malcolm McLaren, who encouraged his young charges to be everything this society hates and by which he primarily meant childish, irresponsible, and disrespectful. 

 

This countercultural philosophy, first conceived by McLaren at art school in the 1960s, was central to punk as it developed in the UK in the 1970s. 

 

For Malcolm, like Sid, being a grown up meant conformity, compromise, and complacency. Being a child, on the other hand, meant remaining open to new ideas and experiences and viewing the world with wonder and a certain innocence - traits that also define an artist (at least in the minds of those who think of art as being more than a matter of paint on canvas).         

 

 

III.

 

Innocence: it's a word that Nietzsche uses in relation to his concept of becoming-child [3]. But it's not one I usually associate with D. H. Lawrence. 

 

However, Lawrence does occasionally speak in favour of naïveté and of the need for an artist to be pure in spirit; which doesn't mean being good in a traditional moral sense of the term, but having a supremely delicate awareness of the world and dwelling in a state of delight [4]. 

 

And Lawrence does say that a combination of innocence + naïveté + modesty might return some young writers and painters not merely to childhood, but to a prenatal condition; i.e., ready to be born into a new golden age.

 

For regression to the foetal state must surely, says Lawrence, be a prelude to something positive:

 

"If the innocence and naïveté as regards artistic expression doesn't become merely idiotic, why shouldn't it become golden?" [5]  

 

 

IV. 

 

Astute readers will note Lawrence's concern in that last line quoted above: there is always the possibility that innocence and naïveté don't result in artistic greatness, but, rather, in idiocy and what Lawrence thinks of as arrested development. 

 

And let's be clear: push comes to shove, Lawrence - like Nietzsche, but unlike McLaren and Vicious - doesn't reject adulthood. 

 

On the contrary, he values it above childhood and whilst he may value the positive qualities associated with children, he loathes those adults who behave in a manner that he regards as immature or infantile and dearly wishes they would grow up and put away childish things (as Paul would say). 

 

Referring to novelists, for example, who, in his view, are overly self-conscious, Lawrence writes: 

 

"It really is childish, after a certain age, to be absorbedly self-conscious. One has to be self-conscious at seventeen: still a little self-conscious at twenty-seven; but if we are going at it strong at thirty-seven, then it is a sign of arrested development, nothing else. And if it is still continuing at forty-seven, it is obvious senile precocity." [6]    

 

Such people, says Lawrence - and in many ways I'm one of them - who "drag their adolescence on into their forties and their fifties and their sixties" [7] and either can't or won't grow up, need some kind of medical help [8].  

 

  

Notes

 

[1] This is one of several well-known quotes attributed to Picasso on the relationship between art and childhood. Others include: 'Every child is an artist: the problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up' and 'It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.'

 

[2] Sid Vicious interviewed by Judy Vermorel in 1977 for The Sex Pistols, a book compiled and edited by Fred and Judy Vermorel, originally published in January 1978 by Universal Books. 

      To listen to Vicious sharing his views on this question, please click here. Sid also speaks frankly, honestly, and directly to his fans from 'Beyond the Grave' on Some Product: Carri On Sex Pistols (Virgin Records, 1979) and confidently asserts that just as you can be ninety-nine and still be a kid, so too can you be a grown up at sixteen: click here. 

 

[3] See, for example, 'Of the Three Metamorphoses' in part one of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the third and final stage of which is becoming-child and the entering into a second innocence. 

 

[4] See D. H. Lawrence 'Making Pictures', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton (Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 230-231.

 

[5] D. H. Lawrence, 'Introduction to These Paintings', Late Essays and Articles, p. 217.

 

[6] D. H. Lawrence, 'The Future of the Novel', in Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed. Bruce Steele (Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 152. Senile precocity is not a recognised medical condition and seems to have been coined as a term by Lawrence in this essay.  

 

[7] Ibid., p. 153.   

 

[8] This condition - increasingly widespread - is often referred to in popular psychology as Peter Pan Syndrome and is associated with the work of Dan Kiley; see his 1983 text, The Peter Pan Syndrome: Men Who Have Never Grown Up. 

      Note that whilst Peter Pan Syndrome is not recognised by the World Health Organization - nor listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders - it has a significant overlap with narcissistic personality disorder.

 

 

Of Punks and Prostitutes (Everyone Has Their Price)

Linda Ashby with Soo Catwoman and members of the Bromley Contingent 

(L-R: Debbie Juvenile, Siouxsie Sioux, Steve Severin, Sharon Hayman, and Simon Barker)

Photo by Ray Stevenson (1976)

 

 

I. 

 

According to the official trailer, The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle is the staggering story of a punk group that not only "held the record business to ransom", "stuck a safety pin through Her Majesty's nose" and "turned the national press into an occupied zone", but also "smuggled a Great Train robber into the top ten and destroyed the myths of their own success" [1]. 

 

All of these things are true: but were the Sex Pistols really a "kamikaze gang of cat burglers and child prostitutes" [2], or is that just a metaphorical mixture of Mclarenesque fantasy and hype? 

 

Leaving aside ideas to do with self-destructive behaviour and criminal theft, let's examine the more disturbing claim that the Sex Pistols - using that term in its wider application to refer not simply to the members of the band, but to all the many colourful, creative, and often fucked-up characters associated with them - might be viewed as child prostitutes ...

 

 

II.  

 

Some readers may recall that back in July 2019, I published a post in which I discussed an idea central to the Swindle project that the music industry ruthlessly exploits the young artists it controls as well as the young fans who buy its products [3].   

 

It doesn't simply make a point about the exploitative nature of the music business from a financial perspective, however. It also explicitly suggests with its language of pimping and prostitution that the music industry has a sleazy underbelly [4]. 

 

Not that Malcolm was adverse to exploiting young flesh himself in order to create a stir and he seemed to genuinely delight in the world of pornography, fetish, and prostitution, as his early T-shirt designs for Sex make clear. 

 

And many of the kids who hung around (or worked in) his store on the Kings Road and later became friends and followers of the band fronted by Johnny Rotten, also seemed drawn to the world of vice; particularly those who fell under the spell of Linda Ashby, a key figure in the early punk scene and a professional dominatrix, skilled in the art of S&M.    

 

 

III.

 

Ashby, with her short blonde hair, distinctive eye makeup, and often dressed in a favourite outfit from The London Leatherman [5], was a member of what we might term the illicit underground; that demi-monde of gay bars, strip clubs, sex shops, drug dens, and houses of ill repute frequented by a wide variety of people, from artists and entertainers, to politicians and bowler-hatted city gents.  

 

She was also one of those rare customers at 430 King's Road who actually had money to spend and, before long, her large central London apartment - just off Green Park - became an important location for the punk elite to meet up and crash out. This included members of the Bromley Contingent, who were famously photographed by Ray Stevenson in 1976 cavorting on the floor having just spray painted her walls with graffiti [6].

 

Of course, being associated with a known prostitute did not make the teens who gathered round her prostitutes themselves, although, everybody's favourite punk blonde, Debbie Wilson (aka Debbie Juvenile), when not following the Sex Pistols or working as a sales assistant at Seditionaries alongside her best friend Tracie O'Keefe [7], wasn't averse - according to Bertie Marshall (aka Berlin) - from turning tricks in Mayfair to clipping mug punters in Soho. 

 

Indeed, Marshall also worked as a rent boy and he described himself and his friends, like Debbie, who were on the game, as a bizarre and exotic pack of whore hounds [8]. 

 

And so, the phrase from The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle trailer with which I opened this post wasn't entirely fictitious, nor referring simply to the manner in which record companies exploit young talent. There was an all too literal sense in which prostitution was an acceptable (and celebrated) aspect of the punk lifestyle - as it was in the contemporary art world at that time [9].          

 

Notes

 

[1-2] Lines from the official trailer to The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (dir. Julien Temple, 1980), narrated by the famous British newsreader and commentator on BBC Radio John Snagge. To watch on Youtube, click here.

      Note that this commentary - entitled 'Pistols Propaganda' - can also be found as the B-side of the Sex Pistols' single '(I'm Not Your) Stepping Stone' (Virgin Records, 1980), released from the soundtrack of The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (Virgin Records, 1979).

[3] See the post entitled 'Young Flesh Required: Notes on Punk and Paedophilia' (18 July 2019): click here. 

[4] In fact, as Deleuze and Guattari demonstrate in Anti-Oedipus (1972), flows of capital and flows of desire belong to one and the same libidinal economy. Thus sexuality, as they say, is everywhere; as much in the boardroom as in the bedroom; "the way a bureaucrat fondles his records, a judge administers justice, a businessman causes money to circulate ..." it's all about desiring-production. 

      See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (The Athlone Press, 1984), p. 293.

[5] The London Leatherman (est. 1972), which caters to connoisseurs of a certain taste, significantly influenced the fetish fashions and accessories sold at Sex by McLaren and Westwood and, later, the wider punk scene. Thus, the name Ken Magson arguably deserves to be more widely known than it is: a brief biography can be found on The London Leatherman website: click here. 

      A description of the LP7 Wrestlers Suit favoured by Ashby - and a photo of her wearing such - can also be found on thelondonleatherman.com: click here.

 

[6] Ashby would have regularly encountered members of the Bromley Contingent not just at 430 Kings Road, but also at Louise's, a lesbian club in Soho that they and members of the Sex Pistols liked to frequent and where her girlfriend at the time would often DJ. 

      The photo session I refer to with members of the Bromley Contingent, taken at Ashby's flat by Ray Stevenson in October 1976, featured in the first (and only) issue of the Sex Pistols fanzine Anarchy in the U. K. One of the pictures (cropped) can be seen at the top of this post. 

[7] See the post entitled 'Reflections on a Photo of Two Young Punks' (4 December 2018): click here, in which I pay my respects to (and express my fondness for) Debbie and Tracie. 

[8] See Marshall's memoir, Berlin Bromley (SAF Publishing Ltd., 2006). 

      Marshall - aka Berlin - was just 15 in 1976 when he and fellow suburban misfits Susan Ballion (Sioxsie Sioux), Steven Bailey (Steve Severin), and Simon Barker (Six) began to hang around 430 King's Road and follow the Sex Pistols. They formed the core of the Bromley Contingent and, along with a small handful of others, can be regarded as those whom one cultural commentator at the time described as the "'extreme ideological wing of the Peculiars'". 

      See Paul Gorman, The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren (Constable, 2020), p. 329, who quotes Peter York writing in an article entitled 'Them', in Harpers & Queen (October, 1976).     

[9] I'm referring here to the Prostitution exhibition (1976) by the performance art collective founded by Genesis P-Orridge - COUM Transmissions - at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, which included (amongst other delights) pornographic images, used sanitary products, bloody bandages, rusty knives, and dirty syringes. The opening night show featured a stripper and prostitutes and punks were invited to mingle with the gallery audience; this included members of the Bromley Contingent, some of whom - including Debbie - got their pictures in the papers. 

      Perhaps not surprisingly, the show - which ran for just over a week - caused press outrage and debate in parliament; one Tory MP described all those involved as the wreckers of civilisation. Despite criticism from almost every quarter, the ICA director, Ted Little, defended the show which is still regarded to this day - almost 50 years later - as one of the most controversial in both the ICA's history and that of British contemporary art, challenging moral and aesthetic values in a manner similar to McLaren's Sex Pistols and obliging him to thereafter up his game as a provocateur. 

 

 

Musical bonus: 'We Are All Prostitutes' by The Pop Group (Rough Trade, 1979): click here.  

    

Everybody's on Top of the Pops

 

Legs & Co. dancing to 'Silly Thing' by the Sex Pistols and 'Bankrobber' by The Clash 

Top of the Pops (BBC Television, 12 April 1979 and 21 August 1980)

 

I. 

 

'Top of the Pops', by the Rezillos, is one of the great punk singles by one of the great punk bands [1]. And, in August 1978, it led to one of the great punk performances on the BBC show of that name: click here.  

But even though the band make it clear in the lyrics to their song that they are critiquing the music industry and the significant role played within it by the broadcast media - 

 

Doesn't matter what is shown 

Just as long as everyone knows 

What is selling, what to buy 

The stock market for your hi-fi [2]

 

- TOTP producer Robin Nash, simply smiled and said that not only was it always nice to be mentioned, but that being attacked in this manner demonstrated just how relevant the programme remained even to the punk generation. 

 

Ultimately, it appears that the cynicism of those who control the media and the music business trumps the ironic protest of a new wave band. 

 

 

II. 

 

As if to hammer home this point to those who still believed in the integrity and revolutionary character of their punk idols, we were treated to the spectacle of Legs & Co. dancing to the Sex Pistols on Top of the Pops just eight months later: If you like their pop music, you'll love their pop corn - click here [3].

 

Perhaps even more surprisingy, the following year Legs and Co. gyrated behind bars to the strains of 'Bankrobber', by The Clash, in a routine squeezed in between songs from Shakin' Stevens [4] and Billy Joel [5]. 

 

Worse, the somewhat sentimental punky reggae composition written by Strummer and Jones, which reached number 12 in the UK charts, was sneered at by Cliff Richard, who mockingly declared that it could have been a Eurovision winner: click here [6]. 

 

 

On the front of a television screen ...

 

 

Notes

 

[1] I'm being generous, of course, but it's hard not to love the Rezillos; an assemblage of art and fashion students from Bonnie Scotland, fronted by Fay Fife, who took a much more fun approach to songwriting than the Clash and described themselves as a new wave beat group rather than a punk rock band. More glam than garage - and seemingly more interested in sci-fi and B-movies than rhythm and blues - the Rezillos are sometimes compared to both the Cramps and the B-52s. 

 

[2] Lyrics from 'Top of the Pops', written by John Callis (or, as he was known whilst a member of the Rezillos, Luke Warm). This track, released in July 1978 as a single from the album Can't Stand the Rezillos (Sire Records, 1978), reached number 17 in the UK chart, whilst the LP did slightly better by getting to number 16 and is now considered something of a classic of the punk-pop genre. 

 

[3] To be fair, 'Silly Thing' is a great pop-punk track by Cook and Jones and the always excellent Legs and Co. - a six-girl dance troupe formed in 1976 - give a spirited and amusing performance, choreographed by Flick Colby. 

      The line quoted is from the cinema ad sequence in The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (dir. Julien Temple,1980) which correctly predicts the manner in which the Sex Pistols would be co-opted by consumer capitalism and become just another brand name to be stamped on a range of products.

 

[4] Welsh singer-songwriter Shakin' Stevens released his cover of 'Marie, Marie' as the third single from his album of the same title (Epic Records, 1980). Despite being released in July, the single did not enter the UK Singles Chart until the second week of August, staying in the chart for ten weeks and peaking at number 19 (his first top twenty hit). 

 

[5] The Billy Joel song, 'It's Still Rock 'n' Roll to Me', was released from his hit album Glass Houses (Columbia Records, 1980). It made number 1 in the US, but only reached 14 in the UK. The song conveys Joel's criticisms of the music industry and press for jumping on the new wave bandwagon, when it was merely a rehash, in his view, of older musical forms and inferior to his own brand of slightly more sophisticated, ambitious, and highly polished soft rock.   

 

[6] For those who would prefer to watch the official video for 'Bankrobber' (dir. Don Letts), click here.       

      To be fair to The Clash, they never did appear in person on Top of the Pops, unlike almost every other punk band at the time (and the reformed Sex Pistols in 1996). However, they did allow the use of videos for 'Should I Stay or Should I Go' and 'Rock the Casbah' on TOTP when these singles were re-released in 1991 (six years after they disbanded).     

Queer as Punk

A punk bromance: Sid 💘 Johnny

 

'Punk is a challenge to reconsider everything you do, think or feel; 

including the ways that you love.' [1]

 

 

I. 

 

In the second volume of his memoirs - Anger is an Energy  (2014) - Johnny Rotten flatly denies the persistent rumour that he and Vicious, unlike Cook and Jones, were more than just good friends ... 

 

Perhaps one reason why this romantic myth continues to resonate is because before becoming a term used by the media to identify a form of rock music that emerged in the 1970s, the word punk had a long subcultural history rooted in illicit and deviant sexual activity.   

 

In the 16th century, for example, it was used by writers including Shakespeare as a synonym for a female prostitute and spelt rather charmingly as puncke [2]. By the late 17th century, however, it had taken on a different meaning and described a youth who is provided for by an older man in exchange for certain favours. 

 

This queer [3] etymology takes on renewed significance when one recalls the story of the Sex Pistols; an anarchic collective held together with safety pins and bondage straps which included a far wider and more diverse group of people than the actual members of the band [4]. 

 

The teens who spent their time hanging around 430 King's Road challenged heteronormative values with their behaviour, attitude, and appearance; cheerfully wearing T-shirts designed by McLaren and Westwood which included images drawn from gay porn, including homosexual cowboys, nude adolescents, and well-endowed American footballers [5].     

And so, whilst both Rotten and Vicious were for the most part straight in terms of their sexual orientation, their emphasis on non-conformity, free expression, and open acceptance of gay culture - the band and their followers would often socialise in the early days at a lesbian member's club in Soho called Louise's - was positively received within the queer community at that time.    

 

 

II. 

 

Notwithstanding what I say above, I think we should be wary of retrospectively romanticising the story of the Sex Pistols, or imposing contemporary theoretical interpretations concerning queer sexual politics and identities on to the reality of the UK punk scene in the 1970s. I don't want to be the person who says let's stick to the facts at every opportunity, but I would agree that any analysis showing a flagrant disregard for historical accuracy seems of little real value or interest.   

 

Further, as David Wilkinson points out, "once punk is separated from rooted judgement through failure to locate it within a particular conjuncture, its politics can be celebrated as uniformly positive" [6] and that's a problem: the Sex Pistols did not promise to make things better and punk wasn't entirely gay friendly; there remained elements of homophobia within it (just as there did of racism, sexism, and reactionary stupidity).   

Ultimately, for McLaren and Westwood, same-sex passion was seen as something with which to confront and discomfort the English; they wished to weaponise it, not promote gay liberation or simply camp things up for the fun of it: 

"Given [their] positioning of same-sex passion as alienated, perverse and violent, it is unsurprising that McLaren and Westwood not only seemed to have little interest in the radically transformative aims of gay liberation, but were also prone to homophobic gestures that were calculated to shock in their contempt of even reformist demands for respect, understanding and openness." [7]

 

Ultimately, as Wilkinson says, McLaren and Westwood's "was an idiosyncratic, peculiarly hybrid kind of politics, especially in relation to sexuality" [8]; one based on the radical understanding of desire as "an instinctive, irrational force capable of disrupting social norms once unanchored from the private sphere" [9], but they weren't interested in how to further loving relationships, same-sex or otherwise.   

 

And as for Johnny and Sid, for better or worse, they were more romantically fixated on Nora and Nancy than one another.   

 

 

Notes

 

[1] I'm paraphrasing Pete Shelley writing in the second issue of his self-produced punk fanzine Plaything (1978): click here. 

 

[2] Shakespeare used the word, for example, in Measure for Measure (1603-04), where Lucio suggests that since Mariana is 'neither maid, widow, nor wife', she may 'be a Puncke’ (Act 5, scene 1).

[3] I am using this term here as one that includes same-sex desire, but which is not synonymous with such. If it were up to me, as someone who finds the empty secret of non-identity philosophically more interesting than the open secret of same-sex desire, I would restrict use of the word queer to refer to forms of practice and behaviour that have nothing to do with sexuality or gender. 

      See the post of 16 March 2025, in which I discuss the term: click here. 

[4] When I think of the Sex Pistols, I certainly don't just think of Steve Jones, Paul Cook, Glen Matlock, and Johnny Rotten, but also of Malcolm McLaren, Vivienne Westwood, Jamie Reid, Jordan, Soo Catwoman, Helen of Troy, and various members of the so-called Bromley Contingent. 

 

[5] David Wilkinson makes the important point that these designs "deliberately inhabited dominant understandings of unsanctioned sexuality as perverse, sordid and violent in order to provoke a reaction" and that McLaren and Westwood were not consciously offering a set of alternative values. 

      See Wilkinson's excellent essay 'Ever Fallen In Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t Have?): Punk, Politics and Same-Sex Passion', in Key Words: A Journal of Cultural Materialism, No. 13 (2015), pp. 57-76. The line quoted from is on p. 64. 

 

[6] David Wilkinson, ibid., p. 59.

[7] Ibid., p. 65. 

 

[8] Ibid., p. 62.

 

[9] Ibid., p. 63.  

Musical bonus: Tom Robinson Band, 'Glad to be Gay', from the EP Rising Free (EMI Records, 1978): click here. 

 

 

What's in a Word: Punk

 'The cult is called punk; the music punk rock ...'

 

 

I. 

 

In a pre-Grundy television interview, Sex Pistol Johnny Rotten is asked by Maggie Norden:

 

"What about the word 'punk' - it means worthless, nasty - are you happy with this word?"

 

A crucial question to which he replies: 

 

"No, the press gave us it. It's their problem, not ours. We never called ourselves punk." [1]

 

It's a somewhat surprising response which every idiot who proclaims that they'll be a punk until they die might care to consider ...

 

 

II.  

 

When Rotten refers to the press, he was more than likely thinking of posho freelance journalist and photographer Caroline Coon, who, having risen to prominence as part of the British Underground scene in the 1960s, attached herself to the new youth movement spearheaded by the Sex Pistols in the mid-70s [2].

For it was Coon, writing for the influential music paper Melody Maker, who famously described this anarchic subculture held together with safety pins and bondage straps as punk - a name by which, for better or for worse, it has been known ever since (despite Rotten's disavowing of the term) [3].

 

Personally, I always think it a pity when something as beautifully fluid, ambiguous, and messed up as the scene that grew out of at 430 King's Road is identified and codified; to name is to know and to know is to kill. Calling the Sex Pistols a punk band was to suggest they were not something radically new or different; that they could, in fact, be compared with other groups and to prevailing rock trends.

 

That's undoubtedly true of the Clash - the band with whom Coon became most closely associated - but it's absolutely not true of the Sex Pistols as conceived by McLaren and Westwood. And not true either of Alan Jones, Jordan, and all those others who either worked at or hung around 430, King's Road. 

 

Assuming that a collective term of reference is at least provisionally needed, what should we call this assemblage of individuals ?   

 

Perhaps the best answer to this question was supplied by cultural critic Peter York, who, in October '76, referred to the "Sex shop people" and characterised them as the "extreme ideological wing of the Peculiars" [4]. 

 

That, I think, is spot on: and very much in line with how I think of the Sex Pistols and those closely associated with them - as more funny peculiar than punk; i.e., as unusual, strange, abnormal, deviant, perverse, extraordinary, singular, exceptional, outlandish ... 

 

The photo below perfectly captures just how queer things were before being named and tamed by the media and the music business and before an army of identikit punks emerged.         

 

The Sex shop people: (L-R) Steve Jones, Danielle, Alan Jones, 

Chrissie Hynde, Jordan, and Vivienne Westwood 

Photo by David Dagley (Forum, June 1976)

 

Notes

 

[1] The full six minute interview with McLaren and Rotten - including a pre-recorded performance of 'Anarchy in the UK' - was on the tea-time current affairs show Nationwide (BBC1 12 Nov 1976). It can be found in the BBC Archive on Facebook: click here. A shorter version - without the band's performance - can also be found on YouTube: click here.   

 

[2] Acting on the recommendation of Alan Jones, then working as an assistant alongside Jordan at McLaren and Westwood's shop on the King's Road, Coon attended an early Sex Pistols gig and, like many others, she was captivated by what she saw happening both on and off stage and immediately began to document this new scene.  

 

[3] See Coon's Melody Maker article entitled 'Punk Rock: Rebels Against the System' (7 August 1976).       

      Although the word punk had already been used fairly widely for several years in connection to rock music in the US - and, indeed, has a much longer and more complex history than that: click here - it was Coon's piece that played a crucial role in introducing a slightly revised version of the term to a British audience and helping to identify a novel (but not radically new) genre of music.

      Coon obviously had a gift for this kind of thing as, interestingly, she was also the person who named the hardcore group of friends who followed the Sex Pistols as the 'Bromley Contingent'.

 

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

 

 

Fuck Everyone and Be a Disgrace! In Memory of the Dada Baroness: Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven

Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven 

(1874 -1927)

 

"Every artist is crazy with respect to ordinary life ..."

 

I. 

 

The relationship between dada and punk has long been acknowledged; Greil Marcus, for example, famously traces out a secret history of twentieth-century art in which he discerns a direct lineage from the Cabaret Voltaire in 1916 to the Sex Pistols in 1976 [1].

 

And it's arguable that the German-born artist and poet Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven who, via her radical performance of self during the years 1913 to 1923 came to embody dada, might also be described as a proto-punk.

 

For not only did she look and act the part, but she even coined the term phalluspistol in her profane and playfully obscene poetry [2], anticipating the name Malcolm McLaren would come up with for the group operating out of 430 King's Road. 

 

I'm not suggesting that McLaren stole Elsa's idea in the same way as Marcel Duchamp allegedly stole credit for his most notorious readymade from her (see below), but it's an interesting coincidence.

 

II.

Apart from her writings, Baroness Elsa was famous for two things: (i) her numerous love affairs and (ii) her utilisation of found objects - including actual rubbish picked up from the streets - into her work and wardrobe (she once wore a bra, for example, made from old tins cans). 

 

Her aim, she declared, was to sleep with everyone and become a living collage, thereby dissolving the boundary between life and art whilst, at the same time, challenging bourgeois notions of femininity and cultural value. If this made her an embarrassment to her friends and family and a disgrace in the eyes of society, well, she didn't care (again, her attitude and behaviour is now what some would term punk).

 

Her colourful and unconventional life took her to New York in 1913 and it was here that she made a name for herself as a model, artist, and poet [3]. To help make ends meet, Elsa also worked in a cigarette factory like Bizet's Carmen. 

 

Whilst Man Ray once filmed Elsa shaving her pubic hair, it was Marcel Duchamp for whom she had the hots and, in a public performance c. 1915, she recited a love poem whilst rubbing a newspaper article about the latter over her naked body, making her romantic interest explicit. Several years later she would make an assemblage entitled Portrait of Marcel Duchamp (1920-22), which was only rediscovered in 1966. 

It was her connection with Duchamp that would lead to a more recent controversy. For there is now speculation that several artworks attributed to other artists of the period can either be partially attributed to Elsa, or that she should in fact be acknowledged as their sole creator - and this includes one of the most famous and important artworks of the twentieth-century ...

 

 

III. 

 

In April 1917, a porcelain urinal signed with the name R. Mutt was submitted by Duchamp for the inaugural exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in New York. Duchamp entitled this readymade work Fountain - and the rest, as they say, is avant-garde art history [4].
      

But some have suggested that the work was, in fact, the idea of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven who had submitted it to her friend Duchamp and there is, to be fair, circumstantial evidence to support this claim. Most art historians, however, maintain that Duchamp was solely responsible for this landmark work in twentieth-century art and he remains credited for it [5].   

   

Ultimately, we'll probably never know the truth of this for sure. 

 

 

IV.  

In 1923, the Baroness returned to Berlin, where she lived in poverty and suffered mental health problems.

 

Things improved after she moved to Paris, but, sadly, she died on 14 December 1927 from gas inhalation (whether this was or was not intentional is unclear). 

 

She's buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris, so in good company.

 

There have since been several biographies published and every now and then there's an attempt to bring the name Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven to wider public attention [6], though one suspects that she'll always remain a marginal figure of interest only to those in the know.

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (Harvard University Press, 1989). 

 

[2] See the poem 'Cosmic Chemistry' in Body Sweats: The Uncensored Writings of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, ed. Irene Gammel and Suzanne Zelazo (The MIT Press, 2016). Click here to read on allpoetry.com.

 

[3] Although most of her poems remained unpublished in her lifetime, some were featured in The Little Review alongside extracts from Joyce's Ulysses.

 

[4] The original piece is now lost, but, along with numerous replicas made with Duchamp's permission in the 1950s and '60s, we still have the famous photograph of it taken at Alfred Stieglitz's sudio and published in The Blind Man (a two-issue journal featuring work by dada artists and edited by Duchamp in 1917).

 

[5] See, for example, the letter from Dawn Adès (Professor emerita of art history and theory, University of Essex) addressing this controversy in The Guardian (15 June 2022): click here.  

[6] See for example Irene Gammel's biography, Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada and Everyday Modernity (The MIT Press, 2003). Gammel makes a strong case for Elsa's artistic brilliance and punk spirit. 

 

 

In Anticipation of and Reflections on a Post-Punk Salon (with Dorothy Max Prior and Richard Cabut)

 

 

In Anticipation of a Post-Punk Salon 

 

This looks like, sounds like, good fun, don't you think? 

 

Regrettably, I don't know Dorothy Max Prior and haven't read her book - 69 Exhibition Road: Twelve True-Life Tales from the Fag End of Punk, Porn & Performance (MIT Press, 2023) - which, according to the publishers' blurb, is a 'vibrant, wry, and engaging account of life as an adventurous, queer young person in late 1970s London discovering themselves as an artist, and an individual'. 

 

However, I do (sort of) know Richard Cabut and have read his book - Looking for a Kiss (Sweat Drenched Press, 2020); a true story based on lies (and vice versa), set in post-punk London and featuring a couple adrift in a world of sex, drugs, and the im/possibility of dreams in a time of nihilism. 

 

Cabut - then writing under the name of Richard North - was the man who coined the term positive punk, about which I have written previously on Torpedo the Ark: click here. 

 

I completely agree with him that, initially, punk was a defiant and stylish response to the boredom of everyday life. However, whereas he also sees punk as a quest for truth and meaning, I see it as a playful (but nonetheless violent) deconstruction of these and related ideals. 

 

Still, there's no reason why such differences should prevent us being on friendly terms ... And so I look forward to meeting him this evening at this post-punk salon; as I do Ms Prior, who is 100% correct to say that punk - as conceived by McLaren and Westwood - was primarily conceptual and performance art, rather than "just another chapter in the history of rock 'n' roll" [1]. 

 

 

Reflections on a Post-Punk Salon 

 

Well, as anticipated, that was fun! 

 

Sean McLusky's got himself a nice new space just off Tin Pan Alley and this event was far more enjoyable than the Crass book launch at the Horse Hospital last month. I may not be a fan of positive punk, but it's surely preferable to militant asceticism and I would rather spend an evening with Cabut and Prior than Rimbaud and Vaucher [2]. 

 

And that's true even though Cabut's fictional self (Robert) clearly misunderstands that punk nihilism was, in fact, a joyous and active negation of the negative. He, Robert, finds the chaos of punk as lived experience almost unbearable and is petrified at the thought of the ruins [3]. The fact that Cabut chose to echo this fear on the night was disappointing. 

 

As for Ms Prior, she seemed very nice and she has certainly had an interesting life and career. Unfortunately, she remains politically naive in her sex radicalism and the belief that punk, porn, and art not only empower and liberate, but present a real challenge to the established order. 

 

She informed her audience that the punk attitude can be summed up by the phrase just do it. But that's an upbeat, aspirational slogan associated more with Nike [4] than the Sex Pistols, is it not? 

 

And it's the motto also of what Byung-Chul Han terms Müdigkeitsgesellschaft - i.e., a society characterised by an incessant (and ultimately exhausting) compulsion to perform and achieve [5]. Contrast this positive imperative with Malcolm McLaren's instructing us to destroy success. 

 

Still, putting these things to one side, it was a well-organised and enjoyable event and there were some interesting people and colourful characters present; none more so than Cuban cigar-smoking punk dandy Algernon Aloysius St. John-Cholmondeley-Featherstonehaugh, who dispensed wit, wisdom, and matches with great aplomb. 

 

 

Notes 

 

[1] Dorothy Max Prior, speaking in an interview with Lene Cortina on the excellent blog Punk Girl Diaries (12 March 2018): click here. 

 

[2] I would remind those who organised the event with Crass at the Horse Hospital that, as a rule, it's always a good idea to provide seating and drinks for your guests; particularly when charging an entrance fee and promoting a book priced at £50 a pop. Best also to allow them plenty of opportunity to chat and mingle freely. Nobody, apart from the most committed of Crass fans, really wants to be crammed into a small space and forced to stand for well over an hour whilst being lectured on how the revolution might have succeeded, if only ... by an 80-year-old Penny Rimbaud. See the post 'Crass By Name ...' (12 April 2024): click here. 

 

[3] See pp. 77-78 of Richard Cabut's Looking for a Kiss (Sweat Drenched Press, 2020). Note that Cabut was reading from the revised and extended edition of his novel, published by PC Press (2023), featuring new text, photos and artwork. 

 

[4] Just Do It is a trademarked tagline of sports shoe company Nike, coined in 1988 by the advertising executive Dan Wieden, inspired, he says, by Gary Gilmore, who is alleged to have said 'Let's do it' shortly before his execution for murder in January 1977. 

 

[5] See Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society, trans. Erik Butler (Stanford University Press, 2015). The original German text, entitled Müdigkeitsgesellschaft, was published in Berlin by Matthes & Seitz Verlag (2010). 

      I published a two-part post on this work for Torpedo the Ark on 7 November 2021. Click here to read part one - 'On Neuronal Power to Vita Activa' - and/or here to read part two - 'From the Pedagogy of Seeing to Burnout Society'.