The Sex Pistols and the London mob

This thesis concerns the invention, improvisation, and right to ownership of the punk patent and questions the contention, put by the band’s manager, Malcolm McLaren, and other commentators, that the Sex Pistols and English punk were a Situationist prank. This challenge to what, in the majority of punk literature, has become an ‘accepted truth’ was first raised by McLaren’s nemesis, the band’s lead singer, John Lydon. McLaren and Lydon did agree that the London punk movement took its inspiration from the anarchic and chaotic energies of the eighteenth–century London mob. This common crowd could switch instantly and unpredictably from a passive state to an anarchic, violent and destructive mob, or ‘King Mob’: one that turned all authority on its head in concerted, but undirected, acts of misrule. Through his own improvisation with punk tropes, Lydon came to embody English punk and functioned, on the one hand, as a natural mob leader; and on the other, as a focus for the mob’s anger. I argue that, in following McLaren’s reduction of the Sex Pistols to a Situationistinspired prank, one of the earliest and most influential analyses of the punk phenomenon, Greil Marcus’s Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century, misunderstood how fundamental the culture and semiotics of the London mob was to McLaren, Lydon, the Sex Pistols and the performance of London punk. I take seriously, then, the idea that the cultural signifiers the Sex Pistols drew upon to make their punk performances, and which accounted in no small way for their ability to ‘outrage’, were exclusively British and unique to London’s cultural topography and the culture of the London crowd. After the implosion of the Sex Pistols on their 1978 American tour, with Lydon quitting in disgust, McLaren attempted to take ownership of the punk legacy: both actually, through attempting to assert his copyright over the Sex Pistols’ brand; and symbolically through re-writing the Sex Pistols’ story in his 1980 movie The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle. Curiously, and most notably, the mob is foregrounded in the film through its opening sequence, which draws heavily from the events of the Gordon Riots in 1780. This thesis contests the paradigm put in place by McLaren’s version of events as portrayed in The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle and reconsiders punk as a cultural object trouve. In particular, I consider literary influences on its protagonists: Graham Greene on John Lydon and Charles Dickens and J. M. Barrie on Malcolm McLaren