Meanwhile, the band was slowly gaining exposure in Britain. Their first press review contains a manifesto delivered by guitarist Steve Jones, but clearly guided by McLaren: “We’re not into music. We’re into chaos”. Early accounts of Pistols gigs, recorded in Clinton Heylin’s Year Zero, focus on the visuals, which were easier to assimilate and parse than the chaos of the music, showing that McLaren and the band had tapped into an identifiable visual culture with their echoing of Paris ‘68.
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The whole point of Sex is that we want to inspire other people with the confidence to live out their fantasies and to change. We really are making a political statement with this shop by attempting to attack the system. I’m also interested in getting people to wear some of our sex gear to the office. ‘Out of the bedroom and into the streets!’ Now that would really be revolutionary.
— Vivienne Westwood, “Buy Sexual”, Forum, 1976
Dialectics is not a sterile process: it causes explosions. Mixing Paris ‘68 and New York ‘74 in the London of ‘76 was an experiment with volatile substances and unpredictable outcomes. In its early days, punk was a sandpit for kids to play in, using slogans and gestures to carnivalise economic turmoil, just like the Situationists had done.
There was a tension between McLaren’s libertarian views, and his desire to control the nascent movement. Reading Leaving the 20th Century, an anthology of Situationist writing edited by Chris Gray, McLaren observed, “the good thing about it was all these slogans you could take up without being party to a movement. Being in a movement often stifles creative thinking”. However, with his “cash from chaos” mantra, McLaren attempted to control both the spectacle of punk and its commodification — adding a layer of vertical integration to Debord’s theories.
In the early days, McLaren had dominated the discourse around punk, and imbued the early followers with his sensibility. After the Bill Grundy interview, where the Pistols caused outrage by swearing on live television, punk became a mass media sensation, too big for McLaren to control; the press diluted the message and turned the movement into a cartoon. The group was also less pliant than McLaren had hoped: when the Svengali presented them with a list of bondage inspired phrases to insert into songs, Lydon and Glen Matlock, in a rare moment of collaboration, recast submission as a submarine mission.
McLaren attempted to regain control of the message with a Situationist broadsheet called Anarchy in the UK. The editorial notes for the second issue state, “no-one is interested in the truth. The fact that what is happening is fluid, spontaneous, changes day by day, living by your nerve ends, chaos”. It was never published.
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As the group collapsed, in a storm of cancelled shows, record company firings, antagonism and addiction, McLaren began work on a film which would retell the Pistols’ story with McLaren as protagonist, a Situationist puppet master manipulating the musicians and the media. McLaren couldn’t decide whether he wanted to be the star, or the hidden mastermind: the film opens with him appearing in a mask, only to declare, “My name is Malcolm McLaren”.
Paris remained a key touchstone in his mythology, and so McLaren sent Sid Vicious to France to film the dénouement. In a scene bizarrely reminiscent of the opening of Welles’ F for Fake, Vicious strides through Paris in swastika T-shirt and leather jacket, the camera cutting to horrified reaction shots from elderly passers-by. McLaren glories in bringing inter-generational conflict back to the streets of Paris, in a confected, staged setting. Many of Sid’s scenes were shot as he walked from Rue de Rivoli to the corner of Avenue Victor Hugo. Reaction shots from passers-by were filmed elsewhere, near Chatelet. The one representative of youth shown in this sequence follows Sid out of a boulangerie, brandishing a felt tip and begging for an autograph, which he crudely graffitis across her chest; a nihilistic negation of the Situationists’ utopian slogans. Playing in the background, a French singer performs the band’s signature song, accompanied by an accordion: “Moi je suis l’Antéchrist, moi je suis l’anarchiste” — a far better rhyme in French.
Sid refused to sing “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien”, but agreed to do “My Way”. Three attempts were made to record the song, with Sid, Steve Jones and a series of French session musos. The Pistols were reportedly too drunk to play, and the French so desperate to leave that the guitarist finished the song with only five strings. Jones added overdubs later, and Sid’s vocals were stitched together from three different takes. Malcolm was absent, as the project descended into ersatz farce.
The iconic filmed version of “My Way” features Sid in white tuxedo jacket, black jeans and garter belt, performing the song in the Théâtre de l’Empire before an upper-class audience — a cliché of Parisian self-satisfaction, waiting to be flung into the trash of history. As Sid sneers his way through the song, the audience applauds and throws roses, neutering Sid’s posturing and sloganeering. Only gunshots provoke real panic, as the punk goes one step beyond what the Situationists offered, in McLaren’s fantasy telling at least. The act even unconsciously reaches further back into Parisian history, echoing the actions of proto-Surrealist Jacques Vaché, who interrupted the premiere of Apollinaire’s Les Mamelles de Tirésias — dressed as an English pilot and brandishing a gun — threatening to shoot at random. Finally, Sid walks away, abdicating his position as leader of a new youth movement.
As the celluloid avatar of Vicious is unloading on the Parisian bourgeoisie, the real Sid is chasing McLaren through a hotel room corridor, aiming motorcycle boots at his manager’s bare arse. Reviewing the film, Greil Marcus says, “McLaren’s attempt to show up the Sex Pistols as a con is blown up by the inclusion of several real Sex Pistols recordings” — just as his fantasies of a Situationist prank were blown up by the Pistols themselves.
By the time of the film’s release, Rotten had left the band, and Sid was deep into the downward spiral which would leave him dead at twenty-one. With the emergence of copycat groups, punk collapsed into parody, and was supplanted by New Wave and then the Thatcherite excess of Eighties pop, whose protagonists fantasised about Monaco, not the Left Bank. McLaren, however, retained his fascination with the city. After the Pistols split, he remained in Paris, licking his wounds and preparing his comeback with the group Bow Wow Wow. In 1994, he released the album Paris, a poorly received love letter to the city. His interests here are clearly more traditional: song titles include “Walking With Satie” and “Père Lachaise”. A few weeks before his death in 2010, he completed a film entitled Paris: Capital of the XXIst Century, echoing his early, uncompleted film project tracing the history of Oxford Street.
McLaren never really succeeded in creating anarchy on the streets of London. Like the Situationists, his movement left behind fertile images and slogans for subsequent generations to appropriate, but the establishment carried on regardless. His attempts to recreate the events of Paris ‘68 had descended into farce, self-parody and the early death of a key player.
The Paris that McLaren dreamed of is disappearing fast: although it is still possible to trace the path that Vicious walked, many buildings have been demolished (including the Théâtre de l’Empire following a fire) and areas gentrified. Bullet scars from street fighting in 1944 have been illegally repaired. After the horrors of the Bataclan, the idea of shots being fired at a rock concert has lost the camp charm of Sid’s performance. Post-Brexit, the idea of combining French revolutionary dreams with British youth culture seems further away than ever.
London still awaits its Paris moment.
Paris Does Not Exist
Stewart Home
Tourism, human circulation considered as consumption is fundamentally nothing more than the leisure of going to see what has become banal.
— Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle
When I hear the word Paris, the 1981 song “Party in Paris” by the UK Subs starts running through my head. If I close my eyes, I can picture the promo video too: the oldest punk vocalist in town dressed in a black-and-white striped “
Gallic” T-shirt with fake cancan girls in frilly petticoats unimpressively kicking their legs to something approaching knee height around the band. Although I saw the Subs at least twenty times in the late Seventies, I’d stopped going to their gigs by the end of that decade, and it isn’t the classic line-up I once almost loved on that song. The tune is crass but catchy, and I guess it is intended to be ironic.
When I was into punk, in the Seventies, there didn’t seem to be much of a party in Paris, the global action for fans of super-dumb sleazebag thud was very much centred on London. The first time I visited Paris was in 1978. While there, I wanted to know if there was any of what us cognoscenti called EFM (extra fast music) I should check out from France. Stinky Toys didn’t count but the Dogs did — I was familiar with their tune “19” from the 1977 EP Charlie Was a Good Boy and that rocked. I also liked some of the tracks Little Bob Story had put out, even if they were more of a Sixties throwback. I found some punks in a Parisian record store and they told me Starshooter (from Lyon) were where it was at. When I heard the band’s 1977 debut single “Pin-Up Blonde” it grooved me, although this tune was totally eclipsed by their trashing of the Beatles’ “Get Back” — “Get Baque” — the following year. Later in 1978 I discovered Métal Urbain who were way ahead of the curve when it came to French rock and roll, and who still sound to me like the best band ever to come out of Paris.
My next trip to Paris three years later was no more memorable than the first. I was with a group of friends into art. We stayed in a cheap hotel in Pigalle and went to galleries — the funkiest groove I heard on that trip was some musique concrète at the Pompidou Centre. That’s what you get for hanging out with posh kids who don’t dig three-chord stomp! What I most remember from that visit is that every morning after I finished my paid-for breakfast, a waitress in her mid-thirties acted like I hadn’t had anything and gave me what I’d just consumed again. I appreciated this both coz croissants didn’t fill me up and no one else got double helpings. Although I was nineteen and the people I was with were the same age, I looked very young and the waitress may well have thought I was my friends’ eleven-year-old kid brother — she didn’t speak English. On my final night in Paris the waitress who’d buttered me up with two breakfasts every morning, ran out into the street as I was approaching the hotel, grabbed my hand and… you can imagine the rest.
The third time I went to Paris was in 1989. I travelled there with Ralph Rumney, a founding member of the Situationist International who for a time was married to Michèle Bernstein, Guy Debord’s ex-wife and the real powerhouse behind the SI. I was to interview Rumney for Art Monthly about the Situationist exhibition then on at the Pompidou Centre.1 When we met up, Rumney told me he almost hadn’t shown up since he felt rotten. At the ferry terminal, he said I should go through passport control on my own: he was a marked man and I’d have trouble going to France for the rest of my life if I went through with him. It did take him a remarkably long time to get past the immigration officers. Once we were in Paris, Rumney needed to stop at a bar every few hundred yards. If I’d drunk a tenth of what he downed I’d have been too blitzed to interview him, instead I was buzzing on a lot of black coffee.
Rumney took me to a load of galleries, and everywhere I was given catalogues. Before Bernstein, Ralph had been married to Pegeen Guggenheim, and their son Sandro Rumney is a well-known art dealer. We went to Sandro’s apartment and other people’s homes and I couldn’t believe the wealth I was seeing. I’d thought one of the girls I’d gone to Paris with in 1981 was super-posh coz she had a swimming pool in her back garden and a yacht in her driveway, alongside her dad’s flash cars. But Rumney’s connections took things to another level entirely. Previously when I’d seen pictures by members of the Surrealist and COBRA movements on people’s walls they’d been prints: on this trip to Paris, I got to see large original paintings used as decorations. Rumney asked me if there was anyone in Paris I really wanted to meet, and I said Gil J. Wolman. We called on Wolman, but unfortunately the artist was out; Rumney took me to see Jim Haynes instead.
Rumney was staying on in France to be with friends and family, so I went home alone. When I got to customs, two officials grinned at me. They asked what I did and I told them I was an art critic, which really made them laugh. Then they wanted to know if I understood that I wasn’t allowed to bring hardcore pornography into the UK and I assured them that I did: back then, it was still illegal. Next, they enquired about what I had in my bag and I said mostly art catalogues. I was asked to open my holdall and show them the “catalogues”. They obviously thought they’d caught me bang to rights smuggling hardcore porn because, somehow, they knew I was carrying lots of glossy publications. The look of disbelief on their faces when I pulled out one art publication after another was truly hilarious.
In 1996 I got invited to the French capital for the opening of the big “Brit Art” exhibition I was included in, Life/Live, at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Since I was broke, and expenses weren’t being paid, I didn’t go. Apparently, all the other artists in the show were careerist enough to attend — I can no longer even remember what I had in the exhibition. The arrival of the Eurostar train service around that time made travel between London and Paris much less hassle, but nonetheless there was a decade and a half hiatus between my third and fourth trips to the city. When I finally got round to visiting Paris by train in 2005, the ease of the journey made the place seem more like Manchester in the north of England than the City of Love it got hyped as being. I must have made a dozen trips to Paris by Eurostar between 2005 and 2014, and two of those excursions were particularly memorable. I even blogged about one of them on 11 November 2009:
Searching for someone called François Raymond on the outskirts of Paris is probably a little like looking for a specific John Smith in London. Who is François Raymond? The one I’m looking for exhibited a series of six photographs of my mother Julia Callan-Thompson as part of an exhibition entitled Exposition Tamrauc at the Maison des Jeunes et de la Culture (Paris) in October 1967. I have two prints of just one of these photographs, and rubber stamped on the back of one of them is an address: François Raymond, 37 Rue Gambetta, Puteaux (Seine). I’d like to acquire copies of all the photographs Raymond took of my mother, which is why I’ve been attempting to track him down…
Virtually every town in France seems to have a street named after the nineteenth-century French politician Léon Gambetta — so the fact that someone with a name as common as Raymond’s should have an address on one such street seemed psychogeographically apt to me. There is another Rue Gambetta in the neighbouring commune of Suresnes, which is a ten minute walk from the street of that name in Puteaux.
On my first visit to Puteaux I approached Rue Gambetta via La Défense, the Paris business district. Two thirds of this high-rise office development is situated within the Putueaux municipality, although parts also encroach upon Nanterre and Courbevoie. As a consequence, Puteaux is one of the richest municipalities, not just in France but the whole of Europe. Initially I was a little confused by the layout of La Défense, but I managed to walk out of it and along to Rue Gambetta without wasting too much time. Raymond’s street was a mix of old and new dwellings, with a monstrous vista of La Défense. The view towards Paris must have been very different in 1967 when Raymond took the pictures he exhibited of my mother.
37 Rue Gambetta turned out to be an apartment block. The outside had been refaced and the balconies replaced relatively recently, but close examination of the structure, the garages behind it, and in particular the doors, led me to the conclusion it had probably been built in the 1950s. It seems safe to conclude that Raymond had lived and/or worked in this building about forty years before my visit. I examined the buzzers to the flats, but none of these were labelled with the name Raymond. Next, I tried stopping people on the street outside the building, but no one knew of a François Raymond who had lived there.
I returned to Puteaux a couple of days later, approa
ching it on foot via the bridge over the Seine. This time I went first via Boulevard Richard Wallace (presumably the street is named after the illegitimate son of the Marquess of Hertford, a nineteenth-century “philanthropist” and art collector), to Rue Gambetta in Suresnes, since I wished to compare it with the Puteaux street of the same name.2 This second Rue Gambetta looked a little less well-heeled than the one in Puteaux, and was considerably less ambient. Both lie in municipalities that are densely populated by European standards. This second trip to Puteaux seemed to take me no further in my quest for François Raymond, and his lost pictures of my mother, than my previous one. However, rather than walking back to La Défense, I decided to take the suburban train there from Puteaux.
Approaching the train station I clocked a couple of pissheads who were weaving so erratically on the pavement that I decided to let them get a little ahead of me as we all approached the escalators up to the platform. The drunks looked like a working-class couple in their late sixties, and they were pretty hefty too. As they reached the escalator, the woman — who’d gone ahead — placed a foot not on the first or second steps which were closest to her and still flat, but the third step that was rising; having done this, she quickly brought her other foot up onto the escalator and placed it beside the right one. The man attempted to do the same thing and lost his balance, grabbing hold of the woman as he did so.
I ran forward, catching both the man and the woman. If I hadn’t the man would have certainly bashed his head on the metal stairs and this might have resulted in a nasty injury or even worse. The pair of them were heavy and behaved like a deadweight. I thought the woman would pull herself upright, and that the man would then do the same. When this didn’t happen another passerby took the woman’s hand to help her, but it seemed she was too drunk to stand up. I held this fat and heavy couple up until we reached the top of the escalator, where the woman rolled awkwardly off the stairs and the man managed to get himself upright. The first thing the man did was check that none of the multiple bottles of wine in the plastic bag he’d been carrying had been smashed, and amazingly they were all in one piece. I rescued one of the woman’s shoes which had come off, another passerby returned the other. I hoped that once the woman had her shoes on she would get up, but she was too dazed. By this time a small crowd were trying to help the couple, particularly the woman. Since neither of them were able to understand my English and odd words of French, I decided to leave them in the hands of the native speakers who’d come to their assistance after me.
We'll Never Have Paris Page 19
