widely considered the definitive history of punk music. In other words, the man knows his shit. So we picked up the phone and asked him to tell us about the real legacy of Malcolm McLaren, the records you need to put on your shelves (he's DJing tonight's opening until 9:00 p.m., in case you needed another reason to go), his take on the state of modern rock music ("one huge major suckathon"), and how art helped him kick speed.
What's the biggest misconception about punk?
Everything gets boiled down to a very simplistic idea, and actually punk was extremely complex. Just look at the New York bands that were called "punk" and who played at CBGB's and what a huge diversity there was there; now people tend to think it was just the Ramones. And the same goes for British punk. People in the U.S. think of it in terms of the Sex Pistols and people with Mohicans and stupid stuff like that. And there was a lot more going on.
Page 16 of London's Outrage # 2 fanzine, Jon Savage, February 1977, 11 3/4 x 8 1/2 in.
Is this exhibit an intervention into that received wisdom?
Well, I hope so. The magazine I did with Linder [
The Secret Public] came out of the Manchester punk scene, which was the most creative punk scene toward the end of '77. Punk in London had already ended that summer, in terms of it being creative and interesting, and it had become very quickly co-opted into the music industry. And the whole idea of punk in the early stages was that you could do whatever you wanted to do. If you wanted to play music, you could do it; if you wanted to do artwork, you could do it; if you wanted to go out on the street looking like a Christmas tree, you could do it.
The Secret Public came out of that, and out of my friendship with the Buzzcocks... who are in fact playing this week at Irving Plaza. The magazine came out on New Hormones, which was the Buzzcocks' record label. So it was all part of a friendship and an idea of possibility.
Buzzcocks/Magazine handbill, montage, Linder Sterling, 1978Before coming to Manchester you studied at Cambridge.
Absolutely. I studied classics.
So how were you first swept into punk?
Before I had my academic and professional training, I was a pop fan. I was brought up in West London and from the age of nine was completely obsessed with pop music. I'm a child of the '50s, and so my parents had intense expectations: They wanted me to be a lawyer, or an accountant. I was nine when the Beatles hit in the UK, and that was it for me, really.
I got bored with hippie music in 1971. And one of the key points was going to see the Grateful Dead in '72 in the UK. And they were so bad. I went, and I wanted to be beamed up, I wanted to be taken to the furthest reaches of the cosmos, and instead I got fucking country rock. It was awful. And bad versions of "Johnny B. Goode." It was so lame. And so I went back into hard rock; a big group then was the Flamin' Groovies, and their album Teenage Head. And I liked glam rock. In '75 we started to get the first reports of the New York scene, and the first Patti Smith album, and then the first Ramones album, and it was obvious something was happening.
Montage from SheShe, [issued with cassette], Linder Sterling, Birrer, 1981, 11 5/8 x 8 3/8 in.
You're best known as a writer, but this exhibit shows that you were an artist and photographer in your own right.
It's all about specialization, and people don't like you being able to move across fields. Writing's my core work. I'm a child of pop music: I grew up with those groovy magazines, with pictures and text, the music press in London in the '60s, and then Rolling Stone when it was great in the late '60s, which had great montages by Satty in every issue. So the idea that you combined visuals and words was very much on my mind. The simple A4 format of the fanzine was incredibly liberating, and it tied in with the onset of the Xerox machine. It all really worked. In the UK at the time you could buy the really early Beat books, and they had these great montage magazines, these great William Burroughs cut-up magazines, by people like Claude Pelieu and Norman O. Mustill.
This was a direct influence on The Secret Public, then?
Well, montage is a great form. Because it's a way of condensing a lot of information. And that's a lot of what punk was about. Punk was about acceleration, dealing with information overload. And this was thirty years ago; a lot of things that punk was dealing with have now of course happened. It's very strange for me, in my fifties, to be living in the future that was prophesized when I was a young man. And that's what's happened.
In The Secret Public there was a lot of sex stuff, which I'm very pleased about. Because Linder's stuff is just fantastic, all that kind of protofeminist sex stuff I just love. In my case it was all to do with being a gay man at a time when it wasn't so great to be gay, and also having this particular view of the prevailing idea of masculinity, which I still think is pretty poor and pretty thin... The conventional idea of masculinity—sports and beer—it's pretty sad, really. I mean, it doesn't mean you have to be gay to like more than that.
The Masculine Principle Has Gone Far Enough, montage, Jon Savage, 1977
For montage, your instrument of choice wasn't a brush or a camera. It was... a scalpel?
Yes. One of the times I was doing montage, I took speed, and I was listening to the Television album, Marquee Moon, and I had a scalpel, and I was so out of it on speed that I was rolling the scalpel between two of my fingers. That was the last time I ever did speed. That's my memory of the scalpel.
The scalpel got you off speed.
Thank you.
What did the name Secret Public allude to?
It's that very English idea that the Puritans brought to the U.S., of hiding everything in closets, sexuality in particular. And punk was a lot about wearing very sexually aggressive clothes—that was what McLaren and Westwood were promoting out of the Sex shop. The whole thing with punk was, We're gonna lift up the stone, and we're gonna show you all the beasts that are crawling around underneath. Because it's fucking time.
Those were your politics, at the time?
Yeah. It was like, Britain is fucked. It's involved in this ridiculous kind of nostalgia for the war, and for the '40s and '50s. It's all a fucking nightmare, and this is what it's really like... and let's move into the present and the future, please. Huge areas of London and Manchester were derelict at the time. And out of that dereliction you had a kind of freedom. If you were young and stupid, because you didn't know any better. You had this kind of playground. You didn't need money.
You were very much part of a culture of independently produced, D.I.Y. magazines. How do you feel about online publishing?
I struggle with it. Part of me is very old-school, in that I love the physical thing. It's like stocks and shares. There's something to me not quite real about it, because I can't touch it... My thing with the internet is very simple: It's much harder to make an impact on the internet. 'Cause there's so damn much of it. One of the reasons punk made such an impact was all to do with focus and scarcity. And I can't see that happening again. My whole point with those pictures I took in North London [featured in the exhibit], they were all of complete dereliction, and then suddenly the last two frames, you're underneath this motorway, and there's this graffiti that says The Clash. There seemed to be absolutely nothing in London at that point except two or three punk rock groups. And they were the only signs of life. Scarcity and focus: It's very difficult to see how you're going to get that back again.
You came out of punk, and wrote about it for several magazines throughout the late-'70s and '80s. And yet your first book was about the Kinks.
Well, it's a question of being a young writer and being offered a book. But I'd known and loved the Kinks since I was a kid. When I was 10 I saw them playing "You Really Got Me" on television and I couldn't believe people could look so fantastic, and be so girly, and make such a noise. And The Clash and Pistols sang songs by all those '60s mod-era pop groups, like the Who and the Kinks and the Small Faces.
What are your five essential pre-punk records—the ones that laid the groundwork for what was to come?
You'd have to have something from the U.K. mid-'60s, something garage-y. "I'm Not Like Everybody Else," by the Kinks; or "Substitute" by the Who.
Then you'd have to know about the whole Velvets/Stooges/MC5 axis. I've just been rediscovering "I'm Sick of You" by the Stooges, which is completely awesome and vile, and which is based on a riff by the Yardbirds, from "Happening Ten Years Time Ago."
Then you've got the whole Nuggets thing, '60s American garage. The intensity of it. The 13th Floor Elevators. "Psychotic Reaction," by the Count Five.
'66 you had all these records that were really nasty. "Seven and Seven Is" by Love, "Have You Seen Your Mother Baby?" by the Rolling Stones, they're all completely insane records, very kind of apocalyptic. And then at the end of the year you had "Good Vibrations" and the whole start of hippie culture, which was great in another way.
You'd have to have glam rock, and I'd go for "Dynamite" by Mud, which is killer. Check it on YouTube... There are a couple of Sex Pistols guitar riffs in there. [laughs]
Also the Sweet, "Ballroom Blitz" and "Teenage Rampage."
And then you have the weird, fringe pre-punk stuff from all those insane people in America making insane records, and the ultimate of that would have to be the Electric Eels' "Agitated."
Oh, and the first Pere Ubu single: "Heart of Darkness" and "Final Solution."
Both bands from Cleveland.
Cleveland! For Brits, Cleveland is real weird shit. I mean, New York is kind of understandable, and London's got a big thing about New York, a good thing. But yeah, Cleveland, "the mistake on the lake." What's that all about?
Is there anything going on today in music that's interesting you?
It's difficult. It's definitely an age thing. Most modern rock I just cannot listen to; I think it sucks. People like Arcade Fire... suck. What are all these men doing with these old-guys' beards, and they're in their late-twenties, and they've got these horrible brown beards that are a different color from their hairdos? What is that all about? It's retarded. It's boys trying to be men. One huge major suckathon, I'm sorry. It just doesn't rock. Rock music has got to have that primal urge in it. It's gotta make you want to drive your car 130 miles per hour, take class-A drugs, have bad sex, and just be irresponsible and vile.
Pop music has become a victim of its own success. When I was a kid it was definitely marginal, it was for the weirdos and the freaks and the mutants and the people who wanted to be different. And now it's just the same as everything else. So I tend to listen to a lot of electronic music. Because it sounds modern. You know, like it was made in 2010.
How would you summarize Malcolm McLaren's legacy?
Well, without Malcolm: None of us, in our present form. Terribly simple. We wouldn't have been doing all this. He just started everything in the U.K. He was the catalyst, he was the spark. End of story.
(Thanx Stan!)
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