Fred
Vermorel first met Malcolm McLaren in 1963 when they were students at Harrow
Art School. The two shared an interest in chaos, scandal and, later, Situationism:
ideas which steered the development of the Sex Pistols and punk.
CHANGING TIMES
One less common way to
see Malcolm is that, rather than leading a seductive insurrection he
effectively gave capital what it needed at the time: a capacity to include
other emotions within the palate of excitement that characterized the star-audience
exchange in rock. In that sense, even if it didn’t at first feel like it,
didn’t punk ultimately serve to emphasize the inescapability of commodity
culture?
Yes, I definitely think so. You know that book, The Conquest of Cool (1998) by Thomas
Frank? And there’s another very similar one: The Rebel Sell (2006) by Joseph Heath. They say it very elegantly, really, that
the new phase of capitalism is to exploit emotional resources: enactments of fanhood
or consumerism in itself; the Self configured as a market place. The
counterculture has been rumbled as a promotional bandwagon, and radical
subjectivity is the new gold mine.
It almost feels that because of ‘deep mediation’ or things like that we’re in an age of flattened affect, and therefore, seeing the Beatlemaniacs who whoever. I always think capitalism needs something outside of itself to authenticate itself.
It almost feels that because of ‘deep mediation’ or things like that we’re in an age of flattened affect, and therefore, seeing the Beatlemaniacs who whoever. I always think capitalism needs something outside of itself to authenticate itself.
Yeah.
But the trajectory, the wall
moves. Now we’re in a place where that 1960s fandom has become commodified as,
“Imagine yourself back here.”
A nostalgic set piece.
Yeah. I was taking to a
guy who runs a museum in Denmark called Ragnarock. As part of their advertising
it was, “Imagine yourself as a Beatles fan in the 1960s.” So those kinds of
things are going on. The thing I struggle with is, we might see Malcolm as the
manager of the Sex Pistols, but I think history might see him as the godfather
of the marriage between commerce and rebellion, moving it into a closer place.
I think that’s very likely. I agree with that.
So if punk was a kind of
ending – something that needed halting before expectations developed, clichés
formed, yobs became rock stars, and participants aged – was its biggest problem
that nobody considered what would come after?
I don’t think it was a problem. I think it was just the
excitement of the moment. Nobody thought, or thought to think what would come
next. Nobody cared, really, did they? It was just about seeing what could
materialize. And again, it depends where you were on the spectrum, and what you
were doing, because I’m sure there were plenty of punk fans out there who felt
disillusioned – living in small towns or whatever – with no outlet, or nothing
to come after all that promise.
So there was no
afterwards for them anyway.
Exactly.
I’ve seen one or two
interviews with people like that.
Yeah.
Jordan Mooney recently
said, “I think that punk is an attitude and if punk teaches us anything, it’s
not to point the finger at anybody, and it’s to include people, and it’s to
include the sexes as equals, and it’s to make people feel that those who are
feeling like they’re outsiders feel comfortable.” I’m quite surprised, and – ironically – feel a bit uncomfortable that she would frame an anti-humanist
movement as a humanist one. Do you agree with her notion that punk was really
about inclusivity? Was it basically an inclusivist movement?
Well, what struck me when you were talking was, “How PC is
that?” It seems to me that she is reinventing the past to suit her own agenda
now. In the same way that Jamie, I think, rather tragically, has become a kind
of druid. Now everything is couched in this magical, mystical kind of stuff,
and you think, “Oh come off it.”
That’s not very punk, becoming a druid!
Yeah – exactly.
The late 1980s saw you
think up a number of ideas summarizing what you had seen, which included
‘consensus terrorism’ and ‘planet pop.’ To what extent would you say those
ideas are still relevant?
That was Frank Owen, his idea. Do you know him? I met him at
the Royal College of Art. He was doing his PhD and then went to America. He’s
written some really interesting stuff about club culture in America, K culture,
for example. It was his idea. He interviewed us, and he actually contributed to
some of that stuff as well. So it was a joint thing.
‘Consensus terrorism,’ very much I think, is still viable,
isn’t it? One thing we didn’t mention there was the way that the internet
stalks us.
That’s interesting. Go
on.
I’m partly saying it in that way because there’s an idea I’ve
been developing, and I’ve just recently come across a book: Stalker, Hacker, Voyeur, Spy (2017) by
Helen Gediman. I don’t think the book is without its problems, but the
potential premise is really good. It looks at stalking and the development of erotomania,
and its spread through culture, and the way that it’s been co-opted by engines
of communication like the media. Every time you go on to Amazon, they’re anticipating
and ambushing and pursuing you and telling you that they know what you’re
thinking. They know where you’ve been before. I think that’s quite potent. Gediman
is a psychoanalyst, and she’s is a little bit wooden in the way she writes. But
the links she makes are really interesting. She talks about Edward Snowden, as
well, as part of that. ‘Consensus terrorism’ does fit into that, I think,
because that fits into a consensus: we’ve allowed that to happen.
The internet as big brother
is spooky, it’s scary. I also think there’s a ‘politics of the partial picture,’
that pop is used in certain ways to give emotion to certain ideas or positions
that are useful to the establishment. Yeah, wow: the internet stalks us! I’m
intrigued by that.
It’s an intriguing idea.
I was reading quite a
lot recently, thinking about my frustration with the idea of participatory
culture, suggesting we’re all in a gleeful world, just sharing things. In a
sense, Henry Jenkins has been a salesman in some of what he’s done.
Yes.
Thinking about it, for
me, there are those bad sides to the internet, but at the same time the net is
just a transparent format for American business. The big corporations are
American and that’s the way they create a transparency of economic imperialism:
“We own the theme park” – even if we’re all playing in it in different ways. Does
it disappoint you that in the neoliberal era – a time when there seems no
‘outside’ from which to rebel – that McLaren’s ideas have been the foundation
for art and culture that takes commerce as a given: a means, its ends, its
focus? I’m thinking here, for instance, of Damien Hirst and his ilk.
Yeah, well, it’s not a problem. It’s personally
disappointing to me. I take it as something that happened, but definitely, they
did take his agenda on and use it as a marketing strategy, in a much more
coherent way than he did. They became much richer and more famous than him.
Also, there is a distinction to be made between punk, pre-punk and post-punk
Malcolm. Post-punk he became a bit like a grandee, prone to being wheeled out to
pronounce in a weirdly camp way about things that were retrospectively
reconstructed, things that I didn’t recognize from the time. At the time I
found it much more chaotic and exciting, what was going on, in comparison to
his anodyne version of it, post-. I also thought his post-punk work was awful. The
music was drab, and all that art. Who cares?
That’s worth talking
about for a minute. I know that when he went to New York to ‘discover’ Afrika
Bambaataa, he was wearing a pirate’s suit.
Was he?
I heard on another
interview, he was comparing himself to Picasso, using African masks. I think
there was something a little bit racially suspect about what Malcolm was doing
in those times, perhaps.
Well, there was. He went to Soweto and hung out there.
He basically ripped off hip-hop, didn’t he? But he did in such a crass way.
He basically ripped off hip-hop, didn’t he? But he did in such a crass way.
In a weird way, what he
was doing there was another kind of logical conclusion of music history: that Elvis
borrows from black culture and there’s Malcolm, rolling it out so much further.
Yeah, but at least Elvis could sing, and was good looking as
well. None of that applied to Malcolm.
And Elvis blended
different influences. Do you know anything about Jenkins’ work on participatory
culture?
I know a bit about it. I’ve obviously followed it and what
he writes about the early fanzines and about fanfic.
Sometimes he uses punk
fanzines as an example of pre-Internet participatory culture.
Well, fanzines go back to the 1930s.
Science fiction.
Exactly – science fiction fanzines.
Should remixing culture
and sharing it on social media – if it is done in a sloganeering or
‘disrespectful’ way – be construed as a punk activity? I’m a little bit
suspicious of some of the claims.
Yes, so am I. Jenkins is a bit “Californian,” isn’t he? The approach is a bit too optimistic. For me, it's too jolly and scout masterly. The culture around that kind of work reminds me of a poster Jamie
Reid did just post-Pistols for The Dead Kennedys: a giant swastika made of cannabis leaves
hovering over a picture of Woodstock with the legend, “California uber alles.” Though I respect what he’s doing. It has a
very different emphasis to what I did… but it’s a little bit over-optimistic,
perhaps, with a cautious eye to grant-funding protocol.
Sometimes I feel it’s
like a kind of utopian way to sell the net.
Yeah.
I suppose what it does
fetishizes the form or the process above the content: everything’s wonderful
because –
Yes, it does, which brings us on to Harry Potter fans. One
thing about the stuff in Starlust: to
me, a lot of it was crass, but a lot of it was deeply interesting, I thought. Good
literature, good writing. Whereas a lot of Harry Potter fan stuff is just not
good writing. Like the actual books, which I think are rubbish. I just can’t
follow that stuff. I can’t get excited by it, which is a problem because my
students love it. But to me all that fantasy fiction genre or Game of Thrones
or even Starwars is not just tedious, it’s also sinister, evoking what Umberto
Eco called 'Ur-fascism.'
We’re of a different age
and market place. Some of it seems to lack creativity, perhaps, but I don’t
know: I’ve not paid enough attention. If I told my students I’d never seen a
Harry Potter film, they’d probably lynch me.
I haven’t either.
You saw the industry as
tempting fans to be creatively perverse, and yet simultaneously attempting to
limit or rebuff what it prompted. Would I be right in thinking that is the main
difference between your views and the fan studies vogue for ‘transformative
works’ perspectives?
I wouldn’t put it quite as boldly as that, but to some
extent, I think you’re probably right. There is a difference there, but it’s
something I’d have to think about, and try and think of examples, rather than
just giving you an answer.
That’s fine. In effect
what the Pistols became was a struggle over creative labour, with Malcolm,
Johnny Rotten, and perhaps Vivienne and even yourself claiming some credit for
their legendary success – isn’t capitalist culture more a case of chaos from
cash than cash from chaos?
Yeah, but it’s about the symbiosis, the way they both link.
You get cash from chaos and chaos from cash. I see where you’re coming from:
the chaos can be quite disturbing and disruptive, and anti-social. With punk
there were victims. Sid was one of them.
Casualties.
People who were left by the wayside and just abandoned. I
remember there was a girl working in SEX called Debbie who became a prostitute in
Shepherd’s Market. The attitude was, “It’s her choice.” But it wasn’t. She wasn’t
happy doing that. It wasn’t what she wanted. There were other people like that
who did not prosper.
In a sense they were victims
of the romance of the ideas?
Yeah – victims of the momentum that Vivienne and Malcolm
were pushing, that process they were pushing forward.
Part of the problem is
that creative destruction is now an aspect of capitalism. Isn’t neoliberalism
basically nihilism in service of
capital, with postmodernism its cultural wing? Isn’t it as if all the people
Malcolm hated – not least Tony Blair – took things further than him, because
the ideas allowed them to take cash from chaos to a greater extent than he did?
Yeah – but I was just thinking, you’d probably need a whole
book to answer that question. It’s very complex. Even the idea of creative destruction – Malcolm used to proclaim,
“you have to destroy in order to create,” is an idea which in its most
interesting form comes from Schumpeter, who forecast that capitalism will
destroy itself by being too successful,
by over-performing, rather than through immiseration and economic failure. I touched on that in relation to punk in Fashion and Perversity.
The question I was
getting at is: once that cat’s out of the bad, is it possible to tell good
chaos from bad chaos?
As Trump shows you, no. Again: is Donald Trump a Sex Pistol?
Do you think that Trump
is a Sex Pistol?
There are some elements, yeah. I think Malcolm would be
amazed by Trump, but also deeply tickled. He’d probably be on his staff.
He’s probably be looking
for a job as an advisor, wouldn’t he? Who, to you, today, lives up to the
promise and possibilities of punk? Is it now an impossible ideal? That’s
idealizing it, but are there any people you think, “Yeah – they’re in the punk
mould”? We talked about Trump there, but anybody else?
I do think it does continue in terms of its resonance in
popular culture, and film and music, but it’s kind of dispersed, isn’t it? The Spice
Girls were punks, because they had a radical agenda and it was playground
feminism. They were put together in a way that Malcolm would have just deeply
loved: if he could have handled those boys the way Simon Fuller handled those
girls, it would have been his dream come true. Then again, the template was set
by the Pistols, and that was followed, by the Spice Girls, and to some extent
Blair. You’re right, but I have no way of giving you a satisfactory answer on
that. One thing I think now is that I almost can’t be bothered when I teach about
punk, because I feel we live in a post-punk world. A lot of these kids –
they’re mostly Americans that I teach. They grew up without any notion of these
people, because they are so old now, so you need to reframe the discussion in
ways that they do understand: in terms of Trump, in terms of –
What about somebody like
Julian Assange?
Are you asking if he’s a punk?
I suppose the agenda is punk, isn’t it? The recklessness.
I suppose the agenda is punk, isn’t it? The recklessness.
In some senses he’s
creating a situation that is unprecedented.
Yeah, and also the irresponsibility of doing that – not that
I think it’s a bad thing, but it’s definitely irresponsible in a normal sense – consciously so.
A sort of liberating
irresponsibility?
Yeah.
What advice would you
give to young scholars and thinkers who have grown up in an era, it feels, that
does not admit the possibilities of artistic and political liberation that
characterized the 1960s?
I don’t know how to answer that, because the 1960s have
never gone away, have they? They just keep coming back. They keep being
recycled: all those attitudes.
The hope of the sixties
seems to have gone. Would that be fair?
I’m not so sure: hope? I’m just thinking of the students I
teach now and how naïve they are, really. That’s about hope as well, isn’t it? They
do believe in social media. They do believe in this stuff. They even don’t
understand, until I tell them, that talent shows are fixed. When you tell them
about audience warm-ups, and cue cards and rehearsals, etc, and ask them to
think it through, then they understand. I sometimes think I am destroying their
lives because I’m making them cynical.
You’re taking away their
innocence?
Because in the sixties, we were quite cynical. We understood
those things quite well. You teach students, too, so you must come across the
same complexities and problems.
I guess one of the
things they learn is that politics seems to be a screwed up place. There are
received narratives. They can have a certain naïvety, but I think everybody at
that age probably does.
Especially if they’re Americans; it’s a cliché, but as well as knowing little
history, many are bereft of irony. Which is surprising, because if you compare
British and American irony in general – for example, in fiction writing – Americans
are way ahead, much richer and more daring. Britain is a backwater populated by
the likes of Martin Amis and Will Self. Whereas
the Americans have Norman Mailer, and Hunter S. Thompson, and the amazing William Gass, and so on. In a different league
altogether. As is their TV satire.
I guess then it’s: what
are they placing their hope in? I was at the ICA yesterday, looking at the book
shelves, and there’s books on post-anarchism. A lot of the titles seem to be
pessimistic. Perhaps we live in negative times. You have an interest in the
creative sociological environment that gives rise to celebrities (Pistols,
Westwood, Kate Moss). In popular music studies, that has been theorized – quite
naïvely in some ways – under the idea of the ‘scene.’
The scene?
Yes. What have you found
from studying the history of cultural intermediaries in situ, and how would you
advise researchers to start analyzing such groupings?
I don’t know, really. One of the reasons I liked the Chicago
School was that the guy who founded it decided that his
students should tackle subjects that he decided to tell them to do. I think if
I ran a department now, that’s what I would do. I wouldn’t just let them drift
off and do something they thought they were interested in. I’d interrogate
them, ask them where they’re coming from, see what their social and cultural
background is, and insert them into that, to some extent. Or at least adapt and
marry a project to their backgrounds and also their fantasies.
That’s how I guide students. Especially at masters’
level. When I was running my MA Media at
Solent University, I would ask them what they wanted to study and then
sometimes point them in a different direction. Research is a long and difficult process and it’s important to choose a
topic you are really into – not something you think will please your tutor – or
your mother; and I always emphasized the complexities of doing research – first
hand research.
Encouraging them to
develop a critical awareness as participants, perhaps?
Partly, as participants, but also the other thing I’d prioritize
is to do what he said to do: go and get the seats of your pants dirty. Don’t do
what he dismissed as “library research.” Go out and talk to people. Go out and find
people in the streets and in their homes, and so forth.
I think a lot of people in
fan studies only go as far as the internet.
Yes, exactly.
That’s the limit point.
You’ve got to further than that and find people in their habitats,
and get messy. That can be dangerous, because you’re intervening in other
people’s lives. Sometimes it’s difficult for you as well.
And it creates complex
cross-currents of debt and ethical issues.
Exactly, and it makes it much more difficult to write up, as
well, because you’ve involved in all the ambiguities and associations that are
required, even to interview somebody. If they’re not used to being interviewed,
it’s a challenge for them as well as you.
Sometimes when people
are asked to speak about things that they do automatically it’s hard for them
to articulate.
Exactly. The most difficult people to interview, I find, are
the people who like to think of themselves as educated: middle class people,
people with university degrees. Because they often think that they who know
where you’re coming from, and they’re always one jump ahead. So if I ask them,
“Well, where is your record collection?” They’ll think, “Why does he want to
know that? I know why. It’s because of this or that....” And then they censor
or massage or rationalize or justify the response. But I just want to know
whether you keep it under your bed, or in your cupboard, or what’s the size of
it, how is it organized, do you spread it out to savour it, do you daydream as
you are arranging it, if so, what are the daydreams... ?
That makes a lot of sense.
Entering into that complexity is where the interesting things lie. From my own
experience, I’ve also found that sometimes an interview can be a bit of a
trade-off, insofar that often an interviewee has an agenda before you get
there.
That’s exactly what I mean. In fact, another problem is the “script” that interviewees will often
have prepared for you, anticipating what you want to discover. It’s useless trying to bypass that script, or
to interrupt it. You need to let an
interviewee unburden themselves of the script – which usually runs 10-20
minutes. When it’s over, that’s when you
start the interview. So a Manilow fan say, wanting to make sense of the
encounter, will have a script about how fantastic an artist Barry is and how
sexy, etc. When all that has been said you start to ask your questions.
It’s a case of accepting
that and embracing it, and also using that to find out what you want.
Because when you talk to people who are ‘naïve’ about that,
they have sometimes never put into words what they’re about to tell you. That’s
something Parker told us: just be aware of that, and just let them speak, but
understand that it can be very difficult for them. And just little things like:
don’t jump in when there’s a silence, because it doesn’t mean they’ve got
nothing to say. They might be thinking, “Do I want to tell this strange looking
guy this stuff.”
I can see that Dead Fashion Girl might be a different
canvas for you to explore some of the issues we’ve been discussing here. Can
you say any more about its genesis, themes and concerns?
Well, the story is about Jean Townsend who, in 1954, was murdered.
She was a young fashion designer who worked for Berman’s theatrical costumier
near Leicester Square. It’s never been solved. She was strangled and stripped
of her underclothing, but not sexually molested. That happened on wasteland in South Ruislip. I was brought up in that
area. I was eight when it happened. I remember being told in the playground
that this girl had been murdered and I was always curious about it. Then, as an
adult, I used some money that I’d got when I was at Southampton for research to
try and look into it, but didn’t get anywhere. That was just before the
Internet happened. After the Internet I was able to locate witnesses and
records that gave me a lot more insight and leads. I just wondered whether I
could use my research prowess to outwit Scotland Yard and find out who’d done
it. I
was helped by ex-coppers I interviewed and one conclusion is that the
likely culprit was killed in custody and it was all hushed up.
During the process of researching this, I tried to make a
reflexive process of it, and get immersed in Jean Townsend’s cultural milieu
and map that against what I could remember as a child. So I tried to build up a picture of Jean
Townsend’s Soho lifestyle, the way she was embedded in gay culture in London.
That was quite interesting as well, because I didn’t know anything about that. I
also used this investigation as a thread to reassess the 1950s through the eyes
of the people I was talking to – a way to avoid the usual clichés and anecdotes
about the ’50s – the Colony Club, immigration, the Coronation, Suez, blah blah.
I discovered some fascinating and “unknown” people and biographies. It was a
weird thing to do because it was almost like ambulance chasing. They were very
old, those people, when I interviewed them. A lot of them have died since.
There’s something
slightly ghostly about it all.
There’s something macabre about it, yeah.
An absence in the middle
of it –
Her.
Which kind of connects
with your concerns in celebrity biography.
Yeah, I suppose so. It’s a different kind of project because
it’s trying to solve a crime, but the methodology is similar, I guess. I
thought it would be a good idea to be, not self-indulgent, but self-reflexive
in a sense, because I was candid about the problems and uncertainties that
arose. So I put in the book the different theories about what happened and the various
blind alleys that I went up.
Was the case notorious
in public before you investigated?
Yeah, you can still find accounts of it on the internet as
an unsolved murder.
It reminds me of the
Jack The Ripper story, insofar that the Jack The Ripper story is an alibi for a
lot of commodities: a continuous place of commodification. Once they found the
DNA that supposedly proved who it was, I was thinking, “That’s not going to end
the story. It’s going to be the starting point to a new story.” People will
find, that was only the accomplice, or whatever.
Yeah, I don’t know what the outcome to this will be, because
I’ve never done anything like this before. So we’ll have to wait and see what
the response is.
That’s it – thanks very
much for the interview.