So we were in the Troy Club when we heard news that Malcolm McLaren had passed onto the great gig in the sky. The Troy was perhaps the best place to hear the news, a drinking den degree zero; a room above a bunch of Spanish restaurants at the Soho/Fitzrovia border.
Before the early 2000s, when the pubs closed by law at 11pm, the Troy was one of the places you went after the chuck-out, if you couldn’t sleaze your way in to a member’s club. The bouncer asked if you were a member, you said yes in an assured fashion, and up you went.
Occasionally you had to sign in, the price of membership being the cost of the first pint. The place was run by someone who had been part of the Colony Club crowd, the Francis Bacon, etc set. Bacon did not make an appearance here. The Troy was a gully trap of human failure, and all the better for it.
When the archaic drinking laws finally changed, everyone presumed clubs like the Troy — one large room, packed like a single human mass, a rudimentary bar at one end, a jukebox plugged through a PA — would collapse once the brave new world of open-ended drinking came in.
But since the British drinking habit is now set in stone — throw down pints, adjourn to street for fight/snog/kebab/all of these — none of the pubs bothered to open late anyway, and the Troy and others survived.
The news that the impresario of punk had passed on, just as the country was offered its first Gen X Prime Minister, made things weird, but it had got weird already. My fondest memory of the Troy was of drinking there once, a decade ago, with Sean Dooley, birdwatcher and author extraordinaire, who had been borne down on by an Irish air hostess, carrying two pints.
“Would you like a drink,” she said.
“Yeah? Hold mine, I’ll just get some in.”
“When he returned three days later,” I was telling people at the bar, “he had the vague look of PTSD about him.”
“There was no furniture,” he said. “Just cartons of cigarettes. Cartons and cartoons.”
Then the weird thing happened.
“Oh god, did you say Sean Dooley?” said a woman in a crowd next to us.
“The birdwatcher? I read his book. It was incredible. He was kinda like this nature boy…”
She tossed her hair.
“Yes, he’s married now, with a child. Most happy…”
“Wow … it’s a funny old…”
“Quite…”
She turned back to her crowd, and we kept talking about Malcolm McLaren.
The situationist, art student, impresario and cultural wossname had died of cancer in New York at the age of 64. Punk was a lot of things but it was partly his creation, out of a scratch band who used to hang round his Chelsea shop — s-x, seditionaries, it changed its name — and who without him would have been another pub rock band (which at their best is what the Pistols were).
The fact that McLaren’s partner Vivienne Westwood was the dead-spit of Thatcher was a dead giveaway — Brit-punk unlike US punk or, you know, the Red Brigades was defeat aestheticised, a way of celebrating one’s powerlessness by a withdrawal of desire, of hope. Johnny Rotten’s closing remarks at their last concert — “ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?” — was the prelude to a Tory era in which cynicism, price of everything value of nothing, was elevated to a standard by which to live your life.
By the 90s, the whole culture was punk. Thatcher had imagined that unleashing the forces of capitalism, individuality, etc would allow Victorian values to bubble up from their long suppression under collectivism. What came instead was a hyper-individualism, a celebration of the grotesque, the envious, the violent that the Pistols had put on stage. Weirdly it was the acid house and rave movement that came along in its wake, with its luvved up weekend ethos that restored a measure of humanity to society.
Punk had been the agonised enactment of revolutionary failure. Thatcherism entrenched it as policy. New Labour’s policy has been to entrench the “energy” of Thatcherism — it is actually the opposite of energy, it is competition driven by fear — and regulate it with social and psychological control. Even Labour’s good stuff — such as its early education Sure Start centres — is filled with this guff, oriented to developing the child not as a whole person, but as a series of programmable scripts, of behavioural processes and motifs.
History will judge all that as a great error, but at the moment there is no doubt both parties think that Thatcherism was a social disaster — the Tories are running on a “big society” programme, a calculated snub to Maggie’s famous Hayekian statement that there was “no such thing as society. There are individuals and there are families”.
Thus while Labour continues to keep being slammed around by business leaders denouncing an increase in the national insurance levy, the Tories are burbling on about a national civil service corps (launched by Michael Caine who did not say “lads I got an idea”), basically a rip-off of the Swedish social democratic idea, and quoting of all people Saul Alinsky, the old community activist, who inspired both Hillary Clinton and Obama.
Whatever it is, it is unpunk, and at this point even I am feeling nostalgic for Maggie T, Alan Clark and all the other burn-the-floor Tories. Politics and culture in the punk era was coming from the Id — wild, inchoate, passionate. Now it’s all a mopping-up operation by the super-ego, the slow strangulation of desire by control.
That was even a reason to mourn the opening up of drinking and the slow shrinking of the dozens of illegal dive bars in the 90s and before. Now, it’s all out in the open, and it is only a matter of time before the toilets in the Troy display a poster warning of the dangers of binge drinking — a phrase now used for what the British called “drinking”.
McLaren was by all accounts an a-sehole, but he released something — cross class cross cultures — that would have otherwise stayed in its place. So did Thatcher for better or worse or both. There’s no sign of it this time round, which is why we’re still in the Troy, mourning old horrors and remembering when.
God save us, I feel a book coming on – Rundle’s UK? Stand by bookshops – you’ll need to order more, er, remainder bins
I love your missives Guy, and this one had it’s moment, but seriously, the analysis of punk and McLaren is way off base. Westwood looked like Thatcher therefore punk was Thatcherite?
I agree that punk was, in the British case, or rather in the case of the Sex Pistols at least, “the agonised enactment of revolutionary failure.” But the neoliberalism of Thatcherism was not the entrenchment of that failure. Thatcher’s neoliberalism was a revolution that succeeded. McLaren’s, and others in the Brit punk movement’s, adoption of situationist techniques provided ways of making everyday life significant as a venue for negations. Yes, this was a Fordist mode in a time when the Fordist-welfare-state -Keynesian period was shutting down. But to equate McLaren’s punk with Thatcherism misses how Thatcher’s way out of Fordism was not to deny and refuse it in the hope that something new might emerge. Her’s was to take the jettisoned human waste of Fordism and make a new kind of subject that needed to pull itself up by its bootstraps or get kicked down. Her’s was a brittle glamour that claimed the chauvinism of British imperial tradition. Punk’s was to maintain the idea that we’re all of us in the gutter, some of us are looking at the stars.
“Fordist-welfare-state -Keynesian period” .. oh, may I use that for a psuedonym?
Baal – don’t rush the bloke, there is the USA tome to consider.
Sorry, “Fitzrovia” is pure estate agent jargon aka utter fucking bullshit. No one describes that particular netherland as such unless they have property to sell.
Pistols a pub band? Like so many others then. You’d be one of those sad old Aussie suckers who’d claim the Saints were the first true punks or some such other garbage. Yep, really and quite honestly when the good old descriptors were being handed down back in the 70s Joh-Bjelke’s QLD dogtrot did not matter a jot. Sorry old chap.
Guy, punk was once memorably described as “a thousand no’s that produced one resounding yes”. You’ve only looked at the nihilistic side of it. As an ageing punk myself, it was a reaction to the failure of the 60s counter-culture and the economic failures of the 70s. Another reaction was disco – escapism. Punk was about shoving reality in your face, saying ok it’s a piece of shit, societal change is out, so what do we do? What can YOU do? You could argue that the answer was creating something like temporary autonomous zones.
The result was a breaking down of barriers, audiences forming bands, fanzines, independent record labels, a whole flowering of independent culture with a “do it yourself” ethic. It was about individual and group empowerment outside dominant power structures.
Thatcherism wasn’t punk – it was part of yet another reaction to the ’70s ennui, a nostalgia for big money, privilege and glamour (think TV series of the time like Dynasty, Dallas, Howard’s End and, with Catholic pretentions, Brideshead Revisited) that allowed Thatcher to implement a Tory wet dream with reactionary savagery on the basis of making this a reality. (Of course, the same then happened in the US).
The only connection I can see between Thatcherism and punk is that punk may have contributed to the feeling among swinging British voters that the country was heading into anarchy and hence perversely helped her get in. This would parallel France where the May 1968 uprising was followed by record vote for de Gaul, but you wouldn’t claim from that that Debord, Con Bendit et al were Gaullists!