SEX was a social experiment as much as a clothes shop, a place of metamorphosis that both challenged and transformed many who entered. When he began selling clothes with his partner Vivienne Westwood at 430 Kings Road in 1971, the former art student activist Malcolm McLaren was disillusioned by the failure of his generation to bring about “some genuine, wacky changes”.
For McLaren, the shop became a recruiting centre for “a group of individuals from the next generation who wanted to find an identity for themselves”. With its taboo-smashing designs, SEX attracted young customers who were delinquent, disillusioned, malcontent or just plain curious. By August 1975, it had given its name to a group of teenagers who would change the face of rock history — the Sex Pistols.
The man who became the Sex Pistols bassist and main songwriter, Glen Matlock, began working for McLaren as a sales assistant when the shop catered for a Teddy Boy clientele. “But Malcolm and Vivienne wanted to get rid of the Teds because there was a lot of reactionary meatheads among them,” he recalls. “Malcolm definitely wanted to set the cat among the pigeons. I helped to make the SEX sign but I found a lot of the new gear pretty sexless,” Matlock admits, displaying the candour that would get him usurped in the Sex Pistols revolt and replaced by Sid Vicious.
Inside the shop S&M accoutrements and spray-painted situationist slogans were added to the foam padded walls. On the clothing racks, the old Fifties drape coats and brothel creepers vied for space with ripped jackets and trousers festooned with buckles, zips and bondage straps. T-shirts displaying outrageous images — swastikas and crucifixes, homosexual cowboys, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs engaged in an orgy — were introduced.
If McLaren was out to replace “reactionary meat-heads” with oddballs, misfits and the plain disturbed, the plan worked. In a matter of months, a hunched and short-sighted 18-year-old from North London called John Lydon arrived at the shop. One night he mimed to Alice Cooper’s Eighteen as it played on the shop’s gaudy jukebox. He passed the audition and the Sex Pistols’ search for a singer was over: Johnny Rotten was born. “The idea was we were the Pistols from the SEX shop,” recalls Matlock. “In the Kings Road we were near to Granny Takes a Trip and Anthony Price’s shop. You would see the Faces and Bryan Ferry going there to get their clothes. Malcolm told us they were a bunch of w*****s and we agreed with him. Even though they were all loaded and we didn’t have a pot to p*** in it was a good attitude to have.”
McLaren had previously tried to form a band with another of his shop assistants, Chrissie Hynde, then newly arrived in London from Cleveland, Ohio. Hynde’s prosaically named outfit Masters of the Backside may have floundered before regrouping as the Damned, but her employer’s style left a big impression on Hynde.
“I’d never seen anything like it, I was like Alice in Wonderland in their shop, although I know they weren’t very happy with me because I just dressed the way I still dress. But I did try some of their stuff, the T-shirt with Jane Solanas Scum manifesto and a rubber mini-skirt. When I went back to Cleveland to form a band I wore it when we played in a little basement club. I gotta tell ya, Cleveland had never seen anything like it,” Hynde remembers.
In truth, neither had anywhere else. As a 15-year-old in Northern Ireland in 1976 I was primed for the next musical revolution. From all the advance information available the Sex Pistols were it — no question. But for months all we saw were pictures of the band and their followers looking like strange invaders from another planet.
Wearing punk clothes held risks, especially in those dark days when stencilled slogans, chains and safety pins weren’t common fashion accessories. It was a lesson that I was still learning several months later when, kitted out in a homemade Anarchy T-shirt, customised with an upside down Union Jack, I asked the DJ at the local disco to play my copy of God Save the Queen. The pogoing had barely commenced before the boot boys waded in.
One question, though, remains. Were punk and the Pistols more significant as a SEX-inspired fashion movement or as a musical revolution? Marco Pirroni gives credence to both schools of thought. A former guitarist with Siouxsie and the Banshees and Adam and the Ants, Pirroni first visited 430 Kings Road in 1973 and later became a SEX regular. The album that he has just compiled from favourites from the shop’s fabled jukebox shows that the records provided a musical seedbed to match the shop’s stylistic innovations. Alongside Alice Cooper’s aforementioned Eighteen there is a treasury of unhinged psycho pop (The Count Five’s Psychotic Reaction), oddball country feminism (Loretta Lynn’s The Pill) and hysterical emotionalism (Jackie and the Starlights’ Valerie). Matlock confirms that the latter and songs such as the Small Faces’ Wham Bam, Thank You Man (the starting point for Pretty Vacant) had a direct influence on the Sex Pistols’ songs.
But for Pirroni the clothes were just as important. “People say the clothes don’t matter, that it would have happened without them. It wouldn’t. If the Pistols had looked and dressed like Bad Company then nobody would have taken any notice of them.”
SEX became a magnet for many people from around the country who wanted to get noticed and make a splash locally. Future stars such as Siouxsie Sioux from Bromley and Holly Johnson from Liverpool came to London to buy (and often steal) the gear. When they went back home, others were encouraged to follow their lead or make DIY imitations. But the welcome that awaited these SEX pilgrims was not necessarily warm and friendly. Westwood refused to serve customers whom she regarded as inappropriate, and simply banned them from the shop. Many people found the staff aloof, snide, bitchy and unhelpful. The prices were exorbitant, while the clothes themselves seemed tailored solely to fit only skinny, amphetamine-wasted frames.
Hynde, who balks at the lack of spirituality in the punk movement, retains her admiration for what McLaren and Westwood achieved. Another SEX shop customer, the DJ and film-maker Don Letts, almost suffocated trying to remove one of Westwood’s super-tight rubber T-shirts. Although he was banished from the SEX inner circle when he opened the nearby rival shop Acme Attractions, Letts maintains that Malcolm and Vivienne gave him and many others like him a vital alternative education.
“They were an encyclopaedia of subculture. As a 15-year-old kid from Brixton this was fascinating crash course in all sorts of s*** that I’d never heard of before, like the Situationists. They made the clothes and they had to find people to fit the clothes and their ideology. It was all about asking questions, for people that knew there was something more than what the status quo was offering, the intellectually and artistically curious,” says Letts.
Today, 430 Kings Road is the World’s End, home to Westwood’s regency and royalty-inspired haute couture. The Pistols have just undertaken their latest reunion tour in America, while SEX shop originals such as the Vive le Rock T-shirt — complete with chicken bones and pieces of old car tyres — fetch upwards of £2,000 on eBay.
The Sex Pistols’ music and the punk fashion that SEX pioneered are nowadays embedded so deep in mainstream culture as to be unrecognisable. No doubt the next tailor-made musical and fashion movement is waiting in the wings. But the times have changed — anybody expecting a repeat of the SEX effect is liable to be sorely disappointed.
Marco Pirroni’s SEX: Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die is out now on Only Lovers Left Alive records
