The shop assistants of the King’s Road never seemed all that pleased to see me. They must have had some kind of unreasonable prejudice against people who were only coming into their retail outlets to nick stuff. As a result, when I went in Granny’s or Alkasura or any of those classier gaffs, I never really felt like I had the right to be there. There was one place, however, where reprobates like me seemed assured of a slightly warmer welcome.
The first time I went into Let It Rock must have been late 1971 or early 1972. There’d been another slightly cool shop there before, but I think the owner fucked off to America, leaving Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood with a foothold in 430 King’s Road. By the time he got back they’d taken the whole thing over, like an infestation of high fashion moths.
Let It Rock had a totally different vibe to the ‘buy something then get the fuck out of here’ mentality of somewhere like Take 6, and I was very attracted to it. There was a couch and a jukebox and it felt like you could hang out there. The jukebox didn’t just have any old shit from the charts on like the ones in pubs did, it was full of cool stuff like Billy Fury and the Flamin’ Groovies. And the people who worked in there weren’t cunts, either. That didn’t just apply to Malcolm and Vivienne, but to the staff they got in to cover when they weren’t there as well. If you had a bit of time to kill, which I usually did while my mates were at school or out working for a living, then you could sit around and have a chat with them.
The shop started out selling an updated version of the Teddy boy gear my mum and my real dad would’ve been wearing when they got together in the mid-1950s – big brothel creeper shoes, peg trousers, drape jackets – with the odd zoot suit thrown in as time went on. It felt like the opposite of the flowing flares and ethnic prints of the hippie era, and I think that was pretty much the idea. I didn’t consider it to be old-fashioned, I just thought of it as cool.
I was so impressed by the atmosphere of the place that I even began dressing like a Teddy boy myself. The first thing I actually bought from there was a pair of pink peg trousers, which was a pretty bold choice in 1972, but I told you I lived on the edge. Eventually I got myself the shoes and the drape as well, though I don’t ever remember wearing them all together. I never went full-on Edwardian. I was kind of half Teddy boy, half fucking idiot from Battersea. I even went to a Teddy boy club in Liverpool Street a few times. It was at a pub called the Black Raven – what other fucking colour do ravens come in? – where Teds would pose around looking at each other and listening to Eddie Cochran.
It wasn’t so much the music for me as that need to feel like I was part of a group – to connect with another little gang. Man, I wanted to belong so badly; whether it was to QPR, or the skinheads, or the Teddy boys didn’t even matter too much. I just had to be something. You could see how desperate I was by the fact that I even tried to be a hippie for a while – around the time I was breaking into all the other shops down King’s Road, you’d often see me bowling along there in patched leather flares with platform boots and a big hairy Afghan coat.
As far as British teen subcultures of the Sixties and Seventies were concerned, I was just about all of them at one time or another. There really weren’t too many that passed me by. On one level, this was just what young people did at that point – experimenting with shit to do with their identities – but because I didn’t really have anything holding me back in terms of a stable background or a sense of self-worth, I was free to take it much further than the normies did.
Of course I didn’t realise this at the time, but now I can see that trying on all these different youth cults for size was almost like the apprenticeship I had to serve before helping to start a new one of my own. There were limits, though, even for me. I was lucky that Jimmy Macken shut down my hippie phase before it could get out of control. He hated it when I started trying to act like a prog-rock guy. He’d ask me something and I’d say, ‘I don’t know, man, it’s just not progressive enough.’ Then he’d get the hump with me and call me a cunt. Basically he’d busted me on the fact that it was all just a pose, and I couldn’t have that – I needed to find people who really understood me.
This was where Malcolm and Vivienne came in. I don’t specifically remember the first time I met Malcolm, but he’d definitely have been dressed as a Teddy boy (with Vivienne as a Teddy girl). We got chatting, and I started coming back to Let It Rock regularly – once a week at first, but then more and more often till it was virtually every day. I felt pretty blank to everything at that time, but something was pushing me to go in there. As I’ve said, it wasn’t just about Vivienne and Malcolm either. When they weren’t in the shop I was just as happy chatting to the other people who worked there.
This was before Glen Matlock or Chrissie Hynde were hanging around. I remember this good-looking black kid called Stuart who worked there who was very queeny but kind of tough, too. Once I’d left home and was needing a place to stay I would kip over at his house sometimes, in the same bed but with nothing sexual going on. He definitely wanted to suck my cock – who wouldn’t? But I wasn’t having it.
There was never anything happening sexually between me and my mates. The handful of times when I trespassed to the other side were all at weird random moments when I was by myself. I know there was the odd rumour about me and Paul but I can definitely tell you that never happened. When we slept in the same bed – which we did often over the years – it would always be top to toe, with his head at one end and mine at the other. That said, there was one time when he woke me up and said, ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ So I guess I must’ve been rubbing his leg or something, but I was totally a-kip. I bet he still thinks I was trying to get hold of him. Don’t flatter yourself, Cookie, I was only touching you in my dreams.
I’m trying to imagine what Malcolm must have thought of me when I started hanging out in the shop. He obviously didn’t think I was one of the regular run-of-the-mill kids who would walk up and down King’s Road at that time wearing tight suits and kipper ties and platform boots, although I did go through a phase of doing that. Cookie calls it the ‘Adam Faith in Budgie’ look, but I reckon that was more denim. There was a bit of Hunky Dory-era Bowie going on too, with all the tank tops and stuff, but I wasn’t so into that. Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane were the two big Bowie albums for me – the earlier records when he still had curly hair gave off more of a folky kind of vibe, which wasn’t really for me. It felt more like something people in squats on Portobello Road would be listening to.
Anyway, back to Malcolm. I guess he would’ve noticed the energy that I had, the way that music and fashion mattered to me, and the element of fucked-up-ness that meant I didn’t give too much of a shit about anything else. They liked damaged goods, Malcolm and Vivienne, but I don’t think it was because they were looking for people they could use to put their ideas into practice. I think it was because they were quite damaged too.
Maybe not so much Vivienne – the vibe I got from her was more that she was terrified of being some normal Northern lass (maybe she’d had a taste of that with her first husband and so now she was going the other way) – but definitely with Malcolm. It was easy to see that he’d had a very confused upbringing. I never found out exactly what it was, but some weird shit definitely went on with his mum and his gran, and he left home really young, just like I did.
Later on, when John came into the picture, he would never give Malcolm credit for that. Because Lydon had come from quite a loving family background himself, he didn’t make allowances for people with a less secure foundation in life. He tried to make McLaren out to be some kind of middle-class hippie idiot, whereas me and Paul saw him as more of a chameleon, which might sound like a good thing – but when you think about it, trying to fit in with everyone around you instead of just being yourself is actually really hard work. We noticed how when he was hanging out with poncey types Malcolm would put on a front to try and sound more posh than he was. But when he’d come out with me and Cookie, he’d go all jack-the-lad and cockneyish.
I never minded that. I thought it was funny the way Malcolm would echo people back to fit in with them, as that would only make it more obvious how different he was. I understood why he was doing it, because I was always trying to find a way to fit in as well. This is why in later years the idea of me, and to a certain extent Cookie (although it was more true of him), being the no-nonsense engine-room of the Sex Pistols would be so far off the mark. Because I was probably the biggest poser out of all of us. Well, maybe not as big as Malcolm, who when he was selling the peg trousers came up with a special way of standing at an angle where he’d bend his leg at the knee to show them off. He was fucking hilarious.
The other thing about the early years of the Sex Pistols people have really got wrong is to think of everything that happened as being planned out by Malcolm from the start. He tried to paint it that way once he started believing his own publicity, but McLaren was actually doing himself a disservice by making himself out to be this kind of old-school Svengali figure who controlled everything, like Larry Parnes or Colonel Tom Parker.
The great thing about Malcolm in the early days wasn’t that he had everything all worked out, it was how open he was to picking up on what was going on around him and twisting it into a new dimension. The direction wasn’t dictated from the top down, it came up from down below. Even in the way he and Vivienne changed the shop – first to Too Fast To Live, Too Young To Die, which had more of a biker element, and then later to Sex – that wasn’t about them thinking, ‘Right, we’re gonna make these idiots buy whatever we want them to.’ What they did was pick up on our energy and transform it into something no one was expecting.
If you even think about me and Cookie – normal kids who were into birds and football but were also totally at ease hanging out with gay guys and drag queens and going to all these weird places in Earls Court – that was kind of something new and unusual. I guess a lot of it overlapped with glam. The upfrontness of Sex would partly come out of that. Not saying it was all down to us (I didn’t even like all the bondage stuff – that wasn’t my cup of tea at all), but we were all plugged into the same electricity.
Malcolm and Vivienne were like a bright light in the darkness I’d come from, and I think they got a kick out of me because as art school types they had been trained to find the working classes exotic. And not only was I a real ’erbert, but I had a sense of avant-garde style. So we both had the same attention to detail, but it came from different perspectives. I definitely behaved myself around them when it came to nicking stuff from the shop. Well, I did once I got to know them. Viv might’ve got the hump with me a couple of times early on, but I think even from the start she knew that I wasn’t stealing stuff in a bad way, it was just because I wanted to look the part.
As time passed, I started to run little errands around the place. That made it easier for me to blag clothes off them without having to resort to thieving. Malcolm couldn’t drive, so I’d take him round all the tailors in East London picking up samples in Viv’s olive-green Mini. It wasn’t one of the classic Italian Job ones, but the newer shape from the early Seventies. Of course I was a traffic violation on wheels, cos I had no licence or insurance, but that never seemed to worry them.
Their flat was a really nice council gaff in Clapham – one of those Simon Templar blocks from the Sixties with only a few floors. I think maybe Viv had got it when she had her first son, Ben, with the bloke she was married to before she met Malcolm. Then she and Malcolm had another son together, Joe, and the two boys shared a room with bunk beds in it. Sometimes, when Ben was away, I’d tag along home with his mum and stepdad after the shop closed to get something to eat and stay over in the spare bunk. Joe and I got along well – he seemed like a normal kid and we’d have a laugh together.
I really enjoyed staying there. I was kipping anywhere I could get a bed at this point, and their place was something a bit different to staying at Hayesy’s or Cookie’s. It felt more like a workshop – a sweatshop, even – than a normal home, because they had all the sewing machines laid out in the front room. Instead of lounging on couches round a TV, they’d be cutting patterns on the table. I was interested in fashion, so I liked watching the process all the way from the designs till the clothes were pieced together. Because those kinds of details mattered to me, it was exciting to be in the place where the decisions were made. The funny thing was, I don’t remember hearing any music in that flat, maybe because you couldn’t have heard it over the noise of the sewing machines. I guess the sewing machines were the music.
The staying over started when the shop was still Let It Rock, so they weren’t making the rubber stuff yet, and this became a really good time for me; before the Pistols were really happening. I didn’t know anything about the world Malcolm and Vivienne lived in – toffs, health food, it was the opposite of everything I’d known. Being in their orbit I felt as close as I was gonna get to a London version of the Factory – the Warhol scene that surrounded The Velvet Underground – and I really gravitated towards that. It meant a lot to me that I was made to feel welcome there, treated like an equal, and even given a bit of encouragement. It gave me confidence.
I can see that from the outside Malcolm and Vivienne dressing in the clothes my mum and dad would have worn makes them look like the parents I’d always wanted. There was a bit of that with Viv, to be honest, because she was quite maternal in her own way. She would do things like turning me on to decent toothpaste, which I really appreciated. I never fancied her – not that she wasn’t attractive, she just wasn’t my type – so I suppose that helped. Vivienne’s vibe was kind of asexual. In a funny way, I suppose the feelings I had towards her were more like what you have towards a mum.
There wasn’t so much of a surrogate dad thing with Malcolm, though. He was more like a clever older brother that had gone to college. Even though he was almost ten years older than me, it was like he was having his teenage years late. He certainly looked like a kid who’d been in the dressing-up box. In any case, my relationship with my stepdad had been so fucked up that I wasn’t really in the market for a father figure. I think ‘mentor’ would probably be a better word for what Malcolm was to me.
That said, he and Viv did kind of adopt me for a few years when I was out in the streets on my own and needed someone to point me in the right direction. They opened my eyes up to a new world that was a lot more colourful and exciting, and I was eager to explore it. I wasn’t stubborn or ignorant – I was very open to bettering myself.
For example, we used to go out to eat at that vegetarian gaff round the back of Carnaby Street where the name was just one word – Cranks, that was it. There weren’t many places like that around in the early 1970s and sitting down in there with them to order food I hadn’t eaten before was very exciting. I didn’t just want fish and chips or a curry, I wanted to try something new. I’m still like that with food now. OK, the grub in there might not have looked quite as appealing as pie and mash at first, but it was really tasty when you ate it. It wasn’t vegan, just vegetarian – quiches and salad, stuff like that.
I’d always known there was a better fucking place than the one I’d come from, but before I started hanging out at Let It Rock, I had no way into it. As a homeless tea-leaf, the closest I could get was by breaking into famous people’s houses and nicking their stuff, and that just wasn’t close enough. I’m still grateful to Malcolm for giving me the chance to tag along with him and not just see that other world but actually become part of it. Whether he was introducing me to avant-garde art-world chicks who were happy for me to fuck them, or taking me to the Speakeasy to hang out with the rock aristocracy, it was all brand new, and I think he got a kick out of what a thrill it was for me too. There was a generosity about Malcolm at that time. He had his fucking issues, same as we all do, but I couldn’t help but like him, and I got a lot out of our friendship – probably more than he knew.