FASHION & PERVERSITY - A LIFE OF VIVIENNE WESTWOOD AND THE SIXTIES LAID BARE -
FRED VERMOREL
Has there ever been a band as much as the Sex Pistols where legend and truth have become so entwined as to become near impossible to distinguish between the two? But then 'When you have to choose between truth and legend' as Factory Records supremo Tony Wilson once said 'Print the legend', and he's a man, of course, who was an expert in such matters. This is the premise on which Fred Vermorel bases the first chapter of his book - Fashion & Perversity, A Life Of Vivienne Westwood And The Sixties Laid Bare. In fact, Vermorel takes it one step further and titles the first chapter 'Vivienne Westwood: An Imaginary Interview', it being exactly that. It's Vermorel taking liberties with everything he can recall Vivienne Westwood saying to him over thirty years of knowing her along with what she's said in interviews.
Now, who's to say if everything in this book is true or absolutely none of it? There's always been argument and confusion among the Pistols' band members themselves even over such simple things as who wrote what lyrics so who knows? According to Westwood in Vermorel's 'interview' for example: 'No one really knows who wrote the lyrics. Sometimes it was everyone, including me, in a pub, pissed. We'd come up with lines and slogans and somehow a song would emerge. Like 'Anarchy In The UK.' That was written one evening in a pub under Centre Point.' Is it any wonder there was such a fight over royalties come the end?
Other such declarations strewn throughout the 'interview' are equally questionable but at the same time equally interesting and even somewhat amusing. 'At one time Malcolm wanted me to go to Madame Tussaud's and set fire to the wax effigies of The Beatles. I thought that was inspired. Only I was worried it might start a fire and someone would get hurt.' Which, whether true or not is indeed an inspired idea. A perfect situationist stunt, even.
'It does make me smile nowadays when John Lydon says that ideas like situationism had little to do with the Sex Pistols, and that he was what counted. In fact, maybe it was John himself who had little to do with the Sex Pistols? 'Johnny Rotten' was really just a face and a mouthpiece for ideas John was often too uneducated to understand, and attitudes he was too cowardly to follow through.'
When it comes to the question of situationism there's an awful lot of evidence to point to the idea that it was in actual fact absolutely everything to do with the Pistols.
'To break through the wall of indifference Malcolm and Jamie Reid and the others around us used the sort of Dadaist tactics they'd learnt about at art college. Shock and provocation and outrage. And then more of the same. Never let up, never give in. Like the situationists they wanted to 'create a situation in which there was no going back'. Burning all bridges, going for broke.'
So might this also have included the idea to promote a blow-up Sid Vicious sex doll? Or Malcolm paying Teds to beat up punks in the King's Road?
'We were trying to start a war,' Westwood is quoted as saying, and everything right down to her T-shirt designs was all part and parcel of this. A prime example being her 'Which side of the bed' T-shirt. Composed of two lists, on one side of the shirt was everything that was hateful in British culture and on the other side everything that gave hope. 'Which side of the bed was like which side of the barricade are you on?'
And on the subject of barricades this is where Fred Vermorel comes into his own, specifically in regard to the barricades thrown up on the streets of Paris in May of 1968. Vermorel was there and in the second chapter of his book writes intelligently and very eloquently about it. Entitled 'Growing Up As A Genius In The Sixties' this particular chapter is wholly autobiographical and is all the better for it.
'Paris in May '68 was an ideological 'slippage', Vermorel writes 'A vertigo of discourses which projected political non-sense centre stage.'
On the building of the barricades, Vermorel describes how cars were shunted into the middle of the streets with cafe tables and chairs and debris added, echoing the French Revolution itself, not to mention the Paris Commune of 1871. Because more and more working class youths had started turning up from their suburbs out of curiosity and in the hope of giving the police a good hiding, the barricades began to go up in earnest - up to seven feet high. These were sons of the street and veterans of building sites so they knew how to build properly as opposed to the amateurish efforts of the students.
According to Vermorel, however, the incursion of these working class youths was not always to the students' liking who were often perturbed at the ease and panache of the street fighting of these newcomers, along with their lack of proportion and propriety and their obliviousness to liberal idealism and polysyllabic rhetoric.
At the time, nobody was acknowledging that rioting is actually serious fun and that cars being set on fire is a beautiful sight. Vermorel even suggests a metaphorical link between a riot and a collective orgasm. Describing the Grosvenor Square riot of 1967 as being less a revolution than a rugby scrimmage, Paris '68 in comparison was the moment when the imaginary burst its banks after reaching the famous situationist 'point of no return'.
The combination of student politics, working class hooliganism and situationist groups made for a heady cocktail, one that would later be commodified through the Sex Pistols and Punk. It's an analysis and an argument that Vermorel convincingly weaves, comparing the relationship of the Situationist Internationale with their student and working class 'cannon fodder' to the Sex Pistols' management team's (Glitterbest) relationship with the punks of 1976. 'Like the situationists, Glitterbest had access to an avant-gardist repertoire of examples which suggested that you can never 'go too far'. To go 'too far' was merely to enter history, timidity being the only barrier to success.'
Fashion & Perversity is an interesting addition to the Sex Pistols/Punk Rock/Situationist/May '68 canon, written by someone who by chance and acquaintance was at the centre of these cultural/political cyclones. Years later in the 1980s during Malcolm McLaren's Bow Wow Wow period, Vermorel fell out with McLaren but remained friends with Westwood though it should be said the relationship between the three was always a strange one, almost like an unfulfilled menage a trois.
Come the end of the book, we see Vermorel diagnosing McLaren as having Tourettes and this explaining the way McLaren talks, his mannerisms and even his behaviour throughout his whole life - and Vivienne Westwood agreeing with the diagnosis. When thinking about it, it's a pretty strange thing to put into print in a book, based as it is merely on amateur and idle speculation no matter if it might be true or not? But then maybe it's meant to be taken as just another stitch in the tapestry? More grist to the mill falling somewhere between truth and legend? Which brings us once again back to the Tony Wilson adage: 'When choosing between truth and legend - print the legend.'
John Serpico
