Latest news with #MalcolmMcLaren
Daily Maverick
24-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Maverick
'Where there's no future, how can there be sin?'- the rise of the age of Brutalism
Post-colonialism has given way to Brutalism; social contract to social assault; human rights to human wronging. The world is undergoing a change of age where the future, even the question of whether there is any future, has become extremely uncertain. In June 1977, Malcolm McLaren, the manager of punk rock band the Sex Pistols, stage-managed an enormous ambush. On the late Queen Elizabeth's Silver Jubilee, the Sex Pistols' anthem God Save the Queen made it to number one. In those days, for young people, Top of the Pops was like Sunday church. We waited anxiously to see which group and song would reach No 1 each week. When it was God Save the Queen, the BBC promptly banned the song. In response, the Sex Pistols hired a barge and played it on the River Thames opposite the Houses of Parliament. The police were sent out to commandeer the boat and they were promptly arrested. Prompt was the operative word in the heady days when punk rockers fought the monarchy with music. Cauterise the infection quickly. Or so the establishment thought. What had this motley crew done wrong? In God Save the Queen, an anthem powered by an opening riff to beat all riffs, the Sex Pistols called the Queen's 'a fascist regime'. It wasn't. It was sclerotic and pampered by taxpayers. But the words rhymed, so why not? It was shocking. Believe me. But there was much more to punk rock than exaggeration. One of the lines in the song had much darker implications: 'Where there's no future, how can there be sin?' rasped lead singer Johnny Rotten before adding poetically: 'We're the flowers in your dustbin We're the poison in the human machine We're the future, your future' 'We' were the doomed, thrown-away working-class youth. At a time of rising unemployment, they were in rebellion by making a fashion of torn clothes, Mohican hair cuts and safety pins through their ears and noses. 'Foul-mouthed yobs' the establishment media called them. They made their point and changed the direction of popular music as well as of society. But it didn't end there. Almost 50 years later, the line 'where there's no future, how can there be sin?' reveals a surprising prescience. Looked at carefully, it's an existential statement that may offer a key to understanding the industrial cruelty being inflicted in Gaza and other places that ordinary people are unwilling bystanders to in the world at this moment. For 'sin', not coming from the dispossessed youth, but from the over-possessed elites, is now the name of the game. Post-colonialism has given way to Brutalism; social contract to social assault; human rights to human wronging. The sin pandemic There's a whole lot of sin in the world at the moment. Genocide is sin. Ecocide is sin. Femicide is sin. Infanticide is sin. Democide is sin. What's different is that the sinners have become oblivious to their sinning. They are certainly not sinned against. They don't sugar coat it; they think they are beyond sin. Why? I have been trying to comprehend such a quantum leap in loss of humanity, to work out how elected political leaders and oligarchs have become so brutalised. An epiphany that came to me while walking around Oxford recently. I think I have the answer. The world is undergoing a change of age where the future, even the question of whether there is any future, has become extremely uncertain. As climate chaos explodes, as the sixth mass extinction accelerates and now extends even to human beings, a largely uninhabitable earth may be a real prospect within several generations. The evidence is mounting: Nasa data reveals dramatic rise in intensity of weather events | Extreme weather | The Guardian; WMO confirms 2024 as warmest year on record at about 1.55°C above pre-industrial level; Climate change: World's oceans suffer from record-breaking year of heat – BBC News As the Indian writer Amitav Ghosh pointed out in a lecture he gave at Wits University in September 2024, the ultra-rich, while financing Trump and his climate denialism, are simultaneously preparing for the social breakdown that may be one consequence of the climate crisis. Ghosh writes: 'It is well known now that several billionaire tech entrepreneurs like Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page and Peter Thiel are preparing for an impending apocalypse by building enormously expensive and heavily fortified retreats on remote islands, or in sparsely populated stretches of the United States and Canada. Not to be left behind, a bevy of America's most popular stars, such as Taylor Swift and Tom Cruise, have also acquired cutting-edge apocalypse shelters. Nor are the ultra-rich the only Americans who are investing in doomsday retreats: so great is the demand that a new and rapidly growing industry has emerged to cater to it.' This is the time of survival of the richest. Democratic restraints and rules that took several centuries to establish are being broken with manic abandon. 'Death capitalism'; 'crack-up capitalism'. Call it what you like. The hypocrisies are worthy of Shakespeare. A political establishment that less than 30 years ago impeached a president for lying about having sex in the sacrosanct Oval Office, now enables a deranged president who blatantly abuses the office for private profit and has appropriated to himself the divine right to permit, stoke, arm or directly make wars that threatens millions of lives. For rulers who would be kings, who believe that the future is uncertain, indeed that for billions of human beings whose lives are extremely precarious, the very idea of a future is becoming untenable, moral rules fall away. Sin becomes permissible. Welcome to the new world disorder. Join the resistance. DM
Daily Mail
21-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
I went on Antiques Roadshow and the BBC said my items were too offensive and politically incorrect to broadcast - despite their eye-watering £20k value
The BBC 's long-running teatime favourite Antiques Roadshow is not known for being a particularly controversial show. But Robert Needs brought quite a different tone to proceedings with his collection of vintage punk fashion on an episode filmed in Cardiff last year. The 68-year-old grandad, who partied with the Sex Pistols in the seventies, reflected on his younger years as he spoke to expert appraiser Lisa Lloyd. He said he bought the clothes from Sex, the punk boutique run by fashion designer Vivienne Westwood and her then-partner and Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren. The shop - now renamed World's End but still on the King's Road in London 's Chelsea area - was also where the band met and how they got their name. But some of Robert's purchases from the shop, known for its outrageous designs, were deemed unsuitable for showing on the BBC programme. Expert Lisa was first to point this out on the show, 'Incredibly un-PC' - but still later valuing his collection of around 20 T-shirts at around £1,000 each. Robert chuckled: 'They told me they couldn't show most of them on camera. Way too naughty for Roadshow viewers I suppose.' He continued: 'I shouldn't really be shocked though because a lot of Westwood's designs were deliberately very provocative, with plenty of nudity or imagery which could be considered offensive - like Nazi swastikas, for example. 'But that was the whole point of it back then, they were intended to be controversial.' The guest said he often used to travel from Wales to London to go to the boutique. 'There was already a ready-made punk scene going on in south Wales at the time, except we called ourselves "Soul Boys" - the term "punk" was more something the media came up with later on', he explained. 'And it was during a visit to Sex that we met the lads from the Pistols. 'They were amazed to hear they had a lot of Welsh fans back home because they'd drawn mostly hostile reactions whilst playing in other parts of the UK.' The conversation led to one of the band's very few performances in Wales, at punk venue The Stowaway Club in Newport in 1976. It was there they invited Robert to hang out backstage with them - and his excitement was clear as he recalled the memory on Antiques Roadshow. 'They were unlike anything I'd seen or heard before and the rubber-style pink T-shirt I wore to that Pistols concert was among the ones I took along to the Roadshow', he said. 'It's still in good nick too, although it would never fit me now. Actually, looking at how small all the shirts are, it's a wonder I was ever able to squeeze into any of them.' The guest explained many of these rare, original Westwood clothes have become highly sought after by music and fashion lovers alike in recent years. He was delighted his T-shirt collection would go under the hammer for a total of around £20,000: 'That's mad, isn't it?' But that was not what mattered to him most: 'That said, I don't really want to sell them – I'd much rather they went on display in a gallery somewhere, as long as they were all safe and properly insured. 'It'd be lovely to think of them getting a second lease of life and others getting the same enjoyment out of looking at them as I had wearing them.' It comes after another guest was just as pleased by the price their precious item was valued at. A repeat episode of the BBC show, which sees specialist appraisers value heirlooms and heritage items, went to Belton House near the town of Grantham, Lincolnshire. Expert Hilary Kay met with a woman who had brought in a unique item - the funeral standard of 17th-century English statesman Oliver Cromwell. He led parliamentary forces in the English Civil Wars in the mid-1600s against King Charles I, helping to overthrow him before his execution in 1649. The soldier and politician then led the Commonwealth of England that was quickly established, serving as Lord Protector from 1653 until his death in 1658. The woman explained how such an incredible object came into her possession: 'It was in a collection about seven years ago. My father actually bought the collection of militaria.' After some more conversation about how precious the item is, anticipation was well and truly built up and the valuation could not come sooner. It did not disappoint, as Hilary said: 'This is about the trickiest thing I've ever had to value. 'It is certain to fetch £25,000 but how much more would it go for?' The wide-eyed guest was rendered absolutely speechless, with Hilary saying: 'It's going to take me a little while to come down from this. 'It'll take a couple of bars of chocolate and a cup of tea but this has been a really special moment with a really extraordinary object, don't you agree?' Antiques Roadshow is available to watch on BBC One and to stream on BBC iPlayer.
The National
03-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The National
TRNSMT: Please hold your nerve and keep Kneecap
Yet before we get into the weeds, we should remember the theory that the Pistols' svengali Malcolm McLaren held, to guide his management aims: 'cash from chaos'. Sampling the Kneecap archive as their notoriety burgeons, I'm struck by their cartoonish brand as much as their terroristic qualities. Like one of McLaren's fruitier publicity stunts, Kneecap rolled up luridly to Utah's Sundance Festival premiere of their eponymous docu-drama in January 2024. Their name was spray painted on the side of a Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) Land Rover. The band were on board, holding up a republican tricolour of smoke flares. The Belfast Telegraph noted that the Dublin-based creative agency The Tenth Man had teamed up with Kneecap for the stunt. Their clients include Stella McCartney, GymBox, Guinness and Carlsberg. So already, the back story is slicker than the front story: that of out-of-control, drug-addled, young Irish-speaking Fenians cavorting down the Shankill Road. When rock writer Dorian Lynskey interviewed them in 2024, Naoise Ó Cairealláin (known as Móglaí Bap) admitted: 'We're very calculated in our PR stuff. We know things are going to get a reaction.' Kneecap the movie shows them to be as capable of self-deprecation and auto-irony as The Beatles or The Monkees. They're taking lightly, and playing for laughs, some very heavy matters. The survival and rights of the Irish language, especially in the North. The lingering potential for violence and gang coercion, even in post-Troubles Belfast. The everyday buffet of hallucinogenic drugs, both dealt and consumed, in youth culture. Yet their mode, as the film's director cites explicitly, is the fast-paced fantasy of Trainspotting and Amelie, than anything too social realist. There are often action lines around the movements of the characters, making them look like Looney Tunes animations. The purisms of Irish republicanism are also being jerked around with. Irish language advocates wear massive jumpers and lament sonorously in the backrooms of bars. Michael Fassbender (below) reprises his Bobby Sands role in Steve McQueen's Hunger – except here as a comically intense IRA fugitive (and father of one of the Kneecappers). He's currently teaching yoga on a Belfast beach; 'Bobby Sandals', as one of the rappers quips. There's even a vigilante group the band contend with, known as Radical Republicans Against Drugs (RRAD). They're rendered as three stooges, stumbling and farcical. Yet there's a line the movie circulates around, capturing an ambivalence towards language-based nationalism. 'Every word of Irish spoken is a bullet fired for Irish freedom', hisses the fugitive father to his sons. That cultural radicalism has granted their children a potent medium to use among themselves. But it's emptied of modernity, even the chaotic and fragmentary kind. So Kneecap invent Irish words for drugs. 'Snaois' means coke, 'capaillín' means ketamine. On Móglaí Bap's chest, the letters 3CAG are tattooed (it's the name of their 2018 record). They stand for 'three chonsan agus guta', meaning 'three consonants and a vowel' in Irish. Which means MDMA. READ MORE: Does Kneecap row show how out of touch Westminster is? The struggle to have the Irish language assume the same legal status in Northern Ireland as in the Republic – a status achieved in 2022 – is consistently referred to in the docu-drama. It seems Kneecap have played their part with lines like: 'These E's are sweet/They're sweet E's/I'm eatin' em like sweeties/Mála mór cola bottles agus mála meanies.' But here we are in the spring of 2025, and things are a lot less about artful hedonism, language activism and scampish satire for the trio. Clips dug up from previous live performances seek to render Kneecap as advocating killing Tory politicians, or supporting proscribed Middle Eastern terrorist organisations. Both positions they have, in recent days, strenuously denied holding. Politicians in Scotland, the US and the UK have urged promoters to take the band off their books and line-ups, with their appearances at TRNSMT and Glastonbury the most symbolic cancellations yet threatened. For what it's worth, as a free-speech-friendly musician, I support the recent collective letter sent out by Heavenly Records, and endorsed by significant artists – especially this part of the statement: 'The question of agreeing with Kneecap's political views is irrelevant: it is in the key interests of every artist that all creative expression be protected in a society that values culture, and that this interference campaign is condemned and ridiculed.' It has to be possible to object, as an artist, to the appalling slaughter by the Israeli Defence Force of the people of Gaza, as a wildly disproportionate response to the Hamas atrocity on October 7, 2023. Without that objection causing deplatforming or the destruction of careers. As to Kneecap, there's a history to their position. 'Way, way before October 7, you'd have seen Palestinian and Basque flags alongside Irish ones on the Falls Road,' Móglaí Bap said to the Irish music mag Hot Press. 'There's always been solidarity in West Belfast for other occupied territories.' In any case, it seems there's a deeper strata to their politics. 'We've more in common with working-class people in Belfast than rich people in Dublin', said the third member, Mo Chara, on Patrick Kielty's Late Late Show. 'A workers' revolution is the way forward rather than one based on a fucking God that might not even exist.' So there's no sense of bandwagon-jumping here – Kneecap have a coherent political position that comes out in their raps. It's as natural and accessible to them as their advocacy of 'e's and whizz' (in Pulp's words). READ MORE: Kneecap teases new music after counter-terrorism officers launch investigation A phenomena like Kneecap makes you realise how divergent social and historical paths can be on these islands. You could never imagine the local rewrite: 'Every word of Gaelic spoken is a bullet fired for Scottish freedom'. The movie shows how language politics helps intensify the street-by-street tribalism in Belfast – hip-hop and EDM is a perfect vehicle for that urban claustrophobia. Scots Gaelic would seem to take a much less aggressive position in the culture – the language feels closer to the rhythms of rural society and ecological balance. No-one looks like they need to invent Scots Gaelic terms for cocaine or ketamine. Scots, in so far as it approaches a language, has had a better run-in with hip-hop – Loki, Stanley Odd, recently Tzusan. And it's tempting to assume that the Scots language is still socio-linguistically lively in Scottish urban and suburban areas. There are also more resources for scenes to develop (venues, studios, nearness of musicians and tech). Having enjoyed the playfulness and comedy of Kneecap over the last few days, I have a sense that their highly political background instincts have pulled them into controversies which weren't really in their strategic plan. I think they were going more for Eminem than Roger Waters. There is talk in the archive of a forthcoming Kneecap album, based on their engagement with other indigenous-language artists. I'd enjoy that, as a creative next move. But the world – and particularly Gaza – is on fire. And artists who cannot help but respond to that appalling situation must be defended for their honesty and bravery. Glasto and TRNSMT, hold your nerve on Kneecap, please.
