Malcolm McLaren

There are also photo prints of McLaren's own late-'60s paintings and sculptures, many situated in or outside retail storefronts, which demonstrate a similar sensibility.

McLaren's photo series Oxford Street is a particularly vivid portrait of the surreal, spectacular qualities of urban life as dictated by commerce.

The archive contains many other materials for appropriation alongside original collages by Reid and an annotated copy of Up They Rise: The Incomplete Works of Jamie Reid (a riff on the Gray title).

Recognizing the extent to which rock music had been defanged, corporatized, and subsumed into the mainstream, McLaren assembled the Sex Pistols to inaugurate a new era of sonic dissidence. Sex Pistols were a phenomenon, smashing records and norms. Greil Marcus writes that the band "used rock 'n' roll as a weapon against itself." Lead singer Johnny Rotten (John Lydon) was discovered by McLaren at his shop at 430 King's Road in Chelsea (the name of which changed constantly; at that point, it was called Sex, its most enduring moniker). Rotten's hoarse vocals—especially on hit songs like "Anarchy in the U.K.," which McLaren called "a statement of self-rule, of ultimate independence"—were the soundtrack of an era of profound (counter)cultural upheaval. "Anarchy" begins with Rotten professing himself an antichrist; it ends with the hissed exhortation "Destroy," and in the middle tells its listeners, "Your future dream is a shopping scheme."

Criticism along those lines was leveled at the Pistols in turn, and often at McLaren in particular (including by Johnny Rotten and his bandmates, who sued McLaren for royalties in the '80s). But the band, perhaps more than any other McLaren venture, epitomized his ideological project: prolonging the gut punch of a good slogan without ever formulating anything so stultifyingly straightforward as manifesto. The Beinecke's holdings from this period include records by and related to Sex Pistols, early press kits and newspaper clippings about the band, scripts and a treatment for a Sex Pistols film, photographs (by Roberta Bayley, who documented the band's first U.S. tour, and Joe Stevens, who captured the band fighting onstage in London), fan zines, posters, T-shirts (designed by Vivienne Westwood) from the King's Road boutique, and other promotional material, much of it created by McLaren's frequent collaborator Jamie Reid in Reid's signature ransom-note style.

Sex Pistols on the scene

Malcolm McLaren (1946–2010) was one of the primary architects of the British punk subculture. As an artist, fashion designer, and the manager of influential acts like the Sex Pistols & New York Dolls, McLaren shaped the aesthetics and ideology (or lack thereof) of the punk movement. He transformed the avant-garde ethos of dada, Lettrism, and Situationism into a hugely successful commercial enterprise—though not without controversy. Controversy, for McLaren, was always the point.

Origins of & influences on the punk aesthetic

McLaren and his punk co-conspirator Jamie Reid became friends at the Croydon College of Art, where they participated in protests inspired by the May '68 student movements in Paris. The archive contains correspondence and notebooks from McLaren and Reid's student days, including materials from Reid's radical paper Suburban Press. An early '70s lithograph by Reid pokes fun at the modernist monotony of towers-in-the-park postwar housing:

McLaren and Reid were associated with the London-based radical organization King Mob, which was started by Chris Gray. Gray was a onetime member of the Situationist International and the writer of Leaving the Twentieth Century: The Incomplete Work of the Sl, a book beloved by McLaren & Reid and passed on to the Pistols as a source of inspiration and lyrics. The McLaren papers contain a number of items that evidence the connection between British punk and various waves of the revolutionary avant-garde. Reid's appropriation of commercial materials for his artwork, a technique borrowed from Lettrist & Situationist détournement, became a throughline in the graphic identity of punk. (See the "Last Days" sticker, circa 1972, at right, which Reid affixed to store windows.) The archive demonstrates just how layered these collages could become; for example, the buses to "Nowhere" and "Boredom" featured on the cover for the Sex Pistols single "Pretty Vacant" came from Reid's copy (included in the archive) of a supposedly "official guide for Bay Area commuters" made and distributed by the San Francisco Situationist group Point-Blank! The guide, "Space Travel," advises readers that "at home, at work, and in all the places in between, we see the same void."

To view a detailed listing of contents for the Malcolm McLaren papers and to request materials for consultation in the Beinecke Reading Room, visit the Online Finding Aid.

Related Collections

British punk archive (disambiguation page)
May '68
Situationist International
Jon Savage papers
John Holmstrom papers and Punk magazine records
Richard Neville papers
Danny Fields papers
Crass archive