The aspiring rock star’s indispensable guide to surviving a life in music, with advice from those who know best. This issue, the punk impresario, anarchic mastermind and former Sex Pistols manager imparts his lifelong learned lessons…
Retain your innocence.
I think bands are always good when they’re not good at all, when they are innocently playing badly, because they don’t know anything else. I’ve always loved the amateur, but the idea of the professional then becoming an amateur, that’s dreadful; that’s what The Rolling Stones have become. But the kid who starts out as an amateur, that is something to retain and really respect, because it is the amateur that we can all access and at the end of the day it’s about communication. You’ve gotta be able to access; you don’t want these cold, distant characters who can’t connect with you. I hate that.
Keep things communal.
I’ve always hated those giant stadiums where you can barely see the group, it’s the human contact that I care about, you know? I don’t need to be in a crowd of 100,000 or even 25,000. I like to be in a crowd of 2000, that’s okay. I hate all that stuff, you start to feel like you’re in some kind of evangelical, horrible rally, for what? These guys don’t deserve this kind of rally. Everything must come down to some kind of human scale.
Dress to impress.
At the age of seven when I was going to school one day I saw these kids who looked so menacing. These guys had these long sideburns, draped coats with velvet and they were brooding. They just had this air of menace about them, and I just thought ‘Oh my God’. This menacing group of kids looked like they were dressed up to mess up, this group of Teddy boys, and I thought, ‘Wow, these guys are pretty fucking amazing’. I had to cross the road; I was terrified because they took up the whole pavement and they moved in unison wearing powder blue suits. They were very sharp and they looked so different. I suddenly saw the power of visual identity, the power that fashion can have to provide identity. Image can move you. So the actual look of the music became fundamental to me.
Let inspiration come to you.
Hours and hours of evenings we [McLaren and The Sex Pistols] sat in The Cambridge pub on the corner of Shaftesbury Avenue, right there opposite that horrible Andrew Lloyd Webber theatre. You’d look out and all you’d see was Cats, and even before Cats, some other dreadful show, and we’d be thinking that we’ve got to somehow change this culture. (Johnny) Rotten liked to talk, he liked to listen, and he liked to get drunk. And we’d sit there with Bloody Marys and the nights went on like that. We’d do that virtually every night. And out of all of that pouring, it suddenly fell into the ‘No Future’s, the ‘Pretty Vacant’ the ‘God Save The Queen’ and the ‘Anarchy In The UK’. It just came out like that, as a manifestation of all that happened before.
Know your limits.
It’s like a painter – once you finish a canvas you move on. Bands keep wanting to stay on the same canvas all the time, doesn’t matter if they’ve got a wooden leg, they had a minor hit back in 1956, they’ll be out there somewhere in a village near you, playing. And I think that they don’t understand that – well I’ve always assumed that the audience is more sophisticated than the band whereas the band always assumed that they are more sophisticated than the audience. How wrong they always are, everybody can see through it. They don’t always know their limits. I just can’t see. I used to like The Rolling Stones when I was thirteen – I fucking loathe them now; I think they’re just revolting, rubbish. Just a joke. The same for all those guys like Bob Dylan, Lou Reed and so on. I’ve met all those guys, I’ve walked the walk, I crossed the turf, I’ve rubbed shoulders, liking or not liking. They all sounded better when they were younger. I’m sorry- they just did!
Direct with purpose.
I’ve never been ultimately that interested in pop culture for pop culture’s sake, that might be because I’m not a musician. I am an artist but I’m not a musician. I always remember Peter Gabriel accusing me of treating the musicians like cattle, and I often think, yeah well Alfred Hitchcock treated actors in the same way. I’m more on the Alfred Hitchcock side of things. I think if it doesn’t do what I say, if it doesn’t do what I want, if it isn’t politically subversive, if it isn’t sexy, if it isn’t stylish to make all that happen then it isn’t truthfully worth listening to.
The Golden Rule.
It’s always been about three words: sex, style and subversion, if you have those three words and you can put that into a song, and a performance, then you’ve probably got a massive hit. I think without those things, ‘Nah, don’t believe it’. That’s the golden rule. I think that’s a rule I may have articulated in the days of The Sex Pistols.
INTERVIEW by Simon Harper
