Sex Pistols: What makes a manufactured punk band?
Punk bands from the Sex Pistols to the Butthole Surfers to Soul Glo all claim to proudly stand against any form of music industry bullshit you might think of.
Where other artists might write music to suit a daytime radio playlist, punk bands write from the heart. Where other bands don’t tour until they can play to at least a thousand people a night, punk bands get in the van and do whatever it takes to stay on the road, no matter how many empty bars stare back at them night after night. Most of all, other bands might have been formed by a shady music industry Svengali. One who spotted a mercurial talent and put them together with a group of good-looking people who won’t argue about silly things like the creative direction of the band or the size of their royalty checks.
In a lot of ways, the idea of the manufactured band might just be the ultimate affront to the very soul of punk rock. An entire band whose very soul is so geared towards selling product that even forming the band wasn’t the idea of its members. Punk bands, so the legend goes, form because they want to make art. At a fundamental level, punk bands form because they choose to, period. Except… Is that really the case?
After all, one of the great punk bands constantly gets tarred with the “manufactured band” brush. Not in the way that the likes of Green Day and Blink-182 do, either, on account of a large portion of their fanbase being kids. No, the Sex Pistols are considered manufactured because by every possible definition of the term, that’s exactly what they are. The Pistols didn’t form organically; they were a bunch of wastrels who worked or hung out at Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s King’s Road boutique Too Fast To Live, Too Rare To Die (later renamed Sex).
Steve Jones, Glen Matlock and Paul Cook had a terrible pub rock band called The Strand that Jones asked McLaren to take over as manager. From then on, McLaren fancied himself as the main creative force behind the Pistols, rejigging the lineup and bringing in a new frontman based on looks alone. McLaren himself said that the one box you had to tick to be considered for the Pistols’ lead singer position was “having short hair”.
Not only was McLaren, a man in his 30s who wasn’t one of the band, putting the group together, but he was also doing so pretty explicitly as a publicity stunt to market the shop he ran with Westwood. The shop’s name is even in the band name, so how could the Pistols be anything other than a bunch of preening tarts who were as manufactured as Steps? It’s certainly a fun stance to take because it pisses off trad-punks, but unfortunately, it’s a slightly deeper question than that.
After all, there’s an argument to be made that punk bands from the outset wanted to spit in the face of all forms of rock ‘n’ roll mythology. Up to and including the idea of the “great rock ‘n’ roll band” that naturally came together out of a shared desire to blow minds, shred sweet guitar solos and change the face of music. Or at the very least get laid. After all, that’s normally a lie as well. Led Zeppelin was a bunch of session musicians that Jimmy Page put together because he knew that heavy blues rock was going to be a massive deal in the States. Is that any more opportunistic than what McLaren was doing with the Pistols?
Then you take into account that, sure, the band were a multi-media project overseen by a behind-the-scenes Svengali. However, the entire point of the project was that it was counter-culture. Legitimately so as well. This isn’t The Police being formed because three jazzers happened to look like underwear models and were told to play “punk” music because it was all the rage. The Pistols were hugely ahead of their time and made people angry. Yes, that’s a great way of getting people’s attention, but ask anyone who was there at the time, and it’s not the most reliable way of making money.
Combine that with the fact that the Pistols at least wrote all their own songs, and you’re left with a pretty fascinating conclusion to the question of “were the Sex Pistols manufactured?” The answer being yes, they were… But by pretty much every single definition of what punk rock is, that’s OK. Were they counter-culture? Yup. Did they genuinely want to make the music they released? Certainly did. Did they piss people off? Abso-fucking-lutely.
What else do you want from a punk band?
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