The death of Malcolm McLaren has led to the media falling over themselves to praise him for changing music, if not society, forever. Given the way the media always overstates, and gushes over the supposed importance of Punk, folk under the age of 35 would be forgiven for thinking that everybody in the mid/late 1970's walked around with spiky hair, leather trousers, a safety pin through their nose, gobbing at passers-by.
Our swooning social commentators usually ignore the fact that McLaren was simply trying drum up interest in order to shift some shoddy clothes that his missus was "designing".
Outside of image-obsessed London, Punk was viewed as something-weird-you-saw-on-the-telly. Like Bagpuss, It's a Knock-Out, or one of those serious plays with lots of nudity. At my school we had just one person who believed himself to be "punk", but this extended only as far as wearing a safety pin on their school blazer!
In Kettering we were still content to be listening to crooners, prog-rock and disco. We wore our flares wide and our sideburns wider. Ask anyone around then who was the more relevant group of people I'm pretty sure you would get the answer of "Kellock, Clayton and Phipps", ahead of "McLaren, Rotten and Vicious".
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