For Jones, the son of a hairdresser and a professional boxer, who left home when he was fifteen, the Pistols grew out of old-fashioned rock & roll yearnings, born of limited options and the escape offered by crime. "I definitely didn't feel wanted as a child," he says in Julien Temple's 2000 documentary The Filth and the Fury, one of several moments when the band's dramatized mayhem gives way to reveal the genuine damage to children behind it. "I actually got put back a year because I was so stupid."So he excelled at crime, or at least persevered. He stole clothes from the stores where idols like Rod Stewart or Bryan Ferry shopped, then progressed to stealing from the stars directly: a fur coat from Ron Wood's house, clothes and a TV from Keith Richards', two guitars from Rod Stewart's, a PA system from a David Bowie gig and assorted drums, microphones and other gear. He didn't necessarily want to learn to play at first, just be part of the action. "All the equipment that I stole, that was the beginning of me being in music. I just wanted to be involved in music, that was it. That was the only way I knew how, to steal musical equipment. And clothes."
One of the stores he stole from was a clothing shop on Kings Road run by McLaren and his partner, Vivienne Westwood, which had a jukebox and a couch where people could hang out. Sex, as the store was soon called, was a destination for style-conscious rock stars and a gathering place for young misfits of mid-Seventies London. Westwood's designs, which included fetish gear and swastikas, foreshadowed some of the contradictions later explored in the Sex Pistols: They signaled liberation through the constriction of pleasure, not the free circulation, and they mocked consumerism and materialism while embracing the purest form of materialism, the fetish. When Jones and Cook took up the stolen instruments, they asked McLaren to manage them, though his limited experience as manager of the New York Dolls -- he put them in red leather and communist insignia -- was a disaster. "I certainly did not want to manage them," McLaren said later. "It was more preventing Steve Jones from thieving in the store."
McLaren, born in 1946, was a student of Fifties rock & roll and the working-class dandyism of British Teddy Boys, named for their revival of Edwardian fashions. To the fraying ends of the 1960s he brought a lightning-fast intellect that combined pop theory, prank politics and visions of hip capitalism. McLaren loved a catchy slogan and the promise of calamity. The idea of the Sex Pistols, he said, was an outgrowth of the store. "I was selling rubber masks and tying that to a jukebox playing tracks from Muddy Waters to Iggy Pop," he said, speaking from his office in Paris. "This really did have an idea before the Sex Pistols, it was already blowing up. And the Sex Pistols just gave it a platform for it to be seen outside the niche of the little shop. It spun it into the domain of the media. In this way, I forced and manipulated and created the Sex Pistols, and doing so, I suppose what I was hoping they would become was fatal attractions, dangerous people to know. I liked the thought that they would forever play as if they were on the verge of collapse into chaos and disaster. And I thought, once bitten by that disaster, you become twice as excited." McLaren speaks in long, discursive paragraphs, and though his account of the Sex Pistols is no more plausible than Rotten's bit about music hall, it has the virtue of capturing the feelings the band elicited. Unlike Lydon, McLaren is a mythmaker, not a debunker. "I didn't see the Sex Pistols as a group," he said. "It's funny to say. You just saw them as an idea. They were a constant, moving idea. Unlike a sculptor that uses clay or a painter uses paint, it was much more organic because they were real, but they were still an idea, and they were used as an idea."Years before the Sex Pistols, he presaged them in a manifesto for an art-school film. "Be childish," McLaren wrote in the manifesto, which is quoted in the exhaustive history England's Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock and Beyond, by Jon Savage. "Be irresponsible. Be disrespectful. Be everything this society hates." Whatever else they were, from the moment they formed in McLaren's shop in the summer of 1975, the Sex Pistols were this manifesto come to life.
