The sound of England screaming

I heard it on the California coast.

On June 7, 1977, I was home sick from school. It’s possible I wasn’t that sick. I hated school and got out of it whenever I could. The academics were too easy for me, and the social interactions were too hard. A few months previously the guidance counselor, Mrs. Knickerbocker, had called me into her office to tell me my friends didn’t want to be my friends any more. “They say you’re like a little puppy dog,” she said. “Always there.”

I didn’t react in the moment—in what would become a pattern I fall into to this day, my immediate thoughts were pragmatic, while I shoved the emotions down. I left her office focused on a tween survival plan and nothing else. There was a rarely-used staircase by the library. I could eat lunch there and not bother anyone, or be bothered.

Mrs. Knickerbocker had other ideas. Maybe she felt bad that she’d told me I was like an unwanted puppy dog. Maybe she just was unbelievably clueless. The next day, as I was sitting on the stairs having lunch, she decided to join me. I can still viscerally feel my panic when she cheerfully plopped down to ask how I was and pulled out her Tupperware. Being bullied sucks. Being called into the counselor’s office sucks. But publicly eating lunch with a teacher? I still cannot get over how bad this person was at her job.

I found another place to eat lunch, and tried to get out of school as often as I possibly could. I didn’t even name what I’d experienced at school, which included slaps and physical abuse, along with taunting and ostracism, as bullying. I just wanted to remove myself from situations where my presence was offensive. I also probably didn’t know the term “alienation,” but it would have made a lot of sense to me.

I was an unstoppable reader, plowing through our local library and my parents’ bookshelves. And I watched all the tv I could, as well. I needed the escape, but I think there was a search on, as well. I was searching for something that would help me know how to act in the world, and how to react to the world when it told me I wasn’t good enough.

So on June 6, 1977, when I saw the Sex Pistols making every adult in London lose their mind just by playing music on a boat, I paid attention.

The news footage showed the band playing “God Save the Queen” as they floated down the Thames on a barge, and the voiceover informed me that the song had been banned from British airwaves. In protest, the Sex Pistols (and the Malcolm McClaren/Vivienne Westwood cabal that managed them) had chartered the boat and put on the performance on the same day as the Queen’s Silver Jubilee. I think they all ended up getting arrested.

Here’s Allan Jones writing about what he saw that day:

We’re heading towards Charing Cross and Parliament when the first police launches appear, coincidentally around the time the Pistols start playing – “Pretty Vacant” giving way to “No Fun” as we pull alongside Parliament.

The police launches are circling us now, searchlights aimed at us, someone with a megaphone shouting at us, presumably ordering us back to the pier, where ranks of surly coppers are waiting, the thought of kicking punk ass an entertaining notion after a long day on Jubilee duty.

Whoever’s in charge boards the Queen Elizabeth when we dock at Charing Cross, and we’re told that if we don’t quit the boat immediately the police will remove us with as much force as they deem necessary. You can see truncheons being unbuckled, and things start getting ugly in a hurry, the police now thundering up the gangplanks, swarming into the crowd.

Paul Cook is still hammering on his drums at this point, and Rotten is screaming “No fun! No fun!”. The power’s off, so you can’t hear Steve Jones and Sid appears to have vanished. There’s a lot of punching and kicking as we’re herded on to the Embankment. Malcolm Mclraen goes down in front of me, and a couple of us scoop him up before the police close in on him.

“You fucking fascist bastards!” he yells at them, and is promptly dragged behind a souvenir kiosk, beaten up and arrested, one of 11 people from the boat trip who end up that night in jail.

Police vans roar around me as I stand on the Embankment, blood in the gutter and on the wall behind me, torn Jubilee bunting hanging from railings and lampposts, sirens in the distance, the sound of England screaming.

The sound of England screaming! You can imagine that for a sheltered white girl in the California suburbs this was one of the most radical things I’d seen. The idea that you could have friendship groups that weren’t based on conformity and power, but on making art and fucking shit up is still revolutionary to me, and it became part of a way better plan than the library steps.

---

Art Ads

Speaking of weird pop culture moments, I’ve been bookmarking these for a while now. Some of them are ads that artists made for brands, and some are ads they made for themselves, back when late-night cable had cheap airtime available. Here’s an ad Salvador Dali made for Alka Seltzer. I would give anything to have been in this pitch meeting. He also did a chocolate ad. I’d like to think his NAZI sympathies would have prevented him from getting this kind of work today, but you never know.

A ton of words have been spilled on artists and advertising—blah blah Warhol, blah blah Ed Ruscha—but the 90s had some incredible crossovers. I remember making a pilgrimage to see the Jenny Holzer installations at the Helmut Lang store, a collaboration that had begun a few years earlier with this, at the Venice Biennial:

My favorites, though, are Chris Burden’s ads from the mid-70s. Fair warning, they are still pretty shocking, although the images are grainy. When his first ad, which showed him crawling across broken glass in a Speedo, aired, the station pulled the rest of his ads and fired the person who’d sold him the spots. Here’s a great video of him explaining the ads. (Other artists who did cable ads include Marilyn Minter.)

Burden’s work always shocks and inspires me. I don’t know if there has been an artist more willing to fuck shit up, and to do that fucking up with intention and terrible beauty. I didn’t know about these ads until I was reading about him in high school, but I imagine if I’d seen them at the time they ran they might have affected me as much as the Sex Pistols did. I didn’t become a big fan of the band, but I’ll never forget that moment of possibility. That’s what keeps me coming back to art, even when I can’t get my brain to do anything but tell me how terrible I am. The right work is a lifeline, a tiny way forward toward the world we want.

---

Thank you to everyone who has been commenting and subscribing! I’d love to hear about things that inspired you, or were turning points in your life. And I would love it if you would become a paid subscriber—the support from this newsletter is another lifeline. Later this week I have a wild update on the AI I built.