Sex Pistols: Poison in the Machine (Paperback or Softback)

The Sex Pistols reimagined as manager Malcolm McLaren’s explosive, world-shaking art experiment.

 

The explosive story of the Sex Pistols is now so familiar that the essence of what they represented has been lost in a fog of nostalgia and rock ’n’ roll cliché. In 1976, the rise of the Sex Pistols was regarded in apocalyptic terms, and the punks as visitors from an unwanted future bringing chaos and confusion. In this book, John Scanlan considers the Sex Pistols as the first successful art project of their manager, Malcolm McLaren, a vision born out of radical politics, boredom, and his deep and unrelenting talent for perverse opportunism. As Scanlan shows, McLaren deliberately set a collision course with establishments, both conservative and counter-cultural, and succeeded beyond his highest expectations.

Scanlan tells the story of how McLaren’s project―designed, in any case, to fail―foundered on the development of the Pistols into a great rock band and the inconvenient artistic emergence of John Lydon. Moving between London and New York, and with a fascinating cast of delinquents, petty criminals, and misfits, Sex Pistols: Poison in the Machine is not just a book about a band, it is about the times, the ideas, the coincidences, and the characters that made punk; that ended with the Sex Pistols―beaten, bloody, and overdosed―sensationally self-destructing on stage in San Francisco in January 1978; and that transformed popular culture throughout the world.
 

John Scanlan is a cultural historian at the University of Central Lancashire. His previous books include On Garbage and Memory: Encounters with the Strange and the Familiar, both published by Reaktion Books.