Malcolm McClaren’s Son Is Definitively Burning His £5 M Sex Pistols Memorabilia This Saturday
Sex Pistols
Joe Corré, son of Vivienne Westwood and Sex Pistols’ manager Malcolm McClaren, has started the burning. You may remember about Corré’s decision: at the beginning of this year, he said he would put his collection of punk memorabilia on fire in order to protest against Punk London: 40 years of subversive culture, a London celebration endorsed by the Queen, the museum of London, the Roundhouse and even the FBI. Despite the fact that his collection is estimated to be worth £5 million, the burning has started to protest against the event which is turning punk into ‘a fucking museum piece or a tribute act.’
On Tuesday night, he destroyed an original copy of the Sex Pistols’ famous single, ‘Anarchy in the UK’ – a event which was live-streamed over on Dazed – in an attempt to warn us about what is about to come. The funny thing is that, before the burning, Corré had listed the single on eBay in order to raise money for charity. However, the bidding ‘only’ reached £62,500 and failed to reach the asking price of £1,000,000. So he put everything on fire!
‘It might be culturally significant to certain punk hangers on and freeloaders, but not to me anymore,’ Corré said in a press statement. ‘The whole lot is going.’
The burning of the remainder of Corré’s punk memorabilia Is scheduled for this Saturday, to coincide with the 40th anniversary of the release of ‘Anarchy in the UK’, and the event will be live streamed on the website ‘Burn Punk London’.
Of course, a lot of people are outraged and the main argument is that the money he could get from the selling could go to a lot of charities, and do a lot of good…. to what Corré answered ‘Bollocks! It’s my stuff, I can burn it if I want to, and I think it’s probably the best thing to do with it.’ Plus he has a great argument against the idea: ‘If you want to sell all of this stuff, who is actually going to buy it? Going on a banker’s wall, that wouldn’t satisfy me,’ he said to Dazed.
I can understand his anarchy-like move, he wants everyone to understand how ridiculous it is to pay £5 million for moth-eaten shirts and old vinyl, he is against capitalism, a nostalgia trip, and he wants to re-give to punk its rebellious power at a moment when it is co-opted by mainstream culture,
‘It [punk] was hated to the point where the Sex Pistols were banned from the radio, you couldn’t buy the records in the shops, they were banned from playing gigs up and down the country; nevertheless they still made it to number one in the charts, and what happened? There was no number one in the charts that week,’ he said to Dazed. ‘People were stabbed, cut up, stamped on, kicked on… and the mayor of London at the time recommended that they should dig a bloody great big hole and bury all the punk-rockers down there – that was to be a fitting end to the idea of punk-rock.’
Corré simply can’t stand the fact that punk has now the Queen’s blessing and an hypocrite system has now embraced a culture it has first ostracized and hated. In a world which is falling apart, we need more than ever a subversive culture able to challenge the status quo, but punk is not there anymore, may be punk is really dead and truly needs to be destroyed.
The live streaming of the Burn will be from the https://t.co/AfP9ZUGKZy website @hotpress #burnpunklondon #nov26 https://t.co/tzyNhLvZPv
— Joe Corré (@realjoecorre) November 24, 2016
Burn Punk London, Saturday November 26th 2016. Image by @GettyVIP #burnpunklondon #joecorre #burnpunk #london pic.twitter.com/xIRLfccw7t
— Joe Corré (@realjoecorre) November 21, 2016
