Selfridges Xmas 1968 and the Punk Santa
What really happened
By various accounts, during the Christmas shopping period of December 1968, Selfridges department store on Oxford Street, London, was invaded by supporters of the English Situationist spin-off, King Mob.
According to Richard Neville, in Playpower (1970), 'shoppers were treated to the spectacle of police confiscating toys from small children and arresting Santa Claus.' A flyer saying IT WAS MEANT TO BE GREAT BUT IT'S HORRIBLE was also handed out. Future Sex Pistols manager Malcolm Mclaren recounted to Jon Savage in England's Dreaming: Sex Pistols and Punk Rock:
'We were all handing out the toys and the kids were running off. The store detectives and the police started to pounce: I ran off into the lift. There's just me and this old lady: the doors start to open and I can just see all these police. I grab the old lady really tight and walk through like I'm helping her. As soon as I got out of the store, I belted out of there.'
Mclaren later contradicted himself, saying:
'That was organised by Christopher Gray and the Wise twins were involved as well. I never actually went to it but I heard of it.In those days nobody would tell you how things were going to work. There was all this rumour and hype. So, no I was never involved as such.' (quoted in Tom Vague, King Mob Echo)
Whatever happened, as Savage wrote of McLaren and his associates,
‘It was largely through the SI's (Situationist International) influence that they developed a taste for a new media practice - manifestos, broadsheets, montages, pranks, disinformation - which would give form to their gut feeling that things could be moved, if not irreversibly changed.'
McLaren said of King Mob:
‘I have to say in those days I was deeply impressed with them. They were so much older than I was and they had a better line of rhetoric. I was excited by what they represented but didn’t fully understand what it was all about. It was a new way of looking at the world. You would gather whatever bits you could, like crumbs falling off a table. King Mob were a direct link with things we were reading at that time. For us the Situationists were revolutionary artists. That’s what they represented… The Situationists were brilliant at turning things on their head. It was that manipulation that I was directly inspired by… Instead of using paint, instead of using clay, one decided to use people.’
(Quoted in Charles Radcliffe, 'Don't Start Me Talking: Subculture, Situationism and the Sixties, Bread and Circuses. Kindle Edition).
The inside story of what actually happened is told in a new book from BPC publishing in our WisEbooks Series: King Mob: The Negation and Transcendence of Art by Dave and Stuart Wise, from which the following is lifted as a taster.
King Mob at Selfridges, December 1968
Letter On What Happened at Selfridges Store
Dave Wise
2007
Dear Vicki,
I just wanted to explain a little more about the anti-Xmas, anti-consumer intervention so that you may be able to correct Jamie Reid’s false assumptions [Reid was an artist/designer collaborator of Mclaren’s]. And I hope he doesn’t get annoyed with you about it! He in fact quite recently put on a display in a shop window in Westbourne Grove, Notting Hill for Pepe jeans. It was simple consumer advertising but deployed a lot of his old props like the Boredom and Nowhere destination buses he gleaned from [the pro-situationist group] Point Blank in California decades ago.
After some rudimentary planning in early December 1968 I informed Malcolm Maclaren and Fred Vermorel about what we intended doing and could they get plenty of people along to Oxford St. By that time I was very friendly with both of them and they listened a lot to what I had to say, which meant I could go on and on and on. I ranged all over, putting forward my theories on English romanticism, English philistinism conjoined to British imperialism, Yorkshire and the north east, plus my knowledge of Russian Constructivism, Surrealism, International Lettrism and the like. Much of the latter – apart from Lettrism – had though come from Ron Hunt in Newcastle.
Fred Vermorel was more clued in about tendencies within the workers’ movement. He knew anout and could discuss the Friends of Durrutti and the antics of the different Trotskyist sects etc. In that sense he was very ‘French’; his mother hailed from France and of course Fred had fought splendidly on the barricades in Paris in May 1968. None the less, Malcolm Maclaren with his dash and audacity proved to be very plucky and imaginative, darting here, there and everywhere during the battle for Selfridges. (Ashamed to say, I utterly wallowed in the way these two guys listened so attentively. It was very flattering). From an exciting and fulfilled childhood amongst the northern coalfields I too in Newcastle had become very French!
I know Maclaren was particularly fascinated with the concept of the drift, the derive. That allowed me to take-off, not only about Baudelaire but also De Quincey especially and how Charles Dickens was influenced by De Quincey in his endless walks through London. De Quincey and the old urban rookeries fascinated MacLaren (Incidentally one of the most haunting descriptions of Liverpool is conjured up by De Quincey as he sits in a room for days on end top of Everton hill looking down on the harbour and listening to all the foreign voices stoned out of his head, motionless on laudanum, or as De Quincey’s children delightfully called it “doddenum”!) Later, much later, MM made an arse of all this in his ill-digested attempt to play for Lord Mayor of London with his programmed version of a drift through cultural events, museums and the like.
The Selfridges intervention was really a disparate, collective effort. No one at the time really thought it was something to be claimed, something to be copyrighted for. In any case, that was the enlightened no property spirit of the times. Later Maclaren was to say he was dressed as Santa Claus which wasn’t true. A good friend, Peter ‘Ben’ Trueman, out of his head on speed, did that! In the Oxford St film (The Ghosts of Christmas Past) Maclaren voiceovers the leaflet we gave out, but it was the Cleggs and myself who wrote that and then I ‘designed’ it, making it into a spoof Christmas card kind of thing. Maclaren was certainly in awe of the guy.
Ben was spectacularised by all the recuperated radicals who were essentially using him as thesis material for advancing their future careers. It was as if the guy was the pure essence of uneducated, wild, pristine hooligan revolt, hailing from a working class background in Winchester. Never a student. Ah wonderful! Ben was no fool though and rapidly realised he was being used and even set up. We became excellent friends and had some great times in the pub where he liked to drop a vibrator in pints of beer watching it froth all over the table - to much hilarity. He was a builder too though half the time you wondered if he was casing the joint or the church next door where he’d nick the lead off the roof. (This happened!) Around about 1974 I was working with him on a site. It was Xmas Eve (again!) and the boss, after faithfully promising all of us we’d get paid on the dot at 5 in the evening, came up and told us he had no money. Ben knocked him out with a heavy left to the jaw and then proceeded to elegantly seduce his wife who didn’t need any enticing. (I think in any case she’d had enough and had probably wanted to engage in some kind of fisticuffs herself as her husband was such an arrogant prat).The Selfridges intervention was also all about playing with consumerism in a kind of liberated way by taking apart its essential cash nexus and/or subverting the commodity form plainly emphasising that everything has to be free. I guess this is why the intervention is still so powerfully remembered years later.
Excellent Read, and Thank You for the memories!