Punk.London, a year of events, gigs, films, talks and exhibits celebrating four decades of punk, launched in January with a £99,000 grant from the Heritage London Fund as well as the endorsement of the Queen and Boris Johnson, Mayor of London.
But some old punk rockers are less than enamoured about the festivities. Chief among them is Joe Corré, scion of punk royalty Vivienne Westwood and Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren, who has threatened to burn his memorabilia collection at a punk auto-da-fé in Camden on 26 November – exactly 40 years after the release of the Sex Pistols’ Anarchy in the UK.
It generated headlines and some pointed comments on Twitter along the lines of: “At £50 a bra he can afford to, can’t he?”, a reference to the £40m he received for his lingerie label Agent Provocateur when he sold it to 3i in 2007. (…)
It’s hard to know what his father, who revelled in winding up the establishment, would have made of it all. Corré, who turned down an MBE, isn’t interested. When McLaren died in 2010, he paid for his funeral; his father’s parting shot was to cut him out of his will.
(BTW, that’s the aptly named Chrissie Hynde in her underwear in the photo.)
