The furious anthem Sex Pistols wrote about Malcolm McLaren
The Sex Pistols did unbridled contempt better than anyone else in punk’s first wave. From Pink Floyd to the Queen, no one was safe from their anger, and in their relatively short lifespan, they helped to bring down the walls of the old world and lay the foundations for the new. Of course, this account is blinkered, but broadly speaking, it is true.
Without the Sex Pistols, much of the experimentation and bravery of the post-punk movement and everything that followed would not have had the legs it did. For John Lydon, Steve Jones, Glen Matlock and Paul Cook (excluding Sid Vicious, as he brought nothing to the band), the future was there to be grabbed with both hands. The establishment was a sitting duck, and all it took was an unapologetic attitude and some raucous tunes to spell its end.
Although the band targeted many with their music, for one song, they turned their gaze closer to home. For the track ‘Liar’, from their only studio album, Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols, the quarry was their manager Malcolm McLaren.
He famously put the band together after they coalesced around his Chelsea boutique SEX that he owned with then-girlfriend Vivienne Westwood. Despite McLaren having a significant influence in the band forming and their overall operation – not to mention the shock tactics – he developed a reputation as a somewhat shady figure.
There is a great deal of mystery surrounding the late svengali, with Lydon once saying of him: “Malcolm likes to give the impression that he’s a bit of a shyster but he’s more involved in his artistic ideas rather than any lust for money.”
Despite the perplexing essence of McLaren and the fact that much of his public image was an invention, this didn’t stop the band from making ‘Liar’ mostly about him. Although the song has long had a much broader meaning, with it primarily attached to the establishment, the band used it as a vessel to accuse him of incompetence and greed – a symptom of the wider world.
“We were just hapless young idiots really, and we were really unprepared for the world of greed and adulthood that we were thrown into so quickly,” Lydon once told Rolling Stone. “Everyone had their piece of poisonous influence to whisper in your ear, and that could cause great division. So I just came around to the point where instead of allowing division, I would unleash my derision.”
Notably, the song was a collaborative effort between all four members, including bassist Matlock, who would be replaced by Sid Vicious shortly after. In fact, the line “You’re in suspension, you’re a liar” is a Matlock creation, and at the time, he particularly enjoyed the power of the double entendre “suspension”.
In 2018, Matlock told Songfacts: “And then I helped out on a couple of other songs that he (Lydon) was stuck for something. The song “Liar” – “You’re in suspension,” that was my little bit. I said, “What about suspension?” It was not long after I was finishing school, and getting in trouble, they suspend you. I thought it was a weird kind of idea, and he was like, “Ah, I don’t know.” But he ended up using it, so that was it.”
