I VE been in Vivienne Westwood s shop in the King s Road in London a few times. There s a very striking architectural feature to the place. It s a simple idea but genuinely original and somewhat startling. The floor is pitched at an angle, as if you re on board a ship that s about to go down, or the building you re in is beginning to implode. The shop is called World s End.
I don t even know if it exists anymore or if the floor has been straightened. Either way I ve a feeling that the time she spent treading the boards in her own shop may have had the long-term effect of scrambling some of the antennae in Vivienne s finely-tuned mind.
At her best, Westwood has been a brilliant designer, with a powerful sense of the link between clothes and sexuality, which she has captured on occasion in designs of stunning beauty. She also knew a bit about pop culture, joining forces with Malcolm McLaren her then husband in the packaging of the Sex Pistols, and the outrageous overstatement which was so integral to the punk ethos, utilising bondage gear, ripped t-shirts, slave chains and safety-pins stuck through any and every part of people s anatomies as part of the gestalt.
The same Vivienne recently launched a broadside attacking The Spice Girls. What they are marketing is disgusting behaviour as a lifestyle, she was reported as saying on the BBC chat show Smillie s People. People should be outraged by it. I m morally outraged by it. I call it child molestation. It s corruption. I really want to attack what I think is corrupting the youth.
It s tempting to dismiss this as a particularly prime example of the kettle calling the spice-rack black. In fact it s so tempting that I m going to go right ahead and do it. The problem, however, is that this kind of nonsense is being taken seriously by some chumps, with the possibility that we ll see a whole new reactionary bandwagon rolling, which will target rock n roll for one level of censorship or another.
The pretext on this occasion is that popular culture, through its dastardly agents The Spice Girls, among others, is prematurely sexualising nine-year-old girls. And an article by Aine McCarthy in The Irish Times linked this to the sexual assault and murder of the six-year-old beauty queen Little Royal Miss 1996, JonBenet Ramsey. The article in question was well-meant but, like Westwood s attack, it was entirely off the point in targeting The Spice Girls as a likely source of corruption.
The first thing to get on the record is that beauty pageants for six-year-olds are irredeemably sick and stupid. Bad enough when you have a bunch of adults parading around trying to appeal to some squad of airheads concept of what s sexy or attractive, but to subject a bunch of six-year-olds to the same treatment is twisted beyond words. It is also boneheadedly dumb.
Point two: I have no particular gra for any band who are silly enough to trace their lineage back to that awful individual who was the British Prime Minister before John Major. If, as one of the band proclaimed, Margaret Thatcher was the original spice girl, then the sooner they all toddle off back to the grocery shop, taking her with them, the better.
In the meantime, however, they make half-decent pop records which neatly sums up the real basis on which they should be judged. There is a suggestion that the lyrics to their songs are particularly explicit, with 2 Become 1 being cited as a case in point. But this is nonsense. Most songs and certainly most pop songs are about love and sex. Countless thousands of hits from the past 20 years express variations of one kind or another on the Spice Girls desire to make love to the object of their intentions, and often in considerably more graphic terms. The Spice Girls are distinguished by the fact that they re the first mostly white all-girl group to become successful in a long time. They also come on as sassy, extrovert and independent, in a way that The Nolan Sisters certainly didn t. But when it all comes down, they re just another pop group and whether they do it badly or otherwise they re as entitled to the same freedom to express themselves as any other artist or performer. And they certainly cannot be held responsible for who happens to like or dislike their records.
The whole notion that music has a corrupting influence is enormously suspect anyway. My first child was nurtured on a diet of Never Mind The Bollocks Here s The Sex Pistols and he hasn t looked back since. The second, who s seven years old now, is heavily into Tricky, whose explicit lyrics put The Spice Girls efforts into the halfpenny place. To see this as somehow dangerous seems absurd to me. And if it isn t for a seven-year-old boy, why should it be for a nine-year-old, or a 12-year-old girl?
Of course, there s a huge level of cynicism in the entertainment industry, with children being targeted as just another segment in the market. But that s the case with every kind of product, from Hula Hoops through the Power Rangers to rollerblades. The problem is not pop music. It is consumerism itself. And anyone who thinks that condemning The Spice Girls is an answer to that needs his or her head examined.
Implicit in all this seems to be a feeling that sex is inherently a bad thing, and that the less we see or hear of it the better. In a pre-inauguration interview for French television, which laughably emphasised family values , the wife of the US President, Hillary Clinton observed that the ideal would be that young people not have sex before they are 21.
By the same logic, they shouldn t be allowed vote until they re 40, or join the army till they re 65. But of course it isn t experimenting with sex that is the problem, it s the absence of love, support and understanding which so many teenagers experience, and the degree of alienation they feel from the appalling values with which they re so often surrounded.
If Vivienne Westwood wants to start a campaign, now she knows what it should actually be about.
Niall Stokes
Editor