(Credits: Raph Pour-Hashemi)
Generation X singer Billy Idol has reflected on the prominence of the swastika in the punk movement, which he has described as “performance art”.
During a recent episode of the Turned Out A Punk podcast, Idol looked back on the scene that spawned his career, including the early days of watching the Sex Pistols perform in London and beyond. He reminisced about his peers, such as Siouxsie and the Banshees, with whom he regularly performed on the same bills.
In 1976, Idol, along with Siouxsie Sioux, travelled to Paris to be with The Sex Pistols to watch them perform in the French capital, which almost led to a violent incident due to Sioux wearing a swastika, which was misunderstood.
He recalled: “Siouxsie was wearing her night porter gear, where she had the swastika on, and she was driving these left-wing French people crazy because they didn’t get that it’s a performance art kind of thing. They just thought she was – because they were practically communists – they were thinking she was an anti-communist and they didn’t realise it’s part of punk performance art.”
Idol then went on to say that audience members were “really upset by Sioux’s decision to wear the swastika as a fashion statement, remembering, “We sort of escaped across the stage. Pistols had come up across the stage and we went backstage to escape from the audience. They were getting really upset.”
The punk icon puts the anger down to cultural differences between London and Paris at that time, explaining, “They just didn’t understand the sort of London fashion performance art aspect of punk. We were reflecting back on the British society what they were doing to us by wearing these sort of political symbols.”
He elaborated: “Like Vivienne Westwood would combine the swastika with communist symbols, Karl Marx. And that was all a bit of a fuck you to the conservative forces in England that we were sort of feeling that they were going fascist. So we were going, ‘Oh, if you’re going to go fascist, then we’re going to reflect that back to you.’”
He concluded by saying it “was a kind of a reflection back on the powers that be. ‘This is what you want us to be? You want us to be fascist? Oh, what about we’ll dress like that to frighten you?’ And it worked.”
In the book, England’s Dreaming, Sioux explained her choice to wear a swastika as a fashion statement, explaining, “It was always very much an anti-mums-and-dads thing. We hated older people. Not across the board, but generally the suburban thing, always harping on about Hitler, and, ‘We showed him,’ and that smug pride. It was a way of saying, ‘Well, I think Hitler was very good, actually’; a way of watching someone like that go completely red-faced.”
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