Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century

"Absolutely. One of the things that Marcus does, for example, is to bring to our awareness the Situationist International. Supposedly – although this is debatable – the Situationists were influential on Malcolm McLaren , the avaricious Sex Pistols manager. That’s perhaps apocryphal, but the fact of the matter is that the Situationist International , with its critique of spectatorship and of ‘The Spectacle’, as modern society was described by them, became a key theme that I believe had a profound influence on punk music. Its underlying message is one of DIY, to stop looking at your television screen, stop going to the movies and stop watching movies. To create your own culture rather than waiting for it to be handed down to you by the powers that be. In that act you become truly rebellious. Even though it was an international organisation, it was based in France and was very French in spirit. “Punk was a movement with a lot of humour at heart” This comes across in Lipstick Traces , although I remember from my own research for my book that Marcus also authored a series of articles that he did for the Village Voice in the early 1980s in which he brought the parallels to light. He was one of the first people to try to explain the Situationist International – not an easy task! Especially if you’re reading them for the first time, there’s all sorts of Marxist jargon that’s difficult to penetrate. But Marcus convincingly made the link between punk and the Situationist International, and in the process explained this arcane philosophy, which is no small feat. Not something that other punk rock books even attempted!"