Chapters
Shownotes Transcript
From Wondery, I'm Matt Ford. And I'm Alice Levine. And this is British Scandal. So Matt, that's it for the Sex Pistols. Quite a ride. An incredible ride. And it's a very short ride. It all happened so quickly. Yeah, from that little shop on the King's Road to becoming one of the biggest bands in the UK...
It's fair to say transforming the cultural landscape. And then, of course, the tragedy that was Sid and Nancy. And all that happened in just a couple of years. Yeah. And we've, of course, argued that the driving force behind all of this was Malcolm McLaren. Quite a difficult man to understand what motivated him. Why did he do the things that he did? What was he really like? A friend, I love this quote, has described him as having the vision of an artist.
Well, an absolutely brilliant quote. I don't think anyone's ever going to say that about me. So we want to know if that's true. So on today's episode, we're going to talk to Paul Gorman, who knew Malcolm. He was immersed in the punk scene and he's written the epic The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren. That's next.
My dad works in B2B marketing. He came by my school for career day and said he was a big ROAS man. Then he told everyone how much he loved calculating his return on ad spend.
My friend's still laughing at me to this day. Not everyone gets B2B, but with LinkedIn, you'll be able to reach people who do. Get $100 credit on your next ad campaign. Go to linkedin.com slash results to claim your credit. That's linkedin.com slash results. Terms and conditions apply. LinkedIn, the place to be, to be.
As summer winds down, let your imagination soar by listening on Audible. Whether you listen to stories, motivation, expert advice, any genre you love, you can be inspired to imagine new worlds, new possibilities, new ways of thinking. With Audible, there's more to imagine when you listen.
And speaking of listening, you can listen to the best-selling science fiction thriller Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir right now on the Audible app and traverse the galaxy in a desperate last-chance mission along with astronaut Ryland Grace, all from the comfort of your living room.
As an Audible member, you choose one title a month to keep from their entire catalog. New members can try Audible free for 30 days. Visit audible.com slash WonderyPod or text WonderyPod to 500-500. That's audible.com slash WonderyPod or text WonderyPod to 500-500. What would you say was your first encounter with punk?
I guess I saw the early flickerings of it in the early to mid 70s in London. There were people who were quite exotic around. They were slightly older. They were sort of art directed. Peter York, the cultural commentator, described them as them. And it was, oh, he's one of them or she's one of them. And so they'd have dyed hair. They wear kind of retro clothing, which had been messed with.
So I was aware of those people and they were kind of a window in, particularly with an older brother as well who was aware of that set and worked in the King's Road in a shop. Roxy Music were the kind of prime providers of the musical soundtrack and of course there was David Bowie who was
more than just a rock star, you know, he was a visual creature and the ways in which he changed his look inspired a lot of people. So there was that whole beginnings of punk which was mixed in with the music which had been really
dismissed by the mainstream. So the New York Dolls, whose albums didn't sell very well, Iggy Pop and the Stooges, a bit earlier than them, the MC5. Patti Smith released her album in 1975, which I got, and then I saw her live in 1976, and the Ramones came through. There was this fusion of quite hard-edged rock music with this almost defeat of
take on fashion. How would you define it musically, Paul? Because I wasn't around at the time and a lot of people say about punk, well, it didn't matter whether you could play or not. And that's a discussion we've had on this show, particularly about Sid Vicious. But when I hear that Sex Pistols music, when I think of some of the other bands, The Clash and The Stranglers, a lot of it is very melodic. A
So is it true that whether you could play or not mattered? Well, in a way it was. It was true because this was part of McLaren. And McLaren is the prime mover in this, really, because he worked in New York with the New York Dolls. He was exposed to the early punk scene there at CBGB and those other places. And he came back as a sort of evangelist. You know, what we do on this little island is we take influences from elsewhere and we kind of make them our own. He did that.
And this was in a period, the sort of fat end of that period, when Stadium Rock ruled. And so the groups that I went to see were from the 60s, really. But you had to go and see them, really, because they were the only game in town for a long time. So I saw Pink Floyd. I saw Led Zeppelin. They play in Norma Domes, great big stadiums, thousands of kids who'd be really pretty bored by it.
What McLaren recognized in New York was that he was a street level thing and in London and other cities in the UK there was this movement called pub rock where people played for free and you could see them in pubs. I was a little too young for that but I did see a couple of the bands by sneaking into pubs. And so this was a very energetic, accessible movement and that was key to punk really because
You've got to hit up the kids to make it exciting because it's a youthful, energetic movement. These dinosaur acts were peddling something that was appreciated by your much older brothers or even, dare I say, your parents. And rock and roll is about generation gaps, not all getting together and wearing the same clothes and digging the same things as we are now. You mentioned Malcolm McLaren, Paul, who, of course, is a key player in our story and, as you say, in the movement. When did your paths cross?
First, just for an evening in September 1975, the older brother I mentioned, I'm the youngest of six, but the older brother I mentioned earlier, worked in this shop, a homeware shop in the King's Road, and he got a contract to paint the apartment off the King's Road of a customer. And so he coerced me into helping him.
And I was aware of McLaren because he'd been interviewed in the New Musical Express the year before in an article about the people who make the clothes for the pop stars. So when I met him with my brother in the pub in the King's Road one night while we were painting this woman's flat, I knew who he was and he made an immediate impact on me, not only because of the clothes that he was wearing, he was wearing leather jeans, these little black half leather booties and
and kind of see-through black T-shirts. And so he looked quite confrontational, but he was also very interesting. And I think when you're young and impressionable, you gravitate to those people. But I don't think it's any coincidence that I never, you know, I met a lot of people in those years because I was out and about going to gigs all the time and parties and whatever. But he really left an impression. Do you remember the conversations you had? Yeah.
Yeah, I do because it remained so important to me. But my brother had started to not dress me up but guide me. I'd always been interested in clothes and I was going to jumble sales from the age of about 12 or 13 and I'd pick up clothes, 50s shirts, little suit jackets.
pairs of brogues, clothes that weren't fashionable that I gravitated towards. And I was wearing a pair of straight jeans, which was a bit of a statement then. Everyone was wearing these huge flares and loom pants and Oxford bags. And so my brother had kind of said, well, you can't wear that stuff anymore. You've got to wear this. And I was at that age where I was quite happy to accept it. And also it interested other people, like-minded people. And if you wore Brothel Creepers
which were very unfashionable then, or Doc Martens, which were very unfashionable. Football hooligans wore them, but I wore them. You could get them at Millett's in the Strand. And they were kind of macho but sexy at the same time. But I was wearing this singlet that I picked up at a jumble sale. It was summer, so it was quite hot. I was covered in paint because we'd been painting. And the singlet was of Jimi Hendrix's.
It's quite nice because I'd always liked the combination of colours yellow and green. And so it was yellow with green piping around the shoulders. And he asked me why I was wearing that shirt. And I said, I just like the colours. And he said, and this really sticks in my memory, he said, that's not good enough.
You've got to have a reason for wearing clothes because clothes are important. He always described himself as a fashion victim because his grandfather had been a master tailor and his parents, his stepfather and his mother had run a womanswear factory in the East End. The rag trade was in his blood. But he took that further
And I think it shows with his association with Vivienne Westwood and the Sex Pistols and Bow Wow Wow and Boy George and Adam Mann, that not only the clothes you wore, but the way you wore them was important. And he kind of distilled that in that little conversation we had in that pub all those years ago. And as well as having met him, obviously now you've published this biography about him, you've researched his childhood. What were his formative years like? They were very chaotic. He was born in 1946.
January 1946, so that's really nine months after the end of the Second World War. Born in London in Stoke Newington and his mother was, I guess, a flibbity-jibbit.
She had been quite spoiled as a child and came from rich parents who lived next door. The grandmother was the daughter of a diamond dealer. And the father, this happened after the end of the Second World War, lots of soldiers, mainly men, were kept on reserve. And so the father was away from the home. And whenever he visited to see his young sons and his wife,
he began to realise that his wife was having affairs with various ne'er-do-wells in that area. You know, the bookies at Walk from Stoke Dog Track and the men that hung around the dance hall in Stoke Newington. And the marriage collapsed. He felt neglected. He was neglected. And so his grandmother, the daughter of the diamond dealer, kind of took him over. And she recognised in him and his auburn curls something of the...
Portuguese Sephardic aristocratic heritage that she always claimed. They were Sephardim. They were Jews from the Iberian Peninsula. And so she spoiled him and she indulged him and she taught him a couple of things, one of which was that she always said to him, "To be bad is good because to be good is simply boring."
And when he acted up at school or at home, she would just sigh and say, well, boys will be boys. This stuff stayed with him because it made him quite a disaffected youth who was interested in being bad because he never wanted to be boring. And I think that's one of the things that's attractive about him, though there are those who bear the wounds of association, in that McLaren was never boring. And you see that
coming out in such associations as those with the Sex Pistols. It sounds like she was a huge influence. I mean that anarchic streak you perhaps wouldn't have thought would come from that source, but that sounds very defining.
Yeah, it does. And it's kind of transgressive as well. She shared a bed with him occasionally, not in a sexual sense, but this was a transgressive thing to do. And it left its mark and it left its scars on him, which he hid forever until much later in his life. But it also made him always interested in the other.
something that wasn't part of the everyday and the mundane. And so by the age of 13 he was roaming around Soho, around the boutiques which were opening up there. And this was part of a phenomenon where immigrant kids, particularly Jewish kids, they were very aware of visual identity. When you have your bar mitzvah, you get a chance to have your own suit made. And so you're kind of showing out at that stage at the age of 13. So teams of them coming in from North London to Soho
to go to the clubs, wear the clothes and show out really. And this coincides of course with the Beat Boom, The Beatles were on the rise, Rolling Stones, Yardbirds. And so McLaren saw all of these groups and it helped him fuse in his mind his interest in what he always called
the look of music and the sound of fashion. And so by the age of 16, he left school with a couple of O-levels and after a disastrous career as a wine taster, he went to art school.
Hey, I'm Ryan Reynolds. At Mint Mobile, we like to do the opposite of what Big Wireless does. They charge you a lot, we charge you a little. So naturally, when they announced they'd be raising their prices due to inflation, we decided to deflate our prices due to not hating you.
That's right. We're cutting the price of Mint Unlimited from $30 a month to just $15 a month. Give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch. $45 upfront for three months plus taxes and fees. Promote it for new customers for a limited time. Unlimited more than 40 gigabytes per month. Slows. Full terms at mintmobile.com. Want to teach your kids financial literacy, but not sure where to start? Greenlight can help.
♪♪♪
The period we focused on is predominantly in the 1970s, which is a fascinating political area defined by industrial strife in the 70s ends with the election of Margaret Thatcher. What was your experience of the politics of the time?
Well, I think you couldn't help but be affected or impacted. I think the politics with a small p runs through British life because of our class system. And so how you speak or how you look or what school you went to or where you live, what car you drive sometimes or who you associate with pins you in a pigeonhole which you're forever trying to escape. Or maybe you accept it. By the age of 14,
I and my friends were taking part in demonstrations. There was still the end of the counterculture, so there was still a protest culture. You might go along to see Hawkwind, the great space rock collective, at the Roundhouse, but there'd be collections for those who were being tortured in Chile. And so you were aware of, and it was part of the mix. If you wanted to, it was there. And so I was a member of this group.
pathetic little cabal called the National Union of School Students where we went on strike and we wanted greater rights. It was that kind of febrile atmosphere into which McLaren plunged himself after leaving art college because he'd engaged in radical politics and demonstrations
in the 60s and early 70s. His first media appearance was in the Times for burning the American flag in front of the American embassy in 1966. He was arrested for that. And so he was the result of having studied radical art or cutting-edge art, people like Warhol,
were really important to him throughout his art school career. But he'd engaged in radical politics as well through the French Situationists, whose idea was that you should upset the everyday through staging a series of interventions. But then you've got the fashion and music thing as well. So it's a very rich mix. By '75, when he's back from New York and starting talking to these youths who have ambitions to be musicians,
It's a very rich mix which that is growing out of. You met Malcolm in 1975, you were in the pub, you started to hang out in that scene. How did most kids hear about the Sex Pistols? You get occasional things. There'd be the TV programme they appeared on today in London where they swore at Bill Grundy. That used to show occasionally.
you know, some interesting people. They'd have interesting fashion or interesting art exhibitions and these would be treated as novelty. But if you were a kid hungry for culture, you kind of grabbed onto it. So I think that that's how it happened in The Nature of Things. It was literally word of mouth. That Grundy TV appearance, even now, years later, is still one of the most electric clips in British television history. It's still provocative. It's still shocking.
Given that it's been repeated so many times and talked about, do you remember how it felt to see it at the time? Yeah, I do. Yeah, very much so.
I think the other thing about it, I don't know about you, seeing it from your distance, is it's quite funny. Oh, it's very funny. Yeah, it is. It's how much grunt he brings out on himself. Sure, and there is that kind of arrogance of the establishment. This is the world according to us, or, you know, late middle-aged straight white men. And so there's that. But I remember watching it, and it's not often remembered, but at the very beginning, there was an intro to what was going to be on the show. And then they panned across these four youths,
And I said, my older brother Timothy, I said, "Oh, Timothy knows them. We met them in the pub in the King's Road."
And my mother, this was in a period where, you know, you settle down to crossroads at half past six in the evening in front of the TV. My mother, oh God, and walked out to prepare the supper. So I sat and watched it with my sister, an older sister, and my father, who'd been in the army for 24 years, fought in the war. And so we watched it through to the end. And they're obviously the final segment. And at the end of it, we sort of sat open mouthed.
And he said that man deserved everything he got from them, those guys, which I thought was really interesting because here's somebody who was, what would he have been, 73, been in the army. But there again, he knew blokes. I mean, he didn't swear very much, but obviously if you've been in the army for 24 years, you hear a fair amount of cuss words. But it was interesting. He took their side rather than the establishment side.
And I think that was symptomatic. I think there were a lot of people, not just kids, we were ready for it. We were primed and ready to go. But I think there were a lot of people who actually quite liked the Sex Pistols. Was that a watershed moment then? I think it was in culture because it was a pretty moribund time. Unemployment had gone over a million. Culture had hit a low. You know, you had unemployment.
really pretty crappy groups on Top of the Pops, your weekly music feed, there was a distinct feeling among everybody, really, that this wasn't good enough. And I think Sex Pistols are symptomatic of a wish to re-energize culture. And a lot of this goes back to McLaren and his, you know, lifelong project to upset contemporary mores and society at large.
So when you're sat watching that TV appearance, are you fully fledged punk? Are you already, you know, immersed? No, not at all. I never really was. I never described myself as a punk. But I was punk in attitude because, as McLaren said backstage at a fashion show in Paris in 1982 when he was asked about, are you still punk? This is five years after, apparently, the great year of punk. And he said punk isn't about having a safety pin in your ear
or a mohawk or playing three chord songs ineptly. Punk is an attitude and it's an attitude based on do-it-yourself and anti-commercialism to a certain extent and anti-corporatism.
he added the fourth element was for him chaos it had to be chaotic maybe I align myself with those but I always understood that by 1977 punk had gone sour because it had become de rigueur in some regards and also didn't look great didn't look sexy
This season, Instacart has your back-to-school. As in, they've got your back-to-school lunch favorites, like snack packs and fresh fruit. And they've got your back-to-school supplies, like backpacks, binders, and pencils. And they've got your back when your kid casually tells you they have a huge school project due tomorrow.
Let's face it, we were all that kid. So first call your parents to say I'm sorry, and then download the Instacart app to get delivery in as fast as 30 minutes all school year long. Get a $0 delivery fee for your first three orders while supplies last. Minimum $10 per order. Additional terms apply. McLaren's obviously this visionary, and the Sex Pistols even take their name partly from his shop. It's odd to think of this now, but is it fair to say the Sex Pistols were a manufactured band?
They were to a certain extent, but the Clash were as well. They were wanting to do something. It came from the initiative really came from Steve Jones,
He realised that he had connections to the music press and he had ambitions then as a singer in a rock band, but he approached McLaren and persuaded him. And so in a way you could say they were willing victims, but they were also their own people. What McLaren wanted to do was to put together a group and then see what happened. He quite often did that and that's part of the situationist thing of staging something and letting it go.
And so he wouldn't, though he did at times, you know, falsely claim authorship and say it was all my idea. He was actually interested in just putting these elements together as
kind of a statement, if not an art project. And so you can say from one point of view that they were a boy band. It's also an example, isn't it, of something that we see a lot in this story. There's become a kind of recurring trend, which is McLaren's extraordinary capacity to manipulate and persuade people around him. Where do you think that came from? I mean, it comes from the grandmother.
She was a provocateur, we know this from the things that she did and said. And so he had that audacity and confidence, but he also had charisma and an interest in upsetting the apple cart, as we know. I roar with laughter years ago when Vivienne Westwood was on Desert Island Discs and she was talking about the time he was trying to persuade her, and this is before the Sex Pistols were formed,
He wouldn't do it himself, but he was trying to persuade her to go into Madame Tussauds and set fire to the waxworks of the Beatles. I thought it was a really funny thing to do, but she refused, which I thought was a bit lame. I would have done it. I mean, what are they going to arrest you for? You know, so there's that kind of sense of humour. Of criminal damage? Yeah, I suppose so, yeah. Sending fire to Madame Tussauds. It was in the Great Fire of London, 1975. Yeah.
So there was that sort of audacity and sense of fun. And so I think when you're younger and not to say impressionable, you think, yeah, let's give it a go. This sounds like it could be good. We talk about his audacity and his charisma today.
But we also have talked in this series about the way he treated Nancy at times and Johnny Rotten once called him the most evil man on earth. I mean, was there an evil side to him? I don't think he treated Nancy Spungen particularly badly. He was trying to save Sid Vicious. There wasn't an evil side to him. He liked to play up to that. I mean, he said to me much later on, I got to know him much later on in the noughties. He said to me once that he didn't believe people would believe he was the embezzler.
Because he played up to it, he called himself the embezzler in the great rock and roll swingle, the biopic of the Sex Pistols. And I kind of said, well, what did you expect? If you tell people that, they're going to believe it. And also, he took part in photo sessions where he'd hold his fingers above his head as though they were devil's horns. So he liked to play up to that. But I really, really believe that he thought he was a put-on.
and it was part of this pantomime image that he wished to project. He was undoubtedly cruel on occasion, not least towards his own son. On the back of the hardback of my book I list all of the things that he was and it starts with an abandoned son and an absent father. He was capricious and he
really sometimes didn't care about what other people felt. He was unembarrassable, which is a very strange aspect, you know. But at the same time, when Seditious was arrested for Nancy Spungen's murder, against the stories put around by John Lydon that Mick Jagger actually put up the bail, that's nonsense, McLaren was on the first flight to New York
and raised the bail money from Richard Branson to get Sid out and tried his best to keep him alive. And the prison psychiatrist who dealt with Sid Vicious over those, I think he survived through about three months maybe, wrote him a letter, which I quote in the book, which says, I see that you did everything in your power to try and keep this doomed youth alive.
And so there are these acts of charity which completely go against the grain of this caricature of him as the evil mastermind. But also perhaps a lot of acts that were self-serving too during that time, it's probably fair to say. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, I don't think you can count on that. I remember that Arthur Killer Kane, who was the bassist in the New York Dolls, who was an absolute alcoholic, used to drink peppermint schnapps for breakfast.
McLaren when he worked lunch only surely yeah
When McLaren was briefly managing them, he booked Kane into one of the first rehab centres, the Billy Rose Clinic, uptown New York. These days, every one of the Mill Rock stars spends time in rehab. But McLaren paid $800 for this poor soul to try and get over. So I don't think people who are utterly evil do that kind of thing. If you could pinpoint one thing,
What would you say Malcolm McLaren's lasting impact on culture is? Lou Stoppard, the writer, talks about this in her essay in my book, and it's something that I've long recognised. I think he prefigured and still has an influence on the multidisciplinary way in which a lot of what we call creatives now work. He wasn't just a visual artist. He wasn't a boutique owner. He wasn't just a fashion designer.
He wasn't just a band manager. He wasn't a film producer. He was all of these things and more. He was a pop star, briefly. He prefigured the way in which, say, Kanye West can move from fashion to music. The way that Virgil Abloh at Vuitton can move from architecture and interiors to fashion, to haute couture.
And I think that there are very, very many people who have benefited from him blowing the doors open on those strictures which were placed on one in the 70s and 80s.
And so he talks about in that interview backstage in Paris in 1982, he talks about the ways in which photographers, journalists, and he's thinking about magazines like The Face and ID and Blitz, and he talks about them having that punk attitude in that they felt that they could do it. So it's back to that thing, here's three chords, you know, go and form a band.
His idea was that if you've got this attitude, you can apply it to anything you want to. And it's one of the things that he did most successfully. It occurred to me that he's the original influencer, not in the 2021 sense, but in the purist sense, you know, leading thought and creativity. Yeah, exactly. I mean, he's...
He'd be actually quite a cliche character now, wouldn't he? Because he's also a disruptor. You know, that terrible phrase that people love to use if they want to sell themselves as being hip and groovy. But he actually was. He disrupted and deliberately set about to do it and not for financial gain.
as one of the other fallacies about him is that he was in it for the money and that's because he said he was, you know, the only notes that count come in wads or castrum chaos, you know, these great phrases. But in fact, when he died, he left a pretty small estate. He didn't own a home. He had a really nice left-hand drive Mercedes and a bunch of great Tom Brown suits. But, you know, this was not somebody who was...
interested in accumulating cash for its own sake. He wants to accumulate cash to make chaos. We get back to that thing, which is about disruption really. I think lots of people have taken their lesson from him and applied it in their own world. He also, the way in which we consume culture digitally these days, he was doing that way back then.
So the great song Buffalo Gals could take an 1848 song, Square Dance, and merge it with hip-hop and sampling. We do that a lot, I think, these days, and that's one of the reasons why he's an interesting bloke. One of his lessons is written on his spectacular gravestone in Highgate Cemetery, which reads, "'Better a spectacular failure than a benign success.'"
Do you agree? Yeah, I think so because I think that lots of writers and artists and creative people talk about the process of failing because it's the only way to succeed. Samuel Beckett said, you know, try once fail, try again, fail better. It's only by testing the limits that you can make your statement. I think he believed this and I think that that's true.
And it also makes him quite a unique figure because he embraces failure a lot of the time. When the Sex Pistols collapsed after only 29 months, they released one album. He moved on. And I write a lot about these figures. And the fact is they get bored and they move on. And I think that that's part of the creative process which he kind of pointed up. These days, we're all too success-driven. We have to be post-crash success.
post-pandemic, post-Brexit. We have to, you know, we're really on our uppers in certain respects. But he came from a time where you could spend eight years at art schools, testing your practice, failing, moving on. There is an irony in some of the things you're saying that a lot of that punk aesthetic has now been commodified by capitalism. What did McLaren think about that? Did it bother him? No, he thought it was funny.
he had a strange attitude to that whole business i think maybe because he'd been burnt so badly in his later years the last five years he would talk a lot about that period and what its intentions were i think he was still processing it and
In a way, he wasn't one of those, he was never one of those, there was a lot of laughter there, which no doubt covered suppressed anger, but he wasn't one of those bitter people sitting around saying, oh, they took this idea from me, you know, I came up with it, and now it's, you know, like many of the fashion houses have adopted the tropes of punk, which he and Vivienne Westwood basically created.
But he wasn't bitter about it at all. Actually, neither is she. I think he thought it was interesting and I think again it goes back to that idea of setting up a situation then seeing, watching the ripple effect. So he sent the Sex Pistols into the music business as a kind of free radical to watch and see how it would change this pretty moribund business. And in the same way,
Punk kind of became the monster that overtook the creator. But he didn't mind about that. He thought it was interesting. Fascinating. I think it's really interesting that we hear a lot about his anger, but not that much about his sense of humour, which you would have to have to create the kind of work that he created. Well, it's funny, you know, if you look at those videos that he made for Dark Rock in South Africa, they're really, really funny. They're really joyful.
they're really on a par with madness or, you know, of that era.
And they're really playful. There were lots of very funny things about the Sex Pistols at the same time as, you know, sort of earth-shaking to the establishment. And if I have one memory of him, it's laughing uproariously. He was very funny. He did great imitations. And as I say, unashamed as well. So I would sit in a restaurant and talk at the top of his voice and tell you the most outrageous stories, none of which I could repeat here about celebrities and people, let alone put into print.
But the end result was uproarious laughter. Great imitations. The original Matt Ford, you might say. What a fantastic interview. And it's just such a good reminder, whenever you're talking about these characters, there's always way more to them sometimes than you presume. And I feel like we understand Malcolm McLaren a lot better now.
Next week we've got a new scandal and it's a juicy one. We are staying in the 70s but this time we are looking at a murder mystery that rocked the aristocracy. We are telling the story of Lord Lucan. We've been waiting for this one. It is one of the biggest, most scandalous stories in British history. It's going to be an absolute classic. This is the last episode in our series The Sex Pistols. If you like our show please give us a five star rating and a review and be sure to tell your friends.
You can listen to new episodes one week early and add free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, the Wondery app or wherever you're listening right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app to listen for free. In the episode notes, you'll find some links and offers from our sponsors. Please support them by supporting them. You help us offer you this show for free.
Another way to support us is to answer a short survey at wondery.com slash survey. I'm Alice Levine. And I'm Matt Ford. Our senior producer is Joe Sykes. Our executive producers are Stephanie Jens and Marshall Louis for Wondery. Wondery.
Scammers are best known for living the high life until they're forced to trade it all in for handcuffs and an orange jumpsuit once they're finally caught. I'm Sachi Cole. And I'm Sarah Hagee. And we're the host of Scamfluencers, a weekly podcast from Wondery that takes you along the twists and turns of some of the most infamous scams of all time, the impact on victims, and what's left once a facade falls away.
We've covered stories like a Shark Tank certified entrepreneur who left the show with an investment but soon faced mounting bills, an active lawsuit filed by Larry King, and no real product to push. He then began to prey on vulnerable women instead, selling the idea of a future together while stealing from them behind their backs.
acts. To the infamous scams of Real Housewives stars like Teresa Giudice, what should have proven to be a major downfall only seemed to solidify her place in the Real Housewives Hall of Fame. Follow Scamfluencers on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to Scamfluencers early and ad-free right now on Wondery Plus.
