A pretty vacant attempt to anarchize retail banking
Virgin Money can’t bring the same destruction to sector that Sex Pistols did to music
One of the more depressing tweets I’ve seen recently arrived courtesy of Richard Branson’s Virgin Money business: “Introduce a little anarchy to your wallet with our new Sex Pistols credit card.”
Punk, it seems, is finally dead, no matter what the graffiti says on pubtoilet walls.
It makes me sad that Virgin Money is commandeering punk rock for its marketing campaign, but more because of the scant prospect of the promised anarchy in British retail banking than out of nostalgia for the golden age of punk. At a time when anyone with a computer can watch Miley Cyrus swinging naked on a wrecking ball in a YouTube video, it’s hard to explain just how shocking the Sex Pistols were in the mid-’70s. I remember almost wearing out my copy of “Anarchy in the U.K.” and my mother tutting at tabloid pictures of Sid Vicious in a swastika T-shirt.
Never mind that the Sonics, Los Saicos, the New York Dolls, the Ramones, the Stooges and the Stranglers all predate Malcolm McLaren putting Johnny (Rotten) Lydon in a rehearsal room with soon-to-be bandmates Glen Matlock, Paul Cook and Steve Jones.
Lydon’s evil chuckle in the intro to “Anarchy” reeks of the mischief the Pistols wrought and the revolution punk brought to the music industry. It was all epitomized in the fanzine exhortation “this is a chord, this is another, this is a third. Now form a band.” Thousands did, emboldened by the disregard the Pistols showed for musicianship and technical ability over passion and snarling.
So seeing punk-record album covers in credit-card promotions triggers a bit of melancholy, but no more than that. The Pistols, after all, were always all about the money. JayneAnne Gadhia, Virgin Money’s chief executive officer, was simultaneously apologetic and defiant in defending her hijacking of punk.
“There will, I’m sure, be all sorts of debate about our approach. And I’ve thought hard about whether this is the right thing for us to do. But in the end, I’m proud of Virgin’s history. Proud of the difference it has made in the world. And proud that we have a chance to be cool.”
Given that the Pistols were signed to the Virgin record label when they launched “God Save the Queen” in 1977 on an unsuspecting nation, Gadhia has a point about Virgin’s proud history.
But she’s as wrong about being cool as she is about Virgin Money revolu- tionizing retail banking.
A series of government investigations and initiatives has failed to introduce much competition into the industry. The four biggest British banks control more than 70 per cent of the 80 million personal chequing accounts (known in Britain as current accounts). Of those, just 1.1 million customers switched banks in the 12 months to April.
Newcomers such as Virgin, built on the skeleton of failed mortgage lender Northern Rock, Spain’s Santander and London-centric startup Metro Bank, haven’t made much headway against the entrenched Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds and Royal Bank of Scotland’s NatWest. So trying to pretend that Branson’s initiative in banking is akin to the creative destruction the Sex Pistols brought to the music scene is a stretch, or “pretty vacant,” to borrow from their 1977 hit record.
As Lydon told the audience at the end of the final Pistols concert at the Winterland Theatre in California in January 1978, “Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?”