Swindler's List; Malcolm McLaren (1946 - 2010)

I have to confess to being a bit teary-eyed last week when word came through that Malcolm McLaren had died from a cancer-related illness in New York, a city he decamped to on more than one occasion looking for musical – and no doubt other! – mischief.

The flamboyant Englishman wasn’t a friend or even somebody I'd call myself a rabid fan of, but as one of the architects of British punk he did play a significant role in my life.
My first encounter with Malcolm and his courtiers was in December 1976 when having been instantly seduced by the Sex Pistols’ debut ‘Anarchy In The UK’ single, I made a pilgrimage to his and Vivienne Westwood’s newly rechristened King’s Road clothes shop, Seditionaires.
A decidedly non-streetwise 14-year-old who’d never heard of Situationism yet alone read its manifesto, I wasn’t the least bit prepared for what lurked behind its barricaded façade.
It wasn’t so much the S&M fetishwear that nearly made me pee my pants as the people who were standing around the counter modeling it. The only one I recognised was punk scenester Jordan (no relation) who soon after that landed a starring role in Derek Jarman’s Jubilee, and mis-managed Adam & The Ants in their pre-dandy highwaymen days. I thought Bowie four years earlier doing his Ziggy shtick was as exotic as it got, but these guys and girls made him look like Gilbert O’Sullivan in comparison. Watching over them almost paternally was Malcolm, a gangly character with a mushroom cloud head of red curls. For the next 18 months the Pistols and him were my world.
Fast forward to August 1994 and I’m sat in the bar at Dublin’s Conrad Hotel waiting to interview Malcolm for Hot Press.
“Can we concentrate on the new album rather than ancient history?” the lady from Island Records asked.
“Of course,” I lied.
It may have been ancient history to her, but I was still mad as hell at the way the Pistols had imploded on stage in San Francisco in January 1978.
“Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?” Johnny Rotten had sneered at the end of the Winterland Ballroom gig, which was the signal for Steve Jones and Paul Cook to bugger off to Rio and meet Ronnie Biggs; Sid Vicious to develop an even worse heroin habit; and Rotten to revert to his real name and start Public Image Ltd. To a hopelessly naïve teenager who couldn’t have taken the words of ‘Anarchy…’ more literally if they’d been hand-chiseled in stone and given to him by an old man from Israel, it had been the ultimate act of betrayal and, damnit, I wanted answers!
Here’s McLaren’s response and the rest of that 1994 interview, which with the benefit of hindsight found him talking about not only the Pistols, but also Vivienne Westwood, the New York Dolls, the Royal Family, Kurt Cobain, Naomi Campbell, Peter Grant and, well, pretty much everything apart from his ill-advised foray into paedo-pop with Annabella Lwin and the rest of Bow Wow Wow. As all of his obituaries have noted, he was a master at airbrushing history.
Anyway, take it away Malcolm…

“Your reaction was typical and, to be honest, fully justified,” proffers the self-proclaimed instigator of The Great Rock ‘N’ Roll Swindle. “A lot of people felt cheated when the Sex Pistols broke up and as the so-called ‘authority’ figure connected to the band, it was inevitable that I copped most the blame. Whilst accepting that I could have handled the situation better, you must remember that the Pistols’ growth as a commodity was so frenzied that not even a team of the City of London’s finest businessmen could have prevented that final implosion. I created the group to compete with the Bay City Rollers and sell bondage-trousers. Along the way, I threw in a couple of good ideas I’d borrowed from the ’60s and they turned out to be bigger than anything I’d ever imagined.”
I’ve always thought of myself as a fairly magnanimous sort of a chap, willing to let bygones be bygones and generally accepting that everyone’s entitled to a spell of rank incompetence. However, when I heard that after 16 years of festering hatred I was finally going to come face-to-face with Malcolm McLaren, it was straight off to Ron & Reggie’s Gangland Surplus Store where one set of knuckledusters and a length of lead piping later, I felt equipped for our encounter.
“I may have been portrayed – and, indeed, contributed to my portrayal – as an out and out bastard,” he pleads, “but I’ve never consciously tried to fuck anyone over. If I am guilty of wrong-doing, it’s in allowing my obsession to drive a good idea home to blinker my judgement. And that, unfortunately, caused people like Johnny Rotten to get hurt.
“What I can’t understand,” he adds “is now that he’s got his royalties – his bleeding pound of flesh – why does he insist on opening old wounds? Can’t he, as I do, rejoice in the fact that he was a principal player in one of the most magnificent periods of British rock ‘n’ roll history?”
I came prepared to slap him over the head with a blunt instrument but before he’s even sunk his first Campari & Soda, I find myself warming to a lovable old rogue who’s managed to make a career out of being in the right place at roughly the right time. Seeing as he doesn’t have horns or a pointy tail, why did Malcolm insist on depicting himself in The Great Rock ‘N’ Roll Swindle as a cross between Fagin and Hitler’s mate Paul-Joseph Goebbels?
“I was legend building,” he hisses conspiratorially. “I literally wrote that film as a Sun journalist because I wanted the Sex Pistols to remain an enigma that leaves a nasty taste in the mouth. Rotten can try and put the story right a million times in his bloody book but everyone’s going to read it and go, ‘I’m not sure if that’s the real truth!’ His version of those gloriously anarchic events is no more accurate than mine but at least I’ve the good grace to admit that, at points, I’ve lied through my teeth. And that’s the beauty of the legend – nobody will ever be able to entirely separate fact from fiction.”
While there’s a certain perverse logic to that argument, surely the Pistols deserve better than to be remembered as the musical equivalent of the ‘Freddie Starr Ate My Hamster’ headline?
“History takes time to put those who make it into proper perspective,” suggests McLaren switching into what I suspect may finally be bullshit-free mode. “One day the Sex Pistols will be hailed as great British patriots for being the first people since Oliver Cromwell to not only question the validity of the monarchy but seriously threaten its continuance.
“Prior to 1977, you’d have been stoned in the street for daring to criticise the Royal Family. Now, slagging off Fergie’s arse is a national sport and I don’t think it’ll be long before it turns into a bloodsport with the rank and file rising up and overthrowing what is the most outmoded and socially repressive of institutions. I myself prey for the day when the Queen’s head sits atop a pole on Tower Hill.”
Oops, there goes the OBE! Malcolm got his first taste of rock management in 1973 when as an aspiring fashion designer he ventured to Manhattan and promptly fell in with a bunch of cross-dressing, riffed-up gutterpunks called The New York Dolls.
“Without seeing them live,” he enthuses, “there’s no way you could appreciate just how good at being bad the Dolls were. At the centre of this glorious shambles was Johnny Thunders, a walking charisma factory who didn’t give a fuck about anything. Or at least that’s what I thought. I was very naïve about drugs and didn’t realise that at one point the band’s entire purpose was earning the $30 or $40 they needed for their next fix. I’ve been accused of encouraging their bad habits to gain notoriety but in those days I wouldn’t have recognised heroin if you’d sprinkled it on my cornflakes. There’s no easy way to deal with heroin addiction, especially when the person involved is hellbent on self-destruction.”
The most perplexing of recent rock ‘n’ roll mysteries is how Johnny Thunders ever managed to reach his 44th birthday, the guitarist finally popping his cowboy boots last year after his long-suffering heart decided it had taken enough abuse. For all McLaren’s bravado, he looks visibly upset at the mention of Thunders’ name and even more shaken when I compare Kurt Cobain’s suicide to Sid Vicious’ chemically-induced demise.
“It was almost a replay of the same scenario,” he concurs, “except for the fact that Kurt was undoubtedly a lot brighter and more talented than poor old Sid. No one will ever know whether his overdose was deliberate but I imagine that his demons weren’t that different from Kurt’s and his death was an inevitability brought about by not having the inner strength to cast them off.”
McLaren recently came in for considerable journalistic flak when he told delegates at Manchester’s In The City music convention that he’d paid “a substantial sum” to have evidence linking Sid Vicious with Nancy Spungen’s murder destroyed. Was this a heartfelt confession or, as his detractors would have it, a ploy to get himself back into the headlines?
“No, that wasn’t in any way premeditated. I was asked in the chair by the manger of Dire Straits, ‘how did you feel when Sid got arrested for stabbing his girlfriend?’ I told him that as his caretaker, his godfather, I was obliged to dig into the Sex Pistols coffers and spend $50,000 on getting him the best legal aid I could find. Now, the best legal aid I could find recommended that the wisest way to invest that money was paying for the knife to be lost down in the precinct or, at the very least, wiped clean.
“I thought, ‘fuck, I’m dealing with the Mafia here!’, but not wanting Sid to spend 30 years in jail, I gave them the fifty grand. Of course, Sid dies three weeks later of an overdose and I’m told the money’s non-refundable. I don’t even know whether the bloody knife was washed or not!”
Although his name will forever be prefixed with the legend “former Sex Pistols manager”, McLaren’s C.V. extends way beyond the confines of punk rock. Besides his other multifarious musical activities, Malcolm and former girlfriend Vivienne Westwood were instrumental in rescuing fashion from the catwalk and putting it back where it belongs – on the street.
“Unfortunately,” rues the Robin Hood of haute couture, “we liberated it from one oppressor – the elitists – and handed it over to another – the tabloid press. I’m 100% in favour of rock ‘n’ roll being allied to fashion but I abhor the idea of supermodels replacing musicians as icons for a generation. Fashion designers became philosophers in the ‘80s but ultimately they didn’t have very much to say. All that was left then was the models themselves and they’ve proved to be the same as silent movie stars. They look glamorous but as soon as they open their mouths, the mystique disappears and you realise they’re no more exciting than the girl on the local supermarket check-out. That’s it – your voyeuristic view of glamour suddenly turns into a trip to Sainsbury’s. Fashion is up there with cans of beans and packets of chewing-gum as a consumer product.
“I adore strong, capable women,” he continues warming to the theme, “but when it comes to the likes of Naomi Campbell – who I’ve met and have no time for – their only attribute is being able to hold their breath and stamp their feet until they get their own way. Far more alluring would be a Cindy Crawford whose flawless beauty is matched every inch of the way by her mental capacity. It’s a cliché but if you have the brain to work out the target, sex can be used as a weapon.”
Such was the impact made by their modified fetishwear that the going rate nowadays for a McLaren/Westwood original – if you can find it – is in the region of £400. Bearing in mind his self-proclaimed fondness for relieving mug punters of their cash, why did Malcolm ever bale out of the rag trade?
“Vivienne decided she wanted to be a fashion designer in the mainstream. I had to leave the fold at that point because I was only interested in fashion as a means of creating constant upheaval at street level. When fashion was there for fashion’s sake, I was bloody bored stiff. I’ll never forget the woman from Italian Vogue coming up to me after the Paris Fashion Show and asking, ‘Malcolm, why do you make poor clothes for rich people?’ This was at the time of the hobo look which was allied to the track ‘Buffalo Gals’ and I turned round and told her, ‘the whole thesis of this collection, darling, is to make rich people look poor, so poor people can look rich!’ Of course, she couldn’t grasp this at all and I decided there and then that I was fighting my battles in the wrong place.”
Since severing his personal and professional ties with Vivienne Westwood, McLaren has concentrated almost exclusively on his role as a musical magpie – stealing influences from every conceivable quarter and occasionally making a record that’s worth more than the sum of its parts. ‘Buffalo Gals’, for instance, gave the mainstream its first taste of scratching, while his artful adaptation of ‘Madame Butterfly’ took opera into the charts long before Freddie met Montserrat or Luciano Pavarotti wrapped his laughing gear round ‘Nessun Dorma’. His latest flight of fancy finds him paying tribute to the French café culture that during the mid-’60s made the short hop across the English Channel and permeated his favourite square mile of London, Soho.
“I was trying to come up with something clever for the title,” McLaren confesses, “and then I thought, fuck, we’ll call it Paris because that’s essentially what it is – a distillation of the sights, the sounds, the smells, the sex of Europe’s most captivating city. As ever, my motives for making the album were entirely selfish – I wanted to recreate the magical buzz I got when I first heard Art Blakey and Miles Davis and I needed an excuse to be able to ‘phone up Catherine Deneuve and François Hardy and say, ‘hey, let’s have dinner!’
“My only regret is that we weren’t able to call on Serge Gainsbourg, who’s someone I’ve often considered a kindred spirit. Like me, he was a grand amateur who couldn't sing and who kicked life up the bloody arse. Remember the time he went on that chat show and told Whitney Houston he wanted to fuck her? That was brilliant.”
Paris is basically US3’s Hand On The Torch without the breakbeats, a slick approximation of imported ‘50s American jazz offset by McLaren narrating and occasionally crooning his way along the Seine, down the Champs Elysee and back to his 200 franc a night hotel for a spot of le bonking. Hardy and Deneuve guest on two of the tracks and, as with all his solo efforts, the LP swings violently between the wonderfully inspired and the hopelessly inept. Which, in an odd way, is meant as a compliment.
“Well, I shall take it as one then,” Malcolm laughs good-naturedly. “Look, I’m not trained, I’m not a musician and I’m certainly not a pop star. I’ve always believed that rock ‘n’ roll is the home of the amateur, a classless activity where inspiration is a far more valuable commodity than money or musical profiency. Generally it’s a minor art but sometimes there are moments – only moments – when it becomes a major art and you get The Who, The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, the Sex Pistols, Nirvana and perhaps Malcolm McLaren.”
You’ll notice that roll-of-honour doesn’t include Led Zeppelin, a band once derided by the Pistols for being the epitome of drugged-up dinosaur rock and who are now central characters in McLaren’s latest escapade, a $15 million big screen telling of the Peter Grant life story.
“I’ve roped in Peter as my partner,” he reveals. “After all, you couldn’t make a Peter Grant movie without Peter Grant’s involvement – one, because you’d end up having your legs broken and two, he’s the only person fully conversant with the extent of Led Zeppelin’s glorious excess. Robert Plant and the others got the cheques but Peter Grant was the thug among godfathers who made the deals.”
Does Malcolm relate to the larger-than-life Led Zep mentor on a personal level?
“No, we were operating on completely different plains. I was a mis-manager, a former art college student whose wild, intellectual ideas only occasionally touched base with reality and he was a sussed, streetwise operator who understood the intricacies of the business and lusted for fame and notoriety of his own. I was far too snobby and pompous to need that recognition and while he thrived on the extremes of the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle, I simply didn’t have the metabolism to cope with it.”
As anyone who’s thumbed through Hammer Of The Gods will testify, Led Zeppelin were Spinal Tap right down to the stroppy girlfriends, sparsely attended rooftop parties and disastrous tours of American Air Force bases.
“They were certainly as comical as they were outrageous,” McLaren agrees. “My favourite story is the time they all went to Graceland, got ushered into the Jungle Room and Peter inadvertently sat down on Elvis’ dad! Granty – who must have been 16 or 17 stone – was worried that he’d committed a bit of a faux pas but Elvis came over to him afterwards and said, ‘I’ve wanted to do that for years!’ We’re currently, as Hollywood parlance would have it, developing the script and hope to start shooting next spring. Michael D’Angelo has been appointed director and Peter is trying to persuade Robert Plant that rather than having session men labour their way through ‘Stairway To Heaven’ and ‘Kashmir’, we should be allowed to use the originals.”
With his publicist semaphoring that he’s late for his next appointment, Malcolm leans over, clasps my hand and imparts perhaps the most telling line of the whole interview.
“It’s a game, a huge great big bloody scam and I’m playing to win!”
So far, you’d have to say he’s ahead on points.