The Life & Times of Malcolm McLaren: The Biography

"Malcolm was someone I knew. What I would say about Malcolm is that he was absolutely mesmerising company. Mesmerising. He was an extraordinary storyteller, who would draw you in. It was like being around the campfire with an elder telling stories: first-hand accounts of an extraordinary life. His upbringing was disturbed and disturbing. He was an art student and somehow seems to have played a major role in the LSE riots in the late 1960s. He then moved into the fashion trade. He had a shop on the King’s Road, the name and identity of which changed multiple times: Let it Rock; Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die; Sex (which is where the name Sex Pistols came from); Seditionaries; and then World’s End. Malcolm’s founding idea for the Pistols was straightforward and simple: he wanted to do a sort of Bay City Rollers, but with cooler clothes. You remember the Bay City Rollers? Shang-a-Lang, Bye Bye Baby? The band wore a sort of uniform; shortened trousers, caps, lots of tartan … and their legions of fans dressed in the same gear, tartan clothing became very big business. That’s what impressed Malcolm most. The Rollers had great pop songs. I wonder if you’re aware that Dee Dee Ramone was a big fan of the Rollers? He based the “Hey-Ho, Let’s Go” thing in Blitzkrieg Bop on the Roller’s song Saturday Night… but Malcolm had no real interest in the music. For him, image was paramount, image led to sales. He wanted to create a cool version of The Rollers. The idea being that he and his partner, Vivienne Westwood would style the band in order to drive sales of the clothes they designed. Malcolm’s shop was a social hub…it’s where he first met the New York Dolls. Lots of people were hanging out there. Steve Jones, Paul Cook were always going there. Steve, of course, was trying to steal things, a self-confessed kleptomaniac. Glen Matlock was given a job as a Saturday boy at the shop. The three Johns: Lydon, Beverley (Sid Vicious), and Wardle (Jah Wobble) were a fixture. Chrissie Hynde was always there too. My buddy Marco Pirroni was a regular. It became an extraordinary meeting point for people and of course, it was from this crowd that Malcolm put the band together. “Malcolm McLaren had no real interest in the music. For him, image was paramount, image led to sales” So, Malcolm’s idea was to get a band together that would act as a vehicle to sell his clothes. But by one of those strange quirks of fate, the band turned out to be fantastic. You know, I don’t think Malcolm was ever able to understand that. I think he went to his grave thinking they couldn’t really play, but Steve was, and is, a great guitar player, Johnny is a superb lyricist and one of the best frontmen in the history of rock. Glen was a really good songwriter. Glen later left to be replaced by Sid Vicious—who looked great but couldn’t play at all. I think it’s fair to say that the Pistols’ days as a proper band ended when Glen left and Sid joined. At that point, they became a cartoon band. Paul Gorman’s biography is magnificent: Malcolm was many-sided; mercurial. He was an extraordinarily charismatic person, and despite his many flaws, there was something very special about him. Some people have said that Gorman takes McLaren at his own word too much. Maybe, maybe not, but it’s one of the best biographies I’ve ever read. It’s unputdownable. I’m not sure you do. I’m not sure you could. With most people, I think we could give a reasonable description of them which would be more or less accurate. With Malcolm, I could only say this is the Malcolm that I came across. Adam Ant always said that Malcolm was a genius, a fountain that sprayed out brilliant ideas. But he had no clue about implementation. He needed someone to enact the ideas for him. I think he actually became a different person depending upon circumstance. I’d run into Malcolm a few times down the years, but in the late 1990s he came to see us in our studio in Primrose Hill, he wanted to sign to our production company. He and I spent about three hours together, chatting away. So far as I was concerned, he was my new best friend. However, a few days later, I was walking down Erskine Road in Primrose Hill and saw Malcolm coming the other with a friend of mine, the promoter Rob Hallett. I said, “Hello Malcolm.” Rob said, “Oh, do you two know each other?” Without even looking at me, Malcolm said, “No.” I never knew whether he’d genuinely forgotten me or whether it was because I’d decided not to sign him to my publishing company. You know what? I’m making myself sound cleverer than I really am. In truth, I would have signed him. I was completely mesmerised by Malcolm, but Tessa—my wife, the managing director of the publishing company and, by the way, a far more sensible person than me—said we’d be crazy to sign him, he was trouble. And she was right. He fell out with everyone he worked with, and he was forever in litigation. Now, you asked me whether Malcolm was the kind of guy who took credit for other people’s work. I think it’s difficult to avoid that conclusion. Hugh Hudson directed a classic British Airways commercial for which McLaren created a soundtrack, or at least was credited with creating the soundtrack. Remember that big one in about 1989? Really big news. They used a version of the Flower Duet from the Delibes opera Lakmé , but with a backbeat. It was a great success. However, there’s no way in the world that Malcolm could have come up with that arrangement, he simply didn’t have the ability. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter After the success of the commercial, Malcolm decided he’d invented a brilliant new musical genre: Opera House. He made or at least was in some way involved in a pretty terrible record of that name. With the awful ‘we love opera house’ chant at the beginning. I’m sure the idea for that chant genuinely was Malcolm’s. Clueless. But the fact is that sometimes cluelessness works because let’s face it, only a clueless person would come up with the idea of creating a cool Bay City Rollers. Punk didn’t really work in the way Malcolm had hoped. The culture which emerged was very much do-it-yourself. His designs were copied and he didn’t make the grand fortune he’d hoped. And then he made that ridiculous film, The Great Rock and Roll Swindle. But all this illustrates something very important about the music business. It’s what you do with what turns up that defines success or failure, and Malcolm was sometimes very good and dealing with what turned up! I actually think it’s a touch of genius. With the Pistols, as we were discussing earlier, the Grundy show was the sine qua non of their success. That wasn’t planned. Malcolm used to make out it was a plan, but that simply wasn’t true. According to Malcolm’s original plan, it had gone badly wrong. For some reason, the press picked up on “the Filth and the Fury” and overnight they became the epitome of bad boy rock. Malcolm was clever enough to ride the storm. Completely. He had some vague understanding of Situationism, but as I say, the core of the idea was nothing more than getting his clothes on a successful band and then selling them by the shedload. That didn’t really work because the punks made their own stuff. And the anarchy talk… well I don’t think anyone really thought about it very deeply. It was just a cool thing to say, and it had a nice symbol that was easy to spray on walls. Be all that as it may, Malcolm’s life is fascinating. He had an extraordinary restless energy: he never stopped trying. All success has an element of luck, and Malcolm’s approach was often, in fact usually , random, but he got a lot of things very right."