Paul Gorman - The Life & Times of Malcolm McLaren

CONSTABLE

First published in Great Britain in 2020 by Constable

Copyright Paul Gorman, 2020

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-1-47212-110-3

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Endpapers: contact sheet of Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood in various locations in Londons West End, 31 March 1979. Photography by Barry Plummer. Stickers for Mayor of London campaign, 2000. Designed by Scott King with Matthew Worley.

This book is dedicated to my love Caz Facey.

It should be said right at the outset that I barely knew the man. Certainly not as well as the dozens of other voices cited in this riveting biography, nor for anywhere near as long: perhaps a half-a-dozen meetings in the legendary flesh and the same number of phone conversations mark the narrow boundaries of my relationship with the remarkable Malcolm McLaren. Then again, even the briefest of encounters with a genuinely phosphorescent being tends to burn their shape indelibly onto the retina, so that theyre still there decades later if you shut your eyes.

With his fuse-wire physique and all that bubbling ginger foam erupting from his scalp, it didnt seem as if there was much more to him than essence; as if his whole personality had been distilled from an inflammable creative drive. It wasnt easy to imagine him boiling an egg without it being part of some ingenious agenda, such was the extraordinary focus that he brought to everything, the sense that every action was a project to which hed commit his last subversive molecule. He was, I thought, a figure made entirely out of counterculture, someone who had flared inevitably into being from his tinder times, a petrol spirit without preamble or precedent.

While the above is obviously true, it cannot be more than a hasty dayglo cartoon of the man I met, viewed in a possibly infatuated lens and through the dazzle of his own mythology. There had to be a mortal being and a human story somewhere under all the zeitgeist, and Paul Gormans thorough excavations here have finally exposed that narrative, along with the pre-torn and slogan-stencilled fabric of the century it mostly happened in.

And what a century, and what a narrative, both scarcely credible from our contemporary perspective and yet both inarguably real, fabulous glimpses of a world thats gone. The fertile post-war topsoil that Malcolm McLaren grew from, bombed and therefore rich in nitrates, was a medium of forgotten colours and Byzantine intricacy that to modern eyes cannot help but appear as an outrageous fiction, unbelievable and Gormenghastly. Theres the anti-matter impresarios infancy and his redacted dad, his wayward mum out sugar-babying with Charlie Clore, his monstrous and sociopathic gran patiently sharpening the child into a poison dart to fling at the society she hated. Theres the style explosion of McLarens teenage years, safaris in the febrile city dark, Mandy Rice-Davies mopping down the bar and at the all-night caf David Litvinoff, appraising culture with a knowing Chelsea smile. Theres the young art students discovery of psychogeography, transfusing Londons streets and their intoxicating ghosts Peter the painter, Blake in a red bonnet watching Newgate burn, Diana Dors directly into his already-effervescing frontal lobe. This is his natal dirt, the neon nutrients that made him what he was, brandied in history and on fire with the future.

The trajectory charted here, from the flag-burning sixties radical in Grosvenor Square to the punk godfather and nemesis of hippies in the seventies, belies our neat perception of one movement born from only snarling opposition to the other, as if what emerged from that Kings Road boutique could be reduced to no more than John Lydons I Hate Pink Floyd T-shirt. As if that incendiary period was nothing but a spat between antipathetic hairstyles. In Paul Gormans reading of events we see instead a long, unbroken continuity of artistic dissent, the foetal punk scene fed from a placenta of Syd Barrett, Hawkwind and the Oz trials; swaddled in the International Times or the anarcho-psychedelic wraps of a majestic Jamie Reid. Just as Marxism has been called capitalisms most sophisticated method of talking about itself, so too can punk be seen as the late-sixties underground subjected to a vicious, necessary self-critique in order to transform itself to something new. One might think that theres only ever been a single counterculture, which, once in a while, changes its shoes.

When I met Malcolm he was at a juncture of his life and art that, given hindsight and this current volume, was most probably a haunted crossroads. His immaculate delinquent project of almost ten years before, the blackmail-lettered albatross that he knew would be dangling from the obituaries, had just gone down in litigation, flames and seven-figure settlements. Meanwhile, his second-act career in media and film remained in its uncertain early stages. Still, he gleefully rehearsed his new pantomime role as Baron Hardup for the tabloid snappers with the same obvious relish that had marked his previous performance as Aladdins evil uncle a persona then on prominent display in Alex Coxs Sid and Nancy. This Mephistophelian-if-not-actually-Satanic posture was at that point a default perception of McLaren, and from my perspective hard to square with the immensely likeable and charming man that I shook hands with. While I was, and still remain, in no position to refute the allegations made by those who knew him better and at earlier stages of his dragonfly development, my own experience was of someone else entirely. This discrepancy, between the warm and funny contra-intellectual and the moustache-twirling serial villain, was a disconnect that Id return to now and then over the years, unresolved until the insights in this possibly definitive biography.

The late science-fiction revolutionary Harlan Ellison once floated the idea of one word people; individuals whose behaviour cannot be understood until youre in possession of the single word or phrase that is the key to them. While Ellison enlisted both hooker and junkie as his judgemental examples, with relation to Malcolm McLaren there is a more sympathetic word suggested in the early chapters of The Life & Times..., that word being autistic. Though this diagnosis will forever be unprovable, it would explain a number of the mans apparent contradictions, not least the divide between his seeming lack of empathy and my impression of somebody who was by no means a stranger to compassion. If considered in this light, McLarens wilful lifelong drive towards outsider status is immediately understandable as an attempt to formalise and outwardly perform the alienation that was there inside. A place on the autism spectrum can be seen as possibly resulting from or else exacerbated by the gothic Freudian nightmare of his childhood, as well as perhaps his only means of psychologically surviving that experience. Such an uncoupling of the intellect from the emotional responses is potentially also a point of origin for the ferocious drive and focus that fuelled all of his endeavours, heaving his brick telegrams proclaiming Magics Back through cultures stained-glass windows, something almost innocent in his appalling disregard for consequence.