Malcom Mclaren passed away today, in New York. The bulk of the piece below is from a bio I wrote for Woodstock.com ten years ago. Sadly, some editing was required, to change the tense of some passages.
Malcolm McLaren, best known as the former manager of the Sex Pistols, was incredibly astute at picking up on the slightest nuances of contemporary culture and lighting an invisible fuse. He was equal parts explorer, appropriator, trash picker, entrepreneur, opportunist and artist. And he knew how to stir up a fuss.
His name seems to pop up everywhere. In addition to the Sex Pistols, he has had ties to the New York Dolls, Ronnie "the Great Train Robber" Biggs, actress Lauren Hutton, Bow Wow Wow, film critic Roger Ebbert, Boy George, French actress Catherine Deneuve and artist Keith Haring. At different times, he has been band manager, entrepreneur, fashion designer and recording artist, and he was one of the earliest to sell the trends of punk rock, vouging, hip-hop and music piracy. In 1999, when it seemed as though he was starting to slow down, he ran for Mayor of London.
Born in London in 1946, he was brought up by his grandmother and began his young adult life attending several London area art schools. While in art school, he organized a happening at an art gallery (that was shut down by the police), was involved in student revolts and traveled to Paris where he began an association with an art gangster group, the Situationists. During these art school years, his predilection for disorder was instilled.
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Photos from McLaren's funeral here
In 1971, he entered the fashion world, opening his first boutique on Kings Road. Originally named "In The Back of Paradise Garage," it would become his hub, operating under several different names and featuring constantly changing clothing lines, designed with his partner, Vivien Westwood. From this store, under it's third name " Too Fast To Live Too Young To Die," he met the New York Dolls. After yet another name change, this time to "Sex," he would go on to briefly manage the New York Dolls, during their "red patent leather" period. McLaren issued a press statement "Better Red Than Dead" and dressed the Dolls in red patent leather outfits. The intent was for the Dolls to appear as having a threatening affiliation with communism. Ultimately the band sabotaged the idea when they told the press that it was joke.
By 1975, while still operating under the name of "Sex," McLaren met a young band called "QT Jones and the Sex Pistols" and, after learning that most of their equipment had been burgled from the homes of various English rock stars, was enamored enough that he began managing them. After dropping "QT Jones" from the name and recruiting a singer they would name Johnny Rotten, they went on to be signed and dropped from two record companies within months, before landing a deal with Virgin Records.
During the short life span of the Sex Pistols (they broke up in 1978), McLaren invited soft core film maker Russ Meyer to make a film about the band, and he began writing a script with Roger Ebert, titled "Who Killed Bambi?" The project was dropped by 20th Century Fox after one scene was shot, a studio spokesman saying, "We are in the business of making family entertainment".
McLaren would later salvage the idea and some footage, assembling a film that would later be released as "The Great Rock N Roll Swindle," with director Julien Temple. It was during this process that McLaren hooked up with Ronald Biggs, the infamous Londoner known as "the Great Train Robber." Biggs, who had escaped from prison and fled to South America, was enlisted to take the place of Johhny Rotten, who had left the band in 1978. Though the middle-aged and talent-less Biggs was an unlikely front man, he was enlisted by McLaren as an ideal candidate to infuriate British authorities. Flying Sex Pistols Steve Jones and Paul Jones to the exiled Biggs' home base, the sessions produced the single "No One Is Innocent".
The Sex Pistols would soon disband, and McLaren later summed up the experience saying, "The greatest technique involved in managing the Sex Pistols was always to create the right explosion and when know that it was going to happen, and as manager, run into the toilet and come out after the explosion and say, 'God, what's happened?"
In 1980, with his shop operating under the name "World's End", Malcolm McLaren discovers and produces Adam Ant, Bow Wow Wow and a young Boy George. Bow Wow Wow included Adam Ant's backing band (persuaded to leave Ant by McLaren) and featured a 13 year-old girl singer named Annabella, whose youth would prompt another McLaren ploy. By recreating Manet's painting "Dejeuner Sur l'herbe" using the members of the group and Annabella in the nude, as a record cover, he again managed to anger officials (and the girl's mother).
The concept for the new group, and accompanying line of pirate influenced clothes, was to promote music piracy, particularly the home taping of songs broadcast on the radio. The first single by Bow Wow Wow was "C30 C60 C90 Go" a name derived from the names designated by different lengths of cassette tapes. The press release was accompanied by a cassette single (said to be the very first in the format) and a statement that "Copyrighting of this sound recording is UNLAWFUL." The lyrics speak for themselves:
When I went in your shop,
And you said my records were out of stock,
So I don't buy records in your shop,
I tape 'em all, I'm top of the pops
Now I've got a new way to move,
It's shiny and black and don't need a groove,
I don't need no album rack,
I carry my collection over my back
C-30 C-60 C-90 Go
Off the radio I get a constant flow,
Hit it! Pause it! Record it and play,
Or turn it on rewind and rub it away
The record company, EMI, was not amused. As the first label to drop the Sex Pistols, they had already been bamboozled once by McLaren. The song was a hit, but they stopped production, issuing a press release that stated "We cannot promote a band who blatantly promote home taping."
By 1983 McLaren had become fascinated with the New York hip-hop scene, then still in it's infancy. He would later say, "I came to rap on a street corner near Harlem, and I noticed this young black kid wearing a T-shirt saying 'Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols' on it, and he was scratching. To me, that seemed like a miraculous kind of vision. Punk, from England, had made it all the way to New York's Harlem, and now here was this whole new music to be discovered as well."
He began an album called "Duck Rock" which combined international music, rap influenced lyrics and some of the earliest scratching to reach a mass audience. The liner notes described collaborators the World Famous Supreme Team as DJs from New York that had "developed a technique using record players like instruments, replacing the power chord of the guitar by the needle of a gramophone, moving it manually backwards and forwards across the surface of the record. We call it scratching."
The album was quietly groundbreaking. Not only had it introduced scratching, hip-hop culture and cover artist Keith Haring to a mass audience, it was one of the first to introduce a world music hybrid in an international pop music context.
McLaren was still active, with Westwood, in clothes designing. The two opened another shop called Nostalgia of Mud (in 1981). To coincide with the release of "Duck Rock," they showed a new fashion collection (featuring textile prints by Keith Haring) in Paris, using music that mixed rap with opera. Within a year, this would be another path that McLaren would wander. In 1984, he released his second album "Fans" which mixed opera with R & B and hip hop elements. The album, and featured single "Madame Butterfly" (which was a hit in Europe), predated MTV's "Hip Hopera: Carmen" (aired in May 2000) by a whopping 16 years.
After 1984, McLaren was seemingly everywhere, though not as much in the public eye. In 1985, he went to Hollywood, pitching movies such as "Heavy Metal Surf Nazis" and "Rock 'n' Roll Godfather." Now split up with Westwood, he began a relationship with actress Lauren Hutton. Though seen as an odd pairing by many who knew McLaren, the press was uninterested, presumably because they had covered enough of McLaren antics.
The next few years would be filled by a legal battle over the Sex Pistols name (which he gave up the rights to by walking out of court), an exhibition of his work (at the Museum of Contemporary Art in New York) and pitching another film project (this time to Steven Spielberg's Amblin Productions). In 1989, McLaren released a third album, this time recruiting Jeff Beck and Bootsy Collins. Titled "Waltz Darling" and credited to McLaren and the Bootzilla Orchestra, it was another odd pairing, this time with waltzes and funk. He also released a single "Deep In Vogue,' inspired by the New York semi-dance craze. Though not a big seller, the single predated and inspired Madonna's "Vogue," the song that put voguing into it's short-lived limelight.
From 1990 through 1999, McLaren was still at it, keeping up a pace that looked that by now, seemed unstoppable. He wrote and directed a TV movie, "The Ghosts Of Oxford Street," released a forth album, "Paris" (featuring Catherine Deneuve), and toured the Far East, Australia and New Zealand as a lecturer.
He was commissioned to begin writing his autobiography, created and managed a Chinese all girl group called JUNGK. An album, called "Buffalo Gals Back To Skool," consisting of "Duck Rock" remixes (by high profile hip-hop producers) was released in 1998.
McLaren's decade culminated with an unsuccessful bid for Mayor of London in 1999. His chances were slim from the outset. By design, the campaign was pure McLaren. (One of his platforms called for the legalization of cannabis.)
From all appearances, McLaren seems to have been on hiatus since the mayoral election. With the exception of a mash-up (of the Carpenters "Love Will Keep Us Together" and Joy Division's "Love Will Tear Us Apart," roughly a year ago), there had been hardly a peep from the McLaren camp in the past ten years. It's quite possible that it was only because he was involved in projects even more peripheral than those in the past (and, if the pattern continues, later someone else will receive the bulk of the credit). Well, then. Long live the shit stirrers.
If you follow this blog and read the last post, the irony may not be lost on you. This post, the first without links leading directly to mp3 files, is about the person who practically invented the term "music piracy".
NOTE TO UK MUSIC PUBLSHERS: These links lead to other sites:
Sex Pistols - Anarchy in the UK mp3 at Music is Art (5th song at bottom of post)
Bow Wow Wow - C30 C60 C90 Go mp3 at Town Full of Losers (4th song down)
Malcolm McLaren - Buffalo Gals mp3 at 8106 (Scroll down to 4th song)
Malcolm McLaren - Double Dutch mp3 at Crying All the Way to the Chip Shop
Malcolm McLaren & the World Famous Supreme Team – Hey DJ at 8106 (6th song)
Malcolm McLaren and the Bootzilla Orchestra - Deep in Vogue mp3 at Nervous Acid
Added 4/12/2010: Comments from John Lydon, Steve Jones, Annabella Lwin, David Johansen, Vivien Westwood and others at Pitchfork
Added 4/22/10: Photos of the funeral at the Telegraph web site
Added 4/24/10: Roger Ebert on McLaren, Russ Meyers and the aborted Sex Pistols film "Who Killed Bambi?"
Malcolm McLaren - A Chronology
McLaren declares Damien Hirst's $160K clothing collection fake
McLaren's Manifesto for London
McLaren's obituary in the Guardian
Malcolm McLaren's run for Mayor of London
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