“To be bad is good, because to be good is simply boring,” the formidable Rose Corré Isaacs would tell her grandson, Malcolm McLaren, a mantra that he would live by. As Paul Gorman’s mammoth biography illustrates, McLaren was never boring, but he could be a dreadful pain in the arse.
The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren details the wild existence of the late artist, fashion impresario, music manager and film-maker, who is variously described here as a “psychotic visionary”, a “genius”, a “conman” and, according to Sex Pistol John Lydon, “the most evil man on earth”. His story spans art school in the 1960s, punk in the 70s, hip-hop and a spell in Los Angeles in the 80s, a failed 2000 bid to become mayor of London and his final years giving theatrical public lectures and exhibiting his art. In his author’s note, Gorman explains his approach, which involved going through a previously unseen cache of papers left by McLaren’s father, Peter, along with talking to anyone who ever crossed Malcolm’s path, barring his ex-partner Vivienne Westwood and their son, Joe Corré, both of whom, he notes crisply, “have had their say about him multiple times”.
Neither hagiography nor hatchet job, the book is curious, rigorous and, despite its eye-watering length, rarely dull. Gorman draws connections between McLaren’s chaotic childhood and his outlook as an adult, when he was known for single-mindedness, his delinquent spirit and treating friends and colleagues atrociously (the phrase “they never spoke again” crops up regularly). As young children, he and his older brother, Stuart, were dragged around London by their mother, Emily, as she visited various lovers; their father soon left, having grown tired of his wife’s infidelities. Their divorce agreement rested on him having no contact with his sons until after Emily’s death.
Malcolm was close to his grandmother, who took a keen interest in his upbringing and would insist on sharing a bed with him. He later told friends that she threaded silk ribbons through his pubic hair to “ward off sexual encounters”. When his school head complained about his poor behaviour, she would shrug and tell him “boys will be boys” – a refrain that McLaren would parrot later whenever his punk proteges, the Sex Pistols, got into hot water. Egged on by Rose, he consistently defied his mother who, disapproving of her son’s habit of staying out all night prowling the streets of Soho, threw him out at 18, leading to a 25-year estrangement. McLaren subsequently set up home in a friend’s car. That friend was Gordon Swire, whose sister was Vivienne Westwood.
While the book leaves us in no doubt about McLaren’s flaws, Gorman also conveys his charisma, his grasp of pop culture and his singular ability to be in the right place at the right time. His ideas about art and society were formulated during his years at art college, where he was captivated by the “art for art’s sake” ethos of William Morris; trash culture (he was a big Warhol fan); and the situationists, the French movement that decried consumerism and the banality of everyday life. The author recounts a story of Guy Debord, leading light of the French situationists, excitedly paying a visit to David Wise, head of King Mob, the London arm of the movement with which McLaren was briefly associated. Wise had “impulsively claimed there was an army of hundreds of British activists who would take to the streets when given the word. Debord arrived unannounced at Wise’s home to find his fellow radical watching Match of the Day from the comfort of his sofa. Debord is said to have turned on his heel and left.”
McLaren and Westwood’s fashion boutique on the King’s Road, London, variously called Let It Rock, Too Fast to Live, Sex and Seditionaries, opened in 1971 as a homage to 1950s fashion but later sold bondage trousers, retooled kilts and T-shirts threaded with chicken bones. It became the epicentre of pop avant-garde London, a hangout for art students, teddy boy nostalgists, punks and new romantics, though its success wasn’t enough for McLaren, whose quest for new ideas took him to New York where an encounter with the rock band the New York Dolls – he described them as “so, so bad, they were brilliant” – prompted a detour into music management.
McLaren’s reputation has long rested on his chutzpah and his ability to turn a situation to his advantage – ever the cultural butterfly, his adoption of new looks, sounds and concepts was swift and intense, matched only by his habit of dropping them when he’d had his fill. Still, Gorman gets closer than most in pinning down where his talents lay. In fashion, he was about the ideas and Westwood the execution (a relationship that carried through into their private lives, as McLaren left her to raise their son alone). He didn’t invent punk but, in assembling the “fabulous disaster” that was the Sex Pistols, packaged it up and sent it out into the world, and revelled in the fallout (the band’s problem, he maintained, was in viewing themselves as artists).
Among McLaren’s more surprising achievements was helping to bring hip-hop to the British masses via his 1982 single “Buffalo Gals”, which made an unlikely connection between rap from the South Bronx and Appalachian square dancing. His later forays into reality TV were deemed ill-judged by those who knew him solely as a punk Svengali, though his ratings-boosting antics could be relied on to introduce a winning seam of dementedness. In ITV’s The Baron, in which celebrity contestants competed for the title of Baron of Gardenstown, the avowedly atheist McLaren was parachuted into a ferociously God-fearing Aberdeenshire fishing village, where, in an address to baffled residents, he proposed turning the place into a “heathen’s paradise” and, quoting the German Dadaist prankster Johannes Baader, declared: “Don’t you know Jesus Christ is a sausage?”
Of all his projects, punk had the most immediate impact, of course – McLaren correctly anticipated that the Sex Pistols would appear in the first line of his obituaries. But, as Gorman’s book underlines, punk made up a small part of the creative life of this strange, mercurial and maddening figure, whose abiding legacy is his uniquely disruptive spirit. “There are two rules I’ve always tried to live by,” McLaren said. “Turn left if you’re supposed to turn right; go through any door that you’re not supposed to enter. It’s the only way to fight your way through to any kind of authentic feeling in a world beset by fakery.”
• The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren is published by Constable.
