Interview: Sex Pistols mastermind Malcolm McLaren gets his proper due in Paul Gorman’s The Life & Times of Malcolm McLaren biography

Malcolm McLaren may be one of the most misunderstood artists of his generation. As the mastermind behind the creation of the Sex Pistols, McLaren presented himself as a stereotypical embezzling music manager, an image that would, unfortunately, go on to overshadow his huge contributions to popular music, fashion, marketing, the visual arts, and youth culture.

British writer Paul Gorman (The Story Of The Face: The Magazine That Changed Culture) has set out to expand the perception of McLaren’s legacy with the incredibly convincing and comprehensive The Life & Times of Malcolm McLaren (Constable), a massive new 800+ page book that brings McLaren’s complicated backstory and stunning achievements to light in a compulsively readable biography.

Gorman takes pains to note that there is much more to McLaren’s story than the rise (and quick fall) of the Sex Pistols; although he was instrumental in putting the band together, giving them their signature name, and co-designing the influential clothing that came to be associated with the early punk movement with his then-partner Vivienne Westwood at their “SEX” shop on the King’s Road, the entire run of the Sex Pistols occupied just a few years of McLaren’s packed life. He would go on to design a number of boundary-pushing clothing lines with Westwood, play a key role in the careers of Adam Ant, Boy George, and Bow Wow Wow (who resisted McLaren’s early push to integrate Boy George into the band), launch a solo musical career of his own that would bring hip-hop, world music and even voguing to an international audience, work as a film producer in L.A. where he pitched ideas to an intrigued Steven Spielberg, and even predict the rise of music downloading years before Napster. (Not to mention undertaking a legitimate run for Mayor of London in 1999). Through it all McLaren acted as a sort of chaos agent, insinuating himself into worlds he admired and disrupting them from the inside, adding a sense of danger and excitement into each industry he set his sights on.

In a recent phone interview, author Paul Gorman explains that he was inspired to write the biography in order to highlight the McLaren he knew, a multi-faceted artist who was often misunderstood thanks to his outsized self-made public persona.

“After his death, I began to realize — or it dawned on me gradually — that other people didn’t see him the way that I did,” says Gorman. “It seemed to me that his memory threatened to become a caricature, based on the kind of line drawing idea of him as a Machiavellian troublemaker. And when he wasn’t around to dispute that, that seemed to ossify quite quickly.”

Gorman first met McLaren as a teenager in London in the ’70s and would reconnect with him in the final years of his life (McLaren penned the forward to Gorman’s 2001 book, The Look: Adventures In Rock & Pop Fashion).

“When I met him that first time it was just for a night, an older brother of mine ran a shop in the King’s Road,” Gorman recounts. “It was a homeware shop, there were very few boutiques there then. But he knew McLaren and Westwood a little bit. We sat in the pub and I was just very impressed with him. And I’ll remember forever a couple of things that he said to me about how clothes had to have importance, what you wore expressed what you were, where you were at, and what you thought of the world. He was very interested in that later on, he talked about the look of music and the sound of fashion. And I know that that sounds a bit facile, but actually, he understood the ways in which you present yourself and have an effect upon the world, particularly if it’s done with thought and is presented with, as he always said, ‘sex, subversion, and style.'”

“I was a kid, but then I next encountered him in the early ’90s at the tail end of his life as a production executive in the film business in L.A. when I was working for a film magazine, he had some exciting ideas. And we talked about those and I wrote one up, it was an idea about a biopic of The Beatles manager Brian Epstein from the point of view of his involvement in the underground S&M scene in London in the 60s. There’s a story that he really urged Vivienne Westwood to go to Madame Tussauds, the waxworks in London, and set light to the waxworks of The Beatles. [Laughs] I thought that was a very funny thing to propose. And so we talked about this extraordinary idea.”

“Another thing that I wanted to get across in the book that doesn’t come across in that caricature version of him is that he was an incredibly generous person. He was his own worst enemy. He called himself the embezzler in [the Sex Pistols film] The Great Rock and Roll Swindle. He called himself a swindler. He actually said to me, “I didn’t think people would take it seriously, because a swindler doesn’t call himself a swindler.” It’s kind of a mocking joke on society, to position himself as such. And in a way, I kind of got that as well, because I’m from North London, where we’re a rich, integrated mix of, you know, London Irish, such as myself, or Afro-Caribbeans, or Jewish people. And he was kind of playing up that archetype of the money-grubbing Jewish manager.”

Moving between the worlds of fashion and music might be commonplace with the rise of multi-hyphenate artists like Kanye West today, but McLaren was one of the first major artists to clearly identity and market (or exploit, depending on your point of view) the vital link between clothing and youth movements, from punk rock to hip hop.

“There’s an interesting thing that when he was managing the Sex Pistols…within a year, he’s talking to the biggest record companies in the world, in the EU in the UK,” recounts Gorman. “And he says they kind of took the piss out of him because they said, “Well, we’ve been in the game a long time and you run this boutique.” And his point of view was, “Wait a minute, I sell tons and tons of trousers to young people, you don’t think I know about their desires?” And so, he had this thing that through music, through visual culture, through fashion, through art, through design, he was able to not only express himself but also identify people’s aspirations and desires.”

“He would have made a great marketing man if he’d been less wild, and less exciting, really, he’d have been head of one of the biggest marketing agencies in the world,” predicts Gorman. “He’d be a brand leader. He’d be somebody who would identify what the kids — if you want to exploit them — are going to be into this time next year or next week.”

“Steve Jones, the Sex Pistols guitarist, is actually the person who made the Sex Pistols, in terms of music,” says Gorman. “Think about it. He was this kid from nowhere, [from] a very troubled background, a kleptomaniac. But he had this burning desire to get somewhere. And he saw McLaren as an entry into that world. But at the same time, McLaren stood up for him when nobody else would. The kid’s parents had rejected him and he’d been pinched and went before the judge on I think his thirteenth or fourteenth, case of burglary, I think he stole a car in this case. And he was about to go down for maybe one or two years, which could have turned him into a career petty criminal. But it was McLaren in 1974, this unusual person who ran a boutique as an ex-art student and radical politico, who went to the court and stood up for him and said, “Hey, wait a minute, this kid is going to make a contribution to society, give him a break.” And of course, a very persuasive man, he persuaded the judge to put him on probation, rather than send him to jail.”

Following the breakout success and rapid downfall of the Sex Pistols, McLaren soon embarked on a musical career initially inspired by the burgeoning early hip hop scene in New York City, along with sounds from Africa and the Caribbean. Released in 1983, Duck Rock featured the massive single “Buffalo Gals,” a unique collage of hip hop beats and square dancing-inspired call-and-response vocals that would prove incredibly influential in hip hop circles, while bringing the sounds of the underground scene to an international audience. Duck Rock also provided an early look at what would come to be known as “world music,” years before Paul Simon and Peter Gabriel began incorporating African rhythms into rock music. While McLaren’s adoption of Black music might be seen as cultural appropriation by today’s standards, Gorman places McLaren’s work within the lineage of his art-school upbringing, which was built on the longstanding tradition of collage.

“[McLaren] was an art student for eight years and he benefited from this business in London where one bureau didn’t speak to the next bureau because there was no internet, there were barely telephones,” explains Gorman. “So you could change your name slightly or not even bother and just go to a series of art schools, get the grants and study, and one of the things that comes across in the book is that his fellow students said that he wasn’t there playing guitar like Keith Richards in the laboratory waiting to be discovered and form a band. He was actually there to study the history of art and also to practice it. And so he created environmental installations. He was a sculptor, he tried to become a painter, you know, he tried to make a film, a film installation. And so appropriation plays a big part in that, and particularly collage. Collage is all about…using objects which already exist and juxtaposing them to create something new.”

“And so if you look at his albums, Duck Rock, Fans, the opera and R&B, Paris for the spoken word, and, you know, lounge music, Waltz Darling, I think is most appropriate for our times, isn’t it? Because he identified well before anybody else — not everybody, because there was Jenny Livingston making [Paris is Burning] — they identified the gender politics, the identity politics, that were inherent in that scene spoke to a mass audience if they were presented in the right way. And look, it’s taken ’til Rupaul and Pose to really break through into the mainstream. But here was McLaren in the mid-80s saying, “I can present this,” not necessarily exploit it. I think this is the problem a lot of people have with him. I don’t believe I’m overly defending him. I really believe that he thought, “If I present this to a mass audience, they will respond because it has integrity and content.” So that’s why you get crazy things like “Buffalo Gals,” which is a combination of rapping, scratching, and square dance. It’s all found music in a way, which is clashing together with the mind of an artist.”

In addition to a wealth of new interviews, Gorman had access to a treasure trove of documents from the Malcolm McLaren Estate, including many never-before-seen letters and diary entries, which provided a new lens on his troubled upbringing and his decades-long estrangement from his father.

“Most exciting for me, is in terms of his life, was the relationship with his father, and his reunion with his father after 42 years,” says Gorman. “That’s kind of his “rosebud,” if it’s a Citizen Kane book. After he meets his father, he writes this incredibly sad postcard from Spain to his father, he says, “Dear Peter, or Dad, I don’t know what to call you.” And he says, from “Your lost and foolish son, whose virtues might be written in water.” I mean, that’s very, very touching. And to come across that as a biographer makes you think there’s much more there, there are hidden depths of this man that need to be shown.”

Gorman’s book demonstrates that McLaren was able to make such an impact in so many subcultures because of his endless enthusiasm for the unexpected and the new, along with a sort of sixth sense about where culture was trending, often months (or years) before the rest of the world would inevitably catch on.

“You realize that here was somebody who had a kind of curious understanding of certainly, where culture was going, pop culture, that is, and maybe even mass culture and political culture as well,” says Gorman. “But there was a curious thing about him — he was a bit of a wizard, in that regard, a very unusual person. And I think the image of him as being the embezzler and the puppet master, that’s always very attractive to a biographer. You don’t want to write about nice people who do nice things. You want to get a bit of grit in there, and you want to sort of get behind them, and understand the person that does these extraordinary things.”

Paul Gorman’s The Life & Times of Malcolm McLaren is available now.