Malcolm McLaren, Svengali and lord of misrule, croaks at the end of the phone.
It is 9.30am in Manhattan and he is yet to have his coffee. “What do you
want to talk about?”
That is a big question: McLaren’s greatest invention, punk rock, was one of
the driving forces of the 20th century. Married to the designer Vivienne
Westwood, inspired by the idea of flamboyant failure, desperate to reroute
what he saw as “the juggernaut of corporate culture”, McLaren hand-picked a
band of snarling teenagers who could translate his anti-establishment
fashion into music. And after the Sex Pistols, nothing was ever the same
again.
McLaren has been accused of many things — not least of ripping off the ripped
and torn aesthetic from New York musician Richard Hell — and he is happy to
admit to most of them. Given his background in the rag trade, he is a master
embroiderer and famously presents a self-aggrandising, embellished version
of the truth. Next month, at a one-off event at the Edinburgh Fringe, anyone
with £15.50 to spare can hear McLaren’s own account of the punk rock years.
Charmingly titled History is for Pissing On, McLaren’s hour-long talk will go
into detail about the death of Sex Pistols bass player Sid Vicious, as well
as his relationship with Westood and other musings on the death agony of
what he disdainfully calls “our karaoke culture”.
By the autumn of 1978 the Sex Pistols had split up and John Lydon was pursuing
McLaren through the courts for the band’s money. Vicious had moved to New
York to be with his American girlfriend Nancy Spungen. McLaren had, while
the band were still hanging out together, tried to get rid of Spungen: “I
did try very much to kidnap Nancy and put her on a first class flight back
to New York. I failed miserably.”
It all fell to bits and Vicious and Spungen, both heroin addicts, fled. They
were living in a squalid hotel room in Manhattan. On the morning of October
12, Spungen was found dead in the bathroom, stabbed in the stomach with a
knife she had bought for Vicious two days before. He was arrested for her
murder.
“When I heard it on the news I immediately stopped everything,” McLaren
recalls. Despite his own impending court case he flew to New York. “I
thought it was much more important — and this may be noble of me — to try
and deal with the matter of Sid.”
Using what he claims was the Pistols’ cash, McLaren got Vicious released from
Rikers Island on bail.
“Once I got him out I had a massive problem. The problem was the mother who
was a junkie, at the same time a heroin dealer, she was taking money from
the tabloids, trying to cut in, make herself important.” Anne Beverley had
been smuggling heroin into her son in prison. Now, sharing his hotel room,
she continued to feed his habit.
“She would go out and score dope on 14th Street. This caused him to continue
his habit to the point where he was utterly dependent on her. This caused
the real breakdown, they had enormous fights. One night I was called to the
hotel where Sid had taken a lightbulb from the bathroom and smashed it and
cut all his hands. Basically all his veins were just opened; he was in a
dreadful state and she was cowering in the corner. I knew at that point I
would have to deal with Sid and call an ambulance.”
As the ambulance and NYPD arrived mob handed, Vicious attempted to jump out
the 15th floor window. He was strapped into a straitjacket and taken to the
Bellevue secure mental hospital.
“At that point I knew I would have to take over and find him a lawyer and get
him into a state where he could defend himself on the charge of murdering
Nancy.” After interviewing every heavyweight in Manhattan McLaren hired F
Lee Bailey, put the money on the table and left for his own court battle in
the UK. Released from Bellevue, into the care of his mother, Vicious died of
an overdose.
“She called me up when he was dead,” McLaren recalls. “He’d been dead for six
hours and she had been staring at him, she didn’t know what to do. She was
terrified, of course, of calling an ambulance because the police would have
come. So she just sat there. I was the first person she phoned.”
Vicious’s grisly fate was, says McLaren, the inevitable outcome of the
nihilistic course he encouraged the band to follow.
“I knew that something like this would happen eventually. It was almost a way
of testing the boundaries, we all do it: you want to feel invulnerable, feel
the razor’s edge between life and death. That was part of the fetishistic
glamour and the self-abusive search for that glamour was an inherent part of
punk rock. I think it was a very artistic part and without it I would never
have created the euphoric sense that the UK felt through all the events that
proceeded his death. Nothing like that could have happened without that
feeling of being immortal. Punk didn’t just change the culture, it changed
life, if only for a moment and that was the result of throwing yourself into
the brink.”
With 30 years of hindsight, McLaren looks back on the events he choreographed,
and the changes he provoked, with some pride.
“Today our culture has changed irrevocably. It’s a corporate culture. I saw it
coming down the motorway back in the dawn of the 1970s and it caused me
immeasurable anger.
“I knew then that we would fail but the fact of the matter was it didn’t
matter. It was fine to fail. We just had to learn to fail magnificently. And
that’s what we did, like the Luddites. With a bow and arrow, you may pierce
a tyre of that juggernaut coming down the motorway. You may turn it left or
right, it may stop for a minute, but once the tyre is repaired it is going
to come down twice as fast and mow you down.
“I knew that, I embraced it. It was fine that the group was failing. It was
fine that people thought they couldn’t play. I promoted that. I thought it
was better that they didn’t play, that was much more the way to destroy
corporate culture.”
The members of the band, however, had not signed up to McLaren’s art
school-inspired situationist masterplan. They would have been very happy to
sign to a record label. The spectacular failure to which McLaren aspired was
inevitable.
“They grew up,” he recalls. “They went from being 18 and innocent to being 21
and not mature but thinking themselves so. Of course they were going to hate
me for promoting them as a group who couldn’t play, hate me for making them
feel like they were puppets on a string, for manipulating all these things.
They would have shaken the hands of every one of those record bosses. Maybe
Johnny Rotten would have married a secretary. I could see in their eyes that
possibility but I wasn’t ever going to allow them to go there.” McLaren has
no regrets or desires to have done things differently. “I don’t know how I
could have done,” he says indignantly. “I’m far too dysfunctional a creature
to ever be considered someone responsible and pragmatic. I’m just not made
that way.”
Is it not the manager’s job to look after the band’s best interests, keep them
happy and, if at all possible, away from voracious heroin dealers (even if
they are their mothers)? He laughs.
“It probably is but I never considered myself a manager in that respect, I
loved the idea of all the machinations and manipulations and so on. I found
that to be a very artistic job and something creative. Booking tours and
being a nurse and looking after people, well I’m not the person to do that
at all.”
It’s not the only role McLaren has backed away from: his personal relationship
with Westwood was far less successful than his professional one and he was
never close to their son, Joe Corre, conceived when McLaren was just 18. “I
never truthfully could be a father to anyone, I’m not made that way, just as
I could never be a manager to anyone.”
And now he is a grandfather? He laughs again. “I don’t even go to that place.
Not at all, under any circumstances.”
Although McLaren has fond memories of his life with Westwood, the pair do not
meet. “She is happily ensconced with someone else. Together we created
a brilliant, although somewhat cerebral, partnership: platonic, creative.”
She was the ambitious designer, he was the “carnival boutique owner” and
together, from their tiny base in London’s Kings Road, they created a
fashion revolution that still reverberates today.
“I set to work making the shop an extension of the art school from which I
came. That was my vocation, to fulfil that art teacher’s prophecy to become
a flamboyant failure.”
Today’s McLaren is not everyone’s idea of a failure: he lives in downtown
Manhattan with his Korean-American girlfriend and keeps his fingers in
artistic, musical and film industry pies. Westwood may appear to be more
successful, with an international fashion empire, but McLaren maintains that
her finest work was the iconic bondage shirts, printed T-shirts and
multi-strapped jackets she made with him at her elbow.
“Today Vivienne is a more commercial designer. She has been since the day I
left. But that whole DIY punk attitude still has a significant effect on the
people who collect the vintage pieces and on Vivienne herself. I don’t think
anything she will do, or has done since my departure, will ever resonate
with as much power and potency on the imagination and the popular culture as
the things she made in those years, those strange deconstructed clothes that
I was so much a part of. Those embers still glow.”
History is for Pissing On, Pleasance Grand, 23rd August , 2.30pm 0131 556
6550 www.pleasance.co.uk
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