To understand Malcolm McLaren’s theory of pop culture and his pivotal place within it, you would probably need not only to be cleverer than me, but cleverer than McLaren himself. McLaren is the perpetual art student who in a fever of conceptualism threw the Sex Pistols at the year 1977 and to his amazement found that they stuck. Three decades on, they have still to slither down the bog wall of history and McLaren appears to have dedicated much of his life to working out why.
We are here to talk about his latest work, Shallow, a beguiling video installation that matches clean bits from Sixties sex movies to slushy pop songs. It has been roaming the world to acclaim for a year and is about to visit the Baltic Centre in Gateshead. He launches into a tutorial in which art history and personal biography clash as cacophonously as a punk band’s set.
To precis: he traces punk’s qualities of self-expression, do-it-yourself and anti-commercialism back to the 18th-century Romantics and the Victorian Arts and Crafts movement. Consumer capitalism, however, has since hijacked its Romantic spirit by cynically taking from punk only the notion that anyone can be famous and rejecting its celebration of failure. This led to The X Factor, in which unknowns will do anything for celebrity except write their own songs. But punk, he predicts, will return because people are again craving integrity. “They don’t,” he says, in his melodious, camp and Cockney accent, “see anything noble in the karaoke culture.”
He is on to something, and what it lacks in coherence, it makes up for in brio, jokes and indiscretions, many concerning the Pistols’ lead singer Johnny Rotten, the fashion designer Vivienne Westwood and their son, Joseph Corre, the founder of the Agent Provocateur chain. The bitchy vigour of McLaren’s lecture surprises only because not an hour before I have observed the 63-year-old, neat in woolly sweater, plaid scarf and tie, sharing a quiet lunch with his girlfriend, the accurately named Young Kim. Could McLaren have become a benign elder statesman living the life with this younger woman? No, indeed.
When I can get a word in, I tell him that Jon Savage, the author of England’s Dreaming, once told me that the one thing McLaren had not counted on was that the Sex Pistols would actually be any good. “No, never. I never thought that could be remotely possible. It never occurred to me. What occurred to me was that it didn’t matter if they were bad.”
It was a theory of his gang of art-school “conspirators”. The album cover for Sex Pistols’ Never Mind the Bollocks was made out of letters ripped from newspapers, as if it were a ransom note. It looked threatening but it was meant to be banal. “It was,” he says, “a fundamental thing: to connect with the banal. I remember sitting there with Jamie Reid [a fellow alumnus of Croydon Art School] and asking: ‘But is it banal enough?’ ”
Instead Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols was a sensation that torpedoed the blandness of popular culture. It was transformative, albeit at a terrible cost to some of the individuals involved. Within two years the bassist Sid Vicious and his girlfriend Nancy Spungen were dead, Sid from a heroin overdose, Nancy from a knife plunged through her heart apparently by Sid.
I can see why Johnny “Rotten” Lydon felt used. “He was! He was terribly exploited. No denying it. I have an unquestioning acceptance of that. But all I say is these guys were looking to be used because if he hadn’t been he would just have been a dishwasher, because that is where he began life.”
McLaren has admitted that to whip up controversy on the Pistols’ tour of America in 1978 he purposely booked them to play redneck bars. Did he feel guilty? “No. You couldn’t even begin with things like that. You did not have time to breathe.” That said, 1978 and 1979 remain “etched” on him: “You cannot stop thinking about it.”
McLaren evidently finds it easier to reach cultural conclusions than personal ones. When he talks of his broken childhood in postwar London, how his maternal grandmother, who brought him up, hated his mother and his mother hated her, and how he was caught in the crossfire, it is remarkable how little empathy he feels with any of them. He did not attempt to meet his father, an army deserter, he believes, until he was middle-aged. (He was “a guy with a shotgun and an Alsatian”.) He had “no choice” but to love his eccentric granny. He talks of his years with Westwood, with whom he ran the King’s Road fetish fashion shop, Sex, with almost equal emotional distance: he met her in a squat, got her pregnant, pleaded with her to have an abortion but Westwood spent the money that his grandmother had provided on “a cashmere twin-set” instead.
Was he in love? “I couldn’t really say. I was certainly intellectually curious and I felt emotionally connected. She was a primary school teacher and she was running away from her husband and had her child in tow. I saw her naked most days of the week, running around, putting the kettle on. In some shape or form I was going to get into that bed with her and lose my virginity. Which I did. Three, four, five weeks later she was pregnant.”
Did he love the baby, Joseph Corre (the surname is McLaren’s grandmother’s)? “I didn’t understand it. I didn’t know what to do.” It strikes him as strange that Westwood, who had a career to manage, sent Joseph off to boarding school, but not that he chose to absent himself from their life. He did not live with them until Joseph was nearly 5 and then left when he decided that he had done “everything I wanted to do in fashion”. He saw his son occasionally.
“At times I thought he had some mad Oedipal complex where he wanted to kill me and f*** his mother. But he was determined to survive, which he did spectacularly and brilliantly — although he could not hold on to his wife.”
Oddly, McLaren seems keen to take some credit for his son’s unhappy divorce from Serena Rees, having introduced Paul Simonon, the Clash’s bass guitarist, to them. “Joe kept getting fatter and fatter and Simonon was always a slim, rather elegant and handsome creature. I introduced him to Joe and guess what? The bass player went off with the wife! I was maybe partly or inadvertently to blame.”
Westwood went on to become a Dame, going through, as he says, a phase where she went into tailoring and “tried to get everyone to look like the Queen”. His own sell-out was to Hollywood and Steven Spielberg, with whom he worked, improbably, on the second Indiana Jones movie and The Color Purple. He resigned when focus groups suggested that his treatment for a musical in which Oscar Wilde would be portrayed as the father of rock would work better if the protagonist were neither gay nor Irish. His girlfriend was the model Lauren Hutton. He once called her the second love of his life but today he says: “She came as part of the whole Hollywood fabric. You just meet these people.”
After an abortive attempt to become Mayor of London in 1999, he moved to Paris, where he still lives in an artist’s garret, once home to the realist painter Gustave Courbet and the Fauvist Kees van Dongen. For the past year he has been working on a successor film to Shallow, a montage of advertising campaigns for Paris (to be shown at the Baltic the evening McLaren gives a platform interview). One can see the connection with Shallow. Soft pornography is like advertising: all about promise, intrinsically shallow.
I ask about Young Kim, his Korean-American girlfriend/assistant who moved in with him in 2002. “I met her at a party in Paris. It is great living with someone like Young because she speaks and writes fluent French. She is a Yale graduate in history. She then studied law at NYU and gave it up halfway through and ended up in Paris. She is just a brilliant right hand. She speaks German, she speaks Korean and she speaks American, of course, which is not the same as English. She is a great partner. I don’t think I could exist without her. Certainly not in Paris.”
You will notice what’s missing in this tribute. Some people say he does not know how to love. “Yes, well, I think they are right in some respects. There is a hidden truth in that, maybe a throwback to my childhood and how I was raised. But, hey, there’s been an awful lot of water under the bridge since then. And you learn.”
Lydon, I remind him, calls him the most evil man on earth. “It is kind of wonderful. That is what my mother called my grandmother. I don’t know what evil is. What does he mean? Did I torture him? What did I do to this kid? I sprinkled him with stardust. But you have to appreciate: no one wants to know they have been manufactured.”
No one manufactured Malcolm McLaren, I offer. “Well, I listened hard to those lecturers at art college. If anyone was responsible for punk it was, indirectly, them. Punk was really the product of William Morris. What those teachers did was allow me to create something that could be a magnificent failure, although I didn’t create it alone or out of nothing: Duchamp chose a urinal . . .”
And he chose Johnny Rotten? “Yes,” he says, “I chose Johnny Rotten instead.”
Shallow is at the Baltic, Gateshead (0191-478 1810; www.balticmill.com), from Fri. An Evening with Malcolm McLaren will be held there on Nov 13
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