1996

Adelaide Festival

Living Yesterday Tomorrow

Malcolm McLaren

Her Majesty’s

The speaker for the evening takes the stage. Strolling towards the lectern in a baggy black suit and a peach coloured open-neck shirt, shuffling papers and lugging an attache case, he looks like a dotty art theory lecturer. This is Malcolm McLaren ? The Fagin of punk, Alfred Jarry of the Kings Road, bagman for the Sex Pistols ?

With his tousled Harpo curls,  his languorous eyelids and drawling delivery he could be a toned-down Quentin Crisp, or some chum of Clive Bell’s here to inform us about the works of Stanley Spencer. Instead Malcolm McLaren, who turned fifty in January, has come to tell us he is the last romantic- choosing for theme: traditional sanctity and loveliness. Well almost. He is certainly more Wilde than angry these days and his meditations on life and work are  now more inflected by aestheticism than by Alexander Trocchi’s sixties situationists

Not that any of this is a bad thing or at all uninteresting. McLaren has always been a very good talker-about-himself and as consultant to everyone from Steven Spielberg to the Polish government he is still an acute reader of the zeitgeist.

I don’t know how all this will go, he muses at the opening of the show- in Perth I talked until one in the morning. Yeah yeah, we think, a bit of Malcolm hyperbole. Apparently not. The McLaren disquisition runs for just on four hours- with slides, asides and whatever questions you have left. There is little visible artifice and a strong sense of the extempore, but an evening with Malcolm McLaren is rarely dull. It’s like have a very long cup of coffee with someone who, while greatly liking the sound of their own voice, is also worth the attention.

His narrative begins with childhood and an enmeshed relationship with Rose Isaacs, his wealthy Jewish grandmother. Dickensian analogies abound as, Fagin to his Oliver, she encourages the freckly child to behave with impish indifference to the requirements of school and society. The neurotic fix on his gran lasted until his early teens -according to McLaren he slept in her bed until he thirteen, fawning to her delusions and serving as her confidante. His mother he hardly knew, or so he says. His father he met for the first time a few years ago.

As he recounts his personal mythology it is Art School which opens him to the world- and one which gives him licence. This was the period when all of English pop was emerging from the art schools- Brian Jones and Keith, Ray Davies, Pete Townshend, all the fine young cannibals. It was then that McLaren met his Yoko- designer Vivienne Westwood, who led him into the Chelsea scene of happenings and fashion.

Pointing his electronic slide changer towards the screen at arbitrary intervals, he narrates the metamorphosing history of 430 Kings Road, McLaren and Westwood’s shop turned gallery, turned crucible of style. 430 transmogrified from the Teddy Boy timewarp Let it Rock to become, in turn, Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die,  the notorious SEX shop,  Seditionaries: Clothes for Heroes, World’s End and Nostagia of Mud.

Malcolm McLaren reminds us through this succession of concepts  and boutique facades that for him music was merely an accessory to selling T-shirts. It is the haberdashery that fascinates him, son and grandson of London tailors, paramour of Westwood of Chelsea. Never mind the chord changes, feel the zips and safety pins.

In his revisionist history the Sex Pistols are little more than a footnote. Depicted as a slightly more rodenty version of the Bash Street Kids, the Pistols are good for a few oneliners- Steve Jones is the artful thief, John Lydon Rotten is despised for his Catholic repression, Glen Matlock is the wimp sent to Coventry and poor, pathetic Sid, is merely an artistic aside, exemplum of the Pistols’  parody of themselves. The nasty facts-Sid and Nancy and all that sad jazz- are overlooked, as is any reference to the lengthy litigation between Lydon and McLaren about who owned the rights to the name Rotten.

More upbeat are the descriptions of the Buffalo Gals fashion show (with matching hiphop hit single) and McLaren’s excursions into aural merchandising with Fans and Paris. Depending on your point of view, McLaren’s narrative is either a portrait of stupefying superficiality or he is the harbinger, like Warhol and Madonna, of true postmodern flux. He is probably both. He believes in beautiful things, he can explain his t-shirts down to the last inverted swastika (they are now in the V and A Museum in London). He is at his proudest describing the outfit that made Adam Ant an overnight sensation.

An evening with Malcolm McLaren is a strange and contrary thing. He is generous in his time and candour, he is self-serving in his selective memory. He is charming and undoubtedly smart and although given the chance to parachute out at eleven o’clock I happily stayed till the end. Mind you, running on till 12.30 in the morning, with plenty of wind still in his sails, you wondered whether Malcolm McLaren might become an overnight sensation all over again.

The Adelaide Review, No.150, March, 1996, p.27.