A Young person’s Guide To Malcolm McLaren

Rip It Up, Issue 74, 1 September 1983, Page 8

A Young person’s Guide To Malcolm McLaren

Russell Brown

So, in a sense, there's hope for everyone?• ' "If you're mad enough. I failed all my exams and was one of the worst pupils at school I was always on the verge of expulsion. And you know what? I never gave a damn then and I don't give a damn now. All that stuff has never been what I considered important."

The Wanderer That most curious of fixtures, the revolving door turns and through swings a floppy travelling bag. Malcolm McLaren is wearing a sort of mutant zoot suit, which looks like it's still pinned up for alterations that never did get done. He looks very tired. . He tosses the bag against the reception desk, does the formalities. ■ "Sense me!" calls the receptionist as he walks away. "You left this behind." She holds up his pen. ■ "That's alright, you can keep that," he says. McLaren has just flown in from Australia, where he has been shuttled round in promotional work for two weeks. He judged the national dancing competitions and appeared several times on TV's Countdown. He's also been spreading the gospel of Double Dutch, the skipping game that was the basis for his most recent single of the same name. The sport's getting big all over the world, he says. He didn't really get to recover from jet lag. "Did you see McLaren?" the receptionist says to a young porter. "You couldn't really miss him, could you?" the porter says. Duck "What 1 really wanted to do with that album was to demonstrate very clearly where the origins of most rock'n'roll lie and what it is and why people like construction workers and bakers can do it quite easily without being

professional musicians. I wanted’to show that it is a people's art. "1 also wanted to show that music doesn't stem from London Town. Being from London, I just wanted to jump out and say 'lt's happening in Zululand and it's happening much better'. "I could never have made that record called Double Dutch' using London session musicians. A New York street dance from the ghettos of Harlem. Going to Zululand and recording it with Zulu singers;, it showed that there were other ways of doing it than sitting in London taking your salsa rhythm here and another bit of rhythm there. 1 went out and used the real people for a change. "People denounced me for that, that was the tunny thing. They called me a terrible plunderer and that sort of thing. I said; 'Well, where are the police then? What have they been doing for the past three years? What have you been living off since the days of the Beatles? I'm just more up front about it,' and they didn't like that, 'cause the English don't like people being up front." <

McLaren briefly squeezes his eyes shut as the hard TV lighting is switched on.

"What's the name of this show then? Shazaml Isn't that what Captain Marvel used to say?"

• The moment the cameras begin to roll McLaren comes alive. He's an odd, seditious little jester. He seems aware he's speaking to a youthful audience and the interview is much

more fun that the dry affair on Radio With Pictures. There's plenty of it Phil Schofield's polite attempts at halting or directing him are brushed aside with ease.

There's a little shiver of delighted horror from the Shazam team when McLaren starts to talk about bondage clothes and kinky leatherwear.

I Have Seen the Future of Rock'n'Roll and Its Name is Sony.

"The days are going when people are going to buy albums. Music will get bigger but in a different way. People are buying it and doing it in more ways than they ever have before. "But that doesn't necessitate them buying albums and the industry's paranoid about that but I don't think they have the vision to understand that it's a growth industry, but in a different format than they're used to. "It might be that some kid just likes the pair of socks that Boy George is wearing and that is the only reason they want to look at Boy George and they get the socks and that's their bit of it.

"They might not actually want the record. That's only 10 per cent of the whole thing. "If the industry thought like that they'd be more up. They think like in the days of the Beatles when everybody bought records and stayed inside their houses and played them. Those days are over because everybody wants the socks more than the records, 'cause they can be seen. You're more happening if you've got the socks. Who cares if you've got the record? Nobody goes back to your bedroom anyway." - So what will the pop stars of the 80s be like? "Dance teams and messy singers.

"Dance teams because there's a lot of content in jumping out of the closet by becoming sexually aware of your body and all that racial distinction has to be swallowed up.

"Messy singers can just strum away on a simple guitar, revive Leadbelly. Without any of the artifacts. It's not necessary to have all that Jto***iwr*> vj v r rk-r.'t'. *hy ./•* * in mu , stuff if you're just a messy singer. "I think discotheques are gonna become live, rather than have DJs like ghosts, behind a box. They're going to become more like personalities. I think the state of the art is actually the discotheque now. . "I think they'll get lighter. They'll be more like

... 1 hate to say this ... health clubs to a certain extent'. You don’t want to be in a. dark, dingy hole, all smoky. The dance you're doing is so visual. You can't be all huddled up, you've got to have a bit of space, you've got, to demonstrate it, so you've got to have lights." -- So the youth culture of the 80s will be colourful? . ~ "Yes. I'm .very optimistic .myself; A lot of people have the exact opposite opinion of me." ■ "Bit racy here, is it?" ’ Eh? Oh, he means like in racist. He's a little puzzled that he hasn't seen a Polynesian in the tour-and-a-bit hours he's been in the country. And that there aren't any in the bar. He seems genuinely interested in having a talk to some street kids. It's a pity he's unlikely to get the chance. Soweto-A-Go-Go "I had ado of problems in South Africa. All that film and music was smuggled out and to actually film 'Soweto' cost £IO,OOO in bribes. I've still got a lot of problems with Soweto because the white South Africans didn't like the fact that I paid all the money over to the Zulus and didn't pay anything to white South African publishing and record companies. They've been knocking at our doof and accusing me of piracy and plundering. My only response is to say 'I just don't agree with the fact that you own the Zulus and I knew fucking sure if I paid you the Zulus weren't gonna get a penny'. "That stand caused a lot of headaches in England because England does so much trade with South Africa.'. "They're a very proud people, the Zulus. And

musical. Those singers on the album, they'd compare to anything out of Motown. There's something about it, some quality, they've got more soul.

The 'Soweto' video was made in Soweto with a black crew.

"I didn't want to film it showing the people sort of downbeat, I wanted to make it very up. Down would be the obvious Richard Attenborough, Natio)iwide approach. You've got to show the people happy, as if it's a place you'd want to go for a holiday. • "I was like Father Christmas in a way, because they'd never had anybody care, ever, about their situation or care to present them in a way that would musically ... kind of promote them. The fact that I may make their music work alongside the likes of Michael Jackson and the Police is a fantastic thing because it. puts Zululand on the map. "Like, if I was to go to El Salvador and find some terrific musical group there and record them and release it - in America and try to get a Top. Ten hit and all these Americans want to go for a holiday to El Salvador and suddenly find that Ronald Reagan's policies ... aren't correct /. you can use music like that. /• "It can be quite political in that respect. I never thought you could, but. now, right; now, this decade you can use music like that to fuck things

up a lot. Because the world's getting so much smaller, you see. People are finding out more. "I'd like to put the IRA and the PLO on the same album. I'd like to do a whole thing with all those guerilla groups the Indian bandits and so on. Because music on that level, it's like an information. It's using music in a different way.

"People haven't been used to using music in that way but they're getting so informed now that I think they'd be interested in an album like that.

"It's like allying sports to music to sports, like in 'Double Dutch', because people like the idea of sport. "Music, as pop music, has lost such a lot of credibility because it's no longer got any point of view." McLaren fairly glows in a bright orange sweatshirt purchased in New York. "It's easy to customise things," he says,

looking down at the lettering on his chest. 'Punk It Up', it says, 'Duck' on one arm 'Rock' on the other. "I just walked into a shop and had the letters put on." Point That Pistol Somewhere Else - "You were running on tremendous adrenalin. You winged it all the time. You played with fire. It was great, you were living it, so you were never aware.

"My original concept when I formed the Sex Pistols was I wanted them to compete with the Bay City Rollers. But it never turned out that way.

"They were nothing like them. They did more than compete with them, they took the world by 'storm in a very different way and left a smouldering hole. "Anarchy crept into a child's dictionary, people understood what it meant. And they loved it because it meant doing everything that you father and mother didn't want you to. •'And to relive that from the days of James Dean or Elvis Presley, was too difficult. It had to be told in other terms. So Anarchy in the UK' became an anthem. So did God Save the Queen' and 'Pretty Vacant'. They were all songs that related to that.

"All those groups Adam and the Ants, Boy George, ABC - they're all punk rockers, you know. People don't realise that. "It was funny because we put Mick Jagger and everyone else aside and they all ran back into their closets and houses in the country and bohemian retreats.

■ "But as soon as the Sex Pistols died they all came out and cut their hair. Mick Jagger said: I'm the Godfather of Punk', he even wore the same T-shirt as Johnny did. Pete Townshend said: 'Hold it, I'm the Godfather of Punk'. They were all godfathers! I thought, what audacity! The Rolling Stones sold more records after the Sex Pistols than they ever sold before." - - With punk came not only major changes in music, but changes in society's aesthetics. The broad, curved and flowing gave way to the narrow, ;• sharp- and economical. Haircuts shortened, ■ trouser legs narrowed, skinny become attractive again, most aspects of design were affected. People no longer wrote 'LOVE' in bubbly balloon letters, they wrote ANARCHY' in stick letters (language, too, was far from unaffected). Would that all have happened in the same manner without the Sex

Pistols and Malcolm McLaren? ... "I don't know. I'd like to think that if I didn't do it, someone else might have; that it was in the air anyway I was only acting as a catalyst, being in the right place at the right time."

Well, some people were predicting something of the type. There was Mick Farren's 'Titanic' essay, which ascribed the future to four young men in a garage somewhere ... "Yeah, the only thing with guys like that is they didn't have what I had, I suppose. I came from'a very different background. 1 had a different pretence, 1 was very visual. "I had no interest in the whole period from 1965 to 1971. 1 didn't actually experience any of that, 1 stepped out. 1 went to art school and didn't listen to music, so I had a very fresh and objective approach which was really based on the late 50s and early 60s, what I listened to as a tiny kid and my sense of style and visual approach and my politics as a student." (McLaren was involved with such anarchistinspired movements as the Situationists during the 19605).

"I was able to put that together with more humour than anyone else. That was a big thing in my favour. I could afford to have people laugh at me. "A lot of these musicians, they were very coarse and got very uptight if anyone made fun of them. The greatest asset Sid Vicious had was he could afford to make a fool of himself on stage. People love that, it's marvellous." . It's'sometimes seemed that the people who didn't like punk were the ones afraid to laugh at themselves. •

"Yeah. No humour. Soulless, I thought. And therefore not very sexy. They're frightened, they're closets. That's right." And others got miffed at the .Great Rock'ii'Roll Swindle film. They seemed to take it as an insult that the music they'd pinned their allegiance on was being pilloried. They got told they'd all been fooled by an evil little man called Malcolm McLaren and they didn't like that. Right?

"Yeah. That was the humour of it all, it was wonderful to do that. My premise for making that picture was to try to be never written up in one of those awful NME rock history books as one of an era.

"And I thought I'm not going to be part of that bullshit'. I refused to get locked into that.

"1 knew they'd hate all that. They'd accuse me of being a svengali but I played it to death. (Laughs). It was like taking Fleet Street and going over the top with it. They hated me. Fabulous. I'm proud of that." The film went through a few changes while it was being made. Was that its original intention?

"That was, again, not to allow it to be incarcerated in the annals of rock history, but keep it as an enigma that no one fucking knows, you know, that was it? 1 think that's what keeps things alive."

McLaren's finished his Riesling (he wanted something drier but the bar didn't have anything else ...) and my Steinlager's gone. A waitress comes by, picks up glasses from a nearby table. "Excuse me," McLaren says. "Could you ...?"

The waitress, who looks to be in her late thirties, glares at him as if he's made a lewd comment, turns and heads off in the opposite direction. What sort of place is this? "That's all right," McLaren says philosophically. "She's probably just a bit straight ..."

C3O, C6O, C9O, GO! "The great thing about cassettes is you never feel precious, do you, giving someone a cassette? Giving someone a record seems sort of ... but if you've got a cassette in your pocket you can say 'Have a listen to that - I got it over there last week'. And that bloke takes it down the line to someone else. It's a very rapid way,of spreading ideas. "With a record player, you gotta get the thing clean, you get the bloody thing on ... It's so 1910 it's not 1983! "The record companies still think that home taping is the curse of the industry. It's been one of the greatest assets that popular music has had invented for it!" Duck Duck "I still like Duck Rock anyway, 'cause all those singers are so bloody good, you're.seduced by that. I like the format, some things work, some things don't - bit too much of Trevor Horn now and again.

"Too much of a bloody overproduction sometimes I thought. 1 had to compromise on that 1 was really fucking upset. I was made to feel small sometimes. I was made to accept his expertise.

"Being an artist for the first time I was too fucking diplomatic. I should have shit on his head sometimes. He was too damned Mr Producer."

But he did get the odd awesome sound especially on Buffalo Gals'.

"Yeah, 1 like the sound of 'Buffalo Gals', It worked, because it's a very mechanical thing. It's superb. It's when you got into those other things. Too much bloody string quartets stuffed on it. All that synthesiser thing to lift it up, make it a bit more poppy. It got a bit hippy with the 'Chango' thing, he got involved in all this weirdness and didn't leave it as it was.

"His technical expertise actually worked in the context of making 'Buffalo Gals'. No kid in the Bronx had been able to get such a great sound with that technique —that's what made it new. That's why it's such a big record in Harlem." So is there any other producer you'd like to work with?

"I don't know, I'll probably have to work with him again. The record company wants it that way and I've got to finish the contract. ' "I'd like to work with someone very young and unknown I might be able to but producers are just mechanics. They ain't the concept and When they are the concept the bloody record is usually just sound without content."

Punk It Up "I've never not been a punk rocker and I'm not ashamed to say I am. 1 think it's great and shall remain so in mind, however much people ridicule it for being unfashionable or whatever.

"Punk rock wasn't about fashion. Punk rock was an attitude. And you know the greatest thing about it? People sang about things they hated. Music today, people sing about things they neither like or hate or love they don't sing about anything. I think most of them are just cardboard cut-outs."

Pop Goes the Funhouse "When punk rock died all those bands didn't want to be known as rock'n'roll bands. They said 'No, we're dance bands, we're fun music'. And this word fun became a horrible grey word. They'd taken the essence of what fun really is. Fun is subversive. "If there's fun at all for me in rock'n'roll, it's making lots of trouble and I thought all that idea of Haircut 100 wearing bow ties and looking like they'd been invited around by the bank manager to meet his daughter was innocuous and to me it took out any reason for rock'n'roll. "It's another aspect of the industry where they always want to sell teddy bears. Duran Duran, Kajagoogoo ... I like teddy bears too but I also like being rough and tough. I think everybody wants to be rough and tough and irresponsible and step out of a very ordinary life that uses music just to soften the blow.

"And I don't want to soften the blow and I don't think punk ever did that. It hurt people and I think people wanted that. I did."

Duck Duck Duck "A Buffalo Gal is a rather adventurous sort of a girl who wants to go and live in the woods. Get out and mess around.

"There was something terrific about that word Buffalo. 1 thought of this big, rumbustious giantess of a woman, waiting for the world to catch up with her as she stormed about the place. There was something thrilling to me—it wasn't dainty or petite. I liked the toughness of it. .

1 love the poor look, the Spirit of the Hobo

Duck Rock has been big in Harlem and you've talked a lot about wanting to reach black kids. What's in it for white kids?

"Oh, there's something in it for white kids. I wanted to do something white that was in essence as pagan as that black R&B that spurted out all over the world.

"Could I find something white that was equivalent and as magical? I had to go back quite a way and discover the origins of dance a bit. The only thing I could discover the square dance, which was an old-fashioned love ritual, a game of pursuit and capture. "And this Appalachian caller relates so much to the rapper in New York. So I thought I'd take it to New York and say 'Hey, do something with this'."

There's controversy in America at present over the all-music cable TV channel, MTV. MTV virtually refuses to play black music, claiming it has a mainly white paying audience and white people don't want black music. MTV wouldn't play 'Buffalo Gals'. But Who To Plunder Next?

"It was funny, in Australia, I got rid of the record company and there was loads of these young kids outside. They weren't necessarily interested in me, they were Duran Duran or Boy George fans and they thought I was the guy who could tell the addresses of all these guys and so on I didn't mind.

"And so I got all these young kids in my room and thought they were great, one of the better moments of my whole time in Australia. And I wen,t back to their houses and they were all

going mad 'cause I was, y'know, 'Buffalo Gals' and Boy George and Sid. "I looked at these kids and I thought 'lf I was in Australia I wouldn't be fucking around Molly Meldrum's house, I wouldn't be recording with Vander and Young. I'd work with those little kids. I'd actually get them happening on the street.

"I could see, I could physically see something could be great. Because they knew more about Boy George than Boy George knew about himself. It was funny, I thought they had more in it. I've always thought the audience was much more interesting than the group. "And it was like 'Well, you know Malcolm, when Boy George comes to Australia I'm going to ask him for an autograph and if he doesn't give me one I'm gonna say, 'Well who the fuck do you think you are?' "I just love that kind of emotion, it's fantastic. I thought 'You're the kind of person I would like to make a record with'. "As a matter of fact, I think that's what I'll do as I'm talking to you. I'll probably make a record with the fans of all those groups. I think they've got more to say somehow."

Rock Is Dead, Or So It's Said - "Rock'n'roll has become to me more than just the 4/4 beat. It's a life-style, it's a critique and to me it's really what makes my heart beat. People malign it through a lack of ... I dunno, maybe just for the hell of it, as a fashion. "Rock'n'roll means loads of things to me. It means sex, it means subversion, it means style. I always thought those were the three ingredients that made any record a classic, it had to have those three things." Out of the Peter Pan and Into the Fire So much of what you've done has hinged on youth culture ... "Yeah, but the generation gap's closing down as days go on and people get more unemployed, especially in England. "But I suppose you can't help working with the young, because they're the ones with the energy, with a bit of anarchy in them. They haven't yet gotten responsible. Luckily, . I've remained irresponsible and a fool. I'm technically one of the most unprofessional people you're ever likely to meet. "For all my expounding on cassette players I could barely work one myself. Hopeless. I just go for the concepts. Sometimes I think I'd better really learn how to do some of these things, understand them. But at the end I don't bother because perhaps it's better left. Technology is useful but you can have your friends do it for you." Epitaph ; "How would like to be remembered? Loved by a few because he was hated by so. many. I like that idea. I never want to be loved by everyone. You can't get anything done then." ;

Epilogue "Look after yourself mate." His handshake is a loopy, upside-down affair with the left hand but the intention's there.

An entertaining, even inspiring man to speak with. An independent, highly motivated man who had a major effect on the popular culture that took me through my late teens and beyond. A man who (doesn't vote or fill in census forms. And friendly. An exploiter? Certainly. An egotist? Naturally. But also an anarchist. The best kind of villain there is.

'The fact that I may take |p their music work alongside the likes of Michael Jackson and the Police is a fantastic * thing because it puts Zululand on the map."

Td like to put the IRA and the PLO on the same album."

"Music, as pop music, has j lost such a lot of credibility because it's no longer got any point of view." C -£

"My original concept when I formed the Sex Pistols was I wanted them to compete with the Bay City Rollers."

"Music today, people sing about things they neither like or hate or love they don't sing about anything. I think most of them are just cardboard cut-outs."

/'Rock'n'roll has become to ® [me more than just the 4/4 beat. It's a lifestyle, it's a Cr . critique and to me it's really | what makes my heart beat."*