Face '83: Malcolm McLaren again

Oh, god. Having already thrown its elegantly-typographed weight behind the whole Duck Rock album, The Face then decides to single out, erm, the single Soweto:



Even at the time, this seemed like a bad idea. To be generous, it was three years before Paul Simon made a higher-profile attempt to convince South African musicians they really needed a pasty-faced bloke bellowing over the top to make their work listenable.

Jon Savage loves the track - he was writing in 2010, as well, which you thought would have at least afforded him a spot of perspective.

It's hard to see this as anything other than a miserable holiday in somebody else's cheap labour. Face 12; History 8.

[Part of The Face's best recordings of 1983]

Face '83: Malcolm McLaren

Well, as we seem to be keeping some sort of arbitrary score on the grounds of whether The Face should be blushing red for its 1983 choices, we better factor in the over-familiar tracks we've skipped so far into the reckoning.

So Michael Jackson was such an obvious choice, it counts against the idea of being taste-forming. 2-2. Blue Monday, on the other hand, might be over-familiar but still sounds fresh, they can have that. 3-2.

And Prince's 1999 could have been viewed either way by the future, so it was a brave choice, so it works as a choice. 4-2.

This brings us to Duck Rock.

I guess if you viewed Buffalo Gals, or even Double Dutch, you might consider that Trevor Horn just about saved Malc from himself. But The Face recommends the whole album.

Which means this is part of a recording they would point to and say "1983! This was the year!"



Duck For The Oyster. They don't usually mention that when they get misty-eyed about Malcolm's influence, do they?

4-3, The Face.

[Part of The Face's best recordings of 1983]

Malcolm McClaren: 'Killed by shopfittings'

Young KIm has suggested that Malcolm McClaren might have been the unwitting author of his own demise. It's all down to the interior decoration of Sex:

"When Malcolm created Sex he broke open the ceiling to make it look like a bomb had hit it", said Kim. "I always suspected that shop because it was the only place Malcolm ever really spent any serious length of time in, and there was a lot of construction and changing things. Then Ben Westwood said his mother had mentioned that she'd seen asbestos there. It was board asbestos and it was in the early Seventies so there was a lot of it left, and I don't think anyone really did anything about it."

His partner also rails against a Harley Street doctor who, she claims, failed to investigate the first signs of cancer properly; she's suggesting she might push for an investigation.

Managerobit: Malcolm McLaren

BBC News is reporting the death of Malcolm McLaren in New York, apparently from cancer.

UPDATE: Alan Yentob has just been on the News Channel, saying (I paraphrase) that he'd known McClaren had been unwell, but was surprised how quickly the end came.

If McClaren was anything, he was adept at selling Malcolm McClaren - positioning himself as the inventor of punk rather than the more honest claim of being the person who worked out how to make money from it. In later years, he would attempt to create new genres, swearing that skipping-rock or opera-pop was just about to come. Normally, the only person making records in that genre would be McClaren; normally, he would plough the furrow alone, until abandoning it and moving on to the next thing. After all, he'd always have having invented punk to fall back on.

There are other blots on his record - Ghosts Of Oxford Street, the toe-curling Channel 4 Christmas confection from a few years back; the toe-curling musical map of London for Radio 2; The Baron, that odd ITV confection where he competed with Mike Reid for a Scottish baronetcy. And turning up for I'm A Celebrity but then refusing to go on because it was fake. (Reality TV? Fake? Whoever knew?)

He wrote the theme music for Carry On Columbus, the ill-judged attempt to revive the franchise in the 1980s. And remixed a British Airways advert. Hired by Adam Ant to turn the Ants' fortunes round, McClaren pocketed the cash, and persuaded The Ants to become Bow Wow Wow.

If Malcolm McClaren was anything, he was the ultimate art school student, stretching out his final show for fifty years.

And some of the stuff he had a hand in really did outshine the stunts:

Malcolm McLaren returns to art

It's been quite a while since anyone's taken Malcolm McClaren seriously - he's tried TV (that frightening Oxford Street thing that Channel 4 underwrote); he's tried radio (that Radio 2 thing which the BBC funded) and at every turn people seem to fail to recognise that he's, you know, visionary or whatever.

So he's now turned up pitching video art in New York:

Mr. McLaren allowed that since he had attended several art schools (and been thrown out of most of them), he was coming full circle. He also copped to being an opportunist. “I’m trying to meet the zeitgeist,” he said, “and art is the hottest cultural form around.”

Well, apart from knitting little dogs out of spaghetti, perhaps.

It would be cruel to suggest that by "the hottest cultural form" Malcolm actually means that he reckons its the cultural form where you can get away with the lamest work and still be shrouded in applause.

If that was what he thought, he was wrong:

Instead they got amateur actors anticipating sex and looking morose after sex, men in Italian suits and women in underwear wearing masks, a woman with large breasts bobbing in a pool. Each snippet was repeated, in slow motion, accompanied by mash-ups of things like William S. Burroughs talking about drugs, incongruous spirituals, and the Captain and Tennille’s “Love Will Keep Us Together.” The kinkiest aspect was the hotel guests who wandered into the adjoining bar in white hooded waffle robes and nothing else.

The video lasted 86 minutes. Some audience members lasted less.

Ms. Rabinowitz, who had produced the evening, admitted, “Some are boring ... they are all so different.”

There were those, naturally, who came up to Malcolm afterwards and told him how brilliant it all was. Sadly, that's probably all it's going to take to encourage him.

Missing the First Post

Curious.

Earlier today, RSS readers worldwide throbbed gently as the First Post published a story about Malcolm McClaren "declaring war" on his son Joe - the phrase "punk rock rip-off" was mentioned.

However, if you trot over the the website, there's not a whiff of anything about Malcolm there. The URL, however, still exists:

www.thefirstpost.co.uk/people,1357,malcolm-mclaren-says-son-is-punk-rip-off,43748

But with an empty page compiled out where it once was. As if the First Post had somehow thought McClaren was at war with his son, but then decided he wasn't.

Malcolm McLaren has seen the future and, in it, he works

We always get nervous when Malcolm McLaren starts talking about the future. We've seen his futures in the past - skipping ropes and opera mash-ups - but let's at least see what he's got to offer this time, shall we?

About 10 years ago I gave a lecture in London to the Television Society in which I proffered that it would not be long before culture became fully interactive and people would start making their own programmes in every shape and form in every medium. Did they listen? No, sadly, but to me and others it seemed obvious.

Ah, the old trick of pretending that you were the voice of wisdom that everyone ignored. But would McLaren really have expected the BBC to suddenly change what it was doing on the basis of a coming change that the technology wasn't quite ready for? ("And now on BBC2, it's over to you... well, we seem to be three or four years ahead of being ready for that next programme, so until then, here's some music...")

And, unless McLaren is tuned in to nothing but Current, we're still not quite at the point where "everybody is making their own programmes in every medium". But McLaren is convinced that we're there now. And why? Because someone's let him make a show:

Well, here we are in 2008 and the BBC are embarking upon expeditions into that world with things like The Game, a radio show starring myself. It's set in a place called Parispace, and involves me fighting boredom for what I call the "outlaw spirit". The whole thing is set as a computer game and I travel through various levels meeting people like Jean-Paul Sartre and the Phantom Of The Opera.

"Starring myself". Yes, Malcolm's brave new world is a video-game conceit documentary on Radio 2. It sounds from the press release like the sort of programme that Channel 4 were churning out in their early years, and - indeed - like the sort of thing that McLaren has been banging out for years. In effect, it's Ghosts of London meets Sonic The Hedgehog.

Malc then bangs on about how film is "dinosauric" and TV has "gone the same way". He dismisses them as media for "the over 40s" - which, since that's the fastest growing demographic, doesn't seem to be such bad news, and, since he's made this programme for Radio 2, shouldn't really be a worry.

McLaren's somehow convinced that his programme is going to unleash a new age:

You're definitely going to see something with a lot more authenticity and therefore more integrity and something with a lot more confidence. We're seeing that desperate fast track now in Hollywood - the whole system is breaking down and becoming anti-corporate. It can't do anything else because being anti-corporate and anti-globalisation and anti-commodification of the culture is now de rigueur, it's fashion. And it's borne out of what is happening on Broadway and the radio.

So the BBC should be praised for commissioning mad, experimental, programming like this, as much as a disaster one might want to suggest it is. Everyone should be commended for allowing people to make disasters, to make failures - you've just got to be sure that it's a magnificent failure and that, by creating a magnificent failure, you plant the seed. The Game needed a much bigger budget to make it work, but at least there is a willingness there to not make the typical, dull, DJ formatted programmes. And following this route may ultimately, dare I say it, make the BBC more culturally subversive.

We love the way that McLaren still believes that his schtick is in any way subversive - and, indeed, hasn't appeared to have listened to any radio output from the last twenty years judging by the way he seems to believe that it's all "DJ formatted programming".

A thing to remember: McLaren's love of subversive television, and understanding of the current media world, led him to agree to go on I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out Here.

Sit down, Britain: Malcolm McLaren has a shock for you

Look, we don't know how to break this to you. What we're about to share will set your world hurtling to the ground, and after reading this, you may find it impossible to resume your life as you've known it to date.

Perhaps you should call friends before reading any further. You shouldn't be on your own.

Malcolm McLaren has discovered that I'm A Celebrity is, you know, a TV game show:

"This is not a reality show. It's fake. They fix things. They know who's going to win and lose...there are about 550 people in the jungle. It might have been a jungle once upon a time, but now it's a film set."

"I had every intention of appearing on the show. But the trials are tricks to fool the
public about a danger that isn't there. It proves this show is nothing more than a circus."
[...]

"The medic, Dr Bob McCarron, told me 'Things are so safe, I would send my own kids in to do the show'.

"There is nothing bad in there. They're hoodwinking the public."

Goodness. ITV don't really send celebrities off to certain death, and have people on hand to make sure there's no real risk? Whoever would have thought, eh?

Coming tomorrow: McLaren reveals the man on the phone in Deal Or No Deal isn't a banker at all - "he's a producer -and it's not even his own money"

McLaren quits before it even starts

Malcolm McClaren's casting as this season's John Lydon for I'm A Celebrity has proved to be something of a success, as he's already got the hump and walked off.

Of course, the bad news for ITV is he's quit before the programme has started transmitting, which isn't, presumably, quite the effect they were hoping for.

Does Michael Grade know Cerys Matthews' dark secret?

The final line-up for I'm A Celebrity has been more-or-less confirmed, and, yes, Cerys Matthews is onboard.

That makes two bad ITV shows in a year she's done, following her participation in the Challenge Anneka 'charity-ish' album project. Now, the thing about Cerys has always been that she's done surprising things, and often pulled them off - the opinion dividing FHM cover for example, to say nothing of the duets with Tom Jones and Aled Jones. And it would be churlish to only applaud someone's 'sod it, let's try it anyway' approach to life when it results in catsuit photoshoots and surprisingly attractive cover versions.

What does irk, though, is that she's pulled a tour to go off to the "jungle" (where 'jungle' is a TV set in surburban Australia).

Also going in is Malcolm McLaren, the man who invented Johnny Rotten and J from Five. J, clearly, is hoping that he'll be able to pull of the trick of H from Steps and actually get people to realise that he's got a name rather than just a letter; McClaren, we fully expect to be honking on about how the whole thing is beneath him in a matter of hours.

The rest: Anna Ryder-Richardson (who was Wonder Woman to Lawrence Llewellyn Bowen's Superman on Changing Rooms); Rodney Marsh (footballer pundit who enjoys a chuckle at a natural disasters and not a stretch of Kent); John Burton Race (apparently in catering); Gemma Atkinson (who we only know of from men's magazines so we assume she either once kissed Callum Best or was in Hollyoaks, or both) and - somewhat winningly - Janice Dickinson and Lynne Franks, which is like Patsy and Edina but in real life.

McLaren has an audience

It's fascinating to discover that Malcolm McLaren is on the board of Philips, the auctioneers, and somehow appropriate for a man whose career has always been about extracting as much money as possible from artists' efforts.

Whne the Telegraph goes to meet him, he's obviously puffed his ego up as much as possible; he misses the point when Nigel Farndale tries a cheeky question about how posterity will view him:

[A] man obsessed by his own self-image, I suggest.

'Completely. I have always loved the idea of being someone who can disappear, of never having an identity. It was probably due to my dysfunctional childhood.'

McClaren? Disappearing? Not if he can possibly avoid it. The man is Hereford in his own constantly redrawn Mappa Mundi:

'In the art world I am a sought-after creature,' he says haughtily. 'To participate in whatever, to endorse whatever.'

Frandale does challenge McClaren's cosy self-indulgence by asking him about his and the Pistol's obsession with the swastika. McClaren's answer isn't entirely satisfactory:

I ask about the fashion, specifically the swastika T-shirt that Sid Vicious always wore, at McLaren's behest. In retrospect does he consider it to have been a gratuitous and sick provocation? 'Not at all.' Does he think he could get away with it today? 'Probably not, but back then we were still on the tip of Sixties libertarianism.'

I suppose what I am getting at is that, well, he was Jewish. Didn't he find the swastika repulsive? 'Not at all. I didn't give a damn about all that. I thought it was just great.' He didn't give a damn about the Holocaust? 'Look, sometimes a younger generation doesn't want to inherit the history of an older generation, so we wanted to appropriate the swastika for ourselves. We wanted to have a clean slate. We decided that we liked certain icons from the past and wanted to reinvent them. We were trying to mix pop culture with politics and art.'

If you believe that Sid was thinking "I shall reclaim the Swastika for myself" when he pulled on his t-shirt in the morning, you're probably beyond saving. McClaren's defence runs counter-intuitive to the whole provocative nature of punk anyway - wearing Nazi iconography as fashion wouldn't have the power to shock if you didn't accept the then-recent history of the swastika; if the idea was reclaim and reky the swastika, what was the new message it was supposed to convey?

Clearly, McClaren doesn't want to say he didn't give a damn about the holocaust; equally clearly, when set against the opportunity to make money, he wasn't that bothered. And given that he's had thirty years to think up a justification that doesn't make him seem like someone who thought the death of millions upon million was somehow ripe for an ironic reevaluation, you'd have thought he could do better than sounding like he was in Kula Shaker.

"Not many people know, but I invented reality TV"

Turning the programme into something of a pension scheme for PunkCapitalists, Malcolm McLaren looks set to follow Lydon onto I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here.

Thank you kindly, EMI and Me

The inspired BBC Business programmes department continues to turn out some cracking ideas; currently applying the "I Love" format to businesses to chart the British public's relationships with major brands.

Last night, James Bolam narrated us through 'EMI and Me', which was a wonderful opportunity to see just how mistakes being made today seem to have been constantly throughout the history of the label.

So, Cliff Richard was given a rubbish song to sing rather than the stuff he was good at; the executives believed that they knew better than Adam Faith how he should pronounce the word "baby", and so on.
Of course, being an EMI facing documentary, Malcolm McLaren had to pop up to tell us how he invented punk and everything. What was interesting this time, though, was the explanation of why the Sex Pistols were dropped - not so much because EMI couldn't handle them, but because the presence of the punks in the music division was causing Americans to pull out of their agreements to purchase the then-innovative CAT scanners from the electronics side of the business - it's apparent that but for that, the label would have been happy to keep the alleged anarchists on their books.

There was a lot that was left out - the humiliating merger with Thorn was covered, but there was no explanation as to how and why EMI became independent again; and although the acquisitiveness of EMI which led to the purchase of Bingo and Cinema chains was given space, no room could be found to explore the HMV shops adventures or the takeover of Waterstones.

But what we take away, mostly, is the image of men who clearly have and had no real understanding of the product they were selling, or the market they were selling to; through a mixture of luck and obstinancy on the part of the talent, they managed to make some profits. Which they then pissed away again and again - on developing medical equipment, on bingo halls, on Mariah Carey. The overriding impression is of a company that never quite got it.