Never mind the Sex Pistols, they're history

Published on Friday 21 August 2009 22:03

THE man who helped break the mould of British rock music with punk and the Sex Pistols more than 30 years ago is a piece of living history.

And tomorrow, Malcolm McLaren is looking for a second act – a third, or fourth perhaps – at the Edinburgh Fringe.

For an hour, McLaren, 63, will face an audience of up to 700 people, trying to hold their attention as a storyteller and raconteur. The show, History is for Pissing On, was inspired by the touring success of much younger zeitgeist writers and pundits such as The Tipping Point author, Malcolm Gladwell, and McLaren hopes it could be a launching pad.

McLaren, former partner of the designer Vivienne Westwood, another pioneer of punk fashion, and father of Agent Provocateur lingerie entrepreneur Joe Corre, has a knack for capturing the fashion of the times. He said he has done "zillions" of corporate presentations or conferences where people have sought his views on pop culture or "how to sell a piece of cheese, or a new motorcar", but for the first time he's testing his charisma on the general public.

In an interview at an Edinburgh hotel, McLaren discoursed non-stop, almost addressing the air, with blue eyes swivelling round the room. He denounced the reproductive "karaoke culture" of talent shows where teens imitate acts they've seen on TV. He described his own experience judging a talent contest in Portsmouth this summer, where he claimed to have found young competitors with their "stage door mums" vomiting from nerves after they came off stage.

He embraced the free music downloads which have shaken up the music industry, and revealed the contents of his own iPod. An eclectic mix ranges from Strangers in the Night by Frank Sinatra, to Billy Fury, Elvis Presley, Joy Division's Love Will Tear Us Apart, to the French composer Francis Poulenc. McLaren has offices in New York and Paris, where he lives part of the time,

He talked up his plans for a Broadway musical, The Life and Times of Christian Dior, based on the life of the French fashion icon and drawing on his own knowledge of music and design since the Second World War. "I like the stage, I like musicals, I'd like to do something profound based on all that I know, based on the look of music, based on the sound of fashion."

According to his producers, McLaren will talk about the death of Sid Vicious, the Sex Pistols singer who died of a heroin overdose in February 1979, aged 21. He had been jailed as the chief suspect for the murder of his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen, who died from a stab wound at New York's Chelsea Hotel, in a tragedy that came to define the punk era.

Earlier this year, McLaren went public on his blog with the theory that Vicious's mother, Anne Beverley, who committed suicide in 1996, smuggled in the drugs that killed him, and suggested that a mystery assailant had stabbed Spungen.

But he played down the story yesterday: "At the back of my mind is, does anyone really care any more about that? Maybe. It doesn't seem to me to be that fascinating."

McLaren was born a "war baby" in January 1946 to a teenage mother, Emmy Isaacs, and a father, Pete McLaren, a war deserter who was probably only 18 or 19, and disappeared when his son was about two.

After doing odd jobs and going to several art colleges, he started selling and designing clothes with Westwood and, in 1975, began managing the group that became the Sex Pistols. They released the single God Save the Queen and the album Never Mind the Bollocks in 1977. In 1983, a second success came with the hip-hop album Duck Rock, including the single Buffalo Gals.

More recently, his career has run from British Airways advert soundtracks to his song About Her, used by director Quentin Tarantino, in Kill Bill Vol 2. He has also produced films and radio documentaries.

When McLaren was in his forties, a Sunday newspaper tracked his father down to a "greasy spoon garage" in England.

McLaren's only real experience of Scotland, he said, came in the reality show The Baron, when he competed with two other celebrities for the affections of a remote Scottish fishing community, Gardenstown in Banffshire, to be elected their laird. He called it a "Christian fundamentalist enclave" devoted to harvesting langoustines, where homosexuals were ostracised. Needless to say, he came last in the programme's vote.

It is on the "karaoke world" that McLaren is most outspoken. "The talent show is the real true remarkable phenomenon on the culture of our time," he said. He recently judged one of them, Live and Unsigned in Portsmouth, where thousands of entrants vied for 60 slots. "I found it extraordinary to see 13-year-old kids trying to sing Beatles songs. I remember seeing the Beatles live and singing in 1963, and I'm thinking, it's 2009. I'm now watching some 14-year-old girl with her face welling up with stage fright as she tried to sing, acapella, Can't Buy Me Love." In a pub across the road, the come-down and disappointments for these "strange apparitions" produced "a sea of vomit", he said. "What you are seeing on stage is this emulation, this simulation of what? It's gone, the whole meaning of it all."

The Fringe show is about "creating a portrait of yourself, told by yourself, through a series of anecdotes and stories". Does it need to be a success? "I don't give a f--ing s---, frankly. Success? What is it? Bernie Madoff was a success? Where is he?"

McLaren also appears today in a first Edinburgh International Book Festival session of a New York spoken word society, Moth.