How an uppity artschool brat with little or no talent became a cultural study in his own right will be revealed when Malcolm McLaren, aided and abetted by U2's manager, Paul McGuinness, finally brings his life story to the stage. A bit of a yarn it will be too: when he's not singing, songwriting and touring, he's discovering other artists and when he's not acting, directing and producing he's "projecting", and when he's not instigating, commentating and creating, he's lecturing all around the world about how he managed to do what he did without being arrested or imprisoned.
He has even contributed a verb to the English language - to Svengali, for it was Malcolm McLaren who not only discovered, but Svengalied, the Sex Pistols to such an extent that at one stage the band was considered a threat to society and there was an early-day motion about them to that effect in the Westminster. Because of all sorts of outstanding legal nonsense, he's not really supposed to talk about the Pistols anymore, so it's just as well he can dredge up madder-than-mad tales of being a Situationist in Paris during the 1968 riots, running a leather-fetish boutique called Sex in the King's Road in London, putting train-robber Ronnie Biggs on Top Of The Pops, having the first successful rap/hip-hop record in the charts, discovering Boy George, and how he unwittingly inspired (irony of ironies) Madonna. Characters walking in and out of the action, as he rabbits on, include Stephen Spielberg, William Gibson, Vivienne Westwood (obviously) and Catherine Deneuve.
"That's why I'm putting my life story on the stage," he says. "I've seen and done a lot and want to get it all across. I'm almost finished the libretto but I still haven't got a title." How about Cash From Chaos? "Oh, very funny. But in a way that ties in with the early stuff when I bolted over to Paris during the riots just because I felt there was something interesting going on with the art gangster groups and people like Guy Debord - that whole situationist thing came back out when I launched the Pistols, and we also included bits in the film The Great Rock N'Roll Swindle. But in a way, it all got left behind in the tabloid coverage."
Just before the Pistols, McLaren had briefly managed the protopunk band, The New York Dolls and it was working with them, he says, that convinced him music could operate as a means to an end - the end being "seizing control of the culture and the media".
"The New York Dolls taught me that a band didn't really have to play that well but they did have to garner an attitude - so once I finished with them and started in on the Pistols, I had a plan." The Pistols' story has now entered the realms of myth, but whatever about McLaren's plans to seize control of the culture/media, he certainly succeeded in seizing control of large amounts of money. The Sex Pistols were signed and dropped by a number of record companies, pocketing large advances along the way, and McLaren knew something, somewhere was working when in 1978, the band were declared "Young Businessmen Of The Year" by London's Investor's Review. Was it the greatest rock'n'roll swindle ever? "I'm not sure but the reason I did what I did with the Pistols was because I was a child of the 1960s which was a time full of original, powerful and optimistic thought - and being in an art school for most of that time meant I was in a haven for the disenfranchised. There was a real sense of vacuum and loss when the 1970s dawned - there were a lot of casualties and the rest just seemed to be swallowed up by the corporate structure. Personally, I found refuge from this alienation in a little hole in the wall on the King's Road which went on to be called Sex and from where the Pistols were launched. It was my version of how the power and energy of the 1960s should have been developed in the 1970s."
Regrets, you've had a few? "No, not even when Lydon (Johnny Rotten) left the group and the rest of us flew down to Brazil and recorded a single with Ronnie Biggs. You have to remember that at the time, Ronnie Biggs was one of the most wanted men in Britain and the idea of me making him a pop star was just such an incredible laugh - he was a vehicle waiting to be used. Then we did the film and the only reason for doing that was again rooted in the time and the place - I had approximately six months' grace from the break-up of the Pistols before the record industry clubbed me to death, so we made Swindle." The story, for many people, would have ended there - after all, a pending court case to answer charges of fraud meant he had to leg it and live in exile in France for a while, but he spent his time on the Left Bank plotting his second coming. Once back in London, he discovered and nurtured Adam Ant, Bow Wow Wow and Boy George but his attention was focused on the musical movement that had just exploded in the black, urban areas of America.
"Although I wouldn't regard myself as a huge music fan (ha, ha) I used to listen a lot to what is now known as `world music' and I spent a lot of time travelling around digging up new variants, new sounds and new directions. My friend in New York, Afrika Bambatta brought me to the South Bronx on one of these trips and there on this piece of wasteland was this massive open-air hip-hop party taking place - it was like black punk rock. That was the inspiration behind my song Buffalo Gals which was the first commercial rap/scratch/hip hop record. It was hip-hop combined with a rhyme sung in the hillbilly areas of the US and the dance was a 19thcentury square dance."
Continuing this pick'n'mix, post-modern approach, he went on to do successful albums such as Fans (which featured the opera/ rhythm'n'blues version of Ma- dame Butterfly) and Waltz Dar- ling (a collaboration with Jeff Beck and Bootsy Collins). At around the same time, he went to Hollywood to work in films and is still involved in talks with Stephen Speilberg to do a musical film about how Oscar Wilde discovered rock'n'roll while in America.
Considering his working methods, it's surprising to hear him give out about Madonna for - he says - appropriating one of his best ideas. "After Buffalo Gals I went back to the Bronx and found all these transvestite black men in nightclubs doing this really peculiar dance called `voguing'. I hired them on the spot and brought out a single called Deep In Vogue. Soon afterwards I found myself on the same bill as Madonna at some Greenpeace concert and I remember her watching my dancers `voguing' from the side of the stage. A few weeks later she had stolen all my dancers, brought out her own single and carried it over into the mainstream. The cheek of her!" Indeed.
Malcolm McLaren presents his lecture, Living Yesterday Tomor- row, at the Town Hall Theatre, Galway at 8 p.m. tomorrow as part of the Galway Arts Festival.
