Ah Malky. You died. The media in its obituaries describe you as an iconoclast and ‘impresario’. I love that. You were an impresario in the theatre of my life too.
I was one of you and Viv’s thousand-fold faceless love-children. The tribe who donned your attitude and the clothes you made - too poor to buy your label, of course, and too silly to mimic your wit but rich in the energy, the creativity and anarchistic rebellion you loved to foster.
We ate up your thrills, your words, your outlandishness.
But while I, a teenage punk rocker, smoked cigarettes and got drunk at parties in people’s houses with hairsprayed, backcombed peroxide hair, black clothes and dark khol eyes, just another unformed adult listening to the Sex Pistols, Stiff Little Fingers, the Buzzcocks, the Clash and all the rest occasionally backslashed into soft Neil Young and Fleetwood Mac songs we began to consider your svengality a betrayal.
You became to us young fools like ‘the man’, the establishment you loved to taunt. You became to us, who related to the punks you managed, uncool. How young and foolish we were not to understand the creator cannot ever kill that which he has already created.
For so long it was pathetically unfashionable to like you. I am glad you did not care. I hope you did not care. I hope you revelled in it, you master of contrariness.
Then “Paris”. How I heard your Paris album I do not know. The discovery is vampired by my total devotion to you for creating this beautiful soundtrack. Songs and tunes that came with me through so many lovely times in Australia and Paris itself.
You made something so grand. A glorious collaboration. Catherine Deneuve breathing and whispering “sing away?”. And your voice, so liquid, confident, smooth.
You said on this album, “This collection of songs attempts to inscribe a map of feelings over this jazz drenched city of Paris. A city where I have often been lost in a daydream, listening to Eric Satie, Art Blakey and Serge Gainsbourg. Some of their blood and smells remain.”
Thank you Mr Malcolm McLaren for being an unstable, revolutionary yet constant thread of a kaleidoscope in my little life.
You did so much more than “rescue fashion from commodification by the establishment” – your stated objective back in the 1970’s. You unwittingly rescued me and many other souls, liberating us from ‘commodification by the establishment’.
Malcolm Robert Andrew McLaren
22.01.46 – 08.04.10
Now your blood and smells remain with us.
