Malcolm McLaren RIP

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/news/malcolm-mclaren-dies-aged-64-1939621.html

I was just thinking it was time for a revival of his work as a recording artist

:/

RIP

rip

I was listening to Duck Rock just yesterday. :(

I had no idea he was ill.

Oh no! ;_;

RIP

do the double dutch in heaven, malcolm

Heh ebo
ebo ebo ebonettes

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_ZLNqAa6roOs/SkspM2bmzKI/AAAAAAAABs8/KwcruZ1J_vg/s400/scratchin%27.jpg

wow, bummer. one of the great rock'n'roll hype men. and "buffalo gals" is total A+ godhead classic.

i've listening to a a bunch of the work he did with World's Famous Supreme Team over the last few months. His Waltz Darling album too. both had moments of sheer beauty and genius.

but that Algebra song is bollocks

Love the 12" mix of Madame Butterfly and Double Dutch.

his website currently reads: "Malcolm will return shortly..."

nu-Easter

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_ZLNqAa6roOs/SkspM2bmzKI/AAAAAAAABs8/KwcruZ1J_vg/s400/scratchin%27.jpg

radiant baby = instant cred

rip

RIP

@jesshopp I never regarded Malcolm McLaren as anything other than the creepy svengali coaxing 14yo Annabella Lwin's nudity on BowWowWow covers. Sors.

I'd like to find one thing that doesn't offend Jessica Hopper's delicate sensibilities, plz.

Duck Rock is grade A classic. this is sad.

^^
Absolutely, justifiably Metal Box/NMTB gets all the kudos, but I go back to Duck Rock a lot more than those pair. Love, love, love some of the Waltz Darling material too, especially this which manages to be both sensual, funny and a whole lotta strange.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcc3mgXnUzY

RIP

you were really something else

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLQRIXZdLhM

Aw, this sucks. Underrated for his musical output in my opinion - he had a great run for a few years - Duck Rock, Swamp Think, Fans, Round The Outside are all great idiocyncratic albums. Perhaps over-rated as a mover and shaker but I have always been impressed by his attitude and creativity. His general process seems to be "let's throw a bunch of disparate things together and if it works, we'll glorify our vision later" - a technique that a lot of people copied.

Just thinking about him pontificating from the bath in the Great Rock'N'Roll Swindle brings a smile to my face.

His last interview about the whole pistols/punk thing must surely then be the one in Jon Savage's 'Englands's Dreaming Tapes' from last year. It's a brilliant interview and like nothing i'd ever read him do before, very honest about the whole era with none of the usual attendant hype.

RIP

RIP

I'm a bit shocked but wasn't he kind of a colossal jerk? Just thinking back to the later Pistols years, the whole Adam & The Ants/Bow Wow Wow thing...

never thought kim fowley would outlive malcom.

r.i.p. malcom! thanx for the great music. thanx for getting bow wow wow together! (a band more near and dear to me than the sex pistols)

i think the whole adam/bow wow wow thing ended up working well for everyone. in retrospect.

Agreed.

um except Adam?

The whole um.. 'Chicken' magazine episode is the real clincher for anyone looking for reasons to diss him but i mean.. let's not go into THAT.

Blackpoolhoaxer This was filmed in The Bronx in June 1983. I was there!! It was not made in S. Africa. The music comes from there and may have been recorded there but this vid was shot in a youth club in Bronx. I was 17 and was there while this was being filmed. It took about 3 hours all up. My brother was going out with a girl who worked at Arista records and she arranged it. Had to pay our own air fare though!!

RIP.

What is the deal with this line from the NY Times:

"Fronted by John Lydon — whose repugnant appearance and Irish background earned him the stage name Johnny Rotten"

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/08/malcolm-mclaren-impresario-and-rock-music-manager-is-dead/

?!

ny times gettin' back into its circa 1893 anti-Irish thang

anyway, RIP -- dude was a character!

Nice obit and Top 5 and an old interview, from Popjustice: http://www.popjustice.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=4628&Itemid=206

Love the 12" mix of Madame Butterfly...

Thought I was the only one on the planet who was a fan of "Fans!"

RIP Malcolm, you provacateur you.

No way, "Fans" is total classic. That "Madame Butterfly" interpretation was mind-blowing when I first heard it and seems no less now.

RIP Malcolm.

Was hoping this was a put-on. RIP

Last time I was up in Manchester I was singing Fans' praises with PiscesX after a chance encounter in the Cornerhouse as it goes...

This is why I love ILX. No one in my real life likes (or has even heard) "Fans."

i like it too! let's form a fan club.

@jesshopp I never regarded Malcolm McLaren as anything other than the creepy svengali coaxing 14yo Annabella Lwin's nudity on BowWowWow covers. Sors.

14yo me supported him on this issue tbqh

well, i liked it when it came out a bunch. can't say i've heard it much since.

"14yo me supported him on this issue tbqh"

OTM! same here. i was totally in love.

r u confusing "Double Dutch" with "Buffalo Gals"?

Nope. "Double Dutch" was the UK hitlist hit from the "Duck Rock" album.

the biggest UK hitlist hit, I mean.

are there good books about/by mclaren? the 2002 momus interview linked above mentions malcolm writing a book, was this an autobiography and did it ever come out?

http://www.malcolmmclaren.com/

Lol.

The Word have done a tribute playlist on Spotify: http://bacn.me/1a6s

xxxpost I think Momus was alluding to the potential autobiography Malcolm might write.

The Wicked Ways of Malcolm McLaren was an authorized biography, rather than an autobiography but it certainly tells his side of the story. It's a good read. I can't see that a subsequent autobiography would have been worthwhile, although there are a couple of things that are skimmed over like the post-Duck Rock recording of the Swamp Thing tracks. I'd like to know more about that.

It's been a long time since I read Wicked Ways, I don't have a copy, and I've read more Pistols books than is healthy, but I think the account of the whole ugly Chicken episode from Rip It Up and Start Again is lifted pretty much directly from there. If I'm right, he authorised it, warts and all.

It's been a few years since I read it too - I got it from the library. I do remember that Chicken thing but the impression I got that it was a wind-up that never went anywhere. At no point was it suggested that he thought a p0rn mag for kids was a good idea.

It's a good idea for comedy prank! c.f. Brass Eye

geir "double dutch" is not a square dance song, it's borrowing quite obviously from african music, esp. mbaqanga, no?

actually what i am doing, geir doesn't know the difference between those things. and he'll probably assert that there is no difference. i might as well be trying to get my alarm clock to distinguish between brahms and bruckner.

Double Dutch is based on a Boyoyo Boys song:

This group would perhaps be unknown outside of South Africa had they not come to the attention of the great rock & roll swindler, Malcolm McLaren, who took their hit single "Puleng" and adapted it for his own production, "Double Dutch." McLaren came to blows with the Boys after refusing to share the royalities from his single. Only after a lengthy legal struggle did the group receive their due. Out of court and on stage, the Boyoyo Boys offer an ebullient music, consisting of chanted, bouncing rhythms. The group suffered a tragic blow in 1984 with the slaying of their drummer, but with their next album, proved to the world that they were Back in Town.

to be fair to geir, he's not necessarily talking about DD when he mentions square dancing:

"Well, "Double Dutch" was being played on constant rotation"
...
"so for me it's more about his own work. Which was interesting in its own way with its combination of modern beats and electronics together with American square dance."

the subject has widened by the end there.

watched buffalo gals video again this morning. it's an odd mix of seven brides for seven brothers and breakdance 2 (electric boogaloo). the next one was weirder, squaredancing done be people wearing american sportswear chic (pre-dating tank girl by some years). i'd completely forgotten Soweto and the Zulu thing (which were great, but relatively untouched by him)

but later in the thread he says, no, i wasn't talking about buffalo gals, but double dutch.

possible "xpost", but this needs to be shared:

Anarchy in Gardenstown - how Sex Pistols guru was thrown out of a Highland village - The Scotsman
http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/scotland/Anarchy-in-Gardenstown--how.3283235.jp

lol

McLaren forced his way back and declared: "Jesus is a sausage," before being bundled from the podium.

My mate at Southern Records says that all film sequels should have the same upgrade as Breakdance. And when you consider Schindler's List 2 (Electric Boogaloo) or The Unbearable Lightness Of Being 2 (Electric Boogaloo) or Threads 2 (Electric Boogaloo), I can only make him right.

Ebert remembers Who Killed Bambi?

WFMU just ran Irwin Chusid's 1983 interview with MMcL...really interesting, worth listening to the archived show when it's updated later this evening.

I found that Ebert piece to be really interesting. The idea of Meyer, Ebert, McLaren and Rotten all working together is quite a thing to contemplate. Not really surprising it didn't work out but it has to be one of the great "what ifs" of 20th century popular culture. Thanks for linking. It's weird how there's a couple of bits that almost foreshadow what would happen in real life, like the final line of the movie would have been Rotten saying "Did yer ever had the feeling yer being watched" and Sid's quote after reading the script "I don't think my mum will like the bit about the heroin".

my bit...

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_JySddEdGkVY/S8ZMZPlvydI/AAAAAAAAAcA/TXY2i252Qco/s1600/God-Save-Malcolm--WHT-T.jpg

http://pollywannacracka.blogspot.com/2010/04/duck-rock-4-life.html

that momus/mclaren interview linked above makes both of them seem like pretentious nitwits. which sounds about right.

i thought it was a great interview. 8yrs on it makes me wonder where and in who the spirit of punk is hiding now ?

The spirit of punk was reincarnated in a baby girl born in Asia born on 1/1/2000. She will restore punk to world dominance in 2018.

Aja?

i thought it was a great interview. 8yrs on it makes me wonder where and in who the spirit of punk is hiding now ?

― beat boy damager, power 2 the people (Its all about face), Thursday, April 15, 2010 4:54 AM (6 hours ago) Bookmark

like for serious? they just come off as pompous wankers to me. especially all the "people nowadays, they've lost touch with (x)" speculation which in my mind = total blowhard. through, i dunno, baudrillard into the mix and there'd be stratospheric levels of self-satisfied hyperbole about the "zeitgeist."

also "spirit of punk" whatevs

isn't momus like philosophically opposed to punk, too? he's mentioned this numerous times.

two 'pompous wankers' talking smack is what makes it great. and yeah 'spirit of punk', oi oi and the whole subversive fuck the world thing, i know it's cliche but whos doing that these days ?

'isn't momus like philosophically opposed to punk, too? he's mentioned this numerous times."

haha...and who sounds like pretentious twat now then

"whole subversive fuck the world thing, i know it's cliche but whos doing that these days"

I feel the magnet-denials/fuck-the-worldism of ICP are subversive but in the wrong direction.

haha...and who sounds like pretentious twat now then

er what? momus has written that about punk numerous times here and on his various web sites. just strikes me as odd that he would reject the sex pistols and then look to mclaren as some kind of guru.

i saw a couple wearing matching ICP t-shirts in the health-food co-op today.

punk music was bollocks if you ask me but the DIY ethics and aesthetics were choice. McLaren was always more than the one dimension the sex pistols portrayed.

so yeah, dunno about guru but as a role model on how to make grand artistic statements irrespective of success, failure or morality, he was quite inspirational.

everyone seems to have behaved brilliantly over this, it seems to have brought out the best in all his ex friends ex enemies ex wives and whoever else. no one's had a bad word to say.

even NME has got it right, their best cover in *years*

http://www.nme.com/layout/magImage.php

time heals i wounds, i guess. or maybe he made up with people late in life. certainly he fucked enough people over once upon a time.

"time heals i wounds" is of course the bad brains version of "time heals all wounds"

"Momus says nowt but his prayers, y'knaa"

Funeral was today.

Guess who: http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/47694000/jpg/_47694434_adamant_getty226282.jpg

Adam Ant - look'n like a hobo

...as if he needed the pic on his hat

I've must have seen a dozen WDYLL threads, and I'll be damned if there's a man or woman amongst us who can call Adam fucking Ant out for looking like a hobo.

If only i knew what a WDYLL thread was ?

Just sayin prince charming seems a lifetime ago. Anyone got a full frontal of the pic to see how the head matches the rest of the ensemble ?

or a photostream of the funeral/procession. It sounded fittingly grand and irreverently spectacular.

http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2010/4/22/1271945221542/Malcolm-McLaren-Funeral-006.jpg

hobo chic ?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/gallery/2010/apr/22/malcolm-mclaren-funeral?lightbox=1

he looks good for his age, tho.

regarding mclaren being some sort of shady, untrustworthy character in business deals...

what did he actually do that was so bad? aside from kicking adam ant out of his own band. or is this just a rep he played up himself?

everyone seems to have behaved brilliantly over this, it seems to have brought out the best in all his ex friends ex enemies ex wives and whoever else. no one's had a bad word to say.

even NME has got it right, their best cover in *years*

― piscesx, Friday, 16 April 2010 06:01 (1 week ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

ha. will this image change every week now?

ah brilliant! i hope so. wonder why it does/ did that? how very 21st century.

Funeral sounds a laugh anyway
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/apr/25/malcolm-mclaren-funeral-sean-ohagan

Ebert publishes Who Killed Bambi? to the web

hmmm.....

RIP

anyone else at this point in malcolm mclaren and the bootzilla orchestra's "call a wave" hear "women of ireland", e.g. this kind of bit?