‘This book solves the mystery of a spell that was cast on a time that won’t fade away’

Hiroshi Fujiwara

2024 has got off to a good start with the news that the Japanese edition of The Life & Times of Malcolm McLaren is going to be published by East Press on January 26, four days after what would have been the great provocateur’s 78th birthday.

This translation includes a new photo selection, the above cover quote from Japan’s style guru Hiroshi Fujiwara and updated text, including much new detail on the visit McLaren made with Vivienne Westwood and Gerry Goldstein to Andy Warhol’s Factory in New York in the summer of 1973.

The Life & Times Of Malcolm McLaren Japanese edition is available to order here.

Tags: Hiroshi Fujiwara, The Factory

In the evening June 9 I’ll be in Soho for a London Society event about the London life of the late cultural provocateur Malcolm McLaren.

At workplace venue Fora in Broadwick Street writer Helen Barrett and I will be discussing the ways in which the man born in Stoke Newington and buried in Highgate Cemetery used the city as the springboard for his dizzying range of creative and subversive activities.

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Tags: BRoadwick Street, Fora, Helen Barrett, Herb lester Associates, Highgate Cemetery, London Society

//Fax of treatment sent by Malcolm McLaren to Neal Purvis and Robert Wade on January 9, 1991//

These faded pages constitute a film pitch Malcolm McLaren sent by fax to screenwriters Neal Purvis and Robert Wade way back in 1991.

//The first page of the fax shows that this treatment was completed a couple of weeks before it was sent, on December 20, 1990//

//From my transcription of the now-very faded fax//

Purvis and Wade are responsible for many  film successes including the astounding run of screenplays for the seven James Bond movies from 1999’s The World Is Not Enough to the recently released No Time To Die. I’ve known them for a  while and Neal has mentioned their contact with McLaren during preparations for their first feature Let Him Have It, so made sure it was covered  in the hardback edition of The Life & Times of Malcolm McLaren.

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Tags: Impressions of America, James Bond, Leadville, Let Him Have It, Neal Purvis, No Time To Die, Oscar Wilde, Robert Wade, Screen International, Skyfall, The World Is Not Enough, Too Too Utterly

//From The Times, July 29, 1966. Paul Gorman Archive. No reproduction without permission//

The late Malcolm McLaren made his first national media appearance in a 250-word item on the Law Report page of The Times in the summer of 1966.

This is an extract from my biography The Life & Times of Malcolm McLaren:

In 1966 while he was attending a painting course at Chelsea College of Art, Malcolm McLaren – who had been forced to take his step-father’s surname Edwards a few years earlier – came under the influence of Stan, a fellow student whose last name is lost to memory.

“Stan was a Trotskyist who played a mean jazz saxophone and politicised Malcolm,” says Fred Vermorel, a friend of McLaren’s who had been at Harrow art school with him a couple of years previously.

For McLaren, radical politics opened up a world of possibilities when entwined with his investigations into art. Encouraged and initially accompanied by Stan, McLaren began attending rallies and demonstrations protesting on behalf of the causes célèbres of the day: against the war in Vietnam and South Africa’s apartheid regime.

Long gone were the polite CND parades peopled by earnest chaplains and fresh-faced Home Counties youth in duffel coats chanting Kumbaya. Taking their cue from the US uprisings such as that among the African American community on Chicago’s West Side, the British protestors of 1966 brought activism to new heights in direct confrontation with the authorities. A turning point was the July central London rally calling for the British government to disassociate itself from US military policy in south-east Asia.

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Tags: Alexander Trocchi, Chelsea College Of Art, Fred Vermorel, Harrow school of art, Henry Adler, King Mob, Kumbaya, Malcolm Edwards, Mrs Gold, Stars & Stripes, The Times

In response to inquiries about signed copies of The Life & Times Of Malcolm McLaren, I’m offering the socially distanced solution: I’m happy to send signed adhesive bookplates (personalised if you like) gratis anywhere in the world.

Send your postal address to my contact address stating whether you want a random or personalised message, and I’ll send you your very own bookplate.

The photo at the top of this post shows variants I have already signed for the virtual event being staged by Atlanta’s A Capella Books next month. I’ll post about that and other US activities coinciding with the book’s American release on September 22 in the coming weeks.

Tags: A Capella Books, Atlanta, bookplates

“Within the slippery divides between disciplines and media – fashion, art, music, interiors, commerce – one finds Malcolm McLaren, roaming and creating.”
Lou Stoppard in her essay in The Life & Times Of Malcolm McLaren

Disruption to the publication of a book is extremely small beer at a time when the COVID-19 pandemic has set the world in disarray, so I’m sanguine about the postponement of several events and signings which were due to occur around the publication of my biography The Life & Times Of Malcolm McLaren.

//The back of the book jacket features this 1976 portrait by photographer Joe Stevens//

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Tags: CBS Theatrical Films, Fashion Beast, Joe Stevens, Lou Stoppard, Malcolm McLaren, Peter McLaren, Tracey Winwood

//Window display for Impresario at the New Museum, Sept 16 – Nov 20, 1988. Image from the New Museum Digital Archive//

//Introduction to the show. Image from the New Museum Digital Archive//

My biography of the late Malcolm McLaren will now be published in April 2020, exactly 10 years after his premature death at the age of 64.

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Tags: Adam Ant, Art & Text, Catherine McGann, Impresario: Malcolm McLaren & The British New Wave, Keith Haring, Marcia Tucker, New Museum Of Contemporary Art, Paul Taylor, Vivienne Westwood, William Olander, Witches

When he was growing up in Minneapolis in the 1950s, the painter Duncan Hannah’s father advised him: “You never know what kind of squirrel cage a man goes home to at the end of the day.”

Hannah’s book 20th Century Boy allows the reader full access to the squirrel cage inhabited by this charming man in 1970s New York.

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Tags: 20th Century Boy, Amos Poe, Andy Warhol, Ashenden, Bryan Ferry, Claudine, Colette, David Bowie, Debbie Harry, Duncan Hannah, Gato Barbieri, Harlem, John Cale, Justine, Last Tango In Paris, Lawrence Durrell, Roxy Music, Somerset Maugham, Unmade Bed, Vintage Violence

//Malcolm McLaren with New York scenester Eileen Polk at New York nightclub Hurrah, October 1978. Photo: © Joe Stevens. No reproduction without permission//

Today marks eight years since the death of visual artist, designer and cultural provocateur Malcolm McLaren.

His friend Joe Stevens sent me this photo a couple of years back. It was taken during the period when McLaren – wearing one of the tartan bondage suits he designed with Vivienne Westwood – was mounting the defence of Sid Vicious, then on the murder charge for having killed Nancy Spungen.

This extraordinary episode from an extraordinary life – during which time McLaren encountered the likes of Donald Trump’s vile mentor Roy Cohn, the legendary radical lawyer William Kunstler and criminal defence attorney F. Lee Bailey (the latter by way of an introduction by Allen Ginsberg) – will of course be covered in my book Malcolm McLaren: The Biography, which is to be published by Constable & Robinson next year.

Tags: Allen Ginsberg, Constable & Robinson, Donald Trump, F. Lee Bailey, Hurrah, Roy Cohn, Sex Pistols, Sid Vicious, Vivienne Westwood, William Kunstler

//Top: Entrance to Ealing Club stairwell with jeweller’s to its right, early 1960s. Photo: ealingclub.com. Above: The entrance as it is today//

“Suburbia is the breeding ground for the richest and most innovative cultural production of the 20th and 21st centuries” Rupa Huq, writer and MP for Ealing Central & Acton, 2013

An advert in the New Musical Express for a “Rhythm & Blues Night” staged 55 years ago today – on St Patrick’s Night, March 17, 1962 – sparked the British musical revolution which soundtracked youth culture in the West for decades.

The ad proved a lure for suburban London teenage r&b fans including Keith Richards and Mick Jagger, while Eric Burdon, soon to be vocalist with The Animals, hitchhiked the 300 miles from Newcastle to join them in witnessing the main performance by Blues Incorporated (in fact he and Jagger traded verses on stage during a rendition of Billy Boy Arnold’s I Ain’t Got You).

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Tags: Alexis Korner, Art Wood, Billy Boy Arnold, Blues Incorporated, Charlie Watts, Cyril Davies, Ealing Club, Keith Richards, Mick Jagger, Rolling Stones, Ronnie Wood, Rupa Huq, The Animals