//Lobby card for High School Confidential!, 1958. This is from the opening scene, where Lewis sings the movie’s title track//

Let It Rock was digging in the ruins of past cultures that you cared about. It was giving them another brief moment in the sun. It wasn’t about doing anything new. It was an homage. It was nostalgia.
Malcolm McLaren to Momus, 2002

Forty three years after its creation I can reveal the source of the Jerry Lee Lewis image which appeared on the Let It Rock t-shirt design “The ‘Killer’ Rocks On!”.

It is from a lobby card for Alan Freed’s 1958 rocksploitation flick High Street Confidential!; an original was just one of the pieces of 50s ephemera adorning Let It Rock’s premises at 430 King’s Road in 1972.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Alan Freed, Chuck Berry, High School Confidential!, Imogen Hunt, Jerry Lee Lewis, Jeunesse Droguée, Let It Rock, Little Richard, London Rock & Roll Show, Masayoshi Sukita, Momus, Paris Capital Of The 19th Century, Paris Capital of the XXIst Century, Patrick Casey, Screaming Lord Sutch, Shallow 1-21, The 'Killer' Rocks On!, Walter Benjamin, Wembley Stadium

Paris, Capital of the XXIst Century is a personal and subjective journey that began firstly by ambling through a century’s archive of thousands of cinema commercials about the city (its inhabitants, what it sells, how it looks…), secondly by gathering impressions (choosing what to exploit, covet and keep), jotting them down only when I returned to my studio. Then, using these specific scenes as a palette and my voice as a brush, twenty-one portraits emerged of a Paris I had never witnessed before.

Malcolm McLaren November 2009

Tomorrow (June 10), Art Basel will host a screening of Malcolm McLaren’s final artwork, Paris, Capital of the XXIst Century.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Art Basel, Gateshead, Marc Glöde, Paris Capital of the XXIst Century, The Baltic, Walter Benjamin, Young Kim