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And the place looked like a sex shop?

People were terrified to come in. It was fantastic. At the very beginning, our clientele included the dirty-old-man brigade and a lot of them turned out to be famous politicians. One of them used to host the News at Ten and he would say to the girl in the shop, “Watch the news tonight because I’m going to be wearing rubber knickers!”

Then the kids started to come shop there.

Of course. They loved it because it was a new look and it was outlaw.

One of our main items were the erotic t-shirts. I used to bring them back from Christopher Street in New York. There was one shirt with a big black man with his huge penis drooping down. They were very, very tight, so you’d be wearing it and his wonger would be dropping down below your belly button. It was perfectly placed. Some of the kids, by the time they’d walk down the length of Kings Road to Sloane Square, would be arrested. We were raided twice by the police and went to court, but I didn’t give a damn. Everything got confiscated but we replaced it and all the kids thought, “This is the coolest place on earth.”

Well then why did you close it down?

It was at the peak of the Sex Pistols’ popularity. At the start, they appealed to the intellectually curious and the emotionally connected but then they became a fucking household name.

And that’s no good.

So I opened up another shop called Seditionary. I went to the war museum and got copies of photographs of the ruins of Dresden and blew them up and used them as wallpaper. Then I smashed a hole through the ceiling of the shop because I wanted it to look slightly derelict. I also had rats underneath the cash register, running back and forth. It was really fun.

And you had people like Boy George, Adam and the Ants, and Bow Wow Wow hanging out there asking you to make them a look, right?

They were there, yes. What happened was, I was involved in a French independent record company called Barclay. On the side they used to make porno movies and they wanted to get me to put some music to it. They said, “Don’t fucking give us a hard time with any music that’s copyrighted. Use African music or something.”

I went up to the library at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and they had a big music collection. I fancied the girl there so I would go every day and look at her and listen to ethnic music. She played me one of these records, mistakenly, at the wrong speed and it fucking blew my ear off. I thought, “What the fuck is that? It’s a hell of a beat.” So I took the idea back to London and I gave it to these kids who were called Adam and the Ants.

At the same time, Vivienne was diving into 18th-century fashion with these cheesy ball gowns and I said, “If you’re going to do that, Vivienne, you’re going to have to give it a label that kids will understand.” Vivienne was like, “Fuck the kids! I want to sell to elegant women.”

But we didn’t have a shop like that. We had to stay in the pop culture. We had to label it somehow, so I came up with this idea of taking images of pirates from the 18th century so the kids could key into it. I needed a group that looked like pirates. I told the kids in the shop: “You’ve got to look like a pirate! You’re not from this corny back alley of London anymore. You’re from Zanzibar and that’s going to give you license to play these drums that I’m now going to play to you that have this ethnic beat and you’re going to look like pirates!” That’s how Bow Wow Wow came about.

But why pirates?

At the time, a big news story was cassette players and the ghetto blaster and kids copying music off the radio. The record industry was trying to put a license on blank cassettes because kids were taping their own music. So it was all about piracy and my kids looked like pirates.

It was a perfect success so I said to Vivienne, “Let’s take this fucking pirate look to the catwalk!”

So was this around the time you started to fall out with Vivienne Westwood?

She wanted to be recognized as a designer and I wanted the exact opposite. Plus I’d learned to fuck some other girls when I was on my hiatus in Paris. Anyway, I knew that she was going to continue to push to create these 18th-century ball gowns and I just didn’t get it. I couldn’t see a rock and roll bone in its body.

I decided that I didn’t want to be a commercial success in fashion. I thought it would cost us a fortune and then we’d no longer be outside the culture, we’d be in it. I knew we’d end up pissing each other off really badly, which eventually we did. So I left and she said, “Well it doesn’t have to fuckin’ be like that.”

I said, “I thought that’s what you wanted to do. You can sign up with some Italian company and become completely engrossed in fashion and this whole heritage that you’ve had with me can stand you in good stead. And you’ll be able to live off that legacy and it’ll give you all the credibility you need.”

And that’s what she did. I went off to make an album of my own, called Duck Rock. The main single was “Buffalo Gals” and that’s what I based my last ever collection on.

How did that pan out?

I thought, “What does a buffalo gal look like?” And I came up with the idea that it would be like a big, fat girl that wanders around like a buffalo all over the planet. It was like a bag lady, basically.

The look included big sheepskin coats, giant hairy skirts, and a hat five sizes too big for you. We would throw a few ethnic patterns on it here and there. It was a scramble. I wanted the shoes to look like the polythene bags that bag ladies wear on their feet. So I did that with chamois leather.

How did the buffalo-gal thing go over with the fashion world?

I’ll never forget this moment when, after a show in Paris, this woman from Italian Vogue came backstage and convinced me that I’d better do something else.

How did she manage that?

She said, “Malcolm, Malcolm, the music is bellissimo, BELLISSIMO, but the clothes, they look so poor. Why you make everybody look so poor?”

Nice.

I didn’t know what to say, so I said, “Well have you heard of Robin Hood? He’s a very big, famous character in English literature. I’m trying to make the rich look poor, so the poor can look rich! That’s the idea.”

She didn’t buy it?

She said, “Malcolm, you’ll never get away with this. The music is bellissimo, but forget the clothing.”

INTERVIEW BY ANDY CAPPER


MALCOLM MCLAREN INVENTED EVERYTHING | 1 | 2 |

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