The Life & Times of Malcolm McLaren by Paul Gorman

Author:Paul Gorman
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472121103
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

In 2018, Temple was more measured about his approach. ‘I don’t actually recall saying that, and I’d be surprised if raising an eyebrow made any difference, but I probably gave the receiver a sense that I was capable of delivering,’ he says. ‘Given the fact that I’d been on a precarious ride I wanted to reassure everyone. Film finances are all based on trust; a big part of my strategy was to convince the receiver that I could finish it. You have to remember that young directors were a rarity in those days.’

Meanwhile Hawkes, who died in 2018, told McLaren’s 1980s biographer Craig Bromberg that he was taken aback by McLaren’s demeanour.

‘I had anticipated, because I heard about the amount of money that was involved, that I would meet somebody with all the trappings of wealth, having misapplied so much money to his personal benefit,’ said Hawkes. ‘I was quite surprised to find a chap who didn’t spend any money on himself, who didn’t drive a motorcar, and who showed no outward sign of having got any money.’12

In fact, so McLaren claimed to journalist Michael Watts in a wide-ranging profile for Melody Maker, he was £60,000 in the hole as a result of losing the court case. Of course, this did not take into account the £30,000 he may or may not have appropriated from the remaining Glitterbest funds.

Watts noted McLaren’s cheerfulness in the face of the loss, as the man who had cut his teeth in central London as a teenager led a tour of Soho and the surrounds with Westwood and photographer Barry Plummer.

‘Malcolm had a few set ideas about where he wanted to be photographed,’ says Plummer.13 These included the entrance doorway to his offices in Shaftesbury Avenue, next to billboards for music gigs outside the adjacent ticket agency, in front of the property developer Harry Hyams’s brutalist Centre Point office tower, over tea in the Regent Palace Hotel and against the Tin Pan Alley Club sign in Denmark Street.

Just down the road from this afternoon drinking establishment, McLaren attempted to gain entry to the QT Rooms, the live-in rehearsal space he purchased for the Pistols in the autumn of 1975, but heavy padlocks barred entry and, in any case, McLaren had been forced to give up the keys to the premises by court order. Through a window, McLaren pointed to scattered lettering piled in the courtyard; these were the cut-outs which formed the opening credits for The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle.

‘If I had expected McLaren to be visibly depressed by events, I was wrong,’ wrote Watts.

His nature is too buoyant; he’s a cork that always bobs to the surface, propelled by the chemistry of excitement. He is very good at hiding his depressions.

He has personally been driven by the constant need to escape from the boredom of his circumstances; he wanted to find an audience to whom he could show off his skills as a theatrical ringmaster, and he took an undisguised pleasure in the commotion he created with the Pistols, the thrill of living dangerously.

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