THE LIFE AND TIMES OF MALCOLM MCLAREN
THE BIOGRAPHY
PAUL GORMAN
Constable, 848pp, £30, ebook £12.99
‘I blame the granny,’ began Ysenda Maxtone Graham in the Daily Mail. ‘Malcolm Mclaren, widely considered to be the creator of punk, grew up in a dysfunctional, sweary 1950s household in north London, looked after by his maternal grandmother, Rose.’ Indeed, the granny loomed large in all the book’s reviews, in particular her stricture that ‘to be bad is good, because to be good is simply boring’. For Victoria Segal in the Sunday Times, ‘This excellent biography is testament to how fiercely he internalised Rose’s advice — there’s little that’s boring here.’ Fiona Sturges in the Guardian agreed, writing that ‘As Paul Gorman’s mammoth biography illustrates, Mclaren was never boring — though he could be a dreadful pain in the arse.’
Nevertheless, could a 900-page tome be justified? Paul Tierney in the
thought so, describing the book as a ‘mesmerising journey’, while for Sturges it was ‘Neither hagiography nor hatchet job… curious, rigorous and, despite its eye-watering length, rarely dull.’ Crucial to the Mclaren story is Sex, the clothes shop he and Vivienne Westwood founded in the King’s Road. ‘A transgressive haven of rubber, leather and bondage-wear, it became the Sex Pistols’ birthplace,’ wrote Segal, while Sturges added the tantalising snippet that ‘newsreader Reginald Bosanquet was allegedly a client’. Segal relates that Mclaren died in 2010 from ‘mesothelioma, the cancer commonly caused by asbestos exposure’. According to Gorman, this was probably, and fittingly, a result of holes he smashed in the ceiling of Sex 30 years earlier — ‘the act of destruction that finally caught up with him’.