1983 Singles # 13 Malcolm McLaren

 

I never cared for Malcolm McLaren. I always found him distinctly sleazy. Well, let's face it, one of the distinctive roles of the Rock and Roll manager was to be sleazy going right back to the Fifties. . McLaren took that role seriously. When I saw Nick Kent who knew him well, give a talk at the Laugharne Literary and Music festival, coincidentally a day after McLaren died, he described McLaren as a pimp. I still don't find him any more savoury even though I don't like to speak ill of the dead.

But I do appreciate one thing he did enormously. His 1983 album Double Dutch. There was something faintly ridiculous about McLaren. With his Akela hat and carrot curls. A man approaching middle age in a Pop world that was then still all about youth/ But the record itself was excellent, exuberant, stood out from all around it and was quite ahead of its time in terms of getting Hip Hop and Soweto Pop in the charts years before it became the norm. Remember him this way.