Deep in McLaren…
We are loving Paul Gorman’s new biography of agent provocateur Malcolm McLaren and had to find out more about the svengali’s pioneering celebration of New York’s legendary Ballroom scene.
Interview by Pippa Brooks
The highlight of lock-down for me was poring over Paul Gorman's latest book: The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren.
It’s an exciting read, an inspirational tome, chronicling McLaren’s importance as instigator, manipulator and iconoclast as he repeatedly defined and re-defined pop culture through music, fashion and art. Gorman reveals a complex upbringing, and the journey through various art colleges, where McLaren's political and disruptive ideas were formed and remained consistent throughout his various creative endeavours - be they culturally genius or fantastic disasters.
I wanted to talk to Paul specifically about the ballroom scene, which McLaren eulogized in his 1989 album Waltz Darling. The track Deep in Vogue from the album, Jennie Livingston’s film Paris Is Burning and Madonna’s career-defining single Vogue introduced ball culture to the world. On the surface, McLaren seemed to be a much less obvious ally to the LGBTQI African-American and Latin American ballroom community than Madonna, and yet….
Wylde: Paul, do you think McLaren’s involvement with ballroom was surprising?
Paul Gorman: He was always quite consistent in understanding outsider communities. If you go back to his time in New York in 1973 where he talks about the sexual experiences that he had, all the scenes that he was getting into…
He was very open, wasn’t he?
Yes, and I don’t think in a prurient way. I think there was another reason for it which was more to do with upsetting society. He saw that ballroom was a form of expression that should be fast tracked to the mainstream and at the same time it upset society, so that fed his desires to go up against de rigueur thinking and the way things were. When Johnny Dynell sent him the early footage from Jenny Livingstone’s film he was really struck by it because he was working on his Oscar Wilde film at the time. He tried to imagine what kind of music Oscar Wilde would have listened to. Seeing this incredibly glamorous, romantic, really overblown scene I think fused with his Wilde idea. Quite often for all of us, a project starts as something and then ends up as something else.
And also, wasn’t the album a love letter to the supermodel Lauren Hutton, who he had a relationship with?
Exactly. So there were all kinds of elements tied in together. He talked about the dispossessed using the stuff that they have at their command. Whether it’s taking Vogue and bringing it to the street or using your body to express yourself to the disco music …
Using the elements to create something new…
It’s consistent with what he said about hip hop when he was making [seminal album] Duck Rock - that it was about using other people’s music to make new music. It goes back to punk as well, taking other people’s music and post-war cult fashions and making something new out of it. So I think that he was really consistent in that way. I wrote that Anarchy in the UK is probably the touchstone for punk, Buffalo Gals is one of the touchstones for hip hop and I think Waltz Darling and Deep in Vogue in particular, is one of the touchstones for the Ballroom scene.
And importantly, his record came out a year before Madonna’s Vogue. Even her video performance echoes McLaren’s very camp performance in his Waltz Darling video the year before. The way she’s framed and the fact it’s shot in black and white. And of course Jose Extravaganza who was one of ballroom’s stars, ended up becoming one of her dancers.
And the titles coming up, the two videos are so similar. By that point, he’s not the singer, he’s more the presenter…I think he thought it was giving expression to outsiders but at the same time shaking things up. There is that thing about him being quite feminine, he was never really ‘rock’ was he?
So many of the people you speak to in your book describe McLaren as effeminate.
And they use that as a term of abuse as well, don’t they?
Yes! Until your book, McLaren has been depicted as a somewhat elusive caricature, from your research we can see that he was curious, complicated and contradictory, not only in his career path but in terms of his personal preferences.
There's a documentary about Cary Grant (Becoming Cary Grant) which came out in 2017 and this quote about the actor could have been said of McLaren: “This is a man who is exploring the breakdown of gender safeguards. He’s somewhere else, he’s placeless. It’s just like his social status, his nationality status. You can’t pin him down.” There’s that similar thing with McLaren, that you couldn’t pin him down, which was the allure. And he had that gift, he knew what things were coming down the pike, which would become important later down the line. And I think that gender identity and identity politics, they’re at the centre of the debate today, aren’t they?
He was so ahead of his time.
You go back to him talking to R D Laing in 1974, who he knew from the counterculture – a radical psychologist – getting him to design suits to be worn by men and women. He calls them transsexual, but what he means, I think, is bisexual.
A lot of the clothes that he and Vivienne designed together could be worn by men or women, very little of it was gender specific.
Yes, you had the rocker’s mini skirts and things like that, but there’s a great photo shoot with Simon Barker and Jordan in May 1977 for Seditionaries and they’re both wearing the same set of clothes, parachute shirts, bondage boots, bondage pants, mohairs…I think that he really understood the gender fluidity of the ballroom scene. It was consistent with how he thought visual identity should be expressed. And of course it was great music.
There was definitely a sense that his motive was to elevate scenes, whether it was hip hop or ballroom, because they weren’t, at the time, lucrative, his intention seemed to be purer than cashing in as such…
And then connecting hip hop to square dancing, seeing them both as pagan, anti-Christian and anti-white basically. Although I know he fell out with Johnny Dynell, because they saw what he did as appropriation, which was fair enough at the time. Dynell’s partner Chi Chi Valenti wrote a piece for Details magazine in October 1988 called Nations, which identified the families on the scene, from Keith Haring’s Haringtons to the Houses of Extravaganza and La Beija. And McLaren literally lifted part of the article and used it in the last verse of Deep in Vogue. And she did bring a case against him and got paid.
He often didn’t do himself any favours…
He was always overstepping the mark, in a way, but actually, when we look back at the history of it we see that once again he was opening the doors for everyone else. And it’s in the book: Willi Ninja was calling him from the Madonna tour saying this is disgraceful, she’s just ripping you off! And he was really upset. The following year, he was working on his Round The Outside mini-album in South Central and screening Laurence Olivier’s 1948 Hamlet performance to give MC Hamlet motivation. I mean, that’s not ripping kids off, it’s that educational thing with him - he was imparting knowledge and exchanging ideas.