Malcolm McLaren shows his new film at Baltic

Nov 14 2009 by David Whetstone, The Journal

THE founding father of punk was on Tyneside yesterday - but without a safety pin to be seen.

Malcolm McLaren, who was talking at Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead, was dressed in a tweed suit with a grey scarf knotted around his neck.

“When you get to a certain age you have to be careful you don’t look too pantomimic, otherwise you become a parody of yourself,” said the man who managed The Sex Pistols.

Sex, the London fashion shop he ran with then girlfriend Vivienne Westwood, was the crucible for the punk movement which scandalised polite society and revolutionised the music industry.

McLaren trained as an artist but was one of punk’s leading lights, along with the members of his notorious band who spat and swore and helped to make anti-fashion a fashion in itself.

At the time of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee in 1977, The Sex Pistols were releasing singles such as Anarchy In The UK and a raucous, ironic version of God Save The Queen.

Yesterday McLaren recalled how, in the 1960s, he and his fellow art students ventured into the “real world” with little prospect other than a career which would end up with them “starving in a garret in the old fashioned European tradition.

“We weren’t actually trained for anything. We were actually trained to be non-conformist and dysfunctional. How were we going to put all that to work?”

McLaren explained how he embraced pop culture, dressed up in outrageous clothes and acquired the shop where The Sex Pistols and others kicked up a storm.