Malcolm McLaren shows his new film at Baltic

Nov 14 2009 by David Whetstone, The Journal

He recalled the loud guitars and “the screaming of pubescent kids” and admitted that he had never aspired to be a musician and couldn’t play a single chord. “But we made things possible for a generation of kids.”

Now, he said, he saw the legacy of punk all around him.

“Contemporary artists used to have to wait 30 or 40 years before anyone took them seriously but that’s all changed,” he said.

“I don’t think Damien Hirst (currently exhibiting at Baltic) would have been famous without punk and I don’t think Baltic would be here without punk.

“Without punk, you wouldn’t have been able to fill all these floors up because nobody would have been interested.”

He explained how the big record companies dismissed his early musical offerings as rubbish and accused him of trying to con them – and how promoting punk had had its physical risks.

“You had to watch where you walked, there’s no doubt about that,” he said.

“But I remember we were so emboldened by what we were doing that it didn’t bother me to any great extent.

“When we knew Chelsea were playing at home we’d get the grilles up at 10am.”

McLaren, who now divides his time between Paris and New York, was at Baltic to talk about his film work, Shallow.

It is a video work made up of clips from the less steamy scenes of old soft porn films, with people thinking about or preparing to have sex – all to a soundtrack constructed from randomly chosen pop tunes.

Sex seems to have been a theme running through McLaren’s colourful career but he said he had never really sat down to analyse what he did.

“Sometimes I think I should have done it 30 years ago rather than creating lots of craziness but in the excitement I never really got round to it.”

Nowadays McLaren is hailed as one of the prime movers in pop culture over the last few decades, as the sell-out audience for his Baltic talk last night testified.

Shallow can be seen on the ground floor at Baltic until January 10.