Malcolm McLaren - Boy George - Adam Ant
The South Bank Show (S8/E9 - 1984)
The South Bank Show is a British television programme which treats high art and popular culture with equal respect. Conceived, written, and presented by Melvyn Bragg, it was originally produced by LWT and broadcast on ITV between 1978 and 2010 [1].
Of the many excellent episodes during this period - and there are over 730 to choose from - I suppose my favourite is the one broadcast on 2 December 1984 (S8/E9) [2], featuring Malcolm McLaren and filmed whilst the latter was recording Fans - his amusing attempt to fuse opera with R&B [3].
It's not just that the film provides an excellent insight into Malcolm's thinking, it also reveals how two of his protégés - Adam Ant and Boy George - really didn't understand his motivation, or quite get what the spirit of punk was really all about; namely, a desire not merely to question authority and challenge conventions, but destroy success (i.e., the very thing these ambitious, hard-working pop stars most wanted).
When speaking about Malcolm, George, for example, says:
"He's somebody who's capable of being absolutely brilliant. But for some
reason, you know, he's someone who regards success as being anti what
he believes in and he gets to a certain level then he wants to smash the
wall down."
Whilst Adam confesses (with the same disbelief at McLaren's anarcho-nihilism):
"I don't understand all the
anarchist stuff, with him. Obviously, that's a lot to do with his youth,
or whatever. He likes to do things [...] and afterwards he just smashes
it all to bits, he just destroys it." [4]
This, of course, is precisely the aspect of McLaren I most admired; the fact that, in his own words, he was not an empire builder ...
Notes
[1] A new version of the series began broadcasting on Sky Arts in May 2012.
[2] As Paul Gorman reminds us, this episode was the brainchild of director Andy Harries and, crucially, it "conferred importance to McLaren's position in British cultural life". See The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren, (Constable, 2020), pp. 555-56.
[3] Fans was McLaren's second studio album released on Charisma Records (1984). Although not an entirely convincing or successful experiment, the album did give rise to the astonishing single 'Madame Butterfly (Un bel dì vedremo)' and the steamy video that accompanied it, directed by the fashion photographer Terence Donovan: click here.
[4] Boy George and Adam Ant interviewed on The South Bank Show S8/E9 (1984): click here and go to 3:42 - 4:08.
