LISTEN TO MCLAREN’S REQUIEM
EXCLUSIVELY AT SHAPERS OF THE 80S
Romance and anguish: James Stewart and Kim Novak in the psycho-drama Vertigo (top), and the post-punk Mekons
◼︎ TWO UNEXPECTED RECENT VIDEOS have acquired poignant new life in the wake of Malcolm McLaren’s death, Svengali of punk that he was. Few people could have guessed that the soundtrack to one of last month’s Paris ready-to-wear fashion shows [in the video above] would be McLaren’s final creative achievement.
It was completed after his diagnosis of cancer and possibly in acceptance of his own mortality.
What seduces the listener is the overwhelming melancholy McLaren evokes, in what suddenly amounts to a Requiem to Myself. It was commissioned by Dries Van Noten – to set a deliberately discomfiting mood for his runway show amid the gilded opulence of the Hôtel de Ville in Paris on March 3.
After McLaren’s funeral, his partner Young Kim described the piece to Shapers of the 80s as “quintessential Malcolm McLaren – an entirely original and powerful, elegant but punk collage”. She gave us permission to run the full 13-minute mash-up in clean mp3 format, featuring the Vertigo theme, Mekons, Roxy, Raincoats and Burundi Beat.
McLaren on how to fail brilliantly
in this ‘karaoke world’
◼︎ “THIS WORLD WE LIVE IN TODAYis no more than a karaoke world, an ersatz society, which provides us with only the opportunity to revel in our stupidity… A karaoke world is one in which life is lived by proxy.” So said Malcolm McLaren last October, only days before he discovered he was unwell. He was presenting a keynote speech to 1,000 delegates in London at the Handheld Learning Conference 2009 about the future of learning and education.
❚ THE ARCHITECT OF BRITISH PUNK was buried in bright sunshine in London’s Highgate Cemetery this afternoon, not many plots away from that other revolutionary, Karl Marx. For all the cheering and irreverence and mild expressions of anarchy that made this an exuberant funeral for Malcolm McLaren, the former manager of the Sex Pistols, few people beyond the fashion world appear to have discovered his last musical creation, an astonishing romantic soundtrack to a Paris fashion show, aired only the month before he died. It can be heard in part on the fashion video in the post dated April 23 (above) and in full as an mp3 audio stream. The music now assumes near gut-wrenching poignancy.
Music was a constant accompaniment to today’s events. When told the mourners would be asked to sing You Need Hands, which McLaren immortalised in the Sex Pistols film The Great Rock’n’Roll Swindle, his ex-partner, fashion designer Vivienne Westwood said: “It’s actually better when you hear Malcolm’s version. He sang it so well and so beautifully. I’ve been playing that song more than anything since he died. It makes me cry.”
Boy George had sent a wreath of crimson flowers shaped in an A for anarchy sign which sat on the horsedrawn hearse during its four-mile procession from a secular gathering at the deconsecrated church of St Mary Magdalene in Marylebone, central London, northwards through Camden Town. Sex Pistol Sid Vicious’s version of My Way blared from the bus carrying celebrants.
Dozens of punks followed the black coffin sprayed with the mantra “Too Fast To Live Too Young To Die” — the name of the Chelsea shop McLaren opened in 1972 with Westwood. Joseph Corré, McLaren’s son with her, asked that people mark his passing with a “minute of mayhem” at midday. Among the selection of mayhems reported at Guardian Online was one from Gareth100 who wrote: “I managed to shrug my shoulders in apathy for a full minute. Now I’m going for a nap. Will this do?”
◼ IN 1985 THE LONDON MUSICIAN Paul Hardcastle stunned Europe with his hynotic anti-war hit, 19, which spent weeks at No 1 in the charts. It was effectively a rap sampled from the voiceover to the Emmy-nominated documentary Vietnam Requiem, which made the shock claim that “In World War Two the average age of the combat soldier was 26. In Vietnam he was 19.” This year, Hardcastle was watching a documentary about British soldiers serving in Afghanistan when he heard an officer say: “I looked at my men. The average age was 19 — my God, I’m taking boys to war.” For the 25th anniversary of his hit Hardcastle updated and wrote a new version of 19 called Boys To War which was released yesterday in the UK.
Visage Mk 1: Egan, Strange and Ure in 1978 searching for sounds and styles
❚ “I’LL NEVER FORGET FIRST TIME I SAW a synthesiser on Tomorrow’s World. For the first time I saw the possibility to create sounds that had only existed in my head. I’d had no chance of getting my hands on one because they were size of house or at least the cost of one. But then cheaper Japanese synths came on the market, so I bought one. It changed my life because I could make music in a small home studio. The possibilities for young musicians like myself seemed endless.”
This was Midge Ure enthusing during Rocking the Blitz Club (audio at YouTube), another remarkably well-informed BBC Radio 4 documentary on our favourite scene that went out this morning. It was also remarkable for handing over the commentary to Ure, who — despite having earned an OBE for being half the brains behind Band Aid’s smash hit for charity in 1984, and being a founder member of Visage and the voice of Ultravox’s directional chart hit Vienna — is not among the first rank of mythologists programme-makers wheel out to explain the Blitz phenomenon.
This R4 slice of the 80s gave us a refreshingly different take on the familiar fables recycled by the usual suspects, but mediated in this show by Midge’s deeply un-London Lanarkshire lilt. He’s more than qualified to stake his claim to have shaped the music of the Blitz Kids, though he’s reluctant to be described as one of them, being a good four years older, and having had fingers in more pop pies than most on the post-punk scene. Even as the word punk was given the heave-ho in favour of the term “new wave”, Ure was probably the first active player of a synth among any of his clubbing pals, having bought his first, the polyphonic CS-50, at cost direct from Yamaha in the summer of ’78.
His was an obsession shared by fellow Rich Kid, the drummer Rusty Egan, and it led the way to a whole new British dancefloor sound. Ure felt synths “embodied a kind of nostalgia for the future”.
He says: “Rusty and his friend Steve Strange realised our crowd needed somewhere to try out our styles and listen to Euro synth bands like Kraftwerk, Dusseldorf and Telex, whose cutting edge sounds seemed to represent the future.” In almost no time the tribal forces of fashion had granted their wish. Rusty’s deejaying at Billy’s in Soho was augmented by Strange vetting the door to ensure an extreme clubbing attitude, then as 1979 dawned their band of outlandishly dressed clubbing heroes descended on the Blitz.
In his straight-from-the-hip autobiography, If I Was, Midge Ure makes the bold claim: “I had this idea to make music to play in the club. We had to invent our own musical style because our points of reference were very limited — after Kraftwerk, Yello and early Bowie we ran out of influences.” His own taste was for the very textured sounds of the synth built round classic songs, which intuitively caught a mood, unarticulated at that time, for a return to melody. And yet …
“A synth is just a software program and it has a very specific sound — a cold European soulless sound that drummers couldn’t emulate. Only a machine could do this,” he says with eagerness appropriate to a new-wave innovator. “Everybody aspired to be a robot — we didn’t want any human element in there at all, so people sang in a very robotic way. It was not going to sound like Jimi Hendrix. It was going to sound like a watered down version of Kraftwerk.”
❚ MIDGE IS THE ONLY PERSON AMONG THE NEW ROMANTICS to go on record and acknowledge the role of Gary Numan, an otherwise dread name who was perceived as an aloof and unclubbable loner. He definitely never signed in at the Blitz. Yet as 1979 unfolded Numan’s dystopian sci-fi synth sound sidestepped the Blitz Kids to reach No 1 in the UK charts, twice: in May with Are Friends Electric? and in September with Cars. They were blatantly commercial records and that wasn’t how Blitz Kids defined cool.
But Ure recognised Numan had broken down barriers of disapproval within the old guard of the music biz. He was being a great spur. Ure dreamed up the name Visage for his new band who knocked out a demo covering the classic In The Year 2525, with Egan on drums and the eye-catching Strange posing away as vocalist after a few lessons from Ure. Despite music industry scepticism, it won them a deal with Radar Records, the attention of producer Martin Rushent who had an office above the Blitz, and helped rope in Magazine members Dave Formula, John McGeoch and Barry Adamson, and Ultravox keyboardist Billy Currie. A single called Tar was released that September. It didn’t chart, but did clinch them a bigger deal with Polydor in 1980.
Ure says: “Visage was never really a proper band, just a group of our favourite musicians who we brought together to make experimental music for the Blitz club. Because they were all signed to other labels we chose Steve Strange as our frontman because he looked the part.” This worked well enough. Even while Ure and Currie part-timed with the seven-man studio-only Visage line-up, while steering Ultravox along similar synth-pop lines, Visage put out two successful albums, and a handful of chart singles (the most enduring being Fade to Grey in November 1980). What laid the pathfinding flares for the movement were some uber-stylish art-videos — the first starred Blitz coat-check girl Julia Fodor before she became the fabulous princess and deejay — which disseminated the OTT New Romantic ethos for fans to emulate.
Ure scored the significant double of taking Ultravox’s majestic Vienna to No 2 a month later and for four weeks, then seeing it win Single of the Year at the 1981 Brit Awards. It was produced by the German Conny Plank with an evocatively romantic landmark video stunningly directed by Russell Mulcahy who was creating a whole visual vocabulary for the then novel music video. Ure can take full credit as lead singer and guitarist for breathing a subtle blend of Roxy Music’s style and krautrock clarity into Ultravox and building them into a credible vanguard for the electronic New Wave.
Reflecting back in the R4 doc, Ure says: “There’s no doubt the early 80s was a golden age of music made by real popstars who created themselves. It was more than just padded shoulders and asymmetrical haircuts. It was a pivotal moment in our cultural history when new tech mixed with new ideas to create something really good. All in the pressure cooker environment that was the Blitz club.”
❚ THE MAN ABOVE IS CALLED No 6: “I am not a number, I am a free man.” The man on the right is the sinister No 2: “I am the boss.” – “No. One is the boss.”
Such staccato dialogue sustained 17 almost hour-long episodes of The Prisoner in 1967, widely regarded as British TV’s most original series. And was it intense! And mould-breaking. It has been declared the 13th most cultish sci-fi series ever by refusing to solve its own enigma: What on earth was it about? The Prisoner was set in a stylised prison village that was a real-world architectural gem, with quirky costumes and motifs such as its pennyfarthing logo which nobody explained. The show calculated to provoke.
The Prisoner made a star of angry, intelligent Patrick McGoohan, who frowned a lot and so became the coolest dude of all time (after Jimmy Dean). He was also the show’s creator and executive producer and played Lotus-driving good-guy No 6, a secret agent they (who?) won’t allow to retire. In the wake of Michael Caine’s sudden fame as Harry Palmer, it proved a trippy, tongue-in-cheek, cold-war precursor to knowing dramas such as The X-Files, 24, Lost, Twin Peaks, even The Matrix and The Truman Show, by being witty and profound by turns. Over its 17 episodes every Brit actor with swagger signed up for a cameo role, with Leo McKern, Peter Wyngarde, Mary Morris and Patrick Cargill replacing each other in the role of No 2. Dare to start watching the stunning Blu-ray DVD (Network, 2009) of the original 1967 Prisoner and you’ll be agog at how it stands the test of time. (Given that the BBC had launched Europe’s first colour TV service only three months before, The Prisoner’s crisp 35mm cinematography is exceptional for its day.) Don’t expect shoot-em-up action, just heated arguments about who’s on whose side.
The six-part remake launches on ITV this week, April 17. The man on the left is now No 6 – he’s an American called Jim Caviezel, who once played Jesus in a Mel Gibson movie. The man in the white suit is the new No 2, one of Britain’s greatest actor-knights known internationally to cinema audiences as Gandalf. (The geeks out there might like to know that the Official Prisoner Appreciation Society will be getting all dressed up for their convention at Portmeirion, the original show’s Welsh location, this very weekend.)
The new Prisoner has been, hmm, let’s say, zip-coded: 93-6-2-oh! It does contain some neat homages to the earlier epic. McGoohan its creator and its No 6 now reappears as No 93 (right), an old man whose first words pose the new enigma. It brings a tear to the eye to know that at the grand old age of 80, the cool dude Pat died only last year, soon after filming. The other treat is a moody and vengeful balloon called Rover (below). We never knew quite what Rover was the first time round, but he does indeed return.
The Prisoner always was said to be “ahead of its time”. In 1968, Isaac Asimov gloomily declared it was about failure, and was popular because it “cracks the old undemocratic folly of success for the few”. Indeed, years later McGoohan conceded that the bicycle logo was an ironic symbol of progress. Ah, ironic – that’s the word. Perhaps Homer Simpson was the best judge.
THE DAY NUMBER 2 REALLY CRACKED
No 6 v No 2: McGoohan and McKern locked in a power struggle
❚ AS PRODUCER, THE USUALLY TACIT McGOOHAN made an extraordinary confession about the pressures of making The Prisoner in his interview with Warner Troyer for TVOntario, which was broadcast in 1977. He’s talking about the episode titled Once Upon a Time:
“That was written in the 36-hour period. And Leo McKern, who was a very good friend of mine and a very fine actor [familiar to most of us, in his later years, as Rumpole of the Bailey], came in on short notice to do it, and it was mainly a two-hander. The brainwashing thing, he was trying to brainwash me and in the end No 6 turns the tables. And the dialogue was very peculiar because all it consisted of was mainly “Six, Six, Six,” and five pages of that at one time. And Leo, one lunchtime, went up to his dressing room and I went to see the rushes and I knew he was tired. I went up to the dressing room to tell him how good I thought he’d been in the rushes. And he’s curled up in the fetus position on his couch there, and he says, “Go away! Go away you bastard! I don’t want to see you again.” I said, “What are you talking about?” He says, “I’ve just ordered two doctors,” he says, “and they’re comin’ over as soon as they can.” He says, “Go away.” And he had. He’d ordered two doctors and they came over that afternoon and he didn’t work for three days. He’d gone! He’d cracked, which was very interesting. He’d truly cracked. So I had to use a double, the back of a guy’s head for a lot, and eventually Leo did come back and we completed the scenes, and also he was in the final episode, so he forgave me for everything. But he did crack, very interesting, I thought.”
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MORE INTERESTING THAN MOST PEOPLE’S FANTASIES — THE SWINGING EIGHTIES 1978-1984
They didn’t call themselves New Romantics, or the Blitz Kids – but other people did.
“I’d find people at the Blitz who were possible only in my imagination. But they were real” — Stephen Jones, hatmaker, 1983. (Illustration courtesy Iain R Webb, 1983)
“The truth about those Blitz club people was more interesting than most people’s fantasies” — Steve Dagger, pop group manager, 1983
PRAISE INDEED!
“See David Johnson’s fabulously detailed website Shapers of the 80s to which I am hugely indebted” – Political historian Dominic Sandbrook, in his book Who Dares Wins, 2019
“The (velvet) goldmine that is Shapers of the 80s” – Verdict of Chris O’Leary, respected author and blogger who analyses Bowie song by song at Pushing Ahead of the Dame
“The rather brilliant Shapers of the 80s website” – Dylan Jones in his Sweet Dreams paperback, 2021
A UNIQUE HISTORY
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❏ Header artwork by Kat Starchild shows Blitz Kids Darla Jane Gilroy, Elise Brazier, Judi Frankland and Steve Strange, with David Bowie at centre in his 1980 video for Ashes to Ashes
VINCENT ON AIR 2026
✱ Deejay legend Robbie Vincent has returned to JazzFM on Sundays 1-3pm… Catch up on Robbie’s JazzFM August Bank Holiday 2020 session thanks to AhhhhhSoul with four hours of “nothing but essential rhythms of soul, jazz and funk”.
TOLD FOR THE FIRST TIME
◆ Who was who in Spandau’s break-out year of 1980? The Invisible Hand of Shapersofthe80s draws a selective timeline for The unprecedented rise and rise of Spandau Ballet –– Turn to our inside page
SEARCH our 925 posts or ZOOM DOWN TO THE ARCHIVE INDEX
UNTOLD BLITZ STORIES
✱ If you thought there was no more to know about the birth of Blitz culture in 1980 then get your hands on a sensational book by an obsessive music fan called David Barrat. It is gripping, original and epic – a spooky tale of coincidence and parallel lives as mind-tingling as a Sherlock Holmes yarn. Titled both New Romantics Who Never Were and The Untold Story of Spandau Ballet! Sample this initial taster here at Shapers of the 80s
CHEWING THE FAT
✱ Jawing at Soho Radio on the 80s clubland revolution (from 32 mins) and on art (@55 mins) is probably the most influential shaper of the 80s, former Wag-club director Chris Sullivan (pictured) with editor of this website David Johnson
LANDMARK FAREWELLS. . . HIT THE INDEX TAB UP TOP FOR EVERYTHING ELSE
The Prisoner made a star of angry, intelligent Patrick McGoohan, who frowned a lot and so became the coolest dude of all time (after Jimmy Dean). He was also the show’s creator and executive producer and played Lotus-driving good-guy No 6, a secret agent they (who?) won’t allow to retire. In the wake of 
The new Prisoner has been, hmm, let’s say, zip-coded: 93-6-2-oh! It does contain some neat homages to the earlier epic. McGoohan its creator and its No 6 now reappears as No 93 (right), an old man whose first words pose the new enigma. It brings a tear to the eye to know that at the grand old age of 80, the cool dude Pat died only last year, soon after filming. The other treat is a moody and vengeful balloon called Rover (below). We never knew quite what Rover was the first time round, but he does indeed return.
The Prisoner always was said to be “ahead of its time”. In 1968, Isaac Asimov gloomily declared it was about failure, and was popular because it “cracks the old undemocratic folly of success for the few”. Indeed, years later McGoohan conceded that the bicycle logo was an ironic symbol of progress. Ah, ironic – that’s the word. Perhaps 
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