My lips are open wide
Stretched so far apart
Searching for that last kiss
With my hands pressed tight to my heartA thousand hungry flowers
Loving you for hours and hours
Soon smothers me so tenderlyA thousand kisses say goodbye
And then they say you’ll never die
A lonely fanfare blew
And then they sing to youA thousand kisses say goodbye
And then they say you’ll never die
A lonely fanfare blew
And then they sing to you– Revenge of the Flowers
© Chrysalis Music Group, Sony/ATV Music Publishing
◼ MALCOLM McLAREN died three years ago today and is remembered on his website by his partner Young Kim with these lyrics from Revenge of the Flowers, a track from the concept album Paris… In 1994, he recorded his own music and words through performances by such prominent French stars as Françoise Hardy, seen above in the Duncan Ward video of 1995 singing Revenge of the Flowers. The album was essentially a love letter to the city he was to make a home in his final years. At AllMusic Stephen Thomas Erlewine’s verdict is: “The heavily orchestrated cabaret jazz backdrops tend to accentuate the sleaziness of McLaren’s words. And that’s what makes the record perversely fascinating: every element is so poorly conceived and executed that the entire thing appears to be an intentional joke.”
A Chanel punk-inspired look from 2011. Photo © David Sims courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art
➢ Punk: From Chaos To Couture is the next Costume Institute exhibition at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, May 9–Aug 14 – British photographer Nick Knight is the creative consultant on a show that examines punk’s impact on high fashion from its birth in the early 1970s, including a Couturier Situationists section dedicated to Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood. All presented as an immersive multimedia, multisensory experience, the clothes will be animated with period music videos and soundscaping audio techniques. Wow.
UPDATE APRIL 2013: A DEATH MASK FOR MALCY
McLaren bronze death mask by Nick Reynolds
❏ McLaren’s ostentatious memorial in Highgate Cemetery, unveiled this month, is inscribed “Better a spectacular failure than a benign success”. The black granite headstone holds a bronze death mask commissioned from Nick Reynolds, the sculptor, harmonica player and former Royal Navy diver, who has captured McLaren’s “trademark sneer”. Update 2017, in a Radio 4 programme about his trade the sculptor claimed: “I didn’t put that on. He actually had the sneer in death. Defiant to the end. . . I did meet McLaren when he was alive and asked him if I could do a cast of his head and he in his own inimitable style told me to F– O–.” Reynolds added: “I did him in the end.”
Reynolds has also cast masks of his own father the Great Train Robber Bruce Reynolds, fellow robber Ronnie Biggs, gambler George “Taters” Chatham, journalist William Rees-Mogg, actor Peter O’Toole and composer Pat Castange. He also owns the death masks of many famous people from Ned Kelly and Napoleon to director Ken Russell. They decorate every wall in his flat.
➢➢ Shapers of the 80s ➣➣ 