Top image: Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood, 1976

In his latest project, Anarchy: The Mclaren Westwood Gang, filmmaker Phil Strongman unearths the tales and betrayals of punk’s Svengali, Malcolm McLaren, featuring interviews from the likes of Tracey Emin, Tony Wilson, Boy George and Ben Westwood – not forgetting McLaren himself, shot in candid depth before his passing. And who better to document the life of subculture’s infamous trailblazer than Strongman? A punk veteran himself, he’s known McLaren since 1976. He was there in and amongst it all – the filth and the fury.

‘Better a spectacular failure than a benign success,’ reads Malcolm McLaren’s grave stone. These were the words McLaren’s very first art school teacher said to him. He lived by them from then on. Other than the aforementioned, Malcolm didn’t have any rules in life. Raised by his grandmother, he was taught to reverse any notion of authority – “To be bad is good, to be good is simply boring,” she would instil. So, it’s perhaps unsurprising that Malcolm McLaren turned into the cultural agitator he was.

1971 – McLaren and his then girlfriend Vivienne Westwood opened up Let it Rock on 430 Kings Road, Chelsea, a store selling DIY teddy boy gear. The store later went through several reincarnations, from Too Fast To Live, Too Young To Die to SEX and it was in this third and most infamous revision that he founded and managed the most famous punk band of all time, the Sex Pistols. Carving his name into subcultural history.

Here, Strongman traces McLaren’s past through to his enduring cultural influence that continues to make waves today.

Cecilia Dinwoodie: When did you start making the film?
Phil Strongman: I think a few months after Malcolm died really, so late 2010. You know, I’d see him doing interviews with other people and he’d just make stuff up. The journalist wouldn’t know anything about him, so just goes, “Oh, fantastic!” And writes everything down, while Malcolm would be winking at me. But this was a different thing. It was just, ‘Oh, you want the truth? I’ll tell you the truth!’

CD: Did anyone you approached not want to be in the film?
PS: Everything went wrong at first. People were either busy or didn’t want to be interviewed and I’d keep changing my mind like, “Wow, this is so bad, I quite like it actually. This is such a disaster; this is really good…” And then the tide turned. People like Ben Westwood and old friends I hadn’t seen for years, like Boy George, Adam Ant agreed to be in it and you realise a lot of people have really unique stories, but no one’s bothered interviewing them before.

“At one point, Rotten would be sitting at the side of the stage. Another point, he’d be jumping up and down with his neck standing out like power cables, storming off stage, things getting thrown about. It was really intense.”

CD: I suppose John Lydon would be against supporting a film about Malcolm, due to their past?
PS: [Sighs] Yeah…he’s a very damaged person. He’s an amazing performer, he wrote some amazing lyrics in the 70s and early 80s, but no one’s forgiven. He’s not the world’s most stable person, but I think that’s his problem. He nearly died as a kid, so I think it was never going to be a normal performance – it was beyond that. And the band didn’t wanna work with him. That whole thing that Malcolm says in the film is true – he was too crazy, but that’s what [the industry] needed then, because rock ‘n’ roll had been dead for so long. It had to be something tenser, to reignite everything.

“I think Malcolm knew that the [music] industry had been closed down, so the only way was to explode it.”

CD: When was your first Pistols gig?
PS: Aged seventeen, I did a thing in Sounds magazine called Mod Revival, basically because I had a scooter and short hair so they did this thing on me – this whole page. And then an original mod from the 60s found the journalist, got my number and rang me up, saying, “You should see the Sex Pistols, you’d love them.” He was so keen for me to see them, he gave me a lift to the 100 club to watch them play.

CD: What are your most vivid memories of the gigs?
PS: Every gig was different. At one point, Rotten would be sitting at the side of the stage. Another point, he’d be jumping up and down with his neck standing out like power cables, storming off stage, things getting thrown about. It was really intense.

CD: What about the clothes?
PS: I was intrigued. Me and my brother thought we knew it all, until we all went into the 100 Club and Siouxsie Sioux was just wearing stockings, suspenders, underwear and this Nazi armband. I liked the fact that it was very fertile soil. I just remember thinking, “This is the cultural centre of the earth.” All us freaks and nonconformists, we had a little bit of something.

CD: How much do you think punk, as a cultural movement, owes Malcolm McLaren?
PS: I think Malcolm knew that the music industry had been closed down, so the only way was to explode it. He opened the doors to everyone, you know: Elvis Costello, Adam Ant, Boy George – they all came through the door he kicked down. He’s an artist on a whole other level. To end up with questions in Parliament, police raids, recordings being banned and still getting to number one – and twenty to thirty years later, you’ve still got bands that are cultural influences – that’s a massive achievement. You have to capture the smoke as it’s drifting, and that’s what he did. And Malcolm was really clever in his marketing, just him saying buy the record now while you can, I remember seeing people buying two or three copies each, so that’s why it sold quarter of a million and got to number one. It was a good way of turning fifty thousand fans into a quarter of a million.

CD: Who was the main driving force behind punk and SEX, Malcolm or Vivienne??
PS: What would’ve happened without either of them? I think he was the artist and the prime mover, but she was the practical one – she’d make it happen. But, I mean, she could have never got the Pistols together – she didn’t want a band, she wanted Vicious – so [ultimately,] it was kind of Malcolm. But you can’t really take one of them out of the equation.

CD: It was one hell of a creative partnership, wasn’t it?
PS: They just picked up on things, some how instinctively. It had style and content. Because, without content, there’s no such thing as style. But what they did worked. It was cult and it was commercial. And it’s here now, you know?

CD: Was their relationship always volcanic?
PS: Malcolm and Vivienne were always intriguing to me, as they seemed to intimidate each other at different times and I’ve never seen that with any other couple. Dave Goodman, who’s in the film, says he’d gone round there a couple of times and she’d locked him in the cupboard. You’d hear him go, “Let me out!” In a way, it was kind of funny, but in another way, maybe it was horrifying for him as it’s this revisit to his childhood. But, also, Vivienne would be in tears because of something he’d said… I’ve never known anything like it – theirs was a strange dynamic.

CD: What was your impression of Sid Vicious?
PS: He was vulnerable. I remember the first gig he did at Notre Dame Hall. It must have been March ’77, when Glen had just left the band, and we couldn’t get in, as NBC were filming it for America. So we were all waiting outside, and I remember Sid came out and people went, “You played without us – you sold out. Where’s Glen, where’s Glen?” And I suddenly felt for him, because you saw the vulnerability there of Sid thinking, “Oh right, John’s the only friend I’ve got in the band, and most of our fans don’t really like me that much.” You could just see on his face, this real shock.

CD: That must have been a real thud. It’s almost no wonder things got heavy so quickly.
PS: Malcolm and Vivienne did try to get him away from Nancy and heroin. They even kidnapped her at one point – they put her in a taxi while she was off her face to get her away from him, and they got her all the way to Heathrow Terminal 3. She was about to get on the plane when she started coming out of it, and was like, “What’s going on? Let me go!” She went back to the flat and Sid never even knew it had happened. Within eighteen months, they were both dead. But heroin was always gonna be a problem for him. I mean, he was shooting speed at sixteen.

CD: Sid and Malcolm both came from broken homes. Do you think artistry is born out of suffering?
PS: I think it’s that thing where it gives people an edge to prove something. It’s that anger, that injustice. And it can be damaging. When Malcolm first started to walk, there was no one to walk to apart from his mother chain smoking on the sofa. It’s a horrifying childhood, really – his brother being locked in rooms and stuff. He’s kind of heroic in that he was kind of affectionate.

Anarchy: The Mclaren Westwood Gang will be screened at London Arthouse, Crouch End on 16th September. Tickets here.