Malcolm McLaren's headstone: as confusing as the man himself
With its bronze death mask, Warner Bros style initials and proximity to Karl Marx's grave, his headstone in Highgate cemetery goes some way to capturing his contradictions
"Better a spectacular failure, than a benign success," runs the headstone inscription on the grave of Malcolm McLaren. Atop the headstone a large shield perches with the letters "MM", which looks not unlike the Warner Bros logo but is actually a sly reference to the crest outside the mansion he inhabited in The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle, that dark and desperate film he made with Julien Temple celebrating the glorious disaster of the Sex Pistols and their quixotic attempt to destroy the record business – or at least bleed it of all its money.
The connections don't end there. The headstone also features a bronze death mask of 'Talcy Malcy' that was cast by sculptor Nick Reynolds, son of the late Great Train Robber Bruce Reynolds (whose most infamous colleague, Ronnie Biggs, featured heavily in The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle).
Amateur semiologists will keenly unpick the myriad meanings here, but perhaps the most resonant part of it all is that McLaren's grave is a mere 100 metres from that of Karl Marx in Highgate Cemetery, north London. There is a thread of a connection here because long before the Pistols, McLaren managed the New York Dolls, trying to shock life into their dying career by dressing them as communists. Like Marx, McLaren ridiculed capitalism, but he also wallowed in it – a "cash from chaos" mantra underpinning his smash 'n' grab approach to signing short-lived but hugely profitable deals with EMI and A&M. Marx also warned of how every revolution sows the seeds of its own destruction and this was something McLaren applauded rather than feared.
It's poignant that McLaren gets a "statement headstone" just like that other punk contrarian, Factory Records founder Tony Wilson, whose grave in Chorlton-cum-Hardy, Manchester, is marked with a stone designed by Peter Saville, the artist behind all of Factory's greatest record sleeves.
A decade ago, I spent an enormously entertaining afternoon with McLaren at Midem, the annual music business conference in the south of France, after we were introduced by a mutual friend, a Hong Kong-based music lawyer he was working with. He was obsessed with China and digital technology at the time and, more specifically, how both would change politics and popular culture. Fizzing with ideas and plans to kick the legs from under the music business again, he unloaded his latest manifesto to me while gleefully smoking every cigarette I had. He almost certainly knew that what he was plotting was never going to come to fruition – but that was hardly the point for him. For all the plans ricocheting around his brain, he just needed someone to act as a sounding board. And a nicotine dispenser.
McLaren was a wriggling bundle of contradictions – there was often little consistency to what he said or did, but that sprang partly from a restless frustration with himself and everyone around him. A headstone can never distil the essence of a person, but his goes some way to capturing a sense of that satirical and cartoon side of him, his desperation to provoke and shock through word, image and deed, and his profundity.
But more than anything, in death as much as in life, McLaren is still weaving riddles that leave bystanders scratching their heads and trying to figure out exactly what the hell he is trying to say.