MALCOLM MCLAREN 22 January 1946 – 8 April 2010 RIP------------------------------------------------------
Malcolm McLaren first came to prominence as the notorious manager of the Sex Pistols, the premier punk rock band of the late '70s. In the 1980s, McLaren turned performing artist himself, assembling eclectic recordings that were especially popular in Great Britain, beginning with the single "Buffalo Gals", which combined traditional folk music with hip-hop. Credited to Malcolm McLaren and the World's Famous Supreme Team, it became a Top Ten hit in the U.K., paving the way for the late 1982 album "Duck Rock", which reached the Top 20 and produced a Top 40 hit in "Soweto" and a Top Five hit in "Double Dutch". Both "Buffalo Gals" and "Double Dutch" made the U.S. dance charts in 1983, and the remix mini-LP D'Ya Like Scratchin' gave McLaren his first American album chart entry in February 1984. McLaren next turned to opera, recording an adaptation of "Madame Butterfly" that made the British Top 20 in 1984; it introduced his second full-length album, "Fans".
1985's Swamp Thing was a contractual obligation collection of outtakes issued while its creator had moved to Hollywood to try to make his mark in the film business. He returned to music in 1989, signing to Epic Records for "Waltz Darling", which produced Top 40 U.K. hits in the title track and "Something's Jumpin' in Your Shirt". The album featured guest vocalists as well as star instrumentalists Jeff Beck and Bootsy Collins. "Paris", released in Europe in 1994, marked its creator's move to France. Featured artistes on "Paris" were, Catherine Deneuve, Francoise Hardy, and superb trumpet player, Guy Barker.BEAUTIFUL ALBUM - Paris - Malcolm McLaren's first release in six years - is music, but it's more than music. The whole recording is a musical and lyrical painting of Paris, from McLaren's viewpoint. It is sordid and sexy: evocative and erotic: beautiful and bizarre, cruel and candid. It takes a walk along rue Pigalle, through Montmartre, beside the flowing Seine: peruses the bars and the cheap hotels: wears black and the dust of the metro, the scent of flowers, the aromas of strong coffee and French cigarettes: it listens to jazz. It is full of dropped names and social gossip, not least being "How did he get Catherine Deneuve to sing?"
The black-and-white sleeve photos give McLaren the air of an aging Leonard Cohen, or a sedate Quentin Crisp: the greying eccentric, the seedy sophisticate: posing, poking fun, almost-but-not-quite over-the-top. And whatever the impression you may have of this man, be it musical genius or blatant manipulator, you have to have at least a little admiration for his ability to gather disparate musical elements and produce something unique and memorable, be it Paris, the Sex Pistols, or Adam Ant.
McLaren says that he makes albums "like a film director who doesn't have a camera". And although Paris is sometimes a film that doesn't need pictures, because of the vivid images that it projects onto the screen of the imagination, sometimes it sounds just a little like a soundtrack and you wish you had the moving scenes before your eyes.
There is a strong jazz influence throughout the fifteen tracks of the main CD (the American Paris comes with an extra eight-track CD of instrumental mixes). There is some beautiful trumpet playing by Guy Barker on "Miles and Miles of Miles Davis". Babik Reinhardt plays late-night guitar on "In The Absence Of The Parisienne", the track with the disturbing backdrop of a thousand buzzing bees. or are they flies? Catherine Deneuve breathes the words with the manner of the perfect Parisienne. Francoise Hardy sings again. The names just go on and on. McLaren's vocals are recited, not sung, the narrator, the poet.
