Malcolm Mac Laren. Thanks, Momus, for the long and fascinating interview (27 pages). We were lucky to approach Malcolm and his lovely girlfriend Young a few times in Paris, thanks to you. He was a man you could listen to for hours. His approach of occidental culture was global and intelligent. He was enthousiastic, curious, polite, smart and generous. A 60 years old man becoming addicted to chip music, this is very rare I guess.



Meeting Malcolm was like meeting the man who changed my life when I was a teenager. I bloomed through the new wave culture, a slowed down branch of punk mixed with electronic sounds. Malcolm was already into proto hip hop at that time, with his amazing "Buffalo Gals" hit.

He was designed by a grand mother who told him to be mean not kind, to use cunning and malice, in a spectacular, humorous and sympathetic way. He had a reversed education, which had a big influence on him. He met the situationnism in the sixties and started to think about culture and medias. How to manipulate it. Eventually, he created the Sex Pistols: it had nothing to do with music, it was a situationnist event at a large scale. It was the birth of the DIY culture. Malcolm had a clear vision of the future we live now, where everyone has become an artist and manipulates cultural references.



I remember when I put headphones on Malcolm's ears at Café de Flore, in 2003. He was needing a French musician for his musical project "Diorama", a musical about the maison Dior. I composed one first song for him and it said "if I knew the rudiments of music, I could write a song for you". I thought he wanted me to compose music and write English lyrics. But he already had the music, he did it himself, he was a musician. He asked me to record as a singer and write French lyrics. We did one song together: "La beauté costumée".

The project was turned down, but we liked each other and he offered Florence and I a dinner in his favorite restaurant, very close to the rue des Martyrs in the 9th arrondissement where we lived. I think it was 2006 or early 2007. He spoke about his production part in "The Fast Food Nation", about his grand mother, about his children clothing project, about culture, over and over… And the risotto was famous.