TIMEMACHINE
MAY 1983 … Malcolm McLaren startles with Duck Rock
Going round the outside: Malcolm McLaren (centre) with (back row) The World’s Famous Supreme Team, model Herbie Mensah (back row, centre) and models; hands up!: (right) Soweto-bound McLaren;
Duck Rock
co-producer Trevor Horn.
Alamy, Getty (5), Shutterstock
MAY 27 Some viewers had been struck, upset even, by January ’83’s Number 9 hit Buffalo Gals. Credited to Malcolm McLaren And The World’s Famous Supreme Team, its video was arguably the UK’s earliest exposure to US hip-hop, break dancing, graffiti and scratching. But what was more outrageous was that the man in charge in the outsize hat was the notorious manager who had orchestrated The Great Rock ’N’ Roll Swindle with the Sex Pistols a few years earlier. Today he’d gone even further: his debut solo LP, Duck Rock, recorded at the age of 36, was in the shops.
What made it galling for punk war veterans was that McLaren invoked the Pistols as he did it. “A Sex Pistol that’s what I am,” went tough township jive Punk It Up, “so drunk on punk.” On the VHS box for Duck Rock’s “video album” he added, “Even I can make records and I’m just an old white honky looking for a couple of bucks. MOTTO: cash from CHAOS.”
The story had begun when McLaren had signed to Charisma Records in 1981. Stimulated by his experiments with Burundi beats and Bow Wow Wow, and the new possibilities offered by hip-hop and sampling, he recalled meeting “a big fat geezer called Tony Stratton Smith.