"Gorman describes McLaren as 'the ultimate inside/outsider'– which is perhaps a nice way of saying that he tried to play it both ways. In a prefatory essay, Lou Stoppard says that McLaren was caught between his impulse to rebel and his secret desire for 'some kind of recognition from the "system"', resulting in a career emblematic of 'the ever so delicate trade-off between success and opposition'. If his objective truly was 'the most flamboyant failure', he was thwarted by success. With the King's Road boutique, each anti-fashion move backfired almost immediately: attention, appreciation and acceptance came from 'enemy' institutions like Vogue. The Sex Pistols, he declared, 'were anti-music and anti-business', yet 'God Save the Queen' outsold Rod Stewart twice over."
At the London Review of Books, Simon Reynolds reviews Paul Gorman's The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren.
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