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When he launched the small-format 32-page song sheet The Melody Maker in 1926, Tin Pan Alley music publisher Lawrence Wright sparked the media revolution that created the music press. This multi-million pound business eventually straddled the Atlantic and simultaneously proved a fertile breeding ground for generations of writers, photographers, film-makers and performers who made their […]
I’ll be joining contemporary music magazines including Disco Pogo and Ambit Pop at a celebration of the music press then and now at London’s premier magazine outlet Magculture a week on Thursday (October 27). Magculture currently stocks a dozen music magazines, so is the appropriate place to talk about the past, the present and the […]
I’m really jazzed about getting my hands on the first finished copy of Totally Wired, my history of the music press which is published by Thames & Hudson this autumn. Designer Daniel Streat has done wonders with the day-the-world-turned-dayglo jacket concept and my choice of cover star Poly Styrene. There are 60 or so illustrations, […]
What with Pistol and all, it seems timely to discuss Malcolm McLaren’s place in the scheme of things so tonight journalist Helen Barrett and I will be in conversation at a London Society event about the late cultural iconoclast’s relationship with the city of his birth. Here is a selection of visuals from this evening’s […]
Beginning in the early 1970s—as under-represented groups were demanding new forms of visibility following the emergence of political movements such as Black Power and the Stonewall Rebellion—a handful of British and American photo-driven alternative magazines came on the scene. The Face, i-D, Rags, Out/Look, and other new publications amplified marginalized voices, especially those of queer […]
These faded pages constitute a film pitch Malcolm McLaren sent by fax to screenwriters Neal Purvis and Robert Wade way back in 1991. Purvis and Wade are responsible for many film successes including the astounding run of screenplays for the seven James Bond movies from 1999’s The World Is Not Enough to the recently released […]
Among the many things the world doesn’t need now is another book of record covers, but DB Burkeman’s Art Sleeves, which is published today by Rizzoli, is something else entirely. For once the publisher’s blurb is spot-on; this is “a tightly curated exploration” of record covers which challenge the distinctions between art and design, between […]
I have an essay in the Stone Island monograph Storia which is published today by Rizzoli Books. Edited by Eugene Rabkin of StyleZeitgeist and art-directed by the supreme Simon Foxton, Storia is an extremely handsome volume featuring texts by Angelo Flaccavento and Jian Deleon, as well as my piece, From The Streets To The Stadium, […]
We have to take our pleasures where we can during these grim times, and last night’s virtual book launch of my Malcolm McLaren biography provided a much-needed tonic. The plan was to celebrate the publication with a party at the library bar of London’s hotel The Standard, with a relaxed congregation of friends and contributors […]
“With this book, Gorman convincingly moves away from the ossified image of McLaren as a great rock’n’roll swindler, a morally bankrupt punk Mephistopheles, and closer towards his art-school roots, his love of ideas” Victoria Segal reviewing The Life & Times of Malcolm McLaren in the Sunday Times, April 5, 202 The first reviews of my […]