Two words sum up today’s culture: “authenticity” is one, and the other is, well …“karaoke”. Most artists spend their lives trying to authenticate (or make true) today’s karaoke culture, but you have to be a magician to do that. Karaoke is mouthing other people’s songs; it is life by proxy, liberated by hindsight and unencumbered by the messy process of creativity.
Everything and everyone in a karaoke world is for sale, and so successful are its TV shows – Pop Idol, The X-Factor and Britain’s Got Talent – that I am racing down an ancient road to Portsmouth on a nothing Saturday morning to judge a talent contest. I am on a mission: I have this undeniable thirst for something authentic. But Portsmouth is agog with signposts and fast becomes impossible to navigate. And, then, no. It can’t be. Yes, it is …the Live and Unsigned Talent Contest.
I have never been a good judge of anything, not women, not friends. I am feeling submissive sitting here at the back of Portsmouth Guildhall. I’ve got “willing prey” printed across my forehead; I am an icon of 21st-century unhappiness.
Surrounded by talent scouts and DJs, I am told that 10,000 acts across the UK have entered this competition: the names on the paper in front of me are the final 60. The panel has to award marks out of 20, according to look, originality and performance. Suddenly, I see Simon Cowell everywhere. Even the women look like him! I can’t be imagining this. Looking for the authentic here might be like looking for a ruby in a field of tin.
The bands thunder forth like horses at the Grand National. They occasionally trip up, singing variation after variation of Beatles’ hits. Are these acts imitating the imitators? Is this what happens when you watch too much Pop Idol? When you aspire to join Simon’s chosen few? How old are they? They look old, the music is old …and yet …
A girl wanders up to the mike. She is 14. Her face swells into a torrent of tearful stagefright and I think I hear her sing a line from “Can’t Buy Me Love”. Her supporters, her particular tribe, wear their star’s T-shirts. They are coached by mothers, or aunts or friends, who cheer and wave banners.
Twelve hours later, a strange-looking boy in ill-fitting adult clothes strums away on a guitar. His strings break but he continues regardless. The sound is terrible. Sympathy from the emcee allows him a reprieve. His few friends wait in anticipation and horror. Then Harry Houseago reprises his song, a fragile tune distinguished by a lyric that describes his recent love affair with a hospital bed, a place he never wants to leave. Harry Houseago is 16 and I award him full marks. He is a dysfunctional, impossible- to-define, wonderful creature. How does he manage that?
More Beatles, Stevie Wonder and Queen covers follow. Next up is Boomin’, best described as a post-karaoke act that cuts up all of those groups’ Best Ofs: a verse here and a chorus there that have no reason to be stuck together and sung, except for the fact that they are and in a similar key. Fascinating. Like out of a William Burroughs novel.
The 55th act, Theory of the Sixth Degree, bellows out: “Mom’s in the Moshpit”. (She probably is at Glastonbury.) By the time they segue into “Johnny B Goode”, I fall in love with what their mum just might look like (in the moshpit of course!). They are 13 and full of it. Then there is Henry, Rupert and the Revolvers: girls dressed in purple shifts fire a revolver from the edge of the stage. It propels them and the group into action: a cover of Del Shannon’s “Runaway”. Smiley faces in tiny, beautifully cut purple suits bob up and down – a magnificent puppet show!
Monday morning, I am at the Baltic Institute of Contemporary Art in Gateshead: a converted flour mill that sits on the banks of the Tyne overlooking Newcastle. I meet its new and enthusiastic director, Godfrey Worsdale, and curator David Thorp for lunch on the top-floor restaurant. Godfrey describes the power breakfast he holds here every Monday morning for the titans and business clans of Geordieland. We both emerge from lunch intent on working together.
On the train back south, David decides to pop into the British Library to see Alan Moore give a talk: a psychogeographic journey into the bowels of London’s past. Years ago, I co-wrote a screenplay in Hollywood with Alan. I explain to David that Alan has become an alchemist. Sadly, I can’t join them.
I have dinner with another David, the theatre producer David Johnson, known for putting Malcolm Gladwell on the road. Crazy people who work with me thought it an excellent idea to tell my stories to the public, and, at dinner at the Wolseley restaurant in Piccadilly, David madly agrees. Eyeing the crowd surrounding us – Lucian Freud and his daughter Bella, Alan Rickman and fans, Justin Timberlake and American record producers from my not-so-distant past – I realise fate is playing me a card and decide that is what I will do. “It’s agreed,” David says, “but what shall we call it? Confessions of a Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindler?” “No,” I say, “History is for Pissing On”.
I work in a very shitty neighbourhood in Paris: dogs are considered better folk in these parts and, such as Parisians are, they allow those creatures to shit anywhere they choose. I am forever slipping and sliding in it. But, perched on top of the Folies Bergère, in what was once the atelier of the painter Kees van Dongen, I sit on the floor of a large empty space. The bell rings. It is a curator from the Netherlands Institute of Art History in the Hague.
She is here, she says, to do research: a van Dongen retrospective will open there next year and van Dongen did his best work right here, in my studio. Did he? She shows me photos of Van Dongen sitting monk-like in the atelier and I wonder how he lived here. Regardless of the fact that this studio is a marvel of light, it is all but impossible to get a stick of furniture into the space, so narrow are the doors and so tight the stairwell. I had to cut my bed in half and put it back together again so I could sleep sandwiched along the mezzanine.
Best is the view: grand, sweeping, romantic, across the rooftops of Paris to the Sacré Coeur. I tell the curator I think van Dongen’s paintings are banal. She comments kindly that anyone who has lost the connection with the fundamental in art also lacks sense for the banal. I look at her, amused and curious as to what will come out of her mouth next. She doesn’t mean the ability to see that something is banal, she says, but the ability to understand the artistic value of banality. She thanks my girlfriend for iced coffee and explains further: “A great work of art is the complete banality, and the fault with most banalities is that they are not banal enough.” I am sold.
‘History Is for Pissing On’ by Malcolm McLaren, Live at the Pleasance Grand, Pleasance, Edinburgh, Sunday August 23, 2.30pm. For bookings, tel +44 0131 556 6550 or visit www.pleasance.co.uk
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