BOOKS
A desire for noisy chaos was in his DNA…
THE way Malcolm McLaren told it, he met Syd Barrett in a central London hotel in 1977 to persuade Pink Floyd’s acid-mangled founder to produce Never Mind The Bollocks. “He showed up wearing a navy-blue blazer and reading a newspaper about the Angolan crisis,” said McLaren. “I tried to talk to him [but] he couldn’t speak, and the following day he left the hotel and I couldn’t find him.”
Impractical, exploitativecalled “the Colonel Tom Parker of the Blank Generation” specialised in. Paul Gorman’s gigantic biography shows that a desire for noisy chaos was in the Pistols manager’s DNA, his grandmother Rose Corré Isaacs having given him his life’s mantra early on: “To be bad is good, because to be good is simply boring.”
