REVIEW: Malcolm McLaren, Paris (Island)

- Ali Sinclair

Paris - Malcolm McLaren's first release in six years - is music, but it's more than music. The whole recording is a musical and lyrical painting of Paris, from McLaren's viewpoint. It is sordid and sexy: evocative and erotic: beautiful and bizarre, cruel and candid. It takes a walk along rue Pigalle, through Montmartre, beside the flowing Seine: peruses the bars and the cheap hotels: wears black and the dust of the metro, the scent of flowers, the aromas of strong coffee and French cigarettes: it listens to jazz. It is full of dropped names and social gossip, not least being "How did he get Catherine Deneuve to sing?"

The black-and-white sleeve photos give McLaren the air of an aging Leonard Cohen, or a sedate Quentin Crisp: the greying eccentric, the seedy sophisticate: posing, poking fun, almost-but-not-quite over-the-top. And whatever the impression you may have of this man, be it musical genius or blatant manipulator, you have to have at least a little admiration for his ability to gather disparate musical elements and produce something unique and memorable, be it Paris, the Sex Pistols, or Adam Ant.

McLaren says that he makes albums "like a film director who doesn't have a camera". And although Paris is sometimes a film that doesn't need pictures, because of the vivid images that it projects onto the screen of the imagination, sometimes it sounds just a little like a soundtrack and you wish you had the moving scenes before your eyes.

There is a strong jazz influence throughout the fifteen tracks of the main CD (the American Paris comes with an extra eight-track CD of instrumental mixes). There is some beautiful trumpet playing by Guy Barker on "Miles and Miles of Miles Davis". Babik Reinhardt plays late-night guitar on "In The Absence Of The Parisienne", the track with the disturbing backdrop of a thousand buzzing bees... or are they flies? Catherine Deneuve breathes the words with the manner of the perfect Parisienne. Francoise Hardy sings again... The names just go on and on. McLaren's vocals are recited, not sung, the narrator, the poet.

For me, the highlights of the album are "Pere Lachaise" with a melody that is beautifully familiar the first time you hear it; "La Main Parisienne" with Amina's haunting, Arabian-nights vocals; and the excellent, 90's disco-version of the Gainsborough/Birkin classic, "Je T'aime - Moi Non Plus". But don't play the sexually-explicit first track, "Mon Die Senie", to your Great Aunt Mabel - or at least, give her a large cognac first.

If I were to write a thesis on the Artist's View Of Paris, I'd start with this CD, and with William Wharton's book "Last Lovers". The two are contradictory and complementary - McLaren focuses on the dark, dirty side while Wharton paints a brighter picture. Both are valid, both are Paris.

Yes, Paris is Paris, France - but it's Malcolm McLaren's Paris. It may not be your Paris or my Paris, but like the city itself, there are scenes, sounds and memories that will inspire something in everyone.