Godfather of punk whose time has come

Is Malcolm McLaren in danger of joining the ranks of Stephen Fry, Alan Bennett and the late Queen Mother by becoming a British national treasure? Thirty years ago, as svengali to the world's most notorious rock band the Sex Pistols, the very notion would have been unthinkable. But in an era gorging on nostalgia and starved of cultural authenticity the suggestion doesn't seem so out of place.

McLaren is the former partner of the designer Dame Vivienne Westwood; has presented his own much garlanded shows on the BBC, which once banned his band's records; appeared in a reality television programme (though declined I'm a Celebrity ... Get Me Out Of Here!) and has been invited to perform his one-man evening of anecdotes and tall tales at the Royal Festival Hall and the Sydney Opera House after successfully premiering at this year's Edinburgh Festival. In 1999, he even toyed with the idea of being Mayor of London.

When I caught up with him he was busy at the Gateshead's Baltic Centre for Contemporary Arts staging the world premier of his new film, Paris: Capitol of the 21st Century. Yet surprisingly for someone of McLaren's famously vaunting ego, the notion of being nationally treasured seems to be something that he has only half considered.

Dressed in an expensive-looking tweed suit and knotted grey scarf, looking more like a respectable don from one of the ancient universities than the man John Lydon aka Johnny Rotten once described as the "most evil person on earth", his voluble pronouncements were providing entertainment for those sitting in the restaurant of the Tyneside gallery. "I'm most probably a missing link that a lot of people don't know. Someone has to tie the loose ends between the 60s and the 90s. That has been left open [to me] because no one is aware what artists had to face in the 70s," he says.

According to curators at the Baltic, he is an artist "whose time has come". The 63-year-old godfather of punk turned adopted Parisian lives in self-imposed exile with his American-Korean partner, Young Kim, 37.

Fresh from some acclaim for his "musical painting" sequence Shallow 1-21, a series of faded scenes taken from 60s home porn movies and set to music, his latest piece continues in much the same vein - a repetitive 62-minute appropriation of clips from a private archive of French television adverts and other "lost" films. Some of the - at times - amusing sequences were created by McLaren's artistic pin-ups such as Max Ernst and Marcel Duchamp from early on in their career, when they were required to take on any work they were offered. It was this previously little-known episode in the history of art that fired McLaren's imagination and - it is hoped - will help secure his late-life credentials as a serious artist to be appreciated.

McLaren talks at length about the eight years he spent at art college in the 1960s and early 70s, an odyssey through outlying suburban institutions then largely unchanged since the 1930s and culminating in a three-year fine art course at Goldsmiths. Everything that followed his traumatic departure from art school, where he had been sheltering from the world of work as if it were a "dreadful disease", has been an expression of his art.

Yet the former King's Road shopkeeper, who helped bring us the notion of "cash from chaos", has little time for those who go to art school in the search of fame or riches. He and his contemporaries were well versed in the "noble art of failure". McLaren recalls the opportunities afforded his generation of "dysfunctional war babies" who were given the time and space to experiment before Mrs Thatcher stepped in to close down the old art schools and turn culture into a marketable commodity and art into a respectable career.

Thatcher is a word that crops up several times during the conversation. The Iron Lady came to power as the punk flame died and McLaren has a sneaking respect for her - in stark contrast to the dreary world of Britain in the 1970s in which he finally graduated. "This was a failed, miserable country whose infrastructure was dying by the hour. Industry was collapsing - there was nothing," he says. But she, like him, was a cultural revolutionary. "Without her, we would never have had Blair or Cameron. They are just the imitators."

Yet for all his admiration for that time at art school, it was not there that inspiration would strike. It was through listening to pop music and visiting the clubs and galleries off Oxford St that the future direction emerged. "A new world was available by tuning into the radio or simply going across the road. That world was spelt out inevitably by pop music that connected to certain contemporary artists; that connected to certain contemporary fashion and connected to some contemporary politics," he recalls.

That relationship between art, music, fashion and politics comes as close to any as explaining why it was that the most famous bands with which he was associated - first the New York Dolls, then the Pistols - could generate such excitement in 1970s. And why it is so lacking today in a music world dominated by The X Factor - though he sees Simon Cowell's creation as wearying rather than worrying, symptomatic of a culture that is overrun with the "pollution" of globalisation.

Inevitably, it has been hard to surpass the notoriety that he enjoyed at the time of punk, one that he never could have envisaged on the day he first stepped out in an electric-blue suit to walk down the King's Road and see what fortune threw his way. The story of that day looking for his first break is as fantastical as it is entertaining. Accompanied by the teenage Westwood (they had met at a London squat and she was soon to fall pregnant by him), he was ushered to a Chelsea hole in the wall by a mystery American impresario who gave him the keys to the premises and was never to be seen again - events that apparently happened quite regularly in the 70s, he says.

From selling a few records and art books, he was able to build the legend that became Sex - the boutique he founded with Westwood that created the punk look. He was soon repelling Vogue photographers, counting Keith Richards among his early (dissatisfied) clients and even coming to the attention of a young Charles Saatchi.

In the decades after the Sex Pistols' messy split, the tragic death of Sid Vicious and his girlfriend Nancy Spungen, and a bitter courtroom battle with Lydon, which saw him cede control of the group (and £880,000) to his former protege, he did have commercial and critical success. There was angry post-punk Bow Wow Wow. There have been forays into film: Fast Food Nation in 2006 was a respectable hit, and there was his music for Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill Vol 2. But it is small beer compared to his heyday at the helm of the Sex Pistols.

"It is not a question of peaking. It is just very hard to top it," he concedes.

- INDEPENDENT