Malcolm McLaren: Master and servant

The Svengali to the Sex Pistols and a major force behind the sound and style of the Seventies, is still obsessed with revolution. He tells Geoffrey Macnab about his current ventures - a film about abuses in the fast-food industry and a musical version of The Servant

Malcolm McLaren was just two years old when Robin Maugham's novella, The Servant, was published in 1948. A barbed satire about the upper-class Tony and his new butler, Barrett, it showed the old-fashioned master/ servant relationship turned on its head. Joseph Losey's 1963 film version, scripted by Harold Pinter, updated the story from the post-war austerity era to the beginning of the swinging Sixties. Both book and movie clearly had a profound effect on the man who would go on to manage the Sex Pistols. McLaren liked them so much that he is now planning to turn The Servant into a stage musical.

"It's about the disintegration of both classes," he tells me in his lilting, Artful Dodger-like whine. "But it's also a bit about the devil and Dorian Gray. It's such an excellent foundation for talking about English culture."

Back in the late 1970s, Abba music was anathema for any self-respecting young punk. Nonetheless, McLaren acknowledges Mamma Mia! as one of the key inspirations behind this new endeavour. The producers of Mamma Mia! took a collection of Benny and Björn's songs, rewrote a story around them "and made them fit". That's roughly what he plans to do with Maugham's story. "I love the idea of The Servant as a very intriguing, sombre, quintessential English pop musical," he explains. The plan isn't to commission new music, but to trawl through English pop of the early Sixties, "the world of the Kinks, of the Herd, Anthony Newley, the Zombies and so on". "Waterloo Sunset", "A Well-Respected Man", "Chalk and Cheese" – the names of some of his favourite songs trip off the tongue. "You're never going to be able to write songs as good as that. They were written at a time when songwriting was so fresh and new."

Will Harold Pinter mind having his screenplay cannibalised? He brushes the question aside. "I've known Harold for many, many years," he states, as if that takes care of the matter. Nor is he keen to talk about what he plans to do with the John Dankworth/Cleo Laine music that featured in Losey's movie. "I love the idea of using existing songs and weaving them in. It's an old-fashioned post-modernist way... the same applied movie-wise in Moulin Rouge." And, no, he's not going to cast Cliff Richard in Dirk Bogarde's old role as the unctuous butler. It's also unlikely that Vivienne Westwood will be designing the costumes. "Vivienne these days is becoming a bit of an old bat," McLaren confides. "She's becoming terribly reactionary. She keeps telling us how the Queen is her favourite person, just because she has an OBE. It's so hypocritical." I say he sounds a tad bitchy. He just chuckles in reply.

I wonder aloud, too, whether his plans for The Servant are so much pipe-dreaming. McLaren insists not. He says Universal recently invited him to cast his eye over its vast back catalogue, which includes not only The Servant but most of the Ealing comedies, Kind Hearts and Coronets among them. "The cheapest way to regenerate a back catalogue besides putting it out on DVD is to turn the film into a stage musical. If that works, turn it back into a musical on film," he says.

After the successes of Oklahoma!, The Producers, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang et al, it often seems that mounting large-scale musical revivals of classic old movies (many of which were musicals in the first place) is a way of making easy money. Talk to McLaren, though, and it becomes apparent that he isn't in this just for profit. He is obsessed by the England of the late 1950s and early 1960s. The Servant complements one of his earliest projects, his psycho-geographical film The Ghosts of Oxford Street, which he began as a student at Goldsmiths College and which, according to the author Jon Savage, began his fascination with rock'n'roll in the first place. "And I've always been interested in things that change the culture," he adds.

Revisionist accounts of the Sex Pistols paint McLaren as a glorified pantomime villain. Julien Temple's documentary The Filth and The Fury portrays him as an often incompetent manager who always foregrounded his own contribution at the expense of that of the band. McLaren concedes that the film includes some "incredible live footage of the Sex Pistols," but bemoans its joylessness. "It was too much of a sad movie. I don't remember punk rock being like that. I always remember it as a ticket to the carnival for a better life. This movie made it feel very downbeat. I don't think that was the case. The manipulation that I was accused of – all of that is absolutely true. But ultimately, it was to express something that was going to be a vital ingredient in changing culture and life within the British Isles."

The arch-manipulator is still up to his tricks. He has just formed his own film company – Malcolm McLaren Productions – and is to partner with Jeremy Thomas (The Last Emperor, Crash) on a new movie based on the best-selling book, Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side Of The All-American Meal, by Eric Schlosser. The aim is to fashion a drama out of Schlosser's often horrifying research into the way the fast-food industry works. McLaren wants Alfonso Cuarón to direct.

The film – which will be largely in Spanish – represents his first real foray into Mexican and Latino culture. Just as 25 years ago he was at the forefront of punk, he now wants to make the first "real Spanish-speaking American movie that combines both the lives of the new second generation of Mexicans with the Anglo-Saxons and the the Caucasians that live in the United States. That's where the new teen culture is."

He promises that not only will the film expose the scandalous conditions that the mainly Latino workforce faces every day in the abattoirs and meat-packing plants, it will also be irreverent and entertaining. "The idea is to make a drama about the young and the new generation who work within the fast-food industry at many different levels," he explains.

Meanwhile, back in Britain, McLaren is busy with Bill Buford, literary editor of The New Yorker, on a screen adaptation of the latter's Among The Thugs. The book chronicles Buford's experiences travelling with and observing English football hooligans over a period of eight years. McLaren, who used to be a "huge Arsenal fan," describes the project as a black comedy. "It combines football hooliganism and the rave culture that got bound up with it. It's from Ibiza to Millwall and back. It has the uncanny quality of the mob, the drug aspect, and then the aspect that all these people who were sent down, as soon as they got out of jail, were the guys organising all the raves in Ibiza."

Unlike many of his contemporaries from 1977 – John Lydon and Westwood among them – McLaren is as anti-royalist now as he was back in the days when the Pistols' "God Save The Queen" was topping the charts. When asked if he'll be joining any street parties, he rolls his eyes and says, "The so-called golden jubilee will be nothing more than a beer commercial for fascism." But he acknowledges the irony in the fact that punk has now become a part of the heritage industry it set itself so fiercely against. "Oxford Street will flaunt images created in the Seventies with a safety pin through the Queen's nose, as well as very pretty pictures of the Queen with diamanté-studded slogans that say 'Isn't she brilliant! She's a one-off!' And most people will probably buy them both."