RIP Malcolm McLaren

RIP Malcolm McLaren: 1946 - 2010

Malcolm McLaren, the self-styled 'godfather of punk', has died from cancer at the age of 64.

Although he released a number of innovative and influential albums himself (1983's Duck Rock did much to introduce hip-hop to UK audiences), it is as the Sex Pistols' manager that he will be best remembered.

McLaren was a pop culture maverick and self-publicist in the grand British tradition for whom making a splash was always more important than making money.

In this last respect, he may well be the last of his kind.

McLaren liked to claim he invented punk but of course he didn't. His real skill was in spotting emerging trends, repackaging them in his own image and pretending they were his idea all along. Stealing, if you like, but in the most artistically valid of ways.

McLaren ran an avante-garde clothes shop on the King's Road with his then girlfriend, designer Vivienne Westwood, in the 1970s. It was on buying trips to New York that he fell in with proto-punk bands the New York Dolls and the Neon Boys, the latter of whose members would go on to form Television. Influenced by their stripped down musical style and fashion sense, he set about creating a UK version.

Having 'borrowed' from across the Atlantic, McLaren then delved into domestic pop history. Clearly seeing himself as part of a tradition of British rock/pop svengalis, he first stole a trick from 1950s impresario Larry Parnes. Parnes was famous for taking ordinary working class boys like Reginald Smith and Ronald Wycherley and lending them an air of exotic danger by giving them names like Marty Wilde and Billy Fury. McLaren simply upped the ante by calling his boys Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious.

He then took a leaf out of 1960s Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham's book and deliberately whipped up as much moral outrage as possible around his band, which was now known as the Sex Pistols. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Quote :

He then took a leaf out of 1960s Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham's book and deliberately whipped up as much moral outrage as possible around his band, which was now known as the Sex Pistols. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Better late than never. Goodbye Malcom.

He took a page out of Oldham's book and worked with both the Pistols and the Dolls. Thumbs up to that!

If I had a time machine I'd go back to the 70's and see both the Pistols and the Dolls in their outrageous prime, although I did manage to see the most notorious of the Dolls, guitarist Johnny Thunders with his later band, the Heartbreakers and caught the Pistols Filthy Lucre Reunion tour. Johnny Rotten opened the show, with "I'm fat, famous and forty" followed by an expletive, maybe a burp too. Then cue the raucus cacophony of guitars, drums and Rotten in full snarl.