Malcom McLaren - punk provocateur

The death of Malcom Mclaren this week sees the passing of one of the great British iconic figures of the 70s. McLaren had an enormous influence on British culture through the King's Road shop he opened with Vivienne Westwood and also through the Sex Pistols. Together, the captured and embodied the zeitgiest - and the imagery of London Punk was born.

Alexis Petridis, of the Guardian writes:
Malcolm McLaren: Blood, spit and tears as the punk provocateur dies.
Malcolm McLaren stirred up chaos all his life – and even in death, punk's most inspired interloper will cause controversy.

You can, if you so desired, make a strong argument for the importance and originality of the largely forgotten albums Malcolm McLaren released under his own name in the 80s.

The first, Duck Rock, was a particularly innovative blending of hip hop and world music, while the video for the hit single Buffalo Gals offered most Britons their first glimpse of breakdancing. But it's as The Sex Pistols' manager that he will be remembered, which means the question of how successful he was in the role is likely to be debated for years to come.

McLaren certainly had an acute grasp of what was wrong with British rock music before The Sex Pistols' arrival.


He was a nonpareil orchestrator of outrage during their early career, but proved incapable of dealing with its consequences. McLaren knew exactly what buttons to press, but seemed to have no idea what to do once he'd pressed them: fatally so in the case of Sid Vicious, who was only too willing to play the monster role that McLaren wrote for him right up to a suitably grim conclusion.

You could argue that Vicious' death from a heroin overdose while on bail for the murder of his girlfriend Nancy Spungen was the greatest disaster of McLaren's career, but it was a close-run thing.

Even before that, he had seemed at best unable to protect the band's members from the unprecedented public antipathy he had stirred up, at worst he seemed actively disinterested in doing so. Perhaps he had his mind on higher concepts than the day-to-day reality of life in a band so reviled that the tabloids stopped just short of actively advocating violence against them: PUNISH THE PUNKS demanded the Sunday Mirror in 1977.

Perhaps the whole Perhaps the whole situation had simply run out of his control. Either way, it wasn't Either way, it wasn't much fun being a Sex Pistol in the summer of the Jubilee they so brilliantly mocked on God Save The Queen: Johnny Rotten was attacked by a knife-wielding mob outside a Stoke Newington pub; later the same day, drummer Paul Cook was beaten with a metal bar in west London; three days later, Rotten was attacked again.

It wasn't until after the band split up that McLaren attempted to reassert his authority over the Sex Pistols: rewriting their story in the film The Great Rock'n'Roll Swindle as a masterplan he had controlled all along, the band merely his stooges. It wasn't a terribly convincing argument, nor was it a terribly good film.

Understandably outraged, Johnny Rotten has spent the subsequent years airbrushing McLaren from the Sex Pistols story, pointing out that the music had nothing to do with him, reinventing the band as autodidacts who would have been even more successful without his interference.

But that seems reductive too: without McLaren's ideas, his art-school grounding in Situationism, without the clothes he and Vivienne Westwood designed for them, the Sex Pistols wouldn't have been the same band, nor would they have had the same impact. Neither party would ever admit it, but they needed each other.

Still, if nothing else, the ongoing argument meant Malcolm McLaren remained a controversial figure up to his death, and will remain a controversial figure beyond it – which is presumably just what he wanted.

Music journalist Jon Savage, who wrote "England's Dreaming," a history of the Sex Pistols and punk, said that "without Malcolm McLaren there would not have been any British punk." He's one of the rare individuals who had a huge impact on the cultural and social life of this nation."

John Lydon issued a tribute signed Johnny Rotten, the name he used in the Sex Pistols. "For me Malc was always entertaining, and I hope you remember that," he said. "Above all else he was an entertainer and I will miss him, and so should you."