According to several news reports, former Sex Pistols manager and all-around punk impresario Malcolm McLaren has died at the age of 64 while in New York. McLaren had been living with cancer for some time, but his health had reportedly begun rapidly deteriorating recently.
McLaren got his start as a clothing designer, opening a London boutique called Let It Rock with his partner, Vivienne Westwood (with whom he later had a similarly fashion-minded son, Agent Provocateur co-founder Joseph Corré). Having become disillusioned with the Teddy Boy styles he’d been selling, McLaren found new inspiration in crafting clothes for the New York Dolls. By 1975, that band was in interpersonal shambles and already waning in popularity; McLaren tried to help restart their careers by dressing them in red patent leather and having them perform in front of Soviet flags, which flopped. (Some Dolls fans still blame McLaren’s for the band’s too-soon demise.)
It was while he was in New York that McLaren first saw the Neon Boys—and more importantly Richard Hell, whose safety-pinned, rip-it-up-and-start-again aesthetic would prove to be a huge influence on McLaren. He returned to London and renamed his store SEX, where he began selling S&M-style clothes to the growing numbers of punk kids on Kings Road; as John Lydon once famously observed, “Malcolm and Vivienne were really a pair of shysters; they would sell anything to any trend that they could grab onto.” Eventually that trend-hopping had extended to McLaren managing his very own punk band: The Strand, a group of working-class teenagers who were always hanging around his shop. After returning from New York, McLaren suddenly took real interest in The Strand, even reaching out to the New York Dolls’ Sylvain Sylvain and Richard Hell and begging them to come over and front the group. After a famous chance encounter with John Lydon—soon rechristened “Johnny Rotten”—McLaren decided he’d finally found the right face and attitude, which was much more important to him than musical ability.
Debate continues over how much authority McLaren actually had over the Sex Pistols, but to hear him tell it, they were his own bit of Situationist theater, an “idea in the form of a band of kids who could be perceived as being bad.” He also took responsibility for the name, claiming it derived from “from the idea of a pistol, a pin-up, a young thing, a better-looking assassin.” Such grandstanding was par for the course for McLaren, who always seemed to care more about image than the music, and whose plans for the band—including an infamous chartered boat trip down the Thames during the Queen’s Jubilee, or scheduling the Sex Pistols’ first U.S. tour almost entirely in venues full of pissed-off rednecks in the deep South—were always calculated to generate maximum scandal. This continued even after the Sex Pistols broke up, with McLaren insisting that group continue on with a new lead singer—first a totally uninterested Sid Vicious, followed by attempts with notorious criminal Ronnie Biggs—and, failing that, as a tragicomic myth in Julien Temple’s The Great Rock ’N’ Roll Swindle. Even though McLaren eventually took his name off that movie, it’s his vision through and through: In it, he claims to have invented the Sex Pistols and completely masterminded their rise and fall in order to further his agenda of “chaos” and then reap the financial awards, all while wearing a series of ridiculous bondage masks. He also claims to have invented punk rock—a tongue-in-cheek supposition that nevertheless reflects McLaren’s own half-satirical self-image as the capitalist mastermind manipulating the myth of rebellion toward his own personal gain. Satirical or not, it permanently pissed off John Lydon, who sued for control of the band in the ’80s and refused to ever speak to McLaren, finally offering a scathing rebuttal to McLaren’s claims in 2000’s The Filth And The Fury.