Sad news yesterday, with the announcement of the death of impresario, manager, film producer and punk godfather Malcolm McLaren. Born in 1946, in London, McLaren started out as a fashion designer at art school, opening a clothing shop with his then girlfriend Vivienne Westwood in 1971. Through this, he designed stage outfits for the New York Dolls, and from there became the manager of a band called The Strand, rearranging the line up and bringing in frontman John Lydon to form the band that would become known as The Sex Pistols.
McLaren appeared in Julien Temple’s film “The Great Rock n Roll Swindle,” which portrayed him as “The Embezzler,” the group’s svengali, using them to create chaos in the music industry, although Temple’s 2000 follow-up “The Filth and the Fury” retells the band’s story from their perspective, in a more straight-laced documentary style.
He went on to manage Adam & The Ants, and formed the punk band Bow Wow Wow with three former members of that group, as well as releasing a series of solo, hip-hop influenced albums, most notably Duck Rock and Waltz Darling. His music received a new lease of life in the last decade, with “Buffalo Gals” being sampled by Eminem for “Without Me” in 2002, and “World’s Famous” being re-used by Amerie on the song “Some Like It” in 2007, while the song “About Her” was used by Quentin Tarantino on the soundtrack for “Kill Bill Volume Two.”
He also moved into film production in the last years of his life, serving as a producer on Richard Linklater’s “Fast Food Nation.” He’d been diagnosed with cancer in October, and died in a clinic in Switzerland yesterday. McLaren was a complex figure, one that we’d be wrong to sentimentalize, but he was a true original, and his anarchic spirit will be sorely missed. John Lydon, who had a tempestuous relationship with McLaren, perhaps put it best yesterday; “For me Malc was always entertaining, and I hope you remember that. Above all else he was an entertainer and I will miss him, and so should you.”
You can watch the first ten minutes of “The Great Rock N Roll Swindle” below.