I wasn't was what one might call a "student" of Malcom McLaren and I was NOT a fan of the Sex Pistols. (It was all over my head.) But I did have an appreciation of Malcom McLaren and what he was able to accomplish and his style. This past week he passed away at 64, after only living three or four lives.
Here's from the NYTimes obituary:
In the 1970s, Mr. McLaren returned to his native London from New York, where he had briefly managed the New York Dolls in the waning days of that band’s initial flush of fame. With his business partner and girlfriend at the time, Vivienne Westwood, they renamed their clothing shop Sex, and Mr. McLaren set about putting together his own rock act of untested British youth, which became the Sex Pistols.
“I’m much more of a magician than a musician,” he told The Globe and Mail of Toronto in 1985. “I steal other people’s songs and try to make them better.”
Mr. McLaren was a keen student of the French Situationists, who believed in staging absurdist or provocative incidents as a spur to social change. He arranged for the Sex Pistols to sign their contract with A&M Records outside Buckingham Palace and organized a performance of “God Save the Queen” on the Thames, outside the Houses of Parliament, on a boat named the Queen Elizabeth. The police quickly intervened, ratifying the group’s incendiary reputation.In recent years his name was linked with film, television and radio projects, most of them never realized, although he did help produce the film “Fast Food Nation” and presented two series for BBC2 radio, “Malcolm McLaren’s Musical Map of London” and “Malcolm McLaren’s Life and Times in L.A.”
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