Bret L
April 9th 10, 07:42 AM
Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren dies at 64
>> "The former manager of the Sex Pistols and one of the seminal figures of the punk rock era, Malcolm McLaren, died Thursday, his son said. He was 64..
Joe Corre said his father died of an aggressive form of cancer in
Switzerland, declining to give the exact location because he said he
wanted to avoid a media scrum.
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."
Although the Sex Pistols broke up after only one album, 1977's "Never
Mind the ********," their rebellious antics and raucous music would
set the bar for bands to come.
Their bassist, Sid Vicious, died of a heroin overdose in 1979 after he
was accused of killing his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen, in New York City
in 1978.
Mr. McLaren's career in music wasn't limited to managing the Pistols.
He also had a solo career in which he blended genres and acted as a
kind of music curator. In the early 1980s, he had key songs in hip-
hop, including the hit "Buffalo Gals," and brought different textures
to the developing genre. During his career, he worked in electronica,
pop - even opera.
In addition to music and fashion, Mr. McLaren also dabbled in
journalism and filmmaking - working in Hollywood with directors such
as Quentin Tarantino and Steven Spielberg.
Corre said that while funeral arrangements have yet to be made, Mr.
McLaren had wanted to be buried in north London's stately Highgate
cemetery, near where he was born." <<
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/04/08/MNM71CRRPE.DTL
Malcolm McLaren, Seminal Punk Figure, Dies at 64
By WILLIAM GRIMES
Published: April 8, 2010
>> "Malcolm McLaren, an impresario, recording artist and fashion designer who as manager of the Sex Pistols played a decisive role in creating the British punk movement, died on Thursday in Switzerland. He was 64. The cause was mesothelioma, a cancer of the linings around organs, said Young Kim, his companion of many years. She said he had been under treatment at a Swiss hospital. He lived in Paris and New York.
Mr. McLaren, a former art student, found an outlet for his ideas about
fashion, music and social provocation in the inchoate rock ’n’ roll
scene of London in the early 1970s. Operating from the clothing
boutique Sex, which he and the fashion designer Vivienne Westwood ran,
he brought together four obscure musicians, called them the Sex
Pistols and provided them with an attitude suited to Britain in
decline: nihilistic rage, expressed at high volume in songs like
“Anarchy in the U.K.” and the vitriolic anti-anthem “God Save the
Queen.”
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.
Until their breakup in January 1978, the Sex Pistols epitomized the
look, the sound and the attitude of British punk. All three came, in
large measure, from Mr. McLaren’s restless brain.
Malcolm Robert Andrew McLaren was born on Jan. 22, 1946, in London and
was raised mostly by a wealthy grandmother. He attended more than half
a dozen art schools. At none of them did things go smoothly. He was
expelled from Chiswick Polytechnic, and the Croydon College of Art
tried to have him transferred to a mental institution.
He terminated his education, such as it was, in 1971 at Goldsmiths’
College in London, but not before completing a series of paintings
titled “I Will Be So Bad.”
In 1972 Mr. McLaren and Ms. Westwood took over a store on King’s Road
in Chelsea called Let It Rock and began selling hipster Teddy boy
fashions. The business was run along unconventional lines.
In a 1997 article for The New Yorker, Mr. McLaren recalled, “We set
out to make an environment where we could truthfully run wild.” On
most days the shop did not open until the evening and closed within a
few hours. The goal, Mr. McLaren wrote, “was to sell nothing at all.”
After the New York Dolls visited the store, renamed Too Fast to Live,
Too Young to Die, Mr. McLaren followed the group to the United States
and became its manager. He dressed the band members in red clothing
based on the Soviet flag, placed politically provocative slogans
onstage and presided over their swift demise.
Back in London, Mr. McLaren, now at Sex, took an interest in a group
called the Strand (later the S******s), three of whose members formed
the nucleus of the original Sex Pistols. The group gave its first
performance at St. Martin’s College on Nov. 6, 1975 — hostile audience
reaction caused the players to leave the stage after two songs — and
soon emerged as the leader of the punk scene. Reliably or not, Mr.
McLaren explained his strategy for packaging and selling the band in
the 1980 film “The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle.”
“Anarchy in the U.K.” and “God Save the Queen” (whose release was
timed to coincide with Queen Elizabeth II’s silver jubilee) rose to
the upper rungs of the pop charts in Britain, and the group’s only
album, “Never Mind the ********: Here’s the Sex Pistols,” reached No.
1 in 1977. On the band’s first American tour, in January 1978, John
Lydon, the lead singer known as Johnny Rotten, walked offstage at the
Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco, and the Sex Pistols dissolved.
Mr. McLaren briefly managed Adam and the Ants and then, with several
ex-Ants, created Bow Wow Wow around a teenage Burmese singer,
Annabella Lwin. The group recorded the hits “Go Wild in the Country”
and “I Want Candy.” Through his clothing store, now called World’s
End, he sold Ant and Bow Wow Wow fashions.
He went on to record his own music. His album “Duck Rock” (1983), a
blend of world music and hip-hop, generated the hit singles “Buffalo
Gals” and “Double Dutch.”
“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.”
In 1984 Mr. McLaren released the album “Fans,” a mixture of opera and
urban music, which included the hit single “Madame Butterfly.” “Waltz
Darling” (1989), “Paris” (1994) and other albums followed.
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.”
He is survived by his son with Ms. Westwood, Joseph Corré, a founder
of the lingerie company Agent Provocateur; a brother, Stuart Edwards;
and a grandchild.
Mr. McLaren spent much of the last 30 years trying to explain punk. “I
never thought the Sex Pistols would be any good,” he told The Times of
London last year. “But it didn’t matter if they were bad.” <<
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/09/arts/music/09mclaren.html?src=mv
>> "The former manager of the Sex Pistols and one of the seminal figures of the punk rock era, Malcolm McLaren, died Thursday, his son said. He was 64..
Joe Corre said his father died of an aggressive form of cancer in
Switzerland, declining to give the exact location because he said he
wanted to avoid a media scrum.
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."
Although the Sex Pistols broke up after only one album, 1977's "Never
Mind the ********," their rebellious antics and raucous music would
set the bar for bands to come.
Their bassist, Sid Vicious, died of a heroin overdose in 1979 after he
was accused of killing his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen, in New York City
in 1978.
Mr. McLaren's career in music wasn't limited to managing the Pistols.
He also had a solo career in which he blended genres and acted as a
kind of music curator. In the early 1980s, he had key songs in hip-
hop, including the hit "Buffalo Gals," and brought different textures
to the developing genre. During his career, he worked in electronica,
pop - even opera.
In addition to music and fashion, Mr. McLaren also dabbled in
journalism and filmmaking - working in Hollywood with directors such
as Quentin Tarantino and Steven Spielberg.
Corre said that while funeral arrangements have yet to be made, Mr.
McLaren had wanted to be buried in north London's stately Highgate
cemetery, near where he was born." <<
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/04/08/MNM71CRRPE.DTL
Malcolm McLaren, Seminal Punk Figure, Dies at 64
By WILLIAM GRIMES
Published: April 8, 2010
>> "Malcolm McLaren, an impresario, recording artist and fashion designer who as manager of the Sex Pistols played a decisive role in creating the British punk movement, died on Thursday in Switzerland. He was 64. The cause was mesothelioma, a cancer of the linings around organs, said Young Kim, his companion of many years. She said he had been under treatment at a Swiss hospital. He lived in Paris and New York.
Mr. McLaren, a former art student, found an outlet for his ideas about
fashion, music and social provocation in the inchoate rock ’n’ roll
scene of London in the early 1970s. Operating from the clothing
boutique Sex, which he and the fashion designer Vivienne Westwood ran,
he brought together four obscure musicians, called them the Sex
Pistols and provided them with an attitude suited to Britain in
decline: nihilistic rage, expressed at high volume in songs like
“Anarchy in the U.K.” and the vitriolic anti-anthem “God Save the
Queen.”
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.
Until their breakup in January 1978, the Sex Pistols epitomized the
look, the sound and the attitude of British punk. All three came, in
large measure, from Mr. McLaren’s restless brain.
Malcolm Robert Andrew McLaren was born on Jan. 22, 1946, in London and
was raised mostly by a wealthy grandmother. He attended more than half
a dozen art schools. At none of them did things go smoothly. He was
expelled from Chiswick Polytechnic, and the Croydon College of Art
tried to have him transferred to a mental institution.
He terminated his education, such as it was, in 1971 at Goldsmiths’
College in London, but not before completing a series of paintings
titled “I Will Be So Bad.”
In 1972 Mr. McLaren and Ms. Westwood took over a store on King’s Road
in Chelsea called Let It Rock and began selling hipster Teddy boy
fashions. The business was run along unconventional lines.
In a 1997 article for The New Yorker, Mr. McLaren recalled, “We set
out to make an environment where we could truthfully run wild.” On
most days the shop did not open until the evening and closed within a
few hours. The goal, Mr. McLaren wrote, “was to sell nothing at all.”
After the New York Dolls visited the store, renamed Too Fast to Live,
Too Young to Die, Mr. McLaren followed the group to the United States
and became its manager. He dressed the band members in red clothing
based on the Soviet flag, placed politically provocative slogans
onstage and presided over their swift demise.
Back in London, Mr. McLaren, now at Sex, took an interest in a group
called the Strand (later the S******s), three of whose members formed
the nucleus of the original Sex Pistols. The group gave its first
performance at St. Martin’s College on Nov. 6, 1975 — hostile audience
reaction caused the players to leave the stage after two songs — and
soon emerged as the leader of the punk scene. Reliably or not, Mr.
McLaren explained his strategy for packaging and selling the band in
the 1980 film “The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle.”
“Anarchy in the U.K.” and “God Save the Queen” (whose release was
timed to coincide with Queen Elizabeth II’s silver jubilee) rose to
the upper rungs of the pop charts in Britain, and the group’s only
album, “Never Mind the ********: Here’s the Sex Pistols,” reached No.
1 in 1977. On the band’s first American tour, in January 1978, John
Lydon, the lead singer known as Johnny Rotten, walked offstage at the
Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco, and the Sex Pistols dissolved.
Mr. McLaren briefly managed Adam and the Ants and then, with several
ex-Ants, created Bow Wow Wow around a teenage Burmese singer,
Annabella Lwin. The group recorded the hits “Go Wild in the Country”
and “I Want Candy.” Through his clothing store, now called World’s
End, he sold Ant and Bow Wow Wow fashions.
He went on to record his own music. His album “Duck Rock” (1983), a
blend of world music and hip-hop, generated the hit singles “Buffalo
Gals” and “Double Dutch.”
“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.”
In 1984 Mr. McLaren released the album “Fans,” a mixture of opera and
urban music, which included the hit single “Madame Butterfly.” “Waltz
Darling” (1989), “Paris” (1994) and other albums followed.
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.”
He is survived by his son with Ms. Westwood, Joseph Corré, a founder
of the lingerie company Agent Provocateur; a brother, Stuart Edwards;
and a grandchild.
Mr. McLaren spent much of the last 30 years trying to explain punk. “I
never thought the Sex Pistols would be any good,” he told The Times of
London last year. “But it didn’t matter if they were bad.” <<
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/09/arts/music/09mclaren.html?src=mv