McLaren with the Sex Pistols signing for A&M Records in 1977 in front of Buckingham Palace.
Malcolm McLaren: Death of a cultural revolutionary
by Simon Whittle
If you switched on Sky News late in the evening of 8 April 2010, headlines like the Prime Minister's pledge of 'tough action' on risk-taking bankers, petrol prices reaching a new record high and Camilla's broken leg all played second fiddle to the main item at the top of the hour - Malcolm McLaren was dead.
'What's the big deal?', you may well ask. The ex-manager of an old, short-lived rock band had died. But McLaren wasn't just any old manager and the Sex Pistols weren't any old punks.
If you believed his rhetoric, McLaren urged his punk pioneers: "Terrorise, threaten and insult your own useless generation." Wearing the ripped-up, safety-pinned fashions of the King's Road shop McLaren ran with Vivienne Westwood, the Sex Pistols - four English, working class, teenage boys - stole headlines across the world with their nihilistic attitude, socio-political lyrics, détournement ransom-note graphics and garage guitar wall of sound.
The impact of the Pistols and the punk movement they inspired, on so many aspects of culture - namely music, fashion and advertising - cannot be understated. And McLaren brought it all together using the ideals of situationism (the movement that had inspired him in the late '60s) to create and steer constructed situations to the advantage of the band.
Others, including the Pistols themselves, rubbish this theory. As John Lydon told The Times in 1999: "We didn't set out to be seen as some great, culturally significant force. If we had an aim, it was to force our own, working-class opinions into the mainstream, which was unheard of in pop music at the time."
But back in 1977 Johnny Rotten's opening line on their only studio album, Never Mind The Bollocks Here's The Sex Pistols, is "A cheap holiday in other people's misery" - a reference to situationist graffiti in Paris in May 1968 which was critical of Club Méditerranée (aka 'Club Med'), a French corporation of vacation resorts in exotic but often war-torn locations.
Contradiction and arguments inside the Pistols camp is well documented. McLaren was as critical of the music as the band were of McLaren's often chaotic style of management.
He turned the band against their most musical member, bassist Glen Matlock, leading to his sacking and replacement with Sid Vicious - who couldn't play a note when he joined the band early in 1977. It was arguably an inspirational move, as Sid's image still adorns as many T-shirts and posters as Alberto Korda's iconic photo of Che Guevara.
McLaren's masterstroke with the Pistols - releasing their anti-monarchist anthem God Save The Queen at the height of the Queen's Silver Jubilee celebrations in 1977 - enraged the establishment. The record was instantly banned by the BBC and Independent Broadcasting Authority, in effect silencing the band.
These bans meant free publicity and sales of the single soared. But it was stripped of the symbolic and rightful number-one spot in the official chart on the orders of the British Phonographic Institute.
They issued an extra-ordinary secret directive to chart compilers the British Market Research Bureau, ordering that shops which sold their company's own records (e.g. Virgin, who the Pistols were signed to) couldn't have those records represented in the chart - a decision reversed a week later.
With Virgin shop sales of God Save The Queen statistically barred, Rod Stewart held the top spot while the Sex Pistols peaked at number two in the official charts, though many unofficial charts placed the Pistols in the top spot. At the time, Guy Debord of the Situationist International phoned McLaren to thank him "for getting my record to number one".
Later that year Never Mind The Bollocks debuted at the top of the album chart. On Christmas Day 1977, the Pistols played two shows in Huddersfield - the first of which was a benefit show for the children of striking firemen, single-parent families and laid-off workers - the band's final UK performances in their original incarnation.
A chaotic tour of the US Deep South in January '78 ended with the band's demise, with Vicious addicted to heroin and McLaren having turned the band against Rotten.
McLaren poured the band's profits into The Great Rock'n'Roll Swindle film (1980), starring himself as the omniscient narrator, self-proclaimed bricoleur, 'Embezzler' and 'modern-day Fagin'.
It's easy to write off the film as McLaren's re-imagining of the Pistols legend to suit his own ends but given the media saturation the Pistols received, and continued to receive after they split, with the murder of Sid's girlfriend Nancy Spungen in late 1978 and Sid's own death from a heroin overdose in February 1979, historical accuracy obviously isn't what the film set out to achieve.
What it did achieve was the cementing of McLaren's status as master-puppeteer of his punk puppets, which still persists, and of Sid Vicious as the movement's style icon, a metaphor for doomed youth. As a work of art in its own right, the Swindle is seminal and innovative rhetorical documentary cinema.
Post-Pistols, McLaren helped to style Boy George, and managed Adam And The Ants and Bow Wow Wow. McLaren released his own album in 1983. Duck Rock spawned Buffalo Gals and Double Dutch - singles that helped bring hip-hop (especially scratching) and World Music to a much wider audience. In 1990 he claimed that Madonna had stolen his Vogue idea because he was doing it a year earlier.
But it is for the cultural impact of punk and the Sex Pistols that he will be remembered. When Sid Vicious died, McLaren had wanted to bury him next to the tomb of Karl Marx in Highgate Cemetery in London, but Sid's mother refused. Now McLaren will be buried there, as a cultural revolutionary.
Simon spoke to Vic Godard of Subway Sect about his reminicences of Malcom McLaren;
"I first came across him in the early seventies because my elder sister used to take me to Kings road now and again and on this occasion was offering to get something for my birthday. The 22 bus stopped outside Let It Rock and we went in and I saw these fantastic shirts that would have been impossible to find anywhere else.Nothing else in the shop inspired me because it was too rocky and I was what would then have been termed suedehead-ie skinhead gear but not hairdo.
"However Malcolm did make an impression on both of us. Then years later I used to look at the gear in the shop but mainly went in as an excuse to listen to the jukebox which had lots of Nico and other stuff you would only hear if it was in your collection. The only places to get decent records were Rock On, a stall in a market no longer there and Bizarre Records in Praed Street. In Feb 76 I was with my mate Rob walking down Wardour St looking for a gig to watch when a fracas happened outside the Marquee Club.
"Investigating further we saw Malcolm in the middle of a contretemps with what must have been the management.We witnessed a few songs but the plug was pulled leaving us desperate to find out where the next gig was. From then on we were not just converts but went around converting as many others as we could and I bought a bass guitar for 26 quid in Munster Road. When Malcolm asked us to practise all week for the chance to play at the 100 club we were in seventh heaven.
"When he came to watch us rehearse we could tell from his reaction that he thought even he had gone a step too far. Nevertheless he let us play and it wasn't as disastrous as it could have been. He made us ready for the world."
Cheers, Vic