Another cool person had to go and die on us today. Malcolm McLaren died of cancer today at the age of 64. For those who don’t know who Malcolm McLaren was, and why he was cool and a massive dickhead at the same time, I shall explain.
In the early 1970’s McLaren opened up a clothing boutique in London called “Let It Rock,” which even today is a really shitty name for a store of any type. In 1972 he travelled to New York City for a boutique fair and while in town he convinced the proto-punk band The New York Dolls to allow him to manage them, even though it’s quite clear that he had no idea how to manage a band.
Later that year he changed the name of his clothing store to the much better “Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die;" a massive improvement if there ever was one.
Since he owned a clothing boutique and managed a band it’s pretty obvious to say who dressed The Dolls on their tour of England in 1975; Malcolm McLaren. Needless to say his red leather outfits and Communist style iconography didn’t go over well in conservative parts of England. The New York Dolls soon broke up.
By this time McLaren had renamed his boutique again. He chose the simple SEX name and switched his style over to S&M influenced clothing completely.
After The Dolls broke up he was left without a band to manage. Soon enough though he found one; a little band you now know as the Sex Pistols.
The story is that he started managing a band known as The Strand (another name that really sucks) and their three members: Glenn Matlock, Paul Cook and Steve Jones. McLaren thought that the band needed to become a four piece and move Matlock off vocals so he could just play the bass.
Well how did they find a singer you ask? They picked a kid off the street who had green hair, torn clothes and a Pink Floyd t-shirt with the words “I Hate” painted on the shirt. McLaren asked him to mouth, not sing, the words to Alice Cooper’s “I’m Eighteen” and when the song was over the band was renamed the Sex Pistols and Johnny Rotten was the new singer.
Why the Sex Pistols? “I wanted the name of the band to sound like a group of sexy assassins.” That works for me.
Just after helping to write 10 of the 12 songs for their debut album, “Never Mind the Bollocks Here’s the Sex Pistols,” the band and McLaren fired bassist Glenn Matlock as it was found out that he liked the Beatles. That’s the reason. It wasn’t that he couldn’t play the bass guitar (he could), not that he was an addict (he wasn’t), but the fact that he liked the Beatles was too much. I’ll always love that little piece of rock n’ roll history.
So the band needed a new bass player to join the band. McLaren hired a well known thug, sometime musician, and full time junkie in the new punk community named Sid Vicious. While Sid looked the part of a punk rock musician he never actually learned how to play any of the songs on the album. Steve Jones recorded both the guitar and bass tracks on the album and when the band played live Sid’s amp was never plugged in. His job was to stand up on the stage, look cool, hop around and be a junkie.
By 1978 the Sex Pistols were massive stars in England so McLaren set up a tour for them in America. The tour was a disaster.
McLaren refused to pay the members of the band any of the money that they were entitled to, except enough for heroin and beer, and the crowds in places like Texas were less than receptive to a group where 2 of the 4 members were on the stage simply to look cool and piss the audience off. The band imploded after just one year.
We all know that Sid never kicked heroin, murdered his junkie groupie girlfriend Nancy Spungen, and died of a heroin overdose while on bail awaiting his murder trial becoming a god to morons everywhere.
Well now it looked like McLaren was out of work. I guess he still had his SEX boutique and all but by 1980 the punk look had really died out in England.
So in 1980 he decided to create a new band. This would be Bow Wow Wow (another horrible name. What the fuck Malcolm?)
How did he form the band? Well he simply told the guitarist, bassist and drummer to quit their old band (Adam and the Ants) and start over again. Wouldn’t you know it, they did it.
Again though Malcolm was left without a singer for this new band, so he did the logical thing and hired Annabella Lwin a 13 year old girl who worked at her local dry cleaning shop.
The band released “See Jungle! See Jungle! Go Join Your Gang, Yeah. City All Over! Go Ape Crazy” in 1981. The cover had Annabella Lwin and the band on the cover posing like Manet’s painting “Le déjeuner sur l'herbe.” That all sounds fine and well until you notice that the woman in that painting is nude and Lwin was only 14 years old when the photo was taken. Yikes. Needless to say that album cover wasn’t printed in either the U.S. or the U.K.
So yeah, the band became popular stateside in the 80’s when they released “I Want Candy” but who gives a shit? What else was Malcolm up to?
Well he started his own music career in the 80’s releasing the singles “Buffalo Gals” and “Double Dutch.” The songs were African and hip-hop influenced which wasn’t common for the time, but then again the Clash had that exact same idea in 1980. No bonus points for you Malcolm.
Oh yeah! Also in the 1980’s Johnny (Rotten) Lydon took Malcolm to court claiming that McLaren owed him money and the rights to the band the Sex Pistols. Lydon won the case and received the money he was clearly owed for years and Malcolm was no longer owner of the Sex Pistols brand. The two never spoke again and the surviving members of the band basically told the world what a massive douche bag McLaren was to the world in the film “The Filth and the Fury” in 2000.
Um yeah, that’s really about it. To be honest the man hasn’t really been culturally relevant on this side of the pond in about 20 years. So let’s break his accomplishments down.
He made a fortune selling kids shitty clothing with slogans and safety pins in them
He managed The New York Dolls in their final days.
He basically created the Sex Pistols while at the same time being the catalyst for their destruction.
He created Bow Wow Wow by stealing them from Adam and the Ants, and had their 14 year old singer pose nude for an album cover.
His own musical career was doing the exact same thing the Clash did three years before he had the idea to do it.
Really though, if you think about it, that’s not a bad run.
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