Malcolm McLaren
1946-2010
Malcolm McLaren, in full Malcolm Robert Andrew McLaren, (born Jan. 22, 1946, London, Eng.—died April 8, 2010, Switzerland), British rock impresario and musician who, as the colourfully provocative manager of the punk band the Sex Pistols, helped birth punk culture. McLaren attended a number of art schools in England, where he was drawn to the subversive Marxist-rooted philosophy of the Situationist International movement and its leading figure, Guy Debord. With his girlfriend, fashion designer Vivienne Westwood, he opened the avant-garde clothing boutique Let It Rock, in 1971, but he soon became more interested in rock music as a means to enact his radical aesthetic ideas. After a brief stint managing and costuming the American glam rock band the New York Dolls, in 1975 he began to work with a band that—in a cross-marketing ploy with the clothes shop, which had been rebranded as Sex—he named the Sex Pistols. By the following year the raucous punk group had become a cause célèbre in the United Kingdom, and McLaren eagerly fueled the controversy with stunts such as having the band play its anti-authoritarian anthem “God Save the Queen” aboard a boat outside the Houses of Parliamen…
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