Malcolm McLaren is dead.
A committed Situationist and/or Frommian marketing character, McLaren (who grew up in Stoke Newington and dropped out of St. Martin's College) managed proto-punk glam rockers the New York Dolls, was instrumental in the creation of the Sex Pistols phenomenon (and the transformation of punk rock into a mass-media phenomenon), before going on to create Bow Wow Wow, toy with the idea of paedophilia as a pop-music marketing shtick, and bring electro-hip-hop out of the New York ghetto and into the mainstream in the form of
Buffalo Gals, and then unsuccessfully trying to do the same for Puccini and equally unsuccessfully running for Mayor of London. I last heard of him talking about getting some chiptune artists together to work on an album organised by him, to be titled
Fashionbeast. He may or may not have been a good bloke, depending on whom you ask, but one cannot say that he wasn't an interesting character.
McLaren is reported to have died in either Switzerland or New York, depending on which report you believe, this morning after a long struggle with cancer. He was 64.
Here is Alexis Petridis' eulogy for McLaren.