A Look at Malcolm McLaren and the Sex Pistols

Malcolm McLaren was born on January 22, 1946 in London, England and was raised by his grandmother. He spent most of the 60's going from one art school to another where he became interested in the French Situationist, international art movement. Situationism, which was all about staging "situations" that grab people's attention, greatly influenced his career as an artist manager and as an "entrepreneur of pop-culture" (Persolvang). Like earning a college degree, it gave him a "tremendous edge" on the competition (Allen). It was around this time that he also fell in love with extreme fashion designer Vivienne Westwood.

In 1971 McLaren and Westwood opened Let It Rock, a clothing store that specialized in Teddy Boy fashion. It was there; in 1974 that he met The New York Dolls, a glam band from the United States. After being disappointed by the sales of their first two albums, the band's label Mercury Records dropped them. The Dolls decided it was time to hire a new manager and McLaren moved to the U.S. to manage the group. 

Working with The New York Dolls was McLaren's first opportunity to "realize a fantasy that was inspired by his flirtation with the Situationist politics in London at the close of the 1960's" (Taylor, 20). McLaren's plan to make the band successful was to get rid of the glam and dress the band in red leather, using the Soviet Union's hammer-and-sickle symbol in their stage set and publicity photos. 

This was the beginning of McLaren's use of shock value for publicity, a skill he perfected in his later management of the Sex Pistols. It was also his first opportunity to promote his fashion design through the music industry. The Doll's Communist attire didn't go over well in the U.S., which was to be expected and it only made record labels more reluctant to sign the group. They had a hard time breaking into the conservative industry because they were a product for a very niche audience and the industry was "just beginning to formulate the concept of adult-oriented rock" (Savage, 61).