The svengali of punk rock

Constable 880pp £30

This “incredible new biography” charts the life of one of the most provocative and divisive figures in British pop history, said Edwin Heathcote in the FT: the “Diaghilev of Punk”, Malcolm McLaren. It presents the man who created and managed the Sex Pistols as a serial “disrupter” with an unerring knack for spotting new trends and inveigling himself into a particular scene “at exactly the right moment”. Besides fashioning the sound and look of punk, McLaren helped launch the New Romantic movement, “alighted on vogueing (still poses struck by clubbers) before Madonna commercialised it”, and was even an early adopter of hip hop. He was also famously amoral: he encouraged the Sex Pistols in their self-destructiveness, and was “unfaithful to everyone”, including his girlfriend and collaborator Vivienne Westwood.

The “most compelling” sections of this very long and detailed book concern McLaren’s “strange” upbringing in north London, in Stoke Newington’s Jewish community, said Sean O’Hagan in The Observer. Following his parents’ split, he was brought up by his doting maternal grandmother, Rose Isaacs, who not only insisted that they share a bed “into his late teens”, but actively encouraged him in his waywardness. “To be bad is good, because to be good is simply boring,” she would say. The adult McLaren lived by her creed, said Victoria Segal in The Sunday Times. He exploited the Sex Pistols and ran them “into the ground”. With Westwood, he produced T-shirts that glamorised the “Cambridge Rapist”; he launched the group Bow Wow Wow, fronted by a 14-year-old girl, and with it a “sexually provocative” magazine aimed at children. But as this “excellent” biography reveals, whatever else McLaren was, he was “never boring”.