Agent provocateur

Of all the outrageous promotional stunts that the late Malcolm McLaren orchestrated — or at least claimed to orchestrate — during the Sex Pistols' short career, the one that attained the greatest infamy was the 1977 boat cruise on the River Thames.

McLaren's fast and loose approach to the truth was always part of his self-spun mythology as a culture-changing visionary.

The coming jubilee celebrations, marking 25 years of Queen Elizabeth's reign, were an irresistible occasion for another act of punk-rock subversion. McLaren, the band's flame-haired manager, had already maximized the potential for scandal presented by the Sex Pistols' foul-mouthed appearance on Bill Grundy's TV show in 1976. This and many other incidents had the British media frothing at its collective pie hole.

McLaren had also engineered a flurry of cunning record deals — EMI and A&M paid handsomely not just to sign the Sex Pistols but also to extract themselves from the contracts after shareholders expressed their extreme displeasure. God Save the Queen, the Sex Pistols' first single after signing with Virgin Records, had sold 150,000 the week before the Thames cruise — despite a BBC ban and many music stores' refusal to even stock it. On the rainy evening of June 7, 1977, the band and a coterie of fans and hangers-on set sail on a boat with the convenient name of the Queen Elizabeth. The performance was initially marred by feedback, but by most accounts, the band was in full flight by the time the Houses of Parliament came into view and the band (including freshly instated bassist Sid Vicious) tore into Anarchy in the U.K.

As the boat prepared to dock, police officers were waiting to receive the passengers. One witness of the melee that followed later described seeing McLaren raise his fist and yell, "You f---ing fascist bastards!" within view of several officers. As this spectator wryly commented in Jon Savage's punk history England's Dreaming, "It was a direct invitation, and it was not declined."

The cruise would be enshrined as a watershed moment in the history of the Pistols and British punk in general, especially after it was depicted in all its messy glory in Alex Cox's feature film Sid & Nancy (1987) and Julien Temple's documentary The Filth & the Fury (2000). Both films would portray McLaren as a motor-mouthed impresario who cravenly exploited any opportunity for media play. Savage's book, however, notes that only one of the national papers actually reported on the cruise incident. As a promotional stunt, it was a bust in the short term. History, of course, presents things differently.

McLaren's fast and loose approach to the truth was always part of his self-spun mythology as a culture-changing visionary. Exactly how much credit he can claim for the formation of the Sex Pistols — which coalesced in the Chelsea-area shop run by McLaren and then-wife Vivienne Westwood — has always been a matter of bitter dispute, with singer John Lydon traditionally being the bitterest of the lot. Regardless of whether he started the group, McLaren certainly ended it by exacerbating tensions between Lydon and the rest of the band and banking the Pistols' future on a legendarily chaotic film project. The latter would eventually surface as The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (1980), a nigh-unwatchable testament to McLaren's capacity for self-aggrandizement and an attempt to write the then-fresh story of punk according to his own dictates.

No matter what McLaren said, he didn't invent the Pistols or punk; he only facilitated them, having learned some lessons during his earlier (unsuccessful) tenure managing U.S. punk forerunners the New York Dolls. He was also one in a long line of British impresarios who benefited from a media apparatus that was largely unique to the country. The U.K. boasted a high concentration of daily newspapers that were eager to fill pages and stoke controversies. Music publicists were especially lucky to live in an island nation with a dense population of unusually avid pop consumers.

McLaren played the media with great finesse, exploiting a set of conditions that could not exist across the Atlantic, where hype men had to make do with a far more regionalized and less concentrated media. In recent years, the internet has widened the gulf between old and new media — nowadays, little short of a $200-million promotional blitz for a Transformers movie or the death of Michael Jackson can make such a sudden, sizable dent on the public consciousness.

McLaren would never again stoke the same furor or excitement as he did with the Sex Pistols, but later achievements suggest that he had more savvy than Lydon would ever acknowledge. McLaren's post-Pistols dalliance with the group Bow Wow Wow briefly scandalized Britain when he promoted the band with suggestive imagery of its 13-year-old singer, Annabella Lwin. (That was almost certainly the last time anyone used kiddie porn as a publicity stunt.) McLaren also pushed a pro-piracy strategy with Bow Wow Wow's first single, C30, C60, C90, Go. (In North America, the band attained one-hit wonder status with the McLaren-less 1983 single I Want Candy.)

He demonstrated the same iconoclastic attitude and a surprising fortitude in his efforts as a music-maker in his own right (albeit with lots of high-profile help). In 1983, he forged one of the first paths between music's mainstream and the underground sound of hip-hop with the release of the album Duck Rock. Featuring the talents of the Rock Steady Crew, the video for the album's song Buffalo Gals would expose many viewers to breakdancing and graffiti art for the first time. In 1984, he made another genre mash-up by combining techno pop and opera on the album Fans. Again, he displayed a prescient understanding of the new medium of the music video with the steamy, sweaty clip for Madame Butterfly, a regular feature on MuchMusic in the station's early days. On the underrated 1989 album Waltz Darling, he illustrated an unexpected kinship between the elegance of Viennese waltz and the plushness of house music.

Following the Gallic-themed concept album Paris in 1994, McLaren largely retreated from the business of making music. He preferred forays into the art and fashion worlds as well as the lucrative practice of speaking at music conferences, where he'd invariably take credit for the Sex Pistols.

In 2007, Vice magazine ran an interview with the headline "Malcolm McLaren Invented Everything." Never bashful about his achievements — real or otherwise — this perennial hype man couldn't have come up with a better headline himself.

Jason Anderson is a writer based in Toronto.