Anarchy rules over Malcolm McLaren funeral as Sex Pistols manager is laid to rest with pomp, finery and jokes

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Terry Kirby12 April 2012

LONDON today gave an appropriately anarchic send-off to Malcolm McLaren, the man who gave the world the Sex Pistols.

After a funeral service in Marylebone, McLaren's coffin bearing the slogan "Too fast to live, too young to die" — the name of the King's Road shop he and then-partner Vivienne Westwood rebranded as Sex — was borne through the streets on a horse-drawn hearse.

It was accompanied by crowds of punks pogoing to the strains of the Sex Pistols' anthem Anarchy in The UK. Camden and Kentish Town were lined with hundreds of McLaren's fans who came to pay tribute to the man many credit with creating the punk movement.

The service was attended by figures from the music and media world including Dame Vivienne, artist Tracey Emin, Bob Geldof, Adam Ant and Alan Yentob of the BBC.

Dame Vivienne urged people to take up McLaren's unconventionality. "I am very, very sad that unbelievably Malcolm is dead and I just wanted to say on this cruel, cruel day get a life, do something with it."

Joe Corre, McLaren and Westwood's son, read out tributes to his father, including a letter from Sex Pistols guitarist Steve Jones.
Joking about McLaren's fall-out with the band over royalties, it said: "Dear Malcolm, did you take the money with you? Is it in the coffin? Do you mind if I come back tomorrow and dig you up?"

Sex Pistols' drummer Paul Cook and bass player Glen Matlock sang along to McLaren's recording of Max Bygraves' You Need Hands, before the coffin left to the strains of Sid Vicious's version of My Way.

In Camden High Street, Beverly Gardner, 47, said: "I'm just a middle- aged mother and housewife now but back in the Seventies I was a punk. I saw the Sex Pistols several times. He changed all our lives and was a great legend."
Clutching a yellow daffodil which she placed on McLaren's passing hearse, she said: "My children who are in their twenties just don't understand what it means to me. But I know what it felt like to be a 16-year-old teenager in London at the time of punk."

Robin Stevenson, 38, an artist wearing a tricorne hat, said: "He was a driving force in helping people become creative individually and setting them free artistically. He had a big impact on my life." McLaren's coffin was taken for burial at Highgate Cemetery, the burial place of another revolutionary, Karl Marx.

It was chosen by McLaren, who died in a Swiss clinic earlier this month, because he had been filmed in a scene there for the Sex Pistols film The Great Rock and Roll Swindle.

As the cortege passed through Camden Town and Chalk Farm it gathered supporters in its wake dancing behind a bus which was playing My Way at top volume and bearing the slogan "Cash From Chaos", another of his self-avowed manifestos. McLaren would have approved.

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