Punk guru dies from mesothelioma

Asbestos from his punk shop ’killed McLaren’

The former Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren may have been exposed to the asbestos which killed him while smashing up Sex, his infamous King’s Road punk design shop.

McLaren, who died at the start of April, aged 64, of the asbestos-related cancer mesothelioma, is believed to have been exposed to the deadly material when he shattered the ceiling of Sex, the shop he shared with his then partner, designer Vivienne Westwood.

His partner, Young Kim, told the press that when Malcolm created Sex he broke open the ceiling to make it look like a bomb had hit it.  Malcolm spent a lot of time in the seventies developing the shop, and there was a lot of construction work taking place.  It has been suggested that Vivienne Westwood saw board asbestos but nothing was ever done about it.

McLaren was angry that his doctor had ignored the signs of asbestos-inflicted lung damage for almost two years. After a routine chest scan in 2008 a doctor noticed "benign" spots on McLaren’s lungs which looked like pleural plaques from asbestos exposure. By January last year, the music impresario was convinced he had lung cancer, but doctors continued to insist nothing was wrong.

After his diagnosis last autumn, McLaren continued his energetic lifestyle. "Six weeks ago you would not have known he was ill," said Kim, who was McLaren’s partner for more than a decade. "He was in New York working because he’d done artwork that was being shown in museums. Then, in early March, he was in London and made a very special piece of music for the Belgian designer Dries Van Noten for his prêt-à-porter show in Paris.

"He was very busy and very happy. Even in the past two weeks he’d been planning his work and this radio programme he was going to make for the BBC – a whole series on pop culture from his personal perspective. So he was working all the way. It just happened so fast that even the doctors in Switzerland were shocked. They thought he would live a few months, and they were being conservative. But it was only a few weeks."

McLaren died in Switzerland surrounded by his family.