Malcolm McLaren /

Malcolm Robert Andrew McLaren (22 January 1946 – 8 April 2010) was an English performer, impresario, self-publicist, and manager of the Sex Pistols and the New York Dolls. As a solo artist, McLaren had an innovative career which helped introduce hip hop to the United Kingdom. McLaren was born to Pete McLaren, a Scottish engineer, and Emmy Isaacs in post-World War II North London. His father left when he was two and he was raised by his maternal grandmother, Rose Corre Isaacs, the formerly wealthy daughter of Portuguese Sephardic Jewish diamond dealers, in Stoke Newington. McLaren told Andrew Denton on Enough Rope, that his grandmother always said to him, "To be bad is good... to be good is simply boring". In The Ghosts of Oxford Street he says Charles Clore (who bought Selfridges) became his mother's lover. When he was six, McLaren's mother married Martin Levi, a man working in London's rag trade. When McLaren was in his forties, a Sunday newspaper found Pete McLaren in an English "greasy spoon garage". McLaren's stepfather and mother owned a rag factory in London's East End called Eve Edwards London Limited. They lived well but McLaren and his stepfather never got along.