Too Fast To Live Too Young To Die

Earlier this year a legend in music passed away. His name was Malcolm McLaren and you may know him as the man who created and managed the Sex Pistols. But Malcolm McLaren did not just invent one of the biggest punk bands that has ever existed.

Another band that McLaren created was Bow Wow Wow, probably best known for their cover of "I Want Candy", formed with some of the members of Adam and the Ants along with singer Annabella Lwin, who was just fourteen at the time, and for a short time Boy George (then known as Lieutenant Lush) who was apparently kicked out because the rest of the band were not so fond of him.

The thing that fascinates me the most about Bow Wow Wow is not their heavily African drum influenced new wave sound but the fact that they were created solely to promote Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood's New Romantic clothing lines and their store World's End. I can't even think of a better way to promote a particular style of fashion than that, because the style of fashion goes hand in hand with the particular style of music. From the 1970's through to the 1980's McLaren and Westwood sold clothes that went with particular styles of music. Teddy Boy fashion to go with the 1970's rockabilly revival, through to Punk and then on to New Romantic. Selling clothes due to a movement in music is one of the many things Malcolm McLaren and his then partner Vivienne Westwood did best. Westwood is often credited as the main person who revolutionised fashion by getting punk and new wave clothing into the mainstream.

I think it's funny how despite 'punk fashion' and the punk image being so successful, the words 'punk' and 'fashion' together go completely against the ethos of punk music. But I do wonder what punk, new wave and new romantic would have been without these two people, or whether the music and fashion movements would've even existed at all, or at least thrived as well as they did.

Bow Wow Wow - Fools Rush In