'My Way' send-off for punk impresario

Friends and family sang and danced in tribute to late punk legend Malcolm McLaren at his funeral today.

Friends and family sang and danced in tribute to late punk legend Malcolm McLaren at his funeral today.

McLaren - best known as the manager of the Sex Pistols - was given a suitably flamboyant send-off as his coffin was led through the streets of central London in a traditional horse-drawn carriage.

Mourners including McLaren's former partner Dame Vivienne Westwood, friend Sir Bob Geldof and Sex Pistols' drummer Paul Cook sang along to McLaren's recording of Max Bygraves' You Need Hands.

The 200-strong funeral party was also encouraged to dance around and throw up their hands, which many of them did - as well as shedding a tear.

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McLaren's black coffin, which was spray-painted with the words "too fast to live too young to die", was carried out of de-consecrated St Mary Magdalene Church to the strains of Sex Pistol Sid Vicious' version of Frank Sinatra's My Way.

The coffin's slogan was the name of McLaren's shop on King's Road - London's centre of punk fashion in the 1970s - before it was renamed "Sex".

He owned the shop with fashion designer Dame Vivienne, who paid tribute to her former partner and the father of her son Joseph Corre.

She told of how they had met through her brother, and how he had helped her make jewellery for her market stall.

"I was teaching and I had a little boy, and he used to keep me awake, I was absolutely exhausted and he insisted on telling me his life story all the time, I never told him mine," she said to laughter.

She reflected on the culture of rebellion which ran through the punk movement, but concluded that rebellion needed ideas to continue.

She said: "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."

PA