The partner of legendary svengali Malcolm McLaren, Soon Kim, has given an interview in which she claims that asbestos from alterations to the legendary punk clothing store he used to run, Sex; led to mesothelioma, the rare form of cancer that killed him last week. She told the Independent that he was exposed asbestos in the ceiling of the shop in the 1970s.
She said: “When Malcolm created Sex he broke open the ceiling to make it look like a bomb had hit it … I always suspected that shop because it was the only place Malcolm ever really spent any serious length of time in, and there was a lot of construction and changing things. Then Ben Westwood said his mother had mentioned that she’d seen asbestos there. It was board asbestos and it was in the early Seventies so there was a lot of it left, and I don’t think anyone really did anything about it.”
