The idea of setting the human against the robotic has provided electronic pop with a rich seam of inspiration ever since Yazoo. In recent years, few acts have carried it off with greater style than this Swedish-Japanese quartet.

Madame Butterfly's doomed story of a Nagasaki 'bride for hire' and her marriage to an American naval officer has, since Puccini's opera in 1904, reappeared in innumerable adaptive forms. Broadway produced Miss Saigon; Malcolm McLaren's eponymous chart hit gave it a pop makeover, and early film-makers even dared to create silent versions.

Now for the final choice

Medical Life

On Camden High Street in north London, the sunlight was glinting off a thousand body piercings in every imaginable size, shape and location. It was a swelteringly hot day to be standing, as hundreds were, in studded leathers and black knee-high boots waiting for the funeral cortège of the grandfather of punk.

The architect of punk, Malcolm McLaren, remained a rebel to the last as mourners said farewell today to a soundtrack of Sid Vicious's My Way.

News coverage of Malcolm McLaren's death a week and a half ago featured an archive clip of an interview with the man behind the Sex Pistols in which he defined the punk movement as "anti-design, anti-fashion, anti-social, anti-establishment". From a man who sometimes claimed to have planned the demise as well as the ascent of the notorious band, an antipathy for design seems perhaps the least credible part of that manifesto. Nor is it possible to overlook the fact that McLaren's former partner, Vivienne Westwood, went on to become a figurehead of design in what is probably its most conspicuous form – clothing.

Partner Young Kim tells <i>The IoS</i> that Sex Pistols manager wanted to make Sex, his Kings Road design store, look as if a bomb had hit it &ndash; and family believes that caused mesothelioma 30 years on

Stands unopposed

Rock'n'roll reinvents itself every generation. And to the leaders of the revolution comes musical immortality. Not least when the music is matched by harsh new attitudes, provoking and ultimately usurping the previous establishment.

Thirty-five years on from the first rumblings of punk in the UK, the pivotal role the Sex Pistols and their svengali Malcolm McLaren played in shaking up British society cannot be underestimated.

For some, the anarchic music scene defined by Malcolm McLaren and the Sex Pistols was terrifying. For others it was an inspiration. They tell their stories to Rob Sharp

Impresario who made the Sex Pistols infamous dies in Switzerland at the age of 64 after a long battle with cancer

The Sex Pistols supremo who helped to revolutionise popular culture in the Seventies wants to be recognised as a serious artist