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England's Dreaming, Revised Edition: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock, and Beyond

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New Labour’s appropriation of England’s comparative success in Euro 96 (beaten by the Germans in the semi-finals) was quite brazen – culminating in the refrain “Labour’s coming home,” deployed by Tony Blair in his party conference speech that year. I was too young for punk the first time around, but following my early teen heavy metal stage, I got into it in later years. LTW: England’s Dreaming came out in 1991. What was the attitude towards punk around that time? Why did you make a decision to write the book around that time? In reality, it took me only a week to plough through and it was never a chore. It covers the history of punk, a detailed biography of the sex pistols and an overview of UK politics and culture in the late 70s. LTW: In one of those entries you mention your experience of seeing a first proper punk band – the Clash. Throughout the book, many speakers mention the sense of urgency that punk emanated. When did you realize the importance of what was happening?

In America, one of the reasons that punk happened was that the late 60s won. I remember going to Los Angeles in 1978 to visit punk bands and the radio was just full of Fleetwood Mac, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. That generation had won and was dominating the media. And in fact, would shut punk out. I think it was just a response to the times. It was an economic downturn. The great energy of the 60s had blown itself out. There wasn’t any over political engagement. I think it’s a mixture of all these things. For a 24-year-old, playing in a World Cup final at the first time of asking is significant. After the semi-final defeat of Australia, Russo described it as “what we’ve been dreaming since we were little girls”. It is a shame that this needs to be pointed out, and in so dramatic a fashion. But such is the political culture of our time. To declare the compatibility of competitiveness and inclusiveness is now a radical position, contrary to the shrunken sense of nationhood bequeathed by Brexit, and so very far from the spirit of international confidence that was celebrated, say, in the 2012 London Olympics opening ceremony. The Sex Pistols' greatly helped (it is too strong to say they alone) changed how music was played and written, how bands were signed and promoted, how records were sold and marketed, how music was read about and how fans treated their idols and their movement including its involvement in politics. The machinations at record companies and the frankly mad, bad and downright chaotic behaviours of Malcolm Mclaren are fascinating and well told. How the band interacted (or not) with their manager and each other and well as with others within the Punk movement and without is also interesting.

The US tour is another interesting chapter and the author's treatment of Sid Vicious's demise and death is told with clarity and sympathy, and include comment from Sid's mother. Despite the brief lifespan of the Sex Pistols, their high-octane existence turned on irreversible processes. Saturated with turbulent events, both from the life of the band (death of Sid, court battles between McLaren and Lydon) and the political context of Britain (victory of the Conservatives), the last part of the book comes up with a reassuring statement: “Punk was beaten, but it had also won. If it had been the project of the Sex Pistols to destroy the music industry, then they had failed; but as they gave it new life, they allowed a myriad of new forms to become possible.” The book built a picture of, to quote Savage quoting McLaren, “the human architecture of the city”, and provided an apocalyptic vision of England on the eve of Thatcherism – for Savage, a mirror image of punk’s suburban sado-masochism and its contempt for the woolly compromise of the welfare state. First of all, the book made me notice London. Suburban Southampton is an interminable, Americanised sprawl. Do You Have The Force? -Jon Savage's Alternate History Of Electronica 1978-82 (Caroline True Records 2020)

No less striking is the broader impact made by this tournament, and by England’s part in it. Of course, politics and football have always been entangled. As Denis Healey revealed in his memoirs, Harold Wilson was concerned about going to the country in June 1970 in case “the England footballers were defeated on the eve of polling day” – as, indeed, they were by West Germany in the World Cup quarter finals, four days before Edward Heath turfed Wilson out of Number 10. LTW: Is there a feeling that England’s Dreaming obtains a new interpretation these days, considering all changes the society has undergone since both the late 70s and 1991 when the book was originally published? The band are tight, well rehearsed and above all 100% entertaining! Each member of the band are skillful musicians with many years experience between them. JS: I did the bulk of the interviews between 1988 and 1990. And then the book took me six months to write, which is a young man’s feat. I couldn’t do that now. England’s Dreaming’s conundrum is the pop-modernist dialectic, and the only writer who caught it as well as Savage was Marshall Berman, who wrote about Hollywood both offering a “dream of escape” from capitalism to his parents’ generation and a “force that bound them to it”. So too with punk: this generation – that of my parents – owed everything to the welfare state, yet they destroyed as much of it as they could.I remember in May 1997, the morning after the Labour landslide, when I was allowed to stay up most of the night, going to an Asda somewhere on the M27 and moping around the aisles thinking: “Nothing here is going to change.” Savage, meanwhile, described a landscape everyone apparently found unbearable, but which sounded thrilling to me – “after Ballard’s High Rise and Crash, it was possible to see high-rises as both appalling and vertiginously exciting”. This appalling excitement he perhaps too kindly ascribes to the sound of the early Clash. The first two of the book’s many epigraphs were from Jonathan Raban’s Soft City – “In the city we can change our identities at will” – and Lionel Bart’s Oliver! – “We wander through London, who knows what we might find?” How could you refuse? That Jon Savage's England's Dreaming stays afloat (just) is due to two things. First, that the times about which he writes are so vibrant, real, close yet distant and fundamentally dirty, makes for exciting copy. And second that his obvious enthusiasm for the people, the music and the events, shines through bright enough to burn. JS: Because when I was writing it, I felt his presence very strongly. My grandfather was very into music, he was a jazz fan, and went to see the Original Dixieland jazz band. It was the first very successful jazz band. They played in England in 1920 when my grandfather went to see them at the Hammersmith Palais. So I have a history with music and love for it through him. And he died in the middle of the whole period [1977] and didn’t really mourn him. So it was a way of saying “thank you for everything, I should have mourned you more but I was too young”.

You could say its the definitive guide. Jon Savage was there - in some photos, and the text is interspersed with his own diary extracts. You can tell the amount of research he has completed before you get to the bibliography at the end. First up, I really dislike the actual reading of the book. No disrespect to the narrator but he is just the wrong man for the job. I found his tone and timbre for a book like this completely wrong. seriously off putting. Savage's book, Teenage: The Prehistory of Youth Culture, was published in 2007. It is a history of the concept of teenagers, which begins in the 1870s and ends in 1945 and aims to tell the story of youth culture's prehistory, and dates the advent of today's form of "teenagers" to 1945. [5] The book was adapted into a film by Matt Wolf. JD: Maybe my favourite section in the book is McLaren’s collision with Richard Branson, who is, if anything, even more wily and amoral. It’s a real battle between two post-war ideologies: hippy millionaire versus situationist disrupter. There’s something epic about that relationship; it could be a film or a play. JS: I was primed by the first Patti Smith album and very much by the Ramones which I was obsessed with during the spring of 1976. So I knew, I knew that something was going to happen. And I was very isolated and very angry at that time. So when I saw the Clash I realized that like that (snapping fingers – ed.). And again it wasn’t an intellectual feeling, it was just like – press the button, and you are there. And I just knew that I had to get involved, sometimes you just know things. And I suppose I was trying to understand what that moment meant by writing a book actually. Because it was a very very powerful moment. I saw the Clash a week later, then the Sex Pistols and the Damned a week after that. By the end of November, within a month, I’d seen the first three British punk bands. I knew that this was happening. I was doing a fanzine [London’s Outrage – ed.] which was the first step in me becoming a writer which is what I wanted to do. I made that decision to be a writer that summer in 1976.Face front, we got the future/Shining like a piece of gold/But I swear as we got closer/It looks like a lump of coal' - The Clash: All The Young Punks. LTW: In the book, you describe 1978 as the year when “pop’s linear time was shattered forever: there would be no more unified “movement” but tribes, as pop time became forever multiple, postmodern”. The same process was happening on the verge of the 60s and 70s, which was catalyzed by The Beatles’ split. Did the end of the Sex Pistols have a somewhat similar effect on the cultural context?

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