I don't know when I fell in love with punk music, but I did. Probably because of Green Day's album Dookie more than anything else, though at the time, I didn't know what punk was, much less have an appreciation of Green Day's place within the genre. But Green Day eventually lead to The Cure, The Cure to Joy Division, Joy Division to the Sex Pistols and from there, out to the Clash, Rancid, Social Distortion, Siouxsie and the Banshees. The emotional energy of punk, the sheer raw power of its social rebellion and the anti-establishment message at its core appeal to me on several levels, both politically and personally. So many things in this country fall short of what I believe them to be capable of. We can do great things, we can be better, eventually events will force us to change, but I think waiting to forced into a corner is laziness. We can be better. And the fact we aren't makes me want to scream sometimes, hence my love of punk.
In England's Dreaming, I finally found the book that told me everything I ever wanted to know about the punk movement but was afraid to ask. The perfect compliment to the biography of Clash lead singer Joe Strummer, Jon Savage's tome (yes, it is a little bit of a doorstop, but a worthwhile doorstop) focuses more on The Sex Pistols than anything else, but within the wider lens of the punk movement as a whole. And what surprised me more than anything? Punk wasn't about music right at first, it was about fashion. And more specifically, punk impresario (the late, great) Malcolm McLaren's drive to sell clothes that shocked, rocked and would shake the world. Operating from a shop called (strangely enough) Sex he pushed his fashion outwards into Britain and from there the world- and crafted punk and more specifically The Sex Pistols as a vehicle to help him hock his fashion wares.
A digression: another surprise? Punk wasn't a British thing. No, the New York Dolls started it and the Ramones and Dead Kennedys followed and THEN The Sex Pistols took the stage, because McClaren was desperate to make his band work, make his band hit big and bring his sense of fashion and music back to London- and incredibly, with Johnny Rotten, Sid Vicious and company he single-handedly moved the center of the burgeoning cultural movement back from New York City to London. Then, it blew up in a major way.
What follows chronicles the heady days of punk in that short sprint between 1975 and 1979, where the Sex Pistols went supernova and then shattered like broken glass. Anyone vaguely familiar with the history of rock n'roll (or for that matter, Gary Oldman movies) will remember the sad demise of the Pistols: Rotten leaving, Vicious being implicated in a murder and OD'ing and it all ended so suddenly, on the moment of their success. While The Sex Pistols blew punk into the mainstream, really and truly it was The Clash that kept it going. The twin Janus-likes heads of the punk movement- so different and yet joined by a core of angry rage at the decay and decadence of the crumbling society all around them. 'God Save The Queen' proved to be the high water mark of the Pistols' success, but it also proved to be their undoing- what today seems to be a fairly straightforward critique of establishment Britain was INSANELY controversial back then and the backlash almost did them in and in fact, proved to be the first of the fault lines that would eventually bring them down.
There's more than Sex Pistols in this volume- its everyone and everything, bands big and small, people that I'd never heard of and it makes me insanely jealous. To be alive back then, when rage and the demand for change was channeled into such pure artistry... it would have been AWESOME.
This book, at the end of the day, pretty much rocked my face off. Everything you ever want to know about punk but were afraid to ask is to be found here. And as almost a signature to the whole thing, remember what punk was really about: 'If nothing gets challenged, nothing gets changed.'
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