(Faber & Faber)

www.faber.co.uk

BY WILSON NEATE

It's been almost two decades since the publication of England's Dreaming, Jon Savage's brilliantly historicized magnum opus on British punk's roots, genesis and its all-too-brief genuinely vital phase in 1976 and 1977. Contextualizing his subject matter in cultural, economic and political terms, Savage focused primarily on London and the rise and fall of the Sex Pistols, tracing the repercussions around the UK and beyond as this initially localized, underground scene quickly turned into tabloid fodder, its anti-establishment sounds co-opted by the record industry and its DIY clothing and accessories packaged as weekend fashion items.

Punk would become, arguably, Britain's most significant post-war pop culture event, exerting a paradigm-shifting influence on style, attitudes, art, music and media, and Savage's groundbreaking book treated this epochal moment with the seriousness it demanded. For all its depth and analytical rigor, however, England's Dreaming never lost sight of the fact that punk spoke directly to young people on an instinctual, gut level: Savage examined the aesthetic and intellectual motivations of punk's founding ideologists and architects but always communicated the excitement, chaos and irreverence of the period and its music.

Although it's not necessary to have actually lived through a historical moment to write about it authoritatively and insightfully, Savage did witness punk's emergence in London, documenting it in his fanzine London's Outrage and as a journalist for Sounds. But while his credentials as the author of England's Dreaming were unimpeachable, that book's success owed much to the contributions of others: alongside his own perspective, both from old diary excerpts and his incisive theorizing of punk, Savage incorporated -- from interviews conducted in 1988 and 1989 -- the perspectives of 100 or so diverse characters who were also immediately involved (the musicians themselves, producers, fellow journalists, assorted band and club managers, record label employees, graphic artists, designers, DJs, photographers and filmmakers). This eclectic gallery of voices was absolutely central to the success of England's Dreaming as a vibrant archaeology of the punk era.

The England's Dreaming Tapes, published recently by Faber & Faber, compiles roughly two thirds of the interviews ("edited for sense and libel") conducted for England's Dreaming. They're grouped in chapters covering the diverse sites where punk happened and the individuals associated with those "sites," which were either literal locations or events or clusters of people (for instance, Malcolm McLaren's King's Road store, SEX, subsequently renamed Seditionaries; the music press; London's Roxy Club; the Sex Pistols management team).

The book opens, appropriately enough, with a look at McLaren, his art-school background and his store, as told by McLaren himself, people who knew him in the '60s and early '70s and those who worked and hung out in SEX; the closing chapter, featuring a grim interview with Sid Vicious's mother Anne Beverley, focuses on her iconic son, whose death symbolized one of punk's many possible ends. Savage also speaks to each of the original Sex Pistols (even erstwhile guitarist Warwick Nightingale, their own Pete Best) and to members of all the major bands to come out of London in '76 and '77. Nevertheless, while an emphasis on the London scene, the Pistols and their elite orbit is inevitable -- since the activities of McLaren and co. were undeniably British punk's immediate catalyst -- some of the book's more interesting accounts of punk are told by those who were, geographically or philosophically, on the periphery of that scene and, in several cases, at a considerable distance from it.

The Pistols played some of their early gigs on the outskirts of London and outside the capital as McLaren sought to develop the band away from the media. Consequently, they garnered a hardcore following that wasn't from the city proper. Take members of the so-called Bromley Contingent such as Siouxsie Sioux, who, in spite of strong connections with the Pistols, recount a suburban experience of punk. At a greater geographical remove, Pete Shelley, Howard Devoto, Tony Wilson and Buzzcocks manager Richard Boon present the view from the northwest of England, which, in turn, would spawn some of the post-punk era's most creative artists. Savage looks even further afield, sampling American -- specifically New York -- perspectives on British punk: for example, Heartbreakers manager Leee Black Childers, who found himself in the UK in December '76, accompanying Johnny Thunders on the Anarchy Tour, and the photographer Joe Stevens, who documented the early goings-on in Britain and also witnessed the Pistols' ill-fated 1978 US odyssey.

Wire's Graham Lewis and Bruce Gilbert offer a particularly interesting point of view, their distance from punk an intellectual matter rather than a fact of geography. Despite drawing early inspiration from the Pistols and gigging at the Roxy (at the time, the capital's only dedicated punk rock club), Wire consciously separated themselves from London's burgeoning scene: as Lewis and Gilbert explain, they had no desire to be part of an increasingly orthodox, stylistically homogeneous movement, preferring to approach their work with a conceptual, arty orientation that set them apart from their contemporaries.

One of the most compelling aspects of England's Dreaming was Savage's close attention to the important structures and discourses surrounding the music itself: that is, the activities of filmmakers, photographers, management personnel, designers and journalists -- those who were engaged in framing punk in different ways as it was unfolding, playing leading roles in constructing the spectacle of punk and perceptions of it. In The England's Dreaming Tapes, Savage talks to a number of these individuals. Especially noteworthy are the parts played by journalists like Neil Spencer (responsible for the first published piece on the Sex Pistols in February 1976 -- an NME review of a gig at the Marquee Club) and Jonh Ingham of Sounds (who wrote the first feature on the band in April that year). They reflect on the once-in-a-lifetime experience of observing a pop culture revolution at close quarters, as well as negotiating how to convey that revolution to readers, as representatives of the music press. The significance of this early press coverage is highlighted by several interviewees whose introduction to punk came via the music weeklies. TV Smith of the Adverts, Howard Devoto, Pete Shelley and Penetration's Pauline Murray remember the catalyzing effect of Spencer's article, which ended with the now-legendary Steve Jones quotation, "We're not into music, we're into chaos." Their imaginations fired, Shelley and Devoto trekked from Manchester to High Wycombe the following week to see the Pistols play; Murray came down from Newcastle, making McLaren's King's Road store her first stop.

Jonh Ingham's memories home in on a watershed moment in British music journalism, when a new breed of writer began to spring up, inspired precisely by the developments of punk. For Ingham, the Sex Pistols gig at the Nashville Rooms on April 23rd, 1976, was an epiphany as it dawned on him that it was futile to write objectively and analytically about this music. Convinced of the enormous cultural importance of what he was witnessing and believing punk rock was an absolute necessity -- something that young people had to know about -- he felt his role should be that of a fervent advocate, not a disinterested observer: "That was the point... where I said to myself... the point is to encourage this, because we need it... I saw it as propaganda, far more than analysis." Shortly after, he quit journalism to manage Generation X.

Another of the discourses crucial to punk's impact on the British consciousness was the unique visual language of its clothing, record sleeves, poster art and band logos. Against the grain of progressively more glossy, epic and overblown '70s artwork, punk's graphic artists ran with the DIY ethic: immediacy, rough edges, recycling and collage replaced craft, sophistication, slickness and high production values; genuinely provocative and unsettling imagery replaced traditional rock and pop titillation. Linder Sterling in Manchester (creator of the Buzzcocks' notorious "Orgasm Addict" photomontage, among others) and Pistols designer Jamie Reid are two of Savage's interviewees. Reid, punk's most iconic graphic artist, stresses that he considered it completely unnecessary to present images of the band on his record covers -- after all, the tabloid press was providing that kind of exposure in abundance. Rather, he felt that his work's purpose was to encapsulate the band's attitude and to represent visually what the songs were about.

The visual language of fashion also helped construct the scandalous, confrontational spectacle of punk rock, and SEX employees Alan Jones and Jordan recall their experiences as some of first people to wear Vivienne Westwood and McLaren's clothing and accessories around town: bondage trousers; PVC, leather and rubber fetish gear; dog collars; garments bearing provocative wording and obscene images (such as shirts depicting the Cambridge Rapist or featuring a Tom of Finland drawing of two trouserless cowboys). All of this was immensely shocking in mid-'70s London. Outraged reactions were common on the street; Alan Jones was even arrested and convicted of gross indecency for sporting the lewd cowboys shirt in central London.

A significant aspect of punk, underscored by Savage's oral history, is the fact that just a relative handful of like-minded people were responsible for launching and shaping this phenomenon in the UK: punk definitely embodied and articulated what thousands of teenagers were feeling, but it's no exaggeration to suggest that its British origins really can be traced to the activities of certain individuals and to specific sites. This is emphasized by the numerous Damascene moments related to the Pistols and their entourage, as experienced by interviewees: Derek Jarman, director of the first and greatest British punk film, 1977's Jubilee, encountering an outrageously attired Jordan for the first time at Victoria station in 1975 (she was wearing a transparent miniskirt); Devoto et al reading Neil Spencer's review; Joe Strummer watching the Pistols open for his pub-rock group the 101ers at the Nashville Rooms in April '76 and deciding, there and then, that it was time to find a new band; Tony Wilson attending the mythic June '76 Pistols gig at the Lesser Free Trade Hall; X-Ray Spex's Poly Styrene seeing the band open for Welsh heavy rockers Budgie at the Hastings Pier Pavilion a month later; and so on.

While The England's Dreaming Tapes makes it clear that a comparatively small group of people set everything in motion, the book also covers some of the peripheral figures who have frequently been overlooked in accounts of British punk. For example, lip service is often paid to the movement's alignment with reggae but beyond the oft-repeated assertion of an alliance between punks and Rastas in popular narratives -- and outside of academically oriented writing like Dick Hebdige's Subculture: The Meaning of Style -- there's been little substantive coverage of the black experience of punk. Savage redresses the balance somewhat by having photographer Dennis Morris and Roxy Club DJ Don Letts tell their stories. Similarly, although there was a pronounced camp flavor to British punk, few histories have adequately accommodated gay perspectives. Savage pays attention to this lacuna by including the voices of Berlin of the Bromley Contingent and Alan Jones.

For all of punk's apparent accommodation of difference and outsider-ness, the display of Nazi symbols by Sid Vicious and others has always been a fraught issue. Savage doesn't shy away from the subject in these interviews, broaching it with Siouxsie and Jordan, for instance, both of whom infamously wore swastikas. Speaking to Savage more than a decade later, they might be expected to take the opportunity to distance themselves from their earlier, highly dubious choice of fashion accessories. Disappointingly, they fail to take that opportunity, maintaining that their appropriation of Nazi iconography had nothing to do with fascism and functioned simply as a means of generational antagonism, with no other negative resonances. Jordan digs a deeper hole for herself, praising some of the Nazi artifacts she owned as "beautifully made" and describing Hitler as a "genius." (Not that it helps much but, in the same breath, she also characterizes him as a "loony.") Also disappointing is the response of Alan Jones, who was once physically attacked by a stranger who objected to his swastika armband. Asked if he has any regrets, he naively persists: "No, no not all. It didn't bother me. I saw it as a fashion. I never saw it as making a statement for or against anything."

The England's Dreaming Tapes is undoubtedly the best interview-based book on British punk published thus far. It's an indispensable documentary resource that offers panoramic insight into UK punk's most innovative and influential stage; it manages to immerse the reader in the visceral rush and the sheer creative energy of the period at the same time as it provides measured, incisive commentary on that period. Just as there's no such thing as a definitive historical narrative compiled by a single author, an oral history is no less problematic. It's not a simple, unmediated account of events: it's shaped by the interviewer's own interests and by the questions he/she chooses to ask, as well as by the interlocutors' agendas and their possibly flawed or deliberately selective memories. An oral history of this magnitude is all the more tricky: the range of different sources and viewpoints might be greater, but then so are the witnesses' biases and blind spots, their differences of opinion and their competing versions of events. Still, neither in England's Dreaming nor in The England's Dreaming Tapes does Savage entertain the illusion of narrative closure -- on the contrary, he gives his work over to the complexities and contradictions, to the anarchy of the moment: the "chaos" that Steve Jones famously identified as punk's essence.

By way of a footnote, it's important to recognize that The England's Dreaming Tapes demonstrates how great writing is often grounded in extensive, painstaking research: as a prequel of sorts to England's Dreaming, the present volume lays bare the foundations of Savage's earlier book, in terms of the extraordinary amount of raw material he assembled and the particular questions and ideas he pursued throughout these interviews.