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26 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
If you like first wave English punk, you must read this., 26 Jul 2001
By A Customer
If, like me, you missed the first wave of punk (hey, I was only born in 1973!), but fell in love with the music later, you gotta read this book.Savage tells the tale of English punk (with some reference to what was happening in the USA, but as the title says, this is _England's_ Dreaming), starting from the backgrounds of those involved, through to the end of the 70's, after the collapse of the Sex Pistols and the death of Sid Vicious. As you might guess from the title (which is of course from a line in the Sex Pistols' "God Save The Queen"), it is the Sex Pistols that are the primary focus of all this. But there's plenty here about The Clash, The Damned, The Buzzcocks, and plenty of less famous but essential bands, like The Slits, X-Ray Spex, Siouxsie & The Banshees, etc. And I should add that there is an extensive index with discographies of many, many groups. I'm not sure exactly what Jon Savage was doing at this time, but he was certainly there and involved. He even appears in one of the photos in the book (police herding punks off the boat after the infamous Jubilee cruise down the Thames, if I recall rightly). His recollections and interviews are interspersed with snippets from his diary from the time. This really is a vivid account, and one that made me curse all the more loudly that I missed the action. One warning - I thought there was far, far too much about Malcolm McLaren's pre-Pistols activities at the start of the book. This was boring. But fight through it, or skip ahead, you'll really miss out if you get bored and quit in the first couple of chapters. Also, after reading this book, try to check out Julien Temple's film "The Filth And The Fury" - you'll see footage of a lot of the events described herein.
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12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
England's Wakening, 18 Jul 2006
'England's Dreaming - Sex Pistols and Punk Rock' by Jon Savage is first and foremost a book about the Sex Pistols, starting with a Malcolm Mclaren inspired by the avant-garde Situationists, the student revolts in 1968 and fuelled by an ambition to make his mark in some way, a Vivienne Westwood who, in conjunction with Mclaren, created the 'Sex' shop which provided the backdrop to the formation of the Sex Pitols and which provided the aesthetic which in the beginning symbolised and communicated most directly what punk stood for.
A story which, in this case, ends in effect with the predictable demise of Sid Vicious, who in the end came to symbolise more than anything else what Punk Rock meant in the eyes of the mainstream (and to paraphrase Shakespeare) 'a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.'
The greatness of this book is that while ostensibly this is a book about the Sex Pistols (and it is) it is much more than that. As someone born in 1980 it is easy to forget that Britain in the 1970s was such a Politicised place, today apathy rules ok, but thirty years ago things were different.
The Post War consensus was crumbling, the age of Thatcherism was dawning, the promise of full employment was exposed as a lie as unemployment figures grew, the once proud ruler of most of the worlds surface had to go with begging bowl to the IMF for a loan, union power was rampant, strikes ubiqutious, the far right increasingly evident and, in the words of Savage 'political and social (even behavioural) extremism seemed very attractive as a way out of this impasse.' In other words the time was ripe for Punk.
The history of the Sex Pistols in the 1970s is the history of the U.K in the 1970s, this is what Savage conveys, Punk grew in fertile soil. The word most used in this book is NIHILISM. Nihilism is a philosophical position which argues that that the world and espiecally human existence is without objective meaning, purpose or comprehensible truth or essential value. The nihilism of punk was a reaction to the idealism of the hippies who had preceded them and to many proved frightening, but while the life of Sid Vicious showed one obvious consequence of nihilism, Savage manages to convey the less obvious flip side: only by negating what has gone before can one create afresh. The concequence of the Sex Pistols was that in this country, musically, things were never the same again.
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5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A very, very good informative read., 22 April 2006
This book must be at the top of the pile when it comes to the history of punk, and the Sex Pistols. There is a wealth of information here - and details of the socioeconomic background of the nation's history that inspired these angry young men (and women). This book was the main source of my dissertation on how the Sex Pistols changed the face of music. Invaluable.
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