The country is going to the dogs. Young, semiotically charged, apolitical dissidents set out a campaign of national provocation. It all ends in tears.
A great “logline” for a feature. Reading Savage’s sometimes astonishing account of the rise of the Sex Pistols, it strikes one as how ignorant we are about the emergence of punk. The realities of the movement. The Sex Pistols remain one of the most famous bands on the planet. Anywhere you go in the world, you will find people of indeterminate ages who know the lines: “I am an anarchist, I am an anti-christ”. Yet, unlike the Beatles and the Stones, for example, the true story of the Pistols remains opaque. They were, indeed a shooting star. Their legacy, punk, (and it does feel on reading Savage’s book that this is the legacy of McLaren, Lydon, Jones, Cook, Matlock and Vicious), is immense. The punk (a name derived from Elizabethan slang) became as identifiable a signifier of Britishness as the Queen. The semiotics of this initial transgression subsequently transformed into marketing.
Savage’s book, which deals with the broader movement of punk, but revolves around the narrative of the Pistols, shows how the pieces came together. McLaren and Westwood’s odd-couple marriage, which spawned the image; Jones and Cook’s neo-cockney ingenuity, is the quasi-Dickensian strand which roots the movement in working class London values; Lydon’s neurasthenic charisma; Sid Vicious’ post-adolescent nihilism. The book traces how all of these factors stirred together in the pot, at a time of national decay, lead to the great counter-cultural movement. There’s a sense of the way in which, unlike so many British cultural movements, which tend to be insular, navel-gazing, punk embraced a cultural cosmopolitanism. A smattering of Debord and situationism coupled with a strong dosage of USA/ New York individualism, forged by the likes of Iggy and New York Dolls. Even a strong hint of mental European Dadaism. Perhaps this helps to explain how Punk evolved into something that imposed itself as a global movement, not just musically, but semiotically.
As the logline states, it all ends in tears, but then it was the very volatility of the movement, a Molotov cocktail, which meant that it burned so bright, and was destined to bun out so quickly. Savage was there and his diary entries, allied to the extensive interviews mean it really feels as though we are getting the inside story on something that went from a few oddballs rehearsing in any old corner of London to global stardom in the space of two years. He’s also very good on the early days of McLaren and Westwood, with their chameleon shops, Sex, and Seditionaries. This is the only strand of the story which feels as though it isn’t followed through. With hindsight it seems obvious that the true victor of the punk movement, the one who reaped the most eventual success (in terms of prestige, finance etcetera) was Vivienne Westwood, who succeeded in maintaining the uneasy balance between edginess and commercial viability for decades. Her shop at World’s End was still, when I worked on the King’s Road in the early nineties, a beacon of counter-cultural chic, which you entered with heart in mouth, like an outsider intruding on a clandestine world.
Savage’s book should really be on the school syllabus. At a time when the notion of Englishness is once again in a state a crisis, when the need to assert a national identity seems to have overwhelmed all common sense, it dissects that curious anti-establishment strand of Englishness which can lead to the most astonishing creativity. The Sex Pistols were a product of disenchantment (Chant Chant Chant) which flowered for a day, before withering, only to be adopted by British mercantilism as it lay dying, resurrected as a stock image in the panoply of English eccentrism. We remain caught on the horns of the clash between establishment and anti-establishment, struggling to impose an identity on the conflict, trapped in bondage trousers and the discordant violence of disaffection.
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