Savage — England's Dreaming

Author: Jon Savage
Title: England’s Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock, and Beyond
Year: 1991
Type: Book (Faber and Faber; US edition St. Martin’s Press, 1992; revised 2002)

England’s Dreaming is a history of British punk by the music journalist Jon Savage, published by Faber and Faber in 1991 with the subtitle The Sex Pistols and Punk Rock, and in the United States by St. Martin’s Press in 1992 as England’s Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock, and Beyond. It follows the Sex Pistols and the punk movement around them from 1971, when Malcolm McLaren moved into the shop at 430 King’s Road that he ran with Vivienne Westwood, to the Conservative victory of 1979. Savage reads punk’s look as a warning sign stitched together from many sources. In its closing pages he gives a double verdict: by 1979 the strands the Pistols had combined had unraveled “into pure music, subculture and the music and media industries,” and punk “was beaten, but it had also won,” giving the music industry new life and making new forms possible. Its evidence is chiefly the interviews Savage conducted with about a hundred people, most of them between 1988 and 1990. The New York Times Book Review called it the definitive history of English punk, and it won the Ralph J. Gleason Award. Kirkus found it compelling but at times overly detailed, and some of the scene’s participants rejected it.

Savage published a fanzine, London’s Outrage, in 1976 and began writing for Sounds in 1977, moving later to Melody Maker and The Face.¹ He told Irina Shtreis of Louder Than War in 2021 that he did the bulk of the interviews for the book between 1988 and 1990, talking to about a hundred people, and that it took him six months to write. The few diary entries of his own that it includes are there, he said, “to put myself in the book.”² Faber and Faber published it in London on October 21, 1991, and St. Martin’s Press published the American edition, under a longer subtitle, on February 3, 1992.^{3, 4}

The first chapter traces the earlier boutiques at 430 King’s Road and reaches the summer of 1971, when McLaren, who had just left Goldsmiths’ College “without completing his degree”, wandered into the shop. In October he moved into its back room with Westwood and Patrick Casey.⁵ Kirkus wrote that Savage “begins with a long description of the nihilistic, in-your-face fashion world in which Malcolm McLaren” got his start, and found throughout the book background on “the suffocating nature of recession-hit 1970’s England.”⁴ Writing of the autumn of 1976, Savage reads punk’s clothes as a sign: “Punk announced itself as a portent with its polysemy of elements drawn from the history of youth culture, sexual fetish wear, urban decay and extremist politics.” Taken together, he writes, these elements “had no conscious meaning but they spoke of many things,” among them urban primitivism, “the breakdown of confidence in a common language” and the fractured perception of a media-saturated society.⁵

The book’s closing pages turn to the Conservative victory of 1979, which, Savage writes, marked an end to the period of social unrest that punk had charted. The freedom punk had sung about and enacted was “hijacked by the New Right to mean something quite different,” and the strands the Sex Pistols had combined unraveled “into pure music, subculture and the music and media industries.” Then comes the verdict: “Punk was beaten, but it had also won.” Whatever the Pistols may have meant to do to the music industry, he writes, “they gave it new life, they allowed a myriad of new forms to become possible.”⁵

Faber published a revised edition on June 4, 2001.³ St. Martin’s published its revised edition in January 2002; its page says the edition “provides an account of the Pistols’ 1996 reunion as well as a freshly updated discography and a completely new introduction.”⁶ The interviews behind the book appeared at full length as The England’s Dreaming Tapes, published by Faber in 2009 and by the University of Minnesota Press in 2010 in 752 pages.^{1, 7} Faber reissued the book for its thirtieth anniversary in 2021, with a foreword by Johnny Marr and an introduction by Jeremy Deller and Scott King.^{2, 8}

Reviewers praised the book, and some of the scene’s participants and the punk writer Stewart Home attacked it. Macmillan’s page for the revised edition quotes the New York Times Book Review calling it “the definitive history of the English punk movement” and Rolling Stone calling it “Scholarship with spunk,” and Faber’s copy names it a winner of the Ralph J. Gleason Award.^{6, 8} Kirkus called it “a compelling and intelligent narrative” and “as much about the nature of anarchy as about the Sex Pistols and punk rock,” though “at times overly detailed and wordy,” with slow opening pages.⁴ David Ensminger, writing in PopMatters in 2010, reported that academics had praised it as “a nimble intellectual text” while others detested it. He quoted Captain Sensible of the Damned, in 2003, calling it “a ripe load of shit,” and Andy Czezowski, the former proprietor of the Roxy, the same year, calling Savage “constantly re-writing history to suit his own purposes.” In Ensminger’s account, Stewart Home, in Cranked Up Really High (1995), called Savage “a cultural elitist” for “legitimizing Au Pairs and Gang of Four and ignoring street punk.”⁹

Key contributions

• A history of British punk from McLaren and Westwood’s shop in 1971 to the Conservative victory of 1979, built on about a hundred interviews.
• Punk’s look read as a warning sign stitched together from many sources.
• The double verdict: punk “was beaten, but it had also won,” and the Pistols, whatever they meant to do to the music industry, “gave it new life.”

See also

• Subculture — Dick Hebdige’s 1979 study of the meaning of subcultural style
• Please Kill Me — Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain’s 1996 oral history of American punk
• Our Band Could Be Your Life — Michael Azerrad’s 2001 history of the American indie underground
• Punk — the genre family to which punk rock belongs