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England’s Dreaming: The Sex Pistols and Punk Rock

Award-winning, Sunday Times bestselling author Jon Savage’s definitive history of punk, its progenitors, the Sex Pistols, and their time: the late 1970s.

A pop-culture classic full of anecdote, insight and exclusive interviews, England’s Dreaming tells the sensational story of the meteoric rise and rapid decline of the last great rock ‘n’ roll band and the cultural moment they came to define. 

It’s a hugely impressive work in terms of its depth and comprehensiveness. Originally written in the early 90s and subsequently updated the book does feel a pretty definitive assessment of the emergence, rise and fall of punk and the Sex Pistols in the mid-1970s.

I liked the commentary on the famous ‘Never Mind the Bollocks’ trial which featured the rather famous John Mortimer and a Professor of English from the University of Nottingham:

After a whistlestop Sex Pistols radio tour around the northern half of England, Lydon arrived in Nottingham for the trial. As in many confrontations between past and present, the agenda of this Magistrates Court was set by a statute that was antique; the formal courtesy of its language cloaked a struggle as savage as any the Sex Pistols had encountered that year. Using Mortimer seemed like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut, but it was not just the album’s title that was on trial. The prosecution had to establish that printed matter ‘of an indecent nature’ was exhibited to public view. This case ostensibly hinged on the word ‘bollocks’, but the prosecuting QC, perhaps hoping to fatten his thin case with prejudice, quickly widened the matter at hand to the poster’s size, and the juxtaposition of the words ‘bollocks’ and ‘Sex Pistols’. The lack of impartiality of the police witness was exhibited by his statement that a million people would have the album ‘inflicted on them’. Mortimer brought on some expert witnesses: Caroline Coon, who neatly sidestepped the prosecution’s smears on her character, and James Kingsley, Professor of English Studies at Nottingham University, who asserted the proud history of ‘bollocks’ as a good, upstanding Anglo-Saxon word, used in records from the year 1000 and quoted in Eric Partridge’s definitive Dictionary of Slang: ‘I would take the title to mean “Never Mind the Nonsense here’s the Sex Pistols”.’ ‘One wonders why a word‚’ Mortimer stated in his summing-up, ‘which has been dignified by writers from the Middle Ages in the translation of the Bible to Dylan Thomas and George Orwell, and which you may find in the dictionary, should be singled out as criminal because it is on a record sleeve by the Sex Pistols. It was because it was the Sex Pistols and not Donald Duck or Kathleen Ferrier that this prosecution was brought.’ That the case had social implications was reinforced by the bench’s final statement: as the chairman said, ‘Much as my colleagues and I wholeheartedly deplore the vulgar exploitation of the worst instincts of human nature … we must reluctantly find you not guilty on each of the new charges.’ For many people, the Sex Pistols were an anathema, not only because of what they did, but because of the way in which they had been represented.

There is also a good account of that first national Sex Pistols tour, scheduled to take place just after the infamous TV interview with Bill Grundy, which led to lots of calculations, including a gig booked to occur at UEA but which was cancelled by the Vice-Chancellor who had watched the programme. I do think the dissections of the actions and motivations of all the main figures from McClaren to Lydon and Vicious to Westwood are really good too – the overall impression you are left with though is a movement genuinely chaotic and out of control, a real Pandora’s box.

The book is genuinely comprehensive, including a substantial punk discography too, and represents a fine achievement by the author.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 4.5 out of 5.