I have read this book before and there is every chance I might read it again at some point in whatever life I have left in me. The version I read before did not have the updated material, including a new foreward and some stuff related to the mid nineties Sex Pistols reunion. As always the Pistols remain the maypole around which this book giddily dances. Yet, in this particular reading it is the mirror held up to the crumbling culture of the nineteen seventies which really gripped me. Everything in history is by necessity of its time and the birth of punk rock is no different. Its womb was a disintegrating empire, its midwife societal ennui. What else was to be done at such a time? The punk sensibility, then and possibly remains, the notion of takingf a sledgehammer to everything which has gone before, sadly this includes the good with the bad. The tent was collapsing and everything had to go, be that the music scene, how people dressed and the social and political paths one choose to walk down. Anarchy in the UK indeed. Or was it....
Dear lord, I felt so old looking at the photographs in this book. The Pistols themselves look like little more than children to my ancient old eyes.A bunch of almost Dickensian waifs desperately trying to break out of a world that saw no worth in them.They were standing in the gutter laughing at the stars. These were days of strange alchemy, when weird aliances were formed, creative collisions and explosions that were to impact upon the shared cultural zeitgeist in the most alarming and entertaining ways. Jon Savage charts so much off it in what feels like authentic eye witness accounts, as one who was there.
What a mad old time.
What an interesting read.The first time, the second time and most probably before I shuffle off this mortal coil, a possible third.Its the only form of time travel that actually seems to work.
