England's Dreaming, Revised Edition: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock, and Beyond

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He’s able to maintain that something is simultaneously ridiculous and important at the same time – and has placed punk into the canon of 20th-century culture, seeing it as important as the Factory or German expressionism. You have to wonder what Liz and Phil were thinking when they gave their son and heir the name Charles. The book was almost telling you: you are right to be interested in pop culture to this obsessive degree. Unlike Greil Marcus’s similar Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century, with its fanciful marriage of John Lydon and John of Leiden, all this was concrete, as real as the stories of puking and gobbing. They were banned; they weren’t allowed to play and the media and the establishment conspired to shut them up for telling the truth.

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He gives space to a band like Penetration, who were good, anyway, and he acknowledged how important The Saints were, that sound coming from Australia; it’s not this kind of claim that the Sex Pistols were the be all and end all, but obviously they’re central to it.

The majority finds it difficult to lift itself above the mundanity and self absorption of Adrian Mole-level teenage scribblers - NME, the last remaining of the great triumvirate of British rock weeklies has always been a stew of teenage hormones and spite ponced up as critique. That’s what the Sex Pistols did, and they were suppressed, most famously with “God Save the Queen” not being allowed to be No1 in the singles charts in the week of the Queen’s jubilee. I'm giving it 5 stars on the basis that it covers the subject matter so well, plenty of other people seem able to find fault with it, but to my mind they're merely nit picking. The second was a feckless playboy who never produced an heir, squabbled constantly with his government, spent public funds on his mistresses, and whose entire family was overthrown a few years after his death.I knew going in that this book had a mixed reputation for being both exhaustive in its coverage while also a tedious and dull read.