Jon Savage – The England’s Dreaming Tapes

-

Jon Savage’s England’s Dreaming is nearly twenty years old; written with ten years’ remove from 1977’s Year Zero, it was one of the first books which set out to explain, justify and recapture what made the initial spark of the British punk movement (and the Sex Pistols in particular) such a visceral experience. The 700-page The England’s Dreaming Tapes collects fifty-eight of the raw interviews which made up the bulk of that book, and spans the opening of Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s King’s Road shop in the early seventies Road to Sid Vicious’ death in 1979.

As an interviewer, Savage wisely chooses not to goad the subjects into being any more revealing than they want to be and doesn’t ask questions which force his subjects to conform to his own ideas, making for an extremely organic collection of stories. He’s also an extremely savvy editor, only letting his own opinions come through subtly, be it via his brief introductory comments to each interview, or even in the way he structures the book. For example, the first interview comes from a repentant Malcolm McLaren, “undergoing psychotherapy” at the time, with almost every subsequent report serving to deconstruct each facet of his personality. Likewise, while everyone in the book seems to have a vendetta against The Clash as chancers, pandering to the corporate notion of political punk rebellion, Joe Strummer’s interview (conducted during his “wilderness years”) presents him as extremely philosophical about the entire experience – “When you’re young and stupid, you don’t think about anything. You just go straight ahead.”

The biggest problem with The England’s Dreaming Tapes is just how familiar and repetitive most of the stories end up becoming. In the intervening two decades, so many books and films have come out which tell these stories with far greater emotional resonance, if not minute detail; knowing that the Sex Pistols have since reformed twice (and gone on to lay themselves bare in Julien Temple’s astonishing documentary The Filth and the Fury), the petty swipes between band members now ring somewhat hollow. Similarly, within the book itself, since most of the characters on the London scene come from the same background and share the same anecdotes – with the occasional amusing discrepancy now and again – there’s definitely not enough material to warrant nearly 400 pages of that sort of attention to detail.

Consequently, after so long tackling the same events from every imaginable angle, the most fascinating interviews end up coming from those who – geographically or psychologically – were on the outside of everything. Subway Sect’s Vic Godard gives a typically aloof account of his band’s contributions – “When we were playing somewhere, and there was something I’d rather be doing, I just wouldn’t turn up” – while the evolution of Buzzcocks from fanboys to figureheads is both endearing and inspiring. Likewise, journalists (or as Savage calls them, “propagandists”) such as Jonh Ingham and Caroline Coon give much more insight into the movement’s original intentions, before postcard punks became a regular fixture of London life – “The fact that it was being done in an intelligent way meant that it was appealing to intelligent people.” Meanwhile, the final section features two accounts of Sid Vicious’s final days which border on In Cold Blood territory; the book’s last interview, with Sid’s mother Anne Beverley – often vilified for providing him with his fatal fix – is probably the most moving of all, showing a woman with no regrets, assured of herself as acting in her son’s best interests.

Much like Totally Wired – the interview companion book to Simon Reynolds’ peerless Rip It Up and Start Again – there is little here that can’t be found elsewhere, and both books seem like cases of flogging a dead horse on Faber’s part, as they wait for two of their star writers to come up with new product. Still, as an account of the era and a series of studies of a bunch of extremely flawed characters, The England’s Dreaming Tapes is undoubtedly an authoritative tome; that said, over the course of an entire book, it can get a bit too much to handle, and it’s too disjointed to work as a coherent read.
67%