Extract
Jon Savage
The 'England's Dreaming Tapes' Outtakes
These three interviews were conducted in 1988 and 1989, during the research for England’s Dreaming. Comparatively little of them were used in the finished book. When last year I came to edit the interviews together into ‘The England’s Dreaming Tapes’, they didn’t fit either, so I’m pleased to present them here.
One of the things I wanted to do in England’s Dreaming was reflect a fact that had not been recognised up until that point: that punk began as a movement of outcasts, that it offered a brief moment when the isolated, the marginal, saw that they could get together and, suddenly, realise their own strength.
Class was a very important element in this, as were various types of radical politics, but so was gender and sexuality. As Siouxsie Sioux told me with a decade’s hindsight, punk was ‘a club for misfits, almost. Anyone that didn’t conform. There was male gays, female gays, bisexuals, non-sexuals, everything.’
There were many gay, bisexual and severely non-conformist young men and women involved in early punk, and they helped to create its look, its patchwork of deviant influences, and its curious, early distance. That all got flattened out as soon as punk did what it was always intended to do, broaden out into the wider culture.
The gender polemics implicit in England’s Dreaming still remain relevant, after a decade and a half of the New Lad counter-revolution. Current histories of punk ramp up the boys groups, forgetting the strong women and the hopeless, introverted men who made some of the period’s best music.
The first two interviews address this topic. Jane Suck and Jayne Casey redrew the possibilities of what women could do in popular culture. A fierce believer in her home town, Casey also gives a partial history of the Liverpool punk scene – as well as outlining the difficulties faced by severe stylists like herself in the late ’70s.
There was this intense urge in 1976 and 1977 to be new, and regional autonomy was part of this. The final interview, with the Pop Group’s Gareth Sager, tells a story often obscured by London, Liverpool and Manchester – that of the Bristol scene that helped to pave the way for Massive Attack and Tricky.
– The rest of this article is printed in Loops Issue 01, available to buy from these Stockists.
One of the things I wanted to do in England’s Dreaming was reflect a fact that had not been recognised up until that point: that punk began as a movement of outcasts, that it offered a brief moment when the isolated, the marginal, saw that they could get together and, suddenly, realise their own strength.
Class was a very important element in this, as were various types of radical politics, but so was gender and sexuality. As Siouxsie Sioux told me with a decade’s hindsight, punk was ‘a club for misfits, almost. Anyone that didn’t conform. There was male gays, female gays, bisexuals, non-sexuals, everything.’
There were many gay, bisexual and severely non-conformist young men and women involved in early punk, and they helped to create its look, its patchwork of deviant influences, and its curious, early distance. That all got flattened out as soon as punk did what it was always intended to do, broaden out into the wider culture.
The gender polemics implicit in England’s Dreaming still remain relevant, after a decade and a half of the New Lad counter-revolution. Current histories of punk ramp up the boys groups, forgetting the strong women and the hopeless, introverted men who made some of the period’s best music.
The first two interviews address this topic. Jane Suck and Jayne Casey redrew the possibilities of what women could do in popular culture. A fierce believer in her home town, Casey also gives a partial history of the Liverpool punk scene – as well as outlining the difficulties faced by severe stylists like herself in the late ’70s.
There was this intense urge in 1976 and 1977 to be new, and regional autonomy was part of this. The final interview, with the Pop Group’s Gareth Sager, tells a story often obscured by London, Liverpool and Manchester – that of the Bristol scene that helped to pave the way for Massive Attack and Tricky.
– The rest of this article is printed in Loops Issue 01, available to buy from these Stockists.
