| Punk in the late 70s: Apocalyptic Rock
While many Jamaicans involved with reggae music aimed to overthrow the power of British imperialism and its lingering effects, many others were fleeing the poor economic and social conditions of the island. Particularly appealing for many emigrants was Jamaica's former slavemaster Great Britain, which retained good relations and support for many of the states in its former empire. Instead of migrating to Ethiopia as their religion would seem to dictate, many Rastafarians choose to move into the very heart of Babylon. As the Jamaican population of England grew throughout the '70s, imported reggae began to make an impact on the British charts. By the '80s, many of reggae's biggest hits would actually be made in England by Jamaican immigrants. But England's white youth were brewing a musical revolution of their own in the late '70s. While "Two Sevens Clash" was having its terrifying effect on the Jamaican populations, punk rock was developing an equally apocalyptic voice in both America and England.
Punk was rooted in some of the same ideas about authenticity and 'roots' music as reggae. It also arrived at many of the same ideas about government and the social order, though stripped of reggae's religious foundations. Punks appropriated the rebel and outlaw imagery that was found throughout reggae, eventually even incorporating rhythms and ideas from reggae and dub, leading to a full-on English ska revival in the '80s.
At its root, punk was a reaction to the progressive rock genre that had dominated mainstream music since the end of the '60s. 114 Progressive rock was complex and difficult, rooted in an idea of rock music as an art-form that had persisted since the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. It relied heavily on the virtuosity of the performers (including lengthy jams akin to bebop jazz) and not on singles but on the artistic concepts behind their full-length albums. The people who would form the first punk bands not only found all this pompous and pretentious but couldn't relate to it in any way shape or form. Unlike in the 1960s, when rock musicians were believed to come from and speak for the general populace, rock musicians in the '70s were seen as true 'stars', sheltered and alienated from the real world by a barrier of money, drugs and fame. A lot of people wanted music from real people again, something that mattered to them. But anybody who could play as well as the rock stars was probably already one of them, so the founding punks had to make a virtue of their ineptitude. They did not want twenty-minute drum solos that only served to impress the audience; they wanted a solid song with a real point.
So they rejected the conventional ideas about rock music and its history and found new heroes. Out of the trashcan of rock history, they rediscovered and salvaged forgotten bands, one-hit wonders and inept garage bands. Groups like Question Mark and the Mysterians that had been considered terrible in their own time were brushed off, reconsidered, and found to offer a lot more than modern rock music. The emphasis was on the root of rock and roll, on the things that made it seem like such a threat in the 1950s and '60s: passion, energy and primal emotions. In the early '70s, the term 'punk rock' was applied not to a specific genre but to all the forgotten singles by garage bands like the Count Five. The term was interpreted quite literally: rock music made by punks and hooligans, and was "the work of thousands of bands, mostly of high-school age, who formed in the aftermath of the Beatles and the British rock invasion …The punkers took a stance of spoiled suburban snottiness … [with] an arrogant snarl in the vocals."115 Like Max Frost and the Troopers, many of these bands started in the garage and later moved towards primitive psychedelic music in the wake of the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper album.
The next time rock music was called 'punk' was in New York in the mid-'70s with bands like the New York Dolls, the Ramones and Television, who attempted to distill rock back to its basic form on the model of the old '60s punk bands. The bands varied greatly in their style but what linked them together was attitude: an embrace of irony, outrage and street smarts. The cynicism of the '70s pervaded their music and their hip attitudes: the hippie dream had failed and everyone knew it, so the New York punks chose not to believe in anything, "They had spiritually--and in almost every other sense--decayed."116
When all these ideas were picked up by kids in England in 1976--thanks to the Ramones' first LP and tour--the music took on a new twist. England's economy was in much worse shape than America's was in the late '70s. The promise of post-war prosperity had turned out to be a fraud and people were angry, "The Nazi decimation of England during World War II--and the subsequent Allied bailout--had placed the country in debt ever since ... in July 1975 the country saw its worst unemployment figures since before the war. The country was plagued by 'school leavers' and 'squatters,' which where groups of youth who moved into abandoned buildings and collected their money from the 'dole'." 117
Since immediately after World War II, the English government had made lower unemployment its primary economic goal, but the economic crisis of 1976 finally broke that goal. In the twelve months after July 1976, retail prices rose by more than 12 percent and inflation came to replace unemployment as the primary issue driving British economic policy. As a result, unemployment skyrocketed from 3 percent in 1974 to 12 percent by 1982, an increase without precedent in the post-war period of Western society. 118 Those on the Left and the Right acknowledged a similar feeling that capitalism was in crisis, and that the welfare state may have been to blame. 119 Anthony Crosland, a member of the Labour Party's cabinet in 1975, summed up the atmosphere in just four words, "The party is over." 120
Bernard Rhodes, later manager of England's second major punk band The Clash, remembered listening to the radio in 1975, "and there was some expert blabbing on about how if things go on as they are there'll be 800,000 people unemployed by 1979, while another guy was saying if that happened there'd be chaos, there'd be actual--anarchy in the streets. That was the root of punk. One knew that." 121 Poverty and hopelessness amongst young people rose significantly and the hopeful millennialism of the hippies and "Swingin' London" only a decade before seemed stupidly optimistic and inanely naïve, as "British society seems to have come to a dead end, to have turned back on itself …the promises of the British sixties … now seem like less: a con game people ran on themselves." 122 The living relics of that time, the rich and distant rock stars, seemed like a cruel joke. The Rolling Stones lived in a castle in France while the members of the Clash were squatting illegally in empty buildings in London.
This sense of rage and chaos became an integral part of UK punk, quite apart from the self-consciously clever punk that was coming out of New York. In their anger and hopelessness, the English identified with the rebellious stance and iconoclasm of reggae artists in Jamaica, as well as the anger and resentment found in the old failed garage bands. Rage and helplessness were things that people could identify with, as unemployment and inflation exploded and the government seemed totally ineffective in managing the crisis. The huge numbers of newly unemployed in British society must have felt as distant from and victimized by their government as many Jamaicans did.
The old rock stars--the ones who had succeeded--were objects of scorn in punk circles, a total reversal of value from the mainstream and the first of many that punks would make. Unlike the New York bands who sought to reform rock and return it to its formative state, the English punks--the Sex Pistols in particular--wanted to destroy it utterly. Also important was the influence of glam rockers like David Bowie and Marc Bolan of T. Rex. Bowie in particular liked to play with the media and his own sexuality, dressing as an androgynous space alien to represent his apocalyptic Ziggy Stardust character. Bowie's sexual ambiguity outraged the more conservative types and his daring flirtations with shock-theater were noted by the punks, who adopted the same mentality though without the sparkly costumes, space aliens, or high-minded concepts. 123
As the very first UK punk band, the Sex Pistols set the template and provided the crucial change of direction between the original American punks and their transatlantic bastard offspring. They combined all the above elements into a grotesque sonic stew that seethed with nihilism and fury. In 1976 rock and roll had never before sounded anything like The Sex Pistols, afterwards it was all any new rock group wanted to sound like. The band was put together by Malcolm McLaren, who owned a clothing boutique called 'Sex' that sold bondage gear and countercultural artifacts and attracted a fringe element of disenchanted youth and sexual perverts. McLaren put the group together out of a few of his customers and employees: Steve Jones played guitar, Steve Cook played drums and Glen Matlock played bass. Vocalist John Lydon--rechristened Johnny Rotten--was a friend who later auditioned for the group.
The sound was crude and rough and the band was even less adept at their instruments than the New York punks. Rotten in particular didn't even try to sing in a traditional manner, preferring to holler, screech, or twist his voice into a grating parody of traditional melodies. The Sex Pistols didn't care how they sounded, and even thought of themselves as pretty awful, because their goal--or at least Rotten's--was to destroy what he considered a bloated and dead musical genre: rock and roll. The sound was destructive, burning and killing every unnecessary chord change, every flashy solo and every extended bridge jam. The music itself was rock music's apocalypse and was recognized as such, "the sound was millenarian from the beginning, certain to lead the listener into the promised land, or forty years in the wilderness." 124 The band members opted for simple rock and roll played loudly, but Rotten gave the group its direction and made them seem so menacing to the British public. He pursued the most controversial subjects in his songs and delivered them in an arrogant, abrasive way: songs about anarchy, abortion, violence, fascism and apathy; all the dirty filth on the edges of society that in 1976 seemed ready to explode. 125
The Sex Pistols released their first single "Anarchy in the U.K" within months of forming. The song was a definitive statement of purpose and was the perfect opening salvo in their musical assault to destroy modern culture and mainstream values. From the opening chords it was clear that something utterly new was happening within pop music as they cut away all the history of rock and roll, obliterated it. No other music matters or even exists while "Anarchy" plays, it demands complete attention and the rolling, evil laugh that follows the opening lets the listener know that's exactly the band's point. With the first words from Rotten's mouth, he gleefully proclaims himself to be the apocalyptic harbinger, Satan's servant, "I am an antichrist / I am an anarchist," the most vile, evil person ever to live. He twists the syllables through impossible contortions until words that shouldn't rhyme suddenly do. Rotten takes in all the evil of the world, personifies it and casts it back off as a pop song to be consumed and absorbed by the population at large. He rolls off a list of government agency's acronyms, meaningless combinations of letters, followed by his own country's acronym, just as meaningless. Rotten then dismisses the entire UK as a 'council tenancy', casting the country's long and storied history as simply an grand example of the low-income housing sprouting up all over Britain. But Rotten doesn't just stop at the past, he condemns England's expectations for itself as well, "your future dream is a shopping scheme." 126 The song's anthemic quality is striking and it is the first pop song to really provide a rallying cry for total apocalyptic destruction. The song flames out and in its final seconds Rotten drags out the word 'destroy'--a command, a demand and a wish--pulling all he can from the syllables until the very end.
The song pushed all the right (or wrong) buttons, and struck a nerve with the public, bringing out all the British fears of political instability and hopelessness. In the ensuing controversy, the single sold 55,000 copies before the Sex Pistols were dropped by their record label EMI due to public pressure. It was a genre-defining moment and English punk rock was born, inspiring an incredible wave of new bands in both England and America that has persisted for the past 30 years. Music critic Greil Marcus described the mood in England at the time as the fulfillment of the apocalyptic promise, "the country feels as if it is shrinking. England seems like a vacuum, and ugliness, physical and spiritual, is filling it. Resentment is everywhere …Time has stopped." The Pistols in all their absurdity transferred this English nihilism and hopelessness into three-minute pop songs. "Their culture--political, economic and aesthetic--has collapsed around them, leaving them stranded in a society that seems not only without prospects but without meaning." 127
Rotten emphasized this collapse in his music, evoking the apocalyptic crisis that so many British commentators feared was happening to their country. Punk became a secular apocalyptic movement, emphasizing the destructive and the inevitable, with its members squatting in abandoned buildings, dressing in rags and trash bags and mutilating their bodies as fashion. They looked like the denizens of a dead world, survivors of a nuclear holocaust living off scraps and discarded artifacts, "people began to dress in rips and holes, safety pins and staples through flesh as well as cloth, to wrap their legs in plastic … trash bags, to drape their shoulders in remnants of curtains and couch coverings left on the street." 128
With the amount of publicity surrounding them, the Sex Pistols had no problem finding a new label to release their second single in early 1977, which proved to be even more controversial. "God Save the Queen" was slower than "Anarchy"--seemingly more in common with the band's New York ancestors--but the song's power and influence at the time was much greater. "God Save the Queen" appeared at the perfect time saying exactly the wrong thing: 1977 was Queen Elizabeth II's Silver Jubilee celebration, the 25th anniversary of her ascension to the throne. The country was in a patriotic mood despite the bleak economic situation and the time was perfectly ripe to release treason onto the public market. In the midst of all the celebration and blind patriotism, Rotten was determined to defame the beloved queen's image.
The record came in a sleeve that depicted the queen's eyes covered by the band's name with a safety pin pierced through her mouth in an imitation of punk fashion. The lyrics in the song's very first stanza tackle the problem of her image: she's a moron, an h-bomb, a fascist, and a figurehead. Everything but a human being. The song was an attempt to damn the past, just as "Anarchy" had been, but a much more conscious and obvious one. Rotten was disgusted by "England's dream of its glorious past, as represented by the Queen … the nation's basic tourist attraction, linchpin of an economy based on nothing, salve on England's collective amputee's itch for Empire." 129 Much like "Anarchy", the contempt for the past twists into a damning assault on the future as well, with a surprisingly uplifting ending as the band cries out in unison, "no future / no future for you / no future for me." 130 The Pistols were stopping time, just as time had stopped for English society, just as the book of Revelations had promised it would when God himself descended from heaven. History was over for Britain, time was finished and all that was left were the dead ashes of a long-gone empire.
The uproar was instantaneous, the song was banned as a national disgrace, but the publicity only gave it more impact, gave it more exposure, and made its message seem more important. "God Save the Queen" was denied all airplay by radio stations, and was banned from all the major chain-stores selling records in Britain. 131 Despite (or because) of all this, the song was a smash hit, reaching number two on the charts. All the institutions that had banned the Sex Pistols and condemned the band as a threat to the very foundations of society were forced to re-admit the song when its sales figures came back. 132 The antichrist was let back into English society by his success as a capitalist. But the song was listed as a blank spot at the top of the Hit Parade. It was contraband that didn't exist -- which made its listeners all the more intent on dissecting the song's message.
But there was a curious ideology buried in "God Save the Queen" that, much like John Lennon's "Imagine", linked it back to long-forgotten medieval heresies. "Oh Lord God have mercy / All crimes are paid. / When there's no future / There cannot be sin," offers a direct link to the beliefs of the Spiritual Franciscans and the Brethren of the Free Spirit. 133 Much as the spiritual Franciscans hoped to destroy the Roman Catholic Church and replace it with a more egalitarian belief in the Bible and a return to the key tenets of Christ's teachings, the Sex Pistols were after the destruction of rock and roll and a return to basics that was open to everyone. The Free Spirit dressed in robes similar to those of the Spiritual Franciscans and lived the same poor derelict's life but believed that they themselves could become God. Because all souls emanated from God, there was a piece of the divine in every human being. The problem was reaching that holiness. Every person could be their own Christ--every human being was capable of the divine. If rock music had replaced religion in the lives of the Baby Boomers in the '60s, punk was its first insidious heresy.
The Free Spirit represented a total reversal of values in the Christian religion. "There was little need for Christ, whose equal some said that they had become, and none at all for the Church and the clergy… Virtue consisted of doing the opposite of what the Church and civil law demanded. What the clergy denounced as sin was to be openly and frequently practiced." The union with God meant that a person was in a state of total sinlessness and ultimate power. The only sin was work, which was God's punishment for Adam and Eve's disobedience. As Gods the members of the Free Spirit were free to engage in any and every whim, just as God himself was: "lies, thievery and especially free love with members of both sexes helped unite the soul to God or were signs that such a union had been achieved." 134
The idea was salvaged and reintroduced in the lyrics about "all crimes are paid" and "there can be no sin" in "God Save the Queen"; it was the wish for pure chaos buried in "Anarchy in the UK". The things Johnny Rotten sang about were lived out by those members of the Free Spirit who believed they had attained the divine in the Middle Ages. Every person involved with the Free Spirit lived in their own apocalypse, attaining the millennial promise in their own lifetime and finding the freedom of apocalyptic time that Rotten was screaming at the end of "God Save the Queen." Despite the church's best efforts to stamp out the heresy, it persisted for nearly 500 years and crisscrossed all of Europe. 135 Much like punk, repression only made the Free Spirit more seductive and its freedom and reversal of values were especially attractive to those in discontent. Rotten briefly gave the punks the same startling freedom and boundless creativity as the forgotten heretics--people who had never picked up instruments before began making all kinds of new music. They began dressing in paint-splattered clothing, putting safety pins through their flesh, nothing was off limits in the race to find the best new way to communicate.
The music of the Sex Pistols also smashed all meaning, reversed widespread ideas about music and created entirely new ones. "The emergence of the Sex Pistols in London … seemed to have overturned all the rules of pop: all the rules governing pop as sound, and all the rules governing it as marketplace." 136 It no longer mattered if musicians could play the guitar. It didn't matter if they could sing or not. It didn't matter if it even sounded good at all. Filth, deformity and disease were hailed. A treasonous, banned record denouncing the English Queen could be a popular international hit. Punk musicians showed contempt for their record labels, for their audience, for themselves. All conventional ideas disintegrated in the face of the Sex Pistols' raw attack and attitude. Despite (or because of) the fame and attention, they disintegrated as a band during their first American tour in January of 1978, after the release of their first and only album, Never Mind the Bollocks Here's the Sex Pistols. Their denial of all rules provided a bold new opportunity for people who had never considered themselves 'good enough' to make music and the whole first wave of English punk emerged straight out of the Sex Pistols' early audiences. They followed Rotten's lead and began to live in apocalyptic time where there was no longer any fear of failure or consequence. There was no longer any reason not to start a band.
The Clash, always the number two punk band until the Pistols ended, came right out of those first audiences. By '77 they also had a full-length album of raw punk, but unlike the destruction that the Pistols favored, the Clash were steeped in rock's history and wanted to revitalize the form in new ways. Lead singer and guitarist Joe Strummer had quit his rock revival band, the 101ers, immediately after seeing the Pistols. Clash songs weren't the same blind rage as the Pistols, but were steeped in Leftist politics and intelligent critiques: "The explanations the Sex Pistols offered when interviewers asked them why-are-you-so-angry turned into the Clash's songs … the Clash took the true anarchy and real nihilism the Sex Pistols offered and rationalized it, made it seem almost reasonable." 137 If the Sex Pistols had presented the public with a number of buried, disconnected apocalyptic fragments then the Clash created coherent narratives about the end of the world.
Even before their embrace and exploration of other kinds of music, the Clash had traveled to Jamaica, had a song produced by reggae legend Lee Perry (who had produced Max Romeo's "War Ina Babylon"), and had Bob Marley offer them tribute in the song "Punky Reggae Party." Many Rastafarians that had emigrated to England saw themselves as "a sympathetic cousin to the punks in a country where racism was becoming more visible every day." 138 As enemies of white mainstream British society, punks and Rastafarians were allies, "Most … reggae songs trumpet the certain downfall of Babylon, the Armageddon that will surely come, in much the same way that punk rock groups in Britain gloat over the diminishing power of the UK." 139 After the destruction of the Pistols, the Clash began incorporating multiple other kinds of music into their sound, including old rockabilly, R&B, pop, ska and reggae.
By 1979, the Clash had left punk behind and offered their third album, the double LP London Calling, which was as complete a history of rock music styles as anyone had ever tried to cram together in one place. They had also left the specific imagery of punk behind, favoring the costumes of communist revolutions, cowboy outlaws and Rasta rebels. The Clash had accepted and embraced their fascination with old rock and roll, even modeling the cover of London Calling off of Elvis Presley's first LP at a time when most punks were still snickering over his death. The picture of Elvis holding a guitar and singing was replaced by a grainy image of bassist Paul Simonon smashing his instrument. London Calling's cover was a potent symbol of the ways the Clash could both embrace rock and roll and give into punk's desire for destruction.
The ambition and conviction of the album is present in its opening title track. "London Calling" successfully welds together reggae and punk rock, balancing a slashing staccato riff over a fast reggae beat. Instead of the high, choppy chords of reggae though, the guitars are thick and distorted. The lazy beat is hyper-accelerated back past ska into speeds typically reserved for punk songs. It's as powerful and raw as any rock record with an intense, innate sense of rhythm while Strummer chants his doomsday picture. The song presents the worst of all possible apocalypses, a combination of every disaster. "The ice age is coming, the sun is zooming in / Meltdown expected, the wheat is growing thin … A nuclear error, but I have no fear / Cause London is drowning and I live by the river." 140 Both natural and human disasters strike as the guitars continue their relentless march over the marshal beat. Pulled into the three-minute song is all the mesmerizing movement of Marley's "Exodus", all the fear and chaos of Funkadelic's "Wars of Armageddon", both of which took over seven-minutes to make their point. High pitched howls float over the claustrophobia music as Strummer predicts the reanimation of the dead, just like Robert Johnson did, only using the secular idea of the zombie, "London calling upon the zombies of death / Quit holding out - and draw another breath."
X-Ray Spex was another band to climb out of the Sex Pistols original audience and onto the stage to demand their own spotlight. Two teenaged girls, Poly Styrene and Laura Logic, friends from school, formed the band and consciously set it apart from all the other punk bands at the time. They eschewed the typical punk look for day-glo colors, homemade clothes, and hideously mismatched absurdities. Similarly, their lead instrument was Logic's saxophone, an instrument that had been practically banned from rock music when the guitar-bass-drums format solidified in the early '60s. Against the distorted punk guitar and thrashing drums, Styrene shrieked out of key in sharp contrast to the masculine, testosterone-rock that began taking over punk after the Pistols. Rather than seeking outrage like the Sex Pistols, or railing against the government like the Clash, her lyrics tackled the stickier problem of consumerism and modern alienation. As a teenager, she was surprisingly insightful about the dehumanizing nature of modern consumer culture. Styrene described a world where everything was for sale and people who were obsessed with their image slowly became the cheap, anonymous plastic goods that they consumed.
"The Day the World Turned Day-Glo" opened X-Ray Spex's debut album, Germ-Free Adolescents, in 1978. The song was a screeching, barely comprehensible tirade that painted the end of the world as an imminent effect of consumerism. The guitars chug with forward motion in what was quickly becoming the punk standard, but what set the song apart were the explosions of distortion and the tuneful saxophone offering a strong melody in contrast to Styrene's caterwauling. Her shrieks and wails could have been lifted from an apocalyptic horror movie as she described her own doomsday fantasy. It was simple: the amount of plastic junk being produced by humanity was taking up all the space, killing the planet and choking the human race. Mounds of styrofoam crap were sucking up all the light, air and water meant for human beings: in the end the world didn't became a nuclear wasteland but a garbage-strewn landfill. In the song, Styrene watches in horror as the world 'turns day-glo', a sly double-reference to a manmade product and the result of a nuclear disaster. In the midst of the catastrophe, she offers a list of products and the man-made materials that compose them, "I wrenched the nylon curtains back as far as they would go / And peered through perspex window panes at the acrylic road / I drove my polypropylene car on wheels of sponge." Even nature became manufactured as she incoherently bleats, "Synthetic fiber see-thru leaves / Fell from the rayon trees." 141
Styrene was strangely prescient, as the world would begin to look more and more like her vision of manufactured destruction at the dawn of the next decade. Before that time though, her band would split up without recording a second album, much like the Sex Pistols. Disgusted with the world, Styrene would eventually disappear into a Hare Krishna sect, as would Logic after fronting her own group known as Essential Logic. On the other hand, The Clash would finally die out in 1986, after five albums, and amidst interpersonal bickering just as they were finally starting to make a break in America, also much like the Pistols. Without vibrant and original leaders, punk quickly became a codified set of rules, a clearly defined musical genre and an identifiable fashion statement--much like what happened to heavy metal after Black Sabbath's dissolution--rather than a free and open movement bent on originality, outrage and the destruction of rules.
Apocalyptic time ended for the punks rather quickly because it was not reinforced by anything as strong as the fear of nuclear war in the '60s. A right-wing reaction swept over Britain as fascist and racist groups began flourishing amidst the disaffected youth for much the same reason that punk had been so effective initially. The influx of immigrants from former colonies like India and Jamaica was despised and blamed for many of the country's problems. Against a backdrop of souring race-relations, a dismal economic forecast and a thorough division of classes in British society, the Conservative Party swept to power in the form of Prime Minster Margaret Thatcher in the 1979 elections. A similar wave of economic fear and tension would push Republican Ronald Reagan to the White House in the 1980 election in America and the two leaders would pursue surprisingly similar policies and doctrines in the new decade.
________________ 114 Laing, Dave. One Chord Wonders: Power and Meaning in Punk Rock, 13. Stratford: Open University Press, 1985. 115 Laing, 11-12. 116 Harrington, 324. 117 Harrinton, 345. 118 Glennerster, Howard. British Social Policy Since 1945, 156-57. Blackwell Publishers, 2000. 119 Glennerster, 155. 120 Glennerster, 153. 121 Marcus, Greil. Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century, 13. First Harvard University Press, 1989. 122 Marcus, Greil. Ranters and Crowd Pleasers: Punk in Pop Music, 17. NY: Doubleday, 1993. 123 Harrington, 324. 124 Marcus. Lipstick Traces, 5. 125 All Music Guide, "The Sex Pistols". <link> 126 The Sex Pistols. "Anarchy in the UK", Never Mind the Bollocks Here's the Sex Pistols, 1977. 127 Marcus. Ranters, 17-18. 128 Marcus. Lipstick Traces, 68. 129 Marcus. Lipstick Traces, 11. 130 The Sex Pistols. "God Save the Queen", Never Mind the Bollocks Here's the Sex Pistols, 1977. 131 Laing, 38. 132 Harrington, 355. 133 The Sex Pistols, "God Save the Queen". This connect is explored in much finer detail in Marcus, Lipstick Traces. 134 Baumgartner, 74. 135 Cohn, 148. 136 Marcus. Ranters, 243. 137 Marcus. Ranters, 302. 138 Harrington, 355. 139 Winders, 19. 140 The Clash. "London Calling", London Calling, 1979. 141 X-Ray Spex. "The Day the World Turned Day-Glo", Germ-Free Adolescents, 1978. |