The Englishness of English Punk: Sex Pistols, Subcultures, and Nostalgia

Abstract

This article considers the Englishness of English Punk, or, more specifically, the Englishness of the Sex Pistols and the cultural productions associated with them. It will consider whether the challenge that they posed to conventional, Establishment, consensus notions of Englishness has merely been recuperated as an entertaining diversion within a broader hegemonic nationalist history or whether this challenge has had a more fundamental impact. It will argue that the Pistols facilitated a reframing and a re‐imagining of English culture and left a legacy, which has been drawn upon by a number of subsequent art and music subcultures.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Dan Bernstein for his patient proofreading and constructive critical challenges.

Notes

1. Nevertheless, these alternative national/ethnic identities were clearly of considerable personal importance to Lydon and McLaren, and may have both aggravated a sense of the oppressiveness of the English Establishment and facilitated the critical perspective of the “outsider.” McLaren recalled that:

My grandmother had impressed on me at an early age that the English were a nation of liars and the royal family its symbol. England was a country whose survival, she thought, depended on how well they practised the culture of deception.…I opened my first store, Let It Rock, with the sole purpose of smashing the English culture of deception.…I gathered my art school friends to help me plot the downfall of this tired and fake culture. All I needed now was a record company. EMI became my label of choice. It was English through and through (McLaren “Afterword” 13–14).

2. That England is taken to be a synecdoche for Britain as a whole, and indeed London for England, is, perhaps ironically, a familiar criticism of Establishment portrayals of the nation. Indeed, this essay could, arguably, be titled the “London‐ness of English Punk.” While I accept that this might reflect also my own regionalist prejudices, and in no way seek to deny the significance of the contributions of the Buzzcocks et al., it is also true that punk and London have become closely associated in the public imagination. The myths of the King's Road and the 100 Club are testament to this, as is the souvenir industry that, for a couple of decades at least, produced London postcards adorned with photographs of colorful punks, and punk dollies which were “part of a series that also included Tower of London Beefeaters and ‘British Bobbies’” (Medhurst 229).

3. Lydon writes:

I loved history [at school] because I don't believe any of it. I have a good memory for it, but since I've seen my own musical history buggered up so professionally, I really can't believe anything about anyone else. In twelve years the media changed me into God knows what for their own benefit. So what on earth have they done with Napoleon and the rest? Any kind of history you read is basically the winning side telling you the others were bad. (Lydon 16)

4. It was for this reason, among others, that many British punks deemed it “significant that Presley died in their year, 1977” (McKay 57). It might be reasonably objected at this point that the Pistols, much as they might wish to deny it, clearly were influenced by the antecedent American punk scene. McLaren and the band admitted the influence of the New York Dolls and Iggy and the Stooges particularly, but this influence was translated into something else altogether that was appropriate to, and shaped by, the English context. This adaptation of their musical subculture was greeted by American punks with, by turns, resentment, horror, delight, and resignation. Legs McNeil grumbled, apropos of the Pistols' US tour and the accompanying media hysteria:

So it was like, “Hey, if you want to start your own youth movement, fine, but this one's already taken.” But the answer that came back was, “Oh, you wouldn't understand. Punk started in England. You know, everyone is on the dole there, they really have something to complain about. Punk is really about class warfare and economic blah, blah, blah.” (McNeil and McCain 407)

A variety of accounts, from both sides of the Atlantic, stress that what distinguished English from US punk was the “sociological” emphasis of the former. While the latter was largely content to remain an underground artistic movement, in the UK punk was regarded as an opportunity to express political, and not merely aesthetic dissent. Mary Harron recalled that:

You could really feel the world moving and shaking that autumn of 1976 in London. I felt that what we had done as a joke in New York had been taken for real in England by a younger and more violent audience. And that somehow, in the translation, it had changed, it had sparked something different. (McNeil and McCain 303)

5. See Mandler for a full account and critical analysis of this history.

6. If we consider the two films about punk discussed here within this schemata, it could be argued that Jarman offers a Utopian vision of punk while Temple's is Edenic. This might at first appear to be a counter‐intuitive classification as Jubilee presents the Tudor past as tranquil and idyllic and “the present” as violent and chaotic. However, Jarman was filming at a time when punk could still be conceived of as an active movement alive with possibilities, whereas Temple presents it rather as an historical “golden age,” the “fall from grace” emphasized by the film's concentration on the various tragedies that ultimately beset the band.

7. In early 2004 Lydon was a contestant on the ITV “reality” television show, I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here, in which personalities face a number of (usually unpleasant) challenges while “living rough” in the Australian rain forest for a number of weeks.

8. As Hebdige observes:

Official reactions to the punk subculture betrayed all the classic symptoms of a moral panic. Concerts were cancelled; clergymen, politicians and pundits unanimously denounced the degeneracy of youth. Among the choicer reactions, Marcus Lipton, the late M.P. for Lambeth North, declared: “If pop music is going to be used to destroy our established institutions, then it ought to be destroyed first.” Bernard Brook‐Partridge, M.P. for Havering‐Romford, stormed, “I think the Sex Pistols are absolutely bloody revolting. I think their whole attitude is calculated to incite people to misbehaviour….It is a deliberate incitement to anti‐social behaviour and conduct” (quoted in New Musical Express, 15 July 1977) (Hebdige 158).

9. As with punk, much of protagonist Jimmy Porter's fury in John Osborne's Look Back in Anger is directed not just at his “elders and betters” but also “at his own disillusionment and that of his generation: ‘Nobody thinks, nobody cares. No beliefs, no convictions and no enthusiasm’” (Carpenter 10). John Lydon's nihilistic persona finds echoes also in Arthur Seaton, the hero of Alan Sillitoe's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958). Seaton “declares himself beyond morality: ‘That's what all those looney laws are for, yer know: to be broken by blokes like me’” (Carpenter 11).

10. Likewise, one element of Beyond the Fringe that appeared genuinely to outrage audiences was a sketch titled “The Aftermyth of War.” “This mocked such 1950s Second World War films such as The Dambusters and Reach for the Sky (the film biography of Douglas Bader) and, in doing so, laughed at all the clichés about the war itself” (Carpenter 113). As with punk, the targets of such attacks were not war veterans themselves, but the myths spun around them and deployed to ultimately reactionary and repressive (if comforting) ends. As with punk also, those who were offended by or criticized these attempts to puncture complacent fantasies seemed unable or unwilling to appreciate this subtle but crucial difference.

11. Despite the fact that the song appears to be a fairly explicit attack on a Britain gripped by an unhealthy nostalgia, given that it was released in 1979 “after Margaret Thatcher had taken office, after Sid and Nancy were dead, after punk was dead” (Queenan) it might also be interpreted as a work of nostalgia for the early, vital years of punk.

12. It is significant that the metaphor of war was also deployed in a number of popular reggae songs of the time—for example, “War Ina Babylon” by Max Romeo, “Two Sevens Clash” by Culture (reputedly the inspiration for the Clash's name), and “Under Heavy Manners” by Prince Far I, a critique of Jamaican Premier Michael Manley's draconian law‐enforcement strategies. The Clash stencilled the phrase on to their stage outfits, to suggest both solidarity with the Rastafarians and that they too were the victims of an oppressive state apparatus.

13. This is made very explicit by the lyrics to the Clash song “White Riot”: “Black man gotta lot a problems / But they don't mind throwing a brick / White people go to school / Where they teach you to be thick.”

14. Sabin notes that bhangra, the closest Asian equivalent to reggae, was largely ignored by both punk and Rock Against Racism in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and argues that Asian music did not make an impression on the UK music scene until the appearance of a number of “indie” bands with Asian members—most notably Cornershop and Echobelly in the 1990s. Although Asian music is still poorly represented in the charts and mainstream music broadcasting relative to record sales (due, to some extent, to the majority of Asian music being sold outside the mainstream “chart return” retail sector) and live audiences, arguably both the dance and UK underground urban music scenes have embraced Asian music to a much greater extent than rock circles in recent decades. The popularity of DJs such as Bobby Friction and Nihal (who have their own show on BBC Radio 1) and bands and producers such as Asian Dub Foundation and Rishi Rich have facilitated a much wider appreciation of “desi beats” and the production of some genuinely “fusion” musical projects. Such shifts have—significantly—coincided with a radicalization of identity and politics among second‐ and third‐generation British Asians. Given this, we might accuse Sabin of both expecting too much of punk and a degree of ahistoricism, given that Asian culture was, in the 1970s, both lacking a political dimension and largely hidden from, and thus unavailable to, white communities.

15. For example, reggae band Exodus were violently heckled when they played at the Wigan Casino.

16. Weight concurs, arguing that the Jubilee had little lasting effect on Britishness because, “[u]nlike the coronation of 1953 [or punk], the Jubilee offered no coherent vision of who the British were or what direction they should take” (551).

17. I would myself go so far as to argue that the Sex Pistols represented the last gasp of the Modernist avant‐garde.

18. Rave culture shares with reggae an emphasis on the “sound system” as a key part of a mobile and DIY approach to staging music events. Such systems—and in particular the enormous “bass bin” speakers—also boast the additional subversive advantage of facilitating the creation of oppositional—aural—places within any given space and consequently attracting the disapproval of “straights” and the authorities.

19. The alarmist reaction to Castlemorton and rave culture more generally resembles the similarly horrified responses to “incursions” of “the mob” (i.e. the urban proletariat—in the guise of ramblers, hikers, and day‐trippers) into the English countryside earlier in the 20th century. See both Wright and Raymond Williams for fuller accounts of these phenomena.

20. The English‐Chinese artist Wong is symptomatic of such diversity. The lyrics of and video for his song “Who's That Boy” flag up his ethnicity while having fun with stereotypes of Chinese culture (Kung Fu movies) and of first‐generation Chinese immigrants (selling counterfeit DVDs on street corners) but is still firmly rooted in the context of London (both its housing estates and its musical cultures).

21. In this context, DJ and film‐maker Don Letts's claim that “Hip‐hop is black punk rock” is not insignificant (Colegrave and Sullivan 364).

22. The “hoodie” has arguably replaced the safety pin as the definitive symbol of delinquent youth and, as such, has found itself the recipient of negative attention and sometimes attempts at legislation from media, politicians, and local authorities. The term “hoodie” has now become a synecdoche for the juvenile delinquent.