Boweries and Blitzkriegs, Safety Pins and Swindles

Punk is the story of a musical scene, philosophical credo and clothing style that ping- ponged back and forth between the United States and the United Kingdom, engendering intertwined artistic excellence and transatlantic social revolution. American punk started in the mid-1970s in the New York clubs Max‘s Kansas City and, especially, CBGB, spawning epoch-marking acts like Patti Smith, the Ramones, Television, Suicide, Talking Heads and Blondie. Simultaneously, across the Atlantic another vital young cohort emerged, chief among which were the Sex Pistols, the Clash, the Damned and the Jam. The British bands were more class- conscious and inclined to provocative lyrics and imagery, but both wings had in common a disgust with the decadence of a virtuosity-obsessed rock scene and a refusal to be intimidated by their own lack of technique. The two scenes would be given a joint title, one predominantly deriving from the equally raw mid-Sixties garage-rock genre. Rock ‘n’ roll was once more young, fresh and a danger to cultural and musical orthodoxy. Moreover, the movement had a long tail. American bands were taken to UK hearts, especially the Ramones and Blondie. The British punk sound was adopted by a subsequent generation of American new wavers that included the Dead Kennedys, Black Flag and X. When in the Nineties Seattle’s uncompromising Nirvana began having number-one albums in the hitherto hidebound American mass market, punk had finally unequivocally turned the music industry on its head. Boweries & Blitzkriegs, Safety Pins & Swindles is the first book to properly cover both American and British punk scenes. Assisting in this comprehensive chronicle are the people who were there at the time. Sean Egan has drawn on his quarter-century archive of interviews with principal punk musicians, producers and observers—much of which material is previously unpublished—to give granular detail and vivid colour to an account of a period of originality and excitement unsurpassed in the history of post-Elvis popular music.