I spent a large chunk of the fading summer reading England’s Dreaming, Jon Savage’s thrilling account of the rise and fall of the Sex Pistols in the mid-1970s. Punk was the cultural expression of a moment of incredible flux between a postwar settlement that was faltering fast and a looming but not yet apparent free-market era. In what Antonio Gramsci termed the interregnum, between the old dying and the new being born, morbid symptoms would appear. Punk employed the twisted aesthetic of the swastika alongside the noble ethic of anarchism. In a world where security was still social, bands could thrive through the creative energy of public art colleges, unconditional dole payments, and police who turned a blind eye to central London squats.
But the security offered by the welfare settlement was in retreat. Britain, the US and eventually most of the world, not least the rusting Soviet Union, would eventually succumb to the nostrums of the new right. The DIY, and therefore egalitarian, culture of punk was subordinated to its dictum of cash from chaos, in which the cash trumped the chaos. In hindsight we can see the shift taking place: from an industrial to a post-industrial society; from a world in which we were defined by what we produced to what we consumed; from a democratic and negotiated settlement between labour and capital to the dominant idea that markets, not people, ruled the world.
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