Over a quarter of a century has passed since punk changed the world. Today the revival machinery operates at full speed. Johnny Rotten, former singer of the Sex Pistols, keeps a tryst with royal reporter Jenny Bond under the Australian sun, while European radios blare out „Anarchy in the UK“ non-stop. But Punk was not a band, it was neither simply a fashion nor merely music. It was the last teenage movement that imaginatively and creatively declared a cultural war. In England and America hundreds of bands formed during the hot summer of 1976, putting weird haircuts and (often more than three) chords to good political use. Jon Savage, author of „England’s Dreaming“ (faber&faber), the ultimate book on punk, has compiled the secret and not so secret musical milestones. Those, that you still don’t usually get to listen to on the radio. 

Artists include: Iggy & The Stooges, Electric Eeils, Patti Smith, Ramones, The Saints, Penetration, Devo, Buzzcocks, Wire, Residents, The Germs, The Dils, The Avengers, The Diodes, The Weirdos, The Zeros, Eno & Snatch, The Normal, Cabaret Voltaire, The Urinals, Bizarros, Metal Urbain, X-Ray-Spex, Siouxsie & The Banshees, PIL. 

“It‘s as refreshing as cold water.”

“The REAL punk story: Mind-expanding punk comp with not a twist on a mohawk in sight!
Compiled by Jon Savage - previously noted for an identically titled and similar brillant book about punk - ‘England‘s Dreaming‘ is one of those rare and wonderful things: an album that makes you reconsider everything you thought you knew. Punk, it turns out, had nothing to do with all those gob-stained tosspots that clog up every other compilation tagged with the ‘P‘ word because punk was, initially, a glorious, experimental movement that drew on 60s pop, psychedelia, garage rock and, perhaps most suprisingly of all, the cloaked and bloated entrails of prog: the very music it was to soon strangle.