PUNK

This series is written from published material and its byline claims method rather than credentials, so the sources are listed. They are given as books and categories of material rather than as page citations; where a claim in the text is contested, the text says so at the point of the claim.

Oral histories and contemporaneous accounts. Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk, Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain, the standard oral account of the New York scene, and the source most often quoted for CBGB and the Punk magazine circle. Read with the usual caution owed to oral history: it is a compilation of recollections, many of them decades later, by people who were frequently intoxicated at the time and who disagree with one another.

The London scene. England’s Dreaming: Sex Pistols and Punk Rock, Jon Savage, the fullest documentary history of the British scene, and the source that takes the business and the media coverage most seriously. The Boy Looked at Johnny, Julie Burchill and Tony Parsons, is a contemporaneous 1978 polemic rather than a history and is useful precisely as evidence of the arguments being had at the time.

The independent sector. Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978–1984, Simon Reynolds, the best account of what happened next and of the labels that carried it. Our Band Could Be Your Life, Michael Azerrad, thirteen chapters on American independent bands including Black Flag, Minor Threat and the touring circuit described in Movement Five. Document and Eyewitness: An Intimate History of Rough Trade, Neil Taylor.

Memoirs by participants, all to be read as interested accounts: John Lydon, Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs and Anger Is an Energy; Viv Albertine, Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys; Patti Smith, Just Kids, for the Mapplethorpe-financed single described in Movement One; Steve Jones, Lonely Boy.

The fanzines themselves. Sniffin’ Glue (Mark Perry, twelve issues, 1976–77) and Sideburns (Tony Moon), the latter the actual source of the three-chord diagram commonly misattributed to the former; substantial runs of both have been reproduced in facsimile.

The music press of the period (NME, Sounds, Melody Maker and Record Mirror, weekly, 1976–1980) for release dates, chart positions, contemporaneous reviews and the correspondence pages, which are the best available record of what the audience actually argued about.

For chart positions and release dates, the Official Charts Company (UK) and Billboard (US) archives.

On the business. The mechanics in Movement Four (recoupment, packaging and breakage deductions, the separation of publishing from recording income, mechanical and performance royalties) are standard industry practice of the period and are set out in any reputable music-business text; All You Need to Know About the Music Business, Donald Passman, remains the clearest general explanation, though it describes a later era and the specific 1977 percentages in this book are illustrative. The Sex Pistols litigation was reported extensively in the British press through the early 1980s and concluded in 1986.

Where figures are disputed (the size of the Sex Pistols’ advances, the attendance at the first Lesser Free Trade Hall show, the exact cost of Spiral Scratch, whether God Save the Queen was kept off the top of the chart) the text says so rather than choosing. Those disagreements are not gaps in the record. They are the record.