ENGLAND’S DREAMING
Here’s my 2009 painting ‘Punk:rock’ from the Project Mogwai series, mocked up as a cover for Jon Savage’s England’s Dreaming which, to this day, remains the definitive article on the rise and fall of punk in the UK. Every few years it gets reprinted and every time the cover design is, to quote Ron Asheton of The Stooges, “weak.” Consider this my attempt to provide a more viable alternative. I was just a bit too young to catch the full blast of punk when it exploded in the mid-1970’s, but I was there for the aftermath and will I freely admit that while Sturgeon’s Law applies to most of punk, it was a vital and necessary cultural diarrhetic and we could do with something similar today because here we are, almost 50 years later, and I haven’t heard anything that “slaps” as good as this: