Playlists
Juste les morceaux qui ont tout changé / Just the tracks that changed everything.
Iggy Pop rolls in broken glass, smears peanut butter on his chest, dives into crowds that don't catch him. The New York Dolls show up in heels and lipstick, playing rock'n'roll that falls apart mid-song. At a filthy Bowery club called CBGB, Patti Smith turns Rimbaud and electric guitar into the same weapon.
McLaren tried to rescue the dying New York Dolls in 1975 — red leather, Soviet flags. They split three weeks later. He took notes.
Twelve months, everything breaks. The Sex Pistols curse on live TV and get dropped by three labels — free publicity. The Clash record their debut in three weeks for £4,000, sell 100,000 copies. Poly Styrene opens with "Oh Bondage, Up Yours!" and changes the game entirely. God Save the Queen outsells everything during the Jubilee — but appears as a blank line in the official charts.
Signed and dropped by EMI, A&M, and Virgin in a row. A&M inked the deal outside Buckingham Palace, voided it four days later after the band trashed their offices. They kept the advance each time.
The Buzzcocks self-release Spiral Scratch for £500 and invent the DIY rulebook — every indie label that follows owes them a debt. Wire strip everything down to 21 songs in 35 minutes — no solos, no encore. Sham 69 drag punk to the council estates. Across the Atlantic, Dead Kennedys weaponize sarcasm — Jello Biafra delivers political venom in a business suit while East Bay Ray's surf guitar slices underneath. Gang of Four show up from Leeds with Marxist theory and a guitar sound like a slap in the face.
Orgasm Addict was too filthy for the BBC. It charted on word of mouth alone. Shelley recorded it in one session — the B-side took longer.
Joy Division are the pivot point. Ian Curtis builds something far more terrifying than punk: music that sounds like grief with a four-four kick. Peter Hook's bass climbs to the top of the register while everything else sinks. On stage, Curtis seizes and convulses — the audience doesn't realize he's epileptic. The Slits fuse punk fury with Jamaican dub. The Cure wrap Robert Smith's anxiety in gothic guitars. It's still punk — it's just wearing black and staring at the ceiling.
Unknown Pleasures' cover — pulsar radio waves from the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Astronomy — was submitted by Peter Saville without showing the band. Joy Division saw it for the first time on the finished record.
February 1979: Sid Vicious overdoses at 21, the night he gets out on bail. The tabloids call it punk's end. Wrong. The Clash release London Calling — double album, single price — and bury inside it the bassline of The Guns of Brixton, thick as concrete. Joy Division perfect their cathedral despair on Closer. Then Ian Curtis dies the night before their first US tour. His bandmates become New Order. Punk doesn't die — it just changes its name.
Love Will Tear Us Apart was released a month after Curtis died. His wife Deborah heard it on the radio before she knew it existed.
