Review by Booklist Review
A coffee table book about punk rock may strike some as oxymoronic, another cynical attempt to cash in on the nostalgia of aging Boomers recalling their antisocial youth. The ground it covers will be overfamiliar to those who have read McNeil Na McLain's Please Kill Me (1996), Spitz and Mullin's We Got the Neutron Bomb [BKL D 1 01], and a slew of recent biographies of Darby Crash, Johnny Rotten, a Ramone or two, and others. Still, Colegrave and Sullivan's hefty, luxurious, photo-laden book would be very nearly the definitive oral history scrapbook of that nebulous cultural phenomenon, punk, were it not for its overlooking the LA punk scene. Its quotes come not from the biggest names in the movement--for instance, from Paul Cook instead of Johnny Rotten; Lee Childers rather than Malcolm McClaren--and are of the predictably outrageous type, emphasizing seediness (sex, drugs, violence) more than the music and the do-it-yourself philosophy of the punks. The photographs really make the book: check out the Sex Pistols on Carnaby Street. --Benjamin Segedin
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Colegrave and Sullivan (The Beatles Anthology) deliver a brash and brilliant photo-essay of the most brash and obnoxious chapter in the history of music and culture long before the advent of crowd surfing. Framing its history between 1975 and 1979 (but covering the years before and after), this volume is a historiography of the music, attitude and dress as typified by Malcolm MacLaren and his manufactured Sex Pistols, uncomfortable commercial shifts in the music when anarchy became "a badge of conformity rather than an alternative way of living" and finally the latter days, which saw the dissolution of the Pistols. The authors trace punk rock from its earliest roots in the avant-garde and Warhol's Factory, and discuss every figure and legend from Iggy Pop and the MC5 to Siouxsie Sue and Johnny Rotten. This volume is smartly designed, featuring hundreds of glossy black-and-white photographs and thousands of appraisals from the likes of Leee Childers, Nils Stevenson, as well as quotes from the film Please Kill Me and Leggs McNeil, whose Punk Magazine gave the wave its name. This is a gorgeous, hefty book and readers may be inspired to break their coffee tables with it. (Mar.) Forecast: While punk revelers won't be as nostalgic as Beatles fans, expect many closet sentimentals to clear the book shelves though reissued and repackaged, punk is not yet dead. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Now a confused and disenchanted 26, punk is ripe for a retrospective but reluctant to be pinned down. Cocreators of the best-selling Beatles Anthology, Colegrave and Sullivan deserve credit for acknowledging both New York City's and London's contributions to the movement and beginning at the beginning with Andy Warhol and his Factory groupies. Yet they still miss the point in this oral history, first published in the U.K.: that punk, like any late 20th-century art form, sprang from a frenzied exchange of ideas. Although they interviewed an impressive range of luminaries from both sides of the pond, they fail to re-create those white-hot intercontinental transmissions. Poor editing and pacing aside, the book's failure has a lot to do with the huge amount of space dedicated to the Sex Pistols and their hangers-on. As crucial as that quartet was to the English scene, bands like the Clash and the Ramones better embody punk's true spirit and show how two groups could constructively rub off on each other. In addition, aside from a few stellar shoe-box shots that have finally come to light, this does not come close to forming a "definitive" coffee-table portrait. Missing are the truly world-stopping photographs of Pennie Smith and Mick Rock, to name a few. Unfortunately, this, too, is only being published in North America as an 111/2" x 121/4" paperback with flaps, so it will easily wear and tear. Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain's Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk (Penguin, 1997) is heavier on American voices and contains a fraction of the photos, but it's a more concise and raucous read. For comprehensive popular music collections only. Heather McCormack, "Library Journal" (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
