Rip it Up and Start Again
Simon Reynolds
416 pages including index
published in 2005
I’ve been looking for Rip it Up and Start Again in my local library ever since I got seriously interested in the whole post-punk phenomenon some two, three years ago. It had been namechecked by a lot of post-punk enthusiasts on music blogs and the like, so it was with some anticipation that I started reading. Fortunately, it didn’ disappoint me. Rip it Up and Start Again is an excellent overview of the response to punk in the half decade after the first wave of punk bands had crashed and burned.
Punk itself had gotten started around 1975, evolving out of raw rock bands like The Stooges, New York Dolls and MC5, through the New York club scene that produced the Ramones and finally landing in the UK where punk was embraced as a backlash against the dinosaur rock and prog rock indulgences of the mid-seventies. By the end of ’77, ’78 however, just as the general public became aware of it, punk had already exploded, with the Sex Pistols disbanding, The Clash selling out to Columbia and the Buzzcocks losing their lead singer. In the meantime a whole host of imitators had sprung up, with lesser and greater talent, mostly imitating what these three bands had done a year earlier, stultifying punk. But there were also other artists who took inspiration from the energy and d.i.y. approach of punk to go their own way: these were the artists that would make post-punk.