Paul Cook lived in my street

So yeah, I've just woken up from a dream about none other than ... Paul Cook. For real! Yes, the Sex Pistols drummer has joined Morrissey, Nick Cave, John Maher and Screaming Lord Sutch in my feverish music-related dreams. It's about time the Sex Pistols got in on the act, I reckon. Anyway, in this oh-so-fascinating nocturnal adventure I'm somehow in the driveway of a house at the end of the street where I grew up a million years ago. In the dream, I'm slightly uneasy because I'm not really supposed to be where I am and I'm vaguely aware that the owners might be coming back and they'll find me there. As I reach the end of the drive where there are some very tall gates - black and quite prison-like - it feels momentarily as if I'm going to be unable to get out. Then, all of sudden, Steve Jones (yes, SJ not Paul Cook) is on the scene, though I don't really see him and I just know (somehow) he's there, along with - apparently - his children. The mood in the dream is now OK and I've got a feeling that the situation is fine and I'm not going to be told off for trespassing. Then Jones seems to fade and instead it's Paul Cook on the other side of the gates, smiling and chatting happily with a bunch of children. In the dream it's clear that these children - three girls I think - are Cook's kids. They're all very excited and there's a party atmosphere, while the black gates have now got ribbons and other cheerful stuff on them. Most notably there are small, handmade signs on the gates naming the children and giving descriptions, stuff like "Lucy, she's five and likes chocolate". Well, there you have it. A lovely little dream, no?

Thinking about it, the location of this house in our old street is very close to where - in real life - we had our Silver Jubilee party in June 1977, with tables set up in the road. Madness! Never mind this silly dream of mine, what about England's Dreaming? The mass hallucination where an entire nation dutifully put out the bunting, set up trestle tables and held a "celebratory" outdoors meal with their neighbours (half of whom they probably hated) because the Government had more or less told them to do it out of "respect" for an ultra-rich, ridiculously-privileged woman born into a rather horrible family (born to rule ...). Anyway, in the dream - my dream, not the collective one of the jubilee - it's somehow quite nice because Paul Cook seems so relaxed and happy. He's wearing a leather jacket, a bit "punk dad"-like, and is neither young nor old. And kind of handsome. I reckon the dream's atmosphere is influenced by the Never Mind The Baubles film about the Sex Pistols' famous last ever UK gig, their benefit show for striking firefighters in Huddersfield on Christmas Day 1977. An adult's world colliding with a child's. My pointless punk dream took place the night after I watched Peter Watkins' amazing film about Edvard Munch. In this, there are countless shots of children from the 1870s looking thoroughly traumatised as one or other of their siblings vomits up blood in their deathbeds where they're going through the agonies of tuberculosis. On the one hand, social suffering in nineteenth-century Christiana (Oslo) seems completely remote from the festive fun of the Huddersfield party gig, but on the other maybe the distance is not so great. Steve Jones once talked about being shocked at the poverty of run-down towns like Huddersfield when the Sex Pistol did gigs out of London ("London was bad enough but some of the other places ..."), and - historically speaking - it's pretty much only because of the desperate struggles of unions like the striking firefighters of Huddersfield that there's been any material improvement in people's lives since the Munchian nightmare of 150 years ago. Yeah, man, my Sex Pistols dream was certainly a strange one. And I'm just glad, post-Munch, I didn't wake up screaming ... 

This poor guy is finding Anarchy In The UK far too LOUD