England's Dreaming: Jon Savage

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Any book whose first word is 'juxtaposition' is going to struggle from the outset to shake off the chains of pretension. And larded with plaudits such 'a claim to be the definitive work on the subject' (The Times, no less) and 'flawless' (Esquire), a book could very well sink beneath the weight of its own cleverness and self-regard. But I also wanted something with which to occupy myself during the long holiday (ugh) weekend because I was bored and miserable and going through personal crap. And in the service of that desire, getting frequently annoyed with this book to the extent of writing pissy lengthy pseudo-scholarly annotations all over the margins succeeded admirably in distracting me.

Britain’s Dreaming: Jon Savage on the future of youth Britain’s Dreaming: Jon Savage on the future of youth

Oh, that’s a good question. Youth culture is changing considerably, and I think for deeper reasons than a whole load of crap television programmes like I Love the 1980s, to be honest. I would imaging this was used for the screenplay of Pistol, the disney tv series. Everything in the show is found in this book - including the emphasis on Steve Jones stealing kit from Bowies gig at the Hammersmith Odeon. My interest in this now looks at teenage superstar Greta Thunberg. There’s going to be a huge shift, I think, in the next 25 years, away from the idea of youth as consumers, and into something else. Ultimately, the way we live is not sustainable, and that’s got to be something for your generation or people younger than you to grapple with.Do you think the death of the democratic consumer will lead to a death in subcultures? A lot of people already say subcultures no longer exist, I guess because they aren’t as glaringly obvious as they once were. SK: Yes, he finds it very confusing working with Richard Branson. Those details are fantastic, actually, and the way they’re written about, because they’re not gossipy at all. It’s really hard-nosed, factual and doesn’t say if one person is wrong or one person is right. I think that Jon treats everyone and everything equally in a way, doesn’t he? He’d treat a brilliant badge or a great haircut as being just as important as some of the records. Death by nostalgia After moving on to write for THE FACE in 1980, Savage’s cultural curiosity had him attend aNew York vogue ball with Malcolm McLaren, commentate on the rise and fall of Britpop and, over the past 20years, write three of the most significant, cohesive books on youth culture. The book built a picture of, to quote Savage quoting McLaren, “the human architecture of the city”, and provided an apocalyptic vision of England on the eve of Thatcherism – for Savage, a mirror image of punk’s suburban sado-masochism and its contempt for the woolly compromise of the welfare state. First of all, the book made me notice London. Suburban Southampton is an interminable, Americanised sprawl. The machinations at record companies and the frankly mad, bad and downright chaotic behaviours of Malcolm Mclaren are fascinating and well told. How the band interacted (or not) with their manager and each other and well as with others within the Punk movement and without is also interesting.

England’s dreaming: Euro 2020 final offers chance to scratch England’s dreaming: Euro 2020 final offers chance to scratch

Yeah, but around 10 or 15 years ago, you’d see all sorts of subcultures down your local high street. Skaters, ravers, goths, punks… I suppose it’s more diluted now, a little harder to find. This Searing Light, the Sun and Everything Else: Joy Division (Faber and Faber 2019) ISBN 978-0-571-34537-3Jon Savage (born 2 September 1953 [1] in Paddington, London) is an English writer, broadcaster and music journalist, best known for his definitive history of the Sex Pistols and punk music, England's Dreaming (1991). If you have any interest in the punk era this book will genuinely inform you and make you re-evaluate your preconceived ideas. SK: It became very fashionable to be negative about Malcolm McLaren, didn’t it? It became very easy to do and lots of people did it. But Jon, I think, paints a fair picture of McLaren’s involvement, not just about the greed, but also about his more visionary ideas, about how he applied his “art school thinking” to both the fashion and the music businesses. It’s a very obvious point, really, but shifting vinyl records in massive units is only one step away from shifting vinyl trousers, isn’t it?

How England’s Dreaming told the definitive story of London punk

Perfect Motion- Jon Savage's Secret History of Second-Wave Psychedelia 1988-93 (Caroline True Records 2015) Do you, then, think nostalgia, and becoming mainstream, contributes to the death of youth subcultures? It seems as though we’re aspiring towards something that didn’t even exist. In reality, it took me only a week to plough through and it was never a chore. It covers the history of punk, a detailed biography of the sex pistols and an overview of UK politics and culture in the late 70s. I remember in May 1997, the morning after the Labour landslide, when I was allowed to stay up most of the night, going to an Asda somewhere on the M27 and moping around the aisles thinking: “Nothing here is going to change.” Savage, meanwhile, described a landscape everyone apparently found unbearable, but which sounded thrilling to me – “after Ballard’s High Rise and Crash, it was possible to see high-rises as both appalling and vertiginously exciting”. This appalling excitement he perhaps too kindly ascribes to the sound of the early Clash. SK: It’s well-documented, this idea of DIY, but it’s incredibly exciting that you could go from just being a fan, or thinking you’re worthless, or thinking you’re just there to buy the record in Woolworths to thinking, actually, I could make the record. Music is prophecyFor Gareth Southgate, England’s coach, this will have felt like something different entirely. Sunday’s game will be the culmination of a task that in many ways was set out for him from the moment he stepped off the Wembley pitch after missing a penalty against Germany in 1996, and which – despite everything – still remains tantalisingly incomplete. England had lost their last four tournament semi-finals. They have not won a major trophy since 1966. That hoodoo has never felt closer to being broken. Counterculture is often a reaction against politics. It’s been a particularly difficult time for the young under Tory rule over the past 10 years, hasn’t it? It's taken me a while to get through this, not because the book was dull or hard work, but because of the sheer volume of information inside, covering a relatively short time span. plus the fact it was too unwieldy for reading on my commute (how punk does that sound!) This an insightful record of the Sex Pistols' formation and their short and frantic career that helped change British music and challenged on aBritish society on a number of levels.