England's Dreaming: Jon Savage

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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.

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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.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!) Yes. The Tories do nothing for us. The Tories actually have nothing for anybody unless you’re very rich and very greedy. They don’t like art, they don’t like music, they don’t like culture. It’s a really sterile vision. If you’re young, it must be intensely frustrating, so just go and do it – whatever it is. A lot of young people will always do that. England’s Dreaming’s conundrum is the pop-modernist dialectic, and the only writer who caught it as well as Savage was Marshall Berman, who wrote about Hollywood both offering a “dream of escape” from capitalism to his parents’ generation and a “force that bound them to it”. So too with punk: this generation – that of my parents – owed everything to the welfare state, yet they destroyed as much of it as they could.

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Jon 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). I should qualify [my answer] by saying that I’m 67 and I live on an island, off an island. I’ve written a lot about youth culture, but I’m now observing it from afar. If you have any interest in the punk era this book will genuinely inform you and make you re-evaluate your preconceived ideas. 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. That’s alright. A lot of adults bang on about youth culture being inauthentic these days, perhaps because of the massive influence nostalgia has had on our generation – particularly in fashion. What do you make of that?I’d like to think we’re the most sustainably-minded generation yet, making conscious efforts in any which way we can to reverse climate change, somehow.

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

Savage's book, Teenage: The Prehistory of Youth Culture, was published in 2007. It is a history of the concept of teenagers, which begins in the 1870s and ends in 1945 and aims to tell the story of youth culture's prehistory, and dates the advent of today's form of "teenagers" to 1945. [5] The book was adapted into a film by Matt Wolf. SK: It’s like what you said about being in bed all day – reading this book – still living at home and your mum and dad probably thinking you should be going to get a job. But, in fact, you were actually researching something that would eventually lead to what you do for a living. I don’t really remember what it’s like to be a 17-year-old, but I think if I were to read it now, at that age, I’d be enthralled and thrilled by it. An awful lot of it is about suburbia and how ordinary, young people transformed their own lives, and he paints a great picture of how boring most of Britain was at that time. If I were a kid at school, I’d certainly rather read this than about the Corn Laws. The Sex Pistols' greatly helped (it is too strong to say they alone) changed how music was played and written, how bands were signed and promoted, how records were sold and marketed, how music was read about and how fans treated their idols and their movement including its involvement in politics.Over the past 40years, Savage has gone from revered ​ ’70s/​early ​ ’80s NME/​ Sounds and FACE journalist to one of Britain’s most trusted cultural historians. He was at the centre of punk in the ​ ’70s, publishing on-the-ground reports for the weekly music press (the ​ “inkies”) and his self-published fanzine, London’s Outrage. The latter was the purest recording of asubcultural explosion, made on aphotocopier at an office where Savage was working, and catching the energetic highs of afebrile youth explosion – moments like Shane MacGowan’s ear-biting incident at aClash gig in 1976. Of course Punk and the Pistols didn't do anything to lessen the bile and angst with violence accompanying gigs and wearing emblems such as the Swastika guaranteed to light fires under many a person. 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.

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

What’s happened is that pop was modernist. You’re dealing with proper art movements here, and the life cycle of art. Pop was properly modernist in the ​ ’50s and ​ ’60s and started to become postmodern in the late ​ ’60s, early ​ ’70s. Bowie and Roxy [Music], for instance, were very postmodern. And so that means taking references from different times and stealing from different kinds of cultures – that’s been going on for nearly 50 years. Compared to how it was when I was growing up, when you really had to fight hard to find out about anything, when records were deleted and you couldn’t find them except when you went hunting in the bargain bins… It’s fantastic that all of this stuff is available now. All I wanted when I was young was information, and then I could go ahead and do what I wanted with it.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. Whatever the problems are in the world, young people – if they’ve got any spirit and they’re not prepared to just go along with things – will have apretty good idea of what’s wrong,” says Jon Savage over aZoom call, ​ “because they are entering aworld made by adults.”