England's Dreaming: Jon Savage

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People say all sorts of silly stuff about young people. Each generation has its own task in its own time and its own particular set of circumstances. To call today’s teenagers or twentysomethings inauthentic because they like old stuff is just nonsense. What I’ve observed is that young people take the bits they want.

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

SK: I think that’s what’s exciting about Jon, because obviously he’s Cambridge educated, he’s very smart and I think that was the great thing as a young person reading this book – that somebody with that kind of intellect was talking to you on a serious level about something you’d spent your whole life being fascinated by: pop music. It’s a justification of – or a vindication of – your own feelings. I think that’s very evident in the book. It’s so dense with information that it just makes you want to know more. It took me a long time to reread it because I kept googling stuff. It’s a kind of portal; it’s a starting point that leads you to a lot of other “secret histories”. The obvious one is that you read about the Pistols and that leads you to the Situationists, and then this whole other world opens up. That’s what I think was so attractive about the book. Also, the chapters often start with short quotes by people like Virilo or Rimbaud, which sounds very pretentious, but, again, it suggests this kind of other, something more than just pop. There’s this density and this seriousness with which he approaches what is essentially only pop music. Even though it is the Sex Pistols and punk, it’s still only pop music and that’s what I wanted to hear at that age. The book was almost telling you: you are right to be interested in pop culture to this obsessive degree. I was not there

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. Savage, Jon (December 2014). "Kurt Cobain's Last Photo Session and Interview, 1993: Part 1 'Very like the Sex Pistols' ". Mojo. No.253. pp.30–31. 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. This Searing Light, the Sun and Everything Else: Joy Division (Faber and Faber 2019) ISBN 978-0-571-34537-3

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The author's politics comes through at times a little more than is required, but that is a minor point. He perhaps over blows Punks significance to the UK at large but only then when you consider my comments above, and that the Pistols remain a focal point in music and media whenever the 1970s is discussed then he may be justified. 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. 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.The US tour is another interesting chapter and the author's treatment of Sid Vicious's demise and death is told with clarity and sympathy, and include comment from Sid's mother.

England’s Dreaming introduced me to the power of urban

JD: As middle-aged men, we are marinated in pop music, and we need to come to terms with the fact that we are potentially doomed to obsess over Top Of The Pops performances, B-sides and album covers. We are just so expert at the absolutely useless information of the pop culture we’ve absorbed. We would be into steam trains if we were 30 years older; Jon rescues punk from that “steam-train syndrome”. 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.

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. J. C. Maçek III (6 June 2013). "Fashionably Anti-Establishment: 'Punk: From Chaos to Couture' ". PopMatters. For 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. 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. JD: Maybe my favourite section in the book is McLaren’s collision with Richard Branson, who is, if anything, even more wily and amoral. It’s a real battle between two post-war ideologies: hippy millionaire versus situationist disrupter. There’s something epic about that relationship; it could be a film or a play.