Do You Have The Force? -Jon Savage's Alternate History Of Electronica 1978-82 (Caroline True Records 2020) 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. 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). 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!)

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

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 nostalgiaOh, 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. 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?

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

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 prophecy 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. Jon Savage has managed to produce a very excellent and readable book. This must have been quite a task given the plethora of material but the complete, and in some cases deliberate camouflaging of events and reasons, that could have led to either some kind of hero worshipful bible-like book or to the usual skim, have generally been avoided. Mr Savage has made an excellent review of the period and analysed the precursors whilst managing to keep the sense of wonder that was there all through the punk years. Having been there (but hardly 'in' them) I found his book to be absolutely fair and very astute in it's analysis. Now I sometimes wonder – and I’m really throwing this to you, because it’s not my experience – but I would surmise that the sheer weight of information is sometimes quite daunting. In July 1993, Kurt Cobain gave a dramatically candid interview to Jon Savage in which he freely discussed such controversial topics as Courtney Love, homosexuality, heroin and Cobain's relationship with his Nirvana bandmates. Conducted with Cobain the night before the now-infamous shoot with legendary photographer Jesse Frohman, and just months before the frontman's death.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. Perfect Motion- Jon Savage's Secret History of Second-Wave Psychedelia 1988-93 (Caroline True Records 2015) The first two of the book’s many epigraphs were from Jonathan Raban’s Soft City – “In the city we can change our identities at will” – and Lionel Bart’s Oliver! – “We wander through London, who knows what we might find?” How could you refuse?

Jon Savage - Wikipedia Jon Savage - Wikipedia

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.

Face front, we got the future/Shining like a piece of gold/But I swear as we got closer/It looks like a lump of coal' - The Clash: All The Young Punks. 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. Well, politics as far as I can see for young people during the past 10 years has been diabolical. The big problem is – and I hint at this in my Teenage introduction – since 1945 we’ve been living in a post-Second World War reconstruction, dominated by America and the idea of the teenager, which is the young Democratic consumer. In the 1966 book, [I write about] adults finally beginning to understand what was going on right underneath their noses. Pop culture was something much more complicated and, to them, threatening. You could say its the definitive guide. Jon Savage was there - in some photos, and the text is interspersed with his own diary extracts. You can tell the amount of research he has completed before you get to the bibliography at the end.