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England's Dreaming: Jon Savage

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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. 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. 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.

England’s Dreaming introduced me to the power of urban

In these times of woeful X Factor/Pop Idol karaoke, manufactured dross I yearn for something to reset the social agenda again. 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. 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. The econcomic situation was different at that time, but that's the beauty of this book: it sets everything in a social, political and musical context, which enables you to grasp how and why it was so provocative and important.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. 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. If you have any interest in the punk era this book will genuinely inform you and make you re-evaluate your preconceived ideas. 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.

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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”. JD: It gives you confidence, in the way that punk did to young people while terrifying everyone else. 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.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. That Jon Savage's England's Dreaming stays afloat (just) is due to two things. First, that the times about which he writes are so vibrant, real, close yet distant and fundamentally dirty, makes for exciting copy. And second that his obvious enthusiasm for the people, the music and the events, shines through bright enough to burn.

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