England's Dreaming: Jon Savage

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His book England's Dreaming, a history of the rise of punk rock in the UK and the US in the mid- to late 1970s, was published by Faber and Faber in 1991 and received a positive review in Entertainment Weekly. This book traces the rise and fall of Punk through its highest profile band 'The Sex Pistols', and it's exploitative and cynical manager Malcolm McClaren. 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. 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.

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Sometimes heavy going, particularly in its account of the dada art movement of the early 20th century but overall an excellent read. Just a few months before MTV there was Night Flight, and for years I watched Night Flight a lot more regularly than MTV (and the USA network also had Video Concert Hall). 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. Already mythologised, as pop culture lore quickly tends to be, the story of the gloriously perverse movement produced by Britain’s disgruntled suburbs (and those who told it with an increasingly nostalgic bent) needed a kick in the teeth to stop the navel-gazing. It is hard to believe today that a "pop" group could be so hated, reviled and indeed feared and yet they were and it scared people witless.It’s a real battle between two post-war ideologies: hippy millionaire versus situationist disrupter. One of the interesting contrasts was how much UK punk centered around fashion, something that I was only vaguely aware of before.

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That’s something that has obviously been diffused now, because everybody feels they are involved in the media via Instagram or Twitter. The book was almost telling you: you are right to be interested in pop culture to this obsessive degree. 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.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. Having been there (but hardly 'in' them) I found his book to be absolutely fair and very astute in it's analysis. 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. The Pistols are on the top – or, in many ways, the way he tells it, “God Save The Queen” is at the top – that’s the peak of the story, but he builds it up to that point in layers. 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.

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

Savage’s tale of the Sex Pistols story remains concrete, as real as the stories of puking and gobbing. 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. Photograph: Ray Stevenson / Rex Features Photograph: /Ray Stevenson / Rex Features Savage’s tale of the Sex Pistols story remains concrete, as real as the stories of puking and gobbing. OTOH, there are apparently now several books about Vivienne Westwood, who struck me as a far more interesting figure than MM. A lot of people were almost surprised that I was talking to them about punk because it was at the bottom of the cycle and nobody thought it was interesting at that moment.

A word for the fearless, exhausted Danes, who fought to the very last second, their minds engaged even as their bodies began to flag. Any book whose first word is 'juxtaposition' is going to struggle from the outset to shake off the chains of pretension. When we read it, punk had only happened 15 years previously, though it seemed to have been filed away firmly as “the past”. Like with many of the albums that I hold dear, it is astounding that "Never Mind The Bollocks" ever made it out into the world, and the same can be said for many of the other foundational UK punk albums. I first read it at a point in my life when I had no idea how I was going to occupy myself for the next week, let alone the next 30 years.