Do you, then, think nostalgia, and becoming mainstream, contributes to the death of youth subcultures? It seems as though we’re aspiring towards something that didn’t even exist.

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

SK: It became very fashionable to be negative about Malcolm McLaren, didn’t it? It became very easy to do and lots of people did it. But Jon, I think, paints a fair picture of McLaren’s involvement, not just about the greed, but also about his more visionary ideas, about how he applied his “art school thinking” to both the fashion and the music businesses. It’s a very obvious point, really, but shifting vinyl records in massive units is only one step away from shifting vinyl trousers, isn’t 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 read Classics at Magdalene College, Cambridge, graduating in 1975. [2] [3] Becoming a music journalist at the dawn of British punk, he wrote articles on all of the major punk acts, publishing a fanzine called London's Outrage in 1976. A year later he began working as a journalist for Sounds, which was, at that time, one of the UK's three major music papers, along with the New Musical Express and Melody Maker. Savage interviewed punk, new wave and electronic music artists for Sounds. At that time, he also wrote for the West Coast fanzines Search & Destroy, Bomp! and Slash. 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.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? Do You Have The Force? -Jon Savage's Alternate History Of Electronica 1978-82 (Caroline True Records 2020) 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.

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

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. The Spanish Flu welcomed the Roaring Twenties, Thatcher’s ​ ’80s brought acid house. Grime hastened the death of skinny jeans – sort of. But however the political pendulum swings over time, it’s always youth at the helm. The movers, the shakers, the pissed off. 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. 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.

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. 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. In a new introduction to the book on its 30th anniversary, published here in full, the designer Scott King and the artist Jeremy Deller sat down to discuss the huge impact the book had on them as they came of age in the early 1990s. How we read it 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 nostalgia 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.

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In these times of woeful X Factor/Pop Idol karaoke, manufactured dross I yearn for something to reset the social agenda again. SK: I thought she was perfect for it! Just the idea that she might stand there, in Trafalgar Square, among all these generals and admirals. She was a sort of seer, wasn’t she? 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.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. I’d had my eye on the book for a while, dipping into it while doing work experience at the local radical bookshop. Over the next two years I would read and reread it until the spine broke, and do what it implored me to do: move to London. 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. If you have any interest in the punk era this book will genuinely inform you and make you re-evaluate your preconceived ideas.

England’s Dreaming introduced me to the power of urban

Yeah, but around 10 or 15 years ago, you’d see all sorts of subcultures down your local high street. Skaters, ravers, goths, punks… I suppose it’s more diluted now, a little harder to find. Time Travel: From the Sex Pistols to Nirvana – Pop, Media and Sexuality, 1977–96 Publisher: London, Chatto & Windus, 1996 ISBN 978-0-7011-6360-0 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.

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.