Tag Archive: Jon Savage


Does Music Journalism Still Matter?

Filed under: Italy, Music — Leave a comment
June 17, 2022

Earlier this month, I attended an interesting panel discussion at the wonderful Beaches Brew free festival on the Hani-Bi beach at Ravenna, Italy.  

The talk was in answer to the provocative question ‘Does music journalism still matter?’ 

 A video of this conversation has just been released  including the bonus of a rambling observation/question from yours truly! (at 43:10)

Needless to say, the answer to the question of the day was ‘Yes, it does still matter’ but explaining why and how proved tricky. Speakers addressed the huge challenges of making their voices  heard within an increasingly deafening market place.  

Making music and writing about it in 2021 obviously bears no comparison to life before the internet.  In ‘1966 – The Year the Decade Exploded’, Jon Savage writes:  “Music was no longer commenting on life but had become indivisible from life. It had become the focus not just of youth consumerism but a way of seeing, the prism through which the world was interpreted.”  It’s difficult to imagine music having the same impact and influence now since it is just one of an overwhelming number of consumer choices.

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My best reads of 2018

Filed under: Books, Fiction, Gender, Modern Art, Movies, Music, Poetry, Politics — Leave a comment
December 26, 2018

goodreads 2018.jpgSince 2014, I have set and maintained a relatively modest reading target on ‘Goodreads‘ of 50 titles a year. I find this website invaluable at the end of year when it comes to reviewing the books I’ve read.

Being gifted, and being thoroughly absorbed by, Kazuo Ishiguro’s ‘The Buried Giant’ led me to a reappraisal of the Nobel Prize Winner. Up until then, I’d read only ‘Remains Of The Day’ and hadn’t been particularly drawn to his other novels. The slow, deliberate pace and absence of colloquial language put me off but now this actually drew me in. Perhaps it’s an age thing. Ishiguro skillfully takes the reader deep into the mind and, above all, the memories of his characters. The only novel of his I haven’t read is ‘The Unconsoled’. Aside from the uncharacteristically messy ‘When We Were Orphans’, I rated all of his works very highly.

Getting fixated on this male author sabotaged my resolve to read more female writers this year. By the end of the year only 20 of the 50 were by women. Of these, my two favorite novels, one old and one new, were Sarah Waters’ quietly subversive ‘Fingersmith’ and Gail Honeyman’s funny/sad study of loneliness : ‘Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine’. Continue reading →

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Happenings 52 Years Time Ago

Filed under: Books, Gender, Music — Leave a comment
February 15, 2018

1966 – The Year The Decade Exploded by Jon Savage (Faber & Faber, 2015)

1966“It’s pretty obvious that contemporary music reflects contemporary life. And vice versa” wrote Tony Hall in Record Mirror in 1966. What is taken for granted now needed to be spelled out then.

Nevertheless, there are still precious few writers who able to contextualize music as expertly as Jon Savage.

When writing about Punk in 2004’s ‘England’s Dreaming’, Savage was able to draw directly from his own experiences but, as he was just 13 years old in the Summer of 1966, he is not able to rely solely on first-hand knowledge for this book. The 55 pages of source references illustrate the substantial research that lies behind this authoritative and illuminating study.

I was just 8 years old in that year so I remember even less than he does but I do recall the impact of some TV shows (e.g. Batman, The Monkees, Time Tunnel etc.) and music like The Beatles, the Motown acts and Dusty Springfield. But as far as historical events go, only England winning the soccer world cup sticks in the memory.

Most articles about the sixties paint a superficial and idealised portrait of swinging London, sexual liberation and the birth of the Woodstock generation. Savage goes deeper and reveals the darker aspects of this era and shows that it has definite parallels with the world we inhabit today.

Far from being a time of hedonism and freedom, this was a year lived under the shadow of the atom bomb and the cold war. In addition, the black civil rights movement, growing opposition to the Vietnam war, the demand for women’s liberation and the struggle for gay rights were just some of the causes that led to politicization of the youth both in America and in the UK. Add LSD to this heady cocktail and it’s easy to understand why this year was so musically explosive and accounts for how “1966 began in pop and ended with rock”. Continue reading →

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BACKTRACKING # 30 : THE SEX PISTOLS – ANARCHY ON EMI

Filed under: Music — Leave a comment
August 6, 2011

Part of an irregular series of bite-sized posts about 7″ singles I own – shameless nostalgia from the days of vinyl. (Search ‘Backtracking’ to collect the set!)

THE SEX PISTOLS – Anarchy In The UK b/w I Wanna Be Me (EMI, 1976)

“It happens. you feel alien. You are other. Nothing in your culture, in your experience gets near what you feel. You want to be elsewhere. If you can’t be elsewhere, you want to see everything brought down. These thoughts explode in your head. You can’t sleep, you grind your teeth. You get migraines. You shake.
Then you walk into a room. You see or hear four people making a noise, playing the limits of electricity and the room’s ambient space: like a switch tripping, your life is changed forever. Out of nowhere, the terrain is cleared and the possibilities stretch before you.
This will happen only once, with that certainty”.

These lines are part of the sleeve notes by Jon Savage to Lipstick Traces, a compilation CD designed to be played alongside the book of the same name by Greil Marcus.

The four people in the room making the racket almost certain refers to The Sex Pistols. No other band, not even The Clash, had that effect

Without the single Anarchy In The UK, Marcus’ secret history of the 20th century would not have been written.

Without this record, and Johnny Rotten in particular, countless bands would have remained unformed and postwar popular culture might have continued on a downward spiral.

I might still be listening to albums like Tales From Topographic Oceans or Brain Salad Surgery.

It is hard to imagine, and as the years pass, it gets harder and harder to convince other people what an impact this record had.

Marcus notes Rotten’s demonic laugh and insolent way he not so much sang as hurled the lines into the world and writes of “a voice that denied all social facts, and in that denial affirmed that everything was possible”. Continue reading →

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