England's Dreaming: Jon Savage

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Which is just silly, really, because if you have something to say, then surely you’d want to say it to as many people as possible. And wtf is up with all the real dodginess about fixating on people as Jewish and attributing various character traits to that and so on?

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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. You may not love the music or the attitide, but it gave society a kick up the backside and reset the priorities for young people. 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). Those details are fantastic, actually, and the way they’re written about, because they’re not gossipy at all.I was watching a documentary the other day where Vivienne Westwood looked at the camera and said punk was nothing like what people thought it was – that it came up and fizzled very quickly as it became mainstream.

England’s dreaming: Euro 2020 final offers chance to scratch England’s dreaming: Euro 2020 final offers chance to scratch

This was something a bit like the “urbanism” England’s Dreaming constantly talked about, but it wasn’t London. Even though it is the Sex Pistols and punk, it’s still only pop music and that’s what I wanted to hear at that age. Although in many ways England’s Dreaming is a portrait of London at a particular time, it’s more than that.

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.

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

Teenage: The Creation of Youth, 1875 – 1945, England’s Dreaming: The Sex Pistols and Punk Rock and 1966: The Year the Decade Exploded do everything their titles promise, dissecting the super highs and tragic lows of 150years of youth culture around the world. Unlike Greil Marcus’s similar Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century, with its fanciful marriage of John Lydon and John of Leiden, all this was concrete, as real as the stories of puking and gobbing.

He curated the compilation Queer Noises 1961–1978 (2006), a collection of largely overlooked pop songs from that period that carried overt or coded gay messages. We would be into steam trains if we were 30 years older; Jon rescues punk from that “steam-train syndrome”. 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. Savage's completism, the recounting of every detail he's garnered - enthusiastic and all too often uncritical - can get wearying. Any book whose first word is 'juxtaposition' is going to struggle from the outset to shake off the chains of pretension.