Bloody Old Britain: An Interview With Jon Savage
Aug 17, 2021 15:04:55 GMT
stu77 and doug61 like this
Post by Lord Emsworth on Aug 17, 2021 15:04:55 GMT
Bloody Old Britain: An Interview With Jon Savage
With Faber publishing new editions of his books, Teenage, 1966, and England's Dreaming, Jon Savage talks to Owen Hatherley about post-war Britain and its discontents
Sample Q & A....
One of the strengths of your historical books is a refusal of hindsight – there’s never a ‘and we all know where that ended up’ moment. Do you have to deliberately force yourself to avoid taking the (often depressing!) later careers of these 60s and 70s figures into account?
Yes, very much a deliberate technique, which was achieved by thoroughly immersing myself in contemporary documents. These give a sense of the way people used language then, what words and concepts they were involved with, and how they felt then – rather than how they might feel about then now, seen with hindsight. I really dislike the apparent inevitability of ‘How Punk/The Sixties Won’ etc. that you see on middlebrow TV and read in middlebrow books – the smugness of the victor.
It didn’t feel like that at the time, I can tell you. It felt provisional, sometimes desperate, with more at stake than a media career. But then there’s a lot of money and ideology riding on the denaturing and defanging of pop and youth culture these days. Obviously, this process is assisted by the rightwards shift of various once-key players, which tends to work retrospectively. Once they’ve spunked all this Brexity racist stuff, you just think: were they always like that? Not always, but the suspicion remains.
Whole thing here....
thequietus.com/articles/30314-jon-savage-englands-dreaming-teenage-1966-owen-hatherley-interview
With Faber publishing new editions of his books, Teenage, 1966, and England's Dreaming, Jon Savage talks to Owen Hatherley about post-war Britain and its discontents
Sample Q & A....
One of the strengths of your historical books is a refusal of hindsight – there’s never a ‘and we all know where that ended up’ moment. Do you have to deliberately force yourself to avoid taking the (often depressing!) later careers of these 60s and 70s figures into account?
Yes, very much a deliberate technique, which was achieved by thoroughly immersing myself in contemporary documents. These give a sense of the way people used language then, what words and concepts they were involved with, and how they felt then – rather than how they might feel about then now, seen with hindsight. I really dislike the apparent inevitability of ‘How Punk/The Sixties Won’ etc. that you see on middlebrow TV and read in middlebrow books – the smugness of the victor.
It didn’t feel like that at the time, I can tell you. It felt provisional, sometimes desperate, with more at stake than a media career. But then there’s a lot of money and ideology riding on the denaturing and defanging of pop and youth culture these days. Obviously, this process is assisted by the rightwards shift of various once-key players, which tends to work retrospectively. Once they’ve spunked all this Brexity racist stuff, you just think: were they always like that? Not always, but the suspicion remains.
Whole thing here....
thequietus.com/articles/30314-jon-savage-englands-dreaming-teenage-1966-owen-hatherley-interview
Well worth a read
