Jon Savage

Jon Savage is a British writer, broadcaster and cultural historian whose work has made youth culture itself a serious historical subject. He began writing about music in the punk era of the late 1970s, producing his own fanzine and reporting for the weekly music press before becoming a contributor to The Face from its first year. Savage’s later books transformed that first-hand criticism into long-form cultural history.

England’s Dreaming used the Sex Pistols and punk to examine politics, media and social fracture in 1970s Britain; Teenage traced the emergence of the modern idea of youth across the decades before 1945; and 1966 treated a single year as a global intersection of music, fashion, politics and generational change. He has also written documentary films and curated archival compilations, repeatedly moving between primary cultural evidence and retrospective interpretation.