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 The machinations at record companies and the frankly mad, bad and downright chaotic behaviours of Malcolm Mclaren are fascinating and well told. How the band interacted (or not) with their manager and each other and well as with others within the Punk movement and without is also interesting. For Gareth Southgate, England’s coach, this will have felt like something different entirely. 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. England had lost their last four tournament semi-finals. They have not won a major trophy since 1966. That hoodoo has never felt closer to being broken. SK: It’s well-documented, this idea of DIY, but it’s incredibly exciting that you could go from just being a fan, or thinking you’re worthless, or thinking you’re just there to buy the record in Woolworths to thinking, actually, I could make the record. Music is prophecy JD: As middle-aged men, we are marinated in pop music, and we need to come to terms with the fact that we are potentially doomed to obsess over Top Of The Pops performances, B-sides and album covers. We are just so expert at the absolutely useless information of the pop culture we’ve absorbed. We would be into steam trains if we were 30 years older; Jon rescues punk from that “steam-train syndrome”.

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

Oh, that’s a good question. Youth culture is changing considerably, and I think for deeper reasons than a whole load of crap television programmes like I Love the 1980s, to be honest. After moving on to write for THE FACE in 1980, Savage’s cultural curiosity had him attend aNew York vogue ball with Malcolm McLaren, commentate on the rise and fall of Britpop and, over the past 20years, write three of the most significant, cohesive books on youth culture. Now I sometimes wonder – and I’m really throwing this to you, because it’s not my experience – but I would surmise that the sheer weight of information is sometimes quite daunting. Yes. The Tories do nothing for us. The Tories actually have nothing for anybody unless you’re very rich and very greedy. They don’t like art, they don’t like music, they don’t like culture. It’s a really sterile vision. If you’re young, it must be intensely frustrating, so just go and do it – whatever it is. A lot of young people will always do that.J. C. Maçek III (6 June 2013). "Fashionably Anti-Establishment: 'Punk: From Chaos to Couture' ". PopMatters.

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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. 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.For sure. It can often feel like you don’t know enough because of all the information on the internet. That can be incredibly daunting. Whatever the problems are in the world, young people – if they’ve got any spirit and they’re not prepared to just go along with things – will have apretty good idea of what’s wrong,” says Jon Savage over aZoom call, ​ “because they are entering aworld made by adults.” 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. If you have any interest in the punk era this book will genuinely inform you and make you re-evaluate your preconceived ideas. The Sex Pistols' greatly helped (it is too strong to say they alone) changed how music was played and written, how bands were signed and promoted, how records were sold and marketed, how music was read about and how fans treated their idols and their movement including its involvement in politics.

England’s Dreaming introduced me to the power of urban

You could say its the definitive guide. Jon Savage was there - in some photos, and the text is interspersed with his own diary extracts. You can tell the amount of research he has completed before you get to the bibliography at the end. Do You Have The Force? -Jon Savage's Alternate History Of Electronica 1978-82 (Caroline True Records 2020) 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. 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.

JD: Maybe my favourite section in the book is McLaren’s collision with Richard Branson, who is, if anything, even more wily and amoral. It’s a real battle between two post-war ideologies: hippy millionaire versus situationist disrupter. There’s something epic about that relationship; it could be a film or a play. 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.

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

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.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. In these times of woeful X Factor/Pop Idol karaoke, manufactured dross I yearn for something to reset the social agenda again.