1966 - Jon Savage

WINNER OF THE PENDERYN MUSIC PRIZE
A GUARDIAN MUSIC BOOK OF THE YEAR, 2015

Award-winning, Sunday Times bestselling author Jon Savage's monument to the year that shaped the future of global pop cultural history.

In America, in London, in Amsterdam, in Paris, revolutionary ideas fomenting since the late 1950s reached boiling point, culminating in a year in which the transient pop moment burst forth. Exploring the canonical figures, from The Beatles and Boty to Warhol and Reagan, 1966 delves deep into the social and cultural heart of the decade through masterfully compiled archival primary sources.

'A marvel of hisotrical reconstruction and pop insight.'
OBSERVER

'Absorbing . . . this is not only fine pop writing, but social history of a high order.'
GUARDIAN

'Savage is rightly regarded as one of the finest cultural critics of the past 40 years . . . an enthralling, exhiliarting read.'
IRISH TIMES

'Exceptional.'
MOJO

Jon Savage is the author of England's Dreaming: Sex Pistols and Punk Rock and Teenage: The Creation of Youth, 1875-1945. He is the writer of the award-winning film documentaries The Brian Epstein Story (1988) and Joy Division (2007), as well as the feature film Teenage (2013). His compilations include Meridian 1970 (Heavenly/EMI 2005) and Queer Noises: From the Closet to the Charts, 1961-1976 (Trikont 2006).

A sprawling tour de force about the pop music if 1966 and the seismic events in the world that helped shape it . . . vast in detail, breathtaking in scope and ambition.
The Times - Richard Whitehead

A marvel of historical reconstruction and pop insight.
Observer - Ian Thomson

Absorbing . . . This is not only fine pop writing, but social history of a high order.
Guardian - Bob Stanley

Erudite and imaginative . . . [Savage] plots a zigzag course through a turbulent and pivotal year, using a dozen key records as signposts to social change.
Guardian, Best Music Books of 2015 - Richard Williams

I have always imagined myself to be an impeccably liberal aesthete. But after reading about The Velvet Underground performing gigs with art-house films projected onto their faces, "ultra sounds" screaming from the amplifiers, accompanied by "sadomasochistic mime", I find that I am actually slightly to the right of Darth Vader - a discovery that only adds to this book's compulsive enjoyment . . .
engaging . . . hugely entertaining.
Daily Telegraph - Sinclair McKay

Savage is rightly regarded as one of the finest cultural critics of the past 40 years . . . it is a tribute to the breadth of vision that these 12 chapters could easily have spawned a dozen books . . . glorious . . . insightful and authoritative . . . an enthralling, exhilarating read.
Irish Times - Johnny Rogan

Reading the book often has the arresting effect of making us realise what to must have felt like to hear these songs for the first time.
Spectator - James Watson

Great.
The Herald - Teddy Jamieson

Masterly . . . a book full of fascinating details that most authors, being much lazier, would have failed to uncover . . . Savage will tell you all you want to know.
Daily Mail - Craig Brown

Superbly produced.
Irish Examiner - Alannah Hopkin

This was 1966; nobody quote knew what was going on. Now, thanks to this exceptional slice of pop culture history, we do.
Mojo - Mark Paytress

[1966] was somewhere beyond exciting, and Savage brilliantly captures the thrill of it all.
Uncut - Allan Jones

From pop to politics, 1966 brilliantly explores how one pivotal year changed our culture.
Stylist

Savage's best and most vital book since England's Dreaming. An intoxicating, cross-cultural survey that uniquely conveys the pure excitement and power of pop as a weapon for change. As always, after reading, you have learned something new which subtly shifts your pop-consciousness
Nicky Wire

It's a strength of this project that Savage opts out of the most told stories . . . the selection here of the unexpected, as a means to weave multiple contradictory strands together without losing clarity, is one of the book's pleasures.
The Wire - Mark Sinker

Jon Savage, in his erudite new book, remembers the year through its seminal pop music and the influence it had upon a rapidly changing world . . . The case is expressively made that the era's wild soul, pop and r'n'b rollercoaster informed the challenges to political outlooks and fuelled revolutions in art, literature, film and fashion.
Esquire

From Haight Ashbury to pirate radio, via the prosecution of the Rollling Stones and the arrival of the first double-album by a major artist (Bob Dylan's Blonde on Blonde), 1966 represents both a watershed and a high water mark in post war culture, a delineating moment the author documents in 12 chapters, each of which focuses on a scene-setting 45 while using primary sources to relay first-hand just how a single year turned into an epoch.
GQ

The book is a marvel, easily the match of Savage's celebrated punk chronicle England's Dreaming . . . pleasantly dense and beautifully textured, 1966 is like an album by a great band not often enough heard from, with all filler removed. It belongs on the shelf not just with rock chronicles of Greil Marcus but between David Kynaston's social history Austerity Britain and Eric Hobsbawm's peerless quarter on the 19th and 20th centuries.'
LA Review of Books - Scott Timberg