Jon Savage

Years attended: 2017

Discipline: FilmWriting

Jon Savage is a writer, broadcaster and music journalist,  known for his award-winning history of the Sex Pistols and punk music, England’s Dreaming, published in 1991, and more recently his book and BBC TV documentary 1966, recalling the popular music and cultural turmoil of that year, published in 2015.

Savage came to prominence as a writer during the glory days of British punk and interviewing and writing articles on all the major punk acts. He wrote and published a fanzine called London’s Outrage in 1976, and in 1977 began working as a journalist for Sounds, which with NME and Melody Maker was then one of the UK’s three major music papers. He also wrote for the West Coast fanzines Search and Destroy, Bomp! and Slash.

In 2017 he co-curated the exhibition True Faith at Manchester Art Gallery which explores the ongoing significance and legacy of New Order and Joy Division through the wealth of visual art their music has inspired.