And besides that, there was stuff like SNL and a dozen other variety shows bands appeared on including the fucking Muppets, for Godsakes, and people were certainly making 'music videos' even before there was MTV. Just a few months before MTV there was Night Flight, and for years I watched Night Flight a lot more regularly than MTV (and the USA network also had Video Concert Hall). Seriously this is so wrong, it is staggering. And here, right here, on page 435 - I had skipped ahead in despair earlier only to read: 'After the demise of the Ed Sullivan Show, there was no concentrated, nationwide TV exposure of pop until MTV in 1981.' Now I'm thinking of all the other books I wish I had read instead of this one! A history of women in punk! A history of minorities in punk! Johnny Rotten's/John Lydon's autobiography! (I have that around here somewhere.) Hell I went and reread about a third of Please Kill Me the other day in desperation. Still continuing, hundreds of pages later.

No reference (yet) to the bondage scene which I always thought was a big inspiration - and wasn't Pynchon's Oedipa Maas drawn from that whole Nazi/bondage scenario? And that was in 1966. And wtf is up with all the real dodginess about fixating on people as Jewish and attributing various character traits to that and so on? Terribly offputting. Words I never wanted to read in this lifetime right there on page 56: '.another commission, this time for Ken Russell's flamboyant 'Mahler.' Asked to work out something for the climactic dream sequence where the Jewish composer confronts his Aryan anima.' PS Dear Savage: Describing any Ken Russell film anywhere ever as 'flamboyant' is not only bloody redundant it is INADEQUATE. (Also, NO, clothing did not 'become' costume in fucking -1968.- Moron.) It is a REAL question if I will finish this, and it's about one of my favourite periods of musical history! : 'Evocations of the thirties environment characteristic of the babyboomer childhood - a process which would peak with that palace of fun, Biba's superstore - went hand in hand with the fine-art codification in 1968 of thirties styles under the term Art Deco.' Who the fucking fuck writes like that? Did he program a robot?

England's Dreaming by Jon Savage