Author Jon Savage says 1966 was full of "noise and tumult'', as he explores that year's pop cultural revolution 50 years on. He talks to Gavin Bertram.
"It just kept building and building,'' Beach Boy Dennis Wilson said of recording his group's late 1966 hit Good Vibrations.
Although contemplating what was then the most complicated and expensive single made Wilson could have been talking about the cultural revolution of the year it was born.
That's why British author Jon Savage's innocuously titled 1966 carries the more descriptive subtitle The Year the Decade Exploded.
The recently published book documents that exuberant year, precisely half a century ago, through 12 judiciously chosen 7-inch vinyl singles released across the months of 1966.
It is an audacious method for exploring a pivotal year in pop culture. As the writer reflects, it has allowed for a highly personal journey of nostalgia.
The 13-year-old Savage was studying towards a scholarship to a public school during the first half of 1966. But he was also transfixed by pop music.
"In the first two-thirds of the year I was a West London pop child,'' he remembers.
"I was being a good boy and pleasing my parents, and at the same time I was listening to all these records on pirate radio and was already an obsessive music fan.''
As the author reflects, it was a big year of change for him, moving from his beloved small school in Ealing to the large public school that he didn't like.
Savage's own experience of upheaval mirrored what was occurring in pop music during 1966.
The form quickly assumed a leading role at the vanguard of cultural change, outgrowing its uncomplicated beginnings and evolving into something far more ambitious.
The flourishing sophistication of both the songwriting and studio production was most obvious in big league pop artists such as the Beatles and the Beach Boys.
In 1966, the Beatles released the album Revolver, and recorded the extraordinary single Strawberry Fields Forever, working on innovative new production techniques with producer George Martin at Abbey Road Studio.
Meanwhile, in California, the Beach Boys' troubled musical genius Brian Wilson was creating studio masterpieces such as the Pet Sounds album and the Good Vibrations single.
Savage takes in these landmarks in 1966, while also visiting more obscure releases including the Ugly's The Quiet Explosion, Love's 7 and 7 Is, and the Dovers' The Third Eye.
But the 12 singles he focuses on are simply prisms through which broader social changes of that year can be viewed.
Themes such as the Vietnam War, gay rights, Swinging London, the impact of LSD and other drugs, civil rights, and the burgeoning of teen culture are closely examined.
"It was fascinating for me to research gay rights, and women's rights, and civil rights,'' Savage says.
"It was fascinating to go into what was happening in the world when I was that age. It's an attempt to understand what I heard in those records, which was a kind of freedom. The book is basically about freedom.''
• Writing 1966 felt like a kind of freedom for Savage, after the extended agony he experienced while completing his previous book, published in 2008.
Teenage: The Creation of Youth 1875-1945 was a vast project that took seven years to write.
Savage recalls that it wasn't an enjoyable process, especially given how little authors are paid for their work these days.
"Teenage took me a really long time,'' he says.
"And that was serious - I had to talk about the world wars and it was really upsetting. I came out of the Imperial War Museum, where I'd been researching the first world war, and I was sick in a bush.
"I couldn't bear it - it was so horrible that it had that physical impact on me. I decided that next time I do a book I wanted to be somewhere where I wanted to be. I thought, ‘oh yes, I want to be in 1966'.''
Where Teenage described the gradual dawning of a demographic phenomenon, 1966 has more in common with Savage's earlier England's Dreaming: the Sex Pistols and Punk Rock.
Published in 1991, the book remains the most authoritative portrayal of the punk explosion in England during the mid-1970s.
Savage had been in the midst of it.
After completing a degree at the University of Cambridge, he abandoned a career in law when punk emerged in 1975.
Instead he published the punk fanzine London Outrage, and later became a journalist at weekly music publications Sounds and Melody Maker.
He suggests that the cultural revolution inspired by the Sex Pistols' brief reign of terror was comparable to the turbulence of a decade earlier.
"I think it was a bit like the punk period in a way, although 1966 is much bigger,'' Savage says.
"Everybody thought they were doing something interesting and worthy of note. Though I don't know whether they thought people would still be talking about them 50 years in the future.''
In Britain, the countercultural movement of 1966 had its roots in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament organisation earlier in the decade.
Formed in the late 1950s, CND peaked during the protest marches to the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston, near London, in 1961 and 1962.
Each of these marches attracted 150,000 campaigners, and instilled a radical edge in the young people involved.
"People were terrified of being blown up in a nuclear war; it was one of the big fears of the time,'' Savage says.
"CND very much gave a structure for a nationwide youth culture, and British counterculture was very much influenced by and peopled by the same people who'd been involved with CND. You had this idea of a kind of a critical youth culture.''
The author emphasises the immense role that drugs such as LSD and marijuana played in crystallising that culture into a movement that rejected the prevailing values of the mid-1960s.
On both sides of the Atlantic, LSD was a catalyst, with advocates such as former Harvard academics Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert in the United States, and Michael Hollingshead in Britain.
Hollingshead took part in the intensive hallucinogenic drug research that Leary and Alpert conducted at the Millbrook estate in New York, before founding the World Psychedelic Centre in London.
There, he introduced a generation of British musicians to LSD.
The drug only became illegal in Britain in 1966, and Savage is convinced that it had a huge impact on the era's music and the culture.
"LSD is bloody strong, and it does change the way you see things,'' he says.
"It really did change a lot I think. The Beatles took it, the Rolling Stones took it, Bob Dylan took it; these were the people who were the heart of youth culture, and they were taking this incredibly strong drug that made you look at the world in a different way.''
The drugs, new studio technology, and bigger recording budgets combined to create an atmosphere in popular music that Savage defines as "a sort of mass-market avant-garde''.
He says that has never been reproduced since, explaining that a modern pop entity like One Direction could never take an artistic leap like that achieved by the Beatles between 1961 and 1966.
"It's to do with demographic changes,'' Savage says.
"This is what 1966 is partly seeking to explain: why the '60s were the '60s, why there was that incredible energy, and why there was that incredible outburst.''
The humble 7-inch single provides the perfect vehicle for the writer's exploration of 1966.
It was the final year that the single would be such an important cultural artefact. In 1967, the LP (long-playing) album would become pop music's primary currency, outselling the 7-inch for the first time, and a split would develop between underground and psychedelic music, and what Savage calls "mum's and dad's music''.
"[In 1966] everything was poured into the single, so you had ideas being compressed into two and a-half or three minutes,'' he explains.
"There wasn't yet an underground, so everything was focused on the pop charts, and there was something very exciting about everything being funnelled into this arena of the Top 40. It was an interesting mixture of commerciality and adventure, and fairly soon the two things seemed to be quite separate.''
After the difficulties he'd encountered writing Teenage, using 7-inch singles as a way of structuring 1966 was immediately appealing to Savage.
He says that the decision absolved him of the responsibility of trying to definitively cover all the events of 1966 in the book.
He cites the chapter on May as an example.
It was the month that Bob Dylan undertook his first tour as an electric rather than acoustic musician, a move that was met with hostility, especially in Britain.
Savage doesn't cover those events in 1966, with May instead dedicated to "The Feminine Mystique and Female Independence''.
"I wasn't aiming to be definitive so it was just too bad,'' he says.
"I couldn't do everything. And in fact I talk about Dylan quite a lot throughout. Having that structure meant that there were various things I didn't really deal with in detail, but you have to make those decisions.''
• A prime motivation for writing 1966 is that Savage believes there has been a concerted attempt to repaint what happened in Britain that year.
He's adamant that "there's been a counterattack on the '60s by right-wing historians and commentators'', who have propagated the idea that it boiled down to just 200 people on the fringes in London.
Savage refutes that idea, stating that not seeing your own experience reflected in the literature is always a good reason for writing a book.
He augmented his experiences as a 13-year-old by re-immersing himself in the music of 1966, and by thoroughly researching the music press of the day.
Music publications such as the New Musical Express served their readers well, Savage says, and he saw many of his own ideas about 1966 reflected on their pages from the time.
He found that the music was as important as he'd remembered it.
"I think pop music from that period has lasted incredibly well,'' he says.
"It's still a sort of touchstone period. It was really more special than I thought, to be honest. It really was a magnificent year, and it did repay my interest, and the hype that we did think it was the year that everything exploded.''
Savage discloses that he has "a bit of New Zealand relevance'', as his father lived in this country when he was young.
The family emigrated to Auckland from Ireland in 1919, before the writer's grandmother and his father returned to the United Kingdom a decade later, leaving his grandfather behind.
The veteran music journalist racks his brain for a New Zealand music reference point, ultimately arriving at a classic Dunedin Sound act.
"New Zealand, hmmm ... oh yeah, Flying Nun,'' Savage proclaims.
"There was one fantastic track called Throwing Stones ... who was it by ... Sneaky Feelings?''
That song appeared on the band's 1983 debut album Send You, and was written by David Pine, now New Zealand's High Commissioner to Malaysia.
Like Pine, Savage has moved on.
He doesn't like contemporary rock music, listening instead to electronic music, mentioning recent albums from British act Underworld, and Canadian techno pioneer Richie Hawtin.
"I always wanted pop music to sound new really; I don't want it to be old,'' Savage reflects.
"Having heard rock music in 1966 when it was beginning and exciting, I don't understand the point of it any more. Well, I do; rock music is there as generational identification, and I'm too old for that now; I don't need it.''
The book
• 1966: The Year the Decade Exploded by Jon Savage is published by Faber and Faber.
