1966: The Year the Decade Exploded - Softcover

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

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

This was 1966; nobody quite knew what was going on. Now, thanks to this exceptional slice of pop culture history, we do. (Mojo)

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)

[C]ultural chronicler 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. (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 a epoch. (GQ)

Savage is to be congratulated for confounding the preconceptions of the there's-nothing-new-you-can-tell-me-about-this brigade once again. Having achieved the same in his now seminal punk text England's Dreaming, and surpassing it via the pages of the extraordinary and revelatory Teenage, 1966sets a new benchmark in cultural storytelling. (Wales Arts Review)

Exquisitely written, stuffed full of great ideas and crackling with music, this is not only a great book about pop culture but about the sixties themselves and is a riveting and thrilling can't put down read. (Louder Than War)

The pop world accelerated and broke through the sound barrier in 1966. In America, in London, in Amsterdam, in Paris, revolutionary ideas slow-cooking since the late '50s reached boiling point. In the worlds of pop, pop art, fashion and radical politics -- often fueled by perception-enhancing substances and literature -- the 'Sixties', as we have come to know them, hit their Modernist peak. A unique chemistry of ideas, substances, freedom of expression and dialogue across pop cultural continents created a landscape of immense and eventually shattering creativity. Jon Savage's 1966 is a monument to the year that shaped the pop future of the balance of the century. Exploring canonical artists like The Beatles, The Byrds, Velvet Underground, The Who and The Kinks, 1966 also goes much deeper into the social and cultural heart of the decade through unique archival primary sources.