‘I remember being in my back garden in the very hot summer of 1966 listening to Radio Caroline. Every single record they were playing was great. I just look up at the sky in a sort of ecstasy and thought, “this is fantastic. This is the best as ever been”. I think everyone from my generation agrees.1965–1967 were the peak years in pop.’ (Ian Macdonald in Gorman, pp. 41–2). Jon Savage was among that generation.

Savage, an English writer, broadcaster and music journalist, best known for his influential book on the history of punk, England's Dreaming, published in 1991, has written one of the best books on the 1960s. In his book 1966: The Year the Decade Exploded, Savage explores that year's popular music and cultural turmoil.

The 12-month period between January and December of 1966 represents a kind of metaphorical tipping point, extending to vast areas of British life. It was the year in which Alf Ramsey's doughty gladiators ‘brought football home’ to the country of its birth, while contriving to win a figurative Third World War against their opponent, West Germany, along the way. It was also the year in which the Labour Party claimed its biggest electoral victory since the Attlee landslide of 1945. Popular music, as Savage reminds us, was also tantalisingly poised between the Beat explosion of 1963–1965, mod cacophonies and the psychedelic wig-outs inaugurated by The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band in the summer of 1967.

Savage's main aim is to explore what happened when political cultures and popular music cultures intersected during the 1960s. 1966 is a case in point. The conventional approaches to the relationship between popular music and the cultures of political protest in the 1960s can be described as moving between two poles: on the one hand, there is Arthur Marwick's (Reference Marwick1999) approach, brought forth in his cross-national survey of social change in the West during the ‘long nineteen-sixties’ (c. 1958–1974), when a ‘cultural revolution’ occurred, and in which protest music played a major role. On the other hand, there is Dominic Sandbrook's observation that the top-selling album of the 1960s was not some masterpiece by the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan or other leading figures in rock music, but the soundtrack of The Sound of Music (1965). It ‘projected a familiar, even conservative vision of the world, based on romantic love and family life. In a period of change it offered a sense of reassurance and stability, not only in its plot but also in its musical style … these were the values of millions … in the Swinging Sixties’ (Sandbrook, pp. 404–5).

Against the background of these two opinions, Savage's 1966 tries to establish connections between rock music and politics on the one hand and the emerging of protested youth subculture on the other. He argues that debates about the meaning and legacy of the 1960s in general, and its popular protest music in particular, should include a consideration of the nature of 1966 as a key year that not only continues to define us today but also remains insistently with us, for better or worse. Furthermore, Savage argues that it is the music of 1966 in particular that could give us an understanding of the nature of the decade, and only after examining it should we consider the most significant aspect of the 1960s: its social and cultural activism. Considering this argument it is a pity that Savage doesn't mention the social and economic problems of Britain which appeared in that ‘wonderful year’ (p. 204): the 1966 seaman's strike, the economic recession and the most terrible disaster of 1966, the Aberfan tragedy in Wales which killed 116 children and 28 adults, mentioned only briefly at pp. 464–5. There again, few of Savage's rock heroes mentioned it in their songs and their tour concerts.

Savage explains in the introduction that he ‘was attracted to 1966 because of the music and what I hear in it … ideas, attitudes, lyrics and musical experimentations … condensed within the two-to three minute format, the possibilities of 1966 are expressed with an extraordinary electricity and intensity’ (p. xi). Savage is a pop writer in the truest sense, having written for the NME, The Guardian and Mojo, among others. He is quick and to the point, doesn't waste words, and bottles an over-familiar song with maximum thrill and minimum fuss. Savage explores the various events and themes of 1966 in 12 essays, each based upon one record and a few cultural and political events that occurred in each month. He dedicates around 40 pages to each monthly essay, except the notorious month of August when Revolver by The Beatles was released and their traumatic tour of the USA ended in tears. Across nearly 60 pages describing what seems to be the most interesting month of the year, 1966 fluctuates between Sandbrook's conservatism and Marwick's social activism, with a clear tendency towards the former. Chiefly speaking, the nature and substance of pop music in 1966 is expressed more clearly in ‘Yellow Submarine’ than in Dylan's 1965 anthem ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ or the Rolling Stones’ 1968 ‘Street Fighting Man’. I think Savage recognises the apolitical nature of 1966 and his last words in the book, following a discussion of the Beatles’ musical activity in December 1966, ‘By then, it was 1967’, containing a possible hint that Savage intends to continue his discussion into 1967.