This book is a work of press history that considers how the music press represented permissive social change for their youthful readership. Read by millions every week, the music press provided young people across the country with a guide to the sounds, personalities and controversies that shaped British popular music and, more broadly, British culture and society. By analysing music papers and oral history interviews with journalists and editors, Patrick Glen examines how papers represented a lucrative entertainment industry and mass press that had to negotiate tensions between alternative sentiments and commercial prerogatives. This book demonstrates, as a consequence, how music papers constructed political positions, public identities and social mores within the context of the market. As a result, descriptions and experiences of social change and youth were contingent on the understandings of class, gender, sexuality, race and locality.
Let’s spend the night together explores how sex and sexuality provided essential elements of British youth culture in the 1950s through to the 1980s. It shows how the underlying sexual charge of rock ‘n’roll – and pop music more generally – was integral to the broader challenge embodied in the youth cultures that developed after World War Two. As teenage hormones rushed to move to the music and take advantage of the spaces opening up through consumption, education and employment, so the boundaries of British morality and cultural propriety were tested and often transgressed. Be it the assertive masculinity of the teds or the lustful longings of the teeny-bopper, the gender-bending of glam or the subterranean allure of an underground club/disco, the free love of the 1960s or the punk provocations in the 1970s, sex was forever to the fore and, more often than not, underpinned the moral panics that fitfully followed any cultural shift in youthful style and behaviour. Drawing from scholarship across a range of disciplines, the Subcultures Network explore how sex and sexuality were experienced, presented, conferred, responded to and understood within the context of youth culture, popular music and social change in the period between World War Two and the advent of AIDS. The essays locate sex, music and youth culture in the context of post-war Britain: with a widening and ever-more prevalent media; amidst the loosening bonds of censorship; in a society shaped by changing patterns of consumption and the emergence of the ‘teenager’; existing, as Jeff Nuttall famously argued, under the shadow of the (nuclear) bomb.
This book is a work of press history that considers how the music press represented permissive social change for their youthful readership. Read by millions every week, the music press provided young people across the country with a guide to the sounds, personalities and controversies that shaped British popular music and, more broadly, British culture and society. By analysing music papers and oral history interviews with journalists and editors, Patrick Glen examines how papers represented a lucrative entertainment industry and mass press that had to negotiate tensions between alternative sentiments and commercial prerogatives. This book demonstrates, as a consequence, how music papers constructed political positions, public identities and social mores within the context of the market. As a result, descriptions and experiences of social change and youth were contingent on the understandings of class, gender, sexuality, race and locality.
In the 1970s, Northern Soul held a pivotal position in British youth culture. Originating in the English North and Midlands in the late-1960s, by the mid-1970s it was attracting thousands of enthusiasts across the country. This book is a social history of Northern Soul, examining the origins and development of this music scene, its clubs, publications and practices. Northern Soul emerged in a period when working class communities were beginning to be transformed by deindustrialisation and the rise of new political movements around the politics of race, gender and locality. Locating Northern Soul in these shifting economic and social contexts of the English North and Midlands in the 1970s, the authors argue that people kept the faith not just with music, but with a culture that was connected to wider aspects of work, home, relationships and social identities. Drawing on an expansive range of sources, including oral histories, magazines and fanzines, diaries and letters, this book offers a detailed and empathetic reading of a working class culture that was created and consumed by thousands of young people in the 1970s. The authors highlight the complex ways in which class, race and gender identities acted as forces for both unity and fragmentation on the dancefloors of iconic clubs such as the Twisted Wheel in Manchester, Blackpool Mecca, the Torch in Stoke-on-Trent, the Catacombs in Wolverhampton and the Casino in Wigan. Marking a significant contribution to the historiography of youth culture, this book is essential reading for those interested in popular music and everyday life in in postwar Britain.
This Companion is the first academic introduction to the 1960s/70s 'Krautrock' movement of German experimental music that has long attracted the attention of the music press and fans in Britain and abroad. It offers a structured approach to this exceptionally heterogeneous and decentralized movement, combining overviews with detailed analysis and close readings. The volume first analyzes the cultural, historical and economic contexts of Krautrock's emergence. It then features expert chapters discussing all the key bands of the era including Can, Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream, Neu!, Faust, Ash Ra Tempel, Cluster and Amon Düül II. The volume concludes with essays that trace the varied, wide-ranging legacy of Krautrock from a variety of perspectives, exploring in particular the impact of German experimental music in the Anglosphere, including British post-punk and Detroit Techno. A final chapter examining the current bands that continue the Krautrock sound closes this comprehensive overview of the Krautrock phenomenon.
In 1976 the British band Throbbing Gristle emerged from the radical arts collective COUM Transmissions through core members Genesis P-Orridge and Cosey Fanni Tutti, joined by Hipgnosis photographer Peter Christopherson and electronics specialist Chris Carter. Though having performed previously in more low-key arts environments, their major launch coincided with the COUM retrospective exhibition Prostitution at London’s ICA gallery, showcasing and contextualising an array of challenging objects from COUM’s various actions in performance art and pornography. In a deliberately curated strategy inviting press, civic and arts dignitaries, extravagant followers of the nascent punk scene and music journalists, the band created an instant controversy and media panic that tapped into the restrictive climate and encroaching conservatism of late 1970s Britain. Any opportunities that were being explored by a formative punk ethos and movement around sex, censorship and transgression were amplified and exposed by Throbbing Gristle and Prostitution. An outraged Member of Parliament Nicholas Fairbairn took the bait and called the ensemble the ‘wreckers of civilisation’, providing the suitable newspaper headline that would be followed a month later by ‘the filth and the fury’ as the Sex Pistols uttered strong profanities on live television. The switch from COUM to Throbbing Gristle encompassed a primary mode of expression in making music as opposed to art, to further coincide with the energy of the nascent punk scene. The band quickly developed a radically deviant and challenging reputation through pushing the punk format past its strictures in terms of lyrical themes, amateurism, and considerations of what constitutes music. Through a handful or record releases on their own label Industrial Records, and a sporadic string of live performances, the band nurtured a strong and devoted following including key journalists and fanzine editors of the punk and post-punk scenes such as Jon Savage and Sandy Robertson. The band’s style of exploring harsh pre-recorded sounds, samples of disconcerting narrative and conversation, and feeding all sounds through messy electronic processing devices gave rise to the title industrial music. This was further buttressed by performing a strictly timed set of one hour, and adopting a non-rockstar mode by appearing disinterested and preoccupied with electronic devices. Having given a name and impetus to the industrial music scene, many of their followers and fans formed bands in later years. Drawing on works such as Andy Bennett’s When the Lights Went Out, this book looks at late 1970s Britain, before, during and immediately after the Winter of Discontent, to situate the activism of Throbbing Gristle in this time. It explores how the band worked in and against the time, and how they worked in and against punk as punk worked in and against the time and place. Punk acts as a mediating factor and nuisance value, as Throbbing Gristle emerged with punk in late 1976, seemingly grappled with it through 1977, and then went on to create and eventually criticise a number of post-punk scenes that had flourished around 1979. Trowell narrates the story through a series of live performances, as this is a point where Throbbing Gristle interact with the various city-scenes around England during their original period of operation (1975-1981). The band reflected (and incorporated into their live music) key tropes form the time, both ‘mainstream’ and fringe (subcultural, avant-garde art, counter-culture, taboo subjects, extremes) such that Throbbing Gristle events had an impact and affect, and Trowell traces these as a series of impressions and reverberations amongst fans who went on to do their own music and projects.
Reviews of the first edition “Not only does the clarity of the authors’ writing make the book very accessible, but their argument is also illustrated throughout with a broad range of empirical material … undoubtedly a strong contribution to the study of both contemporary youth and ‘late-modern’ society.” Youth Justice “A very accessible, well-evidenced and important book … It succeeds in raising important questions in a new and powerful way.” Journal of Education and Work “the book will be very popular with students and with academics…..The clarity of the organization, expression and argument is particularly commendable. I have no doubt that Young People and Social Change will rightly find its way onto the recommended reading lists of many in the field.” Professor Robert MacDonald, University of Teesside A welcome update to one of the most influential and authoritative books on young people in modern societies. With a fuller theoretical explanation and drawing on a comprehensive range of studies from Europe, North America, Australia and Japan, the second edition of Young People and Social Change is a valuable contribution to the field. The authors examine modern theoretical interpretations of social change in relation to young people and provide an overview of their experiences in a number of key contexts such as education, employment, the family, leisure, health, crime and politics. Building on the success of the previous edition, the second edition offers an expanded theoretical approach and wider coverage of empirical data to take into account worldwide developments in the field. Drawing on a wealth of research evidence, the book highlights key differences between the experiences of young people in different countries in the developed world. Young People and Social Change offers a wide-ranging and up-to-date introductory text for students in sociology of youth, sociology of education, social stratification and related fields.
Sixties Britain provides a more nuanced and engaging history of Britain. This book analyses the main social, political, cultural and economic changes Britain undertook as well as focusing on the 'silent majority' who were just as important as the rebellious students, the residents if Soho and the icons of popular culture. Sixties Britain engages the reader without losing sight of the fact that the 1960s were a vibrant, fascinating and controversial time in British History.
