The vitality of London in the swinging '60s-and the pathetic,
sordid underbelly of it-ably conveyed by Levy (King of Comedy, not
reviewed, etc.). Three forces were at work in turning staid England
on its head, writes Levy: "Bohemians in Chelsea and Soho; radical
leftists from the universities and in the media; teens with
spending money" (this last very important, for the upsurge in the
British economy was the quiet partner to this romance). Londoners
had a war-and-recovery toughness, but they were also "people who'd
absorbed the sensibilities and attitudes of the French and the
Italians and grafted them onto the materiality and energy of the
Americans." This was no dropout crowd, however, as Levy notes, but
a New Aristocracy, a celebrity culture that was hardly inclusive.
It was fashioned by individuals like the photographer David Bailey
and model Jean Shrimpton, Vidal Sassoon and Mary Quant with their
"playful, puckish, geometric" designs in hair and clothes, Terence
Stamp, and, certainly, the music, to be understood as the Beatles
and the Stones. It was "excitable and overheated and dismissable
and convincing," all these bells and alarms in music, art, fashion,
sex, hair; it celebrated the ephemeral and was fascinated by, in
Francis Wyndham's words, "tinsel-a bright, brittle quality, the
more appealing because it tarnishes so soon." In other words, it
ate its children, but not before sealing its own fate with a taste
for drugs, bogus mysticism, and a bad case of blinkered attitude.
Economic and cultural malaise were in wait-"race trouble,
austerity, Thatcher, and the gob in the eye of punk rock as the
requisite retort." Goodbye, sunshine. Levy's wasn't-it-a-groove
closing chapter gets at only half the story that he has otherwise
documented so well, of a scene essentially imploding-and taking a
lot of lives along the way-from the start. (Kirkus Reviews)
For a few years in the 1960s, London was the coolest city on earth: a spontaneous, dizzying stew of pop music, fashion, film, scandal, drugs & sex, crime, the avant garde underground and the tabloid obsession with fame. The rest of the world watched in awe.
Snaking through it are such eminent swinging Londoners as The Dreamer (actor Terence Stamp), The Chameleon (Rolling Stone Mick Jagger), The Loner (Beatles manager Brian Epstein), The Snapper (photographer David Bailey) and The Blue Blood (art dealer Robert Fraser), as well as such figures as comedian Peter Cook; hairdresser Vidal Sassoon; singer Marianne Faithfull; fashion designer Mary Quant; supermodels Jean Shrimpton and Twiggy; gangsters Ron and Reggie Kray; actor Michael Caine; actresses Catherine Deneuve, Lynn Redgrave and Julie Christie; pop groups The Beatles, The Who and The Kinks; filmmakers Roman Polanski, Richard Lester and Michelangelo Antonioni; as well as the various participants in the Profumo scandal, the Great Train Robbery, the rise of LSD, the radical underground, the heyday of the gambling club and the fashion boutique and various and sundry scandals, scenes and sensations.
Due to a combination of massive talent and sheer luck, they dominated the world scene. But the party was to end ? after seven short years it seemed that everyone was now a Swinging Londoner and the same vibe was found in Paris, New York and San Francisco.
Ready, Steady, Go recreates the whole show and contrasts a series of emblematic lives with the great events that shaped the time. Through these stories, Shawn Levy, author of Rat Pack Confidential, shows how the city re-invented cool and then seemed to lose it's swing altogether.
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