to get away from the pits and the factories, all that cloth-capped bullshit

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When the scene was at its most vigorous there was this tremendous search for obscurities, and a lot of great records surfaced as a result. But after a while, the chances of discovering some old masterpiece diminish. I started Northern Soul but I actually found the music very limiting because in the early days I’d play a Charles Mingus record, then I’d play a bluebeat disc followed by a Booker T. tune, then a Muddy Waters or Bo Diddley record. Gradually there was this blanding out to one sort of sound. When I started DJing, I could play what I wanted. But after three years I had to keep to the same tempo.

Vince Taylor was ordered to shave off his sideburns before appearing

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Hardcore Teds hated skiffle, the acceptable face of youth, patronized by vicars, teachers and youth club leaders. After playing at a community hall the West Side Skifflers from the Methodist Church were ambushed by twenty Teds. 'We want rock 'n' roll not skiffle' they shouted as they beat the group with their own instruments … the demand for rock 'n' roll never went away. DJ Tony Blackburn was sent a razor-blade sandwich through the post, accompanied by a message threatening to shove it down his throat if he didn't play a rocking record ... The arrival of rock 'n' roll changed the atmosphere of the dance halls. The music was a dangerous and destructive force that worked the listener into a mindless frenzy. The very term 'rock 'n' roll' was slang for sexual intercourse ... During a disturbance at a dance, girls began chanting 'We want sex, we want sex'. The dance ended in chaos as fireworks were let off ... 

Vince Taylor was black leather and chains, the final rocker.

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From the start, Pepsi has been based on a single age-old precept: it's fun to be a freak. And it is, of course. It's fun to get stoned and float on giant cushions, to stay up past your bedtime. And it's fun to visit Hair, to go up on stage and dance with the kids, belonging, and believe that you've had access to secret knowledge, revelations that the straight world doesn't even suspect. It is even fun to be misunderstood, to feel yourself martyred, a rebel and outsider. What isn't much fun, though, is to be punched in the face and thrown into jail. Not at all, it isn't and, therefore, the political and philosophical basis of the movement has been more or less forgotten. In the heart of the Pepsi Rock fan, there lurks a secret shame at the blatancy and vulgarity of the music's past, Elvis in his gold lame suit, Little Richard jumping on the piano and Jerry Lee Lewis so greasy, all those wild and orgiastic exhibitions. Just like the jazz fans of 1960, who preferred Dave Brubeck to John Coltrane, they want it both ways: they want to be hip, to be in the game and yet, in the end, they don't want to get their feet wet.

Drunks, derelicts, wide-boys on the make, storytellers, argufiers

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I roamed the night city - a leather pub in Gateshead, a boxers' pub in Byker, a tarts' pub off Scotswood Road. Self-conscious myself, I worshipped abandon in others. And Newcastle, against all probabilities, turned out to be full of the stuff. The city's bleak surfaces hid all manner of chameleons and inspired excessives: Eric Burdon transforming himself into a Mississippi sharecropper; a lady named Gala who swallowed flames in the nude; and the raddled old queen, met late one boozy night at Central Station, who claimed to have been raped by Winston Churchill. 'Winnie the Poof,' the old queen called him, and showed me, wrapped up in a white lace handkerchief, the tarnished half-crown he claimed had been his hush money.
For me, this was a secret city. There were the public streets, four-square and massive, aggressively masculine. And then there was the hidden: the jigsaw of chares and alleys and precipice drops that cobwebbed the docks and the hillside above them. Clubs seemed like bunkers then. The Downbeat was a stark room at the top of an abandoned warehouse, the A'Go-Go stuck down a cul-de-sac, the New Orleans a rotting tooth in a razed street. Jazz and the blues were a code, and nightlife an underworld - not criminal, exactly, but seductively outlaw.

the speakers be blaring Tito Puente and all that good Latin shit

 

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"Lemme tell you about Broadway. The truth," he said. "People think it's about bright lights, this star and that star, unnerstand, the theaters and babes, limousines, the big wheels and cheeses, all that order of affairs." His face was all knots and gnarls, liver spots; it looked like riven oak. "It's not about that," he said.

"Then what?"

"Quirks," said Izzy Grove.

He pushed away his empty glass, a gesture of abdication. "City pols and landlords call them crazies, freaks, call them bums. But quirks is all they are," he said. "Just people a little different, they got some kind of bug in their heads, some kinda notion, unnerstand. It could be singing, dancing, could be fighting, could be selling the best sturgeon, schtupping the most broads, anything. Wearing a pink tie with lobsters on it. Dancing the Big Apple in their underwear. Could be nothing wears a name." His eyes behind the thick glasses would not stop leaking. "Just some tweak like an itch, won't let them be. So they don't fit in, they got no place, see what I mean. No place except for Broadway, and now they don't got that."

In Moscow, the youth gangs that counted had all been named after English pop groups of the sixties, the more obscure the cooler. Wimp suburbanites chose the Beatles and Rolling Stones; inner-city stylists preferred the Yardbirds or Them. On Novokuz, which must always be hippest of all, prime icons included John's Children, the Action, the Troggs. Sasha himself had been a Fruit Eating Bear, but they were fragile goods and shattered at the first contact with the Pretty Things, who were the neighborhood kingpins. The Things had the deadliest weapons, the sharpest clothes; they looked the most Western. Only the Hi-Numbers dared challenge them.

"English girls take to sex as if it’s candy and it’s delicious."

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Pete Townsend: "It was incestuous, secretive. Difficult to be a real up-to-the-minute Mod 'cause no cunt would tell you where to get the clothes." The Mods fighting and fucking in the alleyways of seaside resort towns were followers and parasites who'd merely adopted the poses of the first strains of Mod without any agenda other than raw kicks. They'd seen the fashions, haircuts and dances on Ready, Steady, Go! but they had nothing to do with the cultish London originals who had invented the scene out of wholecloth. True Mods were really too concerned with their clothes to want to ruin them by fighting with worthless rockers.

a wild sex-house, drink-house and doss-house all slammed into one

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The Lazy Hoop is the only coffee bar in the entire market. It's not a cafe, not a place where the market people go themselves, but a smart, dolled-up little place with a juke box and frothy coffee and plastic table tops. Students go there, sixth-formers on their way home from school, huddles of black leather boys come in to play a few records, a few men who go to see if they can't pick up some nice, juicy schoolgirl. He buys himself a coffee and sits down. The record on the jukebox plays too loud, a hoarse voice droning: 'Baby, keep your big mouth shut,' the guitars racing along behind like a cavalry charge. Laurie sits beside a group of five or six students, puts brown sugar in his cup, fiddles with the spoon. The students are talking about parties, nights when there were flower vases at the end of the hall for the men to piss into, nights when beat poets stood up on tables and declaimed, when there was a woman who had her head shaved bald ... what a rave! What a rave! Three boys and two women there are, and all of them shrieking with their laughter, lurching forward and back over the tables. Laurie takes time off to wonder in a vague way if he was ever the same, if this chatter could ever have raised even a grin in him.

Johnny Angelo was slashing up his seat with his flick knife

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the swashbuckling original Secker & Warburg novel, not the paperback re-write put out by Penguin. 

It was a very passionate time, it was one of the most exciting times there's ever been. Johnny Angelo would go to the coffee bar every night. Catsmeat trailing in behind him. They sat in the far corner booth by the jukebox, out of the cold, cupping soggy cigarettes in the palm of their hands. The jukebox was made of silver and gold and it had highlights that twinkled and it played fantastic records: Larry Williams, Bony Moronie. Bill Haley, Don't Knock the Rock. Little Richard, Miss Ann. The volume stayed switched on way up loud just as long as Johnny Angelo sat there. He didn't want to hear anything in the world but good hard Rock, he didn't even want to know anything else existed. On his back, in great high silver letters, his leather jacket read ELVIS.

 

a man that don't lie got nothing to say

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The exact design he had visioned was not in stock; he was forced to settle for a retro Beatle. The toes were too pointed, the heels too Cuban, and the leather was mere Padua, but at least they were not disfigured by buckles. All the way up Broadway he felt rabid, scraped raw, but exulting; a thoroughbred on the muscle. Every bitch he passed, it seemed, had legs up to her armpits. Long, lissome and luciferous—what man had said that? At the corner of 42nd, a girl in cut-offs saw his boots, and she flashed him her scars. Razor slashes, they looked like, and maybe a cigarette burn or two. If there was one thing that lit Willie’s candle, always had done, it was a quality deformity, and these looked aces high.

visions of kids copulating on dance floors, mass national debauch

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After the show, I hung around in the dressing-rooms. The Stones were being ritually vicious to everyone, fans and journalists and hangers-on regardless, and I got bored. So I went down into the auditorium and it was empty, quite deserted, but there was this weird smell. Piss: the small girls had screamed too hard and wet themselves. Not just one or two of them but many, so that the floor was sodden and the stench was overwhelming. Well, it was disgusting. No, it wasn't disgusting but it was strange, the empty cinema (chocolate boxes, cigarette packs, ice-lolly sticks) and this sad sour smell. Throughout this chapter, I've kept on saying how great the Stones were but all I've shown is evil and the question finally needs to be asked: what's so good about bad?

It was release, it was an orgy, it was a whole new religion.

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Ladies sat lazy in their windows, draped in silks, and from within there came the sounds of the dirty blues, where the professors were playing boogie and the girls were dancing naked in the halls. In the Moriarty tenderloin, what's more, nobody walked the pavements, they spilled all over the streets instead, winners intermingling with losers, the rich with the poor regardless, the millionaires and the madams and the big-time gamblers, the cheapies and  hucksters, punks and palookas, the third-class chippies at their cribs, the dope fiends of the orient, the greaseball Mexicanos and the turbaned Sikhs, the Italian pimps with luminous socks, the gigolos and fancy dans, the professors and the lawmen and the faggots, the entire span of humanity at one time and place, all intermingled in one rich stew, and there was no distinction made, all men were equal.