dim lights, provocative gyrations, drug-taking and ‘sexual misconduct’

epub or mobi, with thanks to the original sharer

‘The Strip was suddenly alive with hairy teen hobos and older hippies in nifty belly-button-baring shirts and little girls with mop straight hair and belted hip huggers settled low and cool on their anatomies. The convergence of social types has created a permanent bumper-to-bumper weekend traffic jam in which it now takes some 30 sardine-like minutes to inch along the strip’s 1.7 miles. Modernist architecture added a celestial feeling to the drive-in restaurants, underground theatres, and coffeehouses, not to mention more than 35 psychedelic/mod nightclubs catering to the scene.’

Dance halls are notoriously great factors in breaking down morality

 

pdf (556 pages / 50MB), with thanks to the original sharer

Rubbishing all those etiquette strictures, the freedoms allowed partaken of by female swing fans also included sex. "The girls would wave at us and many of the boys in the band would motion to the girls to meet them at the stage door." Goodman remembered seeing his first jitterbug in 1934, when a dancer started to go "off his conk. His eyes rolled, his limbs began to spin like a windmill in a hurricane - his attention, riveted to the rhythm, transformed him into a whirling dervish." The Catholic bishop of Dubuque denounced swing as "evil" and "communistic": "We permit jam sessions, jitterbug and cannibalistic rhythm orgies to occupy a place in our social scheme of things, wooing our youth along the primrose path to hell." ...

Secretly attending a February 1940 dance, the Gestapo agents were horrified: "There was only swing of the worst sort. Sometimes two boys danced with one girl, bent double, with the top half of the body hanging loosely down, long hair flopping into the face, they dragged themselves round practically on their knees. The band played wilder and wilder items; none of the players was sitting down any longer, they all 'jitterbugged' on the stage like wild creatures. Several boys could be observed dancing together, always with two cigarettes in the mouth, one in each corner." The swings' lifestyle reversed almost every Nazi tenet. Instead of uniformity, they proclaimed difference; instead of aggression, overt sexuality.

you have to remember that until 1967 they weren't even house trained

pdf scan (178 pages / 152MB)

A black and violent thriller series, The Avengers, aroused particular excitement through Miss Blackman's 'kinky' black leather costumes. And indeed the London-centred craze for 'kinky' black boots, 'kinky' black raincoats, and 'kinky' black leather or plastic garments of all kinds raged throughout that autumn. By July 1965 this frenzy was only a symptom of the gathering strain beneath, as the 'swinging city' galvanized itself for a last flight into the stratosphere. Never before had London been a town so fashionably obsessed with kinks, with sexual abnormality and make-believe violence.

All of us drop-outs and fuck-ups got together and started a movement

pdf, with thanks to the original sharer

The rockabilly thing was huge from about ’72; The White Hart and the Lyceum on a Sunday night, it was wall to wall teddy boys. You had young kids coming in asking for ‘graffiti rock’. They all had their copies of the American Graffiti album and they wanted more of it ...

The songs they did before they went political were much better than the ones they did afterwards: ‘How Can I Understand the Flies’, that was my favourite song, and ‘I’ve Got a Crush on You’. They were like a proper sixties punk band. An American Nuggets-type group. But when they started that political crap, I went right off them. There wasn’t any need for it, really ...

People think that the early days of punk were all banging along at Sex Pistols gigs, but the early days for me were camping it up down Park Lane with a gang of trannies, and looning about. When me and Tracie hung out, we were going off down Park Lane, getting hold of some Arab and not doing anything apart from ripping him off of a whole heap of money.

beatniks, drug pedlars, sexual delinquents and Mods

available in many formats at the internet archive [new link in comments 16/10/12]

Rock'n'Roll landed in the British Isles like a Martian spaceship. There was scarcely the Afro-American music or subculture here that could prepare anyone for the brutality and sheer sexual explosiveness of the records that, between 1954 and 1959, seemed to drop from heaven like the offerings of a cargo cult. These records were so transforming that nobody who heard them could find a language to explain them except in the phrases of the songs themselves, which talked in tongues: 'A Wop Bop A Loo Bop', 'Be Bop A Lula'.

"Edwardian suits, Dance music and a Dagger..."

pdf scan from The Face 1982 (6 pages/13MB)

Most sources, both oral and received, seem to agree that the Edwardians "began" in the Elephant & Castle area of South London, an area that before its hideous, award-winning redevelopment of the mid-Fifties, had a long-rooted history of working class crime, flash, marginality. People around the Elephant were a bit...lairy.-Jon Savage