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 ... 

the dance floor erupted into a pornographic American Bandstand

 

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In the dining room, Roylene had pushed a table to one side and lined it with liquor. A girl wearing men's pin-striped trousers and a matching man's vest with no shirt but a push-up bra supporting impressive breasts, sat apart from the rest, eyeing me.

“You dance?” she asked finally.

“Not well,” I responded.

Coco and the others giggled. Coco explained that the girl wanted to know if I was a stripper. A former exotic dancer herself, Roylene had invited some cronies to perform at her house for a percentage of their tips. This led them into whispered obscene chatter - interrupted by howls of laughter - about how white girls called a man's penis his “cock.” To them, Coco said, cock meant “pussy.”

The pretty girl in the man's vest now slithered into a corner, where she began to strip, pelvis gently undulating for the benefit of a frail old man in a baseball cap and a younger man wearing a cowboy hat. The one in the cowboy hat stuck some bills in her waistband. As we left, a woman in a red leather bra and a painted-on black leather skirt poured herself a drink at the table, singing to herself in a bluesy voice about how she was just a victim of the ghetto, headed nowhere.

“Sing it, Beverly!” Roylene cried.

“I am singing it.” The woman lifted her glass. “'Cause I sure as hell ain't goin' fuckin' nowhere.”

Dance halls are notoriously great factors in breaking down morality

 

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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.

carrying the recognised weekend kit, purple hearts and contraceptives

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Almost from the beginning there was a distinction between the more extravagant stream, attracted to the frothy world of the boutiques, the camp, the flotsam of the art school followers. They were very different from the sterner group, with their wide jeans, old army anoraks or combat jackets, canvas shoes. These were the ones who, on their Corgis or Lambrettas, were thought to be involved in the clashes with the Rockers at the resorts. In fact, by 1964-5, the so-called Mod was hardly recognizable. Leaving aside such groups as the beats, the Rockers themselves and the Anglicized plastic flower children, youth workers at Brighton could distinguish at least between the scooter boys (dressed in plain but smart trousers and pullovers, plus anoraks, often trimmed with fur; usually uninterested in violence, but involved with the law in a range of driving offences); the hard Mods (wearing heavy boots, jeans with braces, short hair, the precursors of the Skinheads, usually prowling in large groups with the appearance of being jumpy, unsure of themselves, on the paranoic edge, heavily involved in any disturbance) and the smooth Mods (usually older and better off, sharply dressed, moving in small groups and usually looking for a bird).

The Mods and Rockers division was ready-made for such exploitation, and commercial interests were able to widen this division by exaggerating consumer style differences between the two groups. Special Mod boutiques; dance halls and discotheques were opened, a book was published called Dances for Mods and Rockers, and in at least one large dance hall in South London, a white-painted line was drawn in the middle of the floor to separate the Mods and Rockers. Consumer goods were advertised using the group images; some of the very shops in Brighton which had protested about loss of trade caused by the disturbances were selling 'The Latest Mod Sunglasses'. Clubs and coffee bars in seaside resorts were advertised as 'The Top Mod Spot of the South' or 'The Mods' Own Club'.

Millions are to be grabbed out here, and your only competition is idiots

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Joseph I. Breen, a professional Catholic who headed the Hays Office, and who had not yet seen a page of the script that Casey Robinson was writing, interrupted all this planning by forbidding the entire project. In a lengthy memo to Wallis, he began by complaining of “illicit relations” between various characters, and “much loose sex everywhere.” And there was a “sadistic characterization” of a doctor, that villain who was to amputate Drake McHugh’s legs. “Any suggestion of sex, madness, syphilis, illegal operations, incest, sadism, all must go,” Breen declared. “If this picture is made . . . decent people everywhere will condemn you and Hollywood.”

The most important part of their style is not to resemble normal people

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"They preferred the pleasures of nightlife, sensuality, and costume to sanctioned youth activity … bad actors and devotees of the arts of crap shooting, gin drinking, loud talk, rug cutting, and zoot suiting … a degenerate exhibition of youthful mass hysteria which began on Broadway with hundreds of them writhing, twitching and howling gibberish to the horrible squeals and squawks of the jive bands ... Young men arrested for loitering were ordered by a judge to cut their duck-tail hair styles and surrender their zoot suits."

"Give us kids something SIGNIFICANT to do. Give us jobs in something besides car-laundries and shoe-shine parlors. Give us GOALS that we can work for, stop dangling before our eyes all the glamor of American life in your movies, your advertisements, and your radio programs, at the same time as you tell us that we can't have any of it because we are 'wops,' or 'dagoes,' or 'niggers.'"