Ready, Steady, Go!
Swinging London and the Invention of Cool
Shawn Levy
For Mary, finally…
Contents
The World Was Full of Chancers
An Ordinary Person Couldn’t Do It
I Hadn’t Thought It Out Beyond That
Mick Doesn’t Like Women. He Never Has.
All the Young Stoned Harlequins
We Are Not Worried About Petty Morals
‘This Ego I Had Nurtured Was Crushed’
It happened to happen. All at the same time. Every day was a party. It was like a child who has been under the parents’ control, and all of a sudden on the eighteenth birthday, they say, ‘Here is the key to your Ferrari, here is the key to your house, here is your bank account, and now you can do whatever you like.’ It was enough to go mad! The new century started in 1960. After that, it’s only been perfecting what we started.
Alvaro Maccioni, restaurateur
Grey.
The air, the buildings, the clothing, the faces, the mood.
Britain in the mid-1950s was everything it had been for decades, even centuries: world power; sire of glorious intellectual, aesthetic and political traditions, gritty vanquisher of the Nazis, civilising docent to whippersnapper America, bastion of decency, decorum and the done thing.
But somehow, in sum, it was less.
Its colonies were demanding freedom and getting it; such unilateral forays into geopolitics as Suez were fiascos; its cuisine, architecture, popular entertainment, fashion and cinema succeeded only when mimicking continental or American models, as Matt Munro, Lonnie Donegan, Diana Dors and Norman Hartnell had done; it stood stubbornly outside a centralising Europe while shrinking alongside the US as standard bearer of Western values in a crystallising Cold War; it was a noncompetitor in the arms race, the space race and, more and more, the prestige race. Winston Churchill, hero of decades ago, sat in Parliament, and the spoor of antique manners lay thick in the air; it seemed a nation not so much in decline as left behind.
The States, France, Italy all felt modern. Rock music and the rise of the teenager as tastemaker made the American scene come on, naturally, loudest, while decadent, savvy, grown-up style made existential Paris and La Dolce Vita Rome meccas for both the international jet set and an emerging global bohemian underground. England by contrast was dowdy, rigid and, above all, unrelentingly grey, grey to its core.
In ‘53 – fully eight years after the war had ended – Britons were still eating rationed food, answering nature’s call in backyard privies, and making their daily way through cities that bore the deep scars of Luftwaffe bombing. Germany, Italy and Japan – the losers, mind you – were seeing their economies revitalise; France, which had been ravaged, was in recovery. But in Britain, the hard days still seemed alive. For many Britons, the mid-1950s were materially and psychologically a lot like the mid-1950s. It was, in the words of critic Kenneth Tynan, a ‘perpetual Dunkirk of the spirit’, made more bitter, perhaps, with the false glimpse of spring that was a young queen’s coronation.
Within a few years, however, that was to change. By 1956, the British economy had finally relaunched itself: key industries were denationalised by a conservative government; American multinationals were choosing Britain as the home base for their expansion into Europe; unemployment dipped, spiking the housing, automobile and durable goods markets; credit restrictions were eased, encouraging a boom in consumerism; and the value of property – particularly bombed-out inner-city sites – soared. In just three years, the English stock market more than doubled in value, and the pound rose sharply in currency markets.
Inevitably, as in America, prosperity led to complacency and nostalgia for a pre-war era that only in retrospect