'London was the hub of the world. Everybody was coming to London, the Americans, everyone, because that's where it was at. You walked down Carnaby Street on a Saturday afternoon and the whole world was in Carnaby Street. It was the place to be.'
In the middle years of the sixties, British youth fell in love with its own reflection. Having been ignored in the early fifties, patronised in the late fifties and worried over in the early sixties, teenagers were now to be flattered and fawned upon in a manner which in retrospect seems quite extraordinary.
The commercial, political and cultural decision-makers (the establishment, for want of a better word) had not suddenly decided that spotty seventeen-year-olds were fab, gear and groovy. In the main, they despised them as profoundly as ever (although such was the ebullient mood of the times that they no longer felt quite so threatened by the energy of working-class youth). The difference was, in the last analysis, one of numbers.
Six years on from Abrams's The Teenage Consumer, the stakes had increased considerably; there were now six million teenagers in the UK, spending £1,500 million a year. Commerce, having finally got its act together, was ready for them.
The record companies, who in 1964 sold over 100,000,000 discs, already knew about the teenage market; the clothing industry too had been aware of it for a while; but now there were other businessmen sniffing the breeze and working out ways to give their products - be they magazines, lampshades, cigarettes, movies, hamburgers or lipsticks - teen appeal.
Suddenly there were magazines like 'Honey' and 'Rave' and terrible comics, 'Valentine' and 'Roxy'. I especially liked ' Valentine' because it had the Beatles in. After that they turned glossy and the middle pages were always a big poster of somebody like Paul McCartney or the Yardbirds or the Small Faces.
Among the first entrepreneurs to see the potential rewards of targeting the teenage market were the radio pirates. The first of them to get his station on the air was Ronan O'Rahilly. Having persuaded five City millionaires to back him, acquired a ship, a crew of disc-jockeys and engineers, two ten-kilowatt transmitters (£50,000 apiece) and a stack of records, it was his stroke of genius to represent himself as being, as he later put it, 'part of a revolution against the entire forces of the establishment'.
Within weeks the station was attracting seven million regular listeners, the majority of them teenagers. A month later the second pirate, Radio Atlanta, moored itself nearby, and a month after that Screaming Lord Sutch ('National Teenage Party' candidate in a 1963 by-election) set himself up on a disused fort in the Thames estuary and started broadcasting rock'n'roll and extracts from Lady Chatterley's Lover. Caroline moored a second ship off Ramsey in the Isle of Man; Radio London, the slickest operation yet, joined the air-waves, along with 'swinging' Radios City, Britain, King, Victor, England, 227, 270 and the 'easy listening' pirate, 390. There was music everywhere.
The BBC was just so square. Anything like Radio One was unthought-of. Children's Favourites! You had to listen to 'Nellie the Elephant' and all that kind of thing for five records before you got the Beatles. That was it before the pirates came along. It would be a tiny tranny that you'd have clamped to your ear and also you'd have it under your pillow at night, and the batteries would wear down and it would get fainter and fainter, but that's what I remember. We had them all the time. You'd wake up in the morning and the first thing you'd do would be to switch on the radio. We would bring our radios to school; if we could actually play the music in school as well, I mean, that was really something. All the time music was there in the background and foreground of your life. Garner Ted Armstrong! The Plain Truth with Garner Ted Armstrong! A crescendo of music and this terrible American voice bible-thumping...
The pirates were not merely a money-spinner for their shareholders, a pulpit for Garner Ted (whose subsidies filled pirate chests at the price of glazing many millions of teenage eyeballs) and a convenience to the listeners; they crucially altered the perception of music and its role in teenage life. Jonathan King has expressed it well:
The greatest thing that the pirates did for pop music was create an atmosphere of excitement and adventure which hadn't really existed before in pop music. By doing all that out on the ocean, going up and down, struggling through absolutely enormous odds to get music to their public, the whole music took on a new sort of feeling of necessity. If somebody was really prepared to go through sheer hell just to play you a Tremeloes record, then that Tremeloes record had really to be a very important thing in your life.
I developed a devotion away from my school work to things like pop culture and pop music. It began to dominate. I let it dominate. I wanted it to dominate. It was my rebellion.
What pirate radio did for the wireless, 'Ready Steady Go!' did for television. The show had trickled unpromisingly onto the screen in August 1963, hosted by chunky Keith Fordyce in a tightly-buttoned suit, crinkly hair and a cheese-eating grin. Two subsequent smart moves saved it: the first was the elevation to presenter status of a stunningly ordinary London teenager called Cathy McGowan, who spoke the same language as the audience ('smashing', 'fabulous', 'triffic') and the second was its conversion into the mods' very own shop window, a process which was reported thus in the Daily Mail in January 1964:
Two thousand angry teenagers charged the glass doors of Television House, Kingsway, last night after being locked out of an audition for the 'Ready, Steady, Go!' twist show.
Girls fainted and were trampled as the crowd grew more furious outside the building. Two ambulances and 100 policemen were called to stop the trouble turning into a riot.
There was a quarter-mile traffic jam and five youths were arrested and charged with obstruction.
A programme official told me: 'We never dreamed that 2,000 would turn up. I don't know how the glass doors stood up to them. We were looking for some really sharp-dressing mods for our show. We never thought there would be 2,000 mods in London. Lord knows where they all came from."
(The dancers for later shows were hand-picked from among the regulars at the Scene Club.)
Oh, 'Ready Steady Go!' I absolutely loved. Those dancers! And there was Cathy McGowan who had the hair-style of the day then, this long, straight, shaggy-dog look. There were so many groups. The Dave Clark Five, the Animals, Herman s Hermits, hundreds and hundreds of groups. I had all the records of all these and in their own way they were all very important. Looking at them now on old tapes of 'Ready Steady Go!' you realise how alike they were in their schoolboy-ish sort of looks, the sort of innocence, the naivete. They were all equally important because they were all part of the total picture.
The programme was also important as a medium for introducing to British audiences the best American black artists. It would regularly feature Tamla Motown performers such as the Miracles, Marvelettes, Supremes, Four Tops, Marvin Gaye or Little Stevie Wonder, as well as soul stars like Otis Redding and James Brown and blues giants like Jimmy Witherspoon and B.B. King. It was the first pop music programme on television to book its acts according to criteria of taste rather than record sales figures. There have been precious few since.
By the middle of the decade, the UK's six million teenagers had acquired all the elements of their own culture. It was sharply differentiated both from 'official' mainstream culture (classical music, ballet, theatre, etc.) and from adult popular culture (pubs, bingo, ballroom dancing, most television, football, etc.) It had its own music, newspapers, magazines, dress, radio stations, television programmes, clubs, concerts, language and leaders. Admittedly, some of these elements had been kindly supplied by commercially-minded adults, but they had been demanded by the young rather than foisted upon them, and whether in it or out of it, everyone regarded the new 'youth culture' as belonging to the teenagers themselves.
It was the apparent self-sufficiency of the young, their confidence and optimism, that mesmerised the grown-ups. As well as commercial power, they were felt to have, and therefore had, considerable political influence. In January 1 963, in the course of one of those hefty anatomies of British youth which The Sunday Times ran by the yard in those days, Godfrey Smith argued that 'Any government that permitted unemployment to persist at even today's level would be doomed, hence the speed and scale of the Government's reaction to it. The young will not know, as their fathers too often did, what it is to live indefinitely with idle hands and empty bellies.'
And magically, for as long as people believed this, it was true.
It seems even more extraordinary that the Prime Minister should have felt it necessary to preside at the reopening of the refurbished Cavern Club in the summer of 1966. Mr Wilson was presented with a pipe carved from a chunk of the stage on which the Beatles had played, and he made a speech. 'Now there will be those,' he declared, 'who look down their pompous noses at pop culture. There is, of course, a tendency to decry youth or to sensationalise the actions of a small and scruffy minority who carry liberty beyond licence to dangerous and self-destructive addictions and other forms of getting kicks in the seamier purlieus of London's night-life, a problem which, I may say, the Home Secretary is making a drive to clean up. But these people, and other delinquents, are not typical in any way of Britain's youth. '
Clearly perceiving that, as Dylan put it, their sons and their daughters were beyond their command, the grown-ups looked long and hard for reassurance that, in Pete Townshend's words, the Kids were Alright. The newspapers. rummaging selectively in the undergrowth, supplied it. Never before or since had so much space been given to announcing that there was no story.
'DARING, DEFIANT, DYNAMIC,’ the Sunday People blazoned across two broadsheet pages, 'That is Arthur Helliwell's verdict on young Britain – THE UNKNOWN GENERATION'
Helliwell, his trilby firmly in place, had been exploring:
...the swinging, switched-on, with-it world of young people in the UK... a world as remote and unpredictable as Mars. A world beyond our ken. It's slick and glossy. Bold and brash. Defiant and vital.
After a few more paragraphs in this vein ('dolly girls ... superbly confident young men ... new standards of freedom and frankness ... brave new world, etc.) Helliwell came to the point:
Forget the mods and rockers. Forget the bicycle-chain gangs. Forget the lunatic fringe of unwashed pill-takers, scruffy beatniks and hairy layabouts. We know too much about this over-publicised, grubby little minority; and the truth is that they are outnumbered more than ten to one by the normal, decent young people of Britain. They don't take drugs. They don't smoke reefers or get drunk. They don't indulge in wild sexual orgies. But they do live tremendously exciting lives at a breathless, breakneck pace that completely baffles their perplexed and confused mothers and fathers... Whatever activity they engage in, from dancing until dawn to ten pin bowling or party-going, they plunge into it with a tremendous and dynamic zest.
Young people were worshipped by the Press. Everybody was in awe of young people, you know. Youngsters had got hold of some kind of arcane knowledge that the oldsters really wanted to get at.
Lurking behind this fascination with zestful ten pin bowling was an unhealthy amount of prurient sexual envy. When the grown-ups weren't banging on about all the drugs that were or were not being taken and checking the cleanliness of teenage fingernails to make sure they weren't attached to a member of the grubby little minority, they were creeping about, flashlights at the ready, in search of TEENAGE SEX.
We used to have a system of numbers - number one, holding hands; number two, a kiss on the lips - and so on up to number ten. But I never knew anyone who got to number ten. My mother threatened that if I ever got pregnant she'd jump off the end of Bournemouth pier, and I believed her.
I'd never been a teenager before, and of course every generation thinks they've discovered sex and that the previous generation didn't do it, but maybe in our case it was a little bit true. We were having contact with the opposite sex in a much freer way than our parents, and I suppose they must have been terrified. I can remember my mother saying ' Well dear, you know what's right and wrong.' That's all she would say, and I actually felt that I didn't know, that I had to work it out as I went along. My friends and I had to work out in a very painful way whether certain activities were or were not acceptable.
We used to go to other people's houses and have evenings in, and the parents would go out, and then we would pair off and disappear into dark corners while somebody was detailed to keep watch. Then it was 'Parents coming!' and the lights would go on and we'd emerge from our corners... It wasn't all innocence.
I can remember having boyfriends and going to the cinema with them, and you instantly get into a situation where you've got to make the rules. The poor boy is obviously trying it out as well, and you're having to decide what you're going to let him do. I remember the battles in the stalls and the terrible feelings of guilt afterwards - should I have let him touch me there? It wasn't until later that I talked to other girls and we discovered what we'd all been up to and the sweaty encounters we'd all had.
