Teenage Rampage?

These three works provide a valuable contribution to our understanding of youth culture in the postwar, pre-Thatcher era, while suggesting tantalising further possibilities for investigation. There are certain common themes which appear across all of them, including meritorious attention to localities and specificities, producing at least the beginnings of a more nuanced picture of this era. The purview extends beyond the hypnotic feverish glamour of ‘Swinging London’ and eschews an emphasis on particular hyped visible subcultures in favour of considering more general experiences of the ‘normal’ and ‘ordinary’ and how various these were.

This was a period when young people became a particular focus of concern. Social observers were studying young people from various aspects, identifying what were perceived as revolutionary changes and the emergence of a new type, the ‘modern teenager’. These perceptions were also reflected in popular media and in the emergence of periodicals specifically targeted at various tranches of this cohort. But underneath the public rhetoric of troubling changes in manners and morals, the lives of the new generation were indeed altering in observable ways from those of their parents. They had more money, more leisure, and they were seeking ways of experiencing that leisure outside the confines of the home and the surveillance of parents, while enjoying sociability with their peers.

Hannah Charnock, in Teenage Intimacies, addresses the changes emerging among young women of the postwar era. While their romantic and sexual lives were still structured around heterosexuality, significant differences from the lives of their mothers and grandmothers were becoming apparent. There were extending opportunities in education and employment for young women. While marriage was still, usually, the anticipated endgame, there was an increasing likelihood that girls of this generation would have some form of sexual experience, up to and including penetrative intercourse, prior to marriage, in relationships which were not with their eventual husband. Charnock draws on a range of source material to produce a rich and nuanced narrative.

Charnock also examines the ways in which the ‘problem of the teenager’ was being constructed and addressed by the older generation. Of course, there was the popular press, never backwards in drumming up moral panics about ‘young people today’. There were reports by social scientists, such as Michael Schofield's 1965 The Sexual Behaviour of Young People, which argued from statistics that the wider claims of entire moral breakdown were greatly exaggerated; and there were the dry statistics of government reports.

Teenage Intimacies is solidly rooted in accounts of personal experience. It draws on 33 oral history interviews that formed part of a project based in Exeter – a theme across all these works is the significance of locality and specific situation to recreating the complex picture of this era of change. It also deploys the Mass Observation Directives on ‘Courting and Dating’ and ‘Sex’, which explicitly prompted Observers who came of age during this period to record autobiographical experiences, in written, anonymous form. Charnock points out the issues with the demographic, which skewed (probably) white and (definitely) middle-class, though a number of respondents also gave testimony to the social mobility via educational opportunity characteristic of this generation.

There is a consideration of the kinds of information about sex that girls would have received, both through parents and such interventions as were made within the education system, and in the columns of magazines such as Jackie and Honey, specifically marketed towards the teenage girl/young woman market. The latter (also usefully analysed in Sarah Kenny's chapter in Let's Spend the Night Together) took a conscientious and in many ways rather enlightened approach to their responsibilities towards their readers (Caroline Rusterholz in Responsible Pleasure: The Brook Advisory Centres and Youth Sexuality in Postwar Britain, published by Oxford University Press in 2024, has an illuminating section on the reciprocal relationship that developed between Brook and the agony aunts and uncles of several magazines). It is probable that this was not only more acceptable to girls of the day, but it was also very likely more readily available to a greater range of the relevant population, and more informative.

The oral testimonies and MO responses reveal the inadequacy and awkwardness of attempts by adults to talk about sex: mothers might provide at least some preparation for menstruation and hand over books or pamphlets conveying the ‘facts of life’, evading verbal discussion of the subject. A dire and depressing picture is presented of such formal sex education as was received in schools (if this even occurred, given the very haphazard distribution of school programmes). It was considered that the timing was too late and the content was usually too biological (accounts of rabbit reproduction clearly stuck in memory, even had these not been found very illuminating). The delivery by teachers perceptibly manifested discomfort and embarrassment. It is probably just a little too late in the day to undertake the collection of the memories of teachers who were obliged to undertake this fraught experience, for which at the time they would seldom have had any formal preparation but been expected to ‘get on with it’: some of them may have been very little older than their pupils. The experience may have been as traumatic for them as it was embarrassing for the girls in receipt of the lessons.

The sources reveal the extent to which the respondents had been actively engaged in seeking out sexual knowledge, even though, or possibly because, this still held an aura of the secret and taboo. Curious girls sought to educate themselves, through consulting such reference works as were available to them, exchanging fragments of information with other girls, and reading notorious, controversial ‘sexy’ books of the day, which were sometimes found ‘most disappointing … the language was old-fashioned and the sex implied’ (p. 52). There is very much a sense of exploration, both in an abstract intellectual sense and in a more physical one – venturing into new territory. A space had opened up for experimentation. These young women were in quest of sexual knowledge and experience.

This was the era of the culture of ‘petting’, a range of sexual activities stopping short of full intercourse, and which could provide a ‘safe space’ within which girls could gradually come to terms with sexual feelings and emotions. Boys might press to ‘go further’, and works of advice invoked a conceptualisation of masculine desire as insurgent and likely to lead the male to get ‘carried away’ – the role of the female being to control and restrain such impetuosity. But petting was, as Charnock describes, ‘incremental and conceptualised in terms of discrete, sequential stages … a learning process’ (p. 54). It was a process of gradual physical exploration and discovery of sexual pleasures. It could often lead to a considerable degree of physical intimacy as a relationship progressed, but there were still limits on ‘going the whole way’. Pregnancy remained something that might lead to a somewhat disgraceful early marriage or rifts with the family if it resulted in single motherhood. In spite of the illegality of abortion prior to the 1967 Act, several respondents did report having managed to obtain abortions, medical or backstreet, through friends or acquaintances, when they became pregnant.

There is a fascinating analysis of the ways in which these young women were reworking the existing narratives about women's sexual lives that they received. While ‘having a boyfriend’ was important (although casual encounters were also recorded), the idea of formal ‘courting’ was pretty much obsolete. Changing attitudes around virginity are particularly intriguing. There was still the ideology that, although it might be acceptable, even desirable, for boys to gain experience before marriage, girls were expected to ‘save themselves’. However, it emerges that while many young women still adhered to this pattern, others saw losing their virginity as a rite de passage into adulthood, something that they deliberated over and chose to do in order to become grown-up. There were also complex ways in which the status of ‘nice girl’ was negotiated even after engaging in sexual activity, in order to maintain a distinction from the ‘slag’, ‘slut’, ‘slapper’, ‘scrubbers’ (p. 187). This evoked the negotiations described by Gillian Sutherland in In Search of the New Woman: Middle-Class Women and Work in Britain 1870–1914 (Cambridge University Press, 2015), involving a similar trajectory for young women of moving into new spheres and having to manage the presentation of ‘respectability’ and the various considerations involved when entering new territory.

While in many ways the accounts represent these young women as having agency and negotiating their own paths through a changing landscape of sexual relationships, there were also cases of relationships breaking down because boys wanted to ‘go further’ than girls were ready for (p. 157). There is less of a sense that (as sex education literature warned) boys would get ‘carried away’ than that they were going to push the boundaries of what the girl would permit. There are also several stories of coercion within serious relationships that developed into marriage, where the very degree of commitment and level of intimacy was used to pressure the woman to have sex. So the picture is not entirely one of a period of idyllic possibilities of slow exploration, which became compromised by the advent of the Pill. On that, one respondent claimed:

I think the Pill changed everything & led men to take the lead and press for instant sex (whereas before they’d been more prepared to hold back[)]. (p. 160)

Charnock largely finds that parents were perceived as a constraining influence, with the young women ‘conduct[ing] their sexual rebellions in ways that made them invisible to parents’, deploying the ‘illusion of compliance’ and ‘evasion and subterfuge’ (p. 240). Even so, one wonders just a little whether, although there were clearly significant generational changes in this particular cohort, there were not quieter and less dramatic but nonetheless influential changes in their mothers’ lives and the nature of marital relationships which inflected their daughters’ expectations by presenting new examples of women's lives even when framed by domesticity. Mothers had experienced the upheavals of the war years. Birth control was becoming more commonly used, and the planned family was the ideal. There was an increasing discourse of mutual marital sexual pleasure within a more companionate and ‘symmetrical’ model of marriage. Although wives were still assumed to have to give up work, even if formal marriage bars were gradually loosening, this was the period when married women were going back to, usually unambitious, jobs rather than careers, once the family was complete and the youngest at school, to assist the family budget. And as far as having her own money in her hand went, the Family Allowance payable to the mother (thanks to Eleanor Rathbone) had finally been introduced in 1945. Did this create subtle differences in gendered household dynamics?

One also wonders to what extent mothers’ women's magazines formed a source of knowledge about sex and relationships. They did not just contain knitting patterns, recipes, and romantic stories; they included columns of health information, and several of them employed ‘agony aunts’ who are now recognised as daring pioneers in the field of relationship advice. While they sometimes provided – or pointed mothers in the direction of – leaflets of ‘what to tell your daughter’ about the facts of life, it is surely not improbable to suppose that girls might have picked up these magazines themselves.

Charnock's work is predominantly dealing with private life, even if she indicates the significance of communities of knowledge communication and the importance of being seen to have a boyfriend/be sexually knowledgeable, and that intimacies nonetheless had a public aspect.

Sarah Kenny, in Growing up and going out: Youth culture, commerce, and leisure space in postwar Britain, examines more visible manifestations of youth culture. Focusing on Sheffield, Kenny looks at the night-time economy of youth leisure, which developed during a similar period of analysis. She is particularly concerned with the spatial developments in youth leisure. New spaces emerged – coffee bars, beat clubs, late-night bars, and nightclubs – developing new cultures of sociability around places where teenagers and young adults could congregate. These were largely mediated by commercial enterprises creating these new kinds of urban spaces, in tension with attempts by local authorities to regulate them, in a wider context of extensive urban renewal and development. There were active responses to the presence in the nighttime city of young people with leisure and disposable income who were seeking places to get together without adults. There was a concern for the moral protection of young people out in the night city, but they were also perceived as a potential danger in themselves.

The idea of young people getting together by themselves, away from adult eyes, roused enormous moral panic. One imagines that in the days of the ‘monkey-walk’ of young people parading along darker parts of the city streets, boys on one side, girls on the other, with the possibility of eventually copping off, there was still the likelihood of observation, of informal community policing, of gossip getting back to the parents. In the new-fangled coffee bars they ‘were at once removed from the public gaze and offered the opportunity to socialise in comfort in the evenings’ (p. 42). But young people were also a source of perceived menace if they were visibly moving about the nighttime city.

Coffee bars were the initial major signifier of this new youthful presence in city and town centres as they proliferated from the 1950s onwards. Besides purveying coffee, soft drinks and snacks – and being accessible to those under the age of admission to licensed premises – they offered entertainment in the form of jukeboxes and night-time opening. Disdained by contemporary cultural critics as deplorable examples of modernity and the Americanisation of culture, they were cheap and central locations for young people to meet, even if during the daytime they might also cater to a different, more adult demographic of shoppers. While one might have supposed that the advent of a ‘café culture’ could have been seen as a desirable alternative to traditional drinking cultures, because of their late opening and media linkage made with ‘Teddy Boys’ and violence, as well as ‘American music’ from jukeboxes, coffee bars acquired the reputation of louche transgressive spaces. Certain coffee bars did acquire a negative image among knowing locals, for example, La Favourita in Sheffield was specifically mentioned in an oral history interview, but this was for particular situated reasons.

The youth appeal of coffee bars was such that it had a significant impact on the work of youth clubs and church groups. In Sheffield, the Association of Mixed Clubs and Girls’ Clubs opened a jazz club in 1960 with ‘the ideal coffee bar type atmosphere’ (p. 44). Kenny suggests that far from this being a rearguard action by an outdated movement in decline, youth clubs and organisations played a role in providing ‘safe spaces’ for minority ethnic groups experiencing gatekeeping from more mainstream venues. These alternative networks provided opportunities to play and hear, and indeed develop less mainstream music trends such as reggae and jazz funk.

While dancing had long been a popular leisure pursuit, the 1950s and 1960s saw significant changes in the provision of facilities for this. Local ballrooms and dance halls already existed, but new tastes were arising in music and dancing to which they did not cater and which therefore required considerable adaptation. At first, halls might be hired out to promoters of events geared towards the new audience, or occasional sessions added for modern dances such as the jive. Meanwhile, more informal provision evolved: the late-night coffee club, or beat club, which did not serve alcohol and was often members only, evading licensing regulations. These were also thus more accessible to a younger age-group, although Kenny cites evidence that underage drinking in licensed premises was fairly common and difficult to police. These beat clubs offered live music – jazz, beat, and rock – and membership fees were low, so they were very attractive to a young clientele. Sheffield's major entrepreneurs in this field, the Stringfellow brothers, were particularly successful and later moved on to a wider field of endeavour. Local tensions simmered over these clubs, particularly when they were situated out of the central district in residential areas, raising concerns over noise and disorder – or at least, these could plausibly be cited as reasons for objection. However, there was some recognition by the local authorities of the need for young people to have spaces of amusement, even if these needed to be regulated. While, as these clubs did not serve alcohol, licensing laws could not be invoked; other regulations around planning permission, noise, and the Public Health Act could be brought to bear.

Kenny provides an intricately researched analysis of the increasing involvement of established commercial interests in developing new manifestations of Sheffield nightlife geared more specifically towards this youthful demographic, distinct from these grassroots clubs. The first licensed nightclub was opened in 1965 in an entertainment centre owned by Mecca Leisure Ltd. These centres offered more forms of entertainment than just nightclubs and discos, including ten-pin bowling, skating rinks, cinemas, banqueting suites and bingo halls, appealing to more than a teenage demographic. These corporate networks accrued a substantial influence and indeed control over the type of leisure that was available. Maintaining a respectable public image along with profitability was prioritised – this led to exclusions of feared ‘troublemakers’ often identified along racialised lines. However, they also played some role in promoting music trends beyond mainstream pop, usually by dedicating specific nights to, for example, ‘soul’. While as licensed premises they were theoretically for over-18s only, the Top Rank Suite in Sheffield city centre offered special nights for younger people, creating a gateway into commercialised dancing culture. Meanwhile, pubs fought back to attract a younger clientele by offering music and dancing and later opening. This involved complex negotiations with local authorities over the licensing laws and the conditions under which later opening might be permissible.

It may be observed that these changes brought about something of a gendered shift. These spaces were intended for both sexes to get together: they were unlike the traditional masculine sphere of the pub. They were not spit and sawdust but glamour, luxury, and soft lights. More, perhaps, could be said about changes around masculinity. There is an account of the application by the Stringfellows’ King Mojo beat club for a licence to serve alcohol, because club members in ‘mod gear’ were unable to go into local pubs – ‘flamboyant groups of youths were not welcome, and were actively excluded from those places’ (p. 53). This makes one wonder about where the violence, though constantly attributed to the young people of the day, was actually coming from, or whether this was an issue of rival groups (Mods vs. Rockers?). When the local justices alluded to the club attracting an ‘undesirable element’, there is an underlying question as to whether ‘flamboyant’ should be decoded as ‘suspected to be gay’ or merely performing masculinity in a way deemed unacceptable. Alternatively, this may have referred to concerns over drugs (at this period, amphetamines, ‘pep pills’), as there had been arrests and charges for these offences.

The existence of a night-time leisure economy based on licensed premises was of concern to local authorities more generally, in particular with the issue of underage drinking. It was hard to judge the exact age of young people and how it could be determined that a licensee was knowingly selling alcohol to minors. A question which is raised but not perhaps fully answered is how important the alcohol was anyway – Kenny cites a 1978 study that for young people ‘the place where they drink is as important as the drink itself’ (p. 144). The ambience, the music, the dancing and the sociability were presumably at least as significant. The consumption of alcohol was nonetheless an important commercial consideration – it was pointed out that ‘the soul crowd tended to drink nothing but cokes which was not very profitable’, so playing soul should be restricted to specific regular nights (p. 87).

However, centrally-located pubs and clubs were where young people went out to meet their friends – increasingly so for young women as the constraints on women entering pubs and bars grew weaker. Even so, from the oral interviews, there is a sense that they went in groups – ‘night out with the girls’ – rather than independently. Besides the presence of the various leisure spaces, another infrastructural factor specific to Sheffield was the existence of a late-night bus service, very much cheaper than the taxis, which were also available.

The chapter ‘Leisure, consumption and identity’ has strong resonances with Charnock's work in evoking a sense that this was a generation able to explore in ways that had previously been, if not entirely impossible, less available to most of the population. Kenny's oral history interviewees describe a rich tapestry of diverse experiences, ‘depending on the group of friends you were with’ (p. 181), ‘You’ve got so many places that you could go to’ (p. 183), though also ‘certain clubs where you know where you’re not going to feel comfortable’ (p. 184) – a range of possibilities. Against this, there were individuals who took on a specific ‘alternative’ identity counter to the perceived mainstream, defined themselves through clothes and musical taste. These young people were exploring the leisure opportunities provided by their environment, moving between the various spaces with their different social groups, and exploring their own identities through self-presentation. Kenny makes the powerful suggestion that young people's experience of the city as they moved through it and experienced leisure in it was ‘increasingly separate from that of the wider population’ (p. 208). No wonder they were found threatening.

Well into the 1970s, marriage was still taking place in the early 20s, and this led to the dropping of youthful sociability in favour of domesticity and children. However, with the age of marriage gradually rising, participation in the leisure economy continued beyond the teenage years. By the 1970s and 1980s, there appears to have been a feeling that nightclubs were becoming more gentrified, and less about sociability in general than facilitating a sexualised space for engendering encounters. Venues endeavoured to maintain an equal gender balance. By the 1990s, yet another changing leisure demographic, which transcended age, arose with ‘rave’ culture. The scene was never static but constantly in flux.

The variety and diversity of experiences is further illuminated by the essays in The Subcultures Network's volume, Let's Spend the Night Together: Sex, pop music and British youth culture, 1950s–80s. This opens by making the case that ‘pop music and sex were evidently joined at the hip’ (p. 1) and arguing an intention to explore this relationship in postwar British culture from the advent of rock-‘n’-roll to the 1980s. Pop stars became ‘objects of libidinal obsession’ (p. 1). Music moved between private and public spaces. As with the other works under discussion, this one emphasises the multiplicity of ‘youth culture’ at this period.

There are chapters by both Kenny and Charnock in Let's Spend the Night Together. Kenny provides a fascinating and nuanced examination of magazines for teenage girls: ‘“We are no longer certain, any of us, what is ‘right’ and what is ‘wrong’”: Honey, Petticoat, and the construction of young women's sexuality in 1960s Britain’. Kenny suggests that this despised genre was in fact something of a vanguard: its coverage of the sexuality of the presumed audience revealed a moment when ‘a new sexual morality was being constructed’ and young women themselves were positioned as ‘independent and ambitious’ (p. 75). These magazines’ coverage of sexuality aimed to improve sexual knowledge and individual agency. While not overturning traditional values, it provided young women with knowledge and support (the knowledge emanating from official sources, Charnock's work, discussed above, demonstrated was sadly deficient).

These magazines were shared, discussed between friends, possibly re-read and returned to, read at home, at school, in transit between various spaces. They were also perhaps surprisingly interactive and in dialogue with their audience about their wants and expectations. They took readers’ letters and critiques seriously, even if the motivation was improving the magazines’ positions in the commercial marketplace. The tone was approachable, and while it conveyed a certain authority in passing on advice, the sense is more of a sympathetic older sister/brother (some of the columnists were male) or ‘cool’ aunt/uncle prepared to be open about matters of sex and sexuality.

While still centring marriage and family life as desirable future outcomes, these magazines did not shy away from discussing topics such as abortion, adoption, the issues that young women might encounter in negotiating relationships, and even, eventually, contraception and the services of the Brook Centres. They also addressed the fraught topics of single motherhood and the related question of marriage forced on by pregnancy. Kenny argues that, within the commercial constraints of the medium, these magazines were complicating the traditional narratives at a moment of social flux. It would have added to the sense of the complexity of the strands in play if there had also been some discussion of the fiction. This was the era of a positive cycle of narratives of single mothers or hasty and regretted marriages in the wakes of unwanted pregnancy: Andrea Newman's The Cage (1966) was serialised in Honey as ‘Enough Rope’ and could be considered to provide an Awful Warning of positively Victorian dimensions when the ambitious university-bound narrator falls pregnant by her dull if sexy boyfriend.

Several of the essays in this book raise interesting questions around changing masculinities and new styles of being a man. These, too, were diverse and complex. One perceives in Tom Hennessy's analysis in ‘Where were you? UK chart pop and the commodification of the teenage libido, 1952–63’ that while there was certainly a libidinal explosion manifested in rock, there was another strand of ‘teen pop’ which looks like pining and passive hopeless yearning. Perhaps not quite l‘amor courtois but sentimental and dreamy: Hennessy tabulates the number of hit titles featuring dreams and dreaming by high-profile performers. He posits British promoters smoothing off the harsh edges of rock (a process already occurring in the United States as White performers assimilated Black music) and blending the transatlantic innovations into a British style, creating their own curated performers carefully pitched to the target demographic. It is hinted that this was to make them alluring to female consumers, but did this plaintive note also appeal to men? Is there not a long tradition of male broody mournfulness over the tribulations of love? Some of the most significant promoters and songwriters of this transitional period were gay, which brings a further layer of complexity to any gendering of pop.

Hennessy pays some attention to the outburst of public manifestations of female pop fan enthusiasm, reading this against a characterisation of the messaging of girls’ magazines – ‘warning girls of the dangers of “going too far”’ (p. 29) – specifically nuanced by Kenny's chapter. This is only characterised, however, as ‘Beatlemania’, and while there were certainly extraordinary scenes over the Liverpudlian Four, there was far wider agitated moralising about young girls screaming more generally at pop concerts (though the resultant ‘wet seats’ may be a tabloidy myth) – this was hardly ‘obsession … conducted largely in private or in small groups’ (p. 29). It was out there and noisy and troubling, a manifestation of unruly active desire.

Moral panic over young girls’ feverish responses to favoured male rock stars – leading in some cases to physically injuring the objects of their obsession – also features in Gillian A. M. Mitchell's chapter on ‘The Jerry Lee Lewis scandal, the popular press, and the moral standing of rock “n” roll in late 1950s Britain’. While promoters were tending to sanitise the images of the British rock ‘n’ rollers they were creating – to the point where George Melly alleged that they were ‘castrating’ British rock ‘n’ roll (p. 41) – there was nonetheless anxiety over girls’ over-excited reactions to (believe it or not) Cliff Richard and the aggressively hostile responses from male audiences. There were perceptions of something ‘unwholesome’, though nothing to match the furore created by the revelation that American rocker Jerry Lee Lewis, lately arrived for a British tour, was married to his 13-year-old cousin (apparently also bigamously). This was just the sort of thing to provoke salaciously disapproving coverage in the press, though with emphasis on not just different American ways but existing cultural stereotypes of the US South. This had a significantly adverse on Lewis's career, even though his music retained a fanbase among various British musicians. Mitchell suggests that although for a decade or so managers continued to promote wholesome images, by the late 1960s press pursuit of sensational celebrity scandals, particularly around drugs, began to erupt. It is odd, however, given the age element in the Lewis instance, that Mitchell does not allude at all to certain flagrant cases within the pop scene of coverups of abuse (e.g. Jimmy Saville) mentioned in other chapters.

Patrick Glen undertakes a close reading of Nik Cohn's 1969 Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom: Pop from the Beginning, an as it were insta-history of the ‘movers and shakers … stars, hits, forgotten heroes and moral panics of the time, showing a keen awareness of the scandals and perceptions of deviance that drove much of pop's hype’ (p. 58), by a young journalist and novelist from a complex academic background. Cohn's ‘recurring subtext’ was that men in pop, and the fans who immerse themselves in it, ‘become sexier and have sex’. There was a perceived transformation of masculinity:

more open to articulating and responding to emotions, anguish and desires; they find the symbolic, attitudinal and behavioural means to transform themselves. These individual changes fit with a broader realignment of sexual mores, though which some young people question the values of their elders. (p. 65)

Cohn is argued to have been framing popular music as foundational to youthful sexuality of the period – providing the soundtrack to sex, while dancing was the prelude to courtship, in a new exhibitionist mode of solitary display in the Twist. This, he claimed, also changed the parameters of male attractiveness – new images ‘starkly different from the boy-next-door and future husband’ (p. 69). (This, of course, made significant assumptions about what girls found attractive!) It enabled ‘outsiders’ to become contenders. Here we do get an allusion to screaming teenage girls who ‘wet themselves’ at a Rolling Stones concert in Liverpool (p. 67). This is attributed to the Stones’ menacing sexual presence, though one would like to have had some comparative data on the scream quotients evoked by other popular groups of the day.

There was a certain repudiation of macho forms of masculinity and the rise of androgynous styles. There were mods interested in looking beautiful. However, the dominant narrative Cohn was making and thinking through by way of pop music would appear to be giving power in the heteronormative realm to a new mode of man, decorative, emotional, and expressive. But this was by no means the New Man being formulated in the 1970s as a response to second-wave feminism's critiques of embedded patriarchy, rather than a success at pulling the birds.

Shaun Cole and Paul Sweetman, in ‘Queering modernism: social, sartorial and spatial intersections between mod and gay (sub)culture, 1957–67’, explore the intersections between the emergence of mod culture, which in its fastidious and innovative attitude to style was often deemed effeminate (see the issues with the King Mojo beat club in Sheffield discussed by Kenny, above), and a period of increasing visibility of gay subculture between the publication of the Wolfenden Report and decriminalisation of homosexual acts between consenting adults in private. There were diverse roots to mod style, including French and Italian art cinema and Black culture (the United States and Caribbean). While figures such as gay retailer John Stephen, who created Carnaby Street as a Mecca of fashion, played a significant role, the exchange was two-way. Mods adapted the output of designers, and designers were influenced in return.

There was also overlap in musical tastes, with mass-produced mainstream pop eschewed in favour of soul, ska, bluebeat, and Motown, and in drug consumption (amphetamines). Men danced alone – the Twist, the Madison, and the Shake – while at the gay coffee-bar Le Duce, men might dance together provided they kept a foot between them. A camp aesthetic might blossom among ‘straight boys’ through their immersion in mod fashion and its club culture. Questions linger as to how far there was a knowledge and acceptance of the gayness of significant figures in fashion design and music, given that most of them were still publicly closeted. The authors’ deployment of Actor Network Theory suggests a complex process of influences which were not necessarily fixed and defined quantities, and that subcultures were neither discrete entities nor were they homogenous within themselves. It is implied that the ‘hard mods’ involved in the notorious clashes with Rockers were a subset that would have been disclaimed by the stylists. However, might the fluidity of identities have encompassed changing the stylish gear of the ‘face’ for the oversized army-surplus parka, and zooming off on a Vespa, ready to rumble, on a different day?

Issues around masculinity also surface in Sarah Raine's and Caitlin Shenshall's chapter, ‘“This could be a night to remember”: authenticity, historicising and the silencing of sexual experience in the northern soul scene’. This has been depicted as – at least during the mythicised golden era of the 1970s – about the music, with the dancefloor not a place for making potentially sexual encounters. The ‘authentic’ scene was about ‘dancing, record collecting, event organising and DJing’ (p. 221), and claims to ‘insider’ status, which have largely been retrospectively positioned as male (in ways that resonate with certain manifestations of ‘nerd’ culture and their gatekeeping practices). The insider histories emphasised northern soul's specifically masculine dance style of competitive physical display. The authors indicate that this is something of a retrospective myth, and that archival film footage of 1970s dancefloors reveals a more gender-neutral story. It was also claimed that women could participate singly or as a group without being hassled, in implicit contrast to other scenes. However, in spite of the discourse that it was not all about copping off and coupling up, northern soul participants had very commonly met their eventual partners through the scene. It was, even if not eroticised, predominantly heteronormative although the narrative was that everyone was welcome. But in rather a counter-narrative to the association of popular music of the period with sex, an immersion in soul was represented as about connoisseurship, in particular seeking out rare items, and great dancefloor moves, rather than mating rituals. It was about the signifiers of being part of a recherché ‘in group’.

There were, David Leeworthy, indicates in his chapter, ‘Singing Elton's song: queer sexualities and youth cultures in England and Wales, 1967–1985’, spaces evolving where young gay people were able to get together, in the aftermath of the passing of the 1967 Sexual Offences Act, and with the rise of activist organisations seeking further reforms or indeed revolution. There was, in fact, a proliferation of gay clubs and discos throughout England and Wales. Leeworthy identifies an ‘everyday queer scene’ in unexpected places, for example, the coastal towns of North Wales, owing perhaps rather little to the tenuous presence there of the Campaign for Homosexual Equality. There appear to have been some generational tensions over musical taste – possibly identified with, on the one hand, the more reformist CHE and on the other the radical Gay Liberation Front. Other music-mediated sites for queer encounters were less formal get-togethers around the radio or record player. Music magazines such as Smash Hits were engaging with issues of representation. Certain record shops were queer-identified and specialised in the kinds of music popular in gay discos, including niche imports.

Queer clubs were not just about the music; they were also very much about sex (and also drugs, principally ‘poppers’, amyl nitrate). There was a development of specific subcultural styles, from the macho to the David Bowie-influenced androgynous. A continuing problem was the issue of the gay age of consent (21, only lowered to 18 in 1994 and finally to 16 in 2000). There were moves towards reconsidering the age of consent in 1974 and various outreach initiatives to young queer people. But the advent of HIV/AIDS and the Thatcher government with its commitment to ‘traditional’ values destroyed the potential for change.

Alison Oram, in ‘“You just let your hair down”: lesbian parties and clubs in the 1960s and early 70s’, using material from oral history projects, suggests that young gay women had a particular struggle to find a community in which they could feel comfortable expressing their sexuality, and this might take well beyond teenage years. It could involve discovering social networks that would pass on information about private parties, and the ability to travel to distant secluded locations. The Minorities Research Group, the first organised lesbian group, and its splinter group, Kenric, published newsletters and organised socials from the mid-1960s. The private parties, oral history suggests, though they might require considerable effort to attend, were often preferred to the increasing number of gay pubs, described as ‘seedy’, and also suited a need for discretion at a time when prejudice was still rife and had consequences. There were some specifically lesbian clubs, most famously the Gateways in Chelsea, but even these required being ‘in the know’. Oram frames her essay with the music of Dusty Springfield, a great favourite at parties and in clubs. Dusty was herself long rumoured to be gay and in a 1970s interview conceded the possibility – ‘capable of being swayed by a girl’ (p. 145).

While Oram's chapter features lesbians riding their motorbikes to houses in the depths of the countryside in order to enjoy a party in discreet likeminded company remote from prying eyes, this runs counter to the ideology of the rural space as invoked by Sian Edwards in ‘Lovers’ lanes and Haystacks: rural spaces and girls’ experiences of courtship and sexual intimacy in postwar England’. This chapter provides a useful excursion from the mostly urban spaces featuring in other chapters. Edwards suggests a continuing nostalgic idyllic vision of ‘rural courtship’, in particular spaces such as the ‘lovers’ lane’, set in contrast with modernity and commercial spaces such as cinemas and coffee bars. But the lures of urban culture were not the only threat to this vision, as redevelopment in rural areas and farmers’ practices unsympathetic to courting couples eroded traditional spaces.

Girls reporting in later life to the Mass Observation Survey found the rural setting tended to be associated with ‘missing out’ on experiences perceived as happening elsewhere. They were living in small communities, they lacked means of mobility, and there was often a considerable degree of community surveillance even where the church did not remain a significant element in village life. Some might manage to travel to towns either by public transport or if they had access to cars. There is also evidence that there were means of subterfuge and evasion, along with hints that a certain leeway was permissible within a ‘courtship’ context, suggesting that older patterns still persisted. Interestingly, given the long tradition of seeing rural nature as sexually informative, one respondent at least said, ‘Sex wasn’t around … I had no sex education from anyone. All knowledge was gained from friends, reading books and films’ (p. 104).

Was the sex always even about sex? Raine and Shentall do complicate the accepted northern soul narrative that it was not at all about sex, and that this was considered part of the attraction of the scene. Matthew Worley's chapter ‘“Mummy … what is a Sex Pistol?”: SEX, sex, and British punk in the 1970s’ provides a deeply unsensual and unerotic picture of the ways in which extreme sexual imagery was being deployed. It was an act of transgression intended to shock, not arouse. Similarly, Claire Nally, in ‘The “style terrorism” of Siouxsie Sioux: femininity, early goth aesthetics and BDSM fashion’, suggests that Sioux's initial deployment of Nazi and BDSM imagery was intended to be iconoclastic and transgressive of perceived suburban conventionality. Her adoption of dominatrix style and fetish imagery was inverting ‘normative expectations of femininity’ (p. 266), although this brought its own problematic baggage.

Questions linger around masculinity. There are chapters delving into specific ethnic experiences – William ‘Lez’ Henry's ‘Run the track but no bother chat slack: understanding the relationship between slackness and culture within the reggae dancehall, 1960s–80s’, illuminates a misunderstood Jamaican musical subculture, while Naheel Zuberi writes of ‘Coming of age Asian and Muslim in post-punk West Yorkshire’. Attention is given to the increasing visibility of gay culture. But what of the unmarked category of straight white bloke? While changes in styles of male presentation of self – allegedly to softer and more expressive, if then on to the harsher mode of punk – are documented, we get less of a sense of what these meant. Were they about being attractive to girls? (and how far was that about being seen to be pulling the birds?) Or was it more about male competitiveness (‘my obscure vinyl collection is bigger than your obscure vinyl collection’)? The two chapters on film do not entirely seem to mesh with the rest of the collection. They discuss movies (Blow-Up and Deep End), which rather seem to have been invoking, if not exactly timeless, somewhat archetypal male narratives (male gaze, male anomie, male coming-of-age angst, etc.) and their relationship to popular music appears a little peripheral.

What were the ways in which boys learnt about sex? Is there any Mass Observation material in which men reflect on their experiences of acquiring sexual knowledge and early sexual experiences? This did feature in the 1949 ‘Little Kinsey’, but have there been directives of more recent date which might illuminate the subject? How far did class nuance masculinity? In fact, one might wish for a more complex consideration of class altogether, but that is probably several whole new projects.

Hannah Charnock's concluding chapter, ‘“I’m your man”: heartthrobs and banter in Smash Hits’ suggests that this magazine manifested certain changes occurring in youthful gender and sexuality during the second half of the twentieth century. Founded in 1978 and pitched at both a male and female readership, Smash Hits deployed a glossy look and a humorous approach, differentiating it from the ‘inkies’ of serious music journalism, and created something of a hybrid between these and the teenage girl magazines. The New Pop ‘heartthrobs’ of the 1980s were presented not merely as romantic figures but as objects of desire for girls. Meanwhile, male-coded sexual banter featured in interviews with them. Charnock suggests that while these two modes were gendered – heartthrobs for the girls, banter for the boys – the boundaries were becoming blurred, for example, it would be expected that girls would ‘get’ the jokes. Sex was both more explicit but defused by humour.

A theme which emerges across these chapters and the books discussed above is one of temporality and changes over time. That there were different phases, both personal and social, some organised around external factors like the licensing laws as to when young people might access certain spaces (flexible though this may sometimes have been in practice) or when they might gain the mobility of a car. Or when new shiny clubs opened, or when they closed or changed their nature or location. There was when particular individuals found their space – while this is foregrounded in Oram's chapter, it is implicit elsewhere that it could take time to find one's proper place. When did people stop being ‘young people’? (This allegedly did not particularly factor into the northern soul culture.) Did the period of ‘leisured youth’ extend as people began to marry at later ages? Did this affect the kinds of leisure they pursued (this is touched on in Kenny's work in the discussion of the changing style in nightclubs)?

It is a tribute to the rich material presented in these three works that they raise so many tantalising questions and possibilities for further research.