Rating: 
Summary: Fab!!!
Review: "Ready, Steady, Go!" is my favorite nonfiction book of the year.
Rating: 
Summary: Cool Britannia, or What I wore to the Revolution
Review: From the thatchy tweedy deportment of the establishment to cool mods to the hairy hippie daze in a single decade. Has any cultural pendulum ever swung so fast? Where did all these people explode onto the scene from? Models, photographers, hair dressers, boutique owners, managers of mayfly-lifespanned clubs, clothing designers, decadent aristos slumming around, East End yobbos coming up in the world of film, pop stars becoming huger than huge icons of an age. I always think of the Sixties as the decade that the world shifted from black-and-white to color. But fashion photographer and Swinging London plankholder David Bailey said that for him, it was when the world shifted from grey to black-and-white, and maybe he's got a point, for the beginning of the era. The English went from the Angry Young Men in the Fifties chafing against the English class system to a pop cultural sunburst in the Sixties in which class simply ceased to matter-for a while.Apparently it all began in the gay sub-culture, when some fashion designers started imitating their camp "clobber." Or maybe it exfoliated from all the Italian fashions flooding London in the Fifties. Or maybe young French students clubbing in London on holiday in the early Sixties brought some fashion ideas. Or maybe all these seeds mutated together and germinated under a steady pollination by American rock 'n' roll. (Whatever, the British did for American pop culture what the Japanese would later do for the American automobile industry: nearly steal it.) One dress designer says that the postwar children were malnourished in the Forties, and they grew up to be beautiful, skinny clotheshorses in the Sixties. And Terence Stamp tells how he went to purchase "Love Me Do" and was surprised to learn that the singers were English. But the ray of inspiration passed from Rome and America to London, and soon Britannia was waiving the rules, and epitomizing youth, freshness, inventiveness, decadence and possibility all at once. And then it all came back down to earth, in a heap. The familiar and to Americans not so familiar deaths, the rise of hippie anti-fashion, and the mass marketing of even that, the psychoactive drugs and the ruin they wreaked in the lives of so many talented people, are all numbered off and duly deplored. The inevitable Syd Barrett pops up almost as the book's coda. The Sixties were dead, and they didn't leave a particularly beautiful corpse. But out of the ashes... One can always carp about this or that bit of music history being left out, doubtless for space reasons. Sure, Jimi Hendrix ushered in a whole new musical era in London, and raised the bar considerably for the English guitar heroes of the time. But Cream had already served notice that the electric guitar was not just a jangly noisemaker, and that rock was starting to have an artistic claim to serious critical attention. This more than anything was a British achievement, however far Hendrix and the prog-rockers of the Seventies ran with it. Or you can read about how Keith Richards stayed out of the making of the movie _Performance_, sullen because of Mick's love scenes with Keith's girlfriend Anita Pallenberg. It might have been interesting to note that Ry Cooder did the guitar work on _Performance_ when Keef grumped out-for which service Richards plagiarized many of his best riffs for Stones songs. The menacing East End crime kings the Kray brothers pop up throughout the book. They were also wannabe scenesters, but were just a few crucial years behind the times. One unremarked-upon irony is that the Krays were the subject of a movie decades on. Their parts were played by members of Spandau Ballet, the fashion-heavy New Romantic Eighties band. We also get quick run-throughs of the familiar Beatles and Rolling Stones stories, as they pertain to London at that time. John Lennon is a nasty git in this book, and Mick Jagger is his familiar amoral self. Indeed, it may be startling to younger readers to read the accounts of his ruthless usage of people early in his life and career. An annoyance is that the text describes classic, epochal photos in many places, but most of them are not included in the book. It seems like Doubleday could have gotten the permissions if they had tried. No key to the photos on the back cover, either. Okay, so this book is drawn from other memoirs, other interviews, other studies. What of it? Fifty years from now all books about the Sixties will be written thus. With its pan-and-zoom-in, pan-and-zoom-in structure, _Ready Steady Go_ is as intimate-but safe-a journey through that time and place as it may be possible to take.
Rating:
Summary: Cool Britannia, or What I wore to the Revolution
Review: From the thatchy tweedy deportment of the establishment to cool mods to the hairy hippie daze in a single decade. Has any cultural pendulum ever swung so fast? Where did all these people explode onto the scene from? Models, photographers, hair dressers, boutique owners, managers of mayfly-lifespanned clubs, clothing designers, decadent aristos slumming around, East End yobbos coming up in the world of film, pop stars becoming huger than huge icons of an age. I always think of the Sixties as the decade that the world shifted from black-and-white to color. But fashion photographer and Swinging London plankholder David Bailey said that for him, it was when the world shifted from grey to black-and-white, and maybe he's got a point, for the beginning of the era. The English went from the Angry Young Men in the Fifties chafing against the English class system to a pop cultural sunburst in the Sixties in which class simply ceased to matter-for a while. Apparently it all began in the gay sub-culture, when some fashion designers started imitating their camp "clobber." Or maybe it exfoliated from all the Italian fashions flooding London in the Fifties. Or maybe young French students clubbing in London on holiday in the early Sixties brought some fashion ideas. Or maybe all these seeds mutated together and germinated under a steady pollination by American rock 'n' roll. (Whatever, the British did for American pop culture what the Japanese would later do for the American automobile industry: nearly steal it.) One dress designer says that the postwar children were malnourished in the Forties, and they grew up to be beautiful, skinny clotheshorses in the Sixties. And Terence Stamp tells how he went to purchase "Love Me Do" and was surprised to learn that the singers were English. But the ray of inspiration passed from Rome and America to London, and soon Britannia was waiving the rules, and epitomizing youth, freshness, inventiveness, decadence and possibility all at once. And then it all came back down to earth, in a heap. The familiar and to Americans not so familiar deaths, the rise of hippie anti-fashion, and the mass marketing of even that, the psychoactive drugs and the ruin they wreaked in the lives of so many talented people, are all numbered off and duly deplored. The inevitable Syd Barrett pops up almost as the book's coda. The Sixties were dead, and they didn't leave a particularly beautiful corpse. But out of the ashes... One can always carp about this or that bit of music history being left out, doubtless for space reasons. Sure, Jimi Hendrix ushered in a whole new musical era in London, and raised the bar considerably for the English guitar heroes of the time. But Cream had already served notice that the electric guitar was not just a jangly noisemaker, and that rock was starting to have an artistic claim to serious critical attention. This more than anything was a British achievement, however far Hendrix and the prog-rockers of the Seventies ran with it. Or you can read about how Keith Richards stayed out of the making of the movie _Performance_, sullen because of Mick's love scenes with Keith's girlfriend Anita Pallenberg. It might have been interesting to note that Ry Cooder did the guitar work on _Performance_ when Keef grumped out-for which service Richards plagiarized many of his best riffs for Stones songs. The menacing East End crime kings the Kray brothers pop up throughout the book. They were also wannabe scenesters, but were just a few crucial years behind the times. One unremarked-upon irony is that the Krays were the subject of a movie decades on. Their parts were played by members of Spandau Ballet, the fashion-heavy New Romantic Eighties band. We also get quick run-throughs of the familiar Beatles and Rolling Stones stories, as they pertain to London at that time. John Lennon is a nasty git in this book, and Mick Jagger is his familiar amoral self. Indeed, it may be startling to younger readers to read the accounts of his ruthless usage of people early in his life and career. An annoyance is that the text describes classic, epochal photos in many places, but most of them are not included in the book. It seems like Doubleday could have gotten the permissions if they had tried. No key to the photos on the back cover, either. Okay, so this book is drawn from other memoirs, other interviews, other studies. What of it? Fifty years from now all books about the Sixties will be written thus. With its pan-and-zoom-in, pan-and-zoom-in structure, _Ready Steady Go_ is as intimate-but safe-a journey through that time and place as it may be possible to take.
Rating:
Summary: Thanks, Shawn
Review: I appreciate Shawn Levy's clarifying the source of some of his quotes. I made the same point -- that most of the sources are newspapers and other publicly available media (nothing wrong with that) -- in a response that Amazon declined to publish. Perhaps it thought (incorrectly) that I was implying plagiarism. I was a teenager in Swinging London and I thoroughly enjoyed the book: It brought many memories. (We were all a little wild back then.) But I'll stick to my original comment that there are a number of minor historical "quirks" (such as the photograph of a war-protesting "Londoner" who is obviously American). I'd guess that some of the other oddities come from misinterpreting the more colourful and colloquial language used in British tabloids. I also stand by my summary. "Ready, Steady, Go" is a more accurate picture of the *mood* of Swinging London than any historically accurate, but soulless, text book of that time and place. It's also great fun to read.
Rating: 
Summary: the devil is in the details
Review: I thought this book presented a good overview and flavor of the era. Clearly, extensive research was involved. The different aspects I had read about, however, seemed different in my memory from what was in the book. For example, Lennon-McCartney did not form Northern Songs for their own music. They were not major composers when they first arrived in London with a contract and Brian Epstein arranged for their music to be handled by this company. It was later a source of grief for them when the company and their creations were sold, completely out of their control. Most of the information about the Rolling Stones seemed to be from Marianne Faithfull's autobiography, which was very well written. Paul McCartney's book, Many Years from Now, had a very lively discussion of the '60's art scene. Michael Caine's autobiography, also, was clearly used for much background material. In translation, the data from these works was much less lively than the originals. Reading only a few of them gave me a sense of the patched together quality of this book.
Rating:
Summary: the devil is in the details
Review: I thought this book presented a good overview and flavor of the era. Clearly, extensive research was involved. The different aspects I had read about, however, seemed different in my memory from what was in the book. For example, Lennon-McCartney did not form Northern Songs for their own music. They were not major composers when they first arrived in London with a contract and Brian Epstein arranged for their music to be handled by this company. It was later a source of grief for them when the company and their creations were sold, completely out of their control. Most of the information about the Rolling Stones seemed to be from Marianne Faithfull's autobiography, which was very well written. Paul McCartney's book, Many Years from Now, had a very lively discussion of the '60's art scene. Michael Caine's autobiography, also, was clearly used for much background material. In translation, the data from these works was much less lively than the originals. Reading only a few of them gave me a sense of the patched together quality of this book.
Rating:
Summary: Great Book, But With Some Depth Missing
Review: I'm in complete agreement with the previous reviewer...while I enjoyed this book, I would have appreciated more comprehensive coverage of some of the lesser-known figures and incidents of the time. In addition to this title and the aforementioned FAITHFULL, I'd highly recommend Mick Farren's GIVE THE ANARCHIST A CIGARETTE--an astonishingly vivid, articulate and hilarious portrait of the more bohemian/hippie end of late-'60s London. There's also another London-in-the-'60s book I've been on the lookout for entitled DAYS IN THE LIFE by Jonathan Green.
Rating:
Summary: Great Book, But With Some Depth Missing
Review: I'm in complete agreement with the previous reviewer...while I enjoyed this book, I would have appreciated more comprehensive coverage of some of the lesser-known figures and incidents of the time. In addition to this title and the aforementioned FAITHFULL, I'd highly recommend Mick Farren's GIVE THE ANARCHIST A CIGARETTE--an astonishingly vivid, articulate and hilarious portrait of the more bohemian/hippie end of late-'60s London. There's also another London-in-the-'60s book I've been on the lookout for entitled DAYS IN THE LIFE by Jonathan Green.
Rating:
Summary: The author speaks about his methods
Review: Just to clear up a point of confusion, there are more than 40 original first-person interviews in this book, with people as diverse as Terence Stamp, Michael Caine, Lynn Redgrave, Bill Wyman, David Puttnam, Vidal Sassoon, Mary Quant, Ian McKellen, Michael Apted, Rita Tushingham, John Boorman, Woody Allen, Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda and assorted restauranteurs, gallery and nightclub owners, models, editors, photographers, musicians, haberdashers and so on. Yes, I did rely heavily on previously published materials -- and I explain how much and why in the acknowledgements. But there is scarcely a page without a quote or bit of information gleaned from one of these interviews. It just seemed to me that the vast ocean of information out there ought not to be ignored if it could give a clear picture of the period. Sorry if I sound a little thin-skinned, but when people take the book to task for its methodology and simply get their facts wrong, it can make you a tad edgy. Anyway, hope you like the book. PS: Since I couldn't post these comments without ascribing a star rating, I assigned four stars, which was the average of the previous reviewers' comments.
Rating:
Summary: Read This Book
Review: Levy has captured the drama and glamour of the sheer novelty of London in the early '60s and, for the most part, rendered it accessible and electric for his readers. The backstories of Mary Quant and Tara Browne may be new to many readers, but the Beatles and fashion info is already out there in a multitude of other books. More focus on the lesser-known personalities would have suited this book better, but overall it's a fascinating study of why the British Invasion succeeded and failed.
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