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Ready, Steady, Go!: The Smashing Rise and Giddy Fall of Swinging London

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Overview

It's the summer of 1966... The fundamental old ways: chastity, rationality, harmony, sobriety, even democracy: blasted to nothing or crumbling under siege. The city glows. It echoes. It pulses. It bleeds pastel and fuzzy, spicy, paisley and soft. This is how it's always going to be: smashing clothes, brilliant music, easy sex, eternal youth, the eyes of everybody, everyone's first thought, the top of the world, right here, right now: Swinging London. Shawn Levy has a genius for unearthing the secret history of popular culture. The Los Angeles Times called King of Comedy, his biography of Jerry Lewis, "a model of what a celebrity bio ought to be-smart, knowing, insightful, often funny, full of fascinating insiders' stories," and the Boston Globe declared that Rat Pack Confidential "evokes the time in question with the power of a novel, as well as James Ellroy's American Tabloid and better by far than Don DeLillo's Underworld." In Ready, Steady, Go! Levy captures the spirit of the sixties in all its exuberance.

Editorial Reviews

The 1960s in Swinging London brought about a sudden a wave of bob cuts, mod struts, pink-shirted blokes and Scotch-and-cokes. Had it not happened, "nothing nothing of the modern world we share could have been the way it is," writes Levy (Rat Pack Confidential). Sure, the American journalist/film critic admits, there were youthquakes at other points and in other cities, but this was "a cultural paradigm" that erased the classes and embraced freedom of expression, exploration and entertainment. The book, which lifts its title from the era's what's-hot-now! TV hit, spotlights the places and the faces who made dowdy London fabulous: The Snapper, photographer David Bailey, credited as first on the scene; The Crimper, hair liberator Vidal Sassoon; The Draper, Mary Quant, a fearless clothes designer; The Loner, Brian Epstein, who found his calling and when he found the Beatles. "For a few years, the most amazing thing in the world was to be British, creative and young." In three main sections structured loosely around the decade's rise, saturation and dark demise, Levy deftly correlates its many moods with such markers as the latest Beatles album, nightclub or drug first it was booze, then amphetamines, pot, LSD, heroin. An invigorating book, it's packed with can't-miss material on the skirt-chasing escapades of actor flatmates Terence Stamp and Michael Caine; the acid party that jailed two Stones and one famous art dealer; the reaction of London musicians to the coming of the "prophet of their downfall," Jimi Hendrix from the States. Levy has gleaned his insights from interviews and from books, but the book reads as if he'd lived the era himself. (July) Forecast: Eye-popping cover art will grab browsers' attention, but with a third Austin Powers movie set to come out in July, it's hard to tell whether the mod-girl image will instantly attract or repulse them. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information. -- PUBLISHERS WEEKLY.

Author Information

Bio of Shawn Levy

author spotlight SHAWN LEVY is the film critic for The Oregonian and the author of The Last Playboy, Ready, Steady, Go!, Rat Pack Confidential, and King of Comedy. He lives in Portland, Oregon, with his wife and three children.

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Additional Info

Imprint

Random House

Filesize

785.77 KB

Number of Pages

400

eBook ISBN

9780385507271

Excerpt from: Ready, Steady, Go! by Shawn Levy

A Cloud of Pink Chiffon

The story of David Bailey's early life and career would come to sound a cliche: Scruffy East End (or maybe northern) boy aspires to a field normally reserved for the posh and sets the world on its ear without bending his personality to fit the long-established model. But like the jokes in Shakespeare or the Marx Brothers, it was only familiar because it was repeated so often from the original. All the pop stars, actors, dressmakers, haircutters, club owners, scenesters, satirists and boy tycoons who exploded on the London scene in the early sixties did so after Bailey, often in his mold and almost always in front of his camera.

Before mod and the Beat Boom, before Carnaby Street and the swinging hot spots of Soho and Chelsea, before, indeed, sex and drugs and most of rock 'n' roll there were the laddish young photographers from the East: Bailey, Brian Duffy and Terence Donovan, "the Terrible Three" in the affectionate phrase of Cecil Beaton, an iconoclastic snapper of another age whose approval of the new lot made it that much easier for them to barge in on what had been a very exclusive and sedate party.

The trio--and a few others who came along in the rush--dressed and spoke and carried on as no important photographers ever had, not even in the putatively wide-open worlds of fashion magazines and photojournalism. They spoke like smart alecks and ruffians, they flaunted their high salaries and the Rolls-Royces they flashed around in, they slept with the beautiful women who modeled for them, they employed new cameras and technologies to break fertile ground in portraiture and fashion shoots. They were superstars from a world that had previously been invisible, perhaps with reason. "Before 1960," Duffy famously said, "a fashion photographer was somebody tall, thin and camp. But we three are different: short, fat and heterosexual."