Ready, Steady, Go!
The Smashing Rise and Giddy Fall of Swinging London
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
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. A portrait of London from roughly 1961 to 1969, it chronicles the explosion of creativity–in art, music and fashion–and the revolutions–sexual, social and political–that reshaped the world. Levy deftly blends the enthusiasm of a fan, the discerning eye of a social critic and a historian's objectivity as he re-creates the hectic pace and daring experimentation of the times–from the utter transformation of rock 'n' roll by the Beatles and the Rolling Stones to the new aesthetics introduced by fashion designers like Mary Quant, haircutters like Vidal Sassoon, photographers like David Bailey, actors like Michael Caine and Terence Stamp and filmmakers like Richard Lester and Nicolas Roeg to the wild clothing shops and cutting-edge clubs that made Carnaby Street and King's Road the hippest thoroughfares in the world.
Spiced with the reminiscences of some of the leading icons of that period, their fans and followers, and featuring a photographic gallery of well-known faces and far-out fashions, Ready, Steady, Go! is an irresistible re-creation of a time and place that seemed almost impossibly fun.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
