Let’s spend the night together: Sex, pop music and British youth culture, 1950s–80s

Let’s spend the night together explores how sex and sexuality provided essential elements of British youth culture in the 1950s through to the 1980s. It shows how the underlying sexual charge of rock ‘n’roll – and pop music more generally – was integral to the broader challenge embodied in the youth cultures that developed after World War Two. As teenage hormones rushed to move to the music and take advantage of the spaces opening up through consumption, education and employment, so the boundaries of British morality and cultural propriety were tested and often transgressed. Be it the assertive masculinity of the teds or the lustful longings of the teeny-bopper, the gender-bending of glam or the subterranean allure of an underground club/disco, the free love of the 1960s or the punk provocations in the 1970s, sex was forever to the fore and, more often than not, underpinned the moral panics that fitfully followed any cultural shift in youthful style and behaviour.

Drawing from scholarship across a range of disciplines, the Subcultures Network explore how sex and sexuality were experienced, presented, conferred, responded to and understood within the context of youth culture, popular music and social change in the period between World War Two and the advent of AIDS. The essays locate sex, music and youth culture in the context of post-war Britain: with a widening and ever-more prevalent media; amidst the loosening bonds of censorship; in a society shaped by changing patterns of consumption and the emergence of the ‘teenager’; existing, as Jeff Nuttall famously argued, under the shadow of the (nuclear) bomb.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Nov 7, 2023
• ISBN: 9781526159977

Book preview

Let's spend the night together

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Let's spend the night together

Sex, pop music and British youth culture, 1950s–80s

The Subcultures Network

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Manchester University Press 2023

While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of both author and publisher.

Published by Manchester University Press

Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 52615998 4 hardback

First published 2023

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Cover credit:

Courtesy of the Subculture Archives

Cover design: Abbey Akanbi,

Manchester University Press

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by New Best-set Typesetters Ltd

Contents

List of figures and tables

List of contributors

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Let's spend the night together: sex, pop music and British youth culture, 1950s–80s

Matthew Worley, Keith Gildart, Anna Gough-Yates, Sian Lincoln, Bill Osgerby, Lucy Robinson, John Street, Pete Webb

1 Where were you? UK chart pop and the commodification of the teenage libido, 1952–63

Tom Hennessy

2 The Jerry Lee Lewis scandal, the popular press and the moral standing of rock ’n’ roll in late 1950s Britain

Gillian A.M. Mitchell

3 ‘I'm different; I'm tough; I fuck’: attitudes towards young men, sex and masculinity in Nik Cohn's Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom: Pop from the Beginning (1969)

Patrick Glen

4 ‘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

Sarah Kenny

5 Lovers’ lanes and haystacks: rural spaces and girls’ experiences of courtship and sexual intimacy in post-war England

Sian Edwards

6 Queering modernism: social, sartorial and spatial intersections between mod and gay (sub)culture, 1957–67

Shaun Cole and Paul Sweetman

7 ‘You just let your hair down’: lesbian parties and clubs in the 1960s and early 1970s

Alison Oram

8 Singing Elton's song: queer sexualities and youth cultures in England and Wales, 1967–85

Daryl Leeworthy

9 ‘Nothing like a little disaster for sorting things out’: Blowup (1966) and the free hedonism(s) of Swinging London

Marlie Centawer

10 ‘Everything gets boring after a time’: Deep End and swinging sex

David Wilkinson

11 Run the track, but no bother chat slack: overstanding the relationship between slackness and culture within the reggae dancehall, 1960s–80s

William ‘Lez’ Henry

12 ‘This could be a night to remember’: authenticity, historicising and the silencing of sexual experience in the northern soul scene

Sarah Raine and Caitlin Shentall

13 ‘Mummy … what is a Sex Pistol?’: SEX, sex and British punk in the 1970s

Matthew Worley

14 The ‘style terrorism’ of Siouxsie Sioux: femininity, early goth aesthetics and BDSM fashion

Claire Nally

15 Coming of age Asian and Muslim in post-punk West Yorkshire

Nabeel Zuberi

16 ‘I'm your man’: heartthrobs and banter in Smash Hits

Hannah Charnock

Index

Figures and tables

Figures

1.1 Stylistic distribution in the UK Top 100 pop charts – 1953

1.2 Stylistic distribution in the UK Top 100 pop charts – 1956

1.3 Stylistic distribution in the UK Top 100 pop charts – 1960

1.4 Stylistic distribution in the UK Top 100 pop charts – 1963

Tables

1 Singles containing references to dreams in their titles, 1954–63

Contributors

Marlie Centawer is a lecturer with the Centre for Studies in Arts and Culture at Brock University, and PhD candidate at Liverpool John Moores School of Art and Design under the supervision of Professor Colin Fallows. She is also assistant and archivist to the British Pop artist, art collector and Indica Gallery co-founder John Dunbar. Her research interests include popular music and youth culture, sixties counterculture, photography, cinema, visual culture, psychogeography and rock and roll.

Hannah Charnock is a lecturer in Modern British History at the University of Bristol. Hannah specialises in the history of relationships and has published work on female friendship, teenage sexuality, and marriage in twentieth-century Britain. She is currently writing her first book, a history of English teenagers’ experiences of heterosexuality in post-war Britain.

Shaun Cole is a writer, lecturer and curator. He is associate professor in Fashion at Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton, and Co-Director of the ‘Intersectionalities: Politics – Identities – Cultures’ research group. He has written on the subject of menswear and gay fashion and his publications include ‘Don We Now Our Gay Apparel’: Gay Men’s Dress in the Twentieth Century (2000), The Story of Men’s Underwear (2010) and Dandy Style: 250 years of British Men’s Fashion (2021).

Sian Edwards is a senior lecturer in Modern British History at the University of Winchester. Her first monograph, Youth Movements, Citizenship and the English Countryside, was published in 2018 and explores the place of the countryside in the citizenship training of mid-century youth organisations. Her most recent research focuses on experiences of the rural teenager in post-war Britain and aims to conceptualise and understand post-war rural youth cultures.

Keith Gildart is Professor of Labour and Social History at the University of Wolverhampton, UK. He has published widely in the field of youth culture

and popular music. He most recent books include Images of England through Popular Music: Class, Youth and Rock ’n’ Roll 1955–1976 (2013) and Keeping the Faith: A History of Northern Soul (2020).

Patrick Glen is a social and cultural historian, journalist and musician based in the School of Performance and Cultural Industries at the University of Leeds. Patrick is the author of Youth and Permissive Social Change in British Music Papers, 1967–1983 (2018).

Anna Gough-Yates is Deputy Provost of the Academic Department at the University of Roehampton. She has published widely on women's magazines and with regard femininity, feminism and representation in television.

Tom Hennessy is an independent scholar and academic quality professional working in Swansea University. His work focuses on dance records, dancefloors and authenticity in urban Britain.

William ‘Lez’ Henry was born in the London borough of Lewisham, of Jamaican Parentage and is the British Reggae Deejay Lezlee Lyrix. He is a professor of Criminology and Sociology in the School of Human and Social Sciences, University of West London, where he is the Equality, Diversity & Inclusivity Lead and Course Leader for the MA: ‘Global Black Studies, Decolonisation and Social Justice’. Professor Lez is a writer, poet and community activist who is a renowned public speaker, both nationally and internationally, featuring in numerous documentaries, current affairs television and radio programmes. He lectures in the areas of criminology, sociology, anthropology, race, education, ethnicity, black history, youth crime and cultural studies. As a passionate educator, he delivers educational, interventionist, programmes such as his ‘Goal Models: Pathway to Personal Success Programme’ in various school settings. Professor Lez has a passion for martial arts and holds a Shodan Black Belt in IKK Kyokushinkai Karate, and is a 3rd Degree Black Belt, senior instructor with Hung Kuen Southeast, Five Animals, Shaolin Kung Fu.

Sarah Kenny is Assistant Professor of Modern British Studies at the University of Birmingham with particular interests in youth culture, lifestyle, and leisure spaces in the post-war period. She has published on a range of topics including urban regeneration, the night-time economy, and cultural identity. Her first monograph, Growing Up and Going Out: Youth Culture, Commerce, and Leisure Space in Post-war Britain is forthcoming with Manchester University Press.

Daryl Leeworthy is the Rhys Davies Trust Research Fellow at Swansea University. His several books include Labour Country (2018), A Little Gay History of Wales (2019), Causes in Common: Welsh Women and the Struggle for Social Democracy (2022), and, most recently, Fury of Past Time: A Life of Gwyn Thomas (2022).

Sian Lincoln is an independent scholar who has published widely in journals and anthologies on aspects of youth culture. Her monograph Youth Culture and Private Space was published in 2012 and her book co-written with Brady Robards, Growing up on Facebook, was published in 2020. She is co-editor of two book series: Cinema and Youth Cultures (Routledge) and Palgrave Studies in the History of Subcultures & Popular Music.

Gillian A.M. Mitchell is a senior lecturer in History at the University of St Andrews. She specialises in the socio-cultural history of popular music in Britain and North America from the 1950s to the 1970s. Her most recent books are Adult Responses to Popular Music and Intergenerational Relations in Britain, c.1955–1975 (2019) and The British National Daily Press and Popular Music, c.1956–1975 (2019).

Claire Nally is a professor in Modern and Contemporary Literature at Northumbria University. Claire has written and edited several books, but her most recent work now focuses on Neo-Victorianism. She has published articles on burlesque, as well as gender and sexuality in goth magazines, and her latest monograph was Steampunk: Gender, Subculture and the Neo-Victorian (2019). She is the co-editor (with Angela Smith) of the Bloomsbury International Library of Gender and Popular Culture.

Alison Oram is a senior research fellow at the Institute of Historical Research, School of Advanced Study, University of London and Professor Emerita at Leeds Beckett University. She has published widely on lesbian and queer history in twentieth century Britain, as well as on queer heritage. Her books include ‘Her Husband was a Woman!’ Women’s Gender-Crossing and Modern British Popular Culture (2007) and, with Matt Cook, Queer Beyond London (Manchester University Press 2022). She led ‘Pride of Place: England's LGBTQ Heritage’ for Historic England in 2015–16, https://historicengland.org.uk/research/inclusive-heritage/lgbtq-heritage-project/

Bill Osgerby is Emeritus Professor of Media, Culture and Communication at London Metropolitan University. He has published widely on British and American cultural history. His books include Youth in Britain Since 1945 (1998); Playboys in Paradise: Youth, Masculinity and Leisure-Style in Modern America (2001); Youth Media (2004); Biker: Style and Subculture on Hell’s Highway (2005); Youth Culture and the Media: Global Perspectives (2016); and American Pie: The Anatomy of Vulgar Teen Comedy (2021). He has also co-edited numerous anthologies, including Action TV: Tough Guys, Smooth Operators and Foxy Chicks (2013); Subcultures, Popular Music and Social Change (2014); and Fight Back: Punk, Politics and Resistance (2017).

Sarah Raine is a lecturer in Cultural Industries at the University of Leeds (UK). Sarah's published research considers issues of gender and generation, authenticity and identity, and the construction of the past and present in the popular music scene and industry. In addition to a range of articles and book chapters, she is the author of Authenticity and Belonging in the Northern Soul Scene (2020) and the co-editor of Towards Gender Equality in the Music Industry (with Catherine Strong, 2019) and The Northern Soul Scene (with Tim Wall and Nicola Watchman Smith, 2019). Sarah is the co-Managing Editor of Riffs and acts as a book series editor for Equinox Publishing (Music Industry Studies / Icons of Pop Music) an editor for Jazz Research Journal.

Lucy Robinson is part of the Subcultures Network team and Professor of Collaborative History at the University of Sussex. She is currently finishing a book for Manchester University Press on popular culture and politics in the 1980s.

Caitlin Shentall is an independent researcher based in Sheffield with an interest in youth culture in post-war Britain. Caitlin is currently a copywriter in Student Recruitment at the University of Sheffield. Her co-authored chapter draws upon and further develops the work she undertook for her MA thesis entitled Do all Roads Really Lead to Wigan? A Reassessment of the History of the Northern Soul Scene in the ‘Crisis Decade’ of the 1970s (University of Sheffield, 2017). As a freelance writer, Caitlin has been involved in projects documenting Sheffield's music and DIY scenes and has contributed to local publications, including Exposed Magazine, Now Then and The Foodhall Project's Open Journal.

John Street is an emeritus professor of politics at the University of East Anglia. Among his publications are: Music and Politics (2012), From Entertainment to Citizenship: Politics and Popular Culture (2013) (with Sanna Inthorn and Martin Scott), and Media, Politics and Democracy (2021).

Paul Sweetman is a senior lecturer in Culture Media & Creative Industries at King's College London. He was previously based at the universities of Durham and Southampton. He has written and published on the sociology of the body, fashion, subcultures, visual methods of research and social and cultural theory. He is currently working on issues of subculture and place (both separately and together), partly through the lens of Actor Network Theory (ANT).

Pete Webb is a writer, lecturer and musician who specialises in research into popular and contemporary music, subcultures, politics, social theory and his concept of ‘milieu cultures’. He is a senior lecturer in sociology at the University of the West of England, Bristol. He previously worked in the music industry (1990–2002) as an artist and tour manager, He is the owner and creative director of PC-Press, publishing books on Test Dept., Killing Joke, Massive Attack and the fanzine Vague. His current music project is New Brand.

David Wilkinson is senior lecturer in English at Manchester Metropolitan University. As a member of the Subcultures Network, he is the author of Post-Punk, Politics and Pleasure in Britain (2016) and is currently working on a British Academy/Leverhulme funded research project investigating the contested legacy of the British counterculture.

Matthew Worley is Professor of Modern History at the University of Reading and a co-founder of the Subcultures Network. He has written widely on British politics and culture, focusing initially on the interwar period and more recently on the 1970s and 1980s. His research on British punk-related cultures has been published across a range of journals, including History Workshop, Popular Music and Twentieth Century British History. A monograph, No Future: Punk, Politics and British Youth Culture, 1976–84, was published in 2017. He is currently researching towards a book-length study of fanzines (Zerox Machine) and has recently published an article on punk and the Marquis de Sade for Contemporary British History.

Nabeel Zuberi is associate professor in Media and Screen Studies at the University of Auckland. His publications include Sounds English: Transnational Popular Music (2001), Media Studies in Aotearoa/New Zealand 1 & 2 (2004 and 2010, co-edited with Luke Goode), and Black Popular Music in Britain since 1945 (2014, co-edited with Jon Stratton). He is currently working on a book about music, race and media after 9/11, to be published by Bloomsbury.

Acknowledgements

The Subcultures Network would like to acknowledge all those who follow us and contribute to our Facebook page. Thanks also to the anonymous readers of the proposal and manuscript for their advice and encouragement.

This book is dedicated to Jordan.

Introduction: Let's spend the night together: sex, pop music and British youth culture, 1950s–80s

Matthew Worley, Keith Gildart, Anna Gough-Yates, Sian Lincoln, Bill Osgerby, Lucy Robinson, John Street, Pete Webb

When the Rolling Stones released ‘Let’s Spend the Night Together’ as a double A-sided single in January 1967, it was quite obvious that Mick Jagger had more on his mind than a long evening's chat about Sartrean existentialism or number crunching figures left over from his accounting degree. In his lyric, Jagger became tongue-tied as he got high, offering no apology for the feelings he could not disguise. Mutual satisfaction was promised and guidance offered as his voice jittered and twitched, pushing and persuading the ‘baby’ of his lustful attention for some fun ‘groovin’ around’. By the end of the song, Jagger was literally begging for ‘it’. ‘Now I need you more than ever’, he pleaded. ‘Oh my’, he gasped as the song pounded towards a climax, ‘oh my-my-my-my-my’.

¹

Whatever the gendered mores revealed by Jagger's lyric,² post-war pop music and sex were evidently joined at the hip. Our version of Let's Spend the Night Together is therefore intended to explore how this relationship between sex and popular music informed post-war British youth culture through to the 1980s. From the moment rock ’n’ roll crossed the Atlantic in the mid-1950s, its jerking rhythms and lyrical tics transmitted missives of desire that soon moved from the ribaldry nonsense of songs such as, say, Jerry Lee Lewis's ‘Whole Lot of Shakin’ Going On’ to the blunter appeals of the Rolling Stones's aforementioned single. In Britain as in the USA, pop stars rivalled and sometimes overtook movie stars as objects of libidinal obsession, expressions of which were captured forever in films of screaming fandom and collated – voyeuristically, revealingly – by Fred and Judy Vermorel in their Starlust (1985) collection of pop-fan fantasies.³ For those in a band or on a stage, self-transformation became possible: from suburban nobody to media-projected somebody; from one desiring to being desired. In lives lived after dark (or in the head), the promise of sexual experience and sexual sensation found opportunity in pop, sometimes reaffirming but also challenging socio-cultural norms. In turn, music infused and helped define wider cultures that generated media-framed simulacrums and permeated spaces both private (the bedroom) and public (the club, bar, street and discotheque). Within those spaces, sex and sexuality were felt, dreamt, pursued, discovered, stylised, spurned and abused to soundtracks that stoked the imagination and moved the body. Not for nothing do ‘jazz’, ‘rock ’n’ roll’, ‘funk’ and ‘punk’ have sexualised etymologies.

⁴

Ann Powers, in her excellent Good Booty: Love and Sex, Black and White, Body and Soul in American Music (2017), traces this relationship between sex and music from a US perspective. Named after the expurgated lyrics to Little Richard's ‘Tutti Frutti’, the book acknowledges pre-Second World War antecedents before drawing a line that connects rock ’n’ roll's initially all-but inarticulate expression of stifled teenage urges to the choreographed hyper-sexuality of twenty-first-century pop. In between, the ‘erotic pull’ of music's communal, physical and sensual charge is revealed across various genres, positioning pop as a driver of socio-cultural change that brokered race relations and posited – albeit sometimes problematically – sexual freedom.

⁵

Let's Spend the Night Together is not intended as an Anglicised companion to Powers's study, even if the pop-cultural dialogue between Britain and the USA means her narrative broadly applies to the UK. From the 1950s, as pop music helped distinguish the increasingly media-saturated (Western) world of commodified spectacle, the relationship between music and sex became ever more explicit. In both countries, pop music and sexuality were codified and channelled through the mechanisms of cultural consumption. To be sure, a British narrative would warrant more attention to class and style than Powers's US account. Jamaican and wider Caribbean influences would also need to be incorporated, given ska-then-reggae's contribution to British music and youth culture.⁶ But a journey from rock ’n’ roll to the 1980s would necessarily take in the studied innocence of late 1950s/early 1960s pop before detouring through beat groups and The Beatles en route to girl groups, soul, rock, glam, disco, punk, post-punk, hip hop and the technologically advanced chart and dancefloor sounds that pushed towards the millennium.

⁷

As such, Let's Spend the Night Together is compiled with a broader remit in mind. For the Subcultures Network, established to explore how youth cultures and popular music relate to processes of social change, the youth culture aspect is important. Not only was music integral to the formation of youth cultures over the later twentieth century, but the sounds, spaces, styles and places they encompassed also bore significance. As portents of the future, young people served (and serve) as conduits for a combustible mixture of hope, fear and anxiety.⁸ What teenagers did, what they wore, where they went, what they said and thought all gave indication of the state of the world and where the world was heading. A ‘generation gap’ was determined and exacted over the 1950s–60s, through which emerged new modes of thinking and being.⁹ An important part of this was sexual, be it in terms of personal identity or personal practice.¹⁰ The sexual liberation of the late twentieth century, however disputed and awkward and incomplete, was bound to a cultural ‘youthquake’ that tested how far the freedoms promised by capitalism, consumerism and democracy could go.

¹¹

Given all this, our objective is not to assess how music correlates to gender and/or sexuality. Sheila Whiteley and others have already produced a range of insightful studies on such a relationship.¹² Nor does it dwell on what youth cultural forms and styles suggest about sex and gender. Again, important work from Nik Cohn and Angela McRobbie onwards feeds into many of the chapters included here.¹³ Instead, our aim is to home in on experiences and representations of sex in the physical and media spaces opened up through music-based cultures. Our attention is focused on what was said and done, examining how and where sex was engaged with and imagined through pop music and youth cultural style. It means capturing the longings and lustings – the frustrations and fumblings – of being young. It concerns how sex, beyond the drugs and rock ’n’ roll, was mediated and understood in (and as) practice.

Historical and logistical reasons inform our timeframe. Let's Spend the Night Together begins from the post-war period underpinned by the Labour governments of 1945–51 and concludes as the tenets of Thatcherism begin to take effect. During the 1980s, the advent of AIDS and the reweaponising of gender politics necessitated a repositioning of sexual relations and sexual representation. These, given their complexities, warrant a book of their own. Put simply, Let's Spend the Night Together examines how youth culture and pop music informed young people's sexual experience and understanding in a period of apparent liberalisation. That this was messy should not be in doubt. As always, however, youthful libidos made sure to find a way.

Time Is On My Side:¹⁴ background and context

The period covered by Let's Spend the Night Together saw youth culture and popular music emerge as defining motifs of British post-war history. Both ‘youth’ and ‘pop’ helped signal a new world built on the rubble of the Second World War. They embraced and relied upon the technological advances that drove towards a suitably modernised consumer society. Their evolution and performance gave expression to, or at least hinted at, the faultlines generated by ongoing processes of socio-economic and socio-cultural change: the post-war baby boom, deindustrialisation, (im)migration, liberalisation. In such a way, the cut of youth cultural style and the sounds of pop music from a particular time now define popular memories of the late twentieth century. No documentary is complete without a pop-sourced soundtrack or a pop-star studded montage to locate the viewer.

That said, British history between the 1950s and 1980s was multifaceted and multi-layered.¹⁵ In geopolitical terms, the Cold War and Britain's own processes of decolonisation provoked existential questions as to the UK's position in the world.¹⁶ ‘Bomb Culture’, Jeff Nuttall called it: here was a generation born into a world primed for destruction but filling with purchasable playthings and commodified leisure time.¹⁷ In other words, knowledge of the Holocaust – and the possibility of a nuclear war made real by the US bombing of Hiroshima/Nagasaki – cast a shadow over the post-war period that never quite disappeared, despite the ideals for living promised by the advertisers.

Politically and economically, the governments of 1945–51 provided for a post-war ‘settlement’ built on a mixed economy of public and private ownership and committed to a welfare state and full employment.¹⁸ This buckled during the 1970s and was largely dismantled by the Conservative administrations presided over by Margaret Thatcher from 1979.¹⁹ In between, however, the rationing and austerity that ushered in the 1950s gave way to steadily rising living standards into the 1970s.²⁰ This, as always, should not be overstated. But the ‘teenage consumer’ was constructed and recognised as a product of the ‘affluent society’ developing through the 1950s–1960s, their frequenting of coffee bars and embrace of new styles and sounds noted and dissected.

²¹

Quite clearly, Britain's economic basis was shifting during the post-war period, transitioning from primary industry and manufacturing towards an ever-expanding service sector.²² Partly as a result of this, women entered the workforce in greater numbers. The sons of blue-collar workers found jobs in offices, with new industries and extended educational opportunities providing a semblance of social mobility. Immigration, too, began to transform Britain's demographic. New towns and new homes were built as slums were cleared and motorways constructed. In the process, communities were reconfigured and high streets reimagined.

²³

Given such circumstances, old certainties around class and gender began to weaken. By the 1960s, even the British establishment was losing its veneer, succumbing to scandals that demystified the pre-eminence of power and privilege. That these were often sexual in nature should be noted. The 1962–63 Profumo affair was exposed, in part, through tabloids gaining a taste for the salacious.²⁴ Thereafter, the Labour governments of 1964–70 became known for seeking to embrace the ‘white heat of technology’ and enacting liberalising reforms that better reflected the changing times.

²⁵ Among

them were the decriminalisation of homosexuality, the widening availability of the contraceptive pill, the reforming of divorce law and broader access to abortion. Censorship, too, was relaxed as modernism and media challenged the boundaries of what was permitted; of what could be said, imagined, shown and seen.

²⁶

Political and socio-economic change was bound to socio-cultural change. Disposable income and extended leisure time enabled new patterns of life, as did the products and appliances that defined an age of consumption.²⁷ In a media-driven society of the spectacle, new possibilities revealed themselves via celluloid portals into visual worlds soundtracked by purchasable music and codified in images collated by magazines and, increasingly, broadcast on television. Researched brilliantly by Claire Langhamer, an ‘emotional revolution’ rolled over the ‘short’ twentieth century, altering how people understood socio-sexual relations. The centrality of sexual satisfaction to love and matrimony served as a destabilising factor, Langhamer argues, not only affecting how people approached marriage but also the pursuit and expectations of romance.²⁸ Youth cultures were in the vanguard of all this, precipitating media-driven ‘panics’ about delinquency and paving the way for concerns about ‘permissiveness’ corroding the morality of British society.

²⁹

Young people undoubtedly became more visible over the 1950s–70s, not just as a proportion of the population but in terms of their presence and purchasing power. If the teds, beats, mods, rockers, hippies, rude boys and skinheads delineated recognisable – or ‘spectacular’ – youth subcultures, then a far wider tableau of sounds, spaces, behaviours and consumables catered for young people more generally. Youth culture, for our purposes, is not thereby confined to style- or music-based ‘subcultures’, which were always amorphous and open to differing interpretation. Rather, youth cultures are here understood to comprise particular ways of life expressing certain meanings and values through common behaviour across a range of contexts.³⁰ As well as looking to young punks and reggae sound systems, the book ventures into gay clubs, out to the countryside, and back towards the charts and high-street magazine racks – tracing youth cultural and pop interactions with sex across both marginal spaces and the commercially popular. The counterculture, incubated in part on further and higher education campuses over the 1960s–70s, also brought attention to a growing number of students, many of whom embraced radical politics and helped cultivate much of what transformed into pop.

³¹

Of course, the embrace and experience of youth culture could be relative and neither evenly distributed nor equally felt. Part of the romance of youth culture and pop music was their juxtaposition with the British landscape and the day-to-day experience of life itself: Teddy boy drape-coats worn beside still-to-be-cleared bombsites; the temporary escape of the dance hall; the glitter glistening and heels clopping along wet terrace streets; the glimpse of hidden or forbidden behaviours stirring feelings and temptations; glamorous dreams born in drab suburban enclaves. But these moments were often fleeting, their realisation forever challenged, denied or decried. More significantly, and as many of the chapters that follow demonstrate, the dynamics of class, race, gender, age and sexuality still generated struggles and reactions that played out across the late twentieth century. As Emily Robinson, Camilla Schofield, Florence Sutcliff-Braithwaite and Natalie Thomlinson have argued, an age of ‘popular individualism’ was dawning.³² That is, the post-war period was defined, in part, by a growing desire for autonomy and control over the definition and expression of individual rights, identities and perspectives. For youth, such popular individualism found an outlet in terms of aspiration, style and cultural choices. Politically, too, such impulses might seek a route through campaigns for social equality or a genuine antipathy to the socio-economic structures and hierarchies that hindered self-determination. If not quite a ‘magical solution’ to the class, gender and racial inequities thrown up in such a period of change, then the sounds, styles and spaces of youth culture arguably provided the means to navigate – or temporarily deflect – their impact.

³³

The relationship between youth culture and sexual behaviour was fuelled by other factors. Like young people, sex became more visible from the 1950s, as if the ‘discursive explosion’ recognised by Michel Foucault over the previous periods now found full display in the expansion of a media that often aligned youthful freedom with increasingly explicit depictions of sex and sexuality.³⁴ Tabloids sold sex as scandal; advertisers used sex to sell products pertaining to be more than simply functional.³⁵ Clothes, lipsticks and cigarettes held a sexual cachet, presented and directed towards youthful consumers. In magazines, bodies meshed with material satisfaction across images ever glossier and more colourful.³⁶ Most explicitly, in London's Soho, a seedy underground moved overground as sex shops flourished and bent policemen succumbed to vice.³⁷ As this suggests, pornography found commercial outlets and – though still bound by censorship laws – permeated the mediascape.³⁸ Just as the top shelf of the newsagents began to fill with an array of titles, so the bottom shelf saw The Sun use its page 3 to showcase topless models from late 1970, their teenage years often presented as part of the appeal.

³⁹

In the arts, the 1960 publication of D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover is typically seen as a turning point, the court ruling in Penguin's favour paving the way for sex and nudity to proliferate through other books, in film and on stage.⁴⁰ Here, again, a cultural dialogue between the UK, USA and Europe was evident, even if Britain's particular relationship with sex revealed itself in distinct ways. Where European art house cinema and writers such as William Burroughs began to explore subconscious sexual impulses and the multiplicity of sexual desire, bawdy English humour found expression in the Carry On films and, later, the tawdry titillation of 1970s sexploitation. Space opened for low cultures as well as high cultures to test at the limits of sexual expression.⁴¹ And while Britain's kitchen sink dramas often told tales of unwanted pregnancies and wayward bohemians that tapped into concerns close to youth culture, the ‘new Hollywood’ auteurs of the 1960s–70s (Polanski, Scorsese et al.) depicted sex and violence in ways more graphic than hitherto. By the end of the decade, sex and nudity were commonplace on film and television: even buying peanuts in a pub might lead to the sight of a naked woman pictured beneath the strategically placed packets.

That representations of sex and sexuality were overwhelmingly informed by heteronormativity and the male gaze need hardly be said. By the 1970s, however, this was being confronted and critiqued by advancing feminist and gay liberation movements.⁴² Popular culture (like the personal) became a site of political struggle, both in terms of contesting existent social structures and imagining new ways of living and being. Indeed, the counterculture that flowered in the 1960s was important here, demonstrating how the propagation of ‘free love’ could at once challenge convention whilst also revealing sexual and gendered fissures coexisting behind the utopian rhetoric. In practice, the ‘sexual revolution’ tended to afford greater sexual licence to heterosexual men than it did to women, gay men and lesbians; nevertheless, debates ensued and openings emerged. More to the point, the counterculture marked the moment when youth culture and the possibilities of sexual liberation conflated, overtly politicising the behaviour of young people and confirming the fears of those who felt ‘permissiveness’ embodied the ‘moral collapse which characterised the sixties and seventies’.⁴³ To now read the International Times and OZ, both of which emerged at the forefront of the underground press and both of which were subject to police raids and prosecution for obscenity, is to see sexual politics pushed to the forefront of the youth-led ‘revolution’.

Beyond these media projections, the sexual lives of young people received more sober attention, with sexological studies slowly filtering into the social consciousness to inform the language and expectations of sexual experience.⁴⁴ By the end of the 1950s, a growing acceptance of sex before marriage was registered in relation to heterosexual couples ‘going steady’.⁴⁵ According to Callum Brown, 38 per cent of ‘first intercourse’ took place within marriage between 1950 and 1965, falling to 15 per cent during 1965–75.⁴⁶ Even so, ‘moral panics’ still ensued in relation to teenage pregnancies and delinquency, feeding into concerns about the well-being of young women attracted to the spaces opening up around youth culture or the degenerating effects of the ‘teenage revolution’ on traditional gender roles.⁴⁷ In school, sexual awareness found only a circumscribed conduit through sex education, while families often remained sites of embarrassed convention.⁴⁸ As a result, hearsay and gossip continued to provide more typical ways to sexual (mis)information, enabling another space to be filled by media-generated advice columns or images as prurient as they were ‘instructive’.

⁴⁹

For this reason, Michael Schofield's 1965 survey into The Sexual Behaviour of Young People offers us a dry but insightful snapshot of Britain on the cusp of the so-called ‘Swinging Sixties’. The survey was prompted by a growing belief that teenagers were having sex earlier and more often. A ‘teenage mythology’ was developing, Schofield argued, integral to which was teenage consumption and recognisable youth cultures.⁵⁰ Through a combination of ‘uncommitted income’ and expanding leisure options, young people began to ‘challenge [the] outworn ideas of the older generation’. Girls and boys were deemed to be maturing earlier, with their dancing, dress and style all setting them aside. According to Schofield, female ‘emancipation’ and secularisation further informed ideas that monogamy and marriage were under threat.

⁵¹

As it was, the 15- to 19-year-olds surveyed suggested only relatively minor shifts in sexual behaviour. Marriage and monogamy remained the ‘norm’, even if variations in experience were registered between the genders, ages and classes of those interviewed. The ‘double standard’ with regard to the sexual activity of young males and females remained clearly set. Nevertheless, accounts of the disappointment experienced by young people having sex for the first time and the layers of ‘petting’ negotiated en route to consummation raised as many questions as answers. Likewise, and despite the survey's heteronormative expectations, the reporting of same-sex encounters among both boys and girls was revealing. Where 21 per cent of boys claimed to know of homosexual activity in their school (with 5 per cent ‘admitting’ to taking part themselves), 12 per cent of girls said the same (with 2 per cent taking part).⁵² All in all, the survey concluded that if young people were having more sex than previously believed, then their experience remained within quite traditional codes and conducts.

Schofield's study reminds us not to exaggerate the depth and breadth of social change ongoing over the 1950s–70s.⁵³ Gaps existed between media representation and lived experience, gaps that pop music and youth culture arguably aestheticised or filled in vicarious fashion. Then again, the cultural and sexual landscape was evidently transforming by the onset of the 1980s. What Peter Bailey calls the ‘parasexual’ had widened, meaning the remit of what was deemed sexual but licit.⁵⁴ Questions of sex and sexuality were far more openly discussed than thirty years previously, with the advances of feminism and gay liberation disputed but apparent. At the same time, sex was commodified in ways that caused concern, while sexual politics moved to the forefront of debates about personal identity and moral rectitude. Both Mary Whitehouse (who founded the National Viewers and Listeners’ Association in 1965) and Margaret Thatcher signalled a reaction to the liberal reforms of the 1960s, even if their attempts to stem the tide of ‘permissiveness’ eventually submerged beneath the radical economic policies celebrated by the latter and the cultural spaces forced open by those committed to social change. In such a context, antipathy towards sexual minorities remained all too common and later found official sanction in the infamous Clause 28 of the 1988 Local Government Act that prohibited the ‘promotion of homosexuality’ by local authorities.

The relationship between sex, popular music and youth culture was complex and contested. In the midst of it, as scholars of female adolescence have demonstrated especially, were real people living real lives, finding themselves as they traversed their way through the shifting cultural contours of the late twentieth century.⁵⁵ If pop music served only to provide a soundtrack to such experience, then it offered a valuable purpose. More often than not, the sounds and spaces of youth culture formed a backdrop to formative moments that were never forgotten (even if they were not always cherished).

Undercover of the Night: content and non-content

Reflecting on sex in connection with pop music and youth culture might appear contentious in the wake of the criminal abuse enacted by people such as Jimmy Savile, Paul Gadd (Gary Glitter) and Jonathan King. That the industries disseminating pop music and servicing youth culture proved exploitative was hardly a revelation in itself. Feminists had long critiqued both the patriarchal structures of the music industry and the misogyny bound up in much popular music.⁵⁶ Related scandals – from Jerry Lee Lewis's marrying his 13-year-old cousin (once removed) to the Rolling Stones’, Bill Wyman's relationship with Mandy Smith of the same age – recurred from the 1950s onwards. As noted already, pop's sexual connotations and the formation of youth cultural spaces immediately generated fears of immorality. Nevertheless, the concentrated detail of sexual abuse – exacerbated by similar stories relating to young people in other sections of society (from care homes to football cubs and the church) – combined to reaffirm the sleazy reputation of the 1960s and 1970s in particular. Heard post-Savile, Mick Jagger's predatory tale of a 15-year-old girl scratching his back on ‘Stray Cat Blues’ does indeed appear to imply a ‘capital crime’.

⁵⁷

None of the chapters included here focus specifically on paedophilia or sexual abuse, though such themes arise. From a historical point of view, it remains important to recognise the ongoing tensions that infuse social attitudes towards youthful – and especially teenage – sexuality. Throughout the period under review, debate ensued as to how the behaviours expressed through youth culture and pop music related to wider processes of social change. At the same time, ‘permissive populism’ – defined by Leon Hunt as ‘the popular appropriation of elitist liberationist sexual discourses’ – ensured that youthful sexuality became a totem of the 1960s–70s.⁵⁸ A veritable Pandora's box appeared to open, unleashing an array of hopes, anxieties and possibilities. These, in turn, were pored over and exaggerated by a media rehearsed in moral outrage and, simultaneously, obsessed by all things prurient.

⁵⁹

As it is, Let's Spend the Night Together locates youth culture and pop music as a space and a means by which these processes played out. One the one hand, music and youth culture enabled young people to explore and experience their developing sexualities. On the other, they provided sites for prevailing attitudes to reproduce and exploitation to occur. By reading Let's Spend the Night Together, residues may be found of teenage pleasures and adolescent pains, thereby explaining, perhaps, why the 1950s–70s can appear both revelatory and repulsive.

The structure of the book is broadly chronological, moving from the 1950s to the early 1980s. The chapters consider how the relationships between sex, pop music and youth culture were shaped by the media; how spaces relating to youth culture and popular music served to inform sexual experience; how youth cultural sounds and styles gave expression to sexual practice; how subcultures and marginal spaces informed popular culture and vice versa; how cultural mediums engaged with and represented youthful sexuality. In many cases, youthful agency is seemingly refracted through pressures and structures either commercial or conservative. As a result, questions of class, gender, race and sexual identity are considered in relation to the evolving political and socio-cultural context. By the book's end, the 1980s have arrived. In January 1984, the Rolling Stones issued the final single from their latest Undercover album before taking a brief hiatus. Titled ‘She Was Hot’, the cover depicted a naked young woman kneeling down to embrace a large red candle. In the song, Jagger is pinned to the ground as he ‘rid[es] the pleasure trails’, taking passion where he finds it on a cold night with a ‘honey […] young and fresh’. Oh my. Oh my-my-my-my-my.

Notes

Our thanks to Natalie Thomlinson for reading and commenting on the draft of this introduction. Her help and insights were invaluable.

1 Rolling Stones, ‘Let's Spend the Night Together’ b/w ‘Ruby Tuesday’ (Decca, 1967).

2 Sheila Whiteley, ‘Little Red Rooster v. The Honky Tonk Woman’, in Sheila Whitely (ed.), Sexing the Groove: Popular Music and Gender (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 67–99; Marcus Collins, ‘Sucking in the Seventies? The Rolling Stones and the Aftermath of the Permissive Society’, Popular Music History, 7:1 (2012), 5–23; Andrew August, ‘Gender and 1960s Youth Culture: The Rolling Stones and the New Woman’, Contemporary British History, 23:1 (2009), 79–100.

3 Fred [and Judy] Vermorel, Starlust: The Secret Fantasies of Fans (London: Faber & Faber, 2011). See also Carol Dyhouse, Heartthrobs: A History of Women and Desire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017); Norma Coates, ‘Teenyboppers, Groupies, and Other