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It began in the 1950s with the Teddy Boys and went viral in the early 60s when the Mods and a new generation of Greasers began to do battle in usually sleepy seaside towns. But between the summer of love in 67 and the riots of 85 the UK birthed a conveyor belt of more complex, often overlapping youth styles.
Not all Hippies were lentil eating clinically depressed vegetarians and before John Lennon decided to give peace a chance he was agonising about revolution with the community of hustlers, rude boys and ne'er do wells who had settled in Ladbroke Grove.
Not all dance music lovers wore white suits and pointed one arm skywards, some preferred to strut their stuff in childrens plastic sandals whilst others took their treasured 45s clubbing. And skinheads will point out that they weren’t all racist (though most were).
In the days before they posed for postcards outside Buckingham Palace the punks were seen by some in authority as ‘a bigger threat to our way of life than Russian Communism’.
Perhaps the post Covid-19 new abnormal will spawn some mutant Disco Dancing Boot Boys but until then take a meandering tour of almost twenty years of Hippies, Skinheads, Rastas, and Punks, their music, their preoccupations, and the world they lived in as portrayed in more than 50 years of UK television, film and theatre. Along the way you’ll spend time Neil Morrissey as a transgender New Romantic, see Martin Compston strutting his stuff at Wigan Casino, and, after losing out to fellow Oscar winner Gary Oldman for the role of punk icon Sid Vicious, meet Daniel Day Lewis as a gay neo-Nazi skinhead. Then there’s Joanna Lumley trying to start a revolution, Paul Nicholas faking one, Olivia Newton John as a student activist and Dennis Waterman held at gunpoint by the Rastafarian Liberation Army.
