The Rolling Stones
The rolling stones was a much larger band than the Beatles but was still equally as popular, the Rolling Stones consisted of: Mick Jagger, Brian Jones, Keith Richards, Ian Stewart, Mick Taylor, Charlie Watts, Ronnie Wood and Bill Wyman. The rolling stones style was sex, drugs, rock and roll; they founded their own record company and own all of their own songs. They have also had dozens on number one hits and Grammies. They were the band of the sixties and seventies.
Fashion
The 1960s didn't start out with colorful and ‘psychedelic’ clothes. They were later designed in the decade. Little shops called boutiques opened selling cheap and colorful clothing for younger people. During the 1960’s, women started wearing mini skirts and leather boots. There were a number of fashion icons within the 1960’s. Mary Quant started her own deigning, and is responsible for designing mini skirts, colored tights. Later in the sixties mini-skirts become much shorter; also the idea of ‘psychedelic’ clothing was becoming more popular towards the end of the sixties. In the late 1960’s a very popular clothing shop opened, this was ‘Biba’, Biba was a clothing shop created by Barbara Hulanicki, Barbara designed her own fabrics in blends of Art Nouveau and Art Deco. When The Mirror newspaper featured one of her gingham dresses at just under £3, orders piled in. Soon a couple of small boutiques were opened in London and Biba became a popular hit with everyone.
Television and Radio
In the 1960’s Broadway productions had become popular but were also very expensive. It was a decade full of musicals, some of these musicals were: Camelot, Hello Dolly and Oliver, although these are just a few of Broadway musicals there are many more.
Musicals that proved popular on Broadway were made into movies some of these musicals were: Sound of Music and My Fair Lady. After the death of Marilyn Monroe in 1962, Audrey Hepburn was the idol of young girls. Disney created even more family entertainment when they released 101 Dalmatians and Pinocchio. Sex became more explicit, they first show of sex on television was on Coronation Street and then later The Graduate. Six James Bond Movies, including Dr. No, From Russia With Love, and Goldfinger, were enormously popular as they were combined sex and violence. Radio continued to be the main thing for listening to music. Television now offered a new type of television, cartoons, some of these cartoons were: the Flintstones and the Jetsons.
Social changes
There were many social changes in the 1960’s, some of them were:
- The Pill – the pill was used to prevent contraception, there where side effects to the pill but it was a simple solution to a difficult problem, the pill had to be prescribed by doctors, it was available to married and unmarried women.
- Abortion – abortions first became legal in Great Britain in 1967, abortions were legalized to try and prevent people having a ‘back street abortion’, and this was an illegal operation performed by unqualified people. The pill and abortions were opposed by some religions as they were seen as being very dangerous and deifying the teachings of the church, the Ten Commandments, the bible and god.
Marriage and the family
Marriage in the 1960’s was becoming less important, but however was still very important to very religious people. The number of illegal births had risen 2.4% from 1960 to 1970, men and women were gaining more security and independence that they wanted to do more than just stay at home and clean, cook, and have kids, they wanted to live a life of their own.
Legal changes
There were two main legal changes in the 1960’s these were:
- In 1964 ‘the married women’s allowance act’, this allowed women to keep half the money they had saved from housekeeping.
- In 1967 men were favored by the courts until the Matrimonial homes act, this gave men the same rights a woman in the home.
Homosexuality
In 1967 the house of parliament voted to legalize homosexuality, homosexuality in the sixties had very little tolerance and sympathy, to many people this was the beginning of the end.
Mods and Rockers
Mods were from London and the southeast, they were follower of fashion, and they never ate because they lived on ‘purple hearts’, a mixture of amphetamines and barbiturates. You had to have had Lambretta GT 200 or a Vespa GS 160.
Rockers were working class people who hated fashion, they never changed their hairstyle, they liked drink and leathers, and they also liked to go to cafes with greasy food and duke boxes, every rocker wanted to own a Triumph or a Norton 650, the rockers were always aggressive. The drug abuse had side effects later and was on the increase.
Beatniks
The Beatniks dressed in black and grew beards, hung around in coffee bars and read novels. They acted and looked like rebels, they drank and smoked a lot too, the beatniks were harmless, and they were students who pretended to be intellectual, they appeared to be dangerous but were actually not.
Transport
The importance of personal transport increased dramatically during the Sixties, the most famous car of the Sixties was, ‘the Mini’. Designed by Alec Issigonis, it was first seen in August 1959 and was originally named the Austin Seven or the Morris Mini Minor depending on where it was built, at Longbridge or Cowley. Alec Issigonis became chief engineer and technical director at BMC in 1961, was awarded the CBE in 1964 and knighted in 1969. His brief was to produce a metal box with four wheels, no more than 10 feet long, to carry four adults in comfort along with their luggage. 20,000 were produced in the first year and well over a million by the end of 1963. More than 5.3 million had been built and it has been crowned the greatest European car of the 20th century by 132 motoring journalists from 32 countries, according to voting results announced on 19th December 1999, coming second only to the Model 'T' Ford in the global awards. The motorized Mod alternative to the motorcycle was the scooter, which had much smaller wheels and engines, although race-tuned machines were surprisingly fast. The most popular and famous makes were Lambretta and Vespa, the Italian 'wasp' earning the nickname of 'hair dryer' due to the shape of its distinctive side panels, which covered the engine. The machines were a dream to customize, many sporting superbly artistic paint jobs and invariably adorned with an excess of mirrors, lights or other things and were as much a fashion accessory or art form as a mode of transport.
Youth culture
Fashion had influence on the various youth culture groups of the time, which changed as the decade progressed. Rock'n'roll music had hit Britain in the Fifties, giving rise to two major cultural groups with a common love for the same type of music. Both groups had, of course, been around since the early Fifties but the advent of Rock’n’roll gave them a new focus.
The 'teddy boys', or 'teds', they were called because of their smart, tailored Edwardian style clothes. The leather and denim-clad 'rockers' belonged to the motorcycling fraternity and sported this mode of dress more to facilitate their mode of transport than as a fashion statement, but also influenced by American films. With the musical style and accompanying fashion changes of the Sixties many of the teddy boy fraternity, along with the new 'baby boom' teenagers and some of the fringe cultures that followed jazz and blues music, became influenced by the sounds and 'shiny suits' of the Beat Boom groups.
The 'beatnik' culture of the early sixties was in some ways a kind of keyed-down precursor to the 'hippie' movement. It began in Paris's St. Germaine quarter and was originally the Left Bank movement of writers such as Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Made more popular by 'style' models such as Juliette Greco and Brigitte Bardot it attracted, mainly, more intellectual middle and upper-class 'dropouts' who wanted to throw off their class trappings by adopting their own strange vocabulary and laid-back bohemian attitude, frequenting low-lit 'cellar' clubs and indulging their love of jazz and blues music.
It was a mixture of pop culture and high art. Most of their fashions were minimalist slim-fitting designs, hand-made sandals, black turtleneck sweaters, black berets and tight black pants. Like the hippies, they favored longer hairstyles; this look was made more fashionable by the success of the Manfred Mann pop group in the early sixties who adopted this style with great success, adapting blues music to the Beat Boom. The arrival of the Mersey sound in 1962-3, ‘the Beatles’, and other influential groups such as the ‘Rolling Stones, a British phenomenon, their culture revolved mainly around dancing, fashion and music, taking little notice to the publicity of girls. In order to get the energy for their 24-hour dance-till-you-drop lifestyle, mods popularized the common use of drugs. There was always something happening somewhere and the Mods drug of choice was amphetamine, amphetamine kept them going for days, although available, marijuana did not fit in with the Mods culture as it had the effect of 'slowing down' not 'speeding up'. It is the modern perception that the Sixties youth society was full of substances of various sorts, and there is no doubt that they were becoming increasingly available, particularly towards the close of the decade, but the fact is that they were generally pretty hard to get hold of and the actual overall usage was comparatively very low.
With 'their own music, fashions, dances and chosen method of transportation (the scooter), friction began to arise between the mods and the rockers.
To Rockers, Mods were weedy, posh snobs.
The Mods viewed Rockers as being out of date, loutish and dirty. Generally speaking, the Mod movement was based in the major cities, particularly rooted in London, whereas Rockers tended to be more rural. Mods had comparatively well-paid office jobs while Rockers were working class and the antagonism even stretched to musical tastes where there was virtually no common element.
Fights fairly frequently occurred wherever 'territories' overlapped or simply when they came across each other. Some Mods took to sewing fish hooks into the backs of their lapels to damage the hands of their opponents. Weapons were also fairly common - flick knives being particularly common, along with coshes and knuckle-dusters. This rivalry came to a head in a series of pitched battles between the groups, usually at coastal resorts on Bank Holidays, when large numbers of the rival groups descended on the seaside towns in organized outings, or 'runs'.
The first major confrontation came at Margate in May 1964,resulting in a rampage of violence and destruction around the town. This was followed by similar outbreaks at Brighton, Clacton, Broadstairs, Bournemouth, South-end and Hastings. These almost ritual battles seem to have been almost entirely confined to 1964 and 1965, appearing to die out almost overnight as quickly as they had begun. This was no doubt helped along by an ever-increasing police presence and a large number of arrests, but was more likely just a result of natural transition of the mod culture.
Shane Lightfoot
Mrs. Mason