Paul Rambali, a music journalist during the 1970s and 1980s, explained that popular music had ‘suggested a range of possibilities in life that nobody ever told me at school nor my parents’.1 For young people like Rambali, in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s popular music was the most significant cultural form that entertained, informed and influenced them. The music press was where, every week, they found out what was going on and why it mattered. Any young person with a small amount of disposable income could walk to almost any newsagents in Britain and find a copy of a weekly music paper—one of the so-called inkies due to their cheap printing methods, which left ink on the readers’ fingers. Even if someone did not have the money to buy a copy, it seemed that music press readers were a generous sort and would share: the National Readership Survey recorded that over nine people read each copy, which translated into a potential readership, combining those who read the Melody Maker, New Musical Express (NME) and Sounds , of around 3,000,000 people per week.2 These papers, made in metropolitan London—the hub of the music industry and the press—offered a window into popular music, the people who made it and other fans. Copies piled up in bedrooms, living rooms, university and sixth form common rooms telling not only a story of the happenings in music, but that of social change and the way that we as a society understood youth.
With their newspapers in front of them, readers were typically greeted with a large photograph of a star musician or group on the front page surrounded by enticing lures—who was releasing an album or planning to tour or let a journalist know piquant details about their personal life or politics? Inside was a familiar format, news at the front with the charts, short articles and record reviews, longer features and interviews, live reviews, concert listings, letters from readers, and finally, the classifieds. All these sections were interspersed with advertisements of various sizes and mostly paid for by record labels or industry management who were promoting their acts. There was plenty to be entertained by and as the 1960s moved into the 1970s, the length of papers doubled, ensuring value for money and plenty to read. It was fuel for the imagination and increasingly, after 1967, a place where critical voices concerning politics and society were presented to a mass youth readership.
Sonic Youth
Young people spent a disproportionate amount on records and music papers and were key markets for the music and publishing industry.3 With around 15% of all young people buying music papers during this period and nearly all having at least second-hand access to papers, the music press provides a unique insight into the culture of young people and the commercial culture that catered for them.4 Papers allowed a lively exchange of ideas between journalists, musicians and readers, many of whom were under twenty-five years of age. From these exchanges, it is possible to recover viewpoints on the lives and ideas of young people. The views and behaviour of youth in this period has a particular significance as it allows us to consider the young people’s reactions to coming of age in a period in which their material position and social power had grown. Full employment, growing consumer power and greater freedoms granted by the liberalising censorship encouraged a buoyant 1960s culture industry that could be used as a platform to critique society. Young people’s unprecedented economic position gave them greater autonomy from parental authority and defined them as a discrete market for goods. As Selina Todd and Hilary Young noted, it was not simply a matter of escaping their parents’ homes and mentalities but parents and children cooperated and even the children of those who had not gained materially during the 1960s were encouraged to live more daring lives.5
The music press’s success epitomised the increasing cultural, social, political and economic position of youth that emerged in the post-war period and the importance of popular music to their lives. Mark Donnelly has argued that ‘the most important field of all, in terms of how it allowed young people to shape their own environment, was pop music’.6 A sentiment shared by historians of youth culture and popular music like George Melly, Jon Savage and, recently, Keith Gildart and Matthew Worley.7 Young people’s ways of living with popular music, however, attracted social anxieties as young people found spaces for their own social interactions, news sounds, styles, ways of speaking and writing, and behaving. Louise Jackson, Jon Savage and David Fowler have studied, for instance, the close attention that was paid to 1950s teenagers gathering around a jukebox (even if, as Melanie Tebutt has noted, there were similar anxieties about youth in the inter-war period).8 Jackson argues that adults in positions of authority constructed a coffee club ‘menace’ to defend ‘an older imagined social order’ that was threatened by new forms of youth sociability and style.9 This is not, however, the full account as there was a significant amount of vested and, indeed, adult interest in harnessing an acceptable form of mass youth culture for profit. Fowler and Gillian Mitchell argue that early rock and roll elicited tolerance and curiosity as well as attempts to control; Mitchell uses the example of rocker Tommy Steele who coyly navigated aristocratic, working-class and youth cultures to create a suitably acceptable pop product with mass appeal setting a ‘moral standard’ for rock ’n’ roll musicians.10 This book continues a similar examination to find, through the music press, those it reported upon and its interactions with figures of authority, how youth and popular music navigated the scrutiny of figures of authority who deemed certain ideas or behaviours deviant or transgressive and reacted accordingly. It will consider how music papers, as mass-market publications, mediated the need to entertain and provoke an audience who were viewed protectively by society.
Keeping out of trouble was sometimes difficult for the music scene, which was ideal for music papers who wanted to attract readers using controversy. Matthew Worley noted ‘youth cultures have long smouldered with the sense of deviance’.11 Like Worley, Gildart and other recent scholars who have intervened in the nexus of youth and popular music, this book learns from and endeavours to develop, the pioneering work of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS). Despite the ‘subcultural’ perspective being challenged by scholars such as Andy Bennett and Richard Peterson’s idea of a ‘scene’ that is underpinned by Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of a ‘field’ and Howard Becker’s ‘art worlds’, allowing for a more fluid idea of identity and belonging, there is still something to be taken from the CCCS’s canon.12 In terms of ‘permissiveness’, Stuart Hall argued that ‘permissiveness’ divided the middle class between young and old as they came into conflict over tradition, consumerism, sex and gender roles.13 This division played out in the music papers of the late 1960s and early 1970s and, in fact, set the scene for the 1970s when the intervention of working-class people in the punk scene’s subcultures caused significant tension as did the various groups who were othered as they made claims for representation and rights in line with the idea of ‘permissiveness’ and liberal acceptance. Resistance through Rituals, as well, provides a significant Marxist account of youth following the election of the Conservative government in 1970, and this book finds a similar authoritarian response to youth as they were demonised by moral panics, media amplification, policing and law.14 John Clarke, Stuart Hall, Tony Jefferson and Brian Roberts’s argument that adult authority responded to the new position of youth in British society and their deviations from social norms with attempts to control youth transgression rings true.15 The work of Raymond Williams is also instructive when considering the views of youth, as it is with anyone else, as they frequently conform to his idea of ‘structures of feeling’ as intuitive organic intellectuals rather than adherents to any discrete ideology.16 Still, this intuition enabled people to reflect on their position within society when making statements.
Music papers were authoritative sources of information for its readers. It was a medium within which the young found social commentary and perspectives on matters that were important to them. Around the turn of the 1970s, musicians were increasingly expected to articulate authentic experiences and positions despite presenting them through a medium shaped by commercial artifice. Popular music had a certain power, studies that examine ‘affect’ use terms such as ‘intensities’, ‘modulations’ and ‘resonances’ and there is no coincidence that these terms are also commonly used to describe sound. Drawing from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guttari’s radical critical theory that developed the systems of knowledge described in Michel Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge, Lawrence Grossberg explains how investments in popular music develop identities.17 The music press facilitated access into groups, contexts and situations where desires, practices and structures could form. These strategic investments created networks or ‘maps’ of meaning that allowed groups who had made ‘affective allegiances’ and individuals to negotiate power, for instance moral codes, through the politics of identity and pleasure collectively. Grossberg argued that,
Music papers offered meanings for reinterpretation and presented opportunities in language, musical products, fashions and physical spaces for readers to resist and reconstruct expectations. They were infl...People give authority to that which they invest in; they let the objects of such investments speak for and in their stead. They let them organize their emotional and narrative life and identity. In this way, the structures and sites of people’s investments operate as so many languages that construct their identity.18