Let's spend the night together

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

Subcultures Network

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9781526159984
• eBook ISBN: 9781526159977
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music Theory & Appreciation

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• Figures and tables
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Let's spend the night together: sex, pop music and British youth culture, 1950s–80s
• 1: Where were you? UK chart pop and the commodification of the teenage libido, 1952–63
• 2: The Jerry Lee Lewis scandal, the popular press and the moral standing of rock ’n’ roll in late 1950s Britain
• 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)
• 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
• 5: Lovers’ lanes and Haystacks: rural spaces and girls’ experiences of courtship and sexual intimacy in post-war England
• 6: Queering modernism: social, sartorial and spatial intersections between mod and gay (sub)culture, 1957–67
• 7: ‘You just let your hair down’: lesbian parties and clubs in the 1960s and early 1970s
• 8: Singing Elton's song: queer sexualities and youth cultures in England and Wales, 1967–85
• 9: ‘Nothing like a little disaster for sorting things out’: Blowup (1966) and the free hedonism(s) of Swinging London
• 10: ‘Everything gets boring after a time’: Deep End and swinging sex
• 11: Run the track, but no bother chat slack: overstanding the relationship between slackness and culture within the reggae dancehall, 1960s–80s
• 12: ‘This could be a night to remember’: authenticity, historicising and the silencing of sexual experience in the northern soul scene
• 13: ‘Mummy … what is a Sex Pistol?’: SEX, sex and British punk in the 1970s
• 14: The ‘style terrorism’ of Siouxsie Sioux: femininity, early goth aesthetics and BDSM fashion
• 15: Coming of age Asian and Muslim in post-punk West Yorkshire
• 16: ‘I'm your man’: heartthrobs and banter in Smash Hits
• Index