The Bebop Scene in London's Soho, 1945-1950

Post-war Britain’s First Youth Subculture

Ray Kinsella

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9783031055546
• eBook ISBN: 9783031055553
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

This is the first book to tell the story of the bebop subculture in London's Soho, a subculture that emerged in 1945 and reached its pinnacle in 1950. In an exploration via the intersections of race, class and gender, it shows how bebop identities were constructed and articulated. Combining a wide range of archival research and theory, the book evocatively demonstrates how the scene evolved in Soho's clubs, the fashion that formed around the music, drug usage amongst a contingent of the group, and the moral panic which led to the police raids on the clubs between 1947 and 1950. Thereafter it maps the changes in popular culture in Soho during the 1950s, and argues that the bebop story is an important precedent to the institutional harassment of black-related spaces and culture that continued in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This book therefore rewrites the first chapter of the 'classic' subcultural canon, and resets the subcultural clock; requiring us to rethink the periodization and social make-up of British post-war youth subcultures. 

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Contextualising Soho, 1800–1945
• 3. Bebop Music and the Soho Clubs
• 4. Men’s and Women’s Sartorial Style in the Clubs: The Bebop Look
• 5. The Police Raids on the Soho Bebop Clubs, 1947–1950
• 6. Soho After the Raids
• 7. Is This a Subculture?
• 8. Conclusion
• Back Matter