Teddy Boys: Post-War Britain and the First Youth Revolution: A Sunday Times Book of the Week

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'Enormously enjoyable' Dominic Sandbrook, Sunday TimesExcellent ... illuminates a fascinating and still under-explored period in British youth culture and social history' Jon Savage, New StatesmanWith their draped suits, suede creepers and immaculately greased hair, the Teddy Boys defined a new era for a generation of teenagers raised on a diet of drab clothes, Blitz playgrounds and tinned dinners. From the Edwardian origins of their fashion to the tabloid fears of delinquency, drunkenness and disorder, the story of the Teds throws a fascinating light on a British society that was still reeling from the Second World War. In the 1950s, working-class teenagers found a way of asserting themselves in how they dressed, spoke and socialised on the street. When people saw Teds, they stepped aside.Musician and author Max Dcharn traces the rise of the Teds and the shockwave they sent through post-war Britain, from the rise of rock 'n' roll to the Notting Hill race riots. Full of fascinating insight, deftly sketching the milieu of Elvis Presley and Derek Bentley, Billy Fury and Oswald Mosley, Teddy Boys is the story of Britain's first youth counterculture.

Reviews

'In his genial and entertaining Teddy Boys, rock journalist Max Decharne takes a calm look at the phenomenon and strips away the myths that coloured it' - Daily Telegraph

'Max Decharne's book delves into the vanished world of the 1950s Ted just before it slips from living memory, presenting contemporaneous reports and eyewitness accounts with empathy and enthusiasm' - Financial Times

'A persuasively detailed chronicle of an entire country ... an engrossing read, meticulously researched' - Record Collector

'[An] enormously enjoyable history of the Teddy boys ... plenty of historians have mentioned them in passing, but none has ever investigated them with Decharne's enthusiasm and attention to detail' - Dominic Sandbrook, 'Book of the Week'

'Excellent ... Decharne's book is a loving reclamation of an important youth type ... Most of all, in focusing on the late Forties and early Fifties, Teddy Boys illuminates a fascinating and still under-explored period in British youth culture and social history.' - Jon Savage

Author Bio

Max Dcharn was a member of the band Gallon Drunk, and has been with The Flaming Stars since 1994. An authority on the 1950s and 1960s counterculture, he is the author of Vulgar Tongues: An Alternative History of British Slang, as well as A Rocket in My Pocket and Hardboiled Hollywood. He lives in London.