Ready, Steady, Go!: The Smashing Rise and Giddy Fall of Swinging London [Paperback]

Shawn Levy (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 8, 2003

It’s the summer of 1966... The fundamental old ways: chastity, rationality, harmony, sobriety, even democracy: blasted to nothing or crumbling under siege. The city glows. It echoes. It pulses. It bleeds pastel and fuzzy, spicy, paisley and soft. This is how it's always going to be: smashing clothes, brilliant music, easy sex, eternal youth, the eyes of everybody, everyone's first thought, the top of the world, right here, right now: Swinging London.

Shawn Levy has a genius for unearthing the secret history of popular culture. The Los Angeles Times called King of Comedy, his biography of Jerry Lewis, "a model of what a celebrity bio ought to be–smart, knowing, insightful, often funny, full of fascinating insiders' stories," and the Boston Globe declared that Rat Pack Confidential "evokes the time in question with the power of a novel, as well as James Ellroy's American Tabloid and better by far than Don DeLillo's Underworld."

In Ready, Steady, Go! Levy captures the spirit of the sixties in all its exuberance. A portrait of London from roughly 1961 to 1969, it chronicles the explosion of creativity–in art, music and fashion–and the revolutions–sexual, social and political–that reshaped the world. Levy deftly blends the enthusiasm of a fan, the discerning eye of a social critic and a historian's objectivity as he re-creates the hectic pace and daring experimentation of the times–from the utter transformation of rock 'n' roll by the Beatles and the Rolling Stones to the new aesthetics introduced by fashion designers like Mary Quant, haircutters like Vidal Sassoon, photographers like David Bailey, actors like Michael Caine and Terence Stamp and filmmakers like Richard Lester and Nicolas Roeg to the wild clothing shops and cutting-edge clubs that made Carnaby Street and King's Road the hippest thoroughfares in the world.

Spiced with the reminiscences of some of the leading icons of that period, their fans and followers, and featuring a photographic gallery of well-known faces and far-out fashions, Ready, Steady, Go! is an irresistible re-creation of a time and place that seemed almost impossibly fun.


From the Hardcover edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The 1960s in Swinging London brought about a sudden a wave of bob cuts, mod struts, pink-shirted blokes and Scotch-and-cokes. Had it not happened, "nothing nothing of the modern world we share could have been the way it is," writes Levy (Rat Pack Confidential). Sure, the American journalist/film critic admits, there were youthquakes at other points and in other cities, but this was "a cultural paradigm" that erased the classes and embraced freedom of expression, exploration and entertainment. The book, which lifts its title from the era's what's-hot-now! TV hit, spotlights the places and the faces who made dowdy London fabulous: The Snapper, photographer David Bailey, credited as first on the scene; The Crimper, hair liberator Vidal Sassoon; The Draper, Mary Quant, a fearless clothes designer; The Loner, Brian Epstein, who found his calling and when he found the Beatles. "For a few years, the most amazing thing in the world was to be British, creative and young." In three main sections structured loosely around the decade's rise, saturation and dark demise, Levy deftly correlates its many moods with such markers as the latest Beatles album, nightclub or drug first it was booze, then amphetamines, pot, LSD, heroin. An invigorating book, it's packed with can't-miss material on the skirt-chasing escapades of actor flatmates Terence Stamp and Michael Caine; the acid party that jailed two Stones and one famous art dealer; the reaction of London musicians to the coming of the "prophet of their downfall," Jimi Hendrix from the States. Levy has gleaned his insights from interviews and from books, but the book reads as if he'd lived the era himself.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Levy (King of Comedy: The Life and Art of Jerry Lewis), a film critic at the Oregonian who has contributed to other major newspapers, here delivers an intriguing look at pop culture. Levy explores the rise of London from drab postwar center to the hippest city in the world by the 1960s. He writes from the perspective of the people who brought it to prominence: fashion photographer David Bailey and his wife, model Jean Shrimpton; the Beatles, provincial rockers turned clean-cut popsters; the Rolling Stones, or "anti-Beatles," middle-class youth turned blue collar terrors; pop singer/model Marianne Faithfull; hair stylist and former Israeli soldier Vidal Sassoon; actors Terrence Stamp and Michael Caine; and a constellation of other stars. Levy traces the growth of the London scene from a small group of dissolute aristocrats and tough East Enders to its fall as a victim of its own success and the emerging psychedelic movement imported from the United States. Although the treatment is popular rather than scholarly, both public and academic libraries will find the book useful to patrons wanting to learn more about 1960s culture, as well as those who want to know why their parents and grandparents laugh so hard at the "Austin Powers" films. Mark Bay, Cumberland Coll. Lib., Williamsburg, KY
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 360 pages
• Publisher: Broadway (July 8, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0767905881
• ISBN-13: 978-0767905886
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #955,966 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Time and Place the Likes of Which We'll Not See Again, July 30, 2002

By 

Robert Moore (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Ready, Steady, Go!: The Smashing Rise and Giddy Fall of Swinging London (Hardcover)

This is a fun, fascinating, engrossing portrait of one of the most exciting moments of the past several decades: London in the sixties. I think of the sixties, especially the sixties of London, as a kaleidoscope, a never ending swirl of colors and images. And just as it is impossible to capture a kaleidoscope in a single image, so it is impossible to express fully in one book the Swinging London of the sixties. READY, STEADY, GO! is a series of snapshots rather than a precise replication, but while it fails, of course, to do the period full justice, neither are the images in any sense not accurate reflections of what happened.

Shawn Levy's skills and orientation are primarily those of the biographer, and READY, STEADY, GO! is largely a series of mini-biographies that taken together contain the gist of his story. Most of the story that Levy is intent to tell is found in his recounting of the lives and careers in that decade of a few key individuals: photographer David Bailey and his superstar model Jean Shrimpton; fashion innovator Mary Quant and hair styling revolutionary Vidal Sassoon; actor Terence Stamp; Brian Epstein and the group he pushed to fame, the Beatles; Andrew Loog Oldham and the Stones, especially Mick Jagger; art dealer and promoter Robert Fraser; the unlikely superstar model Twiggy; the person who is one of the great symbols, victims, and survivors of the sixties, Mariane Faithful (read her marvelous autobiography FAITHFULL); and a supporting cast of dozens. While most of the emphasis of the book is on personalities, there is also a strong emphasis on the places they went. Levy does a marvelous job of highlighting the places all these souls went to mingle, to party, to have fun, and to be seen. The nightclubs, the restaurants, the sometimes bizarre clothing stores, all receive their fair share of attention.

While Levy mainly focuses on telling the stories of the main personalities of the period, he doesn't neglect completely the larger scene. He begins the book by describing how one thing that made the sixties possible was the fact that the youth of the time were beneficiaries of the first economic boom to follow WW II, and for the first time in decades, people had money to spend on more than merely life's necessities. He also discusses how the fashions and styles developed by what was a cultural elite sifted down to the masses, and how the ideas and trends were transformed in the migration. I have to say, however, that I found this aspect of the book to be somewhat lean. I would have liked to know a great deal more about how the sixties influenced and impacted kids as a whole. Instead of delving into this aspect in any depth, he instead continually skirts back to his core characters.

The first half of the book, about the "smashing rise" of Swinging London is, as might be expected, for more interesting and enjoyable than the second half, which chronicles first the mass popularization and more-or-less institutionalization of the trends, and then the gradual dissolution of the entire scene. The "giddy fall" derives from a number of factors, though an unhealthy number of them would seem to be drug-related. Tara Browne's death in a single car crash (immortalized in the Beatles' "A Day in the Life"); the bust of Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, and Robert Fraser for drug possession and use; the decline and deaths of Brian Epstein and Brian Jones; the shattering of relationships as people become more and more involved in drugs; and the death of Jimi Hendrix were all more or less brought about by the increasingly large role that drugs came to play in the scene. In particular, Levy emphasizes the way in which the extensive use of LSD began to put a damper on things, as it drove people more and more into themselves and away from others.

I would have like to seen greater detail on the legacy of Swinging London. In a very real sense, it is still very much with us. Many of the clothes we wear, much of the music we listen to, the way we wear our hair. We owe much of the fabric of ours lives to London of the sixties. Still, this is a marvelous visit back to the most exciting time and place of the past half decade.

16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The author speaks about his methods, August 15, 2003

By 

Shawn Levy (Portland, Oregon USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Ready, Steady, Go!: The Smashing Rise and Giddy Fall of Swinging London (Paperback)

Just to clear up a point of confusion, there are more than 40 original first-person interviews in this book, with people as diverse as Terence Stamp, Michael Caine, Lynn Redgrave, Bill Wyman, David Puttnam, Vidal Sassoon, Mary Quant, Ian McKellen, Michael Apted, Rita Tushingham, John Boorman, Woody Allen, Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda and assorted restauranteurs, gallery and nightclub owners, models, editors, photographers, musicians, haberdashers and so on. Yes, I did rely heavily on previously published materials -- and I explain how much and why in the acknowledgements. But there is scarcely a page without a quote or bit of information gleaned from one of these interviews. It just seemed to me that the vast ocean of information out there ought not to be ignored if it could give a clear picture of the period. Sorry if I sound a little thin-skinned, but when people take the book to task for its methodology and simply get their facts wrong, it can make you a tad edgy.

Anyway, hope you like the book.

PS: Since I couldn't post these comments without ascribing a star rating, I assigned four stars, which was the average of the previous reviewers' comments.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Read This Book, September 29, 2002

By 

"anyasr" (Sonoma County, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Ready, Steady, Go!: The Smashing Rise and Giddy Fall of Swinging London (Hardcover)

Levy has captured the drama and glamour of the sheer novelty of London in the early '60s and, for the most part, rendered it accessible and electric for his readers. The backstories of Mary Quant and Tara Browne may be new to many readers, but the Beatles and fashion info is already out there in a multitude of other books. More focus on the lesser-known personalities would have suited this book better, but overall it's a fascinating study of why the British Invasion succeeded and failed.