Ready, Steady, Go: The Smashing Rise and Giddy Fall of Swinging London Review

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Ready, Steady, Go: The Smashing Rise and Giddy Fall of Swinging London ReviewThis 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.Ready, Steady, Go: The Smashing Rise and Giddy Fall of Swinging London Overview

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