Nostalgia for a time and a place can sometimes end up being very disappointing. My latest experience of this was provided by walking down a street in London’s Soho district. Celebrational banners arched above, and many union jacks hung limp in the chilly drizzle. Carnaby Street was marking its 50th anniversary as the epicenter of the phase of British cultural history known as Swinging London.
For a brief while in the early 1960s this short street, with adjoining alleys, became a 24-hour carnival of youthful rebellion, expressed in radical fashions—male and female—music, and a hallucinogenic club scene.
There was a dizzy, infectious energy at large in London then. An astonishing creative insurrection was taking place. In the worlds of music, theater, literature, advertising, journalism, television, movies, art and design, a generational demolition crew changed forever the idea that Britain was a class-ridden, hidebound and culturally reactionary society, not to mention sexually repressed.
Because it was smack in the middle of London and had a cocky, in-your-face freshness to it, Carnaby Street became a favorite first stop for visitors who wished to find out if it really was true that the Brits were suddenly letting it all hang out.
In truth, Carnaby Street was never little more than a clever piece of
marketing. Few of the real game-changers were to be seen amid the funky
boutiques and stores. Jimi Hendrix did sport a military jacket of the
kind sold by a shop called Lord Kitchener’s Valet and this helped to
inspire the gear worn in the album art of the Beatles’ LP Sgt Pepper’s
Lonely Hearts Club Band, designed by the pop artist Peter Blake and his
wife. And Pete Townshend, maestro of The Who, did hang out for a while
in Carnaby Street clubs and the designer Vivienne Westwood had a studio
there, but the place swiftly took on the feel of a tourist trap selling
tacky rip-offs of mini skirts, flowery shirts and kinky plastic boots.
The April 15, 1966 issue of Time
magazine had a cover story that dubbed London "The Swinging City"
featuring a garish assembly of Carnaby-style frolics, but by then, as
is so often the case when a trend becomes a brand, the street party was
really over, and with it the “mod” look for men with its tight
three-button jackets and drainpipe pants and florid shirts. (The most
famous outcropping of this style was the collarless suit worn by the
Beatles when they made Love Me Do in the fall of 1962—they were
designed by a Soho tailor called Douglas Billings, with assistance from
Paul McCartney, who met his wife, Linda Eastman, several years later in
a club a block away from Carnaby Street.)
The cultural change was, however, permanent and profound. Clearly,
British pop music was suddenly a world force, and has remained so. More
significantly, the idea that popular culture was somehow inferior to,
and a disdained relative of, the traditional cultures was also buried.
This generational revolution was mutually reinforcing—nobody running or
policing any creative activity could afford to miss the bandwagon.
Official censorship was abandoned; homosexuality was legalized;
libertines were celebrated and the French felt really inferior in bed.
One surprising (and under-appreciated) agent of this huge broadening of public taste was a deeply bureaucratic and hitherto uptight institution called the BBC. Eventually, from music to drama, from journalism to movies, it was the BBC that sought out and promoted some of the finest talents. This odd, publicly-funded and inimitably British body, often attacked by its more philistine rivals in the media world (usually led by that great leveler, Rupert Murdoch) has turned out to be the real beneficiary and legatee of the so-called “Swinging” years.
In 1997 the estate of which Carnaby Street is the center was sold for 90 million pounds. Since then the new owners have attempted to remove the more tacky remnants that were living off the reputation of the original 1960s entrepreneurs. I took my walk on the first day of the much-hyped 50th anniversary and although the place was noticeably more decorous than it had been at its cheapest phase, it had no vestige of the wild street energy that I could remember from the early 1960s. (But then nor do I, who once sported floral shirts and Nehru jackets!)
For a similar phenomenon in contemporary London you have to go a few miles east, to the multi-ethnic neighborhoods of Spitalfields and Brick Lane.
Mixed in with the Bangladeshi restaurants (great curry) and a mosque (where there was once a synagogue) are some of London’s most innovative design studios, art galleries and fashion-leading boutiques. In this most cosmopolitan of cities, it’s the collusion of ideas from both exotic and native sources that, once more, enlivens the scene with great originality and surprise.
The April 15, 1966 issue of Time
magazine had a cover story that dubbed London "The Swinging City"
featuring a garish assembly of Carnaby-style frolics, but by then, as
is so often the case when a trend becomes a brand, the street party was
really over, and with it the “mod” look for men with its tight
three-button jackets and drainpipe pants and florid shirts. (The most
famous outcropping of this style was the collarless suit worn by the
Beatles when they made Love Me Do in the fall of 1962—they were
designed by a Soho tailor called Douglas Billings, with assistance from
Paul McCartney, who met his wife, Linda Eastman, several years later in
a club a block away from Carnaby Street.)
The cultural change was, however, permanent and profound. Clearly,
British pop music was suddenly a world force, and has remained so. More
significantly, the idea that popular culture was somehow inferior to,
and a disdained relative of, the traditional cultures was also buried.
This generational revolution was mutually reinforcing—nobody running or
policing any creative activity could afford to miss the bandwagon.
Official censorship was abandoned; homosexuality was legalized;
libertines were celebrated and the French felt really inferior in bed.One surprising (and under-appreciated) agent of this huge broadening of public taste was a deeply bureaucratic and hitherto uptight institution called the BBC. Eventually, from music to drama, from journalism to movies, it was the BBC that sought out and promoted some of the finest talents. This odd, publicly-funded and inimitably British body, often attacked by its more philistine rivals in the media world (usually led by that great leveler, Rupert Murdoch) has turned out to be the real beneficiary and legatee of the so-called “Swinging” years.
In 1997 the estate of which Carnaby Street is the center was sold for 90 million pounds. Since then the new owners have attempted to remove the more tacky remnants that were living off the reputation of the original 1960s entrepreneurs. I took my walk on the first day of the much-hyped 50th anniversary and although the place was noticeably more decorous than it had been at its cheapest phase, it had no vestige of the wild street energy that I could remember from the early 1960s. (But then nor do I, who once sported floral shirts and Nehru jackets!)
For a similar phenomenon in contemporary London you have to go a few miles east, to the multi-ethnic neighborhoods of Spitalfields and Brick Lane.
Mixed in with the Bangladeshi restaurants (great curry) and a mosque (where there was once a synagogue) are some of London’s most innovative design studios, art galleries and fashion-leading boutiques. In this most cosmopolitan of cities, it’s the collusion of ideas from both exotic and native sources that, once more, enlivens the scene with great originality and surprise.
"...or even to send a distress call..."
Mr. Irving wonders why the pilots of AF447 didn't send a distress call or mayday. This is something I addressed in one of my "Ask the Pilot" columns at Salon.com not long ago. The Q&A segment went as follows....
...Q: One of the things bothering me most about last winter's Air France crash was the lack of a mayday call prior to the plane going dowm. Does the absence of a distress call strike you as unusual? Does it mean anything?
No. At the point over the ocean where the crash occurred, the pilots would have been communicating with air traffic control by voice over high frequency radio and/or by means of an onboard datalink unit. Sending even simple messages by these methods is relatively time consuming and is not something the pilots would have been concerned with in the heat of a serious emergency. Maybe you have this Hollywood-inspired image of a pilot with a microphone in his hand, saying "Mayday, mayday, this is Air France...." It doesn't happen that way. The first orders of business in an emergency are to keep control of the aircraft and deal with the problem. Once in a while -- diverting off the organized "track" system over the north Atlantic, for instance -- communicating takes a higher priority, but as a rule you do not make radio calls until time and circumstance affords...
I am not at all surprised at the lack of a distress call.
Patrick Smith