Ready@@ Steady@@ Go!

Shawn Levy, author of the equally excellent Rat Pack Confidential, turns his attention to that most mythical of decades, and that most mythical of places - Swinging London. And does so in style.

Taking a view of the decade by tracing the arcs of the lives of a handful of movers and shakers (such as David Bailey, Brian Epstein, Mick Jagger, Terence Stamp, Jean Shrimpton, Mary Quant, Vidal Sassoon and Robert Fraser) Levy manages to distill the very essence of the decade. The sixties was the technicolour, all singing, all dancing explosive response to the buttoned up, repressive 1950s and the ripples spread out from London across the world.

Levy, by not concentrating on the obvious (such as The Beatles, although the inevitably feature, how could they not?) builds a picture of how the decade's revolutions in music, fashion and attitudes began. He interviews the protagonists (those that survived) and gets to the root of that burst of creativity. Covering everything from Mods, photography, the Beat Boom, fashion (how Carnaby Street and the Kings Road set the style) to movies, drugs and death, Ready, Steady, Go! crams an entire decade into 350 pages, busting a few myths along the way.

This is extremely readable and Levy lets his subjects tell the story, rather than coming in with a “point of view” and in this way we can see how a few hundred interconnected celebrities, musicians, models, actors and “faces” made the scene. From the bright, anything is possible feeling of the first half of the decade, where to be British was to have the keys to the castle handed to you, to the dissipation of all that promise in the second half, as the sixties curdled into cod-mysticism, violence and a drug-addled stupor, Levy fits all the pieces of the jigsaw together brilliantly.

His conclusion, that the world we live in would not be possible without what happened in London for those few, brief years, is entirely plausible. The old ways were questioned, if not swept entirely away; youth found its voice and art and music became central to the world we live in (even if you don't realise it). A great and hugely enjoyable book.