Abstract
The United States of America continued to deeply impact Great Britain in the 1960s and 1970s. The Swinging Sixties, the name given to the exhilarating decade in which Britain became the world center of popular culture, was profoundly shaped by the United States. The music of the Beatles, substantial elements of the counterculture, the clothes of the era and the iconic James Bond movies that suggested a new modern cool Britain would not have transpired without American input. The new music stars of the 1970s, like David Bowie, Rod Stewart and Elton John, took their musical inspiration from the United States while the discotheques of Britain moved to the sounds of African-American music. From Martin Luther King, Jr. to Neil Armstrong, from Kojak to Luke Skywalker, from Muhammad Ali to Farah Fawcett, young Britons found icons both real and fictional in the United States while the sons and daughters of the New Commonwealth immigrants were particularly inspired by the African-American role models and the civil rights movement that they saw across the Atlantic.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Francis Williams, The American Invasion (London: Anthony Blond, 1962), 16.
John H. Dunning, U.S. Industry in Britain (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1976), 9.
James McMillan and Bernard Harris, The American Take-Over of Britain (London: Leslie Frewin, 1968), 4.
Brian Harrison, Seeking a Role: The United Kingdom, 1951–1970 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2009), 464–465 and McMillan and Harris, The American Take-Over of Britain, 188–192.
Thomas J. Carbery, “The Americanisation of British Politics,” The Journal of Politics, 27 (February 1965), 183
Martin Rosenbaum, From Soapbox to Soundbite: Party Political Campaigning in Britain since 1945 (London: Macmillan Press, 1997), quote on page 93.
H. L. Malchow, Special Relations: The Americanization of Britain? (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011).
Harold Evans, They Made America: From the Steam Engine to the Search Engine: Two Centuries of Innovators (New York: Back Bay, 2006), 130.
Paul Gorman, The Look: Adventures in Pop and Rock Fashion (London: Sanctuary Publishing, 2001), 91–92
and Graham Marsh and J. P. Gaul, The Ivy Look (London: Frances Lincoln Ltd, 2010).
Brian Viner, Nice to See It, to See It, Nice: The 1970s in Front of the Telly (London: Simon and Schuster, 2009), 222–223.
Terry Christian, Reds in the Hood (London: Andre Deutsch, 1999), 81.
Alan Davies, My Favourite People and Me 1978–1988 (London: Penguin, 2009), 13 and 14.
Gary Kemp, I Know This Much: From Soho to Spandau (London: Fourth Estate, 2009), 8.
Sarah Street, British National Cinema (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 20–21.
Philip Norman, John Lennon: The Life (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), 82.
Ray Coleman, Lennon (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1984), 187.
Alan Clayson, Ringo Starr (London: Sanctuary, 2003 edition), 28.
Brian Ward, “‘By Elvis and All the Saints’ Images of the American South in the World of 1950s British Popular Music,” in Joseph P. Ward ed. Britain and the American South from Colonialism to Rock and Roll (Jackson, MS: The University Press of Mississippi, 2003), footnote 55 page 265.
Bill Harry, The Ringo Starr Encyclopedia (London: Virgin Books, 2004), 32 and 299–307.
Ray Coleman, McCartney Yesterday and Today (Los Angeles, CA: Dove Books, 1996), 26
and Howard Sounes, Fab: An Intimate Life of Paul McCartney (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2010), 5–6.
Ian MacDonald, Revolution in the Head: The Beatles’ Records and the Sixties (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, third edition, 2007).
Barbara Charone, Keith Richards (London: Futura, 1979), 18–19.
See also Phillip Norman, The Stones (London: Elm Tree Books, 1984).
Keith Richards with James Fox, Life (New York and London: Little, Brown and Company, 2010), 58.
Dave Marsh, Before I Get Old: The Story of the Who (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1983)
and Tim Ewbank and Stafford Hildred, Roger Daltrey: The Biography (London: Portrait, 2004).
Barry Lazell and Dafydd Rees, Illustrated Book of Rock Records (New York: Delilah Books, 1982), 92, 102 and 104.
Jon Savage, England’s Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock, and Beyond (New York: St Martin’s Griffin, revised edition, 2001);
Dave Laing, One Chord Wonders: Power and Meaning in Punk Rock (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1985);
Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1990)
and Roger Sabin, ed. Punk Rock: So What? The Cultural Legacy of Punk (London and New York: Routledge, 1999).
Richard Hell, I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp: An Autobiography (New York: HarperCollins, 2013).
Jon Savage, England’s Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock, and Beyond (New York: St Martin’s Griffin, revised edition, 2001), 184.
Will Hermes, Love Goes to Buildings on Fire: Five Years in New York That Changed Music Forever (New York: Faber and Faber, 2011), 180–181.
John Robb, Punk Rock: An Oral History (London: Ebury Press, 2006), 198–202 and
Stephen Colegrave and Chris Sullivan, Punk: The Definitive Record of a Revolution (London: Cassell, 2001), 212.
Dave Haslam, Adventures on the Wheels of Steel: The Rise of the Superstar DJs (London: Fourth Estate, 2001), 60.
Keith Rylatt and Phil Scott, CENtral 1179: The Story of the Twisted Wheel Club (London: Bee Cool, 2001), 36.
Paul Rambali, “The English Pub, Death by Disco,” The Face (November, 1984) and Sarah Thornton, Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital (Hanover and London: Wesleyan University Press, 1996).
For studies on disco in America see Albert Goldman, Disco (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1978);
Alice Echols, Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture (New York and London: WW Norton, 2010);
Peter Shapiro, Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco (New York: Faber and Faber; Revised edition 2007)
and Tim Lawrence, Love Saves The Day: A History of American Dance Culture 1970–1979 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003).
Robert Elms, The Way We Wore (London: Picador, 2005), 110–115, quote on page 113.
Gary Kemp, I Know This Much: From Soho to Spandau (London: Fourth Estate, 2009), 84.
Mike Ritson and Stuart Russell, The In Crowd: The Story of the Northern & Rare Soul Scene (London: Bee Cool 1999); Rylatt and Scott, CENtral 1179;
David Nowell, Too Darn Soulful: The Story of Northern Soul (London: Robson Books, 2001);
Reg Stickings, Searching for Soul (London: SAF Publishing, 2008)
and Andy Wilson, Northern Soul: Music, Drugs and Subcultural Identity (Devon: Willan Publishing, 2007).
Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton, The Record Players: DJ Revolutionaries (London: DJ History.com, 2010), 94.
Stuart Maconie, Cider with Roadies (London: Ebury Press, 2004), 62–63.
Neil Rushton, Northern Soul Stories (Staffordshire, UK: Soulvation, 2009), 109.
Russ Winstanley and David Nowell, Soul Survivors: The Wigan Casino Story (London: Robson Books, 1996), 55 and 1.
See also Tim Brown, The Wigan Casino Years: The Essential Story 1973–81 (Alcester: Outta Sight Ltd, 2010)
and Dave Shaw, Casino: Wigan 30th Anniversary Edition (London: Bee Cool, 2000).
Peter Leese, Britain since 1945: Aspects of Identity (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 49 and 89.
W. W. Daniel, Racial Discrimination in England (Middlesex: Penguin, 1968), 209 and 47.
Cyrille Regis, My Story: The Autobiography of the First Black Icon of British Football (London: Andre Deutsch, 2010), 96–97 and 127.
Chris Mullard, Black Britain (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1973), 7.
Errol Christie with Tony McMahon, No Place to Hide: How I Put the Black in the Union Jack (London: Aurum, 2010), 82.
Sara Maitland ed. Very Heaven: Looking Back at the 1960s (London: Virago Press, 1988), 33.
Mike Phillips and Trevor Phillips, Windrush: The Irresistible Rise of Multi-Racial Britain (London: HarperCollins, 1998), 232.
Mike Sewell, “British Responses to Martin Luther King Jr and the Civil Rights Movement, 1954–68,” in Brian War and Tony Badger eds. The Making of Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 194–212.
Michael Abdul Malik, From Michael de Freitas to Michael X (London: Andre Deutsch, 1968)
and Dilip Hiro, Black British White British: A History of Race Relations in Britain (London: Grafton Books, 1991)
See Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America (New York: Random House, 1967);
Robert Lee Scott and Wayne Brockriede, eds. The Rhetoric of Black Power (New York: Harper and Row, 1969);
William L. Van Deburg, New Day in Babylon: The Black Power Movement and American Culture, 1965–1975 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 40–51;
Daniel Wynn, The Black Protest Movement (New York: Philosophical Library, 1974), chapter 6
and Allen J. Matusow, The Unraveling of American: A History of Liberalism in the 1960s (New York: Harper and Row, 1984), chapter 12.
Charles E. Jones, ed. The Black Panther Party (Baltimore, MD: Black Classics Press, 1998).
Obi Egbuna, Destroy This Temple: The Voice of Black Power in Britain (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1971)
and Anne-Marie Angelo, “The Black Panthers in London, 1967–1972: A Diasporic Struggle Navigates the Black Atlantic,” Radical History Review 103 (Winter 2009): 17–35.
Don Letts with David Nobakht, Culture Clash: Dread Meets Punk Rockers (London: SAF Publishing, 2007), 39.
Pauline Black, Black by Design: A 2-Tone Memoir (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2011), 63 and 66.
Hanif Kureishi, My Beautiful Laundrette and the Rainbow Sign (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1986), 13.
A. H. Halsey with Josephine Webb eds. Twentieth-Century British Social Trends (London: Macmillan Press, 2000), 449 and 640.
Dominic Sandbrook, State of Emergency: The Way We Were: Britain, 1970–1974 (London: Penguin, 2010), 19 and 347.
Bernard Nossiter, Britain: A Future That Works (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1978), 105.
Paul Addison, No Turning Back: The Peacetime Revolutions of Post-War Britain (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 197.
Martin Goldsmith, The Beatles Come to America (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley, 2004).
Philip Norman, Shout: The Beatles in Their Generation (New York: Fireside, 1981)
and Hunter Davies, The Beatles: The Authorized Biography (New York: McGraw-Hill 1968).
Charlie Gillett, “Big Noise from Across the Water: The American Influence on British Popular Music,” in Allen F. Davis ed. For Better or Worse: The American Influence in the World (Westport, CT and London: Greenwood Press, 1981), 63.
Tony Visconti, Bowie, Bolan and the Brooklyn Boy (London, HarperCollins, 2007), 17 and 21.
Sally Hewitt, I Can Remember the 1960s (London and Sydney: Franklin Watts, 2003), 23.
Charles Hamblett and Jane Deverson, Generation X (Greenwich, CT: Gold Medal Books, 1964), 137.
Bill Wyman, Stone Alone: The Story of a Rock n Roll Band (London and New York: NY, USA: Viking, 1990.), 227.
Pete Townshend, Who I Am (New York: HarperCollins, 2012), 123.
Twiggy Lawson with Penelope Dening, Twiggy in Black and White (London: Simon and Schuster, 1997), 2.
Steven D Stark, Meet the Beatles: A Cultural History of the Band That Shook Youth, Gender, and the World (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), 26.
Hazel Erskine, “The Polls: World Opinion of U.S. Racial Problems,” Public Opinion Quarterly 32 (Summer 1968): 299–312.
Robert J. Wybrow, Britain Speaks Out, 1937–87: A Social History as seen through the Gallup poll (London: Macmillan, 1989), 77, 81 and 108.
Michael Tanner, Ali in Britain (Edinburgh and London: Mainstream, 1995), 96.
Mike Marqusee, Redemption Song: Muhammad Ali and the Spirit of the Sixties (London and New York: Verso, second edition, 2005, originally published in 1999), 207.
Helen Taylor, Circling Dixie: Contemporary Southern Culture through a Transatlantic Lens (New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 70.
Peter Hitchens, The Abolition of Britain: From Winston Churchill to Princess Diana (San Francisco, CA: Encounter Books, 2000), 155.
Christine Paine interview with author April 28, 2013. See also David Nunnerley, President Kennedy and Britain (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1972).
David Farber, The Age of Dreams, America in the 1960s (New York: Hill and Wang, 1994), 111.
Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin, America Divided, The Civil War of the 1960s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 199
and William L. O’Neill, Coming Apart: An Informal History of America in the 1960s (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1971), 170–173, 176–177.
Simon Heffer, Like the Roman: The Life of Enoch Powell (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1998), 467.
Alwyn W. Turner, Crisis? What Crisis? Britain in the 1970s (London: Aurum Press, 2008), 31.
Jeremy Seabrook, City Close-Up (Indianapolis and New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1971), 116 and 166.
Stuart Hall et al. Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1978), 22 and 3.
Steve Chibnall, Law-and-Order News: An Analysis of Crime Reporting in the British Press (London: Tavistock, 1977), 123 and 126.
Alison Pressley, The Seventies: Good Times, Bad Taste (London: Index Books, 2002), 44.
Derek Tait, A 1970s Childhood: From Glam Rock to Happy Days (Gloucestershire: The History Press, 2011), 136.
Rubin, How Others Report Us: America in the Foreign Press (Washington DC: The Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University, 1979), 34.
Colin Seymour-Ure, The British Press and Broadcasting since 1945 (Oxford: Blackwell, second edition, 1996), 160 and
Sylvia Ellis, Britain, America, and the Vietnam War (Westport, CT and London: Praeger, 2004).
Anthony King, ed. British Political Opinion 1937–2000 The Gallup Polls (London: Politico’s, 2001), 328–329.
Nick Thomas, “Protests against the Vietnam War in 1960s Britain: The Relationship between Protesters and the Press,” Contemporary British History 22 (September 2008): 335–354.
Steven K. Smith and Douglas A. Wertman, US-West European Relations During the Reagan Years: The Perspective of West European Publics (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1992), 267.
Philip Agee, Inside the Company: CIA Diary (London: Penguin, 1975)
and Philip Agee, On the Run (Secaucus, NJ: Lyle Stuart, 1987).
Tony Benn, Against the Tide: Diaries 1973–1976 (London: Hutchinson, 1989), 225, 318–319, 332 and 692.
Julie Burchill and Tony Parsons, “The Boy Looked at Johnny”: The obituary of Rock and Roll (London: Pluto Press, 1978), 59, 66 and 72.
Copyright information
© 2013 John F. Lyons
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Lyons, J.F. (2013). The British Working Class and the United States, 1963–1979. In: America in the British Imagination. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137376800_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137376800_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-37679-4
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-37680-0
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)