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Swinging London
Looking back now at the early Sixties, it's hard to pinpoint exactly why things changed so rapidly. Endless books and articles have been written - facts emerge, trends are examined, people reminisce. Yet although objectivity increases with the passage of time, the reality becomes harder to recall. We reconstruct the past in categories, most of which were probably unrecognised at the time - and by creating these categories we may overlook something essential about the period under discussion.

In 1965, a shift took place across a whole range of British teenage sensibilities. The musical explosion of 1963- 64 had opened things up, had made Britain's youth aware of its own potential and had killed the idea that provincial culture was 'irrelevant'. And although London had reasserted its dominance by mid 1965, it now presided over a new teenage world. N ew clothes, new radio and TV programmes and new groups played an important role in a world in which music was part of a general style, a world in which nuances of clothing could be as important as the nuances in a singer's voice.

Provincial power
Prior to the Beatles, provincial towns had been separate entities. Communication, although expanding, was designed to link the provinces with London rather than to improve Londoners' knowledge of Liverpool or Manchester. All roads led to London. But all that was to change within weeks of the Beatles' success, as the media 'discovered' Liverpool. The music scene was the most important, of course; the legends of A&R men falling over each other at Lime Street Station in order to get at the group first are largely true. More significantly, the national (London-based) papers and television wanted to know anything and everything about the place.

Liverpool wasn't the only focus of attentionafter the revelation that there was life outside London. The Hollies and Freddie and the Dreamers were the 'Manchester Sound" the Animals were the 'Newcastle Sound', the Rockin' Berries the 'Birmingham Sound'. But this fascination with things northern lasted less than two years before interest moved back to London.

London had not been dead during Beatlemania; the media had simply been looking elsewhere. In reality there had been a thriving and growing scene that had developed from the late Fifties onwards. This had largely been split two ways. On the one hand there had been the whole art school phenomenon which had given birth to the coffee-bar and jazz-club scene. The people involved were largely middle-class rather than affluent, but their educational backgrounds and creative bent had given them an interest in the more esoteric areas of the arts, particularly in music and literature (their heroes were jazz and blues musicians and the American Beat poets), and a desire to create their own fashions. Their lives centred on the new Soho scene, at coffee bars like the House of Sam Widges and Heaven and Hell, and clubs like Studio 51 and the Marquee.

Out of this grew the early Sixties R&B fraternity; and, although it was initially an underground phenomenon, it had gone overground by early 1964 in the form of the Rolling Stones. It was around the success of the Stones that the superiority of the Liverpool provincial scene started to be challenged. On its own the art school 'style' would never have succeeded, but it did so when it started to merge with the other London scene - that of the Mods.

Mods and mini-skirts
Mods go back to the late Fifties and very early Sixties, when devoted (male) fashion-freaks would go to places like Bilgorri's in Bishops-gate to get their clothes made to measure. Around the same time a few tailors in an obscure street in Soho were offering a similar service; this was the birth of the Carnaby Street phenomenon.

The earliest shops had catered for a gay clientele who, along with West Indians, were the only males habitually to wear brightly-coloured shirts. By 1962, however, the shops had a whole new breed of customer. The influences were originally Italian, and later American Ivy League, very cool and sharp, but with sufficient variety to change almost every week. It was the first time that there had been real fashion for men.

The original Mods had been into modern jazz (as distinct from the art school trad-jazz leanings) and, whereas the art school types had moved on to Chicago-style R&B, the new Mods graduated to soul and bluebeat. Although there were always distinct differences between the two groups, by the time the Stones started to break early in 1964 both camps became lumped together as the new London scene. With the lure of the capital going against it, the Liverpool scene, as such, stood no chance. By the end of 1964 no one was really interested in Scouse accents any more -almost overnight Carnaby Street had become the fashion centre of the world (the teenage one anyway) and was rapidly becoming one of the great tourist sights of the city.

Everywhere it was apparent that 'pop culture' had arrived. Camaby Street, no longer a male preserve, was providing Mod fashion for girls - the age of the mini-skirt was imminent. Pretty soon it wasn't just Carnaby Street - the word 'boutique' was entering the language. Bursting out of Soho, boutiques spread into the suburban high streets and, by mid 1965, every town in England had at least one.

The music scene had boomed in London as well. Almost all the major new bands were coming up through the London clubs: the Who, the Kinks, the Pretty Things, the Yardbirds -the list was impressive. And the provincial groups themselves became part of the capital's music scene; the Beatles had been permanent residents from mid 1964 onwards, for example. This was due partly to the fact that their business was centred in London, but probably more significant was their view of the capital as more fun - more sophisticated, more cosmopolitan.

This was the time when the Smart Set discovered pop music. In 1965, London gave birth to a number of clubs, like the Ad-Lib and the Bag O'Nails, where the sons and daughters of the aristocracy could rub shoulders with the new working-class aristocrats - pop stars. In fact, Swinging London was the era during which class barriers were supposedly swept away and anyone could become, say, a photographer. This whole aspect of Swinging London is the one usually captured in the films of the period, which (apart from attempting to propagate the myth) were usually two years too late in coming out.

For the successful musicians themselves, the Ad-Lib was far more attractive than Liverpool's Cavern or Newcastle's Downbeat. Only family entertainers, artists like CilIa Black or Ken Dodd, emphasised provincial connections, and this as part of light-hearted wholesomeness rather than any idea of musical progress.

The media move in
As the chic and interesting people moved into London, and became part of a general life-style, so the media reflected the change. The national press, ever on the watch for news-worthy trends, was quick to latch on to the concept of Swinging London, but changes in broadcasting were also important in building the new image.

The birth of pirate radio was of great importance. The money and machinations behind the ship-borne transmitters might be extremely dubious, and the government certainly disapproved, but there is no doubt that the pirates both answered a need in the nation's youth and added a significant new facet to teenage culture. On the television, too, there were changes. ITV's 'Ready, Steady, Go!' became enormously influential.

Without doubt 'RSG' was the single most effective promoter of London style of the time - and it was also a great programme. Although essentially Mod in terms of style and audience, it presented artists and bands from all corners of the new music - as long as they were exciting and innovative - both English and from the States. On any week you were likely to see anybody from the Byrds to the Who or Inez and Charlie Foxx. At the end of each show the nation's youth would know what it was supposed to wear the following week, and in this respect 'RSG' was like a revamped' American Bandstand'.

By 1967 things had changed, and the media were getting tired of Carnaby Street stories. Those involved at the centre were either growing out of the old scene or had started looking for other things - nothing in the pop world lasts forever, its very immediacy dictates that. The new ideas were coming from the States, particularly the San Francisco acid scene. And 1967 was the year that the press picked up on it both in Britain and in the US, and the next phase of pop culture had begun. But from 1964 unti11966, London was where it was at.

Carnaby Street
Up to the mid-fifties the central London village we call Soho - a maze of eighteenth-century streets and alleys bounded by Charing Cross, Shaftesbury Avenue, Regent Street and Oxford Street - possessed many quaint backwaters. One of the quietest and least sleazy of these was Carnaby Street.

Here, besides a bakery, a rather faded tobacconists, a harness shop with a life-size wooden horse in the window and a Central Electricity Board depot that took up almost half of one side of the street, you could find innumerable little sweat-shops. An overflow from the nearby garment industry district north of Oxford Circus. And here that Mr. Vince got his first creations made up

Brief Lives
Mr Vince (does anyone remember his surname?) was a photographer, with a tiny studio in Manchester Street, Marylebone. He specialised in beefcake, but no the oiled, anabolic steroid-crammed musclemen of today. Vince's models were of a genteeler kind, but totally ignorant of what to wear while they posed. They apparently expected to be photographed in the Y-fronts in which they arrived. It became clear that he would have to carry a stock of posing briefs and similar clothing ready for his unprepared posers - and in the austerity years of the 1950's such things were hard to come by.

The solution was obvious: he designed his own had them made up and found that he had a profitable line of business on the side. Soon, you could buy 'Vince designs' by mail order through small advertisements in magazines like Weekend or Titbits, or retail at Geo Grosse, the big motorcycle dealers and sports shop in the Marylebone Road

Next came made-to-measure jeans, and Vince took a lease on a small shop a in Carnaby Street, conveniently close to the workshops where the designs could be run up almost at an hour's notice. Very soon he had a neighbour and rival, when the shop of Donis carrying a stock of ready made jeans opened up next door.

After Donis came Paul and after Paul the little shops began to proliferate. It was all so convenient. The trousers and jeans were left with bottoms unfinished: you found a pair to fit you, the assistant marked the correct leg length, and then he scampered next-door to the workshop above, to return five minutes later with your trousers neatly finished and pressed

A natural outcome of this set-up was instant fashion: a new style of jacket, a fancy waistcoat, a new cut of jeans - they could all be put together in sample quantities and if they caught on then could be multiplied at will The Carnaby Street 'men's boutique' took over from Cecil Gee; the sharp Italian style of the professional band musicians gave way to the slick, faintly 'camp' suits of the Fab Four, selected for them by Brian Epstein.

Trecamp, the first shop selling female clothing opened in Carnaby Street; next came Lady Jane; and then the full flood of unisex. At a place like Kleptomania - more a bazaar than a boutique - you could buy a man's shirt that would serve just as well as a mini-dress, and belts and jeans that could be worn by either men or women (see images 001 and 002).

But that word 'bazaar' reveals the worm in the bud: the days of Carnaby Street's rise to fame were also the days of its first decline. And you could perhaps, blame it all on the 'pop' artist Peter Blake. Those printed tin badges, those Edwardian relics, those Union Jacks; 'I Was Lord Kitchener's Valet', dedicated to selling reproduction kitsch to tourists, originally opened in Piccadilly Circus but soon found it's spiritual home in Carnaby Street.

It fitted the spirit of the time; it chimed with the extraordinary concept of Swinging England - 'England swings like a pendulum do' sang that old vaudeville hoofer, Roger Miller, in 1966 - that went with the The Beatles, and The Stones and Herman's Hermits and, above all, The Who

Union Jacks and Lord John
What a ridiculous mish-mash it all was! The mods in their Regency suits and fur-lined ex-US Army parkas, mounted on their Vespas and Lambrettas; the Who, in the vanguard of rock wearing Union Jack jackets; the tiny cardboard reproductions of policeman's helmets, the red-white-and-blue striped seaside rock. Carnaby Street where you could now buy tweed Norfolk jackets and deerstalkers and elastic sided boots, had its pavements and roadways painted with Union Jacks, and all the kids of Europe and America seemed to gather in their T-shirts and climbing boots and boaters made out of recycled paper.

The big clothing wholesalers, under a variety of fancy names - the Earl of Tooting, Lord John of Carnaby (001 and 002) moved in, and the small specialist boutiques moved out. But Carnaby had done something fro the British attitude to clothes: take a look in Burton's or Horne Bros today, and you'll see the fruits of Mr. Vince's pioneering.