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

by Shawn Levy

Book Overview

It's the summer of 1966... The fundamental old ways: chastity, rationality, harmony, sobriety, even democracy: blasted to nothing or crumbling under siege. The city glows. It echoes. It pulses. It... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0385498578
• ISBN13: 9780385498579
• Release Date: July 2002
• Publisher: Doubleday Books
• Length: 341 Pages
• Weight: 1.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 6.3" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

When all the world was young & English

Swinging London! It's already one of those legendary times & places, not quite real, inviting younger generations to wonder if the world could ever have been even remotely like this, even for a brief time. Well, this insightful volume comes as close to answering that question as possible, offering a thorough, glittering history of the period. Having been a teenager during those years, I can confirm that it seemed to be a whole new era every six months or so back then, even to someone living in the less than swinging suburbs of New Jersey. And author Shawn Levy truly captures that incredible feeling of change, excitement & endless possibilities as he examines the lives & impact of several prominent personalities who exemplified Swinging London: David Bailey, Jean Shrimpton, Mary Quant, Terence Stamp, to name just a few. While this is a history, it puts you right in the middle of the action, so that you're living it as it unfolds. The reader is there to witness the sudden flowering of the era, its dazzling heyday, and its swift disintegration as too much exposure & fame took its toll. It had the life of a mayfly ... but it was a gorgeous, baroque mayfly that blazed with color & energy. The films & music of the time will give you a real flavor of its look & atmosphere, but this book provides both juicy details & an intelligent analysis of the phenomenon -- the factors leading to its birth, and those leading to its demise. For those who were alive then, it's a return to a past that doesn't seem quite believable now; for those too young to have been there, it's a window into another world. Recommended!

Puts the "grrrrr" in "swinger," baby!

Levy does a fantastic job of weaving together the various scenes and personalities that made Swinging London happen. A fast, fun read, even if you're not that familiar with the subject matter. I learned a lot about Vidal Sassoon, for example, but more than I actually cared to know.

SWINGING LONDON IN VIVID DETAIL

This is a great connect the dots guide to this brief moment in time. I couldn't put it down.If this period is of interest to you then read this book. It is a knockout!PS: By the way, author Shawn Levy's book on Jerry Lewis is a very revealing and detailed look at the comic's life/career. /gt

Fab!!!

"Ready, Steady, Go!" is my favorite nonfiction book of the year.

A Time and Place the Likes of Which We'll Not See Again

This 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 institutionaliz