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‘Enormously enjoyable’ Sunday Times

‘Genial and entertaining’ Daily Telegraph

‘A joyous celebration of the founding fathers of British youth culture’ Alwyn Turner, author of All in it Together and Little Englanders

With their draped suits, suede creepers and immaculately greased hair, the Teddy Boys defined a new era for a generation of teenagers raised on a diet of drab clothes, Blitz playgrounds and tinned dinners.

From the Edwardian origins of their fashion to the tabloid fears of delinquency, drunkenness and disorder, the story of the Teds throws a fascinating light on a British society that was still reeling from the Second World War. In the 1950s, working-class teenagers found a way of asserting themselves in how they dressed, spoke and socialised on the street. When people saw Teds, they stepped aside.

Musician and author Max Decharne traces the rise of the Teds and the shockwave they sent through post-war Britain, from the rise of rock ‘n’ roll to the Notting Hill race riots. Full of fascinating insight, deftly sketching the milieu of Elvis Presley and Derek Bentley, Billy Fury and Oswald Mosley, Teddy Boys is the story of Britain’s first youth counterculture.

Publisher Review

A joyous celebration of the founding fathers of British youth culture, and a great slice of social and cultural history -- Alwyn Turner Reclaiming a youth cult that from the very outset was besmirched by the gutter press of Fleet Street and continues to be associated more with thuggish behaviour than peacockish dandyism, Max Decharne traces the rise and fall of a peculiarly English street-wise style that found a soundtrack in American rock 'n' roll and that lit up the grey, bomb damaged streets and sedate dance halls of post-war Britain in truly glorious fashion -- Travis Elborough Praise for Max Decharne -- : Decharne writes attentively and with authority about the ping-ponging of scenester phrases between genres, and from closed circles of cognoscenti to the wider world * TLS * Decharne, a musician and songwriter, has written extensively on music, crime and noir, and his great gift is to connect his encyclopaedic knowledge of more recent slang to that of the past. His mind is a trivia-trap of the first order * New York Times * The strength of Mr. Decharne's account is its zest ... he has an infectious enthusiasm for the peculiarities of English vocabulary * Wall Street Journal *