If a film director wanted to flag up incoming violence in the late ‘50s, the camera would fall upon a couple of Teds lurking in the street outside. The teenage Keith Richards remembers razors, bike chains and bloodshed at dance halls and there was an infamous Teddy Boy murder on Clapham Common that plunged the nation into frantic, media-led moral panic. Max Décharné sets out to reclaim the Teds from their “Cro-Magnon, knuckle-dragging cliché” in his new book Teddy Boys and relives this dangerously thrilling rock and roll revolution – the music, clothes, films, press stories, the birth of Ted, Peak Ted, its eventual demise and what’s kept the flame alive since. Things of note include …

… the full effect of Blackboard Jungle on a packed 4,000-seater cinema.

... that poignant sight of an old Ted pushing a pram with a woman with a beehive.

… Joan Collins in ‘Cosh Boy’.

… the first UK rock and roll gig, Bill Haley & the Comets at the New Theatre Royal in Portsmouth in 1956.

… the crepe-soled, velvet-collared Duke of Edinburgh, unlikely ’50s fashion icon.

… Little Richard, Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis at the London Rock and Roll Show at Wembley in 1972, a key point in the Ted revival.

… Malcolm McLaren, Johnny Rotten, Wizzard and assorted Ted torch-carriers.

… Viv Stanshall and ‘Teddy Boys Don’t Knit’.

… fingertip drapes from Savile Row and how Teds subverted top-end fashion.

… Fleetwood Mac as Earl Vince & the Valiants doing ‘Somebody’s Gonna Get Their Head Kicked In Tonite’.

… and how the Beatles and James Bond helped kick the Teds into touch.

Order Max’s book here …

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Teddy-Boys-Post-War-Britain-Revolution-ebook/dp/B0C3SFMTFH

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Episode 84: Imperfect Situations and Imperfect Solutions