Those Swinging Years

Charlie Barnet (1913-1991) is best known as the popular bandleader whose hits included Cherokee, Pompton Turnpike, and Skyliner. But he was also the first to break the colour barrier in a popular dance band, and his black musicians included Clark Terry, Roy Eldridge, and singer Lena Horne; his white musicians included Jack Purvis, Red Norvo, Maynard Ferguson, and Doc Severinson. Barnet not only played jazz, he lived the jazz life: in this book, he writes of his whiskey and marijuana habits, of his whorehouse visits and his half-dozen marriages. Charlie Barnet epitomised the jazz age, and there are few memoirs as lively as Those Swinging Years.

Travel back in time to the era when Carnaby Street led the world, a golden age of youthful innovation and exhilarating pop culture, and a fashion scene that defined a generation. The 1960s was one of the most exciting fashion decades of the twentieth century, during which British pop and youth culture gave birth to styles that would set international trends. This book reveals how the sweeping social changes of the 1960s affected the British look, how designers and entrepreneurs such as Mary Quant and John Stephen made London the fashion city of the decade, and the influence of public figures such as the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Cathy McGowan, Twiggy and Jean Shrimpton on the national identity of a country finally recovering from a prolonged period of austerity.

The book analyses American and global politics in light of the sudden change that whipped the political and historical together into an anxious froth courtesy of COVIDageddon — the viral visitation that changed so much so fast on this planet that we are still trying to make sense of it. We stand at a hinge of history, and how the political gate suspended on that hinge swings, this way and that as the winds blow and time flows, is even now shaping the future.