Patrick Glen 
Youth and Permissive Social Change in British Music Papers, 1967–1983 [PDF ebook] 

This book is a work of press history that considers how the music press represented permissive social change for their youthful readership. Read by millions every week, the music press provided young people across the country with a guide to the sounds, personalities and controversies that shaped British popular music and, more broadly, British culture and society. 






By analysing music papers and oral history interviews with journalists and editors, Patrick Glen examines how papers represented a lucrative entertainment industry and mass press that had to negotiate tensions between alternative sentiments and commercial prerogatives. This book demonstrates, as a consequence, how music papers constructed political positions, public identities and social mores within the context of the market. As a result, descriptions and experiences of social change and youth were contingent on the understandings of class, gender, sexuality, race and locality. 

Table of Content

1. Introduction: A Sea of Possibilities.- 2. Hungry Freaks, Well-fed Entertainers: Something Different in the Music Press.- 3.This is the Beginning of a New Age: New Papers, New Editors and the Underground .- 4. ‘Obligatory Cosmopolitan Musical Viewpoint’?: Gender and Sexuality in the 1970s Music Press.- 5. ‘The Titanic Sails at Dawn’: Punk Papers, Class, Youth and Deviance.- 6. ‘Too Much Paranoias?’: The Beginning of the End for the Inkies.- 7. Conclusions: Goodnight to the Rock and Roll Era?.

About the author

Patrick Glen is a research fellow at the University of Wolverhampton, UK, and teaches Music Journalism at the University of Salford, UK. He is the former Research Associate at University College London, UK, working on the AHRC ‘Remembering 1960s British Cinema-going’ project. He is also a musician and music journalist.