Working Class Heroes: Rock Music and British Society in the 1960s and 1970s

For anyone coming of age in the 1960s and 1970s, Working Class Heroes will evoke the rock soundtrack of youthful rebellion. But unlike the many memoirs by musicians which tend to dominate rock music literature, awash with accounts of sex and drugs, David Simonelli, associate professor of history at Youngstown State University, employs the British rock scene from the Beatles to the Sex Pistols to make important observations on the politics, economics, and social class attitudes of Britain during the 1960s and 1970s.

If you want to learn about the many facets of the beginning of the British rock circus, this book is just for you. I could hardly put it down. And I still learned new facts about the Mods, the beginning of the counterculture, the British Folk scene, the roots of progressive rock and the birth a complex cultural style solid enough to become a powerful British export good. This title comes as close to my personal ‘recommended reading’ as it gets.

In British society’s transformation since 1945 from one defined in socioeconomic terms to those of culture, from working-class roots expanded to educated and multicultural ones, and from transatlantic exchanges to global interactions, the author’s focus on the role of rock and roll in all its changing forms provides valuable historical analysis. Well-written individual chapters delineate the culture and counterculture of Beatlemania, psychedelic and folk rock, progressive and heavy metal rock, and glam rock to punk. Simonelli (Youngstown State Univ.) provides profiles of individual artists, groups, and the public receptions. His conclusion that ‘yesterday’s rebels are today’s establishment’ sums up the evolution of artists and groups in a sociohistorical process and the reshaping of British society. The impact on the British economy and on individual artists and groups is an important aspect of this perceptive study, which also places the different phases within the context of and in comparison to the continuing influence of 19th-century Romanticism. Using underutilized BBC newspapers found in Edinburgh and an array of printed materials, this expanded dissertation provides informative footnotes and a select bibliography, and is a scholarly addition to contemporary social history. Summing Up: Recommended.

Too often the history of rock music is written for fans, and the result is that such accounts tend to be chatty and superficial. In contrast, this book contextualizes British rock in a wider context, at a pivotal moment in postwar British history. Working Class Heroes is a thoroughly enjoyable, clearly written, and nicely researched account of British rock, which situated it within a larger narrative of British social and cultural transformation, while at the same time discussing a transatlantic context, which is an absolutely indispensable dimension of any history of rock during this period.

Working Class Heroes objective is to explore the ways in which popular music mediated and transformed the values of the British society over the 1960s and 1970s. . . . The book works as a useful overview of British pop’s trajectory. . . . Simonelli’s book serves as a primer or a ‘way in’ to the history of rock and pop’s interaction with the British society and British history.

Working Class Heroes takes an interesting direction, looking at the disintegration of the British class structure through the prism of rock and roll. Unlike the U.S. which has more of a distinction based upon race, British society saw the downfall of the traditional class structure and its left-over aristocracy through the introduction of mass consumption, including the mass commoditization of its music through rock and roll. The author does an excellent job showing how rock and roll reflects this significant cultural change in British society and offers a unique perspective.