Adult Responses to Popular Music and Intergenerational Relations in Britain, c. 1955–1975

Gillian A. M. Mitchell is lecturer in history at the University of St Andrews, Scotland, UK.

Adult Responses to Popular Music presents its arguments in three main chapters. The first chapter covers how contemporary generational differences were navigated within nuclear families. Drawing primarily on oral history sources, the chapter argues that, while some parents held negative attitudes towards their children’s interest in contemporary popular music, this negativity was not always expressed as outright hostility. Chapter Two discusses how youth clubs and Christian institutions responded to, and largely accommodated, youth culture and popular music. Chapter Three contends with the decline of variety theatre in the 1950s and 1960s and how youth culture changed the face of contemporary leisure — Jacob Bloomfield; Zukunftskolleg/Department of Literature, Art and Media Studies, University of Konstanz, Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Kent

• Acknowledgements; Introduction; 1. ‘You Go Halfway, Don’t You?’ Family Life, Generational Identity and Popular Music; 2. ‘To Have Done Something’: The Christian Churches, Youth Clubs and Popular Music; 3. ‘You’ve Got to Be Able to Entertain People’: The Encounter between Popular Music and the Worlds of Variety and ‘Light Entertainment’; Conclusion; Bibliography; Index.