William Flew

There have been moments when music has reflected the mood of cultural change and the feelings of a new generation - rock'n'roll in the Fifties, Sixties pop, Seventies punk. But despite the pretensions of many artists, pop music has never started a social revolution. So what? They are just songs.

David Fowler's book Youth Culture in Modern Britain, c1920 - c1970 complains that, in the Swinging Sixties, “the Beatles and the Rolling Stones were more interested in selling records than acting as a mouthpiece for young people”. And there was I thinking they were popular beat combos rather than political campaigners.

Never mind the philosophical limitations of “She loves you yeah, yeah, yeah”. Even Bob Dylan singing “The times they are a'changin'” could not make change happen. Songs such as Lennon's Revolution were a backing track to the events of 1968, not the script.

What those Sixties groups of working-class lads from Liverpool or North London (the Kinks) did do was to help to create a musical revolution of style, a distinctive sound with an English accent. No doubt it is true that, as Dr Fowler suggests, much of the Swinging Sixties was for a cultural elite. Britain remained a class-ridden society, just a bit more permeable to the likes of Michael Caine and Terence Stamp.

But snooty dismissals of the youth movement as being all about consumerism miss the importance of money in giving teenagers more independence. Their new way of life was expressed through clothes and music, yet it challenged their parents' ways on everything from sex to war.

They may not have overthrown capitalism, but that was hardly the fault of the bands that Dr Fowler brands “capitalists”. Although Lennon suggested that he was more famous than Jesus, I don't think he ever claimed to be another Lenin. Meanwhile, his musical revolution continues to make itself felt - hear the widely hailed new Oasis album.

I grew up a Seventies man, and think that there is too much nostalgia about the Sixties. But Dr Fowler's Beatle-bashing appears to be a way of promoting his own nostalgic notion that youth culture in Britain peaked between the wars, in movements led by Rolf Gardiner, a “pop star before pop even existed”. Err, right.

Gardiner was an anti-modern, anti-urban weirdo, into aristocrats and morris dancing, who wanted a German-style youth movement to return to the land, and embraced the Nazis' ideas on “blood and soil” before recoiling from the consequences (though not before training folk dancers for the 1936 Berlin Olympics). He was also an early member of the Soil Association, which may be why some fashionable organicists want to resurrect him today. I'd rather stick with the remains of Keith Richards