Teddy Boys

Max Décharné was a member of the band Gallon Drunk, and has been with The Flaming Stars since 1994. An authority on the 1950s and 1960s counterculture, he is the author of Vulgar Tongues: An Alternative History of British Slang, as well as A Rocket in My Pocket and Hardboiled Hollywood. He lives in London.

[An] enormously enjoyable history of the Teddy boys ... plenty of historians have mentioned them in passing, but none has ever investigated them with Décharné's enthusiasm and attention to detail
In his genial and entertaining Teddy Boys, rock journalist Max Décharné takes a calm look at the phenomenon and strips away the myths that coloured it
Excellent ... Décharné's book is a loving reclamation of an important youth type ... Most of all, in focusing on the late Forties and early Fifties, Teddy Boys illuminates a fascinating and still under-explored period in British youth culture and social history.
Max Décharné's book delves into the vanished world of the 1950s Ted just before it slips from living memory, presenting contemporaneous reports and eyewitness accounts with empathy and enthusiasm
Taking in everything from the birth of rock 'n' roll to the Notting Hill riots, [Teddy Boys] takes us back to an era when working-class teenagers first began to assert themselves in the UK ... Décharné's cultural history offers a fresh take on one of the most maligned youth cultures in 20th-century British history
Enjoyable ... diligently researched ... a powerful, almost poignant, story
Expert research, insider knowledge and a love for the subject all make for a thumping good read
A persuasively detailed chronicle of an entire country ... an engrossing read, meticulously researched
**** [A] rise-and-fall chronicle of the New Edwardians, from the early-'50s cosh boys to the Notting Hill Riots of 1958 ... offers repeated riches in its lovingly curated assemblage of news articles and interviews that reveal how this working-class cultural revolution was reinterpreted, co-opted and demonised
A joyous celebration of the founding fathers of British youth culture, and a great slice of social and cultural history
Reclaiming a youth cult that from the very outset was besmirched by the gutter press of Fleet Street and continues to be associated more with thuggish behaviour than peacockish dandyism, Max Decharne traces the rise and fall of a peculiarly English street-wise style that found a soundtrack in American rock 'n' roll and that lit up the grey, bomb damaged streets and sedate dance halls of post-war Britain in truly glorious fashion
Praise for Max Décharné
Décharné writes attentively and with authority about the ping-ponging of scenester phrases between genres, and from closed circles of cognoscenti to the wider world
Décharné, a musician and songwriter, has written extensively on music, crime and noir, and his great gift is to connect his encyclopaedic knowledge of more recent slang to that of the past. His mind is a trivia-trap of the first order
The strength of Mr. Décharné's account is its zest ... he has an infectious enthusiasm for the peculiarities of English vocabulary