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#1 2021-10-03 07:07:04
- A Fine Sadness
- Member
- Posts: 3009
The English Love Affair With America: Feeding Our Fantasies
I think about this from time to time.
Growing up in the sixties it began with TV. Then movies. Then what the purists insist on calling 'comic books' (DC and Marvel mainly; not easy to find; my mother hated them). Then rarities like the Warren and Beck magazines. (They also found no favour in our house).
It built and built.
Sweets, bubble gum, then cigarettes.
The clothes - probably tenuous to begin with.
Later - for some of us - science fiction: all those wonderful anthologies.
Then - Levis, shirts, warm-up jackets, sneakers.
Music - Motown to begin with. The Beach Boys. Rare soul much later.
Listening to jazz (puzzling and exotic)...
We kind of wrapped it round us.
Delving, I went back to Norman Longmate's book on the Americans in England during World War Two
Which leads me on to a story I once heard about young John Simons and a GI...
#2 2021-10-03 08:27:12
- An Unseen Scene
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- From: Nottingham, UK
- Posts: 1275
Re: The English Love Affair With America: Feeding Our Fantasies
This was a big part of my youth. Having spent massive time there, not so much now. Lots of global influences and seek the good wherever. In the last year I started listening to Japanese ambient music and it flipped my head in a new direction.
There are stories of people buying the clothes of GIs stopping off on way to Germany at such as Americana club or later the Flamingo. But I do not know the truth of that.
The Americana club was very important but now largely forgotten https://flashbak.com/club-americana-on-coventry-street-in-1955-43350/
Last edited by An Unseen Scene (2021-10-03 08:32:23)