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MATTHEW WORLEY: My name is Matthew Worley. I'm a professor of modern history at the University of Reading. Historians have been quite slow to look at youth culture.

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It's usually the preserve of sociologists, criminologists originally, and then cultural studies. In the 1960s, the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, people like Stuart Hall and Dick Hebdige,

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wrote kind of brilliant analyses of emergent youth cultures and what they meant in relationship to society. But they were very much an expression of their own time themselves and a part of the history now.

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And I think from a historian's point of view, the dialogue around youth culture becomes as much part of the historical tapestry as the cultures themselves.

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I think youth culture is really interesting from a youthful point of view because it's such a formative time of anybody's life, that kind of transition from childhood to adulthood.

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And in the post-war period, we've had a kind of an opening up of a space in which young people can construct their own identities, experiment with political ideas, find themselves,

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express themselves in a variety of different ways, both sartorially, musically. I like my fanzines. I do projects on fanzines, so creating their own media

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and things like that. Nowadays, we're into a world of YouTube and TikTok and all that kind of stuff in which young people express themselves that way.

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So I think youth culture gives you a real insight into what young people are thinking, what matters to them, their anxieties, their aspirations, their fears and their hopes and that's

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why I think it's a really important area to study. Now, music's the kind of soundtrack to all this, isn't it? I mean, music is the soundtrack to people's lives generally.

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It's why whenever you see a documentary on television, they'll always play music from the period to evoke the time and the space that they're talking about. You can't imagine a documentary about the 1960s,

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particularly if it's about the '60s in any kind of swinging sense or youth cultural sense, without a bit of the Beatles being played and maybe a bit of the Rolling Stones.

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It's the pop music which takes you back there and evokes the time. So I think the music's really important from that point of view.

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It gives you a sense and a feeling of the time and space, as well as the information relating to it. And also, I'm interested in the way in which pop music becomes--

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Jon Savage has a good word for it-- the teenage news. So pop music is the way in which young people can communicate to each other. There's a bigger picture of that-- the whole music

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industry. And there's a whole relationship between does the music industry drive what people are thinking, or do what young people are thinking drive

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where the music industry goes? But that relationship is kind of not by the by. It's all part of the process. But I like the idea of pop music as a means of communication

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and a means of expression. And that if you're 17, 18 years old or whatever and you've got something to say, the most immediate and quick way to say it, certainly

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in the period we're talking about, often was to form a band, write a song, and express yourself that way. That's one of the reasons I like my punk side of things

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so much is that it was almost set itself up as a-- yeah, as a means of communication. So youth cultural spaces are also important, as that's often the gestation point of cultures.

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So the advent of the 1980s, you've got your Blitz Kids who become the new Romantics, who don't necessarily make their own music, although they do after a while, but start off in a club.

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And they find music that-- soundtracks, the ambience that they want to experience. And it's often been suggested that that's the beginning of club life--

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reinventing and revitalising itself. In London, you've got a kind of rare groove scene developing around at the same time as well. And then by the mid to the late 1980s,

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you've got the seeds of rave-- what would become rave culture, often bringing records in from overseas, whether it's Italian disco music or early house music from the United States.

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But eventually, then forming a kind of British rave culture and a British rave scene with its own style, its own drugs, its own look that defines, if you like, the kind of later 1980s.

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So the music often follows the spaces, as well as the spaces following the music, which again, is something I find very interesting about youth culture.

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And I do think it is a culture, is that it is made up of various components-- the sound, the look, the style, the spaces, the language, all kind of constructing themselves around young people at particular moments in time.

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The stuff that visual archives can do is capture where people went and what people were wearing. If the pop music captures the language of the time and some of the kind of issues that were prevalent at the time

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and the interests, then you kind of need a visual record to capture where people went and what people were wearing. And if you go to any town or city in Britain

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and you ask people about their youth, they'll almost always have a place they went to, a space they went to, a club-- a particular type of club that played a particular type of music.

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And there's quite a lot of Facebook-type sites now in which there's, do you remember the so-and-so club in Cardiff? And do you remember the so-and-so club

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in Sunderland, where people post their post their photos. And I think what you've got in your archive is a kind of snapshot of that as well. And the styles are interesting, obviously because styles

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change over time. So they, again, resonate historically when you see a certain pair of trousers or a certain type of jacket, and it

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helps create a record of how style evolves and changes over time. Some of my favourite images, I think, are when you can get pictures of teenage bedrooms,

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when you see what people had on the wall, and what they've got on the floor, and what's hanging out the drawers and all that kind of stuff.

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And there's such an evocative snapshot of a time that I guarantee would send anyone looking at it to think back to their own teenage bedroom and how it changes over time.

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So mine went from Norwich City Footballers, to Adam Ant, to punk rockers, to a bit of reggae. [LAUGHS] And then I think to a slightly more-- as I got more arty and a young man with weight

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on my shoulders, kind of more filmic or whatever images and arty images on the wall. Punk's interesting because it was quite knowing about youth culture.

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It was the first kind of youth culture that reflected back on what youth culture was and had been at that time. Part of the impetus for punk was the idea that youth culture

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and pop music had reached a kind of lull and nothing was happening, and it had lost its fizz, and had lost it's-- certainly a punk point of view-- lost its kind of deviance, or its ability to shock or change or provoke or challenge.

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And so punk in many ways was a kind of an attempt to realign youth culture and popular music in a way that felt like it had done in the mid-1950s when rock and roll first came through,

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and everyone was scared of it. And a generational gap opened up, and there was a real sense of disconnect. So I think punk is interesting for that.

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And out of punk, you can-- there's a whole range of things that punk did and does and informed, from the Sex Pistols provocations, to the Clash's social realism of reporting back on the Notting Hill riots of 1976,

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to bands like The Damned just having a good time in a youthful exuberant way and not caring about what anyone thought about them. So it expresses itself in lots of different ways.

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But it was very much a sense that it was trying to engage with what young people's lives were about at the time. The early punk rhetoric-- there was a lot about not being

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an escapist form of youth culture, not being into the kind of-- they always criticise progressive rock for its-- Rick Wakeman's, King Arthur on Ice.

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What's that got to do with catching the bus into town and going to a nightclub, that kind of thing. So in a sense-- so it always engaged.

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So that was my interest in punk is it was often youth culture reflecting on itself, which is something I find interesting. I think the relationship is, to use the phrase,

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it's symbiotic, in that they both informed or informed by each other. I think in terms of-- if you think about politics, you can talk about big P politics at times, particularly

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in the 1960s counterculture when the Beatles go serious and decide they don't want to just hold someone's hand, they want to give peace a chance. There's that kind of shift there.

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And rock is very much associated with the politics of the time, not just in Britain, but in the US as well. There's a political turn in soul music, isn't there? And yeah, if you look at-- talk about punk again,

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you've got certain bands making very explicit political statements-- reggae, too, both in Jamaica, but also in kind of British roots bands like Steel Pulse come through.

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And they respond absolutely to the politics of the time and express it. But I think the politics of music and of youth culture is a lot broader than that, and it might--

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a good way of thinking about it is you've got your big P politics on one side, so responding to events, saying you don't like the government or whatever. And then the small p politics of it,

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which is about the way in which people can do things. The very fact that you have an impetus to start a band, or to dress in a certain way, or to experiment with your lifestyle, or to go to places

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that you might not have gone before if you hadn't heard about it through your kind of youth culture and youth culture media. And the small politics of youth culture and pop music, I think,

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in many ways are more important than the big P politics. That's the process where people tangibly kind of transform themselves and find new ideas and new ways. I was always fascinated-- whenever I listened to a record

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or read an interview with a musician, if they mentioned a book, or if they mentioned a film, or if they mentioned-- I don't know-- a magazine or something,

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I'd immediately go out and try and find it and read it. And that was my way of learning about the world. All the stuff you don't learn at school I learned through pop music.

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And I think I learned more through pop music than I ever did at school. There's a kind of a constant dialogue, I think, between the US and the UK from about the 1950s,

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from the moment Elvis Presley's Rock Around the Clock gets shown in cinemas over here, or Blackboard Jungle gets shown in cinemas over here, there's then a constant toing and froing.

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So they give us that. Then we give them the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Then they give us kind of hippie culture and various adjuncts of that.

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And then we reply with glam. And there is a kind of constant dialogue. And I mean, Dick Hebdige, related to this. He talks about pop music and youth culture

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as being a conversation between Black and white cultures that eventually will kind of fuse together, I guess, towards the end of the 1980s and 1990s. Two-tone might be the first example of a kind of synergy,

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if you like, of Black and white cultures with reggae and punk coming together, kind of early reggae-- ska reggae and punk coming together. So yeah, I like this idea there's

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a constant dialogue going on between different parts of the world or different peoples that moves things forward and transforms the culture. In the '80s, you've got what they called

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the second British invasion of the United States, with the pop groups like Duran Duran and Boy George and haircut bands, the Americans called it. But that kind of-- the popification of American music

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in early MTV. You get a kind of comeback on that when big hair and rock comes back towards the end of the 1980s.

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But-- [LAUGHS] but there was a dialogue going on throughout the decade. You've got your kind of-- you've got your, if you like, your mainstream culture, the stuff that you saw

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on Top of the Pops every week or you heard, on Radio One every day, or you might see in newspapers picking up in the 1980s on pop culture more and more.

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And much of it is just what it is. It's the songs that are in the charts and all that kind of stuff. There's always that great moment where--

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I don't know-- to take an example relevant to what you're talking about, Boy George appears on Top of the Pops, and the discussion the next day is whether George is a boy or a girl,

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and you get a glimpse of another world. And that's an important cultural moment, as important as Bowie putting his arm around Mick Ronson and singing Starman in 1972 was a signal to people

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that there are other ways of being. So you have got that. But the great thing about youth culture and popular music is there's loads of subscenes and subcultures

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and subgenres for people to kind of become a part of and experience. You've got people like Derek Riggs and Ted Polhemus and Jill Furmanski going into spaces and taking photographs

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of young people just existing. That's where our record of things like early gay clubs, reggae sound system culture and things like that are captured for us because there's not

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a lot that was put on the BBC or ITV about it. There's bits in the music press if you dig around, but it's really the people themselves capturing their own cultures as they're happening that leaves

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a historical record. So yeah, absolutely. The great thing about youth culture and popular music is that it creates these spaces for people

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to be who they want to be and to kind of form communities and collectives of like-minded people, or people in the same situation, in order to express themselves. Fanzines are really interesting, I think, in that, as you say,

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they start off as they're fanzines, their magazines made by fans for fans. And the early, early music-related fanzines are very celebratory and trainspottery,

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if that's an OK term to use. They're lists of records released by certain artists, and overviews of the Supreme's back catalogue and who they are and that kind of stuff.

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There is a bit of a transformation with punk because punk was irreverent. And so, again, it gets critical. And so while a lot of punk fanzines

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were celebratory still, a lot of them are kind of vehicles for teenage angst and bile to come out, and they change. And into the 1980s, you get an absolute deluge

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of fanzines-- lots of different types. Again, some are just like this band are good. I like this record. Others get incredibly political, particularly the fanzines

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around the anarcho punk scene, bands like Crass and Poison Girls, in which for many they start drifting away from talking about music and become more like existential dispositions

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on the state of the world, complaining about all sorts of things, from vivisection to nuclear disarmament and all-- a range of things.

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And I know in your collection, there's a great load of stuff about CND, both in the '50s and '60s, but also in the 1980s. And that revamp of CND in the 1980s really was--

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again, had a great relationship with punk I think, or certainly a strand of punk, who became the kind of-- foot soldiers sounds wrong, doesn't it? But the kind of [LAUGHS]--

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the cadre of CND were often made up of these punks who spent their weekends or weekdays making fanzines, spreading their anti-war message, and explaining or worrying about what was wrong with the world.

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So fanzines-- I think fanzines are great because they're unedited. They don't have to meet deadlines. They're literally just a kind of outpouring

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of what somebody's feeling at a particular moment at times. And the best ones might just be a brilliant report of a night out. And you get home, and you write a review

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of what you've just seen. And they're really breathless and exciting that way. Then there are also the ones where you get a real sense of what somebody was thinking

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at that moment in the time. You can almost see them-- see these young people trying to work out why the world is like it is, and what their place within it

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might be. Yeah. I mean, I really like the CND stuff because it tapped into some of the research that I've done,

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and the pictures of the concerts, and the kind of marches and all that kind of thing. And again, it's really interesting. My eye always turns to what people are wearing

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and what's in the background. So you get like in a landscape of the time and that. Raymond Williams talks about a structure of feeling, a kind of way of getting a sense of the time

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without it being articulated, and those photographs really tap into that. Another big event of the '80s, I think, you've got lots of the whole kind of Live Aid thing as well,

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which almost the opposite of punk in many ways and youth culture as a kind of subversive force, but such a defining moment of the decade. And I think-- in fact, that's quite an important point,

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I think. Because when people talk about youth culture, they're often drawn to the deviant side, or the kind of subversiveness of youth and pop culture.

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But there's also a whole host of other aspects to it that are simply about-- often about good fun, enjoying pop music, enjoying being young. And then you've got this kind of-- the broader kind of drift,

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I guess, of pop music and pop culture over the 1980s, in which Live Aid serves as almost like a turning point in some ways, where they're kind of-- the old guard all come back, don't they?

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Phil Collins is suddenly back in the charts and all that kind of stuff. And you wonder if punk had made any difference at all? Again, dipping back a bit further back, again,

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you've got lots of stuff about the Notting Hill, Carnival, and stuff like-- both in '70-- I think there's '80s stuff as well. And, again, how that became a move from a site

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that almost became a site of protest in '76, '77, where there was real tensions, to a more celebratory carnival, again, in the 1980-- towards the end of the 1980s. The bank holiday weekends-- that's always

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a good one, where you get the youth cultures coming out, dressing up, showing off, maybe having a fight, or maybe just promenading. But there's some great, great pictures and archives of that.