With their draped suits, suede creepers and immaculately greased hair, the Teddy Boys defined a new era for a generation of teenagers raised on a diet of drab clothes, Blitz playgrounds and tinned dinners.From the Edwardian origins of their fashion to the tabloid fears of delinquency, drunkenness and disorder, the story of the Teds throws a fascinating light on a British society that was still reeling from the Second World War. In the 1950s, working-class teenagers found a way of asserting themselves in how they dressed, spoke and socialised on the street. When people saw Teds, they stepped aside.Musician and author Max Décharné traces the rise of the Teds and the shockwave they sent through post-war Britain, from the rise of rock ‘n’ roll to the Notting Hill race riots. Full of fascinating insight, deftly sketching the milieu of Elvis Presley and Derek Bentley, Billy Fury and Oswald Mosley, Teddy Boys is the story of Britain’s first youth counterculture.

Max Décharné has written about music regularly for Mojo magazine since 1998, prior to which he wrote extensively about film for Neon. In addition, his work has also appeared the Sunday Times Colour Magazine, the Observer,[the Guardian[and the TLS, among others. He has interviewed a wide variety of cultural figures, including Mary Quant, Nick Cave, Christopher Lee, Wanda Jackson, Mick Farren, Colin Wilson, The Trashmen, Ingrid Pitt, Dion DiMucci, John Peel, Cynthia Plastercaster, Sonny Burgess, Wreckless Eric and Dick Dale.

Décharné is probably one of the only people currently writing about music to have played on BBCTV’s Later… with Jools Holland show, on the main stage at the Reading Festival, at Madison Square Garden and at the Hollywood Bowl.

Travis Elborough

Travis Elborough has been a freelance writer, author and cultural commentator for over two decades now. His books include The Bus We Loved, a history of the Routemaster bus; The Long-Player Goodbye, a hymn to vinyl records; Wish You Were Here, a survey of the British beside the seaside and London Bridge in America: The Tall Story of a Transatlantic Crossing.

A Walk in the Park: The Life and Times of a People’s Institution was published by Jonathan Cape in June 2016 and described as ‘a fascinating, informative, revelatory book’ by William Boyd in The Guardian.

The Atlas of Improbable Places, a collaboration with the cartographer Alan Horsfield and specially commissioned by the publisher Aurum, appeared in September 2016 and was saluted by Monocle magazine for ‘making the world feel bigger.’

In September 2017, the anthologies Being a Writer, co-compiled with the novelist Helen Gordon, and Our History of the 20th Century: As Told in Diaries, Journals and Letters, were published by Aurum and Michael O’Mara Books, respectively.

The latter has been hailed by David Kynaston as ‘a wonderfully curated collection of intimate diary voices: rich in their variousness, compelling in their impact, and cumulatively giving us a fresh and thought-provoking version of twentieth-century Britain’.

His most recent anthologies have been Letters to Change the World: From Pankhurst to Orwell issued by Ebury Press in September 2018 (and in a revised paperback edition in July 2021) and Bus Fare: Collected Writing on London’s Most Loved Means of Transport, co-edited with Joe Kerr, issued by AA Publishing in October 2018.

Atlas of Vanishing Places was published by White Lion in September 2019 and won Illustrated Book of the Year at the Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards in 2020.

Through the Looking Glasses: The Spectacular Life of Spectacles was published in July 2021 by Little Brown to immediate acclaim, saluted as ‘fascinating’ by The Observer, while New Statesman stated, ‘It will make you look at specs with fresh eyes.’