And a pursuit devotees invest unwholesome amounts of time to. One of, if not the finest, second-hand emporiums for those of the rummaging affliction is of course Leith’s very own Elvis Shakespeare. It is impossible to pass by without peering through its twin portals into vintage tastes of all kinds.

There’s usually a fresh surprise awaiting the expectant browser. To my great pleasure, I recently came across an original copy of George Melly’s Revolt into Style, replete with a Beatles front cover designed by pop artist Peter Blake. Writing as the 1960s drew to a close, jazz musician and journalist Melly was one of the first publications to retrospectively both damn and praise a decade that had promised much, but perhaps failed to deliver on its most passionate evangelists’ dreams.

The Paris ‘68 students and workers had urged us to Be Realistic, Demand the Impossible! In the UK, liberal legislation around gender, race and sexuality was enacted in the face of fierce resistance, but reflected a growing progressive majority. 

Modernists were the vanguard of a kaleidoscopic fusion of style and imagination, where working-class artists, musicians and street dandies disrupted the hegemony of stuffy post-war Britain.

In Mary Quant’s angular designs, the Who’s auto-destructive pop art, French New Wave cinema, modern jazz or Italian cut suits, a new way of being was conjured into life and unruly passions aroused. The more scandalised the hidebound establishment’s response, the more an emboldened (and financially independent) youth culture doubled down on its newly discovered cultural (if not economic or political) powers.

Melly’s vantage point is one of an amused outsider brandishing an Access all Areas lanyard. At times, his haughty appraisals of the clubs, music, art and literature of the period read like a bewildered but supportive teacher willing his pupils onto greater things. Most often, his curative insights are those of a generous observer handed a ticket to ride on a magic bus he’s not quite sure he wants to board, but in the interests of reportage, Melly will take the hit on our behalf.

Revolt into Style traces the emergence of popular music, from a raucous derivative of black American culture to its sanitising at the hands of often grubby impresarios fronting up a recording industry doubtful as to the long-term profitability of the ‘pop-star.’ In the mid to late 50s, the most prized artists were those who could appeal simultaneously to the newly minted ‘teenager’ as well as older audiences who wanted their rock n roll served in easily digestible, untroubling versions.

Melly takes us on a tour of the music, visual pop, film, TV and literature beginning to converge onto an over-arching Pop Art canvas. Even at this early phase of development, Melly’s intuition is sound. Pop is already an ‘ersatz culture feeding off its own publicity.’ The loose coalition of artists, musicians and writers are self-referential commentators fixated on their image in shop windows, parked cars and mass teenage culture. Pop is already eating itself.

Andy Warhol’s paintings of everyday consumer objects, a reifying of consumption, seems to capture a narrow self-regard which always threatened to overtake pop art’s more ambitious futurists. Pop’s irreverent appetite for self-satire is devolving into a culture feeding off its own memories. But the best of visual pop is a ‘celebration of innocence and hope.’ In Modernism in particular, it presented ‘an exact image of our rapidly changing society,’ a moving document of evolving tastes.

Rock is a ‘meaningless simplification of the blues the poetry removed’. Melly defers to the pioneers, early Elvis and, later, the Beatles are given qualified passes into his good graces.

Mods are, surprisingly, mentioned infrequently, often in comparison to Rockers and Teddy Boys. The Noonday Underground was perhaps more secluded than Melly realised. Mods ‘are not afraid to look pretty,’ though even by the late 60s, Melly observes a variation of subcultures and a pop fashion ‘in splinters’ with no centre. Mods affiliated with the shock of the new, rejecting the paternalism of the BBC for Radio Caroline’s embrace of new sounds and younger DJs.

Mary Quant’s Chelsea Set is described as a hybrid of aloof London cool and working-class innovation. A socially mobile decade allowed access to people previously denied by the gatekeepers of respectable high-street fashion. The concept of gender was becoming more fluid, encouraged by Quant and an East End Jewish tradition of good tailoring, a step change from the rigid articulation of male working-class dress embodied by post-war youth. The pop world was chivvied into at least a visual representation of gender and sexual equality.

Throughout the decade, pop culture would remain the jurisdiction of the 14 to 20-odd year old. The borders of the generation gap remained firmly policed. It is a mark of time passing that those boundaries have become not just porous, but blurred then extinguished altogether.

Melly finishes on a note of eulogy. It could be that pop’s great distinction is constant resurrection and reinvention. It must be true to itself and die.

As Roger McGough wrote:

Let me die a young man’s death

Not a free-from-sin, tiptoe-in

Candle-wax-and-waning death

Not a curtains-drawn, by angels-borne death

What a nice way to go death.