ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book demonstrates how Andrew Davies' lyrics articulate the continued sense of class consciousness that existed beneath the prevailing lexicon of 'affluence', 'consensus' and the 'swinging sixties'. It explores ways by which youth culture served to dramatise and thereby inform the breakdown of the post-war order. The book discusses how the burgeoning market in 'youth-exploitation' literature helped reaffirm the construction of a 'crisis' that has ultimately come to define the popular memory of Britain in the 1970s. It deals with popular music's reaction to the changing socioeconomic culture of the 1980s by mapping the rise of the charity singly as a response to Margaret Thatcher's retraction of the welfare state. The book explores the rationale of Thatcher's wider economic and political ideology. It points out a symbiotic relationship existing between youth culture, popular music and the processes of socio-economic and political change.
