The sixties were still swinging when George Melly was writing this illuminating and incredibly enjoyable history of the British pop culture of the era. Born in 1926 and a trad jazzer at heart, Melly was not a prime mover of ‘60s pop culture, but he was a perceptive and broadly sympathetic observer.

The central thesis of the book is that each pop culture movement begins as authentic rebellion and is then gradually assimilated into show business and turned into harmless and profitable style commodity (the difference now being that contemporary pop culture starts and ends as mere style).

Melly focuses on music as the engine of pop culture (with the Beatles inevitably and rightly taking centre stage) but also includes chapters on visual art and fashion, television, radio, cinema, theatre and literature (the Liverpool poets figuring large here).

Remarkably for a contemporaneous account Melly got most of it right, so the book like much of the music it details, has stood the test of time. Revolt into Style, first published in 1970, was followed by numerous books on the same period, but it remains one of the few essential ones.

Unlike many at the time, who thought pop music was imposed on the ‘masses’ by cynical manipulators of public taste, Melly saw clearly that this was not the case. The manipulators and exploiters are only able to move in after the bandwagon has started to roll - every pop movement begins as a genuine grass roots response to a particular artist or band. He makes the extremely perceptive observation that pop is essentially a moment, a spontaneous eruption of energy which, unbounded by notions of past and future, exists in a perpetual present.

Melly understood that pop culture as it developed in the ‘60s was distinct from both traditional culture and older forms of popular culture, creating the possibility of a genuinely democratic culture which arose from society itself, rather than being imposed from above by an elite, and one which could collapse conventional notions of highbrow and lowbrow art.

To a large extent this is what has happened. Is Philip Glass a classical or popular composer? Was David Bowie a pop singer or a singer of art songs? The blessings may, of course, have turned out to be decidedly mixed. Is reality television a manifestation of democratic culture? There is certainly an undeniable sense in which large numbers of people want it.

In the final chapter of the book, written in January 1970, Melly praises pop for having made society less hidebound by convention, more spontaneous and emotionally open. He then, rather surprisingly, pronounces it dead and the book suddenly reveals itself as a requiem for a phenomenon that has served its purpose and exhausted its possibilities. This too, despite the punk rebellion of the mid seventies, has turned out to be largely correct. The notion that pop music could change anything other than your clothes or hairstyle effectively died with the ‘60s as pop became just another lucrative branch of the music business and success increasingly removed the bands from the audience that had originally produced them.

For those of us of a certain age and sensibility re-reading Revolt Into Style provides a powerful Proustian rush. Strange indeed to think that, once upon a time in the past, Tommy Steele was considered a rock ‘n’ roll rebel. The past, of course, being a foreign country. ( )

A remarkably clear-eyed vision of the pop culture of the 1960s written over the last few years of the decade. Melly’s great triumph is to understand the nature of pop culture as it evolved in that decade, how it came to prize an ephemeral moment and an eternal now. How it disdained history and celebrated novelty. What makes him sharper than most is that even when dissecting the nature of the movement he’s capable of determining its impact outside London and how important a national impact is if a movement is genuinely to be described as popular.

After defining his terms Melly deals with pop music (as the revolutionary catalyst this gets nearly half the book), visual pop (art and fashion, pop film and TV and finally pop literature. Throughout it’s clear that Melly’s a slightly detached observer, being slightly too old to participate in the pop revolution but this is a benefit – he can see the flaws of what’s happening by virtue of experience but isn’t so old that he automatically disparages the art produced by the young. As a result his conclusions are both intellectually and emotionally intelligent, able to see to the roots of his subjects without sneering at how derivative they might be. His key insight is to see pop culture as eternally seeking novelty, that its driving force lies with youth’s fascination with change and kicking against previous generations. Given Bowie’s literary omnivorousness you can perhaps imagine him reading this and realising the need for continual ch-ch-ch-ch-changes (whereas his contemporary Bolan remained trapped in an eternally perfected pop moment and thus was swiftly left behind once his time was done).

Of course, this also really means the book was outdated before the writing was done, but it remains relevant in the principles it finds. You can trace Melly’s central thesis through punk (startlingly you can see punk’s roots towards the book’s end, five years early), new wave, Smash Hits, MTV, Tarantino, Britpop and so forth. What’s slightly startling is the conclusion; that this injection of energy, of pop has left society less rigid and more emotionally intelligent. The specifics may have dated; this though remains an intelligent analysis of how culture works. ( )