Bowie: A Biography - JFK247

Pink Moon album) and author (White Bicycles),
says. At the time, Boyd, an American, brought many
of the original blues artists over. “The kids cheered
Muddy Waters when he played. They knew all about
him. There was a way bigger catalog of blues and
jazz in British record shops than in the U.S. shops.”
While you won’t find a more American form than
the blues, the new breed, unlike their Teddy Boy
subcultural predecessors, did not dress like
Americans. Instead, they fully embraced the sharpedged,
fine sartorial traditions of English tailoring.
The mod aesthetic was all about slim and sleek lines
as opposed to a conglomerate of shapes and
materials. The trousers were skinny and the jackets
were three-buttoned, with each of them pulled in
tight. The ties were narrow. The hair was spiky but
neat. Whereas the Teds were hard men, the mod
boys were androgynous. It wasn’t necessarily a
sexual thing. They used eyeliner and pancake
makeup to extend the sharp lines of their clothes to
their facial bone structure. If the Teds were purists,
happy to preserve and protect an idealized “cats and
chicks” version of postwar youth, the mods, true to
their nickname (short for “modern”) flipped over
anything new and fluid, heading for tomorrow.
“By the time we’re buying you, you’ll be going off in
one of these,” Tom Courtenay’s boss tells him in
John Schlesinger’s 1963 film, Billy Liar. Billy Fisher
works in a funeral home, and the partially bemused,
partially terrified older man is holding up a sleek
plastic coffin. “You see, people don’t realize it’s all