Post-war Britain’s First Youth Subculture: The Bebop Scene in Soho, 1945–1950

In late 1945 to early 1946, bebop, also known as re-bop and modern jazz, migrated across the Atlantic from New York City to Soho, London, where it was reproduced and rearticulated by a racially diverse bunch of musicians in gritty basement clubs. This thesis maps the emergence of this scene by exploring the intersection of race, class and gender through a wide range of archival sources, many of which have been unresearched, such as: oral history archives, the music press, national and local newspapers, autobiographies, police reports, and photographs. In order to question received narratives about subcultural history, it employs an interdisciplinary approach, crossing the boundaries of the following fields: music studies, race and ethnic studies, fashion studies, media studies, and subculture studies. In documenting and analysing the avant-garde aesthetic styles that constituted the scene – the music and sartorial style, as well as the cultural rituals of drug consumption and transracial relations – the thesis establishes for the first time the ways in which bebop identities were constructed and articulated, how they spread to the London suburbs, and how they were received by the authorities and the mainstream media. In so doing, it shows how bebop in Soho became a moral panic which led to a police clampdown on the scene which saw the main clubs raided. The thesis demonstrates that bebop was not just a scene, but was in fact the first youth subculture in post-war Britain.