NOT Biggest Part of Swingin U.K.?
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Was reading an old Vanity Fair magazine article about longtime London man about town avid socializer Nicky Haslim and was startled when a couple of Brits in the story maintained the Beatles didn't actually launch "Swinging England" but played only a modest role, that "models, movies and actors" actually put London on the map for hip coolness. Stars like David Hemmings, Jean Shrimpton, Vanessa Redgrave in "Blow Up" and the like. I'd always thought the Beatles started England being popular, very famous and cool. That THEY "blew it up." There were some good British movies in the very early 60's and late 1950s before the Fabs, but were those films part of the famed "Youth Quake" which made Olde Blighty "Young Blighty." I believe the Liddypool boys got the ball rolling in a big way, paved the road for the rest, not vice-versa.
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The Beatles were instrumental in bringing the British Invasion overseas, but they were "co-incidental" to what was happening in Britain at the time. James Bond cool started in '62, when the the "Fabs" were just starting out. So, yes I would agree that they were part of, but not totally responsible for, Swinging London in the '60's.
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I thought Lord Lucan started it all.
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Poignantly, "Arter" started it all, in a sense...that name found painted on a jagged bit of wooden post dating from antiquity, we're talking way way way back here, before the year 1100, something like that, the first king of that region, "Arter" as claimed in world history books. Actually, regarding the world of pop culture-- is/was James Bond bigger than the Beatles? Not if you practically worship music, I guess, even above the cinema and popular fiction
Even though Sean Connery personified ultimate hunky masculinity as Bond 
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I think the image in my head (as an outsider and born too late) of Swinging England in the 60s is something like The Jimi Hendrix Experience at The Bag O'Nails club in London, circa 1967, with The Beatles, The Stones with Marianne Faithfull, The Who and hip gallery owners and poets like Allen Ginsberg dropping by... in the audience. A smell of marihuana in the air and people wearing sunglasses inside and talking art.
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Hendrix Ibsen:
I think the image in my head (as an outsider and born too late) of Swinging England in the 60s is something like The Jimi Hendrix Experience at The Bag O'Nails club in London, circa 1967, with The Beatles, The Stones with Marianne Faithfull, The Who and hip gallery owners and poets like Allen Ginsberg dropping by... in the audience. A smell of marihuana in the air and people wearing sunglasses inside and talking art.
If I had been 5 years or so older, that's where I'd have been hanging out in London! That and outside Paul's house (especially in the summer of '68 after Jane was out of the picture--nudge nudge wink wink) Unfortunately, I was only 13 in 1968!
