Historian David Fowler has blasted the Beatles and Rolling Stones, saying that they were essentially just a bunch of Young Conservatives out to make some dough and a canape or two.
Fowler has published a book called Youth Culture in Modern Britain that questions the supposed impact the two legendary groups have had on youth culture.
“They were young capitalists who, far from developing a youth culture, were exploiting youth culture by promoting fan worship, mindless screaming and nothing more than a passive teenage consumer,” Fowler says.
"The Beatles did not generate a youth culture at all; merely a youth audience of passive teenage (mainly female) fans who became superfluous when the group stopped touring Britain in 1965."
Remarking at the Beatles regular appearance on Saturday teatime telly shows like Morecambe and Wise, Folower adds that "In effect, they were family entertainment, rather than at the cutting edge of youth culture."
Instead, Fowler is a big fan of the mods: "the mods were a more important cultural phenomenon than the Beatles because they generated the first geographically mobile, national youth movement that empowered thousands of youths and young females," he writes.
