Overpaid, Oversexed and Over There: How a Few Skinny Brits with Bad Teeth Rocked America

David Hepworth

Softcover | 12.7 x 2.29 x 19.84 cm | 336 pp

Black Swan | 2021 | 9781784166410

The Beatles landing in New York in February 1964 was the opening shot in a cultural revolution nobody predicted. Suddenly the youth of the richest, most powerful nation on earth was trying to emulate the music, manners and the modes of a rainy island that had recently fallen on hard times.

The resulting fusion of American can-do and British fuck-you didn’t just lead to rock and roll’s most resonant music. It ushered in a golden era when a generation of kids born in ration card Britain, who had grown up with their nose pressed against the window of America’s plenty, were invited to wallow in their big neighbour’s largesse.

It deals with a time when everything that was being done - from the Beatles playing Shea Stadium to the Rolling Stones at Altamont, from the Who performing their rock opera at the Metropolitan Opera House to David Bowie touching down in the USA for the first time with a couple of gowns in his luggage - was being done for the very first time.

Rock and roll would never be quite so exciting again.

'David Hepworth's books go against one of the core rules of rock & roll. You are supposed to get worse the more you release. He doesn't seem to get that. This latest may be his best. Where's the tradition in that?' Danny Baker

'Another tremendously enjoyable read, full of good stories, expertly told: in other words, satisfaction guaranteed' Spectator

'Informative and insightful' Telegraph

'A zippy delight' The Times

About the Author
David Hepworth (b. 1950) is a British music journalist, writer, television presenter, and publishing industry analyst. He was instrumental in the foundation of a number of popular magazines in the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s. Along with the journalist, editor and broadcaster Mark Ellen, he turned the pop magazine Smash Hits into one of the most popular UK music magazines of the 1980s. A presenter of The Old Grey Whistle Test in the 1980s, he co-presented the BBC broadcast of Live Aid in 1985.