Dominic Sandbrook

“It was not Mrs Thatcher who made it possible for groups like Wham! to become rich and famous. If anything, the reverse was true. It was groups like Wham! – or more accurately their forerunners in the 1960s and 1970s, with all their talk of fighting the system, standing up to the Establishment, being who you wanted to be and living your life on your own terms – who opened the door for Mrs Thatcher. By undermining the institutions that had dominated British life for decades, by emphasizing the importance of self-gratification and by celebrating the value of the individual, Lennon and his contemporaries made it much easier for younger voters, in particular, to embrace her free-market message.”
― Dominic Sandbrook, The Great British Dream Factory: The Strange History of Our National Imagination

“number later put it, ‘quids in’. ‘I was getting taxis about,’ he recalled. ‘I mean, a pound would buy you a bloody good night out. You could probably have eight or nine pints of beer and twenty fags and a couple of tanners for the juke box.”
― Dominic Sandbrook, Never Had It So Good: A History of Britain from Suez to the Beatles