Jagger and Lennon attacked in new book

A new book about British youth culture singles out John Lennon and (Sir) Mick Jagger as being the most colossal phonies. According to David Fowler, a Cambridge historian, the duo were not the radicals they appeared to be, but just "capitalists who wanted to get rich". This not altogether original theory forms the backbone of Fowler's tome Youth Culture in Modern Britain, c1920 - c1970, a reappraisal of the story of British youth, published on Monday.

Says Fowler of Jagger and Lennon: "They did about as much to represent the interests of the nation's young people as the Spice Girls did in the 1990s. The Beatles and the Stones were marketed as oppositional to the old order, but if you look at their lives they were actually very conventional. They just happened to be young. Both bands could have been figureheads for a youth movement if they had wanted to be, and an opportunity to put forward an alternative vision of a British society that was fresher and freer was lost."

He adds: "The 1960s are often viewed as the point at which youth culture in this country exploded, but in many ways they were the years in which the idea began to fall apart. People forget that real youth movements are about a lot more than spending and consumerism – they are a way of life. Groups like The Beatles were basically capitalists interested in enriching themselves through the music industry."

So who were the revolutionaries? According to Fowler it was not working-class heroes, but middle-class radicals who did all the running. Chief among them was the collective started by Rolf Gardiner, the son of an eminent Egyptologist who studied languages at St John's College, Cambridge, between 1921 and 1924 and whom Dr Fowler describes as a "landed gentry hippy of the 1920s with alleged Nazi connections".

"People like Gardiner were true cultural subversives - pop stars before pop even existed. In terms of the influence he had on giving Britain's young people a sense of identity, there's no doubt he is just as important as Mick Jagger." ·