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with igniting the Rock' n' Roll revolution, indeed late 20th Century teenage rebellion as a whole. It did so by featuring Bill Haley & His Comets's "Rock Around the Clock", over the film's opening credits. Originally a rather conventional blues-based song recorded by Sonny Dae and his Knights, Haley's version, which was remarkable for its earth-shaking sense of urgency, ensured the world would never be the same after it.

In August Sun Records released a long playing record entitled "Elvis Presley, Scotty and Bill", featuring the so-called King of the Western Bop who went on to become Rock's most influential figure apart from the Beatles. Then James Dean died in September after having made only three films, the greatest of which, Nicholas Ray's "Rebel Without a Cause" came out about a month afterwards. It could be said to be the cinema's defining elegy to the sensitivity and rebelliousness of youth, with Dean its most beautiful and tortured icon. As such his image has never dated, nor been surpassed. The modern cult of youth was born in the mid 1950s.

Many theories exist as to how the staid, conformist fifties could've yielded as if my magic into the wild Dionysian sixties, some convincing, others less so. For me, if a little leaven is present in a theory for me it leavens, or spoils, the entire lump, even when much of it may be sound. What I do believe is that the transformation of the West that has taken place in the last half century or more was not a sudden, unexpected event, far from it, but one that had been painstakingly prepared, at the very least since after the First World War. Tendencies intended to chip away at the Judaeo-Christian moral fabric of our civilisation reach all the way back to the Enlightenment from which so much anti-Christian thought stems, in fact all the way back to the Garden of Eden and the Serpent's promise to Eve that by disobeying the God of the Universe she and Adam could be as gods, knowing good and evil. It is this false promise that is at the heart of so much of our vain humanistic philosophy.

What happened in the 1960s was simply the culmination of many decades of activity on the part of revolutionaries and avant gardists. Even the most cacaphonous examples of Rock, a music form which the American evangelist John McCarthur once described as having a bombastic atonality and dissonance had its precedents in the works of the great Modernist composers who ushered in the emancipation of the dissonant, and seem quite tame

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