Senseless Acts of Beauty: Cultures of Resistance since the Sixties (London: Verso, 1996) 

George McKay made a significant contribution to the ‘consciousness’ of the protest movement with his seminal study of the radical protest since the 60s, Senseless Acts of Beauty. Jeremy Gilbert, ‘Reflections on Britain’s student movement’ (2 March 2012).

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Books on the modern era: our guide to what you should read if you only have a lifetime…. George McKay Senseless Acts of Beauty:  Reveals the direct link between the different eras of hippies, punks and ravers in the UK, between the 1970s, the 1980s and the 1990s. Modern Music Review (2009)

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By establishing connections to anti-colonial or civil rights struggles of the 1950s, it is possible to grasp exactly what is changing and when it changed. Exemplary here is George McKay’s study of British resistance and protest since the 1960s. His work makes particularly clear the importance of post-1960s festivals to ongoing radical protest. Apart from McKay there seems to be no single author or tradition that is dominant, simply an ongoing accumulation of studies. Tim Jordan and Adam Lent (eds.) ‘Introduction’, Storming the Millennium: The New Politics of Change (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1998, p. 8 )

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[McKay] wants to have his gateau, and eat it too. He likes to confess his own participant-enthusiast point of view, but then pull back into analytical, anthropologist mode. He excels at both.… He demonstrates convincingly that the ‘60s were not some fluke and that countercultural practices popularized then have fed pockets of resistance ever since. Brad Wieners, Wired (US edition, September 1996, p. 181)

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… this rich archive collection. Sabine Janski, in German newspaper Die Tageszeitung (15 July 1996)

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A history of an unwritten tradition … one of the most enjoyable books to be published this year … an account of very moral people consciously trying to create a new politics. Alison Page, books of the year in Red Pepper (December 1996, p. 36)

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Absorbing history … succeeds in unravelling various tangled threads from two decades of countercultural history. Dave Rimmer, Mojo (1996, p. 123)

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The secret history of the last two decades. Jon Savage, author of England’s Dreaming: Sex Pistols and Punk Rock

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This is a book that has already been dismissed with contempt by many people we know within the movement(s) it describes. Various types of criticisms have been expressed, but what they share overall is a dislike of McKay’s ‘approach’­ to his subject matter. In our language, this approach is one of recuperation – it is an attempt (not necessarily deliberate) to appropriate antagonistic expressions and render them harmless through transformation and integration into some form of commodity (in this case, academia and the world of coffee-table publishing)…. The sections on the free festivals and fairs of the 1970s are written by McKay in his role as someone who took part. For those of us who don’t know much about these scenes, McKay’s account presents itself as a detailed and useful history, indicating some of the conflicts among those involved as well as their run-ins with the cops etc. Review in Aufheben, no. 5 (Autumn 1996)

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Excellent.… Using interviews, flyers, DIY newsletters and magazines McKay has drawn together an important record of the endlessly rebellious vein in British society which has managed to circumvent every attempt to smother it. The Big Issue (May 1996, p. 36)

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… an immensely useful history of the past 30 years of British resistance culture.… McKay’s worries about whether the new tribes can crystallise into a counter-systemic force… are well expressed. Pat Kane, New Statesman & Society (10 May 1996, 38-39)

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George McKay’s exuberant new book is in part a celebration of the do-it-yourself politics favoured by modern protest movements and alternative cultures. Yet it is also a lament against the erosion of traditional liberties by a government that claims to make the sovereignty of the individual the heart of its political and economic credo. McKay rightly identifies a surviving strand of libertarian resistance to the acquisitive, low-level authoritarian mainstream of British society. Aidan Rankin, The Tablet (11 January 1997, p. 45)

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A strength of the book is the way in which the history of events and developments is pieced together, and links are made between them, showing an evolution and exchange between them. For example, McKay shows some of the exchanges and meetings between travellers and peace campers throughout the 1980s. Karen Goaman, Anarchist Studies (pp. 77-82)

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At the recent Earth First! gathering in North Wales, an activist quipped that this book should be boycotted because of all the inaccuracies it is supposed to contain regarding recent road protests. This, I feel, had more to do with over-sensitivity on the part of those who have lived and breathed the events described, rather than excessive sloppiness on the part of the author. Everyone has a different slant on any given situation. McKay’s task has been to steer as truthful a course as possible through the choppy waters of contradiction, exaggeration and ego, to link up three decades of underground culture. Drawing on fanzines, free papers, lyrics, interviews and diaries, Senseless Acts journeys from the free festival scene in the mid-seventies to Castlemorton’s rave explosion in the early nineties. With punks, travellers, Molesworth, Teepee Valley, Twyford Down and the Criminal Justice Act providing the landmarks, this as a must buy/blag for anyone who’s ever wafted the joss-stick of defiance under the nose of repression. The counter-culture is building its own library. Neil Goodwin, Peace News no. 2405

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The title is offensive. I thought of all the people present at the Battle of the Beanfield, the Molesworth eviction, Yellow Wednesday, the 1990 poll tax demo in Trafalgar Square, the Newbury evictions and the countless other landmarks of our “cultures of resistance”. Most of these events were not inspired by “senseless” people. Some were far from beautiful…. Ultimately, I am glad that someone has tried to write a book bringing together different strands of protesting and partying. We have only ourselves to blame if this is the only written history we ever get. The incentive now should be to impart our beliefs and history in our words and not just to ourselves, but to the mainstream, who live, largely, ignorant of the strength of our existence. If Senseless Acts of Beauty inspires one 16 year old to go out and lock on, set up a sound system or live in a bus, then it has done a good job. It is just a shame that it has been done by an academic, in a verbose, uncreative style and not by ourselves. Earth First! Do or Die, no. 6

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George McKay offers a vision of an alternative cultural order … he surveys the history of free festivals and radical social movements in Britain. He sees them as part of a culture of resistance, through which music and other forms of cultural expression play a decisive part, and he makes an explicit connection between cultural form and cultural organization.… For McKay, therefore, cultural battles are also political ones. But for him, culture is not just about artefacts; it is about the way they are produced. McKay believes that to produce cultures of resistance you need alternative forms of life and cultural production.… [Greil] Marcus and McKay raise a question about both the type of organization and about how the art acquires political significance. They appeal to different notions of popular culture and democracy. John Street, Politics and Popular Culture (Polity, 1997, 195-196)