Horrible Histories: The Roaring 20s! Lost Generation song

Sing along to The Lost Generation song and learn all about the glitz and glamour of the 1920s...

The Lost Generation song from Horrible Histories transports you back to the ghastly glitz and glaring glamour of the 1920s.✨ From horrible Hollywood heroes like Josephine Baker and Charlie Chaplin to literary bookworms like James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway, this toe tapping tune from new Horrible Histories series 11 explores the highs and lows of the 1920s. 🎶

Join Gertrude Stein in her Paris apartment and hear all about this famous decade’s biggest players.

Gertrude Stein was an American writer who moved to Paris and became best buds with famous artists and writers like Pablo Picasso and Ernest Hemingway. 🎨 During the Roaring 20s, a time of jazz and lots of parties, her home became a creative meeting place, only the coolest people allowed! 🏆

Sylvia Beach loved big books (and she cannot lie!🎶). She opened a very special bookshop in Paris, called Shakespeare and Company. The store became another hot place-to-be for the coolest creatives in town, like writer F Scott Fitzgerald (you've Gatsby kidding!). 📚 

Ernest Hemingway wasn’t your average bookworm sitting in a cosy armchair. He went on safaris in Africa, chased to spot wild animals and probably got chased back! He was an American author who turned his real-life adventures into powerful stories. His famous book, The Old Man and the Sea, is about a seaman's brave battle with a giant fish...sounds turtely tenta-cool! 🐙

Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse were like the rockstars of the art world, except they had paint brushes instead of guitars! 🎨 These two loved nothing more than splashing bright colours, chopping up shapes, and coming up with ideas that made everyone go, "is that a mess or a masterpiece?". Picasso went into mad-art-scientist-mode and invented Cubism, which makes objects look like they've been smashed and viewed from lots of different angles at once. Matisse turned into a paper-cutting whizz, snipping and sticking colourful shapes into art. Turns out they were measly masterpieces after all! 🖌️

Writers flocked to this town

talkin' about Lost Generation

and started hanging around

Paris was our destination.

American literary types

looking for new inspiration

disillusioned with the stars and stripes

Leaving behind our home nation.

I’m novelist Gertrude Stein

writer of great reputation

have these guys around all the time

dropping in for conversation.

I knew all the artistic greats

for arts she had appreciation

Picasso and Matisse were my mates

fought hard with great dedication.

Lost Generation

for us American ex-pats

The Lost Generation baby

Paris is where it’s at.

Hemingway, journalist and writer

was held in great admiration

also a handy bar room fighter

useful in an altercation.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, author supreme

Great Gatsby was his creation

got new ideas from the Paris scene

It fuelled our imagination.

The Lost Generation

to be creative we’re free.

The Lost Generation baby

Paris is the place to be.

Sylvia Beach is my name

ran a book shop on the banks of the Seine.

James Joyce, the author of Ulysses

I'm actually Irish, if you please.

These writers often met round mine

a coming together of brilliant minds.

She published my greatest work.

I thought he was a bit of a jerk.

Lost Generation

An intellectual melting pot,

The Lost Generation baby

Paris has got the lot.

The Lost Generation

Came up with that phrase on my own

America’s my country, baby

But France is my home.

Talking about Lost Generation.

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