by PHILIP NORMAN
We had a terrific time in the Sixties – but at what cost to the millennial generation?
There is a flurry of Sixties-worship at present, with an exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and a cinema documentary about the Beatles’ touring years directed by Ron Howard. Next month, two more books on the subject will join the pile to which I have admittedly contributed more than my share. Steve Turner’s Beatles ’66: the Revolutionary Year reconstructs the band’s exploits in that eventful season (also recently chronicled in Jon Savage’s weighty 1966: the Year the Decade Exploded). And Paul Howard’s I Read the News Today, Oh Boy tells the story of Tara Browne, the gilded young Guinness heir whose death at the wheel of a Lotus Elan inspired John Lennon’s greatest song, “A Day in the Life”.
Truly, this is the decade that never dies. At frequent intervals since the mid-Eighties, glossy magazines have announced that “the Sixties are back”, with fashion spreads of Paisley fabrics, Mary Quant-ish bobs, shorter-than-ever miniskirts and elastic-sided Chelsea boots. Sixties pop music eternally dominates radio playlists, while the Rolling Stones, the decade’s most notorious band, though now withered old-age pensioners, are still widely reckoned the coolest, most dangerous dudes on the planet.
For that, we largely have to thank the “Sixties children”, who lived through the most magical time for youth there ever was, survived its surfeits of alcohol, sex and mind-shredding drugs, and now seek to perpetuate their glorious heyday even unto senility. But the greatest celebrants of the era are often people who never experienced it first-hand yet still yearn for it in a syndrome that psychologists call “nostalgia without memory”. Tony Blair’s “Cool Britannia” shtick in the Nineties, for instance, pastiched the Swinging London of three decades earlier, right down to the Union Jack carrier bags. In folk memory the Sixties are as a rosy blur of psychedelic colour, free love and Beatles music, their complexity and manifold horrors either unrealised or disregarded.
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The mythic decade, as opposed to the real one, was no straight ten-year stretch. It didn’t get into gear until 1962 with the satire boom that produced BBC TV’s That Was The Week That Was, David Frost’s first starring vehicle, and Private Eye magazine, and didn’t absorb pop music until the Beatles’ historic first visit to America in 1964. Its closing year, marked by a series of vast open-air festivals – Woodstock, Bob Dylan on the Isle of Wight, the Stones’ free concert in Hyde Park – felt almost like a decade on its own. When 1970 dawned, so much resembling a grey morning-after, many Sixties children simply refused to believe the party was over and clung to their caftans and joss sticks far into the harsh new eras of glam rock and punk.
Its prime time is generally agreed to have been 1965, when London gave vent to a concerted burst of youthful creativity in music, art, fashion, photography, cinema and graphics, and a shabby, sleepy metropolis, bombed to ruins not long previously, received the unlikely sobriquet of “swinging”. At this stage, the swinging was confined to a small circle of musicians, models, actors and photographers, congregating in the same few, unpublicised bistros and clubs: the most emblematic pop single, among so many, was Dobie Gray’s “The ‘In’ Crowd”.
It is seen above all as an era of burgeoning freedom and tolerance when Britannia seemed to be loosening her Victorian stays one by one. The contraceptive pill became widely available, ending centuries of shotgun marriages and perilous backstreet abortions, and theatre censorship by an archaic royal flunky called the Lord Chamberlain came to an end. Male homosexuality was decriminalised, though not yet destigmatised, and the first feminist voices spoke out. The word “fuck” appeared in the Times (during the farcically unsuccessful obscenity prosecution of Penguin, publisher of D H Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover) and was heard on BBC Television, albeit only in quotation marks, from the National Theatre’s literary manager, Kenneth Tynan.
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