The Summer Of Love

Wednesday 3rd May

1967 and I was just 16.  I barely knew what love was, but I was in love with the music and the slogan ‘Make Love Not War’. Everything was changing, Fashion, Art, Cinema – and of course Music. The Beatles were this fantastic vehicle for absorbing new ideas, turning them into their own and bringing them to us, fresh and sounding so original.  In 1966 they had released Revolver, and all the elements of psychedelia were already there, the tape loops, the ‘flanging’ as John called it and the Eastern influences in George’s sitar.

But it was really in America and California that things were really happening.  New bands like The Doors and the Electric Prunes and Zappa’s Mother’s were emerging every week. We knew nothing really until Scott MacKenzie’s brilliant “If You’re Going To San Francisco” hit the airwaves.  Then The Fab Four released Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields (the ultimate in sublime weirdness) and in June came the album “Sgt. Pepper”.  I didn’t even have a record player, but can remember Kenny Everett playing the whole album on pirate Radio London just before it was released.  We even had a school dance and the album was played there too.  Incidentally Radio 1 began the day after, with Tony Blackburn playing The Move’s “Flowers In the Rain”.  For some amazing reason Pink Floyd, just before they became famous, were booked to play at Stowmarket Carnival.  It was mind-blowing, the rudimentary light show, everyone in caftans and bells listening to ‘Interstellar Overdrive” at full volume.

It was the best of times.  And even if many of the records of those days do not really hold up fifty years later, and the term ‘hippy’ is now used with derision – I was proud to be a hippy, even if only a schoolboy hippy.  I will never forget that wonderful year, which did more than anything to develop my tastes and acceptance of new music. And the ideas of 1967, music festivals, light shows, tie-die t. shirts, candles and incense have all become mainstream – along with acceptance of race and gender and the anti-war movement. And if I get a chance this summer I will wear some flowers in my hair too…hahaha