Friday 15th September

It isn’t just Nostalgia.  There really was something about the Sixties.  It was a wonderful co-incidence of Music, Fashion, Art and Politics which coalesced in a decade (or rather from 63 to about 73) which changed everything and in many ways created the Modern World.

The seeds were probably sown by Atlee’s Government of 1945 to 1951, with the creation of the Welfare State and the NHS.  Because though my generation lived through and were influenced by and loved the ‘Sixties’ it was created mostly by a generation a decade or so older than us.  Those who were maybe young children in the war or born just after it and had grown up without the horrors of that conflagration and were determined that the future was going to be different.  Well, it certainly was.

Musically, Rock and Roll was old hat by the Sixties.  It was Fifties music, beloved of Teddy Boys with their crepe soles and Edwardian jackets and slicked back hair.  The charts were dominated by American Idols singing soppy pop and ballads by the likes of Frank Ifield and Doris Day.  Then like a breath of fresh air came the Beatles, who through their apprenticeship in Hamburg managed to mix Rock and Roll with the new Blues and Soul music coming out of Black America and presenting it as something completely new – Beat Music.  But it didn’t stop there.  The Sixties just kept turning out more and more new music and genres.  Almost each new release added to the cornucopia of styles and sounds.  Just listen to the Beatles White Album, recorded just 6 years after Please Please Me – to see the progression.

Fashion was part of it too.  Mary Quant and Twiggy and Biba were all screaming NEW and MODERN at the world.  Carnaby Street and the Kings Road were the hippest places on the planet.  I can remember having a pair of strawberry crushed velvet flares made for me by one of the Carnaby Street shops – I say made, when all they did was take in the seams so that I had to squeeze into these skin-tight trousers – but I must say they were fabulous and I wish I still had them, and more improtantly could still get into them.  It was the decade of the mini-skirt, of panda eye make-up, of the E-type and the Mini, of short bobbed hair for girls and Beatle cuts that grew longer and shaggier as the years rolled on for men.

Art was booming too, fantastic new films like Doctor Strangelove and James Bond, and Pop Art.  It seems that the floodgates had burst open and suddenly anything was Art.  It was conceptual artist Yoko One who captured John Lennon’s mind.  David Bailey was showing us new ways in Photography too.

There was so much happening that if you blinked you missed something.

And it all continued, fuelled at times by drugs (though I missed most of that, thank goodness), right through to about the mid-Seventies.

I am so glad I was just the right age to have lived through it.