Sunday 6th December

For me it was always about far more then the music, though undeniably the music was great.  It was about a new way of interacting with the World; in fashion, design, TV, Cinema and even Literature, a new feeling was in the air.  It was a liberation from the dead weight of the past.  Our parents had lived through the War, our Politicians had lived through the War, and we had grown up in the Fifties, with rationing and bomb-sites and yet, even here there was an air of optimism.  Council houses were being built everywhere, television was the new thing, and like a flag waving to us loud and clear there was America and Rock and Roll. And we were going to do things differently; there was a new Labour Government in ’64 after 13 years of the complacent grouse-shooting Tories.  The Beatles, Mary Quant, Biba, Carnaby Street – it was all happening.  Then came the summer of Love, 1967 and Woodstock and ‘All You Need Is Love’.  Yes, things would never be the same after the Sixties.

Then ‘at-a-stroke’ Grocer Heath won in 1970 and the Tories were back in town.  And even though they only lasted just over three years, the Seventies were halting and uncertain; three-day weeks, war in the Middle East, sterling crises and the whole dream started to collapse again.  The Tories swept back in ’79 and Norman Tebbit blamed our demise on “The Sixties”.  But these Politicians were still War-kids, and they looked to the free-market and not Socialism to rebuild our World.  And that was it.  The same mentality has ruled supreme ever since.  But I don’t think that Sixties Optimism ever entirely went away, many of us are still hippies at heart and there is still a desire for a better, fairer world.

For many years our young people knew that the World was a dung-heap, and their only ambition was to sit astride it and look down on everyone else.  But now things are changing again.  Slowly, there is an optimism growing, an idea that it doesn’t have to be like this; that the free-market doesn’t work for the benefit of all of us.  Maybe all those Sixties kids who became teachers were slowly indoctrinating the kids all along.  Outlandish ideas such as Female Equality, Racial Tolerance and Acceptance of all types of Sexuality have become mainstream – our Politicians are lagging far behind Public Opinion.  So, don’t be depressed by the bombing in Syria or continuing Austerity, things are changing and there will be a better World.  We just have to trust our kids.  It won’t be another Sixties; that was fifty years ago – but I feel there will be a new Optimistic decade, maybe in the Twenties (co-incidentally a hundred years after another time of new ideas) and the World will get better.