CHAPTER FOUR: Sergeant Pepper and friends
‘Rock and Roll: music for the neck downwards.’
Rolling Stone Keith Richards
Although the Sixties echoed to a great many sounds, the aural landscape was dominated by four Liverpool lads who, after rendering their female fans hysterical with raw numbers such as ‘Love Me Do’ and ‘Please Please Me’, developed an astonishing and unheralded musical range and subtlety before breaking up to go their separate ways.
The Beatles had their first UK success in 1962, stopped touring in 1966 and released their last album in 1970 – by which time they were millionaires several times over.
In one sense they were typical of the period. Most stars from the Fifties and before had been individuals performing other people’s numbers, but the Sixties saw a mushrooming of groups who (for better or worse) wrote their own songs.
Elvis was still the King (though making a run of insipid films) and rock legends such as Roy Orbison and Chuck Berry were still going strong, but in the UK it was the groups – most of them British – who made the running. One vital ingredient in the Beatles’ success was their manager, Brian Epstein, who in the early days of their relationship persuaded them to trim their hair and abandon their leather jackets and jeans for suits. He had, he said, been drawn to them not only by their music but by their sense of humour, too.
It seems a little strange in hindsight, but the four ‘mopheads’ were for a time regarded as the respectable kind of young lads you could take home to mother, compared with the raucous and overtly sexual Rolling Stones, led by the pouting, preening and androgynous Mick Jagger.
The Dansette
The must-have piece of equipment for a rock-happy teenager in the Fifties and Sixties was a portable Dansette record player. Shaped like a small suitcase, but with a brightly coloured leatherette casing in red, blue, pink, green or cream, it was designed for discs played at any of three prevailing speeds: 331⁄3, 45 and 78 rpm (revolutions per minute).
The 45 rpm ‘single’ allowed about three minutes’ playing time on each side, the A-side being the hoped-for hit number, with the B-side, or flip-side, offering something more anodyne.
With a little help from my friends
Here, as a treat for nostalgic readers, is an alphabetical list of three dozen Sixties groups, British and American, with one memorable number each from their repertoires:
• Amen Corner (If Paradise Is) Half as Nice
• The Animals House of the Rising Sun
• The Beach Boys Good Vibrations
• The Beatles Yesterday
• The Bee Gees Massachusetts
• Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas Little Children
• Cream I Feel Free
• The Dave Clark Five Glad All Over
• The Doors Light My Fire
• Fleetwood Mac Albatross
• The Four Seasons Big Girls Don’t Cry
• Gary Puckett and the Union Gap Young Girl
• Gerry and the Pacemakers How Do You Do It?
• The Grateful Dead Truckin’
• Herman’s Hermits I’m Into Something Good
• The Hollies The Air that I Breathe
• The Kinks You Really Got Me
• Manfred Mann Mighty Quinn
• Martha and the Vandellas Heat Wave
• The Monkees I’m a Believer
• The Moody Blues Go Now
• The Mothers of Invention Who Are the Brain Police?
• Pink Floyd See Emily Play
• Procol Harum A Whiter Shade of Pale
• The Rolling Stones It’s All Over Now
• The Searchers Don’t Throw Your Love Away
• The Seekers The Carnival is Over
• The Small Faces Lazy Sunday
• Status Quo Pictures of Matchstick Men
• The Supremes Where Did Our Love Go?
• The Swinging Blue Jeans Hippy Hippy Shake
• The Temptations You’re My Everything
• The Troggs Wild Thing
• The Who My Generation
• The Yardbirds For Your Love
• The Zombies She’s Not There
Production values
Paul McCartney later said that Epstein was the true ‘fifth Beatle’, while George Harrison joked in tribute that the group’s MBEs stood for ‘Mr Brian Epstein’. Weeks before he died of an accidental drug overdose in August 1967, they had released one of the strangest and most successful albums in pop history – Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band – and had another behind-the-scenes man to thank.
The Sgt Pepper album couldn’t possibly have been recreated on tour, because it was heavy with the kind of sophisticated production techniques for which the arranger and composer George Martin was renowned.
For John Lennon’s song ‘Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite!’, for example, the sound engineers collected recordings of fairground organs, cut them into strips, edited them in random order and created a long loop which was mixed in during the final production.
Martin had worked with the Beatles ever since they came under Epstein’s wing, but this new record was altogether more extravagant than anything that had gone before. Gone was the idea of the musicians simply turning up for a few hours of banging out their individual songs and re-recording any sections that might have gone wrong. Sgt Pepper was put together over a period of 129 days, with orchestras and other musicians hired to replicate genres as varied as music-hall, rock and jazz, Western classical and traditional Indian music. It was, in short, a ‘concept album’.
The brightly coloured cover (designed by pop artist Peter Blake and his then wife Jann Haworth), shows the Beatles dressed in extravagant military-style uniforms (designed by Manuel Cuevas) and standing behind a large drum (painted by the fairground artist Joe Ephgrave).
Behind them is a collage of more than 70 figures, most of them famous – and most of them men. Lennon was reportedly thwarted in an attempt to include Jesus Christ and Adolf Hitler, but the sitar-playing George Harrison successfully smuggled in a number of Indian gurus. The former Beatle Stuart Sutcliffe is there, and so is Bob Dylan. Freud, Jung, Marx and Einstein appear, as well as an array of writers, artists, comedians, actors and actresses (Shirley Temple’s sweater carries the legend ‘Welcome the Rolling Stones’). There are a few surprising inclusions:
• Aleister Crowley (occultist)
• Sonny Liston (boxer)
• Sir Robert Peel (19th-century British prime minister)
• Karlheinz Stockhausen (avant-garde composer)
• Albert Stubbins (Liverpool footballer)
What the critics said
‘A decisive moment in the history of Western civilisation.’
Kenneth Tynan
‘Like an over-attended child, Sgt Pepper is spoiled. It reeks of horns and harps, harmonica quartets, assorted animal noises, and a 41-piece orchestra.’
Richard Goldstein
Zapped by Frank
The Beatles never claimed to have produced the first concept album, but the fact that other people hyped it in this fashion seems to have annoyed Frank Zappa. His Mothers of Invention could lay claim to getting there first, and they had their revenge by guying the Sgt Pepper cover (the first of several such ‘borrowings’) for their next album, which they entitled We’re Only in It for the Money.
As the title suggests, something else was bugging Zappa. He was no friend of hippiedom, and he regarded the Beatles’ latest venture – with its psychedelic cover and songs about drugs – as a crass commercialisation of a movement he despised. Rock and roll might have become more complex and interesting, but (in this case, at least) he thought it had lost its soul.
Wild Nights at the Blue Boar
A humble all-night café serving traditional working-men’s fare became a veritable honeypot for Sixties rock stars and their hangers-on.
This was the Blue Boar café (now the Watford Gap service station) on Britain’s very first motorway, the M1.
Here, for the price of a cup of tea, a mug of Bovril, a bacon sandwich or a plate of egg and chips, you could mingle with the big names of the time on their way up and down the country between gigs.
Their beaten-up Transit vans were a regular feature of the Blue Boar car park, and for rockers with an American yearning (and that meant a great many of them) the M1 acquired some of the romanticism of the legendary Chicago–Los Angeles road, Route 66.
At a time when the country was still suffering from austerity, the very fact that you could call in at a greasy spoon at any time of the night was a luxury – and mingling with the likes of Pink Floyd, the Rolling Stones, the Moody Blues and Status Quo was an incredible bonus.
Electrifying performances
Hadn’t we heard this kind of complaint before? Yes, as recently as 1966 – and this time the accused had been not the Beatles but Bob Dylan.
The impact of Dylan on the Sixties hardly needs rehearsing, and it was as powerful in the UK as in America. Here was the folksinger as prophet, protestor, social conscience. The declared influence was Woody Guthrie, who had chronicled the plight of itinerant ‘dustbowl’ families in the 1930s. Dylan’s voice was rasping, the words poetic (the English critic Christopher Ricks famously included him in his pantheon), the tone uncompromising. But if the times they were a-changin’, so was Dylan himself. The burning issue wasn’t his political stance (always enigmatically blurred in his mumbling public utterances) but something much more straightforward: he had begun playing an electric guitar.
The first murmurings of discontent were heard at the Newport Folk Festival on Rhode Island in 1965, where he performed with a rock band. The criticism intensified during his world tour the following year, and climaxed in his UK shows, during which he played acoustic guitar in the first half and switched to electric in the second.
At the Free Trade Hall in Manchester that May he was subjected to a yell of ‘Judas!’ In the Odeon Theatre, Liverpool, someone demanded to know where his conscience had gone, and he replied ‘There’s a guy up there looking for a saint.’ At the Royal Albert Hall in London there were walk-outs during the last two nights of the tour, although he had some welcome support from the Beatles, who were in the audience and remonstrated with the hecklers, whom Harrison called ‘idiots’.
Enduring Cliff
It may seem strange to mention him in this exalted company, but the evergreen Sir Cliff Richard helps us keep our bearings among the psychedelic swirl. His 1958 single ‘Move It’ has been described as Britain’s first authentic rock and roll hit – John Lennon once said that ‘Before Cliff and the Shadows, there had been nothing worth listening to in British music’ – but his subsequent stream of middle-of-the-road chart successes reminds us that (as with other artistic and social changes during this turbulent decade) there were always steadier, more conservative currents below the surface.
Cliff was, and remains, a tuneful troubadour of an enduring kind, and the period’s string of crooners and belters included the likes of Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Shirley Bassey, Engelbert Humperdinck, Tom Jones, Dusty Springfield, Frankie Vaughan, Cilla Black, Jim Reeves and Andy Williams.
Dare we also mention that ‘Tears’, by the toothy comedian Ken Dodd, was the best-selling disc of 1965?
On the glum side
Perhaps psychologists can explain it, but there was a curious penchant for ‘teenage tragedy’ songs during the Sixties. Here are just four:
Teen Angel (Mark Dinning, 1960)
When their car stalls on a railway track, the boy pulls his girl to safety. Alas, she returns to it and is hit by a train. In her hand is the ring he gave her – that’s what she went back for.
Tell Laura I Love Her (Ray Peterson, 1960)
Tommy sends a message that he may be late. He’s taking part in a stock-car race so he can raise the cash to marry Laura. He’s killed.
Leader of the Pack (The Shangri-Las, 1964)
When mum and dad warn their daughter off the boss of the motorcycle gang, she tells him it’s over – and he speeds away to his death.
Ode to Billie Joe (Bobbie Gentry, 1967)
Why, we can only guess, but Billie Joe McCallister has jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge – and only the singer seems to care.
Beware pirates!
Young rock fans could play music on their Dansettes, and watch ITV’s Ready Steady Go (1963–1966) and the BBC’s Top of the Pops (1964–2006), but when they turned the knobs of their transistor radios beyond Radio Luxembourg they found their tastes poorly served by the only alternative, the BBC’s Light Programme. This gap in the market was filled for a while by so-called ‘pirate’ radio stations, which set up their studios on boats moored just outside British territorial waters.
The first pirate station was Radio Caroline, which anchored the former Danish ferry Fredericia 3 miles (5 km) off Felixstowe on the Suffolk coast. A few weeks later Radio Atlanta followed suit, its former coaster MV Mi Amigo positioned a little way off Harwich, Essex. The two soon merged, and others followed.
These operations were hugely enjoyable for their novice broadcasters, and they attracted a huge audience – as two of the first DJs soon found out.
• When Tony Blackburn was coming home on shore leave on one occasion, he told listeners that he would be bringing back some records, and that anyone who wanted one should wave him down in his distinctive red MG Sprite. ‘It took me six hours to get to London,’ he said. ‘I kept having to stop to explain that I’d run out of records.’
• Johnnie Walker was a Radio Caroline DJ when it operated off Frinton in Essex. He had the idea of inviting listeners to drive to the coast one evening, park opposite the boat and flash their lights when he gave the word. ‘It was the greatest moment of megalomania in my life,’ he said. I stood up on deck and said “Lights on!” and the entire coastline was illuminated as far as the eye could see. That was the Frinton Flash.’
Needless to say, this uncontrolled commercialism was too much for the government to bear. In 1966 the postmaster general, Anthony Wedgwood Benn, introduced a bill to Parliament outlawing unlicensed offshore broadcasting, and the Marine Offences Act became law the following August.
Blacking up
How times change! Back in the Sixties one of the most popular TV entertainments was the weekly Black and White Minstrel Show, in which white singers and dancers blacked up in order to enact over-the-top stereotypes of black performers. By 1964 it had a regular audience of more than 18 million viewers.
In May 1967 the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination delivered a petition to the BBC calling for its removal from the airwaves. Although briefly rested in 1969, the show soon returned and lasted until 1978.
Juke Box Jury
Its panel was a strange mixture of the young and (predominantly) middle-aged, but BBC TV’s Juke Box Jury, compèred by David Jacobs, was a popular evening fixture every week until 1967. Four celebrities would decide whether each newly released recording was a Hit or a Miss, with an appropriate sound effect for each verdict.
By 1962 there was a regular audience of 12 million viewers, although this practically doubled on 7 December 1963 when the Beatles formed the panel.
Radio 1
Governments need to be popular if they’re to be re-elected, and this one was swift to placate young voters and potential voters by creating an entirely new BBC radio station catering for their needs. Radio 1 was launched on 30 September 1967, when the Light Programme, the Third Programme and the Home Service were given the numbers, respectively, 2, 3 and 4. Tony Blackburn hosted that very first programme, and this was his playlist:
• Flowers in the Rain The Move
• Massachusetts The Bee Gees
• Even the Bad Times Are Good The Tremeloes
• Fakin’ It Simon & Garfunkel
• The Day I Met Marie Cliff Richard
• You Can’t Hurry Love The Supremes
• The Last Waltz Engelbert Humperdinck
• Baby, Now that I’ve Found You The Foundations
• Good Times Eric Burdon and the Animals
• A Banda Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass
• I Feel Love Comin’ On Felice Taylor
• How Can I Be Sure? Young Rascals
• Major to Minor The Settlers
• Homburg Procol Harum
• You Keep Running Away The Four Tops
• Let’s Go to San Francisco The Flower Pot Men
• Handy Man Jimmy James
• You Know What I Mean The Turtles
• The House that Jack Built The Alan Price Set
• Excerpt from a Teenage Opera Keith West
• Reflections Diana Ross and the Supremes
• King Midas in Reverse The Hollies
• Ode To Billie Joe Bobbie Gentry
• Then He Kissed Me The Crystals
• Anything Goes Harpers Bizarre
• The Letter The Box Tops
• Beefeaters John Dankworth
Isle of Wight
For American hippies there was Woodstock, and for their British counterparts there was… the Isle of Wight. From 1968 to 1970 its August rock festival drew thousands on the ferry from the mainland.
The first event was relatively small: some 10,000 turned up to enjoy Jefferson Airplane, The Move, Arthur Brown, Pretty Things, Plastic Penny and Tyrannosaurus Rex.
By the following year word had got around. Now 150,000 flocked to the island, where there was a special attraction. Bob Dylan, who had injured himself in a motorbike accident not long after his bad experience at the Albert Hall, was making his comeback appearance after an absence of almost three years. (What attracted him, apparently, was the thought of performing in Tennyson country, the Victorian poet having made his home on the island.)
In the audience for Dylan on the final night was a remarkable galaxy of rock stars – John Lennon (with Yoko Ono), Ringo Starr, George Harrison, Keith Richards, Bill Wyman, Syd Barrett, Eric Clapton and Elton John – plus the actress Jane Fonda.
The 1970 festival may be technically just beyond our period, but we ought to record that it notched up an attendance thought to be in excess of 600,000 to watch Jimi Hendrix, the Doors, the Who and Joan Baez, but that it ran into so many political and logistical difficulties that there wouldn’t be another on the island for all of 32 years.
UK’s best-selling singles of the Sixties
1960 It’s Now or Never Elvis Presley
1961 Are You Lonesome Tonight? Elvis Presley
1962 I Remember You Frank Ifield
1963 She Loves You The Beatles
1964 Can’t Buy Me Love The Beatles
1965 Tears Ken Dodd
1966 Green, Green Grass of Home Tom Jones
1967 Release Me Engelbert Humperdinck
1968 Hey, Jude The Beatles
1969 Sugar, Sugar The Archies
UK’s best-selling albums of the Sixties
1960 South Pacific soundtrack
1961 G.I. Blues Elvis Presley
1962 West Side Story soundtrack
1963 With the Beatles The Beatles
1964 Beatles for Sale The Beatles
1965 The Sound of Music soundtrack
1966 The Sound of Music soundtrack
1967 Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band The Beatles
1968 The Sound of Music soundtrack
1969 Abbey Road The Beatles
Upbeat verse
Poets don’t usually attract the razzmatazz of a rock concert, but the grandly named International Poetry Incarnation at the Albert Hall in June 1965 for a brief moment promoted ‘beat’ culture to centre-stage.
Its leading figure was the bearded, bearlike Allen Ginsberg, who had arrived in London the previous month offering to read anywhere for free and who declaimed his verse, sang to finger-cymbals and was enthusiastically pelted with flowers. With him were two fellow American poets, Gregory Corso and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and a host of others, chiefly British.
The flavour of the evening’s wilder reaches can be gauged from a paragraph in the official programme:
World declaration hot peace shower! Earth’s grass is free! Cosmic poetry Visitation accidental happening carnally! Spontaneous planet-chant Carnival! Mental Cosmonaut poet epiphany, immaculate supranational Poesy insemination!
Some 7,000 people witnessed this free-wheeling four-hour ‘happening’ – far and away the largest-ever audience for a UK poetry reading – and more were turned away at the doors. The verse they heard was uneven in quality (the performers were sometimes heckled as well as applauded) and in approach (ranging from the personal to the political).
Corso, for instance, read a long and difficult poem that probably needed to be first seen on the page, whereas the English poet Adrian Mitchell memorably declaimed his poem ‘To Whom It May Concern’, with its stark and immediately accessible anti-war message:
I was run over by the truth one day.
Ever since the accident I’ve walked this way
So stick my legs in plaster
Tell me lies about Vietnam.
The Times Literary Supplement commented that the event had ‘made literary history by a combination of flair, courage, and seized opportunities’. Jeff Nuttall, whose 1968 book Bomb Culture chronicled the emergence of internationalist counter-culture in Britain, later wrote that ‘The Underground was suddenly there on the surface.’ Christopher Logue, who himself performed at the Albert Hall, reflected that ‘Time makes short work of bad verse. Literary standards were not high that day. It did not matter. It was the moment that spoke.’
Some poetry published in the Sixties
• Summoned by Bells John Betjeman
• My Sad Captains Thom Gunn
• Wodwo Ted Hughes
• King Log Geoffrey Hill
• The Whitsun Weddings Philip Larkin
• Summer with Monika Roger McGough
• Notes to the Hurrying Man Brian Patten
• Ariel Sylvia Plath
• The Bread of Truth R. S. Thomas
A trio of London theatres
• Established by the actor Bernard Miles at Puddle Dock, Blackfriars, in 1959, the Mermaid Theatre was the first built in the City of London since Shakespeare’s day. It was a thriving venue in the Sixties, with a stage thrust out into the audience on three sides.
• Whereas the Mermaid later declined and closed, the Donmar Warehouse at Covent Garden has grown in importance since Donald Albery first converted it into a private drama studio and rehearsal room for Margot Fonteyn’s Royal Festival Ballet in 1961. (‘Donmar’ comes from the first syllables of their Christian names.)
The Royal Shakespeare Company bought it as a theatre in 1977 and put on productions there until 1990, when Roger Wingate took it over and completely rebuilt it.
• In 1964 the prolific playwright Arnold Wesker converted a listed former railway engine shed at Chalk Farm into The Roundhouse – a venue for his Centre 42 Theatre Company. Today it specialises in live music, and in 2010 it set up its own in-house record label, Roundhouse Records.
Marat/Sade
A comparable moment in Sixties theatre was the electrifying London production in 1964 of Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade – or, to give the full title, The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade. (Adrian Mitchell wrote the screenplay for a 1967 film version.)
The work had first been performed in West Berlin earlier that year, but it was Peter Brook’s staging in an English translation which won it acclaim – and some notoriety. The play is set in the bath hall of a lunatic asylum during the French Revolution, and its rawness and brutality (de Sade is whipped, for example) shocked and offended some who came to see it. Fractured in style and interspersed with music, it deals in part with the plight of the downtrodden, a recurrent chorus being:
Marat, we’re poor and the poor stay poor,
Marat, don’t make us wait any more.
We want our rights and we don’t care how,
We want our revolution NOW.
‘Most audiences experienced it as powerful,’ found the critic David Richard Jones. ‘Viewers showed that they were strongly affected by its magnitude, whether they walked out in anger or stayed seated, shaking, at the end. . . At least one spectator, the German actress Ruth Arrack, died in the auditorium during a performance.’
Some Sixties plays
• The Caretaker Harold Pinter
• A Man for All Seasons Robert Bolt
• Luther John Osborne
• Chips With Everything Arnold Wesker
• Entertaining Mr Sloane Joe Orton
• The Royal Hunt of the Sun Peter Shaffer
• The Homecoming Harold Pinter
• A Patriot for Me John Osborne
• Relatively Speaking Alan Ayckbourn
• Saved Edward Bond
• Loot Joe Orton
• Inadmissible Evidence John Osborne
• A Day in the Death of Joe Egg Peter Nichols
• Forty Years On Alan Bennett
• Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead Tom Stoppard
• What the Butler Saw Joe Orton
• Oh! Calcutta! Kenneth Tynan
Shock and awe
Though Joe Orton would probably have regretted a death in his audience, there was nothing he liked better than causing shock and offence. His first act was criminal (he and his lover, Kenneth Halliwell, were jailed in 1962 for stealing art books from libraries and defacing others with filthily humorous additions), and his last act was tragic (in 1967 Halliwell bludgeoned him to death with a hammer). Between those two events he wrote a series of wickedly nonconformist black comedies rich in vigorous dialogue and Wildean conceits.
It was Edward Bond, however, who provided the sharpest goad for the Lord Chancellor before censorship was abolished in 1968. His play Saved included a scene in which a baby was stoned to death in its pram – and its banning proved a cause célèbre. Since the work dealt with the causes of violence among the economically depressed south London working class, Bond insisted the scene was an essential part of the action, and he refused to remove it.
The Royal Court Theatre and its artistic director Wlliam Gaskill thought they had found a way of blunting the blue pencil by turning their venue into a club theatre under the aegis of the English Stage Society, and they gave a first performance of Saved on 3 November 1965. It was a ploy which didn’t work: the Society was prosecuted – not for the violence itself, but for performing an unlicensed play.
Many critics had deplored Bond’s subject matter in general as well as the baby-stoning in particular, although Philip Hope-Wallace in the Guardian pointed out that the scene was no more horrible than parts of Shakespeare’s Titus Adronicus, and Laurence Olivier (then artistic director of the National Theatre) defended the play as being ‘for grown-ups, and the grown-ups of this country should have the courage to look at it’.
The Stage Society lost its case but was given a conditional discharge, and Saved, which immediately became a huge success around the world, proved to be the last play to be prosecuted in Britain. Bond’s next work, the surreal Early Morning, would certainly have met the same fate had the tide not already been turning. This included a lesbian relationship between Queen Victoria and Florence Nightingale, portrayed the royal princes as what were then known as Siamese twins, and had Disraeli and Prince Albert plotting a coup before everyone fell off Beachy Head. The Royal Court defied a ban to produce it, but no prosecution was forthcoming, and within a year the law had been repealed.
Last exit for the DPP
The Lady Chatterley’s Lover furore might have appeared to ring-fence serious fiction from prosecution, but there was to be one last stand by those who wished to drive obscenity underground. This time the flak was aimed at an overseas import: Last Exit to Brooklyn by the American author Hubert Selby, Jr.
After it was published in the UK by Calder and Boyars in 1966, the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) declined to take any action, but the Tory MP for Wimbledon, Sir Cyril Black, was so incensed by its content that he initiated a successful private action before Marlborough Street magistrates’ court in Soho, the witnesses for the prosecution including the publishers Sir Basil Blackwell and Robert Maxwell.
Since the restriction on the book’s sale applied only to the immediate Soho area, John Calder announced that he would be selling it everywhere else – a stance which prompted the DPP to prefer criminal charges.
In an echo of the Mervyn Griffith-Jones comment about wives and servants, Judge Graham Rigers decided that the case should be heard by an entirely male jury, as women ‘might be embarrassed at having to read a book which dealt with homosexuality, prostitution, drug-taking and sexual perversion’.
A guilty verdict was returned, but in 1968 the lawyer and writer John Mortimer appealed against it, and a judgement by Mr Justice Lane reversed the ruling – so marking a seemingly irreversible shift in the obscenity laws in regard to literature. By that time more than half a million paperback copies had already been sold in the United States – read, one imagines, by women as often as men.
Ronnie Scott’s
The centre of the British jazz universe in the Sixties was Ronnie Scott’s club in London, which opened in Gerrard Street late in 1959 and moved to nearby Frith Street in Soho six years later.
Scott was a tenor saxophonist, who earned rare praise from the great Charles Mingus: ‘Of the white boys, Ronnie Scott gets closer to the negro blues feeling.’
He founded the club with fellow sax player Pete King, and was the regular MC there, introducing the often stellar performers with a stream of jokes and one-liners.
Some British novels of the Sixties
1960
A Burnt-Out Case Graham Greene
Clea Lawrence Durrell
A Kind of Loving Stan Barstow
The L-Shaped Room Lynne Reid Banks
Take a Girl Like You Kingsley Amis
1961
The Old Men at the Zoo Angus Wilson
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie Muriel Spark
A Severed Head Iris Murdoch
1962
A Clockwork Orange Anthony Burgess
Down There on a Visit Christopher Isherwood
Life at the Top John Braine
1963
The Collector John Fowles
Inside Mr Enderby Anthony Burgess
Up the Junction Nell Dunn
1964
Corridors of Power C. P. Snow
Nothing Like the Sun Anthony Burgess
The Spire William Golding
1965
The Tin Men Michael Frayn
1966
The Jewel in the Crown Paul Scott
Wide Sargasso Sea Jean Rhys
The Magus John Fowles
1967
The Magic Toyshop Angela Carter
Poor Cow Nell Dunn
The Third Policeman Flann O’Brien
Towards the End of the Morning Michael Frayn
1968
Enderby Outside Anthony Burgess
The Military Philosophers Anthony Powell
1969
The French Lieutenant’s Woman John Fowles
The Hired Man Melvyn Bragg
Travels with My Aunt Graham Greene
Something to Answer For P. H. Newby
The two cultures
It was at the very end of the previous decade that the physicist C. P. Snow had delivered his Two Cultures lecture at Cambridge, but his argument that the liberal arts and the sciences were disciplines which operated in mutual ignorance reverberated through the Sixties. That was partly because the literary critic F. R. Leavis launched a vitriolic attack on Snow in a 1962 Cambridge lecture of his own – ‘Not only is he not a genius; he is intellectually as undistinguished as it is possible to be’ – and partly because Harold Wilson’s ‘white heat of technology’ had given science and technology something of a shot in the arm.
It was also because Snow kept the pot boiling through his eleven-part novel sequence, Strangers and Brothers, set in the intense, back-stabbing worlds of academia and politics. The author’s ‘realism’ is often synonymous with tedium (Leavis’s literary appraisal was justly wounding), but at least a serious issue got a thorough public airing.
Queasy designs
The darling of the Sixties abstractionist Op-Art movement was Bridget Riley, her black-and-white geometrical designs producing such a sense of movement that some viewers reported feelings akin to seasickness.
She began ‘investigating’ colour in 1967. The following year she became the first British contemporary artist, and the first woman, to be awarded the International Prize for Painting at the Venice Biennale.
Edible art
There was plenty of aggro, too, in an art world seething with new theories and techniques. The sculptor Anthony Caro rejected the figurative bronzes of Henry Moore in favour of colour and abstraction (shapes in plastic and sheet metal laid out on the floor), and this in turn brought a reaction from conceptual artists such as John Latham.
Performance art was all the rage, and in 1966 Latham took part in the Destruction in Art symposium – an international gathering of artists, poets and scientists – by constructing three piles of books outside the British Museum and setting fire to them. Unfortunately the authorities were more concerned with health and safety than artistic expression, and the police and fire brigade swiftly brought the ‘happening’ to a close.
Latham was a part-time lecturer at Saint Martin’s School of Art, and he demonstrated his disapproval of Clement Greenberg’s cult book Art and Culture by borrowing a copy from the college’s library and inviting students to eat it. The pulp from the chewed pages was distilled into a clear juice over the course of several months, and Latham eventually returned this concoction to the library instead of the book. He lost his job, but the phial of liquid and the correspondence about it are now on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
It was in this iconoclastic atmosphere that the young Gilbert and George first made their mark, an early ‘work’ being their offering to fellow art students of baked beans in ice- cream cones.
Fifteen minutes of fame
It was in an exhibition catalogue in Stockholm in 1968 that the American Pop artist Andy Warhol first made the comment that has been repeated ad nauseum ever since: ‘In the future everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.’
Warhol himself, of course, managed a more lasting fame as a painter, film-maker, record producer and author, and he made a fortune from it: the highest price paid for one of his paintings was US$100 million for the 1963 canvas Eight Elvises.
You can visit the Andy Warhol Museum in his home town of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
A sextet of Sixties composers
• Benjamin Britten War Requiem, 1962
• Michael Tippett King Priam (opera), 1962
• John Tavener The Whale (dramatic cantata), 1966
• Alexander Goehr Arden Must Die (opera), 1966
• Harrison Birtwhistle Punch and Judy (opera), 1968
• Peter Maxwell Davies Eight Songs for a Mad King (monodrama), 1969
Pop goes the easel
Pop art originated in the Fifties, but it was at the 1961 Young Contemporaries exhibition at the RBA Galleries in London that Peter Blake and David Hockney effectively launched the British Pop Art movement.
Hockney was in part influenced by the expressionism of Francis Bacon, whose work was still a force in Sixties art, but the chief preoccupation of Pop art was using images from popular culture, including commercial logos and labels (Warhol’s soup cans) and characters from comic books. Hockney would later spend years in California (the location of his famous swimming-pool scenes) before returning to his native Yorkshire, where his prolific output includes portraits, still lifes and landscapes.
Blake strayed less far, both from home and from his Pop art roots. How fitting that in 2009 he should potter around London in a double-decker bus painted with many of his familiar images, before taking it on a day trip to a contemporary cultural hotspot, Brighton.
Blake brings our chapter full circle – as the designer of the Sgt Pepper album cover and as a Pop artist who fused high and low culture to such a degree that you’d find it hard to slide a paintbrush bristle between them.
The Sixties encouraged a spirit of adventurous eclecticism in the arts and entertainment, and there was much more on offer at the end of the decade than there had been at the beginning.
Some audiences were, of course, distinct, but many of the newly well-off ‘consumers’ found nothing strange in visiting a concert hall one evening and sitting down to enjoy Steptoe and Son on television the next; coming home from the latest James Bond film to grapple with a serious novel; or taking in a visit to an art gallery before setting off to sleep under damp canvas at a rock concert.
For the optimistic and enthusiastic this felt like a brave new world – and one that would never end.
Sixties TV sitcoms
(with dates of first showing)
• Marriage Lines, 1961
• The Rag Trade, 1961
• Steptoe and Son, 1962
• The Likely Lads, 1964
• Till Death Us Do Part, 1966
• Dad’s Army, 1968
• The Liver Birds, 1969
Most watched programmes
(with viewing figures in millions)
1. World Cup Final, 1966 (32.3)
2. The Royal Family, 1969 (30.69)
3. Royal Variety Performance, 1965 (24.2)
4. News: Kennedy assassination, 1963 (24.15)
5. Miss World, 1967 (23.76)
6. Apollo 8 splashdown, 1967 (22.55)
7. London Palladium Show, 1967 (21.89)
8. Steptoe and Son, 1964 (21.54)
9. Coronation Street, 1964 (21.36)
10. Mrs Thursday, 1966 (21.01)
11. Secombe and Friends, 1966 (20.79)
12. Churchill’s funeral, 1965 (20.06)
A dozen Sixties cinema hits
• Psycho, 1960
• The Hustler, 1961
• The Manchurian Candidate, 1962
• Lawrence of Arabia, 1962
• Dr No, 1962
• From Russia With Love, 1963
• Dr Strangelove, 1964
• The War Game, 1965
• The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, 1966
• Cool Hand Luke, 1967
• 2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968
• Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, 1969
A dozen arthouse films
• La Dolce Vita Federico Fellini, 1960
• Breathless Jean-Luc Godard, 1960
• L’Avventura Michelangelo Antonioni, 1960
• Viridiana Luis Buñuel, 1961
• Last Year at Marienbad Alain Resnais, 1961
• Yojimbo Akira Kurosawa, 1961
• Jules et Jim François Truffaut, 1962
• The Leopard Luchino Visconti, 1963
• 81⁄2 Federico Fellini, 1963
• Blow-Up Michelangelo Antonioni, 1966
• Persona Ingmar Bergman, 1966
• Belle de Jour Luis Buñuel, 1967
