OBVIOUSLY I REMEMBER the sixties. Not the distant land of lost content beloved of contemporary TV directors where pretty girls in Courrèges boots are perennially whizzing through the streets of new towns in Mini Mokes accompanied by handsome young men in antique military uniforms intent on enjoying consequence-free sex, but the real sixties. At the time it didn’t feel any different from the fifties. The TV was still in black and white, the food was terrible and nobody had any money.
I don’t remember anyone marking the tenth anniversaries of major sixties events but I can remember how strange it felt when Sgt. Pepper was honoured in this way twenty years ago. This seemed like a new frontier for pop nostalgia. Even at that stage I don’t think anyone guessed that fifty years after the event the sixties would still be, in modern parlance, a thing.
Pop history seems to slow down the closer it comes to the present. The Beatles got from ‘Love Me Do’ to ‘A Day In The Life’ in four years, which is the interval between Olympic Games. Nothing seems to move that quickly nowadays. It seems to take that long to mix a record. But that might be just my perspective. When I reflect that I’m typing this fifty years after the release of The Graduate, that seems only the day before yesterday. It’s only when I subtract a further fifty years from the date of The Graduate and realize that would take me back to late 1917, when the First World War still had another year to run, that I appreciate how long ago it really is.
The decade beginning in 2010 marked the semi-centennial of the sixties, which provided lots of opportunities to reflect on just how unique a time that was. Of course what the TV image makers and nostalgia-mongers get wrong is that in our heads we are always slightly younger than our physical age and mentally we’re always still living in the previous decade.
This particularly applied to the people who made their names in the sixties and carried those newly famous names forward into another fifty years of fame: they were all still children of the forties and teenagers of the fifties, shaped by the decades immediately after the war. Bob Dylan would in time become exasperated by people asking him about being the voice of the sixties because the decade that he knew best was the fifties. Similarly, as far as John Lennon and Paul McCartney were concerned nothing would ever equal the impact of or improve upon Elvis Presley and Little Richard.
In interviews their incident-packed, many-garlanded, post-fame careers often seemed to be to them a kind of dream, the sort of thing they came to rely on others to chronicle on their behalf. It was only when they reached back into the fifties, when they were mere civilians before they were hit in the small of the back by fame, that life seemed real.