“In Liverpool, the Beatles weren’t nothing special. I got up and sang at the Cavern with the Beatles. But they weren’t the best band in Liverpool.”
CILLA BLACK
From Liverpool to London, self-taught musicians who couldn’t read a note of music began inventing their own sounds. With begged, borrowed, or homemade guitars, they gathered an audience from among their neighbors and found empty basements and backrooms that became hothouses for their creativity. Their tribal, affluent followers sought new clothes to dance in, to be seen in, and to characterize their identity; and artists, writers, and the media reacted as if a new species had been discovered.
Cilla Black: Brian [Epstein] was very quiet, a shy man, and a perfect gentleman—total gentleman. And smartly dressed—but, then, he had money, he came from a wealthy family. He had a record shop in Whitechapel in Liverpool, and everyone was asking for this one record, “My Bonny Lies Over the Ocean” [1961] by the Beat Brothers, which is what the Beatles were calling themselves then.
But really the Beat Brothers were only playing as a backing band to another guy. I think it was Tony Sheridan—I don’t know, you’d have to check back in the history books—who did a rock-and-roll version of “My Bonny,” which was a Scottish folksong, and that’s how Brian said, “Who are these Beat Boys? I’ve gotta go see them.” They were playing at lunchtime sessions at the Cavern.
Eric Stewart: My first band, the Staggerlees, changed their name to the Emperors of Rhythm. We went to the BBC in Longsight, a studio in a converted church in Manchester, to audition for workingman’s club gigs with the Northern Dance Orchestra. At the audition were this band the Beatles, and us. We were playing all our things. We probably did the Shadows numbers [the Shadows were Britain’s most successful instrumental band of the sixties], acceptable pop, and copies of the American stuff, which was all the men in suits on TV wanted to put on.
Then the Beatles came on. I thought first they were scruffy, but they mesmerized me. They were dressed in their Hamburg gear, not their Brian Epstein–packaged velvet collars and stuff. They were dressed in jeans. Paul had a little leather waistcoat on and sang “Till There Was You,” which was originally a show tune. John sang “Memphis, Tennessee.” They sung another song, which I presumed was one of the songs they had written because I’d never heard it.
They failed the audition. And we passed. We got paid about fifteen pounds between four of us—no, five of us—but we didn’t care. It was fab that someone was paying us to have a ball.
Cilla Black: In and around Liverpool the Beatles weren’t nothing special. I got up and sang at the Cavern with the Beatles. They had previously done Hamburg, where they went as a struggling band but came back just so experienced. But they weren’t the best band in Liverpool. I was a guest singer with the bigger band in Liverpool, Rory Storm & the Hurricanes. Ringo was their drummer.
There was millions of bands in Liverpool and Manchester and a lot of them were really, really good. We were very insular up there and we were very, sort of, arrogant, ya’ know: “Who needs London ’cause we’ve got our own thing here.”
Peter Noone [singer/songwriter, Herman’s Hermits]: I was at Manchester School of Music—night school. My dad was in a band. A forties Royal Air Force band. Hughie Gibb, who was the Bee Gees’ dad, was in the band. I was emulating Buddy Holly and the Everly Brothers. I had these big horn-rimmed glasses and I used to put them on when we did the Buddy Holly song. I thought just wearing glasses made you look like Buddy Holly, which is really bizarre. I was fifteen. We were already in loads of bands. I was in the Cyclones, and there was a band called the Heartbeats, and one night their singer didn’t show up. So they said, “Peter Noone is a singer. He can do it.” To be a singer in those days all you needed to do was to know the words to a load of songs.
We were doing pubs, clubs, and bar mitzvahs. There were loads of them and lots of places to play. There was a wave of energy. Everyone was too young to drink, but everyone smoked cigarettes and drank cups of tea. We had a business card that said “Sherman & the Hermits” because the guy who printed the card spelt it wrong. It said “weddings, bar mitzvahs, and clubs.” My number was on the card because my family was the only one who had a phone.
I was at school and I knew more about music than my teacher because my family were interested in music. And I knew all the operas. At night school they had all these rehearsal rooms. One time I was in there and they were playing a Chuck Berry song on acoustic guitar. “What is this?” I thought. I played the piano, but the guitar changed everything. The piano was a chore. Your mum wanted you to play the piano. Sit up straight and all that stuff.
Picking up a guitar was certainly a passport for picking up girls but it wasn’t why I did it. That was total bullshit for me. I’m sure guitarists got laid more because they were in a band but I liked girls older than me. That was a tough one. Twenty-one-year-old girls don’t want sixteen-year-old boyfriends.
I remember this girl playing Joan Baez. Boring! What is it about? Everyone was being introduced to new music. Mine was all white. It was a big adventure for kids; there were all sorts of influences.
Georgie Fame: In 1962, I’d been working in the Flamingo in London. I never got a break until finally my manager sent me on a week’s holiday. I went back to Lancashire to my mum, and the guy I used to play with in a local band from the factory said, “Come out for a pint [a beer] tonight, there’s a band playing and they’re making a bit of noise.”
We went to our local dance hall and sat in the gallery in the back and all the young girls were screaming. The Beatles were onstage. All the kids were going bananas. They still hadn’t had a hit at this time and were still looking for a recording contract.
Peter Brown: They used to come into my shop—John, Paul, and George—to listen to records, because in those days you had record booths, and they couldn’t afford to buy the records so they would come in to listen to whatever was new from America.
So they would come into my shop. We found out they were performing at the Cavern down the street. Brian went and saw them and told me at dinner, “I think I am going to manage them.”
Cilla Black: They looked great and different. They looked sexy. They had everything that a teenage person wanted, and . . . there was a choice—four of them!
Peter Brown: Cilla says that she remembers me as this guy who ran the record shop. According to her, I sort of told her to piss off because she also wanted to listen to records, but that’s a story I don’t remember.
Brian obviously saw something in the Beatles. After all, Brian did know about music because we were running record stores; we specialized in the fact that, if you came in and asked for a record we would get it for you within twenty-four hours, that kind of thing, and that didn’t happen in those days.
So we knew all about Motown, which was emerging, and rock and roll, and he really thought the Beatles had something that was unique, special. I think he also loved their attitude—ya’ know, smartasses. But in a Liverpool sense. And you know enough about Liverpool, probably, to know they specialize in being prickly, and we knew the humor.
Cilla Black: When Brian saw the Beatles in 1962 he asked John Lennon, “Is there anybody else that you recommend, any other bands?” So John said, “Oh, there’s Billy J. Kramer & the Dakotas, the Foremost, Gerry Marsden, Gerry & the Pacemakers, the list goes on.” And Brian said, “Any girls?”
“Yeah, there’s Cilla.” And that’s when Brian approached me.
I was closest to Ringo, and I said, “Thank you so much for recommending me to Brian Epstein. He said, “T’wasn’t me, I didn’t recommend ya’.” He was more or less saying, “I’m the new kid on the block, I couldn’t do that.” And I said, “Well, who did then?” He said it was John.
I did my audition for Brian with the Beatles, but not in the Cavern. It was in a ballroom in Birkenhead, across the water, across the Mersey.
I was eighteen. Brian didn’t like me. I was terrible. I was singing in John’s key. I did Sam Cooke’s version of “Summertime” and it was too high for me and I probably was very nervous. I literally walked offstage and got the next ferry home. I didn’t even bother to wait. I knew I was dreadful. But I still had faith in myself. I knew I would make it one day with or without Brian Epstein, that’s how arrogant and confident I was. It was still 1962. The Beatles were only known in Liverpool. Liverpool was very insulated; it was not London.
Peter Brown: Brian thought that because we had very successful record shops we were important to the record companies. We were probably one of the very biggest record buyers and he thought that would have some influence on getting them a deal, which turned out not to be true. Every time he took the train to London to see EMI or Decca or Pye, he was coming back unsuccessful.
They would wait for him at the station—George, John, and Paul, anyway—and I would usually end up having dinner with him when he came back. And it was all rather depressing, really. I was slightly ambivalent because I wasn’t sure Brian was right about the whole thing.
I was working hard running two shops. Somebody had to order the records, had to supervise the sales, the budgets, and all those kinds of things, and meanwhile Brian was going off, driving them to the next gig. I only really knew when we had our dinners that it wasn’t coming together, getting a record contract. The London record companies didn’t get the music.
When George Martin actually signed to produce them, in 1962 [Martin had at first decided the group wasn’t promising], it was when they first went in to the studio and George Martin said that Pete Best, the drummer, wasn’t good enough. That’s when Ringo was brought in.
Cilla Black: First of all you fancied Paul, then you fancied George, then you fancied John, and then your last resort was Ringo. And who’d have thought today he’d turn out the cute one? I think he looks really great. I saw him the other week and my god he looks great.
Peter Brown: The band really respected Brian. He was knowledgeable. He knew about music. He had access to important people. I think they liked him. He was certainly a very honest person. He was an authority figure as much as they allowed him to be, but of course that was the Liverpool thing, “don’t fuck me around” kind of attitude. I think that there is no question that John was undoubtedly the leader of the group and knew that Brian was attracted to him and [that] he could influence Brian’s decisions.
Paul was equally savvy in a much more charming way, and he chose to play the charming one, whereas John was playing the one with the finger. It worked for them both. George, I always felt, ’cause he was the kid, was always not respected as much as the others; there was always complaining like “what about me and Ringo?”
Terry O’Neill: I was really well paid by my newspaper, getting into the music and club scene in between photographing Winston Churchill coming out of hospital or JFK on his way to Berlin—news photos. In those days you really were only as good as your next story, so I was buzzing around everywhere. I’d deliver my film to the picture editor and be off again looking for the next job—sometimes seven or eight every day. You handed over your negatives and never gave them a second’s thought. The next job was how you made your money. I can’t imagine how many amazing shots from that era have been lost because we never dreamed our backlist would be worth money one day.
It was my newspaper editor’s idea that I photographed the young people who were starting to make waves. I was all over town looking and there was this thing happening, a buzz on the street, things seemed to be changing: music, the fashion, young people everywhere having a good time, upsetting the older generation. It was news, and I was in the right place at the right time with the right attitude. I was also the only young photographer. All the others were old guys who just scoffed at the idea of photographing the kids who were into music and fashion and just making people sit up and take notice by doing their own thing. To them, news was air crashes and bank robberies and earthquakes.
I had this idea of photographing this young band I’d heard of. I knew a lot of the bands and the club scene in London. But this one was down in London from Liverpool recording at Abbey Road a single and an album, Please Please Me, with George Martin. I think that was late 1962. I photographed them in the studio with George. It was unionized then; technicians in brown work coats, shirts, and ties who had to be paid overtime and took tea breaks. During one of those union breaks, I took the Beatles out back in the yard for a portrait. John seemed to be the important figure in the band, but in the picture Paul’s on his shoulder.
Strangely, my picture editor held on to the photo for weeks and then he put it on the front page one day when nothing was happening.
Mike Pemberton [nightclub owner and leisure industry entrepreneur]: I was only twenty in 1963 but I already had my own nightclub in Sunderland, near Newcastle. It was called Club 11. Helen Shapiro was this huge young singing star at the time and she was touring, appearing at the Sunderland Empire in February. After the show she came to the club with this band which was supporting her tour called the Beatles. I turned them away because they were wearing leather jackets and they weren’t wearing ties, and being a respectable dive I insisted men wore ties. They hit number one with the single “Please Please Me” two weeks later.
Keith Richards: At that particular time, all the Stones wanted to do was turn people on to this incredible electric blues music from Chicago, and we were a poor approximation of what was really happening. But since nobody was doing it, our attitude was, “Everybody, you should hear this and then maybe you will listen to the real cats like Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, all of our heroes.”
Bill Wyman: After I joined the Stones we did some gigs and I fitted in well. But it cost me more money to come into London on the train and then the bus to rehearse or play a gig than what I got paid. But I didn’t do it for the money. I got off on it. It was really exciting.
We didn’t even dream of making a record. It was so far away as a possibility it didn’t even occur to you. We couldn’t imagine being on TV or radio, and to think of going to America was pie in the sky. You did it because you liked to play the music. You got fuck-all money. Five shillings. I was working all day; so was Charlie Watts. Mick was at the London School of Economics, and the other two were layabouts. They were starving, living off Mick’s student grant.
Eric Clapton: Keith and the Stones were just in front of me in terms of age and experience. I would go and see them when they were fledglings—when the band wasn’t tightened down and was just forming their identities. I spent a lot of time with them when they had their flat in Edith Road in West London, and I would play and sing with them. It was unbelievably disgusting. They never changed the sheets. I thought that was quite civilized, really. Working-class boys didn’t grow up to look after themselves.
Georgie Fame: We would play in a club around London or an American base just outside and then we’d throw all the gear into the van at eleven at night and drive back to London and start the all-night sessions. There’d be a jazz band onstage until we arrived. We’d get three pounds a night. We were doing ten gigs a week and getting thirty pounds a week.
We were playing all the time, listening to all the music and rehearsing all week, and we were doing so many sets. Then we’d go down to the Flamingo and do two sets there. But we never repeated ourselves.
After the Flamingo you might stay up for an hour or two and have a glass of wine or bourbon with the GI’s and then sleep till three in the afternoon. We didn’t need to go to work till seven in the evening.
As a band you were all in it together. We had rented accommodation in Earls Court in West London. There were a couple of working girls there, too. Many times after the Flamingo and at six in the morning we couldn’t get a cab and we’d have to walk it back home.
There were very few late-night eateries around. We met the Stones in the Northern Egg or something. That was the only place in West London, unless you went out to the airport, where you could get a cup of coffee.
There were four or five of us living in the same place. It was a terraced house—a few rooms with single beds and hookers living upstairs, and we’d play records. We were so obsessed about the music we used to walk around talking about music. Our landlords moved us to Russell Road opposite Olympia [an exhibition hall]. An awful, freezing, damp basement.
We came back after the Flamingo one night to our place on Russell Road and there was someone hammering on the door, and the landlord came in and moved us to Ladbroke Grove. We had to walk over there. We had very little stuff, some small suitcases and a record player and all our shit had just been thrown into the new apartment. That was our next flat for a few months.
Eric Clapton: I was just getting thrown out of Kingston Art. I was seventeen, playing gigs sometimes. There was a very strong underground. I was more underground. I identified with the mentality of the Stones or Brian Auger or Georgie Fame and liked it.
Sir Alan Parker: I used to buy my records at Al’s Records in Cross Street, the first record shop in Islington in North London. It was Buddy Holly and the Everly Brothers. The Tottenham Royal, a mecca ballroom, was the dance hall of choice—a short bus ride from Islington. There was also the Lyceum in the Strand, but there were always stupid fights breaking out and it became tiresome as they stopped the music and we all crouched down one end as the nut cases in their winklepicker shoes kicked the shit out of one another.
The haircut of choice was a “Perry Como” at the Angel—and further down Essex Road, the same haircut was called a “college boy.” I was mostly buying my own clothes, as I always had a Saturday job all through my schooldays. I used to work in Jolly’s Cooked Meats in Camden Town. I was in charge of the cooked chicken spit. When I got home I would scrub away in the bath. Once, at the Tottenham Royal, whilst dancing with a particularly pretty girl, she suddenly said, “Cor, you don’t half smell of chickens.”
When I started work I had my first suit made by a tailor in Dalston. “Modernist” was the fashion of the day: short jackets and pointed shoes. I chose a rough black tweed material and insisted on trousers, too. The material was so rough it used to rub the skin of my knees, so I had to wear pajama bottoms underneath so that it didn’t chafe.
At the Tottenham Royal we had a live resident band, the Dave Clark Five, on a Saturday. It was odd that the band was named after the drummer. The lead singer was Mike Smith on keyboards. But Dave Clark was also the manager.
Terry O’Neill: London and the suburbs were alive with clubs and dance halls and pubs given over to music. All the emerging bands were cutting their teeth in these basements and backrooms in pubs in front of fifty or a hundred kids. And of course, the boys with the guitars got a lot of attention from the girls, which would upset their boyfriends, so sometimes the bands had to make a run for it out the back door.
Acts like Rod Stewart and Long John Baldry, Jimmy Page—who went on to found Led Zeppelin—playing with the Crusaders, they all did their apprenticeship in these pubs and clubs, and the good ones also got to go and play at the American Air Force bases in Britain, and that was a big influence on them because they were playing to a musically educated audience. A lot of our young bands would hear the records the American airmen were putting on jukeboxes at the bases and they were amazing records you didn’t hear in the UK. The airmen would want the bands to play these songs, and that’s how a lot of rhythm and blues started in England. I think we were all influenced by America in one way or another—the music, the movies, the cars, the prosperity—we wanted a piece of all that but we wanted to do it our way, in our own style.
Every kid was looking to break the mold in one way or another. It wasn’t just music, but art. I’d wanted to be a jazz drummer and ended up learning how to use a camera at art school two days a week. It was in Ealing, just ’round the corner from the club where the Stones and Eric Clapton and all our great bands used to play. At art school you’d find people aged sixteen to eighteen who were just killing time before they had to get a proper job, but somehow the anarchic atmosphere let them experiment and explore themselves and their own interests. You could go to an art school and play guitar for two years—nobody stopped you.
Sir Alan Parker: I went to a great grammar school. I was very good at art and English but we were all being readied for the new “technological age” and so I’d ended up doing pure and applied mathematics and physics. I don’t regret not going to university but I would have liked to have gone to art school, where everything interesting seemed to be emanating from. Almost everyone I knew who was vaguely interesting had gone to art school. The art schools had grown up in the fifties as a place for kids who couldn’t or wouldn’t go to university but didn’t want a boring career. They could choose two years in art school to find their feet.
Allen Jones: There was an art exhibition specifically for art students, the Young Contemporaries. It was run by the students from the three major colleges and the work was selected by a high-powered group of critics and students.
The Young Contemporaries exhibit was the first manifestation of what is now called pop art in the UK. And you started to realize that something was going on that had nothing to do with art education. [The Young Contemporaries exhibit showed Jones, Hockney, Kitaj, Derek Boshier, Peter Phillips, and Peter Blake.]
We used to work late, as we were very enthusiastic. We’d go into the senior common room and use their kettle. Hockney would always read the staff mail. But we were all running away from the established art scene. We were all called together and read the riot act: “Experimentation is for the final year. In your first year you need to focus on nature and life drawing.”
At the end of the summer term the school said, “We are going to make an example and assert our authority,” and the example happened to be me. I was thrown out of the Royal College.
Mandy Rice-Davies: We were the first generation of girls who could leave home before getting married. We were a power to reckon with because it was so easy to get a job. Everyone had a job. I was eighteen in ’63. I’d been in London about two years. I’d left home in Birmingham at sixteen. You could get off a train and get a job the same day and, if you didn’t like it, leave and get another job. And you could rent an apartment for a couple of pounds a week.
The nicer apartment you moved into, the less you ate. Teenagers for the first time in history had power. There were two million of us. It was buying power—money. That’s all it was. We never had it so good. It was about indulging ourselves and having a good time.
Clothes were very important. Mary Quant established herself. It was the first time you could buy clothes that weren’t your mother’s clothes. Teenagers were having a ball everywhere. I was doing TV ads for toothpaste or promoting stuff.
Jackie Collins: From the age of fifteen I’d felt enormous freedom. Being brought up in a family with famous people coming in and out meant I’ve never been intimidated by anyone. I always felt I was ahead of the game. I never had any fear; I just plunged ahead. I’ve never seen a shrink.
I got married at a very early age, so I was quite sedate by the time the sixties were happening. But I could see what was going on [in London]. Suddenly one could wear what one wanted, one could do whatever one wanted, screw whomever one wanted.
Pattie Boyd: Modeling wasn’t really considered a career. It was something to do. A career would be working in an office. I had fallen into it. I just thought it was fun. It was a means for me to pay rent until I got married. However, the photographers would take three months to pay us, so we would have to borrow from the agency and I always ended up owing them money.
We all wanted to be thin, to look great in the new clothes. Anorexia and bulimia were words that didn’t exist. The doctor would give us “slimming pills” [speed] if we wanted them. And there were biscuits that you could buy in the supermarket that would make you feel full. Yeah, I would eat these little biscuits, then I wouldn’t have to eat all day.
Peter Frampton: I was only at the art school with George Underwood and Davy [Bowie] for a year because there were a couple of kids that didn’t like my dad and he didn’t like them. He was a very well-loved teacher but they took it out on me. By that time I was thirteen and academically I was better. I went to the grammar school but I missed the freedom of the technical school where you could do all the creative things.
My parents said, “This guitar lark is getting serious. You need to start thinking about music college.” I started going to a lady in Bromley South and she taught classical guitar. I did that for four years. I pretty much hated it but it taught me to read music.
Georgie Fame: We had a little bit of money on the side. Friday was payday and I’d always bump into Charlie Watts on payday. Just down Shaftesbury Avenue there was a shop called Cecil Gee [where] you could buy button-down collars, Ivy League jackets, and we’d spend a little money and buy things. Otherwise, we spent money on rent, food, and cabs. We’d share a cab, three or four of us. Or we’d walk it back all the way. Later on when we had hit records we’d splurge on unnecessary baubles. I’ve got an old jacket that Michael Fish made for Mick Jagger, but he rejected it and I bought it. Horrible jacket.
Hilton Valentine: Chas Chandler of another Newcastle band, the Alan Price Combo, came and saw the Wildcats, and at the end he said to me, “How serious are you?” and “Would you go to London?” I said, “Where’s my ticket?”
The Wildcats and Alan Price Combo had a different following. The Wildcats were playing John Lee Hooker, Memphis Slim, and Muddy Waters. We were a cult band for the northeast. They were billed as rhythm and blues. And they appeared at the Club-A-Go-Go, which was posh compared to the workingmen’s clubs we were playing.
We were getting between two pounds and five pounds a gig and they’d be getting fifteen pounds a week. So I joined the Alan Price Combo, and it became the Animals. It was the end of 1962.
Terry O’Neill: I didn’t stray far from the jazz clubs and the rhythm-and-blues scene. The dance halls didn’t interest me, but for bands like the Dave Clark Five that wanted to make good money, you had to play them. The Tottenham Royal was one of many in London and around the country, ballroom dancing halls where their moms and dads used to dance. Halls were suddenly full of two or three thousand kids out on a Saturday night. The ballrooms nationally could entertain over a million paying kids a week.
They needed hundreds of bands to draw the crowds to all these dance halls, and the bands would earn typically between fifteen and twenty-five pounds. Imagine doing three hours a night two or three times a week—a band gets really good learning not just how to play a song but also how to play the audience, too, and keep it on its toes.
Hilton Valentine: I’d given up the job as a machinist on doctor’s orders. We were earning—I was playing with four or five different bands before I joined Alan Price—and it was cash. I earned the same amount of money playing with the bands as [I was] earning in the factory. I didn’t think it would last. I was young. It was exciting and I wanted to do it. And I could always get a proper job later.
There was no drugs or groupies then, but there was beer—any beer. A crate of beer and a pack of cards and a sleep on the road: touring. They called me the “human time machine.” I would get in the van and fall asleep and sleep until we arrived at the gig. I could sleep anywhere and just wake up ready to go. At this time there was no leader of the band. Eric Burdon was the front. Pricey would do the money—he was the taxman. It was kind of his band—the Alan Price Combo. But no one felt ownership. No one bossed anyone around.
Chrissie Most: We’d been touring South Africa for over a year. Mickie went to a little record company which recorded African music, and that’s how he learned to be a producer. He went to the studio and cut the record. We did really well. We made eleven number one hit records and toured the whole country. They crowned him the king of rock and roll of South Africa. We thought of going to Rhodesia. We got there and I called a press conference. I was eighteen.
We got great publicity. We booked the halls, and we got to Bulawayo, to the gig, and there was a riot. The army came in, but they didn’t stop it. They had to let it go ahead.
The soldiers were really jealous of Mickie because he was loved by all the girls. There was this rumor that he was going to get beaten up by some of them. So we invited the army’s head guy as our guest and we sat him at the front where he was in full view of all the soldiers. We had to duck and dive a lot. Things went wrong. We nearly went over a cliff in Mozambique. I preferred him to play fast numbers, not ballads, because the crowd danced and got hot and we sold more drinks.
By then my parents knew they couldn’t stop us, and we’d got married and were living in a flat, and we were so successful Mickie bought a Porsche. Then I got pregnant. It was 1962—time to go back to London.
But Mickie made a big mistake. He was besotted with Gene Vincent and wanted Gene to headline on our farewell tour in South Africa, and we got hold of Sharon Osbourne’s father, Don Arden, who managed Gene. We had all our money to come back to England. But Gene Vincent and the tour cost us a fortune on airfares and hotels and we did all our money in. Gene Vincent didn’t make a scrap of difference to the ticket sales. Not one extra ticket sold.
Back in London we were broke and had this little flat in North London. It cost us seven guineas a week, no hot water. It was a dump. Don Arden had said to me, “When you get to London, call me. I’m doing these package tours and I’ll book Mickie.”
Eric Clapton: In 1963 we just closed the door of what went before, like Shirley Bassey or Matt Monro, the sort of postwar pop idol. They were all Frank Sinatra imitations.
When we came along we kind of did a punk thing. The idea of punk, my interpretation, is dynamic, as it let us clear the decks and start all over again. We kind of did that in 1963, but not in a destructive way. We just shut it down [middle-of-the-road pop music]; we ignored it and went straight for Chicago blues and black rock and roll. That was the order of the day. I was listening to Muddy Waters, Chuck Berry—same as Keith. We had a small handful of idols. They were all based in Chicago.
Allen Jones: I was offered a contract in a gallery, which was pretty unusual. So after my first exhibition things happened quickly. The artists began to be seen, as a pop thing, as an entity. But it wasn’t seen as a pathway to riches. You hoped it was a pathway to a major museum show and [that] you’d get to sit at the top table.
At that moment my printer, Peter Cochrane, came back with pop art bought in America. We sat in some splendid house—much wealthier than I was used to. Peter Blake was there, Derek Boshier, Peter Phillips, and Hockney, and Kitaj were all there passing ’round these black-and-white photographs. There was a Lichtenstein, a canvas with a pedal can [foot-operated garbage can] with the foot up, and the next picture the foot down.
It was such a release. One shouldn’t be constrained by what’s right or wrong. It was unbridled. It was the absolute first time; we were all absorbing this. It opened up my horizons. There is no doubt that the only inhibition one had was one’s own limits.
Vidal Sassoon: People could get a job anywhere. Good-paying jobs. Once people have an income they have a certain amount of power, and if you have hundreds of thousands of young people with the power to spend money how they wanted to spend it and not how Mummy wants, they have the power to change things.
Andrew Loog Oldham [pioneering music industry manager who discovered the Rolling Stones]: It wasn’t the Beatles and it wasn’t the Rolling Stones, it was Vidal Sassoon, it was Mary Quant, David Bailey, the models, they were the start of it.
Felicity Green [fashion editor]: I joined The Daily Mirror in 1961. It was very influential, a very important paper. It sold five million copies to mainly working-class families. I found a place in the paper for fashion, which was new.
My instinct was we needed pictures. One picture is worth a thousand words. In 1962 I introduced photographers like John French, David Bailey, and Terry O’Neill. Before Terry and his like, photographers did football and film stars. What I did was employ fashion photographers for a national newspaper. The reproduction quality was revolutionary. Readers loved it. It had an aesthetic quality that had never been seen before.
Terry O’Neill was one of the first, and we got on like twins. He talked my language and I talked his. The photographers took a particular type of picture, specially sexy but acceptable, never an inch beyond good taste, but it was sexually exciting with beautiful girls.
Pattie Boyd: People started painting their houses and flats. There was a burst of color, a burst of joy. Color is representative of emotion and mood and I think that’s what it was. One minute everything was gray and the next it was color. It happened almost overnight. The same with modeling.
Boys started growing their hair longer, and we all just started wearing different clothes—more free, liberal clothes. Everything suddenly became a little more sexy. You noticed in Vogue magazine that the makeup was very different.
Mandy Rice-Davies: I came to London with a healthy libido—very healthy. I was moving in fascinating circles: actors and gangsters and peers of the realm. A social melting pot.
Whatever I did then is not a tenth of what happened after—not just me but everybody else. By today’s standards it was nothing. I moved in with Peter [Rachman, the notorious slumlord] at the end of March of ’61 and didn’t move out till October ’62. I was with him the whole time. I was his mistress. He was in his forties; I was seventeen. I was a good-time girl in the real sense of the word. I loved it all. I was certainly not the only healthy young woman with a healthy libido. This was the teenage party. It was what was happening.
Peter had nightclubs. At one, the Discotheque, above the Flamingo, you’d have the gangsters [the Krays], Julie Christie. I could dance with Terence Stamp because he had dyed his hair blond for a part [Billy Budd], and Peter didn’t get jealous because he thought Terry must be gay.
I was acting, dancing, and modeling. I did the Sammy Davis Jr. show and remained friendly with him till the day he died. I did a toothpaste ad. I worked for Robert Mitchum when he was in London filming The Longest Day in 1962. My job was to turn up at the Savoy Hotel at eight a.m., go out to Bond Street, and buy him a bottle of scotch or two or three. Get him Wilkinson Sword razor blades, the American version. And now and again go off in search of some pot. The most important job was to sit in the suite and keep the door open, and anyone passing by he liked the look of, he invited in. And once he’d had enough I had to get them out. Robert was a lovely man.
Johnny Gold: I have a friend, Monty Marks, who shared an apartment with a guy who made and lost and made millions again on the stock market. We played poker there every Sunday I was in London . . . , and we were playing cards with an American guy called Blackie Siegel and another, Oscar Lerman. Oscar came to London to get away from a girl and had ended up living here for twenty years.
Oscar had this club, the Ad Lib, which was the meeting place of all the young musicians, photographers, actors—they were all jack the lads. It was the most exciting place. And then one day Oscar said, “How would you like to be in this business? I’m opening another club.” I thought it was a bullshit conversation because what did I know about clubs? But six weeks later I was looking at premises and suddenly I was signing documents and I was in the club business. We opened Dolly’s.
Pattie Boyd: We started going out together, to bistros and cafés and clubs like Dolly’s. A crowd of us: Ossie Clark, David Bailey, David Hockney, Jean Shrimpton. You could feel the permissiveness that was emerging, and I think you can see that in the fashion pages. Bailey started being more edgy with his photographs, more sexually daring. He would give you a come-on so you would feel great and sexy. And he was gorgeous.
It was like playtime, really. I had that sense of entitlement, that entitlement of youth, which is blind to other things.
In the fashion shoots, models looked more available and more friendly, more like the girl next door as opposed to models of the era before where they looked totally untouchable and very aristocratic, as though you would never meet them. This shift was more to do with girls that could be your friends, and girls from aristocratic families had to tone down that arrogant look.
When I first started modeling for David Bailey it was a bit scary because I knew that the women at Vogue were in love with him. The editor of Vogue, Diana Vreeland, just thought he was fabulous. There had never been such a young photographer strutting around the corridors at Vogue with such arrogance, demanding and getting everything he wanted. It had never happened before. But I knew that he was quite shy really.
He was going out with Jean Shrimpton at that point, and we would go to a place called the Casserole on the Kings Road, and I remember one dinner, it was the first time I’d tried an avocado. It looked weird and tasted extraordinary. Bailey kept saying, “It’s one of these new vegetables that will grow on you.” Was it a new vegetable? In England it was.
Mary Quant: This mother brought a boy called Andrew Loog Oldham ’round to my shop. “I want you to employ him. He won’t go to school and I don’t know what to do. I can’t make him and he wants to work for you. You have to employ him.”
Andrew was a gawky thing. I said I didn’t need him, but he said he’d do anything I wanted. Anything! And even though I never hired him, he showed up every morning. He worked for us for about two years. He ran about, fetched things. He’d do anything you asked him.
Andrew Loog Oldham: I worked for Mary Quant at the same time I worked for a jazz club in the evenings, and on Saturdays I worked at a really kind of nice mafia basement club called the Flamingo. My job was serving scotch in a Coke bottle because the club had no liquor license. I was the innocent-looking one, if the police came in.
Mary Quant: Andrew worked at one of the jazz places, and we had an arrangement with him. He’d ring us up when American jazz people would come to London and tell us to come and see them. There was a lot of excitement. It was a lovely time.
After about a year, eighteen months maybe, he wrote a letter that he posted from the airport on his way to France. He said, “Thanks very much, it’s been great fun, and I see that I can now do all the jobs that you and Alexander can do, so I think it’s time I left.”
Andrew Loog Oldham: I kind of had my first nervous breakdown. It was too much—I mean, I was seventeen, with three jobs. It was too much, so I then went off to France.
I stayed in Cannes for eight months, begging on the Croisette from English tourists; it was very easy. Then I got involved in a kidnapping, which wasn’t very helpful. Very Mickey Mouse—it wasn’t dangerous. Somebody said to me, “Listen, this girl wants to be kidnapped,” and it was like the gang who couldn’t shoot straight. It all went terribly wrong, and it was funny.
So then I came back to England, and Mary Quant said, “I can’t give you a job, Andrew. You just walked out. But I’ll send you to someone who can,” a guy who did the PR for the Queen’s dressmaker, Norman Hartnell. He did Hardy Amies [couture fashion designer for Queen Elizabeth II] , he had a model agency as well, at the top of Beauchamp Place in Knightsbridge.
My job was basically delivering stuff to newspapers, you know, photos of models and things like that, and walking models’ dogs, basically. I was a gofer. Then my mother said, “You ought to get a real job,” so I went and worked for a man called Leslie Frewin. It’s got to be, like, the spring or summer of ’62, and this man was an industrial PR; he represented things like the British Menswear Guild.
I couldn’t stand working for him, and when the office closed at six p.m., I started somehow getting pop music clients, and the first one was this really butch American dancer called Pepe. I can’t really remember how I got it. But he was my first client. I was getting five pounds to publicize him—[back] then it was a great ride [gig].
I made a career out of going banging on people’s doors when I wanted to meet them, like the guy who managed Shirley Bassey. I didn’t get the job, but these people were so intrigued that somebody was fascinated by what they did so they let you in. This guy called Mark Wynter, who had been discovered by Lionel Bart, the guy who wrote Oliver, became my first real client. A bona fide singer with a recording contract, and he was about to have a hit, and I was doing his publicity. He had two hits, “Venus in Blue Jeans”—that would have been like September of ’62—and then he had another one called “Go Away Little Girl.”
I was suddenly now part of the club.
Felicity Green: Vidal and I became friends, and I featured his pictures in the Daily Mirror. We had a bond. We were all breaking the rules together and it gave you a very buzzy feeling. It was a time when London exploded. It exploded in every area. It was all youth-based; it started in London and spread all over the world. Mary Quant had arrived. She was queen of the whole scene. She made the clothes she wanted to wear. She opened one shop on the Kings Road and the press beat a path to her door. It was later called the “youthquake,” and that was, frankly, exactly what it was.
Fashion is about life. Fashion affects people’s lives. People can express their personality through their clothes. Before then you wore roughly what your mother wore. Then suddenly clothes were for you. It gave a sense of individualism. It made people feel good about themselves.
Barbara Hulanicki [fashion designer]: I was terribly style-conscious when I was at art school in Brighton. I would spend hours trying to find shoes like Audrey Hepburn wore, and I would buy clothes and cut them up. I was doing illustration at art school and left home as soon as I could. Moved to London, met my husband Fritz, and moved into this flat in Cromwell Road in West London at the start of ’63.
Felicity Green: All the revolutionaries broke out of art school. This is where the energy and innovation and the courage came from. They were rebelling from the formulaic life. They didn’t want to pick up where previous generations had left off. They wanted to turn a corner to go somewhere where no one had been before.
Terry O’Neill: I had this feeling that something special was happening and I’d decided I wanted to be the one to record it. Bailey and Jean Shrimpton were the toast of Vogue in 1963, from New York to Paris and London, so I photographed them at work and then photographed Jean in the Kings Road and on her parent’s farm. Terry Stamp got Oscar nominated for Billy Budd, his first film. Michael Caine was making Zulu, his breakout film. The two lived together and we were all mates.
I photographed them, their girlfriends. In music, in fashion, in culture, films, writers, artists—you could be what you wanted to be. Nobody questioned it or asked for qualifications, they just let you do it.
I was trying to record this amazing change as a news story; there was a buzz, we didn’t know what it was, and we didn’t think it would last.
For us working-class lads it was amazing. Suddenly working-class boys like Caine, Stamp, Bailey, me even, were supercool. Posh birds wanted them. They had the pill, we had the accent. Sex didn’t kill you in those days. Clubs were opening up, we working-class lads could go in them and mix with toffs [upper-class men and women], musicians—even royalty was rubbing shoulders with gangsters and guitarists.
Edina Ronay [actress]: I was at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in 1963. I’d made a few films. I was nineteen or twenty, still living at home, and dating Terry Stamp. It was all quite innocent. I was eighteen I think, he was absolutely beautiful, and I wasn’t bad myself in those days. I was so used to people looking at me, but people would look at him instead of me!
Terry was a lovely guy. He was sharing a flat with Michael Caine, and we would go out with him and his girlfriend of the moment as a foursome.
I was very fond of Terry, and he became a bit like a brother to me. Unbeknownst to me Michael had taken a shine to me. He definitely wasn’t my type—sort of blond hair, blond eyelashes, pink face, and very tall. After Terry, I had my first serious relationship with a very nice French guy, and that was clearly never gonna work out because he lived in Paris and I lived in London. It was very tearful when we broke up.
I remember going to a party—it was Terry’s brother, Chris Stamp’s party, who managed the Who. He was a really good-looking guy, and to be honest, even sexier than Terry—very hip and cool and rock-and-roll. And there was Michael Caine, who made a beeline for me. He was broke, completely broke. He actually said he hadn’t dared to ask me out because he couldn’t afford to pay for dinner. I remember he picked me up from RADA one day, and he had big holes in his sweater. Terry was doing Billy Budd so Terry was making good money. But Terry really admired Michael. While I was with him he got Zulu; that was the big break for him.
We would go to restaurants or clubs and the newspapers started talking about us as the ”it crowd.” At that point, it was the Pickwick, the Ad Lib, or Dolly’s. We used to walk in and stop the crowd. I remember once in the Pickwick Club with Joan Collins and she said, “We won’t smile because we don’t want wrinkles,” and we would talk in a way so we wouldn’t smile.
Jackie Collins: London started the whole revolution. The music and fashion was an eruption of energy, but 1963 is just a blur to me. I didn’t feel a part of that. My first husband [Wallace Austin] was in a psychiatric hospital. The thing I remember clearly about 1963 is my husband’s psychiatrist put him on methadrine and that made him an addict. He was bipolar, but they didn’t know what bipolar was, then—they thought it was depression and put him in a psychiatric ward. It was scary. He’d hide the drugs—under the tiles in the bathroom—and I would spend my life being a detective searching for them because I had a young child in the house.
I remember walking into the doctor’s waiting room one time and screaming, “If this doctor gives my husband any more drugs I’m going to the police.”
My whole life then was back and forth to the hospital and my mother dying of cancer so I didn’t really find myself part of the sixties until later. But in between my husband had this fabulous fashion business and I would model for him. I felt a little left out of it but I had a lot of friends, and sometimes I’d get a babysitter and go to the Ad Lib Club.
The Ad Lib Club was incredible. The Beatles, Stones, Clapton—everyone there was on the cusp of fame. It was a big club, and as you went up in the elevator you felt you were going to a big private party. It was genuinely fun. You went there to see your friends, and people could have sex with whomever, whenever they wanted—unless you were married with a child, like me. Eventually I got a divorce in 1964.
I guess when you’re a young woman in the situation I was in, with a sick husband and a child, I had a lot of responsibility as a wife and a mother, but I had this other person inside of me. I was writing every day. It’s always been my retreat, where I want to go and be. I’d start a book, write fifty pages, and then move on to another idea, and another.
I was interested in the sexual revolution. I loved the sixties because women came into their own and could do what they wanted sexually, which was one of the themes of The World Is Full of Married Men [Collins’s first novel]. I was watching it all, taking it all in. In 1963 this was all brewing in what I was writing.
The pill changed a lot. It gave women freedom. The liberation spread right across the world. You’d pick up an American newspaper and it was talking about what was happening in London.
Johnny Gold: Dolly’s was pure discotheque. It could only hold a hundred twenty people—it was small. But the energy was electric. Membership was five pounds a year. People weren’t wanting to be part of a scene, they were [just] caught up in it. They created their own scene, their own way of life, their own fashions. Public school boys adopted Cockney accents because it was fashionable. I’d get stockbrokers in pin-striped suits, loosen their ties, then they’d take off their jackets and suspenders, and gradually they started coming in jeans and T-shirts.
We didn’t have a dress code, and they’d be sitting next to someone on the board of a major company or a member of the royal family or the lads from the Beatles or the Stones—it quickly became classless. The snob value disappeared. High-society people wanted to be with the working classes because they were having the best time—working-class guys like Michael Caine, who was sharing a flat with Terry Stamp, and Albert Finney, young kids who were just breaking out. Oscar Lerman met his wife there. He saw her across the room and said to me, “I’m gonna marry that girl over there.” It was Jackie Collins.
Two men, James Hanson and Gordon White, built the biggest conglomerate we’d ever seen in Britain. They were ex-army officers, and they both became lords. Gordon was engaged to Audrey Hepburn for a while, and they brought movie stars down. I remember one night getting roaring drunk with John Wayne.
We had to deal with a lot of villains, too. There was one who used to come in—a small guy—he was the most vicious bastard. The story was he was a hit man for one of the mobs. They used to say he wouldn’t just shoot you, he’d empty the whole gun into you. Charming!
He only used to drink milk with brandy in it, and for some reason he took a shine to me—and he saved my life because the word was out on a Johnny Gould from Brighton and some people thought that was me. He talked to the right people and set them straight.
It was an unbelievable atmosphere, a melting pot. You just never knew who you’d meet or bump into—it was show time every night. At Dolly’s I became friends with the Marquess of Tavistock, whose father was the Duke of Bedford. They had an amazing stately home, Woburn Abbey, and I’d drive there after the club closed and arrive at five in the morning. They sat in order of title, so he, Tavistock, would be at the head of the table, then there’d be a duke and a knight, and I said, “Where do I sit, in the toilet?” I would be with their racing manager, who was an anti-Semitic ass. I didn’t feel awkward being in that environment; I didn’t feel I shouldn’t be there. That’s what ’63 was all about, but it couldn’t have happened prior to the sixties.
Edina Ronay: I suppose I’d fall into the class of posh bird. My family was middle-class, living in Holland Park, London. My father was shocked when I brought this working-class, out-of-work Cockney actor home and was out of his comfort zone.
If I had not been an actor I would not have been involved with working-class people, I would have stayed in my comfort zone. I always thought they were very boring, these upper-class English guys who took me out. I was bored to hell. The working-class boys were interesting.
Michael Caine had had this real problem as an actor: he couldn’t get the posh parts, and the posh parts are what it was all about. In fact, it was a very strange casting that they let him play an officer in Zulu, and it definitely was his making. He was probably the most ambitious person I have ever met in my life and he was gonna make it come what may. At the same time there were people like Bailey around. In fact, Jean Shrimpton became a very good friend of mine because then Terry Stamp was dating her after Bailey. So there was definitely this working-class thing happening, but it’s odd because for those boys, certainly Michael, smoking a joint would definitely be out of the question, and getting drunk and all that sort of thing, because they were all sort of straitlaced.
Barbara Hulanicki: The working-class had a voice. Everyone was flocking to London, and by then my husband decided we should aim our price to hit that market. We needed a name for the business, and we called it Biba. I wanted something feminine, and it was my sister’s nickname. It didn’t mean anything. It was neutral. So we showed this name around and this chap said that it sounded like the name for a cleaning lady’s daughter. And that was where we wanted to be.
We began with mail order and a catalogue through word of mouth. They would talk about ordering these clothes from the catalogue. We had to pre-manufacture everything, and it was a nightmare. We were learning as we went along.
Pattie Boyd: I remember somebody told me that there was this fantastic little shop called Biba, in Abingdon Road, it was just one shop, one space, and the clothes were just fabulous. The colors were so completely different to what Mary Quant was doing, Mary’s were block colors and very geometric in design. What Barbara was doing was colors in plum and sage greens—muddy colors.
Jackie Collins: I remember this: everyone wanted a Mary Quant miniskirt and Biba’s white boots.
Sir Alan Parker: I was nineteen in 1963, a junior copywriter in advertising at the Maxwell Clarke agency and living at home, with my parents, in a council flat in the first flats built after the war. I was earning ten quid a week. My dad insisted I handed over one pound ten shillings to my mother. He was very strict about it, except she secretly always stuffed it back in my jacket pocket when he wasn’t looking.
My job was “copy forwarding,” and I took the proofs of the ads around to be approved by each department. I befriended the copywriters and the “visualizer” [Gray Jolliffe, humorist, illustrator, and cartoonist], who used to give me ads to write at night. They used to mark them “five out of ten—must try harder.” Eventually they persuaded the boss to take me on as the junior copywriter at twelve pounds a week.
Meeting Gray was like a crash course in art. He opened my eyes to everything visual, from Cartier-Bresson to Magritte to George Lois. Suddenly the world was full of images—perhaps this was new, or maybe they had been there all along and I just hadn’t seen them!
We did five ads a day, and soon I had a portfolio that could fill a medium-sized suitcase. When I went for the interview at the new U.S. hotshot agency, PKL [Papert Koenig Lois], the copy chief, Peter Mayle [later the author of A Year in Provence], was impressed by the quantity of ads, if not the quality.
“How much do you want?” he said. “Thirteen,” I said, meaning thirteen pounds a week. “The job pays fifteen,” he said. I accepted. When I got my first paycheck I was amazed. I meant fifteen pounds a week, and he meant fifteen hundred pounds a year!
Terry O’Neill: Two years maybe, tops, is what we figured. We’d have fun, we’d have a laugh, we’d milk it, and then we’d all have to settle down and get proper jobs in banks.
Time magazine didn’t coin the phrase “swinging London” until 1966, when they said Jean was the face of the sixties. They were three years late. Diana Vreeland called it a “youthquake”—and Britain in 1963 was the epicenter of it.
Sir Frank Lowe: Nineteen sixty-three was a defining year for me: leaving America, dodging the draft and not going to Vietnam, and coming back here. The whole thing with Biba and Barbara Hulanicki and Mary Quant and Jean Shrimpton, the whole business was just lifting off. I had a flat just off the Cromwell Road and I worked with a wonderful art director who said, “Come on, you have to come to CDP [Collett Dickenson Pearce & Partners]. So I went to CDP and there was, of course, David Puttnam, Alan Parker, and Ridley Scott doing the ads.
I left a country that seemed dead on its knees and I came back to a country that seemed exciting. It was a really curious thing what happened. Advertising was the best fun you could have with your clothes on. You could walk into a restaurant and you could know quite a lot of people, and there was no sense of “I’m famous, you’re famous” and “I’m important and you are important.” It was a very special time.
Felicity Green: There were shops opening that echoed what Mary Quant was doing. Young people could buy clothes that they’d never seen before and that had never been available to them before. There were other designers coming in on the wave of Mary. A whole lot of young designers were coming in and opening shops.
Mary’s first shop was in Chelsea, but suddenly there was Carnaby Street. Shop after shop. And of course there was music, and it created this whole atmosphere. We went to listen to music. It was so energizing and stimulating. Everything was directed at youth, which the older generation either went along with and enjoyed themselves or said, “This is dreadful and England will never be the same again and they will all go to hell in a handcart.”
Barbara Hulanicki: Fashion was for older people. It was important to buy two good things and wear them for one season. There was no turnover at all. Now the prices went down. Now they wanted something new every week to go dancing in—throwaway clothes. The baby boomers were now earning money so they had, say, eight pounds a week, and they wanted to spend it. First thing was they left home and got a bed-sit for three pounds. Spent no money on food. It was all about clothes. Young girls—and they were very young, fifteen and sixteen—were very rebellious. Anything goes.
Everything was for the young: very skinny and short. They had their own money, they didn’t live at home, and there was no dad saying, “What are you doing in that top?”
Edina Ronay: I did shop at Mary Quant first, but she was very, very expensive. It was really very high-quality stuff. But Biba was a revolution, very trendy and sort of the right stuff at unbelievably silly prices, so she was the first one who did that diffusion fashion. Barbara Hulanicki should take a lot of the credit.
Sir Alan Parker: Girls were about relentless chasing and unfathomable optimism, mostly hardly justified by the results. The great badge of honor was when, after having a haircut, the barber would say, “Something for the weekend, sir?” Meaning a packet of three condoms. By the end of 1963 the Durex was out from under the counter and on top of it. This presaged a decade of unprecedented bonking, because everyone was at it.
Edina Ronay: Whenever you went out with a boy they always wanted to sleep with you. I just wished that you could go out with men and not have this dreadful threat that you have to sleep with them. They were very predatory all the time.
Lots of girls, and especially the guys, were sleeping around like crazy. Not me, though. And Michael [Caine] was always a gentleman. In many ways I admired them and felt a bit old-fashioned. I was very faithful, but there were many other girls who were not.
Johnny Gold: The whole of ’63 was a feeling of liberation, but what surprised me most was the pill. Suddenly you could go to bed with girls and not be worried. You’d go out and expect to go to bed with a girl and more important, the girls expected it, too. They were determined to enjoy their sexual freedom. Taking away those inhibitions had a lot to do with the atmosphere because we felt we could let our hair down and not worry about consequences. We didn’t register any fear. The worst thing that could happen was a dose of the clap, and a penicillin shot would sort that out.
Mandy Rice-Davies: I had to say I was married to get the pill. It was only available for married women. But there were a lot of women wearing brass rings. I was eighteen, a single girl, and having sex, and I was a threat.