CHAPTER 2

HIGH TIMES ON CARNABY STREET

I arrived at a state of determination while I was at the Rudolph Steiner School. Playing drums as a way of life was still a vague, fanciful wish, and I saw no realistic path to that goal aside from collecting instrument catalogues and dreaming. I had a pile of them, from which I’d build fantasy drum kits in my mind’s eye, and I carried them around for months, until they’d all become so weathered that I needed to bind them together with tape. I was distraught about school and the dim prospects in my future, so one day I hiked up a hill on campus far away from where anyone might find me, to seek solace under a shady tree. I sat there for hours, feeling desperate, until I could take it no longer and cried out for help. With my catalogues in my hands as if they were holy texts I offered up a forlorn prayer. Confused, sad and earnest to the depths of my soul, I pleaded to God and the universe to hear me. I begged for help to get me what I wanted. I knew I could do it and I knew where I had to go, I just needed someone, or something to please get me to London.

I experienced what I consider to be a divine episode under that tree, much like Buddha, though at the time I hadn’t yet learned that fable. I saw myself in London, playing drums in clubs, in those smoky rooms I’d seen with my sister. In my vision I was there and I was doing it. It was so real I could feel it. I was uplifted and I had the sense that what I saw was there just waiting for me. It was all possible, but when I opened my eyes and looked to the sky I was acutely reminded that it was still out of reach. It was as if I were looking into the window of a store for which I couldn’t find the door; I could see it, but I didn’t know how to walk into that dream.

So I sat there, under that tree and began to plead aloud. I stayed all afternoon, four hours or more, crying most of the time, talking to the greater powers the rest of the time. When I’d exhausted myself, I got up to leave, none the wiser, but I’d found my determination. I wasn’t going to wait for it to happen, and I wasn’t going to suffer any more. I wasn’t going to stay the course. I was going to strike out on my own, and wherever it might lead me, I intended to get inside of that vision of mine. I walked back down to school knowing that I had to leave for good, come what may.

Telling my parents I was through with education was difficult, but they couldn’t have been surprised given my struggles. When I told them my mind was made up, they let me go without a fight, even though I was just fifteen. I’ll never forget telling my dad of my decision because it was one of the few occasions I ever saw him with tears in his eyes that weren’t from laughing. We were at a little café near our home, having a heart-to-heart and I just came out with it.

‘I can’t do it, Dad,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to go back to school, and I won’t make it through college. I don’t know how to do all that. I need to leave school and get on with my life. I want to play drums and move to London.’

He held my hand, making me feel safe, and we both started to cry. I knew at that moment that he really loved me and that I would be okay because I had his support.

‘Well, we will have to sort you out. We have to get you a proper drum kit if you’re going to do this professionally. You’ll move to London and live with Sally, but you’ll have to get a job.’

My father had a way of tempering his criticism and reprimands with the honest insight of a man, not a father, and I found that very enlightening. It allowed me to understand why he might not agree with me, or wished I’d reconsider, but ultimately that he understood my point of view. He did that when I ran away from school, telling me that he knew school wasn’t for me and he didn’t expect me to think about college, but that I needed to get back in the saddle and finish high school. When I was in a shooting phase with my air rifle as a ten-year-old and I shot an endangered local seagull off the back of the house barge, he told me every reason why what I’d done was wrong and said I needed to shoot tin cans. At which point I frowned and started to feel pissed off.

‘However,’ he said. ‘Damn good shot.’

I know it wasn’t easy for my parents when I left for London, nor was it easy for me; but my parents handled their decision with the same grace, love and wisdom as they did everything else when it came to raising their children. They must have known that they’d instilled within me the tools to find my own way. As a father myself, I appreciate now that it takes great strength to let your teenager move to the big city with nothing but a drum set by way of a future. God bless them both for their faith in me.

I’m sixty-five now and I have my own Club Keller; it’s called Fleetwood’s on Front Street in Maui, and it’s been a journey getting that off the ground, but it’s been worth it, every bit. When I signed the lease on it and set about designing the kind of restaurant where live music, great food and great wine would be the main event, my mother Biddy, who as of this writing is ninety-four, reminded me of something.

‘You always did want your own club didn’t you? Always inviting your friends round, selling tickets, that was grand. Quite precocious for a teenager. Well now at least you can serve more than Coca-Cola can’t you!’

I was gone and away, on my own, leaving behind the last elements of a traditional British teenage upbringing. I had not the slightest idea of what it meant to be a young man of the world and was naive about what lay ahead. I’d never even played in a proper band, but thanks to my father, I was sent off to London with a brand-new full-sized drum kit. It was very flashy, slick black with a glittery finish that seemed as if only a professional should dare play it. A professional show-off at least.

I moved into the attic space at the top of my sister Sally’s house and she continued her role as my saviour and cultural guiding light. Sally lived in the Notting Hill area with her husband John Jesse, who was an art dealer, and after I settled in I did the only thing that made sense and went to find a job. I landed one at the department store Liberty, where to my utter bewilderment, they hired me to work in the accounting department. I would have understood if they’d put me on the floor to sell goods, because I could compose myself and was friendly and determined enough to move product, but placing me in an office with paperwork involving numbers? That was madness. In terms of my Blackboard Syndrome, mathematics has always caused my heart to palpitate dangerously. I really have no idea how I got that job. I don’t recall the interview, or whatever I wrote on the application that convinced them I was their man. Clearly they didn’t ask me to do calculations because if they had the next words I’d have heard would’ve been ‘We’ll be in touch’ instead of ‘You start on Monday.’

I can’t be trusted to keep track of how much is coming in or going out when it comes to my own finances, though I’ve always been good at it when it comes to others. When I was Fleetwood Mac’s acting manager, I knew our budgets and stuck to them. But my own? Well, that has been an ongoing saga involving a number of business managers who often produced no better results than I could have. As a result I’ve seen my share of ups and downs.

But all of that was in a very distant future when I was still a lad of fifteen, living in my sister’s attic, a space I accessed via a rickety iron ladder. As a member of Liberty accounting department, I was tasked with reviewing applicants for the store’s charge accounts. I had a small office, where I’d sit and pretend to work. I’d have a notepad to doodle on alongside my actual work so that if someone passed by my doorway it looked like I was busily writing away. I’d open the folder that held the application and the documents the applicants were required to provide and I’d arrange all of that on the desk, before starting to draw on my doodle pad. When I grew bored of the current doodle, I’d stamp the application ‘Approved’, move on to the next and begin a new drawing. Most days I also enjoyed a satisfying nap after lunch.

The guy who’d hired me thought I was well-spoken and well-dressed (clearly the only reason I got the job) and he told me that if I applied myself and stuck with it, I might have myself an office like his one day. His was much larger and better appointed with a window and all the trimmings, but it looked like a fucking cage to me.

I needed the job but I didn’t want it. I also couldn’t quit because the family would have been disappointed, so instead I decided to get fired. I did everything I could not to fit in. Liberty was very posh and proper, and I’d dressed the part for my interview, but once I’d decided they must make me go, I wore more casual clothing, typically a roll-neck polo sweater in place of the expected starched shirt and tie. I also grew my hair long and didn’t comb it so that it might be more unruly, and I chewed gum as visibly and often as possible when in the company of my superiors, because that was a clear violation of the etiquette guide given to all Liberty employees. I made sure to stride just over the line of acceptable behaviour and my plan worked famously.

Within a few months, my co-workers began logging complaints about me and soon my boss could ignore it no more. He called me in one day and told me that Liberty wasn’t the proper fit for me and so it was, with a heavy heart, that he had to let me go. I was probably smiling like a fool the entire time. I remember agreeing with him heartily, as politely as I could. As I walked out of the store that day, I’d never felt more relieved in my life. That was the first and last time I held any manner of straight job. My parents weren’t angry, but they didn’t offer to support me, though when I did run into problems they gave me a few pounds here and there to sort me out in the short term.

The only problem, of course, was that soon I had no money. That troubled my family more than it bothered me. I was willing to trade money for my freedom. Without a job, I could spend every single day playing my drums in my sister’s garage, which is why I’d come to London–to play, though not exclusively in a garage. Sally’s garage was a great place to start though, it was a spacious double-doored affair, originally built to house horses. There was plenty of room for my kit, and it sounded nice too. With no gainful employment to take me away from practising, that’s all I did, all day, every day, all by myself.

I had no idea what I was going to do next but I found a great comfort in that; the kind of strength a person can only derive from committing themselves to a course of action, come what may. It’s not to be done lightly, it should be the result of a very brave, or conversely a tremendously foolish perspective. It can also be inspired by having no other choice, which in my opinion is when it means the most. That’s how it was for me; after failing at school and having no prospects ahead, my back was against the wall. Playing drums was the only thing I wanted to do. I had no idea if that would see me through life, I had no idea if I was even very good at it. I didn’t care. That was how I felt and it was liberating. If I’d been mature enough to consider the ramifications of such a pledge, it would have been a bit scary, too.

As a shy young man, it wasn’t easy being tall (I’m six feet six) and all the more noticeable because of the way I chose to dress. I wore bright-coloured blousy shirts, tight trousers, big belt buckles, boots, and I wore my hair long. Perhaps shy isn’t exactly the word, because I’ve always been social and jovial just like my dad, but when I think about my first days in London, what strikes me is how shy I was in the presence of girls. I’d always liked the girls at school, but I was suddenly out of my league. The girls in London were absolutely gorgeous and enchanting and they were everywhere. I was awestruck in their presence and would fall apart just walking down the street. I could be chatting with a bloke about the blues, confident and knowledgeable, but the moment a beautiful girl walked by I became a complete idiot. This may be odd to hear from a guy who adores meeting fans and chooses to hold court to thirty or forty of them every night on tour before the show. Nowadays I have no problem greeting people, whatever the situation. But when I was young, girls were my kryptonite. I wanted to talk to them but I couldn’t. I was completely dumbstruck.

I didn’t lose my virginity until I was almost eighteen and by then I’d been a gigging musician for a few years. That’s kind of pathetic, considering my advantages and the mores of the time. My introduction to sex was very late and basically I had to be railroaded by my first girlfriend, Sue Boffy. Sue was a society girl who always got what she wanted, and when she saw me on stage one night, she decided that I was it. She had me all right. She took me back to her flat in Chelsea and taught me what it means to be a man and a woman.

I was a sheltered country boy in so many ways. I didn’t even know what homosexuality was until I moved to London. I had to ask my sister about it because I kept hearing people saying that so-and-so was ‘queer’, to which I would just smile like I knew what they meant. It reminded me of being at boarding school, when I realised that I didn’t know what being a virgin meant. I was even less happy when I found out that I still was one. If I hadn’t learned to play in bands, I can’t imagine how much longer it might have taken me to lose my virginity.

The world I’d landed in fascinated me and I became a sponge, soaking up everything I could. Though I was not an astute student, I am a keen observer and I took in all of the new customs and concepts that presented themselves to my young mind. It was ‘swinging’ London, when the mod fashions in Carnaby Street were all the rage, and the sensory overload was incredible. I went anywhere that I heard something interesting might be going on and attended all manner of happenings, where people gathered and talked about ideas. My sister’s house was in a cul-de-sac called Horbury Mews in Notting Hill, which, along with neighbouring Ladbroke Grove, was the epicentre of the underground movement in art and music that was soon to define the sixties counter-culture as we now know it. Those neighbourhoods were the real shit, the low-life, hip, starving-artist reality. Jamaicans and art students lived side by side and the working class of all races had to find ways to get along. Out of these burgeoning cauldrons of people and energy, the music, the art and everything that played a part in changing England’s cultural identity, and then the world’s, started to happen.

Notting Hill is a very different place now; it’s extremely expensive to live there and the former diversity and bohemian elements are long gone, but back then it was glorious and larger than life to me. Even at my age, with my inexperience, I knew it was significant. I could feel that this moment in time was something. I was aware that I was living in an historic period. If you lived there you were instantly a part of it too because these vibrations were all around you. There was a tangible shift occurring on an international level too, which made for a uniting and vivid moment in time that I don’t think can be appreciated properly now.

Today the world is united through technology, so ideas spread and knowledge is shared in a much less organic, human way. It is all done so quickly–only to be replaced with new information. The transaction of sharing ideas is fundamentally different. But there was a time when a band like the Beatles or the Rolling Stones or later on, Fleetwood Mac, united like-minded people around the world the way the Internet or Facebook does today. Bands were a reason for people to gather in groups and exchange ideas–and they used to have to do that in person, not from the comfort of their computers.

Bands were a way for people to connect with each other and if the bands were good, then their fans were able to plug into something greater than all of them. People are still fans of bands in the same way, and music still accomplishes that goal, but back then was the moment that type of relationship was born. The founding fathers of rock and roll started it, but the bands of the 1960s made it a language that teenagers (and the rest of us) still speak today. It was a revolution that brought a shift in values and a change in times.

In the United States, because of the Vietnam War, that revolution was much more dramatic and visceral than it was in the UK. It had a purpose and a common goal, to end the violence, whereas in the UK it was more about fashion, music, art and a loosening of that traditional British reserve. Everyone was united by music, because music was our vessel to a deeper, mutual understanding. The fact that they loved the Beatles and ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ was something teenagers from both Dusseldorf and Des Moines could agree upon, no matter how different they were. Love, rhythm and teenage lust are universal, and so is shouting ‘Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!’ at the top of your lungs. If more people did that together more often, the world might be a better place.

I didn’t give up on my dream and kept playing in my sister’s garage day in and day out, with no audience until the day a guy from the neighbourhood, just a few years older than me, poked his head in to listen. I wasn’t playing along to anything, I was just making up beats and fills and enjoying myself so much that I didn’t notice him there at first.

‘Hey! Hello,’ he said. ‘I’m Peter Bardens.’

And with that, I awoke into my living dream. If it weren’t for Peter Bardens, I could have been alone in that garage for five years. Peter was well-educated, intelligent, extremely witty and always stroking his hair out of his eyes when he spoke. He was eloquent and a great musician, and I suspect he would have been a great writer because his father Dennis Bardens was a well-known author and journalist. Peter was also a great draughtsman and was always drawing satirical comics that were hilarious. He was a complete dreamer, more so even than me, and we shared an ineptitude for handling finances. Peter never deserted his dream, and struggled as a musician, achieving recognition and a modicum of success, but until his death he was still envisioning the next band, the next album, and next project.

Peter was my entrée into the scene; he was already playing in bands and living just a few doors down in the cul-de-sac, Horbury Mews. He wanted to put a new group together and was interested in recruiting me, though he had yet to find the remaining players.

‘That other band isn’t quite together yet,’ he said. ‘But in the meantime, how would you like a paying gig?’

‘Well yes, of course!’

Suddenly I was thrust into the world I’d been searching for–and with a job. All my doubt was gone; I could tell my family that I’d done it, I’d actually got myself a job as a drummer! I nearly jumped over the drums and bear-hugged Peter that day. It was only one gig, but I didn’t care.

I joined a band called the Senders and played exactly one gig with them, in a youth club. We mostly did covers by the Shadows, a band whose records I’d listened to while learning to drum. They were Cliff Richard’s backing band, (to all of you in America, Cliff was our Elvis) and they were huge during my childhood. I absolutely adored them and knew all the songs by heart. I did the gig, playing with a real band to a real audience, and the exhilaration was dizzying. There is no feeling quite like it and once I got a taste, I wasn’t letting go.

By the summer of 1963, Peter Bardens had got his pop-rock act together and I became the drummer, alongside Eddie Lynch on guitar and vocals, Peter Hollis on bass, Roger Peacock on vocals, Phil Sawyer on guitar and Bardens on keyboards. We were called the Cheynes, named after a fashionable street in Chelsea called Cheyne Walk, where everyone from Mick Jagger and Keith Richards to Marianne Faithfull, Lawrence Olivier and Henry James have lived. The Cheynes’ repertoire consisted of Bo Diddley, Buddy Holly and Little Richard covers, plus a handful of originals and we did put on a good show. We toured Britain extensively, playing regular gigs in London as well as short trips on the university circuit with bands like the Yardbirds, the Animals and the Spencer Davis Group.

I must say that, considering our relative youth and great inexperience, we were a pretty hot act for the time. As a band, like a thousand others, we all went to a shoe shop called Anello and Davide and got ourselves Beatle boots, which were basically Spanish dancing boots (they’re also known as Chelsea boots). They were a cool thing before the Beatles, but afterwards they were mandatory. We had a crooked booking agent, who I believe was the one who came up with a uniform for us all to wear: leather jerkins, pink Dr Kildare shirts, and brown mohair trousers to go with our boots. We amassed a following locally, and my favourite regular venue was a dive in Soho called the Mandrake. The place was open all night, every night, and when I wasn’t playing I usually stopped in there to see who was on. I was still only sixteen at the time, but thanks to my height, no one ever questioned whether I was old enough to drink or be in the club–which I wasn’t. I learned so much with the Cheynes, not only about playing, but also about what rock and roll was becoming and what the music had begun to mean.

I saw all of this close up by having the chance to tour and open for the Yardbirds, which we did quite often, and usually at the original Marquee Club on Oxford Street. The Yardbirds were not then the influential band that history has proven them to be, but they already had fans–dedicated, knowledgeable, die-hard fans–something I’d never seen before. It was the first time I realised exactly what that meant. Before then I’d always seen my fellow audience members as people like me, there to absorb the music. This was different, these were people who were there just for the Yardbirds, to see them play songs that they already knew by heart because they’d seen them many times before. These people shouted out to their favourite band members as if they were old friends. This was very early in their career, too, at a time when the Yardbirds had a blonde lead singer with one lung named Keith Relf and a young guy on lead guitar named Eric Clapton, who was good, but at that stage, honestly, he was still just a guy in a band and didn’t stand out whatsoever.

Later I would see the same thing when I saw the Rolling Stones play gigs at Eel Pie Island, a tiny piece of land in the middle of the River Thames. Those audiences hadn’t just come to hear blues and rock and roll, they had come to hear those guys play blues and rock and roll. That might seem silly to say about legendary acts like the Stones, the Yardbirds and Clapton, but at the time they were nothing more than cover bands with a few original tunes in their repertoire. They hadn’t even begun to find themselves, so to see that degree of dedication from an audience was eye-opening. The energy of that idol worship was tangible and when we opened for the Yardbirds I could feel it, even though the fans weren’t there for us.

That moment in time was the start of ‘bandmania’, an unfolding phenomenon that soon went completely viral as we’d say today. This happened to the Cheynes as well; we had people following us from pub to pub around London. With the Cheynes I also lived through every cliché that young inexperienced bands endure. We were ripped off by promoters and kicked out by venue owners without being paid after playing a great show. Our booking agents gave us a van and a PA system to tour with but had included words in the small print of our contract that required us to repay them at a loss. We’d play gigs all week long, driving for hours in a freezing cold van, only to end up with pocket change. But I wouldn’t have traded it for the world, and eventually, by being as thrifty as I could, I moved from my sister’s attic into a small flat that I shared with one of my bandmates. It was about then I also got my first car, an old taxi. I’ve always been a nut for motor cars.

The Cheynes recorded a few singles, gained momentum around London, and in 1964 did a tour with the Rolling Stones just as their star began to rise. The Stones had been booked on a tour of old cinemas, and we’d been hired to play as the back-up band for the pop legend and opening act Ronnie Spector and the Ronettes. Ronnie, aside from taking the house down every night with her unparalleled vocal gifts, answered patiently our never-ending questions about her then-husband Phil Spector. Like almost everyone in the world of music, we were fixated on his famous ‘Wall of Sound’, on every technique he used to capture such massively beautiful soundscapes. ‘How many guitarists did he have doubling those parts on “Sleigh Ride?” How many musicians were required to lay down the basic tracks? What was the room like?’ We didn’t leave her alone for a minute!

When she told me how Phil had built a platform that hung five feet from the floor by thick chains to hold the drummer’s kit, I nearly died. He’d built it because he believed that drums should be recorded from every side, including below. I was grinning from ear to ear; this made so much sense to me because no one knows more than a drummer how much reverberation is created and how much is dissipated into the ground as we play. That echo is a powerful feeling that both grounds us and drives us. The fact that Phil Spector had tried to capture the sensation that a drummer felt when his bass and snare vibrated his stool was genius as far as I was concerned. I could barely contain my envy, vowing to myself that one day I’d record with a producer like him, if not Phil himself.

That tour was magical to me. The Stones really took care of us, looking after us like little brothers, and that is when and how I got to know Brian Jones quite well. I feel lucky about it because Brian was a special soul, in many ways far too sensitive and perceptive for this world. A brilliant, fluent multi-instrumentalist, he was the one who founded the Rolling Stones and he had the creative vision that helped them to evolve organically from a mop-top blues-pop group into the mystical rock gods they became–something that many people today might not realise. Brian had a huge heart and we became friends very quickly. We’d sit and talk about the blues for hours, trading stories we’d heard about the recording of the songs we both loved.

Later, Brian and I became even better friends when I was dating the young beauty who became my first wife, Jenny Boyd. Our social circles became intertwined and we saw each other all the time. Jenny and I used to go round to Brian’s flat to hang out and even to participate in the séances he’d hold at his mews cottage in Fulham. At the time Brian had a girlfriend called ZuZu and the two of them would pull out the Ouija board and we’d attempt to communicate with the dead. Peter Bardens’ father had written a book about ghosts that we had all read, so we were scared and fascinated at the same time.

I’m far from the first to have said so, but I’d like to confirm that Brian Jones was, without question, one of the sweetest human beings and the most visionary musician I’ve ever met. He’s yet another who died too young, at twenty-seven, the same age as far too many of his peers–Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison, as well as Kurt Cobain and Amy Winehouse in the years to come.

Bill Wyman was a great mentor to us as well. The Stones bass player took an interest in us and brought us a song he’d co-written with a former bandmate named Brian Cade (they were in a group called the Cliftons together) called ‘Stop Runnin’ Around.’ Bill played bass on it and co-produced it with Glyn Johns, whose work with everyone from the Beatles to the Eagles to the Clash is iconic. The song came out as a B-side to our song ‘Down and Out’ in 1965 though it didn’t chart (none of our singles did), it was just so cool that Bill did that for us.

There is a reason why Mick Jagger was with Marianne Faithfull at that time and their relationship encapsulates all that was changing in the counter-cultural scene and in English society as a whole. Marianne came from a very sophisticated family and dating Mick Jagger, who was well-educated but very much associated with a working-class band and movement, was symbolic. It was the epitome of the cultural shift and their relationship was a catalyst for it. Marianne was one of many well-bred members of the scene, such as Tara Browne, an heir to the Guinness fortune, and many like him were of the younger generation and wanted to be a part of this new movement. They included members of the aristocracy, some in their twenties and thirties and others who were even older, lords and ladies and members of parliament, who aligned themselves philosophically with the more radical ideas of sixties culture. All of these people could be found hanging out at the same clubs where we played and at parties in posh properties where the Stones would be the main course.

The Rolling Stones were the crown jewels that the wildest of the rich, young and privileged felt they had to possess. They were the best party favour anyone could hope to have at their gathering. I’m not sure if any of their party hosts realised it, but as funny, fuzzy and odd as they saw the Stones, these eccentric entertainers were the ones who truly held the cards. They became the linchpin to those aristocrats’ social lives more than they would have thought possible when they started inviting them round.

After the Cheynes toured with the Stones, we were accepted and we found ourselves invited everywhere that they went. At the end of that brief tour, I wondered if I’d be seeing Brian again soon and I remember him turning to me and saying, ‘Well, you’ll be coming along with us now, won’t you?’ It was that simple and we did.

It was a moving scene that would start at a number of pubs or clubs and usually move to some elegant townhouse that lads like us would never have imagined being inside. Rolls-Royces and Bentleys would be parked out front, antiques were everywhere, and the men wore gorgeous velvet jackets. I wanted clothes like that too. So I saved my pennies until I could afford to have one shirt made and I scoured the second-hand shops for the right funky old scarf to wear with it. Everyone looked so cool and it was all so exciting.

In the way that people talk about Paris in the 1920s, everyone who was a part of London in the 1960s knows what I mean when I say there will probably be nothing like it in this lifetime. The working classes and the children of the rich were sharing the same space for the first time, all of us finding ourselves. Everyone was like-minded and anything was possible, and why not? Musicians were the pied pipers who rallied the socialites, the fashion folks, all of the mods, the models–just about everyone.

Music was our shared playground, but I must say that without those younger aristocrats unwilling to follow the path set out for them, a lot of it wouldn’t have been as swinging. They were the patrons, just like the families throughout history who commissioned great works, from Wagner to da Vinci. Their patronage wasn’t as directly influential or recognised, but they furthered everything. The easiest way to think about it is that something exploded and it was heard. Then it grew bigger until it was no longer exclusive to the lucky ones sitting in townhouses in Chelsea and it became everybody’s property.

The Stones and the Beatles became the spokesmen for a generation, the vehicles that allowed a large number of people to come out of their shells and that had a lot of repercussions. For one thing it caused a much deeper, eventually dangerous degree of fandom. You only have to look at how obsessed people became with John Lennon, or any of the Beatles, and how personally they took it when John hooked up with Yoko Ono. It made no sense that people should feel failed by an artist for the decisions he made in his personal life, but it happened. This was the start of that kind of devotion when it came to our cultural public figures. The Stones and the Beatles were living billboards for a movement that changed from day to day, just as they did as people, because everything was new and in flux then. They were the flag-bearers and they ended up bearing the brunt of a storm that wasn’t necessarily of their making.

When the government and the more conservative lawmakers tired of the younger generation’s taste for drugs and flamboyant living, they went after the figureheads. The Stones were busted for drugs, constantly harassed and eventually forced into exile in France. It was all reported in the newspapers, served up as a morality tale by the powers that be, but they didn’t win in the end. They tried their best but they couldn’t hold back the tide of change. By the end of the 1960s, the counter-culture was accepted, but only after it was deemed fashionable.

Now, looking back on what happened then in London, I am reminded of a story my dad told me about a journey he took by canoe, as a young man. He rowed his way down the Rhine, through Germany and France, and though it was well before the Second World War, he saw things he could not ignore. He observed the start of the Nazi movement and he wrote about it in his journals. There was something afoot that he didn’t understand. He knew only that something tremendous was about to happen there and it was but a matter of time before the pieces came together to form a larger, and in this case ominous, whole.

Forgive me for drawing such a negative parallel with the sixties scene in London. I do so only because I remember how my father spoke of that trip and I felt the same way about that particular moment for me. Things were happening, there was something coming together, but I didn’t know what it was. I knew it was bigger than me. It was bigger than all of us, even those at the centre of it all. And it was coming our way.