What was it like to be in the 1960s? There are many answers to this. Mine is, I’m glad to say, rather feeble. I was on the edge of the great multitude, as we surged down the primrose path towards the eternal bonfire, hanging back a bit. Some people of my generation were even less involved. For poor hard-working citizens in industrial towns, the seductive music of the new age was faint and distant, and unexplained. It was obvious from the T.V. we all watched and the new radio stations we all listened to, that something was happening, but they did not know what it was and were rightly suspicious of it. For the privileged and young that music was a siren song, a luring, untrustworthy, sinister beauty that meant them no good. I have always compared it to the music of the Pied Piper. I was too young to appreciate it fully when it was at its height, but I was living among people who weren’t. So I was jealous of the liberation they were experiencing, but never quite in the midst of it. One thing I can say for sure is that it did exist as a distinct era, and that it was something about the music that enraptured us.
I was born in late 1951, so I was fourteen for most of the year 1966 when, in my opinion, the music, the fashions, and the morals of the new age really began to assert themselves. Later, I caught up reasonably quickly and got myself into all kinds of minor trouble on the edge of the new age. Thank heaven for the serious, puritanical Bolshevik politics which I first embraced in 1968, that most haunting year of all. The Leninist worldview exercised far more power over my mind and actions than the vestiges of childhood Protestantism could possibly have done. In particular, I then developed a view of drugs which I still hold. It is weak and dismal to escape reality by stupefying yourself: If you do not like the world as it is, try to change it.
In May that year I imagined I could hear the police sirens and the shouts of French rioters on the Boulevard St Michel, far away across the Channel, and sniff the tear gas too. But I never tried to go. I was much less interested in the personal liberation that the students in Paris were demanding than I was in taking part in some kind of idealistic combat. Combat appealed to me, or so I thought. Now it very much does not. In August 1968, I was, if anything, even more jealous of the young men and women of Prague, who were taking on real tanks. I remember seeing a news bulletin in which a Soviet tank smashed a tram to one side in a single contemptuous charge. I realized for the first time what a serious object a tank is. It took me thirty years or so to make sense of these twin events, in Paris and Prague, and to see what connected them and why they still matter. They were, in an unexpected way, the rebirth of the revolutionary left which had failed in the U.S.S.R. and which has since succeeded so well. But instinctively I knew they were important.
Not long afterwards, a serious road accident made me even more of a prig than I was already. I was badly but not permanently hurt. I felt real fear and, seconds later, found it to be justified. This is no bad lesson. Drivers of cars in which I rode, after this event, sneered at me for insisting on wearing my seat belt, in those days optional and cumbersome. I often had to untangle the things, dusty and unused and sometimes crusted with old chewing gum blobs, before I could strap myself in. Many took my behavior as an insult to their driving. But I knew something that they did not about how quickly calm and safety can be torn to bits. I had also experienced the uncontrollable blaze of real pain, just short of blacking out, which took away forever my old desire for combat.
I more or less stopped listening to popular music at that point. I thought it was trivial, and mostly still do. The whole vocabulary of millions of my contemporaries became a mystery to me. They ceaselessly mention the names of what we used to call “groups” and now (mysteriously) call “bands,” and the names of their songs, assuming that I will know what they are talking about. I don’t. Unless it happened before somewhere around the autumn of 1969, it means as much to me as Burmese poetry.
Yet a few small snatches remain, usually plangent and in some way full of the longing for something never quite explained, which so many of us felt in those days. You can, by and large, keep the Beatles, but an unusual song called “Things We Said Today” still has the extraordinary, evocative power of cheap music to the full. If I hear it, I am transported back to the grey, sultry September afternoon when I first encountered it. I didn’t need to have it broadcast over and over again to know that I liked it.
There’s something similar in the voice of Sandy Denny in a couple of songs played by the British group Fairport Convention. But here is an odd thing. I recall being very taken with the first of the two, “Meet on the Ledge,” when it first swam on to my radio, perhaps in late 1968. I thought it was about death and loss, which wasn’t the main topic of the music of the time. I never heard the second, “Farewell, Farewell,” until about fifty years after it was recorded—but immediately liked it. It is definitely about death and loss, as Fairport Convention had by then been almost destroyed in a terrible road crash. It is an emphatic, melancholic goodbye to the 1960s, which is another reason why I like it. After an interlude of soft breezes and lotus eating, which ended badly, it was time to face the cold North Wind again.
There was one other small thing I liked from that era, again accidentally and not thanks to it coming from a big name or being heavily promoted. In 1968 the B.B.C. broadcast a one-hour T.V. play, called Hello, Good Evening and Welcome. It is impossible to imagine them doing anything so serious today. It examined the morals and pretensions of a celebrity television presenter with his own fashionable current affairs show. The recording is lost, but I still recall the way it glowed on the black-and-white screen, and the sharpness of the dialogue—though I have no idea now of what the plot was.
The fictional current affairs program had a musical interlude, featuring a group of the time called the Eclection. The song they played was entitled “Please.” If you read the lyrics now they would seem plain and hackneyed. But the power of the singer’s voice was extraordinary, thrilling, and moving—and it stayed with me. It even led me to find out what an eclection was. Then I more or less forgot about her and the Eclection till one idle afternoon after the Internet had exhumed all this lost material a few years ago. Then I learned that she was an Australian from Melbourne with the odd name of Kerrilee Male. She had a strikingly intelligent and beautiful face along with her extraordinary voice.
Why had she not become famous, in any of the ways, good and bad, in which the 1960s made young, talented people famous? In this case it was because, for reasons never stated in any of the few brief accounts of her life, she decided to quit the music business and return to ordinary life. Some of this emerged after her recent death, in her seventies, in her native Australia. She did not, it is said, like touring with the group. Who can say now what she saw and heard? Who can say, amid all the tragedies we have read and heard of since the 1960s, that she made the wrong choice?
