The Diamond Decades: The 1960s

Who kick-started the Sixties? Well, the artist Richard Hamilton might be one candidate, coining the term Pop Art and writing its first manifesto. Pop Art, he wrote, is “Popular; Transient; Expendable; Low Cost; Mass Produced; Young; Witty; Sexy; Gimmicky; Glamorous; and Big Business”.

Hamilton was actually writing in 1957, but eras have an awkward tendency to resist being tied to convenient dates. As a prescription for the revolution to come, his manifesto was pretty unbeatable.

The cultural explosion of the Sixties was a product of affluence and mass consumerism, a brief hysterical interlude in which youth reigned supreme, sex came out from under the covers, elitism and deference were held hostage and, for a fleeting moment, the whiff of cordite hung in the air.

Of course, the Beatles also had something to do with it.

I was 11 when the first Beatles single, Love Me Do, was released – a little young to realise that a revolution was in the offing, but not too young to be captured by the sheer exuberance of their music. It seems now that the Beatles mark a point in British history when the world turned from black and white into colour, and then into Day-Glo, that tilting point from post-war austerity to “you’ve never had it so good” affluence. Their provincialism, their jokey, unapologetically working-class manner, allied to musical genius, changed the face of what was socially and culturally acceptable at a stroke.

They were an explicit act of revolt against the barriers of age, class and the division between popular and high culture – a force that nobody could afford to ignore. “Serious” music critics deliberated on whether Lennon and McCartney were composers the equal of Mahler and Brahms; Harold Wilson pandered to popular taste by dolling out MBEs to the group.

By 1966, the pop revolution, of which the Beatles were in the vanguard, had made London the cultural capital of the world – or at least the pop-cultural capital of the world, which for a while was the only culture that mattered. London was officially “The Swinging City” as Time magazine famously pronounced, the global hub of youthful creativity, hedonism and excitement. “In a decade dominated by youth, London has burst into bloom. It swings; it is the scene.”

Well, yes, and no. Few Londoners, let alone Britons, were dancing at the Ad Lib or having their hair cut by Vidal Sassoon, “the man with the magic comb”, as Time had it. (In the suburbs of south London, the less celebrated Mr Tony was styling my hair in the centre-parted-fringe, blow-dried-from-the-crown neo-Mod style that, along with a mohair suit, was de rigueur for 16 year-olds at the Orchid Ballroom, Purley.)

Time was, anyway, a year or two too late. By 1966, the ripples of Swinging London were already a flood, sweeping through music, fashion and film, from Antonioni’s Blow Up – a painfully self-conscious study of Sixties hipness – to Clive Donner’s Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush. A bittersweet confection about a teenager in the suburbs (filmed in the swinging purlieus of Stevenage) desperate to taste the fruits of the burgeoning sexual freedoms, Donner’s film perfectly captured the blithe innocence, and fabulous music, of the times – and actually made a deeper impression on me (call it identification) than Blow Up.

Richard Hamilton, meanwhile, would make his own ironic riposte to Swinging London, and the establishment’s revenge, with his painting Swingeing London, which showed Mick Jagger and the art-dealer Robert Fraser being driven away in handcuffs after the Jagger drugs trial of 1967.

For a teenager, music was the medium through which all these cultural upheavals were filtered. The Who’s My Generation was a two-fingered salute to anyone who dared question the new tyranny of youth, while the group’s climactic destruction of their equipment was a direct homage to the “auto-destructive” art of Gustav Metzger.

Shock. It was all the fashion, in drama as well as music and art. The Theatre of the Absurd and the Theatre of Cruelty sought to break down the “hierarchical” barriers between performers and audience; to challenge bourgeois assumptions about such vital (for the time) questions as Britain’s support for America in the Vietnam War, and to test the limits of censorship – and, all too frequently, the audience’s patience.

In 1965, the Royal Court was obliged to turn itself temporarily into a private club to stage Edward Bond’s Saved, with its notorious scene of a baby being stoned to death. (The ruse did not prevent the theatre being prosecuted). The Telegraph’s W A Darlington reflected that “my only emotion was a cold disgust at being asked to sit through such a scene”. The Queen did not attend Saved. Her sole theatrical excursion in 1965 was to a production of Hello Dolly starring Mary Martin at the Drury Lane Theatre.

What all these disparate events signalled was a challenge to “the System”, as the jargon of the day had it, that would become as political as it was cultural.

Jim Haynes is largely forgotten now, but he was an important architect of what became known as “the underground”. An expatriate American, in 1959 Haynes opened The Paperback in Edinburgh, the first bookshop in Britain to stock the writings of the American “Beat” authors and Henry Miller at a time when his books were banned under the obscenity laws.

Moving to London, he was one of the founders in 1966 of IT, Britain’s first underground newspaper, and in the same year he established the Arts Lab in Drury Lane – London’s first space for the artistic “happenings” which so characterised the period. Its ideology, Haynes said, “was to never say the word ‘no’. And out of it, God knows what would happen, but whatever it was would be fun.” He might have been talking about the underground as a whole.

Once again, the Beatles were in the vanguard. At the time of Sgt Pepper, even the Queen reportedly remarked that “the Beatles are getting a little strange these days”.

Of course, it was to be short-lived. The underground fractured into political radicalism, drug-bound apathy and naked commercial ambition. True to Hamilton’s dictum, Pop’s counter-culture had become big business, revolt had become style. On September 27 1968, the “love rock” musical Hair opened in London – a day after the abolition of the Lord Chamberlain’s role as theatre censor. Hair was the first theatrical production to portray full-frontal nudity on a West End stage, the first rock musical, and certainly the first to include songs celebrating hashish, LSD and, as one song title succinctly put it, Sodomy.

Outside the theatre, hippies – real ones – protested at the “exploitation” of the counter-culture. But I loved it. To an impressionable 17 year-old it felt like a celebration of all that was transgressive, idealistic – and fun. I didn’t realise it was an epitaph.

Four months later, the Beatles gave their last public performance on the rooftop of Apple’s headquarters in Savile Row, London. Swinging London, and the revolution, was officially dead, and the Sixties with it. Hard political and economic reality were just around the corner. But nothing would ever be the same again.

1960s bestselling albums

1 Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band The Beatles 1967

2 The Sound of Music Soundtrack 1965

3 With The Beatles The Beatles 1963

4 Abbey Road The Beatles 1969

5 South Pacific Soundtrack 1962

6 Beatles for Sale The Beatles 1964

7 A Hard Day’s Night The Beatles 1964

8 Rubber Soul The Beatles 1965

9 Rubber Soul The Beatles 1965

10 West Side Story Soundtrack 1962

Bestselling singles

1 She Loves You The Beatles 1963

2 I Want To Hold Your Hand The Beatles 1963

3 Tears Ken Dodd 1965

4 Can’t Buy Me Love The Beatles 1964

5 I Feel Fine The Beatles 1964

6 The Carnival Is Over Seekers 1965

7 Day Tripper/We Can Work It Out The Beatles 1965

8 Release Me Engelbert Humperdinck 1967

9 It’s Now Or Never Elvis Presley1960

10 Green, Green Grass Of Home Tom Jones 1966

Top movies

1 The Sound of Music 1965

2 The Jungle Book 1968

3 Thunderball 1966

4 Mary Poppins 1964

5 Goldfinger 1964

6 Ben Hur 1960

7 The Guns of Navarone 1961

8 Doctor Zhivago 1967

9 One Hundred and One Dalmatians 1961

10 Oliver! 1963

Top West End shows

1 Black and White Minstrels 1962

2 Oliver! 1960

3 The Sound of Music 1961

4 Creeper 1961

5 Charlie Girl 1965

6 Pajama Tops 1969

7 Canterbury Tales 1968

8 Boeing-Boeing 1960

9 Fiddler on the Roof 1967

10 There’s a Girl in My Soup 1966