The Sixties were when they packaged up counter-revolution and sold it to us as revolution.
The Sixties were when the establishment observed the aspirations of the millions of working class kids coming out of the grammar schools and art colleges and held up a hand that said: Thus far and no further.
The Sixties were when we were asked if we really wanted our wives and servants to read about Lady Chatterley.
The Sixties were the time when, as Frank Zappa pointed out so perceptively, the CIA attacked the new generation with chemical warfare. (And, I might add, when the HIV/AIDS virus escaped from the US biological warfare labs – either accidentally or deliberately, the jury is still out, though the evidence suggests the latter – to attack its primary targets, the gays and black Africa.)
The Sixties were when, like Allen Ginsberg, “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness” (though that was originally written in the mid-1950s). We mourned, and still mourn, those who died on the front line, Hendrix and Brian Jones and Mama Cass (and, most recently, Davey Graham, cos the Sixties aren’t over yet).
The Sixties is a book written by Jenny Diski, who doesn’t seem to know shit about what really went down in the decade she revisits, 40 years on.
Of course, there were always people like Diski around as we fought off the police in Grosvenor Square* and tried to overcome the restraints that had so restricted our parents from fulfilling the promise of modernism. For the Sixties didn’t just happen at midnight on December 31, 1959; the ferment between the wars, from Picasso to Dick Sheppard’s “peace is indivisible”, Beveridge, and the 1944 Education Act, were all part of the same story.
What Diski’s narrative does not engage is the sheer hard work that went into the demo’s and be-ins and boutiques that were the hedonistic tip at the top of the Sixties pyramid. While she and her kind were lying around in squats zonked out of their brains, or shopping in Biba, we in the vanguard were working our arses off to keep the show on the road.
Yes, we used drugs. Like the graphic designers for rock magazines who needed piles of coke to get them out on time; and yes, they’d then smoke a joint to get over the inevitable come-down.
And yes, the counter-revolution won, but as Jim Morrison said, they might have the guns, but we’ve got the numbers.
A truncated version of this review was published in the Morning Star.
* I might also have mentioned the Hyde Park "free Hoppy" demo, and in particular the time we blocked the News of the World from getting its newsprint supplies delivered in protest at its campaign to "get" Mick Jagger. Though I was on both actions, the driving force in these campaigns came from below, and was not driven primarily by politicos like me. Knowing my experience, however, I was asked to provide my "expertise" in their organisation.
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