In the air

I’m pleased that the Broadway opening of Hair at the Biltmore Theatre on 29th April has been noted in Radio 4’s 1968: Day by Day. According to John Tusa, ‘Broadway’s defences crumble[d]‘ as the ‘first Rock Musical’ arrived after playing Off-Broadway for six months. (Not only that, Sir John: Hair was the first theatre piece ever to transfer from Off- to On-Broadway.) However, while it’s great to hear a burst of Nina Simone, the rather clumsy statement ‘at [Hair's] heart: Nina Simone’s classic – Ain’t Got No…I Got Life‘ could give the erroneous impression that she wrote the song. It was Gerome Ragni, James Rado and Galt MacDermot’s ‘classic’ before it was ‘hers’.

Forty years and one day later, Albert Hoffman, the man who invented LSD, died. He was 102. He must have been doing something right.

Forty years and two days later, the city formerly known as ‘Swinging’ London seems inclined, on May Day, to elect as its Mayor a man who does a very convincing impersonation of an imbecile – which, of course, he can’t be because he was ‘educated’ at Eton and Balliol. And it just doesn’t get any better than that, does it? If, forty years on, so many caps can still willingly be doffed at a pig’s bladder on a stick, did 1968 change anything…?