Uncanny. Just as I finish reading In the Sixties by Barry Miles (London: Jonathon Cape, 2002), BBC London’s evening TV news bulletin reports on a visit by Yoko Ono to a ‘re-creation’ in Soho of Indica, the “gallery where John met Yoko”. Indica was, of course, a bookshop and gallery run by John Dunbar (then married to Marianne Faithfull) and Barry Miles with financial input from Peter Asher of ‘Peter and Gordon’ fame. Peter was also the brother of actress Jane, who was then going out with Paul McCartney, who also helped to redecorate Indica, which rapidly became the place where everyone who was anyone hung out…
And so it goes on: and therein lies the problem with separating the wheat from the chaff of the plethora of memoirs of ‘counter-culturalists’ “who were there”. An affable and articulate man in the flesh, Barry Miles’ book provides an exceptionally detailed genealogy of what he considers to be the ‘counter-culture’ or ‘underground’, or ‘anti-Establishment culture’ (he uses the terms interchangeably). He chronicles who shared a flat with whom, who shared a bed with whom and who shared their drugs with whom.
What he never offers the reader, however, is any coherent explanation for a) why he and his friends behaved as they did b) why we should consider their behaviour in any way ‘counter-cultural’ c) why anyone other than those involved should now care about what they got up to.
As you may have gathered, I was highly frustrated by his book. The endless succession of drug anecdotes palls rapidly. Miles provides much evidence in favour of charges that none of us should care about (and publishers should not destroy so many trees over) the youthful japes of perhaps a couple of hundred predominantly bourgeois young people who happened to be in London between around 1965 and 1968. If only he could have told us why they did what they did, what it was that they actually achieved (or, at the very least, believed they were achieving), and why we should still care.
Marianne Faithfull’s autobiography, ghost-written with David Dalton (Faithfull, London: Michael Joseph, 1994) provides as many anecdotes and nearly as much genealogy. However, she casts a far more healthily cynical eye over what she now believes was actually going on. Miles is never po-faced and, to be fair to him, he has no need to justify why we should be interested in what a bunch of Beat poets (predominantly American), pop stars and minor aristocrats got up to while taking large amounts of drugs in their youth. After all, I am already interested: I bought his book, didn’t I?
What Marianne conveys better is the desire for exploration, experimentation, libertarianism and hedonism which underpinned the actions of her and many others. She conveys the combination of bourgeois rebellion, drugs (often courtesy of feckless minor aristocrats from the ‘Chelsea set’ which she identifies as the jeunesse doree) and pop star money which constituted her and Miles’ particular sub-section of the ‘counter-culture’.
Her candour about her naivete (even as she became a pop star) is refreshing:
“I was just a typical child of my time, I suppose – open to everything. I was being a teenager: curious, rebellious, in quest of the forbidden…From my little girl’s perspective, it was all connected to hipness. I was putting together a persona out of a lot of diverse elements. It was all unfocused. The sixties hadn’t happened yet, there were only hazy intimations of what was coming…I was hellbent on being there when it happened – whatever it was!” (p.21)
She stresses the importance of individual agency and the extent to which the ‘counter-culture’ could be considered merely the activities of a group of young people with too much time and money on their hands searching for individual and group identity through finding something (anything) to do:
“The threads of a dozen little scenes were invisibly twining together. Sixties London actually has its own origin myth. All these people – gallery owners, photographers, pop stars, aristos and assorted talented layabouts – more or less invented the scene in London, so I guess I was present at the Creation. The Ur myth was concocted, rather typically, in an espresso bar in Chelsea…Early in 1963, John {Dunbar} and a man called Paolo Leone, a left-wing beatnik type, and Barry Miles, John’s partner, put their heads together and hatched a plot. I was just a young girl watching these mad intellectuals all dressed in existential black charting the future of the globe.”
She offers, with more than a little self-irony, the closest we can perhaps get to a coherent ‘manifesto’: “They had it all worked out. ‘It’s going to be the psychic bloody centre of the world, man!’ ” (p.25)
I heard Miles acknowledge in a discussion at the Whitechapel Gallery in 2005 that, for him, the ‘counter-culture’ was predicated entirely upon the use of drugs. Drugs formed the key means of economic exchange and bound all participants in a culture of ‘oppositional’ behaviour. I took this to be a simplistic, ‘headline’ representation on his part. Unfortunately, 300 pages of his book offer us little more enlightenment or explanation than this, despite the claim of his publisher on the cover blurb that “this book tells the real story of the 1960s counterculture, from the inside”, or gushing Amazon reviewers, grateful that “Miles really makes you feel as though you are there.”
The moot point is: can such behaviour be considered in any way subversive in the political sense? Or was it merely a furtive and thrilling (for the participants) bond of illegal behaviour through drug use? It is difficult to conclude other than that what both Miles and Marianne describe was, more accurately, a sub-culture: on the strength of both books, it cannot be considered a ‘counter-culture’ at all.
“What have you got, 1968, that makes you so damned superior?”*
Posted by Jack on April 1, 2008
[*The title of this post is a quote from Hair. In a debate amongst the generations, Claude, the hero, is asked 'what have you got, 1968, that makes you so damned superior....and gives me such a headache?' He replies: 'well if you really want to know, 1948....', then launches into the number 'I Got Life' (made famous by Nina Simone, amongst others). Later versions of the prompt script from the London production reveal that this reference was updated during the five-year run of the show. Thus the line later became, for example : 'what have you got, 1971.....well if you really want to know 1951....']
I mentioned below that there was a comment in a recent BBC Radio 4 programme which I found somewhat dismissive, unjustified, and all too typical of the ‘canonical’ view of the key case studies of my thesis: the ‘Rock Operas’ of the late 1960s and early 1970s. In ‘London’, the first episode of the series 1968 – The Year of Revolutions, presented by John Tusa and first broadcast on Tuesday 18th March at 9am, the playwright (and, generally, astute social commentator) David Edgar discussed the state of theatre during that year. So far, so good. Surely, I thought to myself, Hair, (the undisputed British theatrical event of the year, which opened one day after theatre censorship ended in September) will finally warrant the recognition it deserves?
And lo, we got a burst of the original London cast singing Aquarius, while Edgar told us that the Lord Chamberlain putting down his blue pencil for the last time resulted in ‘this sudden whoosh of work, I mean things like the musical Hair which knew it was coming and wanted to be the first on the block. But much more importantly all kinds of radical theatre work from America in particular but also from Europe which just couldn’t have been performed in Britain which of course came much more in 1969 and subsequent years and transformed the British theatre.’
Mmmm. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Counter-Culture, Cultural commentary, PhD Thesis, Reductive/Nostalgia, TV, Film & Radio, Visuals | Comments Off