Stardust Memories
Page 1
STARDUST MEMORIES
Talking about my Generation
RAY CONNOLLY
Contents
Introduction
Roger McGough
Jimi Hendrix
Chris Farlowe
Mick Jagger
Pete Townshend
Paul McCartney
Ringo Starr
George Best
Yoko Ono
Jean Shrimpton
Jane Birkin
Iain Quarrier
Twiggy
Janis Joplin
Ken Kesey
Charlie Watts
Elvis Presley
Keith Richard
Joni Mitchell
Britt Ekland
Dusty Springfield
Paul McCartney
Stevie Wonder
Ronnie Hawkins
Germaine Greer
Ann Summers
Patti D’Arbanville
John Lennon
Michael Caine
David Puttnam
Joe Frazier
Spike Milligan
James Baldwin
Muhammad Ali
Peter Fonda
Michael Parkinson
Garnett and Loach
Marc Bolan
Ned Sherrin
David Storey
David Bailey
David Bowie
Emperor Rosko
Jane Seymour
Michael White
Alan Parker
Don McCullin
Sarah Miles
Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber
Bianca Jagger
Trick or Treat?
Introduction
The era of the sixties was always slightly out of sync. It began late — with an extraordinary flourish in 1963 when the Beatles, That Was The Week That Was, The Profumo Affair and the Great Train Robbery competed in an atmosphere of giggling frivolity for newspaper headlines; and ended in the early seventies in disillusionment, growing unemployment and accelerating inflation.
This book is about fifty of the people whose names made headlines during those years. For the most part they were men and women from my own age group, young people who saw the opportunity to make waves during that decade of extravagance, and whose images we then found reflected everywhere.
Although the cult leaders of the sixties produced much that seemed dazzlingly refreshing, history will, I suspect, largely judge the era as a time when style dominated. This book is therefore also about the style makers of the sixties: the people who dictated fashion and whose words, no matter how silly or banal, became the subject of earnest consideration by bishops, academics, politicians and pundits. In fact the sixties could well be said to have reached an apotheosis of daftness in 1967 when, after release from prison on a drugs offence, Mick Jagger was flown by helicopter to a secret meeting in the English countryside where he was gently interrogated before Granada television cameras by Malcolm Mugger-idge, the Bishop of Woolwich and the Editor of The Times. It was a summit conference of consummate silliness even by sixties standards. Today it is inconceivable that the attitudes and catchpenny beliefs of a pop singer would be of interest to anyone other than his most demented fans. But the explosion of youth culture after 1963 contained so many elements which were in direct confrontation with the establishment, that no fashionable fuddy-duddy felt secure until he had embraced the new young meteors and, by so doing, sanitised their little revolt.
But from where did this generation of metoric young emerge? What were the pre-determining factors which made the ‘swinging sixties’ possible? Why, one might ask, were the sixties so different, if indeed they were, from any other decade?
In my view there were very definite socio-economic reasons for the emergence of the sixties as a definable era. The Beatles did not happen in a vacuum. The hippy generation did not mushroom out of nothing, and the permissive society (for want of a better description) was not, despite the insistencies of many, purely the result of media propaganda. All of the changes, fads and fashions which took place in the sixties (and in this respect the boundaries of this book relate mainly to the performing arts) had very long roots which stretched back at least to the Second World War. In the decade of the sixties, owing to a combination of reasons, a great amount of surface change occurred in a very short space of time which was chronicled everywhere by a narcissisticly self-obsessed generation. It was this self-obsession that made the sixties special for me.
Although peoples in different countries experienced different tragedies, traumas and deprivations during the Second World War, they all shared one goal which was a general desire that once the war was over the children of the combatants should inherit a better future. In Britain this hope for a fairer future for all was translated into votes in the 1945 election landslide for the Attlee Labour Government. But a year earlier the seeds for at least one major contributory factor to the sixties had been sown with the passing of the 1944 Education Act, a branch of the Welfare State which (in theory) promised state-aided education to all capable of benefiting from it up to, and including, university level. At one stroke, an act of parliament created a generation of achievers. While a previous generation had been shuttled from high unemployment in the early thirties to the forces in the forties, the children of the war years were the benefactors of an idealism born out of a shared hardship. In 1960 there were more university places chasing fewer candidates than at any previous time. When Harold Macmillan said during his election campaign of 1959 ‘You’ve never had it so good’ he was speaking generally about the growth in prosperity in the late fifties. He might, just as accurately, have turned to the teenagers of that time, the war babies, and said: ‘No previous generation was ever so lucky’. Because in the early sixties the tree of opportunity was burdened as never before with the fruits of possibility. The economies of the entire Western world were rapidly expanding and the children of the war, and the post war bulge, were waiting to inherit the rewards of the labour and sacrifices of their parents’ generation.
Much has been written of the way the class barriers supposedly buckled, then crumbled, during the sixties. This is partly true, although it is interesting to observe how rapidly the barriers were once again erected as soon as adversity threatened. By and large, the achievers of the sixties were people from lower middle-class and working-class backgrounds. The 1944 Education Act, and the ideals of the creators of the Welfare State, produced a generation of achievers. And the expanding economy of the sixties, particularly in the high profile areas of publishing, television, advertising and the arts, gave those achievers the opportunities to restyle (at least for a short time) the surface look of society.
Wealthy young people had always expected and enjoyed a period of self-fulfilment between school and marriage or career but that had never been the lot of the working class before the early sixties. The smart young people about town in any decade before the sixties were invariably those from privileged backgrounds. Working-class people had traditionally sought trades and secure jobs: while the middle class had instilled into their children the dogmas of the protestant ethic of hard work, thrift and sound business practice. So the young meteors who arrived in the public’s consciousness in the early sixties came mainly from a class which had hitherto not been expected to enjoy youthful years of irresponsibility and self absorption. And most of them were bright enough to recognise the opportunity when it came along.
Would the Beatles ever have existed if Paul McCartney had not been able to spend a year in the sixth form of the Liverpool Institute while John Lennon was next door mislaying two years at Liverpool Art College? In any previous time they might well have found themselves either conscripted into the army or propelled in the direction of the
local employment exchange by their respective parent and guardian. But both, like so many of their contemporaries, were instead given the opportunity to stay young and follow their personal whims — a common enough situation with the Brideshead privileged of other generations, but something completely novel in Liverpool in the early sixties. At the same time, Mick Jagger was taking advantage of his own scholastic achievements with a place at the London School of Economics, Pete Townshend was at Ealing Art College, Roger McGough at Hull University and Tony Garnett and Ken Loach were becoming graduate trainees at the BBC.
Sixties people were, therefore, somewhat different from previous generations of fashionable people in that not only were they reasonably well educated, but they also came from relatively humble backgrounds. It was a time rich with unique opportunities for that achieving generation, and particularly for those entrepreneurs anxious to entertain the legions of their contemporaries unable to grasp the reins of influence. In the late fifties the buoyant economies of the West had led, firstly in America, to the identification of the vast new and hitherto untapped market — teenagers. And by the early sixties the same socio-economic forces were spreading to this side of the Atlantic. In television it led to the setting up of BBC 2, and opportunities for all the young lions of the BBC graduate training schemes to land themselves positions of authority within the new network; in advertising it led to the creation of swish sounding jobs for young graduates like ‘account executive’ (chaps from art college usually became ‘copywriters’); while in the pop world it led to the creation of millionaire idols.
Looked at from a purely economic viewpoint, rock music almost seems to have been designed to garner the maximum possible profitability from the minimum possible outlay. Before the fifties, rock music could hardly have existed, being dependent for its structure and style upon the over-amplification of three, possibly four instruments. A popular performer in earlier decades could make a living touring the country with an orchestra, but big bands are notoriously expensive to keep on the road and profits would be hard earned. But with the plugging of a guitar directly into an amplifier in the early fifties, the days of the thirty-piece orchestra were limited. Now four boys could make enough music to fill a whole stadium. No one needed big bands any more. More than that, no one wanted to listen to big bands any more. Rock and roll represented a democratisation of music. More or less anyone could form a group, and more or less anyone did. Ninety nine per cent were, as one would expect, terrible. But the best appealed to a world audience like no other music before. Rock and roll became the music style of the late twentieth century, first through Elvis and then, more importantly, through the groups of the sixties. It is not, I think, coincidental that the great pop boom of the sixties coincided with a flood of cheap transistor radios on the market. Suddenly music was as portable as a paperback book. Not only could four boys with guitars fill a dance hall, they could now be carried easily on the shoulder, a cosmetic case of audio emotions.
While the fifties had produced remote rock heroes, the sixties’ generation of idols, all of whom had first been influenced by the sounds of 1956, were bright, accessible, impudent, well educated men by comparison. And while Presley’s generation remained humble and grateful throughout life (at least during their public utterances) the Beatles and Stones were grateful to no one. They accepted what happened to them as their rightful deserts, just as they had accepted the possibilities of further education. There was never anything humble about Lennon, Jagger, Dylan, Joplin or Jim Morrison. In another age Dylan and Lennon might feasibly have made a living out of the written word. In the sixties they used music to articulate the viewpoint of the generation of achievers who followed a half decade behind them.
In their time both Dylan and Lennon, along with the whole of the pop music movement and the BBC, were accused of corrupting youth by encouraging the spread of the ‘permissive society’. This was, of course, nonsense. The permissive society came about as a direct result of the introduction of the Pill in 1963. For the first time women could control their own fertility, and the walls of self-restraint tumbled for a time. The generation of achievers were finding more places for girls in the universities than ever before, and full employment encouraged women to defer marriage and child-rearing, particularly in the educated middle classes. The permissive society was, I think, a period of behavioural uncertainty before the re-ordering and institutionalising of sexual mores following the introduction of a totally efficient method of female birth control. Indeed, so far reaching in its effects upon society is the Pill (and allied devices), that it would have been extraordinary if there had not been a period of confusion, since in a decade the history of man’s relationships with woman was completely overthrown. Partly as a result of the liberation afforded women by the introduction of the Pill, the various women’s movements of the late sixties and seventies came about, but these particular social changes are so vast in their implications that I believe it will take more than a generation or two before a new order becomes properly stabilised and recognisable.
The sixties meant different things to different people, and indeed the student riots of 1968 seemed a long journey away from the pop effervescence of 1963. I think both phenomena sprang from the same ground. The early sixties represented youthful hope: in America President Kennedy’s PR machine processed enthusiasm and optimism and sent thousands of young Americans off to work for the Peace Corps. In Britain Harold Wilson promised a white-hot age of technology. But by the end of the decade the escalating war in Vietnam and the fading heat of technology was pointing a lie at what had once seemed so seductive an illusion. In France the students took to the barricades, and in America the National Guard was called out to quell campus riots and anti-war protests.
What had happened was that the generation of achievers was not content to be merely the pawns of a tolerant paternalistic society. They wanted to run their own lives and universities and were no longer content to be the tools of the establishment. If the unpopularity of the Vietnam War was due to any single thing, it was to the enlightening effect of education. In the late sixties America found that you could not educate a large proportion of young people to the level of university and then expect them to go willingly to war in a country which posed no apparent threat to their way of life. No wonder there were so many draft dodgers. Had the cannon fodder of the First World War been as well informed of the issues involved as were the reluctant combatants of Vietnam, it is likely that the course of history would have been considerably different.
Although the sixties can generally be said to have begun in 1963, it is rather more difficult to point to any specific date as the moment when the era ended. Certainly, as I have already pointed out, the youthful euphoria of a pop mad, mini-skirted young world had evaporated well before the end of the decade, and the excesses of the flower power summer of 1967 were, on reflection, little more than a crowning moment of mass silliness. Romantics will, no doubt, point to the break-up of the Beatles in 1970 as the end of the era, but I think that is to saddle the Beatles with rather more of a historical role than even they would wish to claim. Instead I prefer to consider the decline of the sixties as a gradual retreat into realism from the student riots of 1968 until the Arab/Israeli War of 1973. Neither the jargon of the sixties, ‘Love and Peace’, nor the songs and fashions counted for anything against the continuing outbreaks of war.
That decade, particularly for the English, was an attractive illusion: a time when the barriers seemed to fall for a while, allowing the cockiest of rabble to race through. But with the growing unemployment of the seventies, the optimism died and the doors were once again closed in the face of impudent youth. For a while, those who could deluded themselves that all kinds of things were possible, and that a fairer society lay just around the corner. Such pipe dreams have no place in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain of the eighties.
* * *
During the sixties I wrote well over three hundred and fifty profiles for a variety of pu
blications (but mainly for the London Evening Standard) and was fortunate enough to have what might be called a ringside seat at the unfolding of those times. The pieces chosen for this collection are not necessarily the best written, but they do, I think, paint a picture of those years, albeit largely from the viewpoint of entertainment and popular arts.
The title of this book, Stardust Memories, came about after I wrote an article in the Standard in 1982 admitting that many of the characters and incidents in my screenplay for the film Stardust were based upon people I had interviewed for that paper. Stardust told the story of an English rock band who took America and the world by storm in the sixties, and the film traced the development and eventual death of the group’s leader, played by David Essex. At the time of the film’s release I was constantly asked whether the film was based upon the Beatles, the Stones or Hendrix. The answer was, of course, all and none. The part played by David Essex was a composite character drawn from hundreds of pieces I had written. Stardust Memories is a collection of some of those pieces.
RAY CONNOLLY
1983
February 1967
Roger Mcgough
Roger McGough walks inside the public bar, sidesteps a cloister of students with foam-tipped beards, and gingerly approaches the bar with the stuttering gait of a blind man walking on cinders.
‘No one in tonight.’ He glances sheepishly over his shoulder into the saloon bar of the Philharmonic, half afraid, perhaps, that someone he doesn’t want to see might be in there. ‘This place will be packed later on. Half of Liverpool 8 turn up every night. The boys come for a drink, and the girls come because the boys are here.’
He smiles, takes off his corduroy peaked cap and black donkey jacket. A galaxy of badges, suggesting loyalty to the Highway Patrol, the Boys and Girls Club and the Committee of 100, cover the cigarette pocket of his denim jacket.
‘Sometimes I feel a bit ashamed of them.’ Then pointing to one which says simply LEADER: ‘I took that off another leader.’