1967, Sgt Pepper, The Beatles, a few of their friends and me.

Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band cover design by Peter Blake (1967)

One of the many great moments I remember from the summer of 1967,  the so-called Summer Of Love, was the release of that pioneering, musically brilliant and era-defining album, The Beatles' monumental Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. I bought it on the day of its release, 1st June 1967, and, without exaggeration, I have to say that I was flabbergasted. There had never been any album like it in my limited experience and it became THE album I played all year and for many years afterwards. It was the first time a non-classical music album made it onto my list of great musical artworks. Yes, I know, I was an opinionated teenager who had all the answers in those days and I hadn't yet discovered jazz.

Moody adolescent teenage Wolf, 1967

My turntable alternated between Sgt Pepper and another album released that year, Pierre Boulez's revelationary recording of Debussy's orchestral masterpiece La Mer. The Debussy performance showed me that Debussy was indeed the exciting genius that I saw in the great Ken Russell film, Debussy.

Oliver Reed as Claude Debussy in Debussy, directed by Ken Russell (BBC Television, 1965)

He was, as that, at his best,  most exciting of directors, Ken Russell showed us, a lot more than an atmospheric picture-painter. Both albums are still honoured in my collection but now they are on CD and joined by many other "couldn't-live-without" albums. For me still, The Beatles with Sgt Pepper crossed the line into high art and brought the rock album with them. These were exciting times for a moody teenager - The Beatles, Pierre Boulez and Ken Russell was probably liquor much too strong for the lad.

Twenty years after The Beatles' album debuted  - with that famous line 'It was twenty years ago today Sgt Pepper taught the band to play" - I sat back and watched television because the documentary that I had worked on for nearly two years claimed the ITV screen in peak-time for two hours in what was claimed to have been the most expensive television documentary ever made. The Granada Television film was called, appropriately enough, 'It was twenty years ago today" and it was. The programme was then transmitted around the world on the correct anniversary release date for each country. It was one of the highlights of my television career and  an extraordinary opportunity for me to relive that 1967 experience in adult life. It was my chance over the preceding months to meet and film many of the heroes of my youth, most of whom are still iconic figures from modern popular culture, from the surviving members of The Beatles, The Byrds and the Mamas and Papas to some of the leaders of the literary avant garde, Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs as well as legendary political activists Dr Timothy Leary, Abbie Hoffman and Dutch provo anarchist Robert Jasper Grootveld. People often ask me about the people I met at that time and I keep promising myself to write about it at more length. Not here though today but I will, I promise, when I find the time. Enough said, maybe, that the film tried to place The Beatles' album into the cultural and political spirit of the time. I'm very happy and proud that it is still used in colleges as an educational tool.

Peter Fonda interviewed for It was 20 Years Ago Today, in Los Angeles, 1986

Looking through some old photographs from the time, I found these shots of me interviewing Hollywood actor Peter Fonda, a leading figure in the Los Angeles demonstrations in 1967 and San Francisco actor Peter Coyote, once a member of the anarchic San Francisco Mime Troop. I have fond memories of my time with both these gentlemen and with many of the others, especially Beatle, George Harrison, Byrd, Roger McGuinn, Beat poet, Allen Ginsberg and  anarchist activist, Robert Jasper Grootveld who all took time out to both educate and entertain me.

Peter Coyote interviewed for It Was 20 Years Ago Today in Marin County, San Francisco, 1986

So the year 1967 keeps coming back into my life as a major event and influence. It is therefore no surprise that I should've chosen that year as the setting for my first novel, the recently published Stephen Dearsley's Summer Of Love (see below). I think I shall try to share some other memories of that time over the next few blogs. It was a truly unique epoque.

Here though is a clip showing the opening of that documentary, It Was Twenty Years Ago Today. For me it is the holiday movie of a lifetime.

All You Need Is Love: Stephen Dearsley's Summer Of Love is published today.

I was young in 1967, probably a lot younger than I realized. I was moved by the so-called Summer Of Love but I'm sure I can't have understood the half of it. I felt it though and some of those feelings must have made it into my novel, Stephen Dearsley's Summer Of Love. I suspect a small part of me is there, hidden somewhere between those pages hoping not to be discovered now that the book is published and Stephen Dearsley, formerly "my" Stephen Dearsley, is out there with you all or with any of you that decide to read about him and his momentous young man's summer.

I might know Stephen a lot better than I know the moody young man in the photograph at the top of this blog. Who I was then or, maybe, who I was trying to be then in the Summer of 1967 may have to remain a mystery to me as well as to the rest of you. I do remember though that even then I wanted one day to write a novel and to get it published as a paperback. That was very clear to me, as The Beatles sang that summer about love, it was easy. Young ambitions are not the mountains they look like from a distance. Those youthful summer days were for dreaming dreams. It would all be fine, it was easy. Well nothing's quite that easy and a lot of years have passed before that sultry summer dream came true.

I remember the ambition just as I remember a song from that year - both were vivid, thrilling and, yes, I guess, erotic dreams and both, I was sure, would come true. It was easy.

The song, of course, was all You Need Is Love by The Beatles, first performed on the first ever simultaneous live international television relay on the 25th June 1967 to an estimated audience of 400 million people. It was, naturally, the answer. Love really was all you needed if everyone agreed to go along with that thought or so it seemed that day.  I was excited, maybe even more than that,  to be there as a witness to a moment of revelation. Then came the new Beatles album Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and, for me at least, life was never to be quite the same again.

The Beatles, 25th June 1967

It wasn't, as we all found out, that easy after all, love or people agreeing that love was all you needed, but it turned enough of us on at that time to make a difference. It wasn't just the music but the whole counter-cultural shift that those records revealed to my innocently voracious eyes and ears. Even though The Beatles split up, became disillusioned, some of them died, were even murdered and the others grew old, I still can't listen to that song of songs without the same thrill of optimism and the spirit of delight that awoke in me then and has never fully died.

When I think of Stephen Dearsley, I often say 'poor Stephen' and hope that he forgives me for all I have done to him. If you do decide to read my novel, be kind to him and try to think well of those idealists and dreamers who once thought achieving the sublime was easy.






It was a sublime moment too this afternoon when I first laid hands on a copy of my book. There's no other feeling like this one.

1967 and all that.

I've been having a bit of a sort in my computer files and found some of my old research photographs for my novel, Stephen Dearsley's Summer Of Love, published on the 31 October - yay!
As you can probably tell the book is based in that vivid year 1967 and these photographs sum up some of the moods that I was trying to capture.

My computer clear-out has failed of course because I really can't delete these even though the text of the novel is now about to go off to the printers and I shall have to live with it as it is. As Pontius Pilate said, what I have written I have written.

I was a teenage schoolboy in 1967 but I knew that I was experiencing the dawning of something exciting and, probably, life-changing and I couldn't wait to get on with it. I was, I think, a little jealous of those, just ahead of me,  like the young man below, who could get out there,  on the road to what I assumed would be that difficult word 'freedom'. I don't know the people in these photographs but then again I do.

I could see them all around me and read about them too even in my edition of Wordsworth's The Prelude (1805)


OH! pleasant exercise of hope and joy!

For mighty were the auxiliars which then stood 

Upon our side, we who were strong in love! 

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, 

But to be young was very heaven!--Oh! times, 

In which the meagre, stale, forbidding ways 

Of custom, law, and statute, took at once 

The attraction of a country in romance!

Wordsworth was writing about the French Revolution but his words rang true for me when, not entirely wrongly, I felt that we too were on the edge of a glorious revolution.

Since then, of course, the so-called Summer Of Love has been much maligned or, worse, trivialised. Whatever its legacy, it was a thrilling moment in time - one which I attempted to write about with some trepidation.

I don't know where I was, quite literally, when this photograph was taken. Presumably, judging by the length of my hair, it was a couple of years later after I had moved on from those idealistic schooldays when I used to listen to the excitingly new Beatles' Sgt Pepper Pepper album and dream the dream.

Wherever that was, whatever I was on and whoever I was with, I think I must have got the message.