In
1990, The Proclaimers released a four-track EP, the lead track of which was a
cover of King of the Road, Roger Miller’s countrified blue-collar paean to life
as a permanent road trip, cheap, easy and positively revelling in its
commitment-free existence. Released by Miller in 1964, the song’s crossover
smash hit status chimed with the new freedoms that the decade was starting to
open up. As such freedoms trickled down the class scale, the song’s breezy
optimism was the perfect soundtrack to male middle-aged spread turned to a collective
mid-life crisis which suggested that, for ‘a man of means by no means’, as
Miller would have it, nothing was impossible.
In
its own home-boy way, the sentiments of Miller’s song chimed with the
burgeoning would-be revolution that had been building, and which would bear
various fruit over the next few years. This saw 1967’s so-called Summer of Love
explode into the seismic events of the following year, when pop, protest and
proletarianism saw workers, students and the intellectual avant-garde
collaborate for a fleeting alliance down at the mythical barricades just before
the tanks rolled in.
‘Be Realistic:
Demand the Impossible!’ went one of the Situationist slogans daubed on Parisian
walls during the May ’68 uprising that took everyday spectacle onto the
streets. ‘Under the Cobbles, the Beach’ went another, it’s misty-eyed desire to
reclaim a more primitive existence beyond the inner-city grid systems later
forming an umbilical link with the wilful nihilism of punk. One might also
argue the latter phrase was misinterpreted by global urbanists on a grand scale
as an excuse for regeneration, gentrification and the property developers’
paradise currently burying whatever beaches are left flat out of existence.
Whatever,
it was the third track on the Proclaimers King of the Road EP that caught the
real spirit of the ‘60s. The second track, a cover of Lefty Frizell’s Long
Black Veil, recorded by Johnny Cash in 1969, was a similar country classic
reinvented by Craig and Charlie Reid with a Caledonian common touch that has
consistently and quite rightly transcended their local origins to take the
global village by storm.
The
song that followed, Lulu Selling Tea, was a Reid brothers original which took
issue with how the 1960s as a decade had been immortalised. ‘May I be allowed
to voice dissent / Over the Sixties, and what they meant’, the song began,
before going into a nostalgic reverie of pop cultural totems, from George Best,
to Mother’s Pride bread, Batman on TV and the eponymous Lulu selling tea. It’s
key line, ‘Now I don’t recall too much long hair’, may not have referenced 1968
specifically, but it nevertheless served up a small-town working-class
corrective to the myth-making.
Lulu’s
own accidental flirtation with the counter-culture wouldn’t come until 1969, when
her Saturday night prime time TV show featured Jimi Hendrix as a guest. With
Lulu and Hendrix scheduled to do a duet, Hendrix stopped mid-way through
playing Hey Joe for an impromptu take on Cream’s Sunshine of Your Love.
In a
largely two-channel country, TV moments like this were remembered. Indeed, this
was how most people experienced the 1960s, with the fetishised fashions of
swinging London as far away and as untouchable as the events on the streets of
Paris and Prague.
The
same year as the Jimi Hendrix incident, Lulu won the Eurovision Song Contest with
Boom Bang-a-Bang, the first ever joint winner of the contest alongside entries
from Spain, the Netherlands and France. The song’s title was as nonsensical as
the previous year’s winner, La, la, la, won by Spanish singer, Massiel. Yet, for
all the infectious appeal of its hormonally-charged bubble-gum melody, the
phrase Boom Bang-a-Bang itself was a piece of accidental Dadaism, a pop-powered
grenade worthy of Kurt Schwitters. So seemingly powerful was the song’s
unintended incendiary air that it was one of several records banned from
airplay during the 1991 Gulf War.
Prior
to Boom Bang-a-Bang and in ’68 itself, Lulu had a hit with I’m A Tiger. Ronnie
Scott and Marty Wilde’s jaunty lyric probably wasn’t a homage to the café scene
in Lindsay Anderson’s film, If…, released earlier that year, in which Malcolm
McDowell’s public school rebel Mick Travis cavorts with Christine Noonan’s
surly waitress beside the juke box which plays the Sanctus from the Missa Luba
performed by a Congolese choir. The iconic image of McDowell wielding a machine
gun flanked by Noonan at the film’s end became a favourite pin-up of many a bedroom-bound
teenage revolutionary. ‘The rest is up to you’ said Anderson following a
screening of If… at Cannes.
One
of the biggest hit records of 1968 was Those Were the Days, an Anglicisation of
an early twentieth century Russian romance sung by Welsh chanteuse Mary Hopkin.
Hopkin had been recommended to Paul McCartney by Twiggy after being spotted on TV
talent show Opportunity Knocks.
As
one of the first artists to be signed to the Beatles Apple label, McCartney
produced Hopkin’s version of Those Were the Days, which was a global smash that
went to number one for six weeks in the UK. With a lyric by Greenwich Village
folk singer Gene Raskin set to a melody by Russian composer Boris Fomin, the
song looks back with ennui at a time of youthful idealism, by September when it
hit the top spot, it already seemed to be sound-tracking an age just past.
Beyond
such seemingly saccharine chart-bound sounds, 1968 is remembered as the year of
Beggars Banquet by the Rolling Stones and the Beatles’ White Album. The cover
of the latter was designed by Richard Hamilton, and was a long way from Peter
Blake’s groovy collage for Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band the year
before.
Beggars
Banquet opened with the ethnographic diabolism of Sympathy for the Devil, a
song recorded in June of that year, when its genesis was filmed by Jean Luc
Godard in his sprawling counter-cultural cut-up, One Plus One. The film also
looked at black power, Marxism and deconstructing power in a film later
compromised by producers, who re-edited and re-titled the film as the more
commercial Sympathy for the Devil. In light of the events of May 1968, the film
was pulled from its scheduled screening at Cannes, and on release was derided
by Situationist-on-high Guy Debord as ‘the work of cretins’ and derided as what
Tom Wolfe would later dub radical chic.
The
second side of Beggars Banquet opened with Street Fighting Man, which Mick
Jagger wrote about Tariq Ali after attending an anti-war rally at London’s US embassy,
attended by some 25,000 people. The spirit of events in Paris too filtered
through the song.
On
the White Album, meanwhile, John Lennon’s song Revolution 1 was explicit
enough, but the tape experiment of Revolution 9 took flux-inspired musical
concrete into the mainstream. Also on the album was Piggies, George Harrison’s copper-baiting
nursery rhyme-styled singalong favoured by Charles Manson and family alongside
another track from the album, Helter Skelter. Both albums were pretty grown-up
stuff.
Elsewhere,
Waiting for the Sun by the Doors contained both The Unknown Soldier and Five to
1, featuring the legend-sealing line, ‘No-one here Gets Out Alive’, which
became even more loaded when Jim Morrison died in a Parisian bath-tub three
years later. Then there was White Light White, the Velvet Underground’s post
Warhol second album, which maxed-out the volume into something fuzzier than the
sunshine-eyed productions people turned on, tuned in and dropped out to
elsewhere.
None
of this may have been in Bomb Culture, Jeff Nuttall’s still seminal frontline
study of the counter-culture, which was published in 1968, but it remains a
vital study of how things got to this point. Written in Nuttall’s muscular and
deeply personal voice, it wasn’t afraid to lay bare the era’s scars just as the
flesh that was now possible onstage after the abolition of the Lord Chamberlain’s
archaic censorship.
All
of the 1960s luminaries good, bad and ugly turn up in Bomb Culture, along with
variations of every anecdote that turns up in every book about the British
counter-culture ever, so you realise just how small and necessarily incestuous
the scene was RD Laing, Alexander Trocchi and Tom McGrath, the unholy trinity
of Scotland’s counter-culture, are in there, with all that stuff about
anti-psychiatry and Project Sigma that has by turns lionised, rejected and
reassessed ever since.
Kevin
Williamson’s Rebel Inc imprint picked up on Trocchi in the 1990s, republishing Scotland’s
original Beat figure’s neglected novels, Young Adam and Helen and Desire. Young
Adam was later adapted for the big screen by David Mackenzie, with Ewan
McGregor, Tilda Swinton and Peter Mullan.
RD
Laing was reimagined on film in Mad to Be Normal, Robert Mullan’s film, which
starred David Tennant as Laing. More interestingly, artist Luke Fowler was nominate
for the Turner Prize for a body of work shown at Inverleith House in Edinburgh that
included All Divided Selves, a film collage drawn from archive footage of
Laing.
As
for McGrath, it would take a decade, but he would go on to take the spirit of
’68 to Glasgow by way of the Third Eye Centre, the city’s first real arts lab,
which helped house a plethora of underground artistic activity in the city.
Nuttall
would do something similar to Bomb Culture a couple of decades later with his
less sung tome, Art and the Degradation of Awareness, another phlegmatic
critique of received orthodoxies in a post-punk, post YBA climate.
Nuttall
had been a key member of The People Show, the very English performance art
troupe he co-founded in 1966, originally performing in the basement of underground
mecca, Better Books, on Charing Cross Road. At various points in 1968, Nuttall
and co took People Shows numbers 3, 11, 20, 21, 8 and 19 to the Traverse
Theatre, Edinburgh’s then revolutionary studio theatre still in its original
home up a close in James Court, where it had opened in a former brothel five
years before.
If Bomb
Culture marked the end of something, a necessary taking stock before the real
revolution began, as the Proclaimers make clear in Lulu Selling Tea, such seismic
activities would take a while to affect a couple of young shavers growing up in
Fife. Their generation had other concerns.
In
truth, culturally speaking, the spirit of ’68 didn’t really start taking shape
until the ‘70s, when the strung-out post-hippy come-down subsided and people
started to agitate, educate and organise. When punk went boom bang-a-bang then
La la la almost a decade later, all those Situationist slogans had come of age.
Lulu selling tea might have been a lifetime away, but, in the words of Hopkin,
by way of Raskin and Fomin, those were the Days, my friend. Those were the
days.
Bella Caledonia, May 2018
ends
Comments