From Gill Hornby, writing for The Telegraph:
The Mamas and the Papas: Peace, love and unhappiness
Never has a decade been more pleased with itself than the Sixties. It was supposedly our Renaissance, our Cultural Revolution. But when did you last curl up with a Sixties novel, or stare in wonder at the beauty of a building thrown up then? It was that famous time of great political and social progress, and by the end of the decade racism was rife and feminism just a twinkle in a dolly bird’s eye. Sixties fans may mention, just drop it in, that there was some music. The Beatles might crop up, perhaps The Rolling Stones. Yes. And who had the Christmas number one in 1969? Rolf Harris, with his groundbreaking, radical Two Little Boys.
The Sixties was a very bad party, to which most of us were too young or uncool to be invited. But those who went, and did not die choking on their own vomit or bombing out their own brains, will not stop banging on about it. And yet little stories like Mackenzie Phillips’s memoirs, or the revelations this week that, while purring as a sex kitten, Brigitte Bardot was attempting to commit suicide, or the childhood of Michael Jackson, should remind us to put their paradise in perspective.
It’s been a difficult year, 2009 – coming, as it does so neatly, 40 years after 1969. Apparently, back then, they all had a whale of a time. There was a concert in a muddy field and everyone took a lot of LSD and their tops off, and there was some peace as well as, I gather, some love. And just as we finish the fascinating retrospectives of Woodstock – you can shake yourselves awake now – we approach the most dangerous anniversary of all. 2010: 50 years since the dawn of civilisation as they think they knew it. Time for the rest of us to brace ourselves, drop off, and tune out.
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