 Almost everything about the Sixties seems to be an icon. David
Bailey wore a crewneck sweater to marry Catherine Deneuve while
Mods and Rockers spent the Easter holidays hurling deckchairs at
each other on the seafront, and when England won the World
Cup, A
cartoon lion called 'World Cup Willie' was everywhere.
Julie Christie starred in John Schlesinger's Darling and
Jane Birkin in Richard Lester's The Knack, both creating
images that defined 'Swinging London'.
The Beatles made the film Help!, played Shea Stadium,
visited Elvis Presley at home and went to Buckingham Palace to
receive their MBE's - not quite all in the same week, but almost.
Jean Shrimpton (whose sister was going out with
Mick Jagger)
lived with Terence Stamp (who had just moved out of a flat he
shared with Michael Caine and whose brother was managing The
Who).
'The Shrimp' later horrified Australian society by turning up at
the Melbourne Cup in a mini dress that terminated 4" above
the knee.
Some predicted the mini skirt would lead to anarchy - or even
worse, to joy. The Pill and the miniskirt seemed to promise some
kind of utopia, providing the maximum of temptation with the
maximum of opportunity.
While Bob Dylan said that the answer was Blowing In The Wind,
many women found a better answer in the Pill. Meanwhile, The Rolling Stones were in and out of police vans
for puffing weed and peeing on walls, the Krays were being
remanded and Hindley and Brady were charged.
Internationally, the big issues were Vietnam and
civil rights
(both of which commanded the attention of young people throughout
the western world, touching mass instincts that have no parallel
today) and the 'Space Race'.
For a while it seemed the air was full of abuse and tear gas
and paving slabs, the streets were alive with the sound of
shattering glass, every wall was papered with posters of
exhortation, and every poster was splattered with blood.
But it wasn't all violence. The quiet unflinching dignity of
the civil rights marchers in the USA wore down a system that had
abused black people for nearly 200 years.
Everything seemed connected somehow or other. When Cassius Clay
beat Sonny Liston to take the heavyweight championship of the
world, even that was a part of the bigger deal: the youthquake,
black pride, the feeling that 'The Establishment' was there for
the taking. Clay was Dylan's age, Jagger's age, Lennon's age. Our
age.
 Youth cut loose in the Sixties. They squatted in empty houses
and smoked dope. They wore outrageous clothes. They listened to
music that, even if it didn't emanate from the devil, was played
at a volume that certainly suggested all hell had broken out.
The youth of the 1960s certainly had plenty of heroes to choose
from - Mary Quant, Twiggy,
Che Guevara, Mick Jagger, Malcolm
X,
Muhammad Ali, Bernadette
Devlin, Yuri Gagarin . . . DJs, pop
stars, footballers, racing drivers, film stars and those four lads
from Liverpool.
And sandwiched between the studied sloppiness of the beat
generation - sandals and shapeless sweaters - and the floaty
self-indulgence of the hippies was the time of the
Mods. All
targets, chevrons, bright colours, flags and crisp hard edges. Pop
Art, Op Art and Psychedelia.
But there was still time for ordinary people to do
extraordinary things, and for the camera to be there to record
them. People invented strange contests - to see who could cram the
most bodies into a telephone box, to leap the widest chasm on a
motorcycle, to cross rivers and oceans in the strangest craft.
What a decade . . .
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