The Sixties (3 page)

The art world (no shortage of art schools and grants to attend them for young people who didn’t fancy university) joined in
the fun and called itself Pop. The word ‘popular’ in relation to the arts might conceivably have a twang of the radical about
it; a bold rejection of the traditionalist understanding of it as meaning a loss of quality. But the diminutive ‘pop’ merely
suggested ‘new’ and ‘fun’. And ‘throwaway’. It wasn’t confronting, only absorbing, and consuming. If occasionally some works
commented on or liberated themselves from this apparent fact of life (Lichtenstein, Warhol, Hockney), they were soon enough
reincorporated into commerce. Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup tins returned to advertising as advertising itself became the sexiest
industry and took all the new talent it could find – photographers, designers, writers, artists, film-makers – to its bosom.
Pop Art belonged to the same world as pop music in the early Sixties (the corporate-managed and decidedly unradical Sandie
Shaw, Billy J. Kramer, Cilla Black and Dave Clark Five were topping the charts); it was as much about the market as clothes
were, and as such became an essential part of our everyday life. Clothes were overprinted with motifs from pictures hanging
in galleries, pictures and sculpture reflected passing style (advertising, comics, pornography) and the cheap, throwaway attitudes
of fashion that felt so much like fresh air. Record covers became art, art became tea towels. Things got mixed up in a way
that was original and amusing to us. Our parents kept things separate and appropriate: art in galleries, certain clothes for
particular occasions, work marked off from play, private walled away from public, formal dissociated from casual. Their mores
derived from the old rules, the strictures of Leviticus:
Ye shall keep my statutes. Thou shalt not let thy cattle gender with a diverse kind: thou shalt not sow thy field with mingled
seed: neither shall a garment mingled of linen and woollen come upon thee
.
²
That ancient terror of mixing things up, of losing the order of things. One thing must be one thing, never another too. Pop
Art, in its very shallowness, rejected the old way. Separated, actually, the young from their elders. The freedom to try new
things, to play, to incorporate, extended to the arts and bounced back again to daily existence in a quite novel, non-Judaeo-Christian
way.

Was it
all
only about style and its marketing? Was nothing to be taken seriously in those days up to the mid-Sixties, when London was
deemed by
Time magazine
in 1966 to have started ‘swinging’? Between the ages of fifteen and eighteen I may have spent an inordinate amount
of energy worrying about my hair and shortening my skirts (though not much has changed there, apart from the length of the
skirts), but between visits to the mirror other things were impinging on my life. Most of it wasn’t quite so brand new, however,
as the asymmetric Sassoon cut or a pair of Courrèges boots. Those more cerebral, less sartorial matters that gained my attention
during this time were almost entirely developments or continuations of what had been happening in the 1950s and before. The
recent war, immediately prior to my birth, I paid almost no attention to, since, being the most vivid years of my parents’
life, it was more archaic to me than the English Civil War. But I was powerfully aware of having missed out on the doings
of the youthful generation just before mine. While I was still pushing a toy Coronation coach and horses across the living
room floor, some very interesting things had been going on in the world outside the four enclosing walls of our small flat
in Tottenham Court Road. There weren’t just the Teddy Boys ripping up cinema seats with their flick knives, and people sipping
Brown Windsor soup in dismal English dining rooms, there were also the Beats, a Cold War in full frost, and a collapsing British
Empire hanging on to its genteel skirts, the results of all of which were beginning to make the rest of the world, no longer
merely to be dismissed as ‘abroad’, look very interesting.

I became aware of the Beats, jazz, poetry, cool, and muddled them properly with the existentialism of Sartre and Camus’ fiction
while I was at boarding school, mixing with the wrong crowd from the local town who had designated a corporation bench near
a roundabout just outside the centre the ‘Beat Seat’. There we sat while they, older than me – in their late teens while I
was thirteen and fourteen – told me to read the books any self-respecting wannabe Beat had to know.
Jude the Obscure
,
Ulysses
,
Crime and Punishment
. Not bad reading recommendations as bad-friends go. I found
Lolita
for myself, listened to
Red Bird,
poetry and modern jazz from Christopher Logue via Pablo Neruda, and discovered that in America some, like Allen Ginsberg,
were already howling most ungenteelly about the state of the world. If it was a little downbeat, that was fine by me. I was
already angry and sullen – a gift from my dysfunctional family, as well as, doubtless, a dash of biochemistry – and ready
to argue with any form of authority that came my way. Just before I was fifteen, I was expelled from the co-educational, progressive
boarding school the local council had paid for me to attend in order to improve my character and absent me from my mother
– not for reading those books, but for sniffing ether, and getting caught after attending an all-night party. In various ways,
I was the Sixties waiting to happen.

After the Beat Seat and expulsion, my Sixties continued in a psychiatric hospital near Brighton, but in 1963 I went back to
live in London, invited by the mother of a former fellow-pupil, who, the following year, sent me to another school, where
the plan was to do my O and A levels and become, in spite of the educational blip, one of those of my generation who went
to university. It seemed, after a somewhat turbulent childhood, fairly straightforward. But I took the book-and-poetry reading
and the anger along with me to London. There was still an awful lot of reading to catch up on, some terrible poetry to write,
and I also discovered, in the culturally rich atmosphere of the house I had fetched up in, a world of film. Not that films
were new to me. My childhood block of flats was attached to a cinema. Movies were at my back door. I went to everything I
could get into, as well as finding cunning, illegal routes into those I was forbidden by law to see. They were westerns, soupy
romances, Fifties comedies and British B movies. Now I filled in the gaps of the past at the National Film Theatre, going
to classic silents and Hollywood marvels of the Thirties and Forties. In addition, there was an entirely new cinema to me,
from Europe and beyond, to discover. Godard, Fellini, Antonioni, Bergman, Kurosawa, Ozu, Ray, Truffaut, Malle, Pasolini, Polanski,
Jiri Menzel. They mattered enough for me to take illicit afternoons off school in order to get to the first matinée showing
of
8½
or
The Silence
at the crucial Academy Cinema in Oxford Street, where I’d sit in the smoky auditorium with fifteen or so other film fanatics,
and one or two flashers, overwhelmed by the potent sexual narratives and social critiques, Marxist, psychoanalytic, libertarian
or simply different and, to me, astonishing. I absorbed the complexities of relationship, and spiritual or cultural emptiness,
played out in tones of grey, with echoes of poets, writers and philosophers. Godard’s intensely charming, hopeless and crazy
about love film,
Pierrot Le Fou
, had me returning eight times during its run. I couldn’t take my eyes off a single frame, or miss one step of Monica Vitti’s
slow, despairing walks through the blighted urban wasteland in Antonioni’s
Red Desert
. I wept sometimes with exaltation, sometimes rage, at the visions coming at me from the Academy screen. And, let me say,
all this lived quite easily with my despair at my unsatisfactory hair and concern for the precise shortness of my skirt.

There was music, too. Older friends introduced me to Mozart and Beethoven string quartets, opera, Brecht and Weill. I discovered
Ives and Copland. And, of course, all the while listened to pirate radio, Caroline and London, and watched
Ready Steady Go
and
Top of the Pops
religiously. Buddy Holly, Roy Orbison, the Everly Brothers, the Beach Boys, the Four Tops, Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan,
John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Thelon-ius Monk, Charlie Mingus, the Beatles (though I was disdainful until
Rubber Soul
came along), the Stones, the Animals, the Kinks, all either accompanied me from the beginning of the decade or had emerged
by the middle of it and were essential: the rhythm inside my head, the beat of my heart, the tuning of my sentiments.

The Fifties are often characterised by a lack of colour. Like most of the movies, they were, everyone agrees, in black and
white. In memory, the streets, the clothes, the prospects of the Fifties were in shades of grey. The arrival of colour was
no more than implied in the early Sixties. The boldness, at first, was all about the insistent use of monochrome. Black and
white was style, art and commentary. Aubrey Beardsley reproductions decorated walls and Bridget Riley paintings shimmered
into fabric, Richard Avedon took pictures documenting the civil rights movement and mental hospital patients, David Bailey
portrayed the rich and the influential. All of it in a kind of mockery of the 1950s lack of colour. Each of them using the
dramatic contrast of black and white, or the grey tones between as a bridge from where we had been to where we were going.
White lips, black eyes; implacable black dress, white Courrèges cut-out boots. Bergman, Antonioni, Pasolini. All of this spoke
of the colour that wasn’t there, of an absence that until then we hadn’t really noticed. All that insistent black and white
screamed the lack of colour that we had put up with and worked its way into forms of art and expression. Colour was possible
before the Sixties, but it took time before the world needed to be represented by the full spectrum. Did colour explode into
being with the increasing use of drugs? Or did the stark simplicity of black and white finally pall? The middle Sixties was
that moment when Dorothy stepped through her front door, out of Kansas, on to the undreamed-of yellowness of the brick road
on the way to the Emerald City, and the heart burst with pleasure at the sudden busting out of a full-blown Technicolor world.

The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the more militant Committee of 100 were political organisations devoted to unilateral
nuclear disarmament. But the Aldermaston March and the sit-down demonstrations organised by the Committee of 100 became culturally
and socially desirable for the young who wanted not only to create a sense of peace and security for the world but also to
meet each other and rebel against the elders. Our parents, and the papers they read, hated the marchers with their long hair,
jeans, resistance songs and clashes with the police. What more could an angry fifteen-year-old want? I had waited, along with
the rest of the world, to be blown to pieces on 11–12 October 1962. While I sat on the snowy pebble beach watching the grim-grey
sea in Brighton, America and Russia played chicken in what became known as the Cuban Missile Crisis. It wasn’t history happening
at the time – it was perfectly clear to me, and to others, that my world was very likely to end within forty-eight hours.
There seemed every reason, once I got to London and my liberal new household, to join in the marches and sit down in the street.
There was also the promise of tens of thousands of people of my age and older, like-minded, looking scruffy and cool, having,
as the
Daily Mail
and the
People
promised, sex like rabbits, and really annoying, actually scaring, vast numbers of the majority we were so intent on being
different from. I had ached to go when I was under my parents’ control and couldn’t. When I finally set off on my first Aldermaston
in 1963, it was my version of the debutantes’ coming-out ball.