This programme contains some strong language.
Let's take a trip through the most visionary period
in British music history,
five kaleidoscopic years between 1965 and 1970
when a handful of dreamers reimagined pop music.
In the mid-'60s, a counterculture swapped the white heat of technology
for an older Britain
of Edwardian fantasy
and bucolic bliss.
From out of the Bohemian underground,
psychedelia took over the pop mainstream.
So, let's go back through the secret gardens of childhood
to a time when British pop found its first truly original voice.
- STOCK FOOTAGE: - The Britain that is going to be forged
in the white heat of this revolution
will be no place for restrictive practices
or for outdated methods on either side of industry.
It's the mid-1960s,
a new Britain is emerging.
This is the era of the dishwashing machine.
Touch-of-the-switch central heating, they say, will soon be universal.
As soon as people got back on the right foot after the war,
the primary objective was to have permanent jobs for ever
and to be as conventional as possible
in order to retain those jobs.
In other words, not to rock the boat.
"Well, we've survived the war. What do we do now?
"Well, let's insure everything."
We were expected to be architects or civil engineers.
I had no idea what I wanted to do at all
and it was only because my grandfather had been a solicitor
I thought, "Oh, I'll try that, then."
But not every post-war child could see their place
in this brave new world.
This idea that young people were kind of meant to be formed
into either something academic or factory fodder,
it still kind of hung around.
I didn't care about the future.
We didn't used to think about it in those days. I didn't.
No career plans, no "Will it look good on my..." What's it called?
VE something or other?
- CV. - CV.
You know, fuck.
Too young to worry about that crap.
MUSIC: I'm a Man by The Yardbirds
# Now I'm a man
# I spell M
# A
# N... #
Teenage Britain had been borrowing the raw energy
of American rhythm and blues
but conventions were starting to be questioned.
# You can't resist
# I'm a man
# I spell M... #
We were doing blues covers.
We were doing Howlin' Wolf, Chuck Berry,
and it was all very predictable
so we wanted to break out of that.
MUSIC: Still I'm Sad by The Yardbirds
In 1965, The Yardbirds released Still I'm Sad.
It was the sound of British R&B loosening its moorings.
# See the stars come falling down from the sky... #
We used to listen to all sorts of classical music.
You know, Stravinsky and all sorts of stuff,
and then we got in the studio and we were just experimenting with it
and, suddenly, we started to bring in a vocal chant.
I think it was that sort of wish to make it something different.
When we first heard The Yardbirds' Still I'm Sad,
it certainly gave a whole new feeling
to what The Yardbirds were doing
and they stopped just being that blues group.
# Still I'm sad... #
The blues was being radically reimagined
as a handful of groups began testing its limits.
The early '60s, I got quite a reputation as a jazz drummer.
One university gig, Eric come up to me and said,
"I know you, Baker," he said,
"You're not a hard nut at all."
I said to him, "Look, I'm getting a band together.
"Would you be interested?"
And he said yes straightaway.
MUSIC: I Feel Free by Cream
In July 1966, Ginger Baker, Jack Bruce and Eric Clapton formed Cream,
a supergroup that combined blues, jazz and poetry
to create a strange brew.
The first time we played together,
it just went bam.
# Feel when I dance with you
# We move like the sea... #
Jazz takes you on journeys.
Ginger and Jack, they were both jazz musicians
and they really would take you somewhere.
# I feel free... #
I never play the same two nights running.
Nor does Eric, nor did Jack.
Every night was a new adventure
musically.
The psychedelic element is that we were taking people on a journey
in a different way from what they had been taken on before.
By mid-1966, a new word was starting to catch on.
- Psychedelic. - Psychedelic.
- Psychedelia. - Psychedelic.
Psychedelic...
Thing.
I mean, what does psychedelic mean?
MUSIC: Paint It Black by The Rolling Stones
# I see a red door and I want it painted black... #
A strange exotic drone was building.
Even the two most familiar bands in Britain
were beginning to look and sound unfamiliar.
I used to co-own a bookshop with a number of people,
including Paul McCartney, in fact,
and, one day, Paul and John came into the shop
and John curled up on the settee with The Psychedelic Experience
and, literally in Tim Leary's introduction,
it says turn off your mind and drift downstream.
So John took the book home
and the idea's in the first Beatles psychedelic track.
MUSIC: Tomorrow Never Knows by The Beatles
# Turn off your mind
# Relax and float downstream
# It is not dying
# It is not dying... #
The Beatles, they were the world's most commercial
of all time rock-and-roll band
and yet they were producing totally far-out stuff
that no-one could even imagine how they got those sounds.
If you haven't heard of LSD,
you will.
LSD 25, a legal substance introduced to Britain via America in 1965,
began rippling through the Bohemian underground in 1966.
I think part of the musical experimentation that was going on
was certainly driven by a lot of use of drugs.
Alcohol became not really cool.
When we're talking about psychedelia,
the definition of it is to do with drugs.
I mean, let's not be silly. People were experimenting.
We didn't think of it as a drug.
It was something you could take
and it expanded your mind
and I don't think there's many musicians at the time
that didn't have a go at this thing called LSD.
In those days, it was a serious exploration.
You'd expect it to take a couple of days and wipe you out,
and, you know, you'd prepare the music
and have friends who were going to look after you
if you freaked out and stuff.
I mean, it was not something to take lightly.
- STOCK FOOTAGE: - These are acid heads who are going to take a trip.
Why?
To get high.
By which you mean what?
You can't explain it. You have to experience it yourself.
You expand your consciousness
and you get more aware of things.
Your senses are heightened.
If you have a record on, you're hearing things
that you wouldn't normally be attentive of.
The colours have become quite a lot brighter.
Also, I'm getting a slight paisley effect in the sky.
All of a sudden, you were like, "Hey, I've got hours."
Every second seemed to last, you know, ten minutes,
so you were kind of wound down into this slow rhythm.
Once, when I took a little LSD,
I played the guitar for about ten hours continuously.
Seeing into people's eyes,
I saw all the universes.
I saw them being born.
I saw them die.
I would say it was the nearest I came to being able to see God.
LSD use was not widespread in 1966
but its effects catalysed an emerging counterculture
that questioned everything.
MUSIC: Do You Hear Me Now by Donovan
# Freedom fighters Speak with your tongues... #
Where ideas were being formed, people were experimenting.
They were curious. What were the alternatives? What was happening?
So there was an intellectual and almost philosophical
questioning of the past.
It was very obvious that capitalism,
it was sort of a monster.
We didn't like all that. You know, breadheads they were called.
What we liked was equality for all people, the world should be green,
not too many cities, don't use electricity,
that coal was revolting.
There was this sort of getting away
from the traditional notions of order.
All the traditional structures were in question.
What you're allowed to think, what you're allowed to be,
the lid got taken off.
While the underground questioned the establishment,
a former blues band were about to set fire to the 12-bar rule book.
MUSIC: Interstellar Overdrive by Pink Floyd
Up to then, it was all about playing the blues
and then playing blues guitar and...
I saw The Pink Floyd and I thought, "This is very avant-garde.
"This isn't like anything else I've heard."
The chords were very operatic.
They were almost Wagnerian.
And there was a very European sensibility
that anchored everything
and I think definitely put a big separation
between them and the blues.
Syd and Rick were improvising together long...
what seemed like long improvisations all on one chord.
Interstellar Overdrive, because it was just a riff which kept going,
it went right away from that notion of verse, chorus, verse, chorus.
That traditional sort of music structure was gone.
Maybe the music we play isn't directed at dancing necessarily
like normal pop groups have been in the past.
But, whilst Pink Floyd were sonically progressive,
Syd Barrett's lyrics harked back to a world of childhood fantasy.
# There was a king
# Who ruled the land
# His Majesty was... #
We lived in Cambridge,
in a town which had a lovely river running through it
with willows right along it.
Syd was certainly very keen on that.
It was very easy to avail yourself
of an actual Wind In The Willows landscape.
All of Syd's early songs referred in passing
to fairyland and the world of goblins and gnomes
and an Arcadian world picture
derived from classic children's books.
# Across the stream
# With wooden shoes
# Bells to tell the king the news... #
It was English. It was Shakespearean, in a way.
And I just thought that Syd Barrett
was a little wild Puck-Ariel figure
coming out of the woods with his, you know, curly hair and these eyes.
He seemed to me to be born of the English countryside.
Syd was not alone.
For a counterculture at odds with society,
LSD and children's classics combined to create the perfect retreat
inwards and backwards.
We read a lot of those children's books, you know,
like Alice In Wonderland, like Wind In The Willows.
So there was a looking back to a sort of a golden age
of childhood and innocence,
because our childhood had been fractured, a lot of us, by the war.
It was the last part of traditional British culture
that people still trusted, because that's what they grew up with.
This was something that they knew they could refer to
which, in a way, set them apart from the adults, as it were,
the grown-ups, the straights and the suits.
These Arcadian worlds of imagination and innocence
appealed to the new underground,
but this band of idealists still lacked a home.
In December '66, they'd find one.
Ufo grew directly out of things that John Hopkins
had been involved with -
Hoppy, who was the kind of leader of the whole underground scene.
We went and found this Irish dancehall in Tottenham Court Road.
The first night at Ufo, we didn't know how many people were
going to come, and a huge crowd turned up.
We were surprised at how many people came, and I think the audience
was surprised to see there were so many of us.
It was like London freaks recognised each other like, "Wow! Oh!
"There's more than just me and my friends."
# Ridin' all around the streets
# Four o'clock and they're all asleep
# I'm not tired and it's so late
# Movin' fast everything looks great
# My white bicycle... #
When you entered the club,
you had to go down a very large, wide staircase.
You could see these little bubbles,
it looked like bubbles coming up into the street, almost.
But they never quite made it into Tottenham Court Road.
It was very much descending into another world.
# My white bicycle... #
There was a sense of chaos.
When you got in there, you could do what the hell you liked.
There wasn't any real restrictions.
Everywhere else you went, you sat down and shut up.
I just bought it straightaway - incense burning,
freak-out dancing, a little kind of theatre group,
movies on this wall, another movie on this wall.
It was an amazing experience.
Ufo became the weekly meeting place.
It was a kind of galvanising place.
# My white bicycle... #
While Ufo, LSD and Pink Floyd were galvanising the freaks,
a group of musical misfits from Canterbury were developing
a sound along parallel lines.
Maybe if we'd lived in a big city we'd have known more people sooner
and it would have been a wider, looser circle.
In Canterbury, I was the only drummer they knew
and Mike was the only keyboard player any of us knew,
so despite the fact that we hadn't got much in common
in terms of interest, we worked together,
cos that's what there was.
I think that made us have to be more inventive, stretch ourselves.
John Coltrane, towards the end of his life,
was doing very modal stuff,
sometimes with just two or three chords.
It was, "How deep can I get into the zone?"
I think that sort of influenced us a lot -
just getting into this zone, this modal zone, and just kind of...
Just digging deep into that groove.
The only thing that mattered about who you were playing with was,
in my case - have they got anything original?
Were they specifically themselves?
What I like about Kevin is there's no other Kevin Ayers,
there's no other Mike Ratledge.
Mike's keyboard playing -
I think even he was surprised at how it came out.
Like a scientific experiment.
Suddenly you put this acid with that acid and it goes boom.
You think, "Blimey!"
The Soft Machine's heady blend of modal jazz and improvisational rock
needed an audience with an open mind, an audience they found at Ufo.
The audience didn't have any expectations,
so you could do what you liked. They were all stoned.
If they hated it, they were too out of it to pick you up on anything.
We found out what you mustn't do -
if you stop, somebody will boo, so don't stop.
# Say goodbye, watch the sky... #
It wasn't on predictable tramlines,
and neither were the trips people were having,
so people could go along with us for the journey
and they would go with it.
We weren't a pop band, we weren't a jazz band.
We weren't really a rock band.
I can only say psychedelic because we weren't anything else.
For a few hours one evening, together with the audience,
you could really go to... another planet.
The psychedelic underground was about more than never-ending space jams.
Art and fashion were also being re-cut.
Carnaby Street was still pretty uptight in many ways.
It was very sharp and smart.
We were looking for a much more romantic, Bohemian idea of it all.
# Kaleidoscope
# Kaleidoscope, kaleido
# Kaleidoscope, kaleidoscope
# Kaleidoscope... #
The first idea of Granny Takes A Trip was in tune with
the ideas of people like Oscar Wilde.
We were raiding vintage wardrobes
and William Morris patterns for jackets.
It's that idea of nostalgia, British nostalgia.
Just like much of the music,
psychedelic fashion was also channelling the past.
I thought everybody looked like Renaissance paintings -
masses of long hair, wearing robes and stuff.
The girls wore long skirts.
Everybody looked like John the Baptist.
Some of us did walk around looking like dandies,
with these Edwardian jackets.
There was always a scarf.
I broke down once on the side of the motorway and I had this...
what looked like a nightshirt on.
The AA man came up and he said,
"What are you, one of them lords or something?"
This sort of strange figure, you know.
The psychedelic underground was even developing
its own subterranean media network.
We have our own publishers, our own film-makers, our own theatres,
night clubs. It's a complete society.
The scenes themselves are connected by the paper as an agency.
1966 we brought up the first issue of International Times,
which was the first underground newspaper in Europe.
International Times covered the areas that we thought that
Fleet Street was completely ignoring -
the anti-Vietnam war movement, for instance, the CND movement.
We covered how much dope was costing.
Myself and a bunch of friends realised there were
a constituency of young people who had no voice, basically.
Even in the slightly garbled image of the International Times,
there was some very serious thought and some very serious writing.
I think Miles provided the underground scene
with a very rigorous professionalism.
As 1966 grew to a close,
the counterculture that had centred around Ufo, It
and Granny Takes A Trip was a growing force,
but the psychedelic movement was little more than a whisper -
a world away from booming Britain.
MUSIC: Sunshine Superman by Donovan
In December of '66, however,
a harpsichord-drenched piece of psych pop hit number two in the UK charts.
# Sunshine came softly through my
# A-window today
# Could've tripped out easy
# But I've a-changed my ways... #
And, perhaps sensing a rising tide, December '66 also saw the BBC
broadcast Jonathan Miller's Alice In Wonderland.
Was this just a coincidence?
Or was there something in the air?
Oh, that's the great puzzle.
Who am I?
MUSIC: Strawberry Fields Forever by The Beatles
# Let me take you down cos I'm going to
# Strawberry Fields
# Nothing is real
# And nothing to get hung about
# Strawberry Fields forever... #
By February 1967, Britain was beginning to suspect
that The Beatles' catchy tunes and matching suits period was over.
We'd started off as cheery chappies, Northern lads - fun, nice boys.
We didn't really believe it, but we realised it was our image.
But as time went by, we needed to develop.
It was quite a heavy drug period for most of the people in our world,
so I think all of that found its way into the music.
# No-one I think is in my tree
# I mean, it must be high or low... #
Strawberry Fields was where The Beatles suddenly stopped
being transatlantic and suddenly dealt with British subjects,
childhood memories, feelings about death.
They went in all sorts of interesting directions
which popular songs had never gone to before.
# Strawberry Fields
# Nothing is real... #
The potential of what you could do under the guise of making pop music
was...the doors were being opened.
Strawberry Fields Forever had a very universal message which was,
basically, return to innocence.
We were talking about the period when music moved
from being part of the entertainment business to art.
I think a lot of people have twigged they've shut themselves in a bit.
They've got all these rules for everything -
rules of how to live, how to paint, how to make music.
It's just not true any more.
Any new strange world, like psychedelic, drugs,
the whole bit, freak-out music and all of that, don't immediately
take it as that, because your first reaction has got to be one of fear.
Then, rather shockingly,
Paul McCartney admitted to taking LSD on national television.
Go on, how often have you taken LSD?
About four times.
Don't you believe that this was a matter which you should have kept private?
I mean, you're spreading this now, at this moment,
this is going into all the homes in Britain.
I'd rather it didn't, you know, but you're asking me the question,
you want me to be honest. I'll be honest.
But as a public figure,
surely you've got a responsibility to not...
No, it's you who's got the responsibility.
You've got the responsibility not to spread this now.
I'm quite prepared to keep it as a very personal thing if you will too.
If you shut up about it, I will.
MUSIC: Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band by The Beatles
Society's darlings were becoming full-on psychedelic trailblazers.
# It was 20 years ago today
# Sgt Pepper taught the band to play... #
We were all down the Speakeasy.
At that time, George Harrison and John Lennon were in.
They sent the roadie back up to Abbey Road to get
a copy of Sgt Pepper.
We put it on the big speakers at Speakeasy.
I can remember George doing air guitar
to the opening of Sgt Pepper.
# We're Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band... #
The power, the energy, it was like a kind of tidal wave,
it just washed over you.
# Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
# Sit back and let the evening go... #
I remember during the sessions that they were very concerned to
not lose anybody, you know, not lose the mums
and the aunties who bought the records for their teenage kids,
but they also wanted to push the boundaries of rock and roll.
A lot of what The Beatles were doing
when you look at it was passing on this freedom.
I think that was one of the great values of what we did.
We kind of just showed what we were going through to the world.
# Arnold Layne
# Had a strange hobby
# Collecting clothes
# Moonshine washing line
# They suit him fine... #
While The Beatles had been creating their carnival of psychedelia,
Pink Floyd went pop.
The charts were getting weird.
# Oh, Arnold Layne
# It's not the same... #
Arnold Layne is based on truth.
Syd's mother took in lodgers.
Laundry would get hung on the clothesline in the back yard.
There was a case about a guy getting actually
convicted for stealing underwear.
This is just Syd reporting on his life.
# Arnold Layne
# Arnold Layne, Arnold Layne... #
I think Arnold Layne was an example of rock and roll
dealing with subjects which had not previously been covered -
a pervert stealing underwear off of people's back-yard washing lines.
Even two years earlier, nobody would have written a song about that.
A second single, See Emily Play, soon followed.
The kings of the underground were now appearing on Top Of The Pops.
# Emily tries but misunderstands
# She's often inclined to borrow somebody's dreams till tomorrow... #
Steeped in a longing for childhood,
the song was allegedly inspired by a teenage Emily Young.
We used to sit around the same place smoking joints.
I think that song was... It was about him. It was the two Syds.
There was one who got on with his life and the other one who
had become a star and was taking huge amounts of drugs.
He was losing his grip.
His muse, his poetic spirit, he called that Emily.
It was the feminine part of him, it was the creative part of him.
That side really needed help.
# See Emily play. #
While pop was getting trippy, by the spring of '67
LSD had been illegalised and the psychedelic movement started
feeling the effects of an establishment clamp-down.
The police was starting to get upset with the underground.
I mean, they used to come to Ufo
and search people in the queues for drugs and arrest people.
The fact that a lot of people were taking drugs
meant that the police had easy targets, basically.
By the middle of the year, The Rolling Stones were busted.
International Times also was busted by the police.
We thought we were going to have a major lawsuit,
so we needed to put on some benefits to raise money to fight the case.
Something like 40, 42 bands, I think, offered their services.
It was absolutely fantastic.
MUSIC: She's A Rainbow by The Rolling Stones
In April 1967, 10,000 people poured into Alexandra Palace
to attend the 14 Hour Technicolor Dream.
It was the moment the summer of love opened its gates to the masses.
# She comes in colours everywhere
# She combs her hair
# She's like a rainbow
# Coming, colours in the air
# Everywhere
# She comes in colours... #
You walked inside and the scale of it
and the whole thing was just wonderful.
It was like the UFO club magnified.
It was a wonderful place to be at that time and to be performing.
# She comes in colours everywhere
# She combs her hair
# She's like a rainbow... #
I decided that it would be a good idea to take a trip to
get into the spirit of the event.
I think Syd did as well,
so we both dropped a tab or whatever one did at that time.
You went in and it was this huge place.
This huge room with people climbing up, lots of scaffolding,
the old Ally Pally organ.
Lots of lights and smoke.
It was just an extraordinary experience, because everybody was
out of their heads, wandering around looking at other people who were
out of their heads who were doing things whilst out of their heads.
Some came and found enlightenment.
We're letting our imagination flow with the rhythm of music.
That's like the rhythm of the sea or the rhythm of creation.
All you can do is dig it.
You just go where it's going and flow with it.
Others were left scratching their heads.
Do you know what the evening is really about?
No, I don't think anybody does.
I feel rather sorry for them, personally.
To me, they're looking for something,
but they don't even know themselves what they're looking for.
- Did you come here to enjoy yourself this evening? - Yeah, and I haven't.
- What did you expect? - Something better than this.
We walked out and lay on the grass
and saw one of those great English spring dawns.
Hundreds of people streaming out of Alexandra Palace downhill.
I remember thinking to myself, this whole movement, this whole thing
that we're all a part of, is way bigger than I thought.
Now, it's unstoppable.
The summer of 1967 saw psychedelia become a mass phenomenon.
I remember seeing all these people with Afghan coats,
long hair and bells walking up the straight.
My God, they've all become hippies, within months.
We're talking about something which just exploded.
It was the beginning of the end in terms of its naked purity
as an artistic movement and statement.
On the other hand, it was the beginning of it spreading in
a more watered down way throughout the whole of English culture.
Now every band in Britain seemed to be writing songs about toy shops,
toffee apples and rainbows.
A psychedelic tsunami was about to wash over the singles charts.
MUSIC: Whiter Shade Of Pale by Procol Harum
With Whiter Shade Of Pale, we were trying to do something different.
It was a direct influence
from Jacques Loussier's Air On A G String.
I'd thought that classical music can be part of contemporary music.
# We skipped the light fandango
# Turned cartwheels cross the floor
# I was feeling kind of seasick
# And the crowd called out for more... #
Psychedelia really gave the freedom
and made you float off places that you hadn't been.
We didn't really know if it would be a hit,
but it all happened so quickly.
I think it got released about three weeks after we'd made it.
It was number one the week after that.
# That her face at first just ghostly
# Turned a whiter shade of pale... #
Now even baroque could be number one.
# But it's too late to say you're sorry
# How would I know? Why should I care? #
Bands that had only recently been knocking out R&B hits
were being caught up in the moment.
# Well, let me tell you 'bout the way she looked
# The way she acted
# The colour of her hair... #
We always thought we were just being a beat group.
There were a lot of Zombies tracks we did which, you know,
a lot of blues and jazz influence in those things, but apart from that, I
was listening to a lot of classical music and I wasn't the only one.
That European influence really came into our music as well,
without being conscious of it.
I mean, Time Of The Season I would say at the time was
affected by that zeitgeist.
# It's the time of the season
# When love runs high
# In this time
# Give it to me easy
# And let me try with pleasured hands
BOTH: # To take you in the sun to promised lands
# To show you everyone
# It's the time of the season
# For loving... #
The whole "summer of love" thing, in inverted commas,
was something that we were very suspicious of in a way,
because it felt very naive
and people paid lip service to it to some degree, but in another way,
there was a really genuine upsurge of feeling there.
You couldn't help but be captured by it.
# It's the time of the season
# For loving... #
Even kings of Carnaby Street The Small Faces
were trading in their mod suits for kaftans
and creating psychedelic music hall.
# Over bridge of sighs
# To rest my eyes in shades of green
# Under dreaming spires
# To Itchycoo Park, that's where I've been... #
The great thing about The Small Faces, we were experimenting.
Most bands were - The Beatles, The Stones, everybody -
they were desperately trying to lose that teenybopper image.
LSD, right, songwriters in the band
would be looking for other expressions,
so they're writing songs about their experience of taking it.
# It's all too beautiful... #
Itchycoo Park was the first time we'd discovered phasing.
# I feel inclined to blow my mind
# Get hung up, feed the ducks with a bun... #
We looped a piece of tape around the tape machine
and looped it around the back of a chair and just let it run.
There was that drum fill...
HE IMITATES DRUMS
- # Tell you what I'll do - What will you do?
# I'd like to go there now with you... #
The best way to listen to it is smoke a bit of weed
and lay back and enjoy it.
# It's all too beautiful
# It's all too beautiful... #
The psych craze was even permeating the no-nonsense bands
of working-class Birmingham.
The bands that played in Birmingham just played in pubs
and working men's clubs.
Flower power, psychedelia and all that,
I don't think it meant a great deal to the people of Birmingham.
We were a working-class band,
but you're influenced by whatever else is going on around you because
you think it might make whatever song you write more up-to-date.
In 1967, the ubiquitous sound of psychedelia was the sitar
but, without access to such an instrument, Roy Wood
set about creating his own DIY take on that exotic Eastern sound.
In those days, you had to make the best of what was there.
I wanted to try and make it like a sitar kind of thing
with the drones and then...
..you know, that kind of stuff going on.
I thought, "Well, wouldn't it be nice to include that in a song?"
That ended up being I Can Hear The Grass Grow.
# See the people all in line
# What's makin' them look at me?
# Can't imagine that their minds
# Are thinkin' the same as me
# I can hear the grass grow
# I see rainbows in the evening... #
The Move, they were psychedelic
but they were a beer drinker's psychedelia.
# Can't seem to puzzle out the signs... #
Roy Wood was picking up stuff that was coming up from the underground.
Cos he's so brilliant musically,
he was just turning it into whatever he wanted to
without necessarily having to take acid to get there.
While psych was invading the singles charts, post-Sgt Pepper,
the artistic scope of the LP was exploding.
The four of us decided that we were going to drop acid,
and it opened a door in my mind.
I could see the world as it really was for the first time.
We were searching for some kind of enlightenment.
Having seen the light,
The Moody Blues set about writing an album of cosmic proportions.
Days Of Future Passed we'd written around the story of Everyman
and a day in his life, but he had a magical mystic side.
# Who's there?
# Afternoon
# I'm just beginning to see
# I'm on my way... #
The scope of Days Of Future Passed was unprecedented, and cemented
the concept of the concept album in the popular imagination.
One song and a strange new instrument would combine to create
the album's break-out hit.
I wanted to do a song about the night.
I was at the end of one big love affair, at the beginning of another.
So I sat on the side of the bed and I wrote the two verses
on this big old 12-string.
I played it to the other guys and they weren't that taken by it.
# Nights in white satin... #
# Never reaching the end... #
Mike, our keyboard player, had found an instrument called the mellotron.
Mike said, "Play it again." I went, "Nights in white satin." He went...
HE IMITATES MELLOTRON MELODY
# Beauty I'd always missed
# With these eyes before... #
And when he did that and he put the big chord on it...
# Cos I love you... #
HE IMITATES MELLOTRON
..everybody else was interested.
# Yes, I love you
# Oh, how I love you... #
There's another element in that song that I haven't talked about,
because the other element is death.
Love, when it's over, is a form of death. It's close to grief.
That mellotron, the mysticism in the song, put that all together
and it starts to create a beautiful magic.
# Yes, I love you
# Oh, how I love you... #
In the wake of Days Of Future Passed, the concept album became de rigueur.
The LP was surpassing the single as pop's ultimate expression.
Meanwhile, away from the glare of the pop industry,
the traditionally conservative world of folk music was also mutating.
We thought the kind of music that we want to be listening to is
not really around, so we'd better make it.
That's how the String Band started, really.
We thought, "Let's make the kind of music that we'd like to listen to."
# My cave was bright with sulky gems
# That paved the stars like diadems
# Silver lost and buried gold
# Such was my home in days of old... #
Robin went to Morocco and he came back with lots of instruments,
Moroccan instruments and African instruments
that he'd got over there -
flutes and gimbris and ouds and all that kind of stuff.
The Incredible String Band, they were travelling to Morocco
and travelling to Turkey and travelling to India and coming back.
You know, there was this real thirst for cultures that were really
different from England and Britain.
I just thought it was brilliantly original.
The band's exotic sound was honed on a heady combination of LSD
and the isolation of the Scottish countryside.
Maybe ten miles out of Glasgow was Temple Cottage.
It was just a retreat.
We were away from the obligations of the town and, you know,
we didn't have to bother about any of that stuff.
We would just completely be immersed in developing this music.
In 1968, the band released The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter,
which included a 13-minute song about life, love, amoebas and acid.
# Lay down, my dear sister
# Won't you lay and take a rest?
# Won't you lay your head upon your saviour's breast?
# And I love you
# But Jesus loves you the best
# And I bid you good night
# Good night
# Good night... #
With acid, you went on a trip.
You went to experience a slightly different reality and bring it back
to the world and the world would be sparkly and new with a bit of luck.
Cellular Song is just a trip.
It's my attempt to write a kind of timeless hymn
that would relate to everyone.
# May the long time sun shine upon you
# All love surround you
# And the pure light within you
# Guide you all the way home
# Oh, may the long time sun shine upon you
# All love surround you
# And the pure light within you
# Guide you all the way home... #
The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter hit number five in the charts
and the band became the unlikeliest of stars.
When The Incredible String Band released
Hangman's Beautiful Daughter, and by that time I had become
their manager, I said, "You're not playing folk clubs any more.
"You're going to open for the Floyd."
# May the long time sun shine upon you
# All love surround you
# And the pure light within you
# Guide you all the way home... #
Joe arranged for us to do big concert halls.
The promoters said, "Oh, there's no way we can do this."
And they all sold out.
# Oh, may the long time sun shine upon you
# All love surround you
# And the pure light within you
# Guide you all the way home. #
This new breed of folk music resonated with
a generation of urban Bohemians that distrusted modernity
and yearned to get back to the garden.
A lot of British music is fascinated and devoted to the countryside,
whether it's Cecil Sharp
and Vaughan Williams walking down a byway in Norfolk to collect
a song in 1908 or whether it's Mike Heron and Robin Williamson
tripping out on, you know, a Scottish Highland.
There's a sense of wonder of nature, awareness of nature.
The late '60s saw a wave of musicians turn their backs on the city
and head for the country.
# The rainbow river
# Is a loving stream
# Down in a valley by a mountain
# That is pine tree tall... #
I'd grown up in London and I knew London and I love London,
but it wasn't where I could be.
I couldn't understand it, I couldn't make any sense of anything,
of the way that the world appeared to be.
# Sit by the lantern
# Watch as the years turn
# Slowly bringing truth
# For every child to learn... #
Donovan told us about these islands
he'd bought off the west coast of Skye.
It just sounded perfect.
I left London with a horse and a wagon and a boyfriend and a dog.
We set off on this journey.
We don't exactly have an aim.
We want to set up a croft, a community.
But we want to keep travelling as well.
# The stone-built farmhouse is a rough-stone cottage
# Hiding close against the hillside of a winding track... #
I just wanted to learn how to live
without the internal combustion engine.
Without electricity, without running water,
without all the trappings of modernity.
It was possible to get out to the country
and have nothing and just live.
# Just another diamond day
# Just a blade of grass
# Just another bale of hay
# And the horses pass... #
There were neat little haystacks and neat little houses
and beautifully ploughed fields.
I just felt that everything could be so simple
if I could just get back to that kind of way of being.
# Just another field to plough
# Just a grain of wheat
# Just a sack of seed to sow
# And the children eat... #
For me, the road took on a personality,
the mountains took on a personality, the grass, everything.
I was creating my own world. I made a bubble for myself.
# Just another life to live
# Just a word to say... #
But while Bohemia was getting its head together in the country,
as the '60s drew to a close, the innocence and idealism that
had blossomed in the psychedelic revolution was wilting.
A lot of the amateur idealism of the '60s was being
absorbed by commercial success.
You know, suddenly we were grown up and having to do business.
You know, had to get to gigs on time.
That was one of the problems with Syd.
Being in a band and having to deal with all these things
became too much for him.
Reality kicked in and you couldn't just be.
Syd Barrett's increasing LSD use and erratic behaviour
meant that he had to leave Pink Floyd in April 1968.
A lot of the ideas had been usurped,
had gone in the wrong direction, had been atrophied by drugs.
The counterculture went very, very sour.
After all the warmth of '67,
musicians must have felt like I did -
like there was a new coldness.
I think that had an effect on the music.
# Oh, fire
# I'll take you to burn
# Oh, fire
# I'll take you to learn... #
Musically, the child-like optimism of psychedelia
was giving way to a darker trip.
I am the god of hellfire and I bring you...
# Fire
# I'll take you to burn
# Fire
# I'll take you to learn... #
Fire itself was part of a reflection of a change in mood,
because that innocence had met with money, political resistance,
police resistance.
There was a sense of, "Well, either we just turn tail, join them,
"or we resist them."
Before I knew it, this shy, long-nosed boy
from Whitby in Yorkshire became the god of hellfire.
# Fire
# To destroy all you've done
# Fire
# To end all you've become... #
Things were toughening up.
Enoch Powell giving the "rivers of blood" speech, you know.
This was all stuff that was going on.
You know, it's all very well, the idea of love and peace,
but realisation isn't going to come from just sitting back
and smoking and listening to Sgt Pepper.
No. It's going to come because you want those changes
but you have to work for them.
The National Front, the growing troubles in Ulster
and the Grosvenor Square protests
were demanding a different cultural response.
There's no doubt that there was a martial atmosphere.
The world was changing.
Some of our music was a bit dark at the end of the '60s,
because we knew that a lot of the stuff was ridiculous,
and claims people were making about changing the world were farcical.
We were a bit cynical, I think.
By 1970, the golden age of British psychedelia was over.
The commercialism of peace and love
was such that everyone had moved on to something else by then.
Reality was right in your face. Just like, "Wake up!
"It's time to wake up."
In just five kaleidoscopic years, British music
and culture had been totally shaken up.
The freedom that psychedelic music gave us, it was totally free.
You did what you bloody well liked.
It was an enlightenment. Yes, this was a time... A new enlightenment.
The years between '65 and '70 were among the most open,
the most tolerant in British music.
They were times of opportunity.
One thing that I learnt from going from the '60s into the '70s -
that there are no barriers.
It was a period of just tremendous concentration of ideas.
But it had been taken to its limit
and had its influence on future music.
Which way ought I to go from here?
(That depends a great deal on where you want to go to.)
MUSIC: The Great Gig In The Sky by Pink Floyd
(Amoebas are very small.)