But the American influence can be exaggerated. English artists did not follow the American lead in art any more than in politics. In fact, the relentless succession of stars and soup tins across the ocean found little favour in Britain. Even when they used such images, the instinct of the artists was to subvert rather than merely replicate. Peter Blake’s Self-Portrait with Badges (1961) embodied the paradox with charm and delicacy. A short and unprepossessing Englishman in middle age, standing in a suburban garden, looks flatly at the viewer, his clothes adorned with badges from America. His eyes seem to say: ‘I’m trying to look American. It isn’t working, is it?’
As much of this art reveals, the decade was increasingly exercised by the rapidly growing influence of psychotropic substances. Cannabis had been available for years, if you knew where to look. The houses and tenements of the West Indian community were widely supposed to be thick with resinous smoke, but like all such racial totems this was largely a myth. What cannot be denied is that by the mid-Sixties, a few hours of ‘ease’ was cheaper and more accessible than ever it had been before. However, cocaine was the toy only of the rich, heroin was scarcely heard of, and ‘magic mushroom’ could be found only in the less salubrious markets of the capital. To be sure, the pills known as ‘uppers’ and ‘downers’ were widely used, but they had been in circulation for years.
The peculiarly Sixties offering was lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD. Its origins were innocent enough. When LSD was developed in the late Fifties, it was hailed in some quarters as balm for hurt minds. This reaction derived from LSD’s unique property among hallucinogens: it provoked what was called ‘synaesthesia’. While under the influence of ‘acid’, the subject found that his senses swapped their functions: sounds could be seen, smells heard. This was followed by a state in which the senses simply elided, leaving the subject in a state of whimsical ecstasy.
No less an authority than Aldous Huxley had praised its curative powers. More significantly still, Bill Wilson, co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, had tried acid and declared it beneficial, a remarkable endorsement from one understandably suspicious of altered states. The problem, as so often, was that the recreational user could never be sure that the acid he had bought was quite what it appeared. It was not long before acid was ‘cut’ with strychnine, producing a state of agitation and fury. Sometimes substitute hallucinogens were sold and these offered only horrible visions, lasting sometimes for days. LSD had sunk into the mire by the end of the decade, leaving little trace.
Like so many trends of the Sixties, this largely metropolitan habit scarcely grazed the consciousness of most people, yet the wider effect, as filtered through the arts, was incalculable. Michael English and Nigel Waymouth composed posters and album covers that at first recalled art nouveau, but which belonged in temper and in subject only to the Sixties. Wild images, extravagant lines, colours that refused to cooperate, swirled about and about within a fantastical vision that came to be known as ‘psychedelic’.
42
The new brutalism
Brandy apart, the prime minister himself did not indulge in mindaltering substances, though few could have blamed him. For three years, the government had been attempting to fulfil its social and strategic commitments while placating its creditors. It had even resorted to borrowing from the IMF, a humiliating position for a supposedly great power. Now there was nothing for it, it seemed, but to devalue the pound.
While Wilson’s government had hugely increased welfare provision, the difference in economic outlook between Labour and Conservative was still one of degree rather than of kind. Wilson had largely followed his Conservative predecessors, who in turn had largely followed Attlee. The post-war consensus had yet to be challenged on any scale. It is hard to see how any one party, let alone any individual, was to blame. This thought cannot have greatly consoled the prime minister as he faced the cameras on 27 April 1967. With a smile that seemed almost a plea for mitigation and in a voice that sought rather than offered reassurance, he told the nation that ‘From now the pound abroad is worth 14 per cent or so less in terms of other currencies. It does not mean, of course, that the pound here in Britain, in your pocket or your purse or in your bank, has been devalued. What it does mean is that we shall now be able to sell more goods abroad on a competitive basis.’
It was a gift to the opposition, and Edward Heath was scathing: ‘Having denied twenty times in thirty-seven months that they would ever devalue the pound, they have devalued against all their own arguments.’ The image of Wilson as a political eel was now fixed in the minds of parliamentarians, while his reputation among the public for amiable bluntness suffered accordingly.
Once again, however, it is hard to see how things could have been better managed. The clue lies in Wilson’s preamble to the announcement. He had said that the ‘decision to devalue attacks our problem at the root’. Later economists might have observed that the ‘problem’ lay not in the root but in the branches – overladen, overextended and caught in a mass of tangles. The Labour government of the late Sixties, like the Macmillan government before it, had committed itself to a programme in which a hundred irreconcilable aims jostled for priority. Nor could the effects of the six-day war on oil prices have been predicted. The current account for the balance of payments did recover, however, and its recovery lasted until 1970. It would be left to another generation to address the problem of money supply, the ‘root’ problem.
The spring had been dour indeed; what hope then for the summer? The Beatles had conquered America, but the joys of live performance had started to pall. ‘One more hotel, one more stadium, one more run for your life,’ was their summing up of the experience. The disillusion had begun after a carelessly provocative remark by John Lennon that ‘Christianity will die, it will vanish and shrink. We’re more popular than Jesus now.’ Lennon’s startled apology in the wake of public protest did nothing to mollify the deeply religious states of the American South and Midwest. And when crowds began burning Beatles paraphernalia, the Beatles began to sense that their popularity was not after all unassailable. The coup de grâce, however, came with their visit to the Philippines. The dictator Ferdinand Marcos had arranged a meeting with them, but due to an administrative glitch they failed to appear. It is never prudent to snub a despot, and when they were assaulted by the very guards assigned to protect them, the Beatles fled. Touring, they decided, had lost its charm. Instead they closeted themselves in their studio, writing, composing, editing and, above all, experimenting. When asked what magnum opus they were assembling, they were uncharacteristically coy.
In the world of fashion, a dual trend of nostalgia and mysticism became apparent. The seeds had been laid in 1964, when Barbara Hulanicki set up Biba, a fashion boutique whose ethos was quite different from that of Mary Quant or Carnaby Street. In 1965 she remarked, ‘I love old things. Modern things are so cold. I need things that are lived.’ It soon became obvious that her taste was widely shared. The clothes marketed were voluminous, richly coloured, and just decadent enough to excite without offending. The ‘Belle Époque’ of the early twentieth century was everywhere evoked but at affordable prices. In this, as in every other respect, Biba broke with its predecessors. By 1967, its store on Kensington High Street, with its Egyptian columns and stained-glass windows, was drawing as many as 100,000 customers a week.