Pink Floyd’s brittle genius Syd Barrett is symbolic in the British psychedelic story, an illustration of the timeless cautionary tale of art versus fame. In the programme, sculptor Emily Young calls Barrett "a little wild Puck or Ariel figure coming out of the woods. He seemed to me to be borne of the English countryside."
THIS absorbing BBC4 documentary explores the rise and fall of the most visionary period in British culture: five LSD-laced years between 1965 and 1970, when musicians reimagined the boundaries of sound. Narrated by Nigel Planer, this hour long piece sees a generation of homegrown R&B bands discover psychedelic drugs and embrace the avant-garde, starting a movement that would uneasily morph from the bohemian underground to chart success. Substances were initially taken with a wide-eyed innocence, broadening sensory, artistic and emotional possibilities. So began the counter-culture surge against postwar stability and professional pigeonholing, a kaleidoscopic and hallucinatory palette enthused by the 1950s beat generation. It was an important time, when battles for gay rights and women's liberation would also be instigated.
The Sixties had been swinging, but now there was a dizzying but heightened altered state. This lifestyle had a preference for the imagery and fashions of youth; like the concept of Hauntology, this yearned for the security of a safer and less complicated world ("In the mid 60s, a counter-culture swapped the white heat of technology for an older Britain of Edwardian fantasy and bucolic bliss.") It was an idyllically pastoral and untroubled dream, where The Wind and the Willows and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland were an Arcadian blueprint. Singer-songwriter Vashti Bunyan dropped out of city life and moved into rural Britain; other bands travelled further, The Beatles with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in India, and The Rolling Stones and The Incredible String Band departed for Morocco.
Created by Australian artist Martin Sharp, the cover of Cream’s Disraeli Gears album became an iconic image of the era. It was also used for the retrospective compilation Those Were the Days, released in 1997.
All interviewees still talk passionately about their baroque time in the sun. The mainstream lysergic drip fed us two cornerstones in 1967: 'Arnold Layne' became Pink Floyd's debut single in March, and May saw the release of The Beatles' Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Eclectic mixes were not just present in the music, but also in location. Classical was embraced by The Yardbirds (who introduced a vocal chant for 'Still I'm Sad'), The Nice and Procol Harum, and Cream were heavily Jazz-influenced. London may have had The UFO Club, International Times, nostalgic fashion outlet Granny Takes a Trip and the "music-hall psychedelia" of The Small Faces, but the documentary also highlights Robert Wyatt's Canterbury pioneers Soft Machine, and Birmingham-based The Move and The Moody Blues. For this Midlands assault, Roy Wood channeled his "DIY sitar" while Justin Hayward and company changed the scope of the LP with concept album Days of Future Passed.
In PSYCHEDELIC BRITANNIA, Arthur Brown describes taking LSD: "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." Yet like all Utopia, it is inevitably undone by reality. Childlike optimism was no match for the harder realms entering Britain in the latter stages of the 1960s. The early growth of The National Front and "The Troubles" in Northern Ireland shifted the United Kingdom to Dystopia, as did Enoch Powell's "Rivers of Blood" speech on mass immigration.