History of England 1-6

For those with money or taste, the theatre could still offer distraction and even intellectual challenge. Tom Stoppard, the Czech-born ‘university wit’ who had never gone to university, began to bewitch audiences with plays of punishing erudition, unabashed persiflage and broad comedy. Less ostentatious in his erudition but no less lyrical was the young Peter Shaffer, whose The Royal Hunt of the Sun reimagined the Spanish conquest of the Americas from the perspective of the compromised Incas. Such interpretations were to become his unchallenged demesne.

The great pop bands of the early Sixties were scarcely in retreat, but the hysteria surrounding them was spent and a long-delayed scepticism could at last be felt. Fleet Street, once the Beatles’ most ardent well-wisher, was beginning to roll its eyes at what seemed their growing perversity. Why couldn’t they just stick to playable tunes? Why all this cleverness? Satirists, too, were again sharpening their knives.

The musical invasion of the Sixties had been an invasion of groups. Just as the United States was the arena of individual endeavour, so it tended to be the cradle of the solo artist. Britain, comparatively more communal in its approach, represented the land of the band. Thus there were the Who, the Animals, the Yardbirds, the Dave Clark Five, and in the latter half of the decade, the Moody Blues, Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd. Certain patterns emerged: the upper-or upper-middle-class manager, full of enthusiasm but short on experience, the predominantly workingclass origin of the band members, the American influence and its subsequent jettisoning.

Of all the bands, the Kinks were the most distinctively English. Towards the end of the Sixties, they began to compose wistful elegies and biting eulogies for the country, its vistas and its customs. Like many of their contemporaries, they had begun as a rhythm and blues band, but by the end of the decade they celebrated and satirized contemporary life in the cadences of the music hall and the folk song.

The ‘beautiful people’ did their best to quiet the warring world through ‘flower power’, yet the hippies and musicians of England were less strident in their anti-militarist stance than those of the United States. It was not, after all, the sons of the English who were fighting in Indochina. For all the mockery he suffered, Wilson was by no means the poodle of Washington. He refused, for example, to allow British troops to serve in Vietnam. The pop songs of the time often seemed to celebrate or advocate a certain kind of liberty, but the singers themselves were rarely revolutionaries by conviction. A sometimes forgotten bond between the various groups was art school. Nowadays considered a middle-class institution, it was, for those coming of age in the Sixties, a wardrobe through which the aspirational working class could enter the Narnia of the arts.

The role of a British group had been to learn from the American masters and then offer them the ultimate homage of a cover version. But to write your own songs? Could it be done? Was it not a hubristic betrayal of the masters to try to improve upon them? While classical music is, of all the forms, the most rooted in individual genius, pop music had been authorless. In that it resembled, of all things, the music of the sacred. With the advent of the Beatles and their followers, this had changed. In previous eras, the music and dance of the working class had either been adapted for polite society or dismissed; now it stood alone, unadorned and unapologetic. This had wider consequences. During the Sixties, the aspirational impulse that drove many to speak ‘posh’ began to recede. In interviews, a young musician whose stage name was Cat Stevens spoke in the languid tones of bohemian Chelsea. Middle-, let alone upper-class, tones were to be flattened or expunged.

This new grit flew everywhere, changing accents and idioms. Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud had been known to rehearse in evening dress, but this was not the Sixties way. The working class had always exerted a deep influence on film and the theatre, but in this decade the influence was actively celebrated. Michael Caine, Richard Burton, Terence Stamp and a flock of others gave the working class not respectability, but glamour.

By the late Sixties, recreational drugs, previously a minority interest even among the wealthy, were impinging upon popular consciousness. Rates of cocaine and heroin addiction had tripled by 1970. The embedding of a drug habit was in some ways easier then, and the reason seems clear: government had forbidden without informing, and no one knew exactly why these delightful diversions should be proscribed. As Mick Jagger put it: ‘We didn’t know about addiction then; we thought cocaine was good for you!’

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In place of peace