I’ve been having a bit of a sort in my computer files and found some of my old research photographs for my novel, Stephen Dearsley’s Summer Of Love, published on the 31 October – yay!
As you can probably tell the book is based in that vivid year 1967 and these photographs sum up some of the moods that I was trying to capture.

My computer clear-out has failed of course because I really can’t delete these even though the text of the novel is now about to go off to the printers and I shall have to live with it as it is. As Pontius Pilate said, what I have written I have written.

I was a teenage schoolboy in 1967 but I knew that I was experiencing the dawning of something exciting and, probably, life-changing and I couldn’t wait to get on with it. I was, I think, a little jealous of those, just ahead of me,  like the young man below, who could get out there,  on the road to what I assumed would be that difficult word ‘freedom’. I don’t know the people in these photographs but then again I do.

I could see them all around me and read about them too even in my edition of Wordsworth’s The Prelude (1805)

OH! pleasant exercise of hope and joy!

The attraction of a country in romance!

Wordsworth was writing about the French Revolution but his words rang true for me when, not entirely wrongly, I felt that we too were on the edge of a glorious revolution.

Since then, of course, the so-called Summer Of Love has been much maligned or, worse, trivialised. Whatever its legacy, it was a thrilling moment in time – one which I attempted to write about with some trepidation.

I don’t know where I was, quite literally, when this photograph was taken. Presumably, judging by the length of my hair, it was a couple of years later after I had moved on from those idealistic schooldays when I used to listen to the excitingly new Beatles’ Sgt Pepper Pepper album and dream the dream.

Wherever that was, whatever I was on and whoever I was with, I think I must have got the message.

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STEPHEN DEARSLEY’S SUMMER OF LOVE BY COLIN BELL

My first novel, Stephen Dearsley’s Summer Of Love, is published  on 31 October 2013. It is the story of a young fogey living in Brighton in 1967 who has a lot to learn when the flowering hippie counter culture changes him and the world around him.

You can  pre-order the book from the publishers, Ward Wood Publishing:

http://wardwoodpublishing.co.uk/titles-fiction-colin-bell-stephen-dearsleys-summer-of-love.htm 

…or from Book Depository:

http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/Stephen-Dearsleys-Summer-Love-Colin-Bell/9781908742070

…or from Amazon:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Stephen%20Dearsley’s%20Summer%20Of%20love

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San Francisco (Be Sure To Wear Some Flowers In Your Hair) the wonderful Librarian titled and wonderfully atmospheric song will always the the memorial to a nice American pop singer called Scott McKenzie who died on Saturday.

The year was, of course, 1967 and it was the Summer Of Love. It was the year when some people really did put flowers in their hair and many thousands more thought about doing it and wished they had. It was the year that a lot of young homeless people descended on a down-at-heel suburb of San Francisco where a colony of counter culture “drop-outs” were experimenting with living a non-materialistic, make-love-not-war, philosophically anarchist lifestyle. The huge crowds that arrived in the small conclave that was Haight Ashbury soon turned it into a media cliche and an organizational and sociological nightmare.

Coach trips for shocked and curious toursits were soon organized to show an older generation what seemed to them to be a frightening and threatening if not mildly silly phenomenon but, believe it or not, there was a moment when people thought the World was going to change.

It did a bit but not as much as some of those original “hippies” wanted.

It caught the public’s imagination though and you didn’t have to be a hippie to be, well, a hippie. You could just like the idea of the clothes, kaftans and sandals, and the hair, just beginning to grow long, you could be attracted to all that talk about recreational drugs or be drawn to the thought of “free love.” You could do most of those things whilst also doing a normal job, studying conscientiously at college or daydreaming as you did the housework in respectable suburbs all over the Western World. Others did it for real – there were success stories and casualties too but it has left its mark even if the movement as a whole went the way of all fashions and trends to become ridiculed and pigeon-holed as just another kitsch chapter in cultural history. They don’t want to live in the news but I know, for a fact, of some of the original hippies whose “communes” arevstill function hidden away from salacious news hounds all these decades later.

San Francisco (Be Sure To Wear Some Flowers In Your Hair) didn’t come out of Haight Ashbury, Scott McKenzie wasn’t an anarchist counter-culturalist, he was a nice guy from Los Angeles contracted by a record label to sing a song written by John Phillips of Los Angeles band, The Mamas & The Papas. It was, undoubtedly an example of the recording industry jumping onto the latest band wagon but, hey man, it worked.

It really is a wonderful song and, against all the odds and probably contrary to the record labels expectations, it really did capture something of the spirit of those times. OK, it is slightly soppy and sentimental, it makes claims that it couldn’t substantiate and, I suspect, didn’t know what it was talking about but it caught the public’s imagination in a way that more hard-core and “authentic” songs like the San Francisco band Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit” could never muster. It was, in the end, a great pop song that did what all great pop songs do, it opened its arms to all and in the mildest and least controversial way possible, turned everyone on a little. We can still listen to that gentle lyrical melody with its yearning sense of hope and wonder, the simple imagery of those  flowers in the hair and the optimistic and anthemic sense of a new dawn, we can still listen to it and wish that some of those things could really come to pass.

So thank you Scott McKenzie – love and peace, man.

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