Categories: uncategorized
Date: 03 September 2012 14:42:27
The Church Times review of Greenbelt has within its introduction "the choices each of the 20,000 made coloured his or her experience of the festival" - and so it is also with the writing social histories. Barry Miles London Calling is no exception the choices he made coloured his experience of the period and the material included within his book. The Counter-cultural History of London since 1945 which the book seeks to give tries to cover 1945 - 2010 but the core of the book goes from 1955 - 1973 with an additional chunk bolted on related to punk. The references leading up to the mid 1950's and from the mid-1980's onwards are pretty much window dressing.
Part two of the book (pp121 - 309) which covers the 1960's and ends with the Oz trial in 1973 has the most depth to it and the book would not have been that much altered if it only that part had been published. The coverage of this period is not so much counter-cultural history as personal memoir. Within this lies both the strength and the weakness of the book. The strength is the depth of information given but the weakness is that it looks at the topic too narrowly. By focusing on the celebrities of the time and his friends, (many of whom were one in the same), he gives a counter-cultural history of the underground elite rather than of the wider social and artistic movements in their entirety.
Is it worth ploughing through? Yes, primarily for chapters 15 - 20 which cover '66 and '67 and focus on the London Free School, International Times, UFO, 14 Hour Technicolor Dream and The Arts Lab.
In terms of the getting the counter-culture picture from the non-elite members of the underground dad if you happen to read this get on with writing your memoirs. I say this because having listened to my dads ramblings/ recollections and thinking back on the life I saw him live as I grew up I know his experiences of countercultural history would compliment this book really well. There is overlap but dad lived it from a different perspective and in some more suburban settings.