White heat of the disco ball in the local church hall, promising a dazzle-dance, a girl and a chance. White heat of the summer barley fields, the rolling dens, electric touch of skin on skin.
White heat of technology faraway in the skies, Concord leaving sound behind and those Neil Armstrong strides.
**************
I have enjoyed 'White Heat' on television so far, though it only touches on the spirit of the 60s.
It is too much of an artificial construct and the dialogue rather stilted. In order to deal with the awakening of issues of gender, sexuality and Civil Rights we are suppposed to believe that posh yet revolutionary protagonist Jack has succeeded in bringing together six very different students as his tenants in a London house owned by his MP father.
However, this seems too much like a Big Brother experiment, created so that the major concerns of the times can be dealt with. I'm sure that Orla, the devout northern Irish Catholic, would never have agreed to Jack's diktats on 'free love' in the first place and others would have resisted.
I admired the way the character Charlotte (played by the gorgeous Claire Foy) was developed through her totally credible conflict with her parents, even though her clothes change from 50s to 60s in the taxi and wielding of 'Lady Chatterley' were both too forced.
I recall going out with a girl very much like her, who even wore the same red PVC coat! I thought she was beyond me and I turned out to be right! She liked me 'as a friend' and soon after I stopped seeing her she began dating my nemesis, the Head Boy who owned a motorbike and captained the rugby team.
My youthful years straddled the decades, so the 60s were my teenage era.
The kind of class warfare I indulged in were constant battles with teachers who all had their own forms of torture, either physical or the sheer boredom of lessons.
The only street fighting I did was when we used to raid houses with bangers on Bonfire Night, or attack students with pea-shooters on Rag Day. My brother was one of them ; being set in concrete for charity, if I remember rightly.
There's no doubt my background was completely different to any of the characters in 'White Heat' : son of a single mother who had always considered herself 'shocking' when it came to any sexual matters and who flirted with Communism and CND, I was never confined or restricted; if anything given too much licence.
In fact, my brother was probably the most rebellious by being the most conservative. He joined the Armed Forces and showed no interest in a popular musical revolution which always engrossed me.
On the other hand, my sister often tried to 'out-shock' my mother. She studied Social Anthropology at a London Uni. and visiting her I glimpsed something of that world depicted in 'White Heat'. She left Uni. to work at a kibbutz in Israel, doing 'a gap year' before anyone had even coined that phrase.
The 60s did keep invading and disturbing our old-fashioned Grammar School.
There was a drugs raid once and many of my friends were hauled out of lessons and interrogated by police on the premises. One of my friends ( whose brother was well-known for designing one album cover of a certain Elton John.......whatever happened to him?) was viciously attacked down town ; he had long hair and was mistaken for a student.
We had one influential English teacher who was an Asian escapee from the apartheid regime in S. Africa and spoke about it on occasions. He was an inspirational teacher of Shakespeare and mostly tolerant of my heresies. He was a rarity then : someone who possessed a life outside the classroom and was unafraid to share it with us.
6th formers in the late 60s were increasingly defined by the teams we supported, but especially by the music we liked and , at one stage, SOUL versus BLUES was as big a conflict as Oasis and Blur became for my older daughter's generation.
Though I favoured the Blues and went to see John Mayall's band play locally, I savoured being apart from the mainstream: the only one who followed Soft Machine and preferred T.S. Eliot's words to those of Bob Dylan.
One thing I vividly recall are the many times we visited an open psychiatric hospital outside town. We went to see my sister there, as she had fractured her skull whilst out walking on a mountain in Israel. She was fortunate to survive and was knocked back to infancy.
The place was full of casualties of the 60s : suicides and breakdowns, drug addicts and victims of a time of excess, where no such consequences had been foreseen.
However, for every victim like Fleetwood Mac's Peter Green, there was a hero like Lennon and none of this prevented me from going to Uni. and experimenting, if not fully, then to a considerable degree. I gained a BA in English with a subsidiary in Piss Artistry.
At Aberystwyth, the 60s hung on into the next decade in the form of many hippies there, whose dope-fuelled parties we attended and who did possess the wealth and privilege of Jack in the series.
However, there were signs of a change. Almost all my friends came from working-class backgrounds and had the kind of anger and desire for change more closely associated with the punks.
My best mate was an example : Manchester accent, black leather jacket , long black hair, he quoted Nietsche and read the anarchist paper 'Black Flag'. His hero was Rimbaud and he once attended a Fancy Dress Ball as a Kamikaze pilot, dive-bombing terrified females on the dance floor. In the early 70s, he was a walking prophecy of punk and a sign that 'Peace & Love' was turning darker, becoming more nihilistic.
****************
Black heat of a flag, a fist, a future where rules would be fired and you could charcoal a world without leaders.
Black heat of anger : bottles thrown like grenades and glass shattering on the night-time, sleeping town.
Black heat of Beefheart : tributaries of Blues, dream imagery and jagged jazz poetry joining in a torrent to cut deep chasms, gullies.
SHE WORE A RED MAC
Everyone was after her,
even my friend Ben
who was more interested
in the demise of Harold Wilson.
She was a Marianne Faithfull
to our rock fantasies,
a Twiggy to our doodled designs,
to our aspiring lenses, Julie Christie.
After two months of spluttered hellos
and passing her house on my bike
on the way to nowhere in the hope......
a mutual mate Chris was go-between.
Our first date late on the Rec.
I affected a gruff accent,
she kept asking if I had a cold :
nearest I got, pushing her on a swing.
We did walk together after that.
She wore a bright red PVC mac.
I even plastered my curly hair down
to turn it into a Beatles mop.
She was so pretty, my arm was limp
as I tried to wind it round her.
She went stiff as a mannequin,
the red plastic colder than leather.
Later on in our non-relationship
she said - 'Chris called me frigid!
What do you think, Mike?'
I nodded wisely, cleared my throat.
Looked it up in a dictionary that night.
Soon found out she was meeting Chris,
he was starting a band, playing their first gig.
I vowed to be more insulting next time.
White heat of technology faraway in the skies, Concord leaving sound behind and those Neil Armstrong strides.
**************
I have enjoyed 'White Heat' on television so far, though it only touches on the spirit of the 60s.
It is too much of an artificial construct and the dialogue rather stilted. In order to deal with the awakening of issues of gender, sexuality and Civil Rights we are suppposed to believe that posh yet revolutionary protagonist Jack has succeeded in bringing together six very different students as his tenants in a London house owned by his MP father.
However, this seems too much like a Big Brother experiment, created so that the major concerns of the times can be dealt with. I'm sure that Orla, the devout northern Irish Catholic, would never have agreed to Jack's diktats on 'free love' in the first place and others would have resisted.
I admired the way the character Charlotte (played by the gorgeous Claire Foy) was developed through her totally credible conflict with her parents, even though her clothes change from 50s to 60s in the taxi and wielding of 'Lady Chatterley' were both too forced.
I recall going out with a girl very much like her, who even wore the same red PVC coat! I thought she was beyond me and I turned out to be right! She liked me 'as a friend' and soon after I stopped seeing her she began dating my nemesis, the Head Boy who owned a motorbike and captained the rugby team.
My youthful years straddled the decades, so the 60s were my teenage era.
The kind of class warfare I indulged in were constant battles with teachers who all had their own forms of torture, either physical or the sheer boredom of lessons.
The only street fighting I did was when we used to raid houses with bangers on Bonfire Night, or attack students with pea-shooters on Rag Day. My brother was one of them ; being set in concrete for charity, if I remember rightly.
There's no doubt my background was completely different to any of the characters in 'White Heat' : son of a single mother who had always considered herself 'shocking' when it came to any sexual matters and who flirted with Communism and CND, I was never confined or restricted; if anything given too much licence.
In fact, my brother was probably the most rebellious by being the most conservative. He joined the Armed Forces and showed no interest in a popular musical revolution which always engrossed me.
On the other hand, my sister often tried to 'out-shock' my mother. She studied Social Anthropology at a London Uni. and visiting her I glimpsed something of that world depicted in 'White Heat'. She left Uni. to work at a kibbutz in Israel, doing 'a gap year' before anyone had even coined that phrase.
The 60s did keep invading and disturbing our old-fashioned Grammar School.
There was a drugs raid once and many of my friends were hauled out of lessons and interrogated by police on the premises. One of my friends ( whose brother was well-known for designing one album cover of a certain Elton John.......whatever happened to him?) was viciously attacked down town ; he had long hair and was mistaken for a student.
We had one influential English teacher who was an Asian escapee from the apartheid regime in S. Africa and spoke about it on occasions. He was an inspirational teacher of Shakespeare and mostly tolerant of my heresies. He was a rarity then : someone who possessed a life outside the classroom and was unafraid to share it with us.
6th formers in the late 60s were increasingly defined by the teams we supported, but especially by the music we liked and , at one stage, SOUL versus BLUES was as big a conflict as Oasis and Blur became for my older daughter's generation.
Though I favoured the Blues and went to see John Mayall's band play locally, I savoured being apart from the mainstream: the only one who followed Soft Machine and preferred T.S. Eliot's words to those of Bob Dylan.
One thing I vividly recall are the many times we visited an open psychiatric hospital outside town. We went to see my sister there, as she had fractured her skull whilst out walking on a mountain in Israel. She was fortunate to survive and was knocked back to infancy.
The place was full of casualties of the 60s : suicides and breakdowns, drug addicts and victims of a time of excess, where no such consequences had been foreseen.
However, for every victim like Fleetwood Mac's Peter Green, there was a hero like Lennon and none of this prevented me from going to Uni. and experimenting, if not fully, then to a considerable degree. I gained a BA in English with a subsidiary in Piss Artistry.
At Aberystwyth, the 60s hung on into the next decade in the form of many hippies there, whose dope-fuelled parties we attended and who did possess the wealth and privilege of Jack in the series.
However, there were signs of a change. Almost all my friends came from working-class backgrounds and had the kind of anger and desire for change more closely associated with the punks.
My best mate was an example : Manchester accent, black leather jacket , long black hair, he quoted Nietsche and read the anarchist paper 'Black Flag'. His hero was Rimbaud and he once attended a Fancy Dress Ball as a Kamikaze pilot, dive-bombing terrified females on the dance floor. In the early 70s, he was a walking prophecy of punk and a sign that 'Peace & Love' was turning darker, becoming more nihilistic.
****************
Black heat of a flag, a fist, a future where rules would be fired and you could charcoal a world without leaders.
Black heat of anger : bottles thrown like grenades and glass shattering on the night-time, sleeping town.
Black heat of Beefheart : tributaries of Blues, dream imagery and jagged jazz poetry joining in a torrent to cut deep chasms, gullies.
SHE WORE A RED MAC
Everyone was after her,
even my friend Ben
who was more interested
in the demise of Harold Wilson.
She was a Marianne Faithfull
to our rock fantasies,
a Twiggy to our doodled designs,
to our aspiring lenses, Julie Christie.
After two months of spluttered hellos
and passing her house on my bike
on the way to nowhere in the hope......
a mutual mate Chris was go-between.
Our first date late on the Rec.
I affected a gruff accent,
she kept asking if I had a cold :
nearest I got, pushing her on a swing.
We did walk together after that.
She wore a bright red PVC mac.
I even plastered my curly hair down
to turn it into a Beatles mop.
She was so pretty, my arm was limp
as I tried to wind it round her.
She went stiff as a mannequin,
the red plastic colder than leather.
Later on in our non-relationship
she said - 'Chris called me frigid!
What do you think, Mike?'
I nodded wisely, cleared my throat.
Looked it up in a dictionary that night.
Soon found out she was meeting Chris,
he was starting a band, playing their first gig.
I vowed to be more insulting next time.
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