The Other Summer Of Love

Following last week’s post about this month’s BBC-wide season celebrating the album, you may have caught last week’s day-long event (presented by our very own Stuart Maconie) which came live from Abbey Road Studios. Here were modern acts recreating what many would cite as the true start of the ‘swinging sixties’ – the Beatles first album, Please Please Me.

And in many ways who else would epitomise the period covered by tonight’s show - Britain Skips the Light Fandango - better than that band who released Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in August of 1967: the height of the fabled ‘Summer of Love’? But why was that summer so significant for young people?

It’s probably put best in the words of listener Peter Johns in this comment on Radio 2’s Facebook page:

‘It's easy to laugh, but the colour, the feeling of being in on a revolution, of an end to the drab post war period, of and end to how the world had been, the start of how it was going to be. It was totally intoxicating. I know now that it all went pear shaped almost immediately, but for a while it was wonderful!’

But, not everyone was in on the ‘revolution’. The People’s Songs is an alternative history of Britain via the stories of people who lived so-called ‘ordinary’ lives during these epochal times. Hence this week’s featured song – ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ by Procol Harum – is probably far more representative of those times. Most of us know this psychedelic classic written by Matthew Fisher and Gary Brooker, and many of us remember it hitting the top spot in the summer of 1967. You may even know that, according to scholars, the surreal lyrics concern (in the words of author, Claes Johansen) "a male/female relationship which after some negotiation ends in a sexual act"!

And you may even be tempted to call it ‘timeless’. But that’s the point. The songs featured on the series aren’t timeless in this context. They’re very much rooted to the era that we first heard them. And while the Bach-inflected intro and metaphor-heavy lyrics may, in many people’s minds, be the very epitome of the psychedelic experience, this is a huge single that strength of sales alone proves was bought by people from every strata of society (27 weeks on the charts on two separate occasions and number one in May 1967 for six weeks). Of those hundreds of thousands of record-buyers only a small fraction would be genuinely experiencing the sensation of wearing paisley or flowers in their hair. In other words, the power of the music transcended the loftier cultural significance of this hit.

Via your contributions, we hope to provide a snapshot of what life really was like in Britain that summer. John, one of the contributors to this week’s show, recalls in this clip how he saw the London ‘flower children’ that summer while he was on shore leave. 

In other words, while Procol Harum’s hit (along with others by acts like Pink Floyd, Small Faces, Scott Mackenzie, The Move and, of course, The Beatles) sums up a zeitgeist, you have to remember that 95% of the population still existed in that ‘drab post war period’. If you were a sailor in the merchant navy, or someone working in Woolworths on a Saturday, saving up to see more ‘mainstream’ acts like Scott Walker (although some may argue that Scott became more ‘far out’ than many of the aforementioned acts!), life was far more quotidian than that of San Francisco’s hippies or the trendy crowds who attended London’s hippest spots like the UFO club on Tottenham Court Road.

It’s these ‘real’ experiences which hopefully make The People’s Songs far more resonant with you, the people who either lived through the times, or are fascinated by what’s turning out to be a real social history of these isles.

Tune in tonight at 10pm and we'll skip the light fandango! (whatever that means...)

• Contribute your memories to The People’s Songs