As with San Francisco, Swinging London also experienced a 'Summer of Love' in 1967. The musical and social revolution changed Britain forever.
Everyone knows 1967 as the Summer of Love and it is forever associated with San Francisco. London also had its own Summer of Love (as did other cities across the world) and London’s scene was every bit as varied and flower-powered as the one on the US West Coast. Based in three areas of London, Soho's fringes, Chelsea's King's Road, and the Westbourne Park area of W2, it changed the nature of Britain's music and culture forever.
Music
While San Francisco had the Grateful Dead and Big Brother and the Holding Company, London saw The Beatles release 'Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band', argued by some to be the greatest album of all time. Sgt Pepper is interesting, however, because it refected fashion styles which looked backwards towards the past influence of Swinging London's Carnaby Street, Lord John and Mary Quant. The Summer of Love brought a different, flower-powered, bare footed, flowing, scented, hippie look. New bands making the most of the changed atmosphere included Pink Floyd who released, first, the single Arnold Layne, and then the album Piper at the Gates of Dawn. The UFO Club, first held in an Irish Dance Hall on Tottenham Court Road and then, after a police raid, re-opened in Camden Town’s Round House, was London’s equivalent of The Fillmore. Pink Floyd, Tyrannosaurus Rex (Marc Bolan and Steve Peregrine Took), Soft Machine, Arthur Brown, the Incredible String Band, and Tomorrow all played there, sometimes with DJ John Peel in attendance. Between them, they changed the UK’s music taste forever.
Culture
The year 1967 can be seen as a watershed between a grumbling on the part of youth about the post-war austerity and mores that were associated with the older generation and a complete rejection of it. The early-mid sixties saw modifications of what had gone before. Teddy Boys and Mods, for example, had worn suits just as their fathers did, but they were sharper suits, worn with attitude. The hippies rejected suits altogether and it became acceptable not to wear one.
The year 1967 was also the year that British society began talking about drugs. Very few people outside the very hip London set were, in fact, taking drugs (that came later in the 1970s and 1980s), but the whole country was certainly talking about them. The establishment was determined to stamp them out and it can be argued that this was the point at which the seeds of contemporary, failed, drug policy were sown.
The other legacy of 1967 was a freeing-up of attitudes towards sex, although as with drugs, it is probable that this freeing up was talked about rather more than it was being acted upon!
The Summer of Love in the UK also saw a blossoming of the ‘alternative press’ and, in London, IT (International Times) was particularly important. It was a benefit for this newspaper’s ‘legal fund’ that turned into one of the year’s seminal events and saw the fusion of music and counter-culture. The event was an all-night International Love-In at the Alexandra Palace in London in July 1967. Pink Floyd and many other bands played in front of huge light shows that had become staples of the scene, while the London psychedelic glitterati mingled with others fortunate enough to get tickets.
The End of Love
By 1968, the War in Vietnam had intensified. The scene had been infiltrated by commercialism and those selling drugs and sex for profit had decided that ‘Free Love’ offered a useful ‘brand image’. The numbers of ‘weekend hippies’ were outnumbering those for whom the scene offered a total lifestyle and, as was also the case in San Francisco, the Summer of Love was over. Although many of the trends, much of the music and art, and many of the causes (feminism, and ecology are two obvious examples) established in that year continue with to be with us, normal life was resumed, but many will think that the Summer of Love’s greatest legacy is that what we considered ‘normal’ had itself changed forever.
