More 1960s North-east England
When people talk about the Sixties, I’m sure younger people assume they started in 1960. They didn’t. They began in 1963, with events like The Beatles and other pop stars exploding onto the world’s notice and ended in 1973 with oil price rises. I say they began and ended then but that was for the world at large. To the younger me in northeast England, there wasn’t a huge change in anything. One year, as a Boy Scout, we traveled from our homes to Derbyshire on the open flat bed of a truck, singing Beatles songs most of the way. Those Beatles songs were the total change we experienced at that time.
For me, however, it did begin my long dislike of fashion. Fashion was what defined you in the Sixties and woe-betide-you if you got it wrong or joined in too late. Fashion required constant attention to the stream of pop culture in order to remain ‘groovy’. The Rolling Stones summed it up perfectly in ‘Baby, You’re Out of Time.’ Miss only a few days of what the fashionable world was doing, and you were ‘out’. As someone looking on this from the outside, I disliked this mob mentality over trivial matters. I still do, and not just for fashions in clothes.
