THE SWINGING SIXTIES

The 1960s were a heady time of revolution in lifestyles, music and civil rights, heralding a new age of sexual freedom.

The children of the conformist, sedate fifties came of age against the "youth quake" and later the backdrop of the Vietnam War, and rebellion expressed itself in clothing and hair styles, sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll, and on into powerful, far-reaching political movements for social change. These ranged from the early '60s "mods" in London, where Mary Quant designed the miniskirt, to the later '60s hippies in San Francisco with their back-to-the-land communes and psychedelic drug manifestos. The decade that started with civil rights demonstrations proceeded to anti-war draft-card burnings, massive peace marches and civil unrest throughout the world. The US saw the assassination of President John Kennedy, and later his brother Robert and Martin Luther King. The early civil rights movement gave birth to Black Power. Riot and demonstrations flared, from the anti-war crusades on campuses, to the 1968 National Democratic Convention in Chicago, to the first demonstration for gay rights, known as the "Stonewall Riots," in New York City. In France in May 1968, student rioters were joined by ten million workers, who shut down the economic machinery of the country for several weeks, while in August of that same year, Soviet tanks rolled into Prague to quash the reforms of the "Prague Spring" movement. Violence erupted on campuses from Japan to Italy to Mexico. The "Pill" went on sale in Britain and, not long after, the government made it available for free on the national health service, kick-starting a new age of sexual freedom. Women worldwide saw legislation for reproductive choice, no-fault divorce and equal rights in the workplace. Music was eclectic, from the early stirring folk anthems of Bob Dylan and Pete Seeger, to the "British invasion" of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, to Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and the gigantic 1969 Woodstock concert. The Beatles became spokesmen for a generation, segueing from the sweet, bluesinfluenced early "I Want to Hold Your Hand" to their seamless experimental masterpiece album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Broadway captured the energy of the times with Hair, in which peace-andlove hippies danced nude and sang about the "dawning of the Age of Aquarius." Modern celebrity was ushered in by Andy Warhol's famous-for-being-famous "superstars" at the New York club Max's Kansas City and by Truman Capote's exclusive high-society Black and White Ball of 1966. The arts broke free of conventional forms and became improvisational and politicised-there were "happenings" in the street and jazz-poetry jams in packed clubs.

THE SILVER SCREEN

It was also a time of experimentation in film, from Polanski's Repulsion to Antonioni's Blowup, and Cassavetes' Faces.Easy Rider fused biker culture with the American road-trip movie tradition, while Bonnie and Clyde followed the wild, violent odyssey of an outlaw couple. Midnight Cowboy, about a hapless hustler in New York City, was the first major studio release with an "X" rating and went on to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. Alfred Hitchcock's cult classic Psycho produced the most famous shower scene ever shot and Stanley Kubrick's Lolita, adapted from Vladimir Nabokov's novel, depicted a man's obsession with a teenaged girl.

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A raft of previously censored novels saw the light of day in the 1960s, including Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover and Fanny Hill by John Cleland. Feminist classics included Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebooks and Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique. Richard Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America and Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five both used experimental form to explore complex social issues. Alan Watts pioneered the fusion of Eastern enlightenment with Western psychology in The Book. The sixties also saw the rise of the pop-psych and - sociology genre, with Games People Play and Human Sexual Response, and such