A TECHNICOLOR DREAM
The high water mark of the ‘underground’ movement in the Sixties was the event that we have chosen as the centre piece of our programme. This event, which took place on the 29th April 1967 at Alexandra Palace, was the first all night rave - ‘THE 14 HOUR TECHNICOLOR DREAM’.
The party would feature bands - most notably Pink Floyd, The Pretty Things, and The Soft Machine- dancers, poets and artistic happenings. In fact, the party, and the events that led to it, could be seen as a microcosm of the Sixties. Experimental music, free love, flower power, psychedelia, drugs, light shows, the abolition of censorship, CND, ‘happenings’ - they are all there in our story.
The Sixties is seen as the decade in which society experienced its most profound changes, its most radical cultural shifts. To many of the participants, the Sixties was an era of unashamed utopianism. Maybe because many of the changes were taking place for the first time, people believed, to put it naively, that they could be free and the world might actually be made a better place.
With this new freedom came experimentation and excess - what in a later decade became known as ‘sex and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll’. And - the search for something different and better. An alternative. And the group of people leading the search for that alternative became known as the ‘underground’.
The story of the ‘underground’ - and arguably the story of the Sixties – began in earnest with the first spontaneous happening - the International Poetry Incarnation at the Albert Hall, June 1965 which included appearances from Beat luminaries such as Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso. The event brought together many of ‘straight’ society’s fringe elements for the first time and the underground movement began to solidify. John ‘Hoppy’ Hopkins, Peter Jenner, Joe Boyd and many others started the London Free School soon after the event. Syd Barrett’s Pink Floyd would play at Free School events and would be so popular that Hoppy and Joe Boyd decided to capitalise on this popularity by opening the first underground psychedelic club – UFO.
Barry Miles got together with John Dunbar and Peter Asher to form the Indica bookshop and art gallery. Indica was a meeting place for like-minded writers, artists, musicians and radicals. The Fluxus art movement had its first exhibitions there; indeed, John Lennon first met Yoko Ono at one of her exhibitions at Indica.
Indica’s basement was home to the International Times, or IT as it was known – the first British underground newspaper. The International Times quickly came to be seen as a threat by the Establishment and so the offices were raided and shut down. A benefit was called for to raise funds and the 14 Hour Technicolor Dream was born.
If the Technicolor Dream was the pivotal event of the underground movement of the Sixties it was also typical of the spontaneous ‘beat’ sensibility of most of what took place. The party was disorganised - people gate crashed the event - no money was raised - nothing changed. For at its root the Sixties was just that - a party - people dressed up, danced, took drugs, had sex and enjoyed trying to shock the straight middle classes. Once that party had run its course, they discovered that the ‘alternative’ maybe didn’t exist. And all the revolutions - ecological movements, gay liberation, and the women’s movement - had been absorbed into the mainstream.
The headline act at the Technicolor Dream was Pink Floyd led by Syd Barrett – the darling of the underground. Syd, like the conscience of the underground, was beautiful, talented and revolutionary but, as with the underground, once the mainstream tapped him on the shoulder he fell apart and we will look into this in depth.
Syd Barrett, as well as many, many others took copious amounts of LSD, as well as other drugs, and drugs are obviously a big part of the story of the ‘underground’ in the Sixties and we will discuss the pros and cons, fallacies and truths, and explore the actual impact of the Sixties drug culture and its repercussions.
Those interviewed for the film include Nick Mason, Roger Waters, Kevin Ayers, Phil May, John ‘Hoppy’ Hopkins, Miles, Joe Boyd, Peter Jenner, Jeff Dexter and many, many more.