Tim Worthington
Writer. Occasional Broadcaster. TV's 'Clangers Expert'.
The Larks Ascending
Top Of The Box
Can't Help Thinking About Me
Fun At One
Higher Than The Sun
Not On Your Telly
The Camberwick Green Procrastination Society
Well At Least It's Free
Cult Q&A
Creation Records Interview
Looks Unfamiliar
Looks Unfamiliar: Shows 1 – 6
Looks Unfamiliar: Shows 7 – 12
Looks Unfamiliar: Shows 13 – 18
August 27, 2017 October 6, 2019 Tim Worthington
All That I Can See With My Mind's Eye
For me, 1966 begins with a puppet clown staring forwards at terrified child viewers before jerking round a handle attached to a blackboard. It ends with Jonathan Miller herding a troupe of former Beyond The Fringe cast members and future Pythons around an eerie psychotherapy-tinged dreary Victoriana-hued Lewis Carroll retelling with sitars plunking all over the soundtrack. In between some jazzmen in lab coats scared audiences with co-ordinated scraping noises, a small army of small-screen comedy stars hared around London trying to make sense of a Robert Louis Stevenson-derived script, and over in the BBC's Riverside Studios, Polly put Doctor Who's hat on and nobody is quite sure why.
Several of you will already have noticed that the last on this list didn't actually take place until the first few days of 1967. Some of you may also be voicing suspicion that filming for The Wrong Box might have started late in 1965. And that's precisely my point here – this is an entirely subjective and impressionistic view of a year, and one that I have no first hand knowledge of at that, which cannot possibly fit entirely within a rigidly defined timeframe. And whether documentary makers and historians like it or not, the same will invariably be true of any overview of a 'year'. You cannot tell the 'story' of a year simply because each is made up of a potentially infinite number of 'stories', usually spilling into more than one other year in either or both directions, and often with absolutely no impact or bearing on each other whatsoever. The 1966 that exists in my own frame of reference is all about a colourful yet also predominantly black and white expansion in the least regarded areas of the arts; for others, and particularly the overwhelming percentage of those who were there at the time, the reality will have been very different indeed.
Despite bearing the subtitle 'The Year The Decade Exploded', Jon Savage's 1966 in fact deftly and deliberately avoids trying to present itself as a definitive document of that tricky twelve-month stretch. Instead, it concerns itself solely with how pop music mirrored aspects of rapid social upheaval and vice versa, maintaining an awareness throughout – and sometimes explicitly forming part of the narrative – that there were huge swathes of international society whose lives were not touched by any of this in any way at all. Key to this is Savage's tactic of diving the book up into twelve months and twelve pop singles that reflected the key sociocultural themes and obsessions of each; these range from the expected likes of Good Vibrations and 19th Nervous Breakdown to records that, like The Quiet Explosion by The Uglys, you could be forgiven for having assumed that only you knew about. Norma Tanega's Walkin' My Cat Named Dog introduces the first stirrings of radical gender politics, Joe Meek's shockingly camp Do You Come Here Often? points to how the still legally persecuted gay community went in entirely the opposite direction, Wilson Pickett's Land Of 1000 Dances is contrasted with the growing resentment and unrest of Black America, and Love's 7 And 7 Is is on hand to remind us all that not everyone thought that peace and love was the 'answer'. There's even Winchester Cathedral by The New Vaudeville Band, which as you're imagining takes some explaining.
There are literally hundreds of other records fitted in and around all of this, from the likes of 13th Floor Elevators and The Velvet Underground And Nico, through The Yardbirds and The Monkees, right up to popular crooners and stray retired military men that some lunatic decided could sing and the often decidedly non-'Easy' reasons behind their surges in popularity. Needless to say The Beatles sit at the centre of it all, though as a fractious, dissolute and often downright nasty presence, producing their finest work at the same time as apparently not wanting to be there at all. If there's one thing that you cannot accuse this book of, it's following a cliched narrative.
Clocking in at such a hefty size that Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling would market it as a pocketbook – and yes, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore are in there too – 1966 is a fine and meticulously researched work that if nothing else will expose you to a whole new library of pop music that you had never heard of previously (nobody reading it will have heard everything in it). My one criticism would be that there are moments when it conflates events in the UK and USA too heavily as influences, when they more than likely had little direct correlation, especially in the earliest days of mass communication. Chances are that whatever battles with The Great Society were raging in America, those loudly-shirted scamps clogging up Tottenham Court Road and BBC2 arts shows had drawn much greater inspiration from Adam Adamant Lives! and post-Pop Art advertising and supermarket packaging. And maybe we're going to be taking a look at another book that explores that very argument very soon…
You can get 1966 – The Year The Decade Exploded from Faber & Faber here or from Amazon here. There's also an excellent soundtrack CD available from Ace Records here.
There's much more on 1966, pyschedelic pop, television weird-outs and Camberwick Green (which technically combines all three) in The Camberwick Green Procrastination Society, an anthology of some of my columns and features. The Camberwick Green Procrastination Society is available in paperback here or from the Kindle Store here; there's also a full-colour eBook version, complete with era-appropriate magazine layout pastiches for each feature, available here.
Jonathan Miller's interpretation of Alice In Wonderland – along with the BBC's edits of The Monkees – was one of my choices when I appeared on Perfect Night In, which you can hear (and see clips of) here.
All Fall Down And Lost In The Mystery is my piece on the enduring mystery of The Beach Boys and SMiLE – and what happened once they solved it – which you can find here.
There is plenty of background on The Beach Boys and SMiLE – and some speculation on what might have happened if it actually had been released in 1966 – in Rob Chapman's excellent book Psychedelia And Other Colours; you can find You Can't Seem To Find How You Got There, So Just Blow Your Mind, my thoughts on reading the book, here.
© Tim Worthington.
Please don't copy this only with more italics and exclamation marks.
Camberwick Green
Peter Cook And Dudley Moore
Published by Tim Worthington
Writer. Occasional Broadcaster. TV's 'Clangers Expert'.	View all posts by Tim Worthington
Previous All Fall Down And Lost In The Mystery
Next Take Five Really Swings!
Tim Worthington's Newsround
Looks Unfamiliar #55: Lydia Mizon – There Was No Dicaprio Rhyme
QI Elf Lydia Mizon tells us about Stoppit And Tidyup, Fervour, Roseanne And The Magic Mirror, Alphabet Castle, Party Mania and more. Listen to it here.
Looks Unfamiliar Now The Christmas Album Extra: "Just Cross That Four Out And Put A Five In"
Ben Baker joins us to talk about the mysteriously airbrushed from history original version of Now - The Christmas Album. Listen to it here.
Looks Unfamiliar Christmas Extra: "It's Like A Choose Your Own Adventure Of News"
Phil Catterall joins us to talk about the Christmas Specials of On The Hour, The Chris Morris Music Show and Lee And Herring. Listen to it here.
The $1,000,000 Collection
A critic's eye view of some remarkable UK sixties jazz cover art - and the equally remarkable music.
The Ten Least Effective Protest Songs
A look at the songs that were never going to change the world...
Go Down Record Huntin' (In Charity Shops)
A deep dive into that mouldy box of records in your local charity shop with some of my best, worst and just plain weirdest finds - and stories to match...
The Pilots That Time Forgot
The tryouts for hit telecision shows that almost got it right... but not quite.
Never Too Quickly, Never Too Slowly
A look at the episode of Trumpton where the telephone lines got mixed up, thanks to Miss Lovelace's dogs...
Book Offer
You can currently get The Larks Ascending with 10% off in paperback (Code LULU10) from here.
Not All The Albums Again
I've written the sleevenotes for a box set of the Not The Nine O'Clock News albums. Find out more here.
The Zeitgeist Tapes
I'm on The Zeitgeist Tapes with Emma Burnell and Steve Fielding talking about Vote For Froglet, the election special of Clangers. You can listen to it here.
A deep dive into that mouldy box of records in your local charity shop with some of my best, worst and just plain weirdest finds - and stories to match... hear it here.
Looks Unfamiliar #12: Steve O'Brien – E.T. Pretzel Design
KP Sky Divers, Brat Farrar, Simon In The Land Of Chalk Drawings and more...
@outonbluesix
In case you missed them…