Contents

About the Book

Deep in a wood in the Marches of Wales, in an ancient school bus there lives an old man called Bob Rowberry.

A Hero For High Times is the story of how he ended up in this broken-down bus. It’s also the story of his times, and the ideas that shaped him. It’s a story of why you know your birth sign, why you have friends called Willow, why sex and drugs and rock ’n’ roll once mattered more than money, why dance music stopped the New Age Travellers from travelling, and why you need to think twice before taking the brown acid.

It’s the story of the hippies for those who weren’t there – for Younger Readers who’ve never heard of the Aldermaston marches, Oz, the Angry Brigade, the Divine Light Mission, Sniffin’ Glue, Operation Julie, John Seymour, John Michell, Greenham Common, the Battle of the Beanfield, but who want to understand their grandparents’ stories of turning on, tuning in and not quite dropping out before they are gone for ever. It’s for Younger Readers who want to know how to build a bender, make poppy tea, and throw the I Ching.

And it’s a story of friendship between two men, one who did things, and one who thought about things, between theory and practice, between a hippie and a punk, between two gentlemen, no longer in the first flush of youth, who still believe in love.

About the Author

Ian Marchant is originally from Newhaven in East Sussex, and now lives with his family in the no longer extant Welsh county of Radnorshire. He has published seven books, including the travel/memoirs Parallel Lines, The Longest Crawl and Something of the Night. He is a sometimes presenter of documentaries for BBC Radio, and has appeared numerous times at festivals (including Glastonbury, Secret Garden Party and Wilderness) as one half of semi-legendary hippie cabaret duo ‘Your Dad’.

Ian Marchant

A Hero for High Times

A Younger Reader’s Guide to the Beats, Hippies, Freaks, Punks, Ravers, New-Age Travellers and Dog-on-a-Rope Brew Crew Crusties of the British Isles, 1956–1994

It is by me,

Ian Marchant,

and I am your grandfather.

This book, my darling granddaughters, is mostly about a small group of people who called themselves Freaks. They have called themselves many other things over the years. The Beats, the Hippies, the Punks, the Ravers, the New Age Travellers. Freaks will do for them all.

The Freaks thought the world was broken, and that they might have found a new way of mending it. They wanted freedom, and happiness, and a world in which people could be themselves, which meant that there would be no war, no famine and no disease.

The Freaks thought that in order to make this happen, everyone and everything needed to change. And to change everyone and everything, the Freaks were going to teach the world to play.

The Freaks wanted everybody to look at everything in a new way.

A new way which allows people to live their lives how they choose, no matter what anybody else thinks or says. A way where we can dance and sing and play all day. A way where Love is the most powerful force in the universe, and where people see that the world is a wonderful, magical place. A way where we all realise that we are in the here and now, just this once, just in this pregnant moment of the eternal creative life of the cosmos, and that we are the eyes and hands and souls of Creation.

It didn’t work, my darling girls, of course it didn’t. But between about 1956, when your grandmother Rowan was born, and about 1994, when your mummy was fourteen, the Freaks tried to make it work.

Lots of my friends were Freaks. You can read about one of them called Bob Rowberry in this book. I was a Freak, too – still am – and I’m sorry it didn’t work. Sometimes it even looks like we made things worse.

Just like every other human in history, you have been born into a world that is broken. I don’t know if the world can be mended. On the evidence of what I’ve seen, I almost want to say it can’t be. But I still believe with all my heart that the world is worth trying to mend. The thing is to try. It is always hard, so trying may be your only reward.

I hope you will try one day, and that your way, whatever it might turn out to be, will be better than ours.

Presteigne, Radnorshire, July 2017

You know, there really exist certain people to whom it is assigned, at their birth, to have all sorts of extraordinary things happen to them.

Mikhail Lermontov

The Past is Only a Pleasant Void

Deep in a wood in a valley in the Marches of Wales, alongside a long-ago abandoned railway line, there lives a seventy-five-year-old man called Bob Rowberry. His home is a superannuated school bus, now painted battleship grey, whose engine has died and whose wheels have fallen off.

This is the story of how he ended up in this broken-down bus, on this abandoned line, in this lost and forgotten part of the world.

I’ve come up here today – pulled up a farm track off the A44 onto the old permanent way, driven along the rutted trackbed between overhanging trees, and parked up alongside the corrugated-iron shed where Bob keeps his tools and parks his quad bike – to see if he can mend my writing stool.

I write sitting on a 1960s draughtsman’s stool. I am a big lad. Yesterday part of the base snapped, and it has felt unsafe all morning. Bob will be able to mend it, I know. He’s a travelling metalworker; from the roughest blacksmithing to the most delicate jewellery, Bob can make and mend pretty much anything. He’s a highly skilled man. Besides, I want to talk to him. I have had an idea.

He says he’s always pleased to see me, and I trust him. I know I’m always pleased to see him. He looks at the stool, and props it up on his bench.

‘You big fat fucker,’ he says. ‘Come and have a coffee and I’ll fix that in a minute.’

A third of the bus is filled with Bob’s bed, a ginger cat dozing on the Afghan throws that cover it. The rest is part kitchen, part metalworking shop. A box full of lettuce seedlings sits on top of the dashboard. Next to the bed, a wood-burner smoulders, even on this muggy late-summer day, with a kettle keeping warm on top. The bus smells of hot metal, coffee and woodsmoke. And Bob. Smelling like Bob is a good thing, to judge from his startling success with the ladies. Perhaps it helps that he is officially a gypsy; Powys County Council designated him as such a few years back, so that he can continue to live in this wood, which he rents from a homeopathic vet for 5p a year. He’s a looker, even at seventy-five; he looks a bit like David Essex might have, if David had dressed in Hereford Hospice Shop chic and actually lived a great deal of his life outdoors hitting hot metal.

Bob wasn’t always a gypsy. Society has had a few names for Bob over the years. He was a Beat in the fifties, a Face in the sixties, a Freak in the seventies, and a New Age Traveller in the eighties. Bob calls himself a Raver. I call him my friend, for thirty years now.

We take our coffee outside. The wood is loud with birdsong.

‘Do you know why there are so many birds in my wood?’ Bob asks me.

‘Isn’t it because we’re in a wood in the middle of nowhere?’

‘No, it’s because I’ve killed all the grey squirrels, so the birds lay more eggs.’

I’ve seen Bob do this. I’ve sat outside his van at the Abergavenny Food Festival, and watched him kill a squirrel from thirty yards with a ball bearing fired from a catapult.

The wood might belong to the homeopathic vet in law, but it’s Bob’s patch. Here and there, in clearings in the wood, he grows his own veg, and his own requisites. There’s no spring, but Bob catches the water he needs in rain butts. His meat he often shoots himself; lots of rabbits and pigeons, and even, on one occasion, a squirrel. The meat was too greasy and tough to repeat the experiment. He husbands the trees, thinning them for fuel, and making sure the strongest trees grow stronger still.

Under an awning on the side of the bus, there is a welder’s bench where Bob makes psychedelic spinning tops from old pennies and fabulous mobiles out of feathers and scrap metal, which he sells at festivals in the summer and at high-end garden centres and Surrey art galleries in the winter. Students make their way out here; young craftsmen and women who stay for a day or a week or so, learning how to work with metal, sleeping in what was once Bob’s Other Van, but is now his spare bedroom.

On top of a high pole mounted to the bus roof, three solar panels charge an array of 12-volt car batteries. The panels need to be high because although today sunlight is dappling the floor of the wood, in winter sunlight can be hard to come by under the trees.

There is a fire space between the workbench and the shed, where logs burn on cold evenings when Bob and his guests want to sit outside and chat and smoke. It’s too warm to have the fire going this afternoon, but we sit, Bob and I, in one of the four old wheelchairs that are gathered round the fire space, drinking Bob’s thick coffee, sweetened with honey and evaporated milk.

‘What were you supposed to be writing before you broke your stool?’ Bob says.

‘Do you remember,’ I ask, ‘Theory & Practice, General Builders?’

Bob laughs.

‘Yeah.’

The idea was a good one, I always thought. It came to us one afternoon in 1989. Bob was outside our house fitting a radio to my car, whilst I sat indoors, revising for an electronic engineering exam at the Polytechnic of Wales.

‘Come out and I’ll show you what I’m doing, you stupid wanker,’ Bob shouted up at the room where I was trying to do hard sums. ‘That’ll teach you more about how to do electronics than some fucking equations.’

I came down to make him tea.

‘You know I’m not good at doing stuff,’ I said. ‘You do Practice, and I’ll do Theory.’

Thus was born the idea of ‘Theory and Practice, General Builders’. We’d go round to people’s houses to do mending and shit, and while Bob handled the practical side of the job, I could discuss theoretical aspects of the project with the homeowners.

We never got much work.

‘What about Theory & Practice?’ says Bob.

‘I’m still at it,’ I say. ‘Theorising while you practise.’

‘What are you theorising about?’

‘Hippies. Hippie culture. The Freaks. You, I guess.’

‘Me?’

‘Yeah, man, you.’

You, Bob. And what you seem to represent.

If I have ever added one nugget of fact to the sum of human knowledge, it is to help prove that Bob really did once own the cat after which Procol Harum were named. This legendary cat-ownership claim was one of the initial stories Bob told me when I first met him. In 2007 a music journalist, Marcus Gray, following up on my report of Bob’s story in my book The Longest Crawl, confirmed it to be true. There really was a cat called Procol Harum, owned by Bob, after which the band was named. In the Appendix at the back of the book, you’ll find links to the full story on the Procol Harum fan website.

Bob has told me a lot of stories over the years. Sleeping rough in Soho in the fifties, living the Beat dream – reciting Howl on buses, bopping at Ken Colyer’s club on Great Newport Street. Eric Clapton’s facility with the banjo. Throwing quoits over Long John Baldry’s erect cock. Bukakke nights with Diana Dors.

He told me once, ‘I was the first person to sell R.D. Laing acid,’ and I believed him.

After thirty years, you might think he’d be coming to the end of his stories, but I see no sign of it. The best place to buy a gun in Kandahar. The best way to test it. Why Afghan coats smelled of piss, and whose piss it was. His fashion spread in Vogue. The thing with Howard Marks and the IRA. The time he was freed from jail in Mexico by a popular uprising of the peasantry who had come to know him as ‘El Maestro’. The run-in with Saddam Hussain, for fuck’s sake. I tend to believe them all. Why not? If a chap tells you that Procol Harum were named after his cat, and if top-level investigative journalism proves it to be the case, why not just go with the lot?

‘What about me?’ says Bob.

‘You know I’ve got this job at a university?’

‘They put you in charge of young people?’

‘It is odd, I know. But … it’s got me thinking.’

And so it has.

When I started work at Birmingham City University in 2006, there was something nagging at me from Day One. Something was missing, but I couldn’t work out what. It took me the best part of my first term to put my finger on it. It was the virtual disappearance of student politics. There were no flyers, no posters, no overheated student union meetings; nothing. Even the poor old SWP seemed to have gone. Twenty-five years ago, you couldn’t have got near a university campus without encountering a cost accountant’s daughter from Kettering desperate to sell you a copy of Socialist Worker. All gone. I was shocked to see copies of Nuts and Zoo in the student union shop; when I was a student, the sisters campaigned to get rid of this kind of stuff.

Who let it back in?

Feminist politics, and student politics in general, seemed alive and well when I graduated in 1992. I myself had thrown an egg at Norris McWhirter, and occupied the Senate Room at Lancaster University; to what end, I’m afraid, I can no longer remember. On graduation, I lived amongst the Freaks, writing songs and trying to write a book, in cat-infested rented houses, in a caravan, in a London squat and, latterly, for four years, in the extraordinary bubble from reality that is an Arvon Foundation house.

By the time I emerged back into the real world in 2006, after a long absence, radical student politics seemed to have disappeared. Any politics that was left seemed to focus around the Islamic Society. The students I was meeting liked to get drunk on beer and jägerbombs at weekends; but, by and large, they were clean, hard-working and well behaved; one might almost say wholesome.

What had gone wrong?

Then one lunchtime, I mentioned the OZ trial to a colleague, a specialist in Norwegian literature, aged, I would guess, in his late thirties.

‘What’s the Oz trial?’ he asked.

Something, I thought, from a lost world. Ozymandius, the Schoolkid’s Edition.

In seminars and in tutorials, I’ve teased students with references to this lost cultural world, but the Aldermaston marches, Spare Rib, Operation Julie, the International Times, the I Ching, Catch 22, Illuminatus, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the NUSS, the Angry Brigade, R.D. Laing, the Divine Light Mission, the Incredible String Band, the Little Red Schoolbook, the Socialist Party of Great Britain, the Revolutionary Communist Party, the Revolutionary Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist), the Pink Fairies, Throbbing Gristle, Sniffin’ Glue, Crass, John Seymour, John Michell, Greenham Common, the Peace Convoy, Beanfield, Swampy – all seemed to have been forgotten. I started to think of this lost world as Freak Culture. I thought about how it was the culture in which I’d been raised, and about how it is fading away now, and about how I wish Younger Readers could know something of the cultural world of their parents and grandparents before it has gone, and while some of the perpetrators are still with us.

This is a quote from the Preface of Theodore Roszak’s The Making of a Counter Culture, first published in Britain in 1970:

He admits that he is ‘quite aware that this constellation has much maturing to do before its priorities fall into place and before any well-developed social cohesion grows up around it.’

A few paragraphs later he writes,

He was wrong. The adolescent young might be interested in playing Alien Nation on their devices, but that’s about it. No college-age young person has thrown the I Ching these last twenty years. It is fair to say that Minnie, my Millennial daughter, has shown a good deal of interest in psychedelic drugs, but her interest in communitarian experimentation does not extend to sharing her Pringles.

But, for me, for my generation in particular, he was dead right. The people that Roszak writes about – Herbert Marcuse, R.D. Laing, Alan Watts – they built our intellectual life, though we knew it not at the time. For us, growing up in the seventies, it seemed obvious that only the idea of radical discontent and innovation could possibly bring about ‘something a human being could identity as home’. These were the big hip cultural ideas of our youth. We were spoon-fed it. John and Yoko in bed for peace. ‘Something in the Air’ at school discos. The NME. We grew up in the seventies, when the lights didn’t work, when the State shook, and when, O Glorious Day!, anarchy was declared in the UK. We were the heirs of those Freaks Roszak was writing about, the next generation, the clear inheritors of this world-changing cultural constellation.

But Roszak was wrong. So we were wrong too.

I was born in 1958 on 14 March. Elvis Presley joined the US Army ten days later. This event traditionally marked the end of the Golden Age of Rock ’n’ Roll. The fact that I was born in that Golden Age has always seemed to me important in terms of how I have lived my life. 1958 also saw the publication of Michael Young’s satire The Rise of the Meritocracy, the tragic misinterpretation of which has had untold consequences for my Younger Readers, to whom this book is addressed, as you’ll notice from the subtitle.

By the mid-seventies, my hair was long, my flares were wide, and my politics were radical. This was the case for lots of young people. The seventies were a highly charged and politicised time to be young. No one could ignore politics, not when politics turned off your lights at ten every night; not when your dad was on strike for long periods of time; not when bombs were going off in towns like Guildford, the town my parents were from, the town where I’d been born.

When punk came along, it voiced these realities. Punk rock swept aside the flabby prog rock with which we’d been suffocated, but its anger wasn’t just musical. Punk castigated the ‘rock dinosaurs’ for being not radical enough. For ‘selling out’. For not being real enough. ‘Anarchy in the UK’. ‘White Riot’. Punk was a child of the failures of 1968, an attempt to try again. I’m still grateful to the young teachers at my school who were soixante-huitards, out to change the world by radicalising their pupils; who gave us tools for trying to understand why everything was shit.

The punks still form part of the soundtrack of our times, but the radical anger has gone. The nasty spate of riots that swept the country in 2011 looked like shopping with violence, rather than a radical uprising of any kind. Somebody will always play a bit of Clash, a bit of Pistols and The Specials’ ‘Ghost Town’ on the soundtrack to the News. The music still gets played, but the Freak Culture from which the punks sprang, and which they revitalised for a time, has gone. The Ramones are a popular T-shirt.

There seemed no real way to account for this disappeared culture to my students. How, for example, do you explain Maoist student movements to students who have never heard of Mao? A student in a creative writing class, asked to write something from the point of view of a New Age Traveller, didn’t know where to start. Not only did she not know what a traveller was in this sense, she had no idea what was meant by ‘new age’. Sometimes, it seems like all that has survived is some of the dullest of the music, transmuted into Dad Rock, the stuff of nothing but an endless circuit of washed-out summer festivals.

To a Freak like me, coming to adulthood as I did in the intellectual world that Roszak describes, the idea that shopping should be taken seriously or that the Kardashians or the X Factor or Geordie fucking Shore would be interesting to anybody is incomprehensible. Why young, talented, creative and intelligent people in their early twenties would be the least bit keen on getting jobs and mortgages is still quite beyond me. These world views, mine and those of my students, are incommensurate, I thought. Perhaps there is some kind of paradigm shift going on; or perhaps, more likely, the paradigm shift in the way we live demanded by the advocates of the Freak Culture had never reached the point of crisis. It was, after all, the call for a revolutionary paradigm shift in modes of living that was at the heart of the Freak Culture …

‘Yeah .… hello? That’s a whole shitload of theory,’ says Bob. ‘What the fuck are you on about?’

‘Ah. Yes. Well. It’s all about the philosopher Thomas Kuhn. He talked about the way ideas change over time. He called the moment when ideas change a “paradigm shift”. He said that when two ideas don’t match they are “incommensurate”; and when two ideas are incommensurate, one of them will win out, and one will die away. The moment when the new idea grows as powerful as the old is called the crisis point.’

‘I’ll skin up,’ says Bob.

‘Will it help you follow my argument, do you think?’

‘No. But it might make it seem funnier.’

I ignore him, and plough on.

‘See, the Freaks’ method of bringing about this paradigm shift was Kuhnian as well. Kuhn suggested that old paradigms finally die out as the stakeholders of the old paradigm die. This, in effect, was what the Freaks predicted: the death of the corrupt old world as the old and corrupt died away. This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius. Never Trust Anyone Over Thirty. And although there were antagonisms between various subsets of the Freak Culture (as between “hippies” and “punks”, or “ravers” and “crusties”, for example), it seems to me that there was a shared continuity of thought – an aim, a goal – which was to overcome alienation …’

‘I just thought we were trying to have fun,’ says Bob.

‘You were in practice, yes. But in theory, you weren’t. In theory, you were trying to overcome alienation.’

‘I don’t even know what alienation is.’

‘That’s probably because you’ve overcome it.’

‘How can I overcome something if I don’t know what it is?’

‘Right. Alienation is an idea based on the early writings of Marx. Alienation is the bit of the system that takes our intelligent engagement with the world and saps all our pleasure in what we do, in order that we fulfil our economic function as consumers. For example: Growing a coffee bean tree on common land, cropping the coffee beans with your smiling friends, roasting and grinding the beans, singing folk songs together about the spirit of the bean, heating water from a communal well over a renewable energy source, pouring it over the ground beans and drinking it from a hand-thrown earthenware mug together with your neighbours is a non-alienated cup of coffee. I’ve never had one, but it sounds quite nice, I think.

‘Going into the caff, and saying, “Morning, Frank, can I have a coffee and a crispy bacon sandwich please?” is a slightly alienated cup of coffee, because everyone understands that Frank bought that big catering-sized tin of Maxwell House from which he is spooning the granules to make your coffee from a Cash and Carry, and now he is selling it to you for more than he paid. Frank paid price X and is now selling it to you at price Y, where Y = X + Frank’s costs + a small profit so Frank can get his fags and have a bet and save up a bit to take his wife on their annual holiday to Eastbourne, but where X = a large profit to Maxwell House, a smaller one to the Cash and Carry, and a tiny one to the people who grew the coffee beans. But Frank asks nothing else of you than your money; it’s a fairly simple deal.

‘Visiting Starbucks or Costa or Caffè Nero, queuing for the services of a barista, standing, waiting, reading wall signs assuring you of the passionate commitment of the barista to his or her craft, reading little notices on displays of cakes, supposed to look like they’ve been handwritten in chalk saying “Choose your favourite” (what else would you choose?), reading a notice on the back wall in the same faux-chalk script offering you a choice you didn’t know you wanted between a range of coffee drinks whose names you can’t pronounce, differing in ways which are unknown to you, in various sizes described in a language not your own, and then being forced to watch the barista as they exercise their craft … … to come to believe that it is a craft … … that is a fully alienated transaction.

‘Admittedly, the coffee served with passionate commitment by a trained barista in a special cup is better than poor old Frank’s, though I’m not sure it’s worth all the palaver.

‘We never used to mind it in Frank’s caff, and you could get a crispy bacon sandwich on white bread, rather than a quinoa and mung bean spelt flour wrap. Frank only wants 90p for your coffee, and perhaps a chat about football or what you fancy in the 2.30 at Lingfield, because the only things he’s passionately committed to are Brighton and Hove Albion and the gee-gees.

‘The franchised coffee shop coffee costs £2.90 and it demands your interest in their passionate commitment to coffee. If you work as a barista, the company demands your passionate commitment to their profits; your intellect, your time, your life. At no point do you own anything that you have made – none of that passionate commitment, nor your education, your brain, your soul, etc., none of it belongs to you. It all belongs to your employer.

‘As a consumer, while your coffee is being hand-crafted, you can look at leaflets containing assurances about the company’s passionate commitment to their ethical and moral policies re. fair trade/environment/equal opportunities, etc. – even though they have neither ethics nor morals, so far as I can see – and you are made to look at large black-and-white photographs on the wall of smiling people in Venice drinking the stuff and smiling people in Vietnam growing it, and the train is leaving in three minutes and all you want is a CUP OF FUCKING COFFEE. That’s Alienation.’

‘I see. Bad one,’ says Bob.

‘Essentially, alienated capitalism doesn’t just exploit our labour, it exploits our souls. It degrades all our transactions. It renders our lives meaningless. Joyless. Empty. Inauthentic. Untrue. No Fun.’

‘I’d agree with that. Do you remember my hooks?’

‘I’ve got a bunch of them in my house.’

One of Bob’s products is this lovely little hook, made from the wire on the fence that still runs the length of the abandoned railway line. Perhaps an inch long, with a twist in the shaft and a curlicue on the end, they are the very thing to put up in your weekend cottage kitchen to hang your Le Creuset pots on. Back in the nineties, Bob sold some to a woman who, unbeknownst to him, was a writer for Country Living. She publicised Bob’s hooks, printed a picture of them, and told her readers where they could get them. Orders flooded in, and Bob started to make real money. So much so that some people still call him ‘Bob the Hook’. He was making so much money that he rented a small workshop in the village closest to his wood, and even took on an assistant.

‘Problem was,’ says Bob, ‘I suddenly realised that I was working in a factory. I mean, it was my factory and that, but it didn’t make any difference. It was still a factory. No fun at all. So I thought, fuck it, and jacked it in. Now I only make a few hooks when I need a bit of extra money.’

‘So, they are de-alienated hooks. Leaving you free to mend my stool.’

‘Is that what you were supposed to be writing about before your fat arse broke your stool? Alienation?’

Yes. Alienation and its enemies. I want to write about the Freaks and their lost culture. A history of the British underground. A history book to explain to my students, my daughters, my stepdaughters, my granddaughters, my Younger Readers, what the Freaks were up to in their war on alienation, their failed, imperfect, valiant revolt against the long slow death of the human soul.

I’ve come up with two dates for my history, to bookend the project.

1956 and 1994.

1956, because it was the year of Suez, which saw the collapse of Britain’s view of itself as having importance in the world.

1956, because it was the year of the Soviet invasion of Hungary, which fatally wounded traditional Communist support, and forced radical idealists to look towards Mao, Trotsky, Gramsci, Tolstoy, Kropotkin, Bakunin.

1956, because the UK was right in the middle of a Christian revival that swept through what the historian David Kynaston calls ‘Family Britain’, and was, to the young Freaks, a dull, hide-bound, suffocating prison.

1956, because it was the year Elvis released ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ on the RCA Victor label. This might seem trivial, but to the earliest Freaks, hearing ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ on Radio Luxembourg seems to have changed how they saw themselves and opened new possibilities of ways to live. As John Peel, the great DJ of Freakdom put it: ‘Before Elvis there was nothing. After Elvis, there was something.’

I chose 1994 to end my history because it was the year of the Criminal Justice Act, which ended traveller life and the big outdoor raves.

Bob nods.

‘Yeah. After that it became really hard to find a park-up.’

By 1994, it was clear which ideas were ready to be taken up by a dominant culture. Some of the ideas had become something approaching mainstream, especially ideas around food and concerns about the medicalisation of health. Vegetarian restaurants existed in Everytown, and brown rice and wholemeal bread had become de rigueur in middle-class homes. By 1994, everyone was rubbing arnica on their bruises, and everyone was keen to reuse and recycle. Everyone had gay friends. Men appropriated the most creative and enjoyable household tasks, and although we still left our wives to clean the loo and to assemble the IKEA furniture, at least we were doing something about the place, and had begun to fully comprehend the implications generated by the rediscovery of the clitoris.

‘Communism’ had failed in 1989; and there seemed no alternative but unrestricted capitalism. History had ended. The alienation that had been the Freaks’ concern didn’t seem to worry a population stunned by Neo-Liberalism. Compulsory drug education at school had warned children off harmless substances like marijuana, LSD and ecstasy, and weaned them on to the lethal but legal pleasures of alcohol. The internet had come into existence a few years before, and one of its first victims was the old underground press. 1994 was also the great year of Brit Pop; ironic, cool, cynical, well-dressed and clean cut, Pulp, Blur and Oasis were simply a great deal better than Chumbawumba, or the Levellers. Pop music, so vital as a means of sharing ideas within the Freak culture, was moving away from cultural criticism or political involvement. Now pop music seems to have lost interest in everything, except expressing and expressing and fucking well expressing a 24/7/365 emotional weather report in voices cracking with self-pity.

1994 was the year that Blair was elected to the leadership of the Labour Party. Sadly, big-tent politics turned out to be too small a tepee to include the dog-on-a-rope crusties, eco-warriors, drug liberationists and anarchist techno-geeks who were by then all that remained of the Freak culture. Roszak’s wrongness was now self-evident and I still fail to see anything that looks like home.

If a paradigm shift implies a change in consciousness, then 1994 is as good a moment as any to draw a line, and admit that, so far from uptight, war-mongering, plutocratic, phallocentric, racist, environment-despoiling late-period capitalism dying out, it had, once again, adapted itself enough so that it had pretty much beaten down the alternatives. Very few people, in the end, could cope with the enormous responsibilities of turning on, tuning in and dropping out.

Freak culture has gone.

It is lost.

Alienation, so far from being overcome, has never been in better health.

‘I haven’t gone,’ says Bob. ‘I’m still here.’

‘Yeah, I know. But I was talking to Chas the other day …’

‘How is Chas?’

I feel a lump gather in my throat. Old Chas Ambler, my sixty-nine-year-old piano player and musical partner of twenty years, is dying of oesophageal cancer in a friend’s house in Glasson Dock, just outside Lancaster. I’ve been driving the 400-odd miles round trip most weekends to spend time at his bedside, to offer limited comfort, and to garner what I can from his fading memory – because Chas, only five years younger than Bob, is a Freak if ever there was one. It hurts to talk about him, and I don’t want to cry.

‘He’s not good. Lot of pain when he eats. Finds it all but impossible to eat, actually.’

I take a breath. The hippies all are going, fading away.

‘Anyway, he was telling me about how once, in about 1974, he was on tour as a drummer with a left-wing theatre company, and how he had nothing to read, so he went into a radical bookshop in Cardiff, and bought and then read Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle in the van between shows.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Don’t you see? There used to be radical bookshops in pretty much every fair-sized city. People could buy Situationist tracts in them. There were left-wing theatre companies touring all over the shop. Drummers read books. What the fuck happened? And why did you go to Mexico?’

‘I wanted to do that thing that Gurdjieff did in Meetings with Remarkable Men.’

‘What thing?’

‘That thing where he just set up in a place and mended things for people. I wanted to do that.’

‘I haven’t read Meetings with Remarkable Men,’ I said.

‘Loads of it’s bollocks,’ said Bob. ‘He reckons he crossed the Gobi Desert on a raft of sheep.’

‘But you read a book, and thought the mending was worth a try?’

‘We all read.’

‘I know. You had cult books. No such thing any more. You read On the Road and went on the road. I read all sorts of stuff and threw caution to the wind as a consequence. These days, if my students read anything, they read fucking Twilight and wish they could be vampires.’

Bob rolls his eyes at me.

‘Kids today, eh?’ he says.

‘That’s not what I’m saying. It’s not that they aren’t taught to think about the past any more. It’s just this story has very few people left to tell it. It’s never really been rolled up and put into one book for them to read.’

‘So this is what you were writing? When you broke your stool?’

‘Sort of. But it’s too big. Too baggy. Too theoretical. It needs practice. It needs you.’

‘Why me?’

‘Because you were there. Really there, from the word go.’

‘I was, yeah.’

‘You were a Soho beat in the fifties. I want you to tell me all your stories. The time you met the Beatles in the 2i’s. Busking with Clapton. CND. Profumo. R.D. Laing. Why you went to Afghanistan. I want you to tell me it all. Running backstage at the Isle of Wight Festival. The one about Sly and the Family Stone, the ambassador’s son and the air crash. Mexico. California. The Peace Convoy. You’re like Zelig in the Woody Allen film. Or Forrest Gump. You were everywhere.’

‘But who’d read a book about an ordinary bloke?’

‘You’re not an ordinary bloke. You’ve lived an amazing life, and stayed true to yourself. Besides … have you ever read Stuart: A Life Backwards?’

‘No.’

‘I’ll lend it you. It’s about this homeless guy in Cambridge, written by one of his friends. It’s fabulous. Game-changing. And Stuart’s life was tragic. Yours has been … heroic.’

Now Bob is laughing, but I know I’m right.

Bob gets me to hold my stool steady in his vice as he welds the wonky leg back together, and then, while it cools, he makes another pot of coffee.

‘You’re happy to talk, then? About the past?’ I ask him.

‘Of course,’ says Bob. ‘The past is only a pleasant void. No harm talking about it.’

‘The future?’

Bob sips his coffee, and rolls a fag.

‘The future is a less pleasant void, waiting to be filled,’ says Bob.

And he gestures round at his clearing, at his home, at the place where his wheels have fallen off.

‘But the present,’ he says, ‘is lovely.’

I had a Reputation as a Foul Mouthed Fucker

On dark winter days in the woods, the light hardly makes it down to the ground, like it can’t be arsed; or, as the Freaks might say, like it can’t get its blanket out of its muesli.

The mountains which rise to the west shut the last of the sun out from the valley where Bob’s wood grows by 4 p.m. In winter, the problem of living in the woods is the wet rather than the cold, because although you can crank a wood-burner in a living vehicle up to a temperature approaching that of the surface of the sun, rain makes mud, and this winter is as wet as anybody in the Radnor Hills can remember. The ground is like a sponge. Every step is wet. There is a place just in front of the doors to Bob’s bus where water collects and mud accumulates, Glastonbury deep. Bob has no running water in the woods other than the rain; he collects it in butts which are placed to collect the run-off from the sheds and the roof of the bus. Water is a good thing, and like all good things, you can have too much.

This winter, the wet has been too much. Bob’s bones are hurting. He is seventy-five. His brother just died.

Any wood can seem a cheerless place at this time of year. Bob can’t get up into the trees to manage the timber; his gardens are unproductive mud wallows, and even the squirrels won’t come and get shot.

The reluctance of light to get through the gloom has consequences. There’s not enough of it to get the solar panels fully powered up, so energy has to be conserved. Even though it is daytime, a small gas hurricane lamp purrs and putters. Bob puts a few logs on the wood-burner, whilst I fill the stove-top moka with water for coffee.

The logs are to dry things out as much as to warm up the van; the coffee to give us an excuse not to talk, to avoid the subject. Because, after all, where do you start to talk to somebody about their life?

I mean, this might do as an opening question.

‘When were you born, Bob?’

‘Sixteenth of August 1942. In Yeovil, on the RAF base. My father was a …’

I suddenly realise the full implications of my question.

It’s all very well for Bob to tell me the date of his birth, on this wet winter’s afternoon in the gloaming of his bus, by the heat of the wood-burner and the light of the hurricane lamp, in the kick of strong coffee and the buzz of a little hashish that I had brought over, but if I’m to write Bob’s Life and Times, then I need to do a bit of work first.

I know that Younger Readers don’t always want dates, but this is important. Who else was born in 1942? What else? What ideas? And what ideas had brought the ideas of 1942 to being? What had happened long before Bob was born, so that when Bob was born, at such and such a place and such and such a time, he was the heir to certain ideas that had already been tried, which enabled him to travel in the wake of certain people who had already tried to live as authentically as they could.

This then, is where to start telling the story of someone’s life – long before their birth.

‘Let me stop you there, Bob!’

‘Why?’

‘Because you weren’t the first hippie.’

‘What the fuck difference does that make? When did I ever claim to be the first hippie?’

‘You didn’t. Because you weren’t.’

‘I never said I was.’

‘I know. Because you weren’t.’

‘Who was, then?’

‘Not you.’

Scholars might argue who the first hippie really was. Maybe it was Krishna or the Buddha or Jesus. Maybe it was one of the Levellers, or the Diggers, or the Anabaptists. I don’t know for sure.

So I think I’ll pick my own candidate, and say that he was the first, and leave others to argue.

My candidate’s name was Henry David Thoreau. He was an American writer and troublemaker who was born in 1817 and who died from tuberculosis in 1862. He came from the small but important town of Concord, Massachusetts, which was also where the well-to-do poet, critic and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson lived. Emerson befriended Thoreau on his graduation from Harvard, and encouraged him to write.

From July 1845 until September 1847, Thoreau lived in a one-roomed shack that he’d built for himself close by the shore of Walden Pond, in a tract of woodland owned by Emerson, and only about a mile and a half from his family home.

He wanted to live simply, without compromise. He wanted to be free, and he thought that freedom could only be won by learning how to live as lightly as was possible. He wrote that

Thoreau cannot have read what Marx wrote about alienation, because although they were working at roughly the same time, Marx’s theory of alienation would lie undiscovered for another seventy years. But Thoreau had realised that jobs are shit. It is better to grow your rows of beans, to hew your wood and fetch your water, than it is to work for the benefit of someone else. It is always better to listen to the sound of birds in the woods, to watch the ice grow on your pond, to sit in front of your hut and write your book, than it is to accumulate so-called wealth.

There is a sense in which Walden, the book he wrote as a consequence of his life in the woods, is a book of natural history. Thoreau earned himself the time to sit and watch and listen to ‘nature’; but his idea of nature was a liberal one. Walden is pro-science, not anti. Thoreau practises as a scientist. He is not merely a bucolic poet. He observed the behaviour of birds, he watched and recorded the nature of ice, and he accurately measured the depth of the pond. He includes in ‘nature’ (and with some admiration) ‘the iron steed’, as he calls the new railroad which cut through a corner of his wood. For Thoreau, the problem isn’t the modern world; not innovation, not technology. The problem is the way things are valued. He said, ‘Love your life, poor as it is.’

Thoreau didn’t look as we might expect a Freak to look (though he was ‘ugly as sin’ and ‘dressed like a tramp’), and so far as we can tell he didn’t take recreational drugs. But Thoreau loved the little house that he had built for himself – ‘a tight-shingled and plastered house, ten feet wide by fifteen long … with a garret and a closet. A large window on each side … one door at the end and a brick fireplace opposite.’ Having built it, he set out to change the world by trying to change us. What is perhaps his most famous line – ‘Most men lead lives of quiet desperation’ – if not a condemnation of alienation?

Bob has never done that, lived in quiet desperation. Most of us have, at one time or another, but Bob hasn’t.

‘Can I tell you about what happened after I was born yet?’ Bob asks me.

‘No. Not quite. I’m still setting your scene.’

‘I had jaundice, and I had a pointy head, and I was covered in fur. I was so fucking ugly that the doctor offered to flush me away.’

‘That’s not kind.’

‘And I was nearly dead, so they sent me up to a specialist hospital in London, and I was only five days old and the fucking hospital was bombed.’

‘Soon. A bit more about Thoreau, then some stuff about the Nature Boys, then you.’

Bob lumps another log into his wood-burner, rather than me, which I sense at this moment he might like to.

‘You been behind the door, Bob?’

‘You know I have. Have you?’

‘Yes. For a day. Non-payment of fines. Same as Thoreau.’

On one occasion when Thoreau strolled into Concord (as he did a couple of times a week; he wasn’t a hermit), he was arrested for non-payment of his poll tax, which he had refused to pay because the proceeds were being used to fund slavery, as he saw the case. Although he was only held for one night, jail shaped his consequent writing. His later book Civil Disobedience is an account of his political ideas. Thoreau felt that he was seeking a ‘form of government beyond democracy’, where individual conscience would be respected as ‘a higher and different power’.

He said,

Thoreau’s writing has an underlying commitment to a democratically oriented recognition of the claims of others. And the claims of others, their rights by necessity, include claims on water, food, energy, resources, etc.

And therefore, it is good, it is best, it is democratic, to take only your share; to live as simply as you can. To fell your own wood, to build your own shack, to cultivate your own bean-rows.

Walden was published in 1854; John Updike (in his introduction written for the 150th anniversary of its publication in 2004) said that it ‘risks being as revered and unread as the Bible’. This is probably true. But Walden is one of the most beautifully written books of the nineteenth century. American schoolkids have to read him like we had to read, say, Lord of the Flies, and so they do not always enjoy it as much as a non-American audience who have not been force fed the thing all through school. It’s a bit opaque at times. In fact, I’ve never met anyone who has read it all the way through, other than me. I’ve met lots and lots and lots of hippies, and no one has ever claimed Thoreau as their great-grandfather.

But he is.

This seems to me an all but note-perfect summation of what the hippies came to believe. All that I’ve come to believe, in a way.

‘In that case,’ says Bob, ‘I’ll continue. Five days old, and I’d already been bombed …’

‘Not yet,’ I say. ‘Not quite yet. I need to talk more about your shadow time.’

‘My what?’

‘Your shadow time. The time before you were born, that you sort of grew up in, even though you weren’t there to see it. The writer Colm Tóibín says we all inhabit shadow times. For me and my generation it’s the war … for you, it’s ninety years’ worth of Freaks. Ninety years between Walden and you.’

Ninety