Summer Soundtrack

The precise sounds of any singular summer are a little hazy but, suffice to say, it was some amalgam of years in an era between 1967 (the Summer of Love) and, perhaps, 1970 (when the world ended with The Beatles split). 

A summer soundtrack might begin with Fleetwood Mac's Albatross, first heard on an ancient tape deck when heading into Margate for the very first time, car windows open and seagulls weaving wonders in a white cloud dotted sky. Or, alternatively, on listening to Canned Heat's On the Road Again springing siren like from the bakerlite radio at the bookbinder's where I was apprenticed and, within a month or two, was heading out in a ramshackle rusty Land Rover Defender, to join a 'Hippy' commune in Yorkshire, and imagining us to be Merry Pranksters, me to be Kerouac.

Mungo Jerry's In the Summertime would spin its magic from my 'Victorian' reel to reel tape deck, or bounce with vinyl warp on a portable record deck through an open window, while a much slimmer I would pose all in black, sunglasses and beret included, for Polaroid images which would fade with time, to blues and browns, and I too would encounter blues and browns in turbulent post-teen times.

Inevitably it would be a time of Hyde Park Free Concerts, so maybe that sublime soundtrack would include Blind Faith, Donovan, Roy Harper, Pink Floyd and The Rolling Stones, as well as several thousand 'Heads' chattering to real and imaginary friends, all doped up and being dopey like dopes in the days of kaftans, beads, bells and flowers. Dylan and The Isle of White escaped me, as did the paid concerts, for they needed the money I never seemed to have. I consoled myself with bootlegs, tape recordings and second hand vinyl, bought cheaply.