Writing about where I was from and the people I knew was not something that would have occurred to me early on, because like so many Southerners of that period – the Sixties – I rejected those things when I went north.
I never went overseas until I left school and joined West Ham United Football Club at the beginning of the Sixties.
Of course, I remember when everybody was thin. It wasn’t until I went to America in the Sixties that I saw anyone who wasn’t skinny thin.
I think a lot of people of my generation have a certain guilt that, from the Sixties onwards, we started taking package holidays abroad and neglected our own country.
When community action was put into federal law in the early sixties as part of the effort to combat poverty and social injustice, I supported it intellectually.
My generation of the Sixties, with all our great ideals, destroyed liberalism, because of our excesses.
In the sixties when Paul was with the Beatles and I was with the Moody Blues, we shared the same bill and tried to blow each other off the stage.
I dieted all the time in the Sixties, but we had no idea what dieting meant – we thought it meant not eating anything.
The trouble with young writers is that they are all in their sixties.
I remember driving to North Carolina when I was a little girl in a snowstorm to get down to my mom’s family in the Carolinas. There were chains on the car – it was the late sixties – and we were just singing in the car. Christmas carols.
As everyone else, I was a fan of Pink Floyd in the sixties.
You go through these phases. That’s how life is. Over the long term, you just can’t do one thing. I saw that back in the Sixties when I was getting started.
The late sixties and early seventies were kind of a breeding ground for exciting new sounds because easy listening and folk were kind of taking over the airwaves. I think it was a natural next step to take that blissful, easy-going sound and strangle the life out of it.
I always knew the Sixties wasn’t a revolution. It really was just a bunch of university students with wealthy parents having fun.
In the late Fifties and early Sixties, opposition to state terror and aggression and torture and so on was zero. That was a horrible time: the massive Kennedy terror operation against Cuba, the first attacks on Vietnam in 1962, the imposition of national security states in South America.
But, you know, the Stones were my opening act in the Sixties. I loved those British guys, the way they just stood there and shook their hair.
I was a feminist in the Sixties, and can you imagine? The worst thing I could have done was to be in fashion. It was the most uncomfortable position.
It’s very hard to have lived through the Sixties and not be political.
The Stones were more dangerous than other bands of the Sixties. It looked like they had more fun than the Beatles – like they stayed up later.
Kabul was very popular with the hippies in the Sixties and Seventies. It was very quiet and peaceful.
If ‘Trek’ is a hit, we’d love to do a series of films – a regular event. Look at James Bond’s films. They’ve been around since the early sixties.
The freedom that women were supposed to have found in the Sixties largely boiled down to easy contraception and abortion; things to make life easier for men, in fact.
I love the Nineties because more than any other period of time, there was such an eclectic mix of styles going on. More so than in the Sixties and Seventies, when there was an overriding look and sound.
In the sixties, everyone you knew became famous. My flatmate was Terence Stamp. My barber was Vidal Sassoon. David Hockney did the menu in a restaurant I went to. I didn’t know anyone unknown who didn’t become famous.
I think the sixties must have been quite a lot of fun.
It’s the audiences that inspire me to keep going. I feel that we all grew up together. The majority now are the people who were raised on the music in the Sixties.
Don’t underlook the Sixties; we started eating more vegetables, respecting women, and we shut down Vietnam. We did a lot of good stuff. But it shouldn’t shut you down from the moment.
Here we were supposedly changing the world for the better in the Sixties, but as we get 40 years further down the line, we realise that some of those changes such as the drugs probably weren’t all that great or sensible. It was all about social experiments.
When I first started playing, I plunked away just like everyone else. During the Sixties I played in a blues band for a few years, and I liked it. It wasn’t until I was playing for a while that I made the decision to change my style from a percussive to more of a legato approach. I just wanted a different sound.
The Sixties – I had to have my foot in everything then. I’m doing the same thing now but through an intermediary. You know. The food company. Maybe that’s the way to go about it. You go right straight into the inferno, and when you get older, you pull back.
The thing the sixties did was to show us the possibilities and the responsibility that we all had. It wasn’t the answer. It just gave us a glimpse of the possibility.
My dad is Chinese, and my mom is a white American, and they married only ten years after the United States Supreme Court ruled that it was illegal to ban mixed marriages. Imagine that. Marriages between people of different races – now common and accepted – were illegal in many states up until the late Sixties.
I think the Sixties in some ways is a barrier to young people today. They think of it, you know, what we’re doing is not that. But it’s partly the myth of the Sixties. It always felt embattled and small. It always, almost always, was a small group of people relative to the opposition around.
Some of these sketches were done at the very beginning of the Pirates project, when I was trying to find a direction for myself. That was the early sixties… maybe 61 or 62.
We got £25 a week in the early Sixties when we were first with Brian Epstein, when we played the clubs.
The Sixties was a time of breaking down class barriers, although I think class still exists today in some areas.
As I grew older, I worked less as an actor and as a model, and I went back to what I had tried to do when I was young but wasn’t really available. I’m so glad now to be in my sixties and to be able to go back to school.
Thankfully I’m not endlessly ambitious, but I have done some crazy ambitious things like buying an island off the west coast of Scotland in the late Sixties.
I think until Britain acknowledges just how much of a presence black people had here before the Sixties, then there are certain stories that are not going to be inclusive of what I have to offer.
I designed the miniskirt that caused so much havoc in the Sixties – the miniskirt that was such fun but has travelled well to today.
A lot of people think that the music was responsible for a lot of changes in the Sixties, but I think the music came out of it. The music wouldn’t have happened without the social changes.
In space-flight terms, six landings on the moon back in the Sixties and Seventies doesn’t mean much.
Well I’m a very similar age to Prince Charles. I’m a year older than him. I was at university at the same time as him. I think in the sixties, like all the Royals, he really had very little impact on my life at all and he seemed, if anything a lot older in his attitudes.
I grew up in the sixties watching B.B. King and Tito Puente and Miles Davis and Coltrane, everybody, Marvin Gaye, Jimi. And at the same time, with my left eye I was watching Dolores Huerta, Cesar Chavez, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Mother Teresa.
I grew up in the Fifties and Sixties and remember how unpleasant all kinds of food could be then.
To her audience, Janis Joplin has remained a symbol, artifact and reminder of late Sixties youth culture. Her popularity never derived from her musical ability, but from her capacity to link her fantasies of freedom and immortality with ours.
In the early sixties, we were strong, we were virulent.
There’s not that many people from the sixties who have progressed as writers and are continuing on. They’re out there. But I’m one of them who’s just continued on, following his own little inner madness.
I think women were gradually becoming more independent – the feminist movement of the Sixties didn’t just spring out of nowhere.
I don’t even know what a hippy is. I mean, hippy is an evolution of the Sixties movement. A time when people were trying to make a difference, trying to write songs that were political. People grow old. The hippy camp kind of breaks off into different sects.
England was always very special. It was so important because the reason Benny and I started writing was the Beatles. During the Sixties, England was everything. To be number one in England was more important than being number one in America because England set the tone.
I look at couples in the street who are in their sixties and have been together for 40 years, and they’re my idols. That’s Ice and me for sure.
That attitude toward women as objects may have worked for the late Sixties, but it doesn’t do so now.
In the Led Zeppelin shows of the Sixties and Seventies, it was the same numbers every night, but they were constantly in a state of flux. If I played something good, really substantial, I’d stick it in again.
