There are individual years in the 1960s that generate more nostalgia than entire decades. Quentin Tarantino’s new film Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood lovingly zeroes in on 1969. So does the demi-centennial of The Beatles’ Abbey Road. London motorists are losing further seconds at the titular thoroughfare’s zebra crossing, clogged as it is with even more tourists than usual.
And all this fuss, remember, is for the depressing finale of that decade, the year of Altamont, Charles Manson and Brian Jones’s founding membership of the “27 Club”. The industry devoted to sunny 1966, perhaps the most romanticised year in British history, does not even need convenient anniversaries to prosper.
The 1960s still makes other decades cringe like dowdy wallflowers at a party. This is understandable enough. The artistic feats were legion. The politics were interesting — if, at times, too interesting. No decade’s fashion, for men or women, has dated better.