Around 1967 artists and bands emerged from the British blues scene,
influenced by folk, jazz and a growing sense of psychedelia, including artists
such as Donovan, Pink Floyd, Traffic, Soft Machine, Cream, and the London-based
Jimi Hendrix Experience. As a parallel development, already established bands
such as The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Small Faces and The Who also began
to use psychedelic rock influences inspiring the newer bands such as Procul
Harum who’s “Whiter Shade of Pale” became anthemic. Commercialism
of what had been a counterculture soon followed however. Now as new rock bands
proliferated, the commercial fashion industry took notice, and men’s hair grew
longer.
Not all people thought this change in thinking was
wonderful and concerns about sexual behaviour, drug taking, and a sense of
moral panic proliferated. In 1968, a year after the original
‘Summer of Love’, a witty, sceptical and eclectic Los Angeles musician, Frank
Zappa, intoned with a high degree of sarcasm that“…every town must have a place where phony hippies meet, Psychedelic
Dungeons popping up on every Street” Was
Zappa right? Psychedelia? A commercialised counterculture? Psychedelic
Dungeons…in Nantwich? What you have read so far are merely preliminary thoughts;
let us expand on them in future posts!