Days in the Life: Voices from the English Underground, 1961–1971

by Jonathon Green

Voices from the English Underground movements 1961-71, an oral history of the sixties, including CND, beatniks and bop.

Genres: Music, History, Nonfiction, British Literature, Politics

480 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1988

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

I am a lexicographer, that is a dictionary maker, specialising in slang, about which I have been compiling dictionaries, writing and broadcasting since 1984. I have also written a history of lexicography. After working on my university newspaper I joined the London ‘underground press’ in 1969, working for most of the then available titles, such as Friends, IT and Oz. I have been publishing books since the mid-1970s, spending the next decade putting together a number of dictionaries of quotations, before I moved into what remains my primary interest, slang. I have also published three oral histories: one on the hippie Sixties, one on first generation immigrants to the UK and one on the sexual revolution and its development. Among other non-slang titles have been three dictionaries of occupational jargon, a narrative history of the Sixties, a book on cannabis, and an encyclopedia of censorship. As a freelancer I have broadcast regularly on the radio, made appearances on TV, including a 30-minute study of slang in 1996, and and written columns both for academic journals and for the Erotic Review.

My slang work has reached its climax, but I trust not its end, with the publication in 2010 of Green’s Dictionary of Slang, a three volume, 6,200-page dictionary ‘on historical principles’ offering some 110,000 words and phrases, backed up by around 410,000 citations or usage examples. The book covers all anglophone countries and its timeline stretches from around 1500 up to the present day. For those who prefer something less academic, I published the Chambers Slang Dictionary, a single volume book, in 2008. Given that I am in no doubt that the future of reference publishing lies in digital form, it is my intention to place both these books on line in the near future.

Reviews

[Paul Bryant · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mariel in her review of Revolution in the Head wrote

Life in the '60s must've been grey. In my mind it is The Beatles and French New Wave.

Well, not quite. Half way through the 60s, life - in Britain anyway - suddenly BURST INTO COLOUR. Consider these movies :

1959

Room at the Top

1960

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning

1961

A Taste of Honey
Victim

1962

The L-Shaped Room
The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner

1963

This Sporting Life
Billy Liar


All pretty good movies and mostly about gritty stories about Northern towns where life was tough and ground down and definately black and white - but then...

1964

A Hard Day's Night

still black and white, but - in a truly emblematic way, four gritty Northern lads come down (on a train) to London, and a pop explosion takes place :

1965

The Collector
Darling
The Knack
Life at the Top

From now on, it's big bold vibrant COLOUR and it's SWINGING LONDON, goodbye to the dour North...

1966

Blowup
Georgy Girl

1967

Accident
Bedazzled
Charlie Bubbles
How I Won the war
I’ll never forget what’s is name
The Jokers
Poor Cow
Smashing Time

1968

30 is a Dangerous Age, Cynthia
All Neat in Black Stockings
The Charge of the Light Brigade
Girl on a Motorcycle
If…
Isadora
Oliver!
Petulia
Secret Ceremony
Sympathy for the Devil
Up the Junction
Wonderwall
Yellow Submarine

1969

The Bed-Sitting Room
Kes
The Magic Christian
Oh! What a Lovely War
Three into Two Won’t Go
Twinky

1970

Deep End
Performance

You can see some gritty working class angst-tales still being made (Kes, Up the Junction) but mostly it's zany fun and frolics. So, the 60s was, like football, a game of two halves, and in the second half, the inmates took over the asylum, to mix my metaphors.

This book is a very cool oral history of the life and times of what was known as the "underground" by the hipsters, movers and groovers who did it way back when. They didn't, in the end, make a revolution, but they did have a right old go. This book is for hippies and 60s fans. You will laugh and you will gurgle.

[Tosh · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fascinating oral history of the British Underground, but specifically focusing on the Underground Press between 1961 and 1971. Ten years of active activity that uniquely happened in London. The book is mega in its coverage of those years and a classic read for anyone who has an interest in the bohemian set of that period in England. One of the more interesting and intelligent voices in this book is from Paul McCartney, who was very close and attached to the Underground Beat/Hippie life of London during those years - especially from 1966 and onward.

[Colin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Goodreads star rating system falls down rather with a book like this; while Jonathon Green deserves five stars for his endeavours in pulling together over a hundred movers and shakers of the English Underground of the Sixties and recording an oral history of the movement (if it could be so called), spending time in their company soon palls, and after 450 pages the reader has become comprehensively jaded. What Days in the Life reveals, above all else, is the self-regarding, insular and judgmental nature of the various radical movements that made up the ‘Underground’. Although there were some dangerous offshoots of the movement (the Angry Brigade bombings, for example), the most obvious and surprising line to trace from the movement is to Thatcherism and beyond: the overriding emphasis on individualism, libertarianism, the London-centric focus and entrepreneurial approach of many key figures (a surprising number of people involved in the Underground press went on to become multi-millionaires), the air of superiority, of knowing what’s best for everyone else; it’s all here in Days in the Life. The other notable, but not at all surprising, theme in Green’s book is the aggressively male nature of the Underground. Women are in the minority of interviewees, and their stories are by and large not happy ones. Only with the founding of Spare Rib magazine in the early Seventies, do we get a true woman’s eye perspective.

[Caleb · Rating 1 out of 5]

I can't keep going with this garbage. Trying to tell a compelling story of the 60's in England sounds like a great idea, but when you're interviewing people whose stories are so far off from each other it just gets frustrating to read. It just feels like a way for these various people to vent their memories as they remember them with little regard for how readable the book should be. I've complained about other books written in this style having issues, but even that terrible one about the history of punk music at least felt more polished and told a tale that you could follow because most everyone's story would jive together (an amazing feat considering the abuse these people were doing to their bodies with various substances).

So yeah, this is a book that I can't recommend, and one I'm honestly a bit sorry I imported because I wanted to read it so badly. It was a waste of money and a waste of time.

[Nigeyb · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved this book. It starts off quite slowly as there's quite a bit on the roots of all the amazing changes in the sixties but once it get's going it's kaleidoscopic and give a really great insight into the era. Every time I read a good tome about the sixties I realise just how unoriginal so much that followed was. I include punk rock in this. To me - at the time - as a 14 year old in 1976 it seemed the most exciting and novel thing ever. I now realise that so much was initiated by people who were steeped in 60s culture and much was a rehash of what had gone before.

[Tony Marshall · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book collects the memories of 101 unreverentially self-critical movers and groovers who lived to tell the tale. People may sneer at it now, but 'The Sixties' were a major watershed in modern history. Perhaps with hindsight and our ice-cold 21st century cynicism, people were a tad naïve, but there really was a feeling that the world was changing and it was only a matter of time until we would be living in Utopia. Maybe the experiment failed, but it was a very exciting, colourful, creative and liberating time.

[Tim Julian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Being born in 1960 I missed the sixties, to my eternal regret, but when I started reading the NME in the mid-seventies names like Miles and Mick Farren were still legendary. This book, written by Dictionary of Slang lexicographer Jonathon Green and first published in 1986, is an oral history of the "English underground" with contributions from around one hundred of the most significant movers and shakers of that turbulent decade, and was just up my Carnaby Street.
Contributors include Paul McCartney, Joe Boyd, Richard Neville, John Peel, Charles Shaar Murray, Robert Wyatt and dozens more lesser well-known names. Some of the attitudes expressed grate a bit, the casual sexism in particular, but hey, different times man, dig?
One of the most enjoyable aspects is the juxtaposition of the testimonies, which frequently contradict one another. I guess if you can remember the sixties you weren't there, as they say.

[Kris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very in depth interview series on the English counterculture of the Sixties. Done in a combined set of exhaustive interviews cut together to feel like a talking heads documentary, it gives a very warts and all depiction of what was going on from numerous perspectives. Like a Ken Burns documentary in book form.

[Gerry · Rating 4 out of 5]

A welcome addition to the Trials of Oz and PlayPower on the shelf

[Christopher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Days in the Life is an oral history of the 1960s London counterculture that Jonathon Green, himself a participant in this scene, compiled out of interviews with over a hundred prominent figures of the time. Many of the names were familiar to me from other books about the counterculture, such as Jim Haynes, Richard Neville, Barry and Sue Miles, John Hopkins and Mick Farren. Green managed to interview other figures who don't often appear in treatments of this decade. The most famous is Paul McCartney who turns out to have been the Beatle most invested in the counterculture (in spite of his psychedelic interests, John Lennon was isolated from it by his married life). But Green is also to be commended for interviewing blacks who were active, such as Horace Ove and Courtney Tulloch, as their story is often missing.

In line with the memoirs of some of his peers, Green choses to set 1961 and 1971 as the boundaries of this era. Nonetheless, some of the contributors, such as Christopher Logue and John Wilcock had associated with beatniks and bohemians in the 1950s and reveal the 1960s counterculture's debt to these forebears. Green's arrangement of the material is broadly chronological, but he groups the reminisces according to various themes such as OZ magazine, the UFO club, encounters with Michael X, the macrobiotic diet fad, the big rock festivals. I've read several books about this era, but Days in the Life covers some things I hadn't found elsewhere. It gets into greater detail than other memoirs about the drug trade during this era: who was making the stuff, selling in and in what quantities. There's also coverage of religious cults.

Days in the Life seems to assume some prior familiarity with this era, so I'd recommend reading Richard Neville's Hippie Hippie Shake or Roger Hutchinson's High Sixties first. Although Green chose 1961 as the beginning of the era described in his book, there is little material about the early 1960s, though Hutchinson's High Sixties can fill the gap on youth trends from around 1960–1965 and how they relate to the full-on counterculture of the second half of the decade. Also, as the book expanded to over 400 pages, Green was forced to leave out the material he had gathered about the hippie trail. It is therefore a slighly flawed work, but nonetheless there's a huge amount of material and readers passionate about this era will enjoy the book.

[Lysergius · Rating 3 out of 5]

A fascinating oral history of the English underground in the 1960s. Be warned by England the author generally means London.

[Kevin Scott · Rating 4 out of 5]

The best read that you can ever have if you want to get an insight and depth of being in amongst the feelings, action, vibe and scene of the late 60's to the end of the 60's political, hippy, psychedelic era. How it built up and was created to how things changed afterwards in England. From the main people involved to the partakers in time who not only see it and lived it but where it. Transport yourself back in time and get your mind in a life that changed everything and will never be repeated so powerfully and originally ever again. The news, the sounds, the state of minds, the love, the movement and being there alive.