Defective memories (From York Press)

Defective memories

8:02am Thursday 13th July 2006 in

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AH, the 1960s I remember them well. All that swinging, the summer of love, the Beatles, the naked hairy hippies and the rampant drug taking.

They used to say that if you can remember the 1960s, you weren't there but what do they know?

I was there at the Isle of Wight Festival in 1969 when Bob Dylan appeared, and then the following year when Jimi Hendrix performed on August 30, preceded by Britain's own Jethro Tull.

I watched when The Beatles played on the roof of the Abbey Road studios in January 1969, jamming in the open air after the stormy, destructive Get Back sessions. Just imagine, being there when the imploding Beatles gave three performances of Get Back, only stopping when the police arrived.

Oh, what memories, what seismic happenings. Only they are not exactly mine. The only time I've been to the Isle of Wight was on a weekend trip a decade too late to join the estimated 600,000 fans who flocked to see the doomed Hendrix.

But my older cousin, now long since dead, did go, with his flowing hair and his black leather jacket with the letters IS studded on the back, for International Socialism (a notion as far departed as my dear cousin).

As for The Beatles, well, I saw a report about the roof-top jam on the BBC news that night, a memory stored away with other fuzzy black and white television milestones of the decade (Winston Churchill's funeral, the first episode of Doctor Who and so on).

In further mitigation, I would like to add that I did see Jethro Tull at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester two years or so later, at the time of the Thick As A Brick album (for those who remember these things).

I took my younger brother, now a professor, who sat there saying "I thought you said these concerts were loud" as Ian Anderson strummed his acoustic guitar. Just then, the full band kicked in and blasted my brother out of his seat. By one of those circular coincidences, my eldest son took his younger brother to see the Red Hot Chili Peppers in Manchester this week, carrying on the tradition.

These memories, real or borrowed, are not merely the product of all the drugs I didn't take in the 1960s. Incidentally, the only swinging I managed involved my school satchel, the only free-wheelin' took place on my Raleigh All Steel Bicycle, with wooden blocks clamped on the pedals.

A new survey suggests that fifty-somethings exaggerate what they got up to in the 1960s and 1970s in order to impress their children. As someone who has whole months to go before hitting 50, I obviously don't fall into that category at all, especially as "trying to impress the children" strikes me as one of the least productive activities known to dad-shaped man. The survey was conducted for UKTV Living, ahead of a new series called The Beatles Decade.

It found that many people now in their 50s were easily carried away when remembering what they got up to in the 1960s. Yet for most teenagers at the time, the 1960s were "more akin to Cliff Richard that Keith Richards", as one commentator put it.

My own defence lies in being only 13 when the decade ended, and therefore more of a child of the 1970s (explosive hair, loon pants, droopy wizard-sleeved T-shirts, Fairport Convention and The Grateful Dead records, guitars and girlfriends, beer and, ahem, a passing interest in wildly indulgent prog rock, before moving on to Ry Cooder, Elvis Costello, university and, come 1980, my first grown-up job well, as grown-up as a newspaper ever is).

As mentioned once before, I did go to the first Knebworth rock festival, which is a notch worth having, although less impressive than the Isle of Wight. So perhaps I should steal my dead cousin's memories of that great event. But, no, it's useless appropriating other people's experiences. You are stuck with your own history, pickled by your own past. And in the 1970s, we were pickled more often or not. Unless I'm exaggerating