Product Description

'Jonothan Green offers a time trip from late-fifties CND, beatniks and bop to the threshold of our own decade's designer revolutionaries and style warriors...His chosen form is the oral history pioneered by Studs Terkel in which cross-cut voices recount a shared experience or epoch...what anecdotes!' - "Guardian". Green has collected 101 quintessential sixties groovers and lovingly teased out their memories, all of them refreshingly self-critical and remarkably sharpened by hindsight' - "Glasgow Herald". 'This is the first publication I've seen on the 1960s to address all closely the question: how did it feel in that dawn to be alive? ...An action packed tapestry of illuminating flashbacks' - "Spectator".

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #175766 in Books
• Published on: 1998-04-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 480 pages

Customer Reviews

The definitive text of the London sixties underground
Jonathon Green's 'Daysn the Life' was a particular revelation to me, finding it as I did in a Singapore airport bookstore. My flight was called, and foolishly I left for Jakarta without buying it, despite having read 20 pages in fascination.

It wasn't until six months later that I bought it and read it and re-read it until it fell apart. The scope of the book is so much greater than just the sixties and its often moribund nostalgia.

As a direct consequence of reading Green's book, I became a writer and wrote my own book on Syd Barrett of the Pink Floyd, whom I learned a great deal about through 'Days in the Life'.

Green was kind enough to allow me full access to his unedited interviews when I met him in London. A charming man with an acerbic and quick wit, Green's book reflects his passionate scholarship.

Suffice to say, I urge you to read 'Days in the Life' post-haste, as well as Green's subsequent 'All Dressed Up'. They are nothing short of remarkable.

Julian Palacios

It sparked my imagination
I have re-read this book a number of times. Jonathon Green selected a wonderful mix of stars, players, winners, cads and losers to participate in this opus. His masterful collating and editing of their tales weaves its way through anything that was interesting about the culture of Britain (well, London really) in the late '50s to the early '70s. The descriptions are so great and well-presented that you can almost smell it: the soggy dufflecoats and greasy hair of the Aldermaston marches, putrid armpit odour wafting around the macrobiotic cafe, UFO and the Roundhouse, the fragrant hum of patchouli and hashish. It's wonderful. And apparently it's a very scholarly piece of work.

Something I find quite poignant is that the characters were interviewed in the 1980s in the midst of Thatcherite greed, bouffant hair and shoulderpads, which makes some of the interviewees almost apologetic for the ways they lived in the '60s. I'd like to think that they would be a little bit prouder of their way of life if the interviews were taking place right now.

Evoking the past
I was only 12 in 1971 so the era described in this book is not something I experienced at the time. But as a teenager in the mid-1970s, I was very aware of the turbulence still echoing from the late 1960s-early 1970s. Many of the political and social figures active in that era were still going strong - I can remember seeing the Little Red Schoolbook in a bookshop, and all the controversy that book caused.

For me, Jonathon Green's interviews are highly evocative of an era that seems so different to today's more commercialised world. But I would advise against any nostalgia - some of the descriptions of the mess people got into through over-indulgences of various kinds are very sobering.