Yours has been a captivating life so far. I was drawn into reading the autobiography thread, knowing two was my limit because I had other things to do. By the time I came up for air I must have read half of them and along the way forgotten what at least in part was a reason for doing so in the first place.
To the point, I have two questions: Did the Paul is dead rumor ever make it to your shores when it suddenly became hot topic speculation over here I recall an entrepreneur, sometime disk jockey on this side of the Atlantic had some dialogues with a psychic named Clio (I haven't had this thought in maybe 50 years :- )
My other item of interest is what do you make of and know about the allegation that The Beatles were enabled, facilitated and/or "useful idiots" of the Tavistock Institute?
This fascinating story of watching the Beatles rehearse & perform live undermines the belief in some quarters that the Beatles were deep state fakes who did not write or perform much of their music.
I grew up with Beatles, loved everything about them, but ,unlike you, from a distance.
At the time the whole sixties revolution seemed great fun. Now I believe it also did a lot of harm.
In a world of so much fakery were the Beatles entirely genuine & part of a spontaneous uprising. If so, why did the controllers allow it, even encourage it?
All through the 60s every corner of UK had wannabe bands. I was in one myself from the age of 12! I don’t think any authority could have stopped it because we were playing in small clubs, pubs, church halls and parties. It was a cheap, easy and fun way to socialise.
Of course the Beatles were genuine - they had been playing together since their teenage years and become very proficient. The idea that they were faked appeared decades later from some sceptical Americans who clearly knew nothing of Brit 60s youth culture.
I suppose they were hoping that people in my age group were bumped off by Covid or the jabs and they could spread their lies without opposition now. I have argued with many of these mugs on this post and am disgusted by the weakness of their suspicions.
‘What harm do you imagine our joyous youth caused?’
‘Joyous’ for a fortunate cadre.
Creation of drug culture, detachment from reality through psychedelia, promotion of eastern mysticism (not bad per se but this was shackled to a strong rejection Christianity) - but the promotion of satanism was harmful, through that a promotion of an amoral culture, a form of feminism that began the weakening of the family & community & laid the foundations for transgender ie women are the same as men.
I am not online alot nowadays. But I did afterward and replied in another with that being seen. You didn’t do any further or new research for that opinion. You didn’t thoroughly look into the evidence. So we can’t debate it.
Sorry to ruffle your limbic side. Sincerely, it must be maddening at times when rubes ask questions that are answered further down the page.
Almost relevant ( - : I'm gonna take a wild guess that you enjoyed neither The Metamorphosis nor The Trial either.
Thanks for clearing that up. I don't have the time to sort through all the rumors so it's good to be connected to someone who's lived it. And doubly comforting that I don't have to resort to a revisionist version of my original memories.
1965 Carnaby Street I equate with the mod movement. Hippies too? How the hell can you have hippies without drugs?
The 1960s were then the latest round of the cyclical back-to-the-land movement but living so close to the other Americas, Central, South and Mexico and with some help from the CIA with their multiple agendas (drugs MK Ultra) saw to it that our hippies soon lost their way. But wait, maybe we should credit the Brits for that too, if not the English, because wasn't our CIA taking orders from The Crown?
This who got there first thing turns into a convoluted mess but if after much research it turns out hippies originated in London, well thank you, I think, for doing your part.
And to round out this pissin' contest, The Merry Pranksters bus got there first (1964) so eat your heart out you Magical Mystery Tour bus :- )
The takeaway here? Reality is for those who can't face drugs.
"1965 Carnaby Street I equate with the mod movement. Hippies too? How the hell can you have hippies without drugs?"
In 60s London we had three simultaneous youth cultures.
First came the Bohemians aka Beatniks, later named by Americans as Hippies but we did not use that name. We didn't use ANY name. We began to grow our hair, dress in bright colours and go bare footed.
Then with Twiggy and Mary Quant, the Mods preferred suits, short neat haircuts and scooters loaded with mirrors. The mini-skirt and hot pants were popular with them.
Finally, in opposition to the Mods but in collaboration with the Hippies came the Rockers who were motorbikes, leathers and clubs crazy.
There were mini wars between the Mods and the Rockers but we Hippies stayed out of that rivalry. We were the smallest group and mainly were students at university.
You asked how the hell we could be hippies without drugs? I laughed a lot at that question. I was dressing in a very bohemian style from 1964 onwards - I was TWELVE.
I had to make my own clothes because the things I wanted to wear did not exist in the shops. Most of my friends did the same. None of us were on drugs because we were still at school.
Drugs for us were pharmaceuticals from the doctor!!!
I realise that in America things changed much later and would appear to have been very much different.
Frankly, drugs were not the central theme of being a hippy in London. It was free love and music that mattered to us. I have no recollection of being offered street drugs until 1975.
Speaking for over here, I've never quite been convinced that our hippies were an evolution of the former Beatniks. It's more like one died and another began. Hippies were outdoor creatures; the Beats were urban cafe dwellers. Their music was primarily jazz, the hipsters were all about rock-n-roll. The common denominator was folk music.
In June 1966 the world saw it's first multiday outdoor rock venue, the Monterrey Pop Festival. In 1967 was the iconic Summer of Love in San Francisco with original clothes boutiques emerging like dandelions. Only recently I realized S.F. wasn't ground zero for the west coast hippy movement. Los Angeles preceded it by at least a couple of years, again music was at the center of the burgeoning movement. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2GjY8DN-7I
Granted, the streets of London pedestrians were more flamboyant in style, attire and appearance than the American hippie city counterparts and yet, as is not unusual in other historical examples, simultaneous developments, namely hippies with and without drugs, thousands of miles apart, occurred seemingly independent of each others influence.
I just love this story, and I will always say, "you are the most interesting journalist/woman on the planet." i just adore you , Frances. The work you have done for our planet is so much appreciated. You inspire me to be a better person.
I saw Paul McCartney and the Beatles long before 1966 on TV and in films. I met him in the summer of 1968 when we recorded Hey Jude. There was no fake Paul. Why on earth do you believe a young yank over someone who was THERE??
Then you saw the real one. If you haven’t looked at the vast amount of evidence in those videos, from many different people, then there’s nothing to talk about, much less argue about. Like the JFK hoax fake assassination, its something people have to be willing to look at without attachment.
We wonder why people won’t look at 5G and its the same thing.
You are muddled. The claim is that Paul died in 1966. In which case I met the supposed 'fake' - which he definitely WAS NOT. You just won't allow me to hold to my opinion will you? Stop fucking bullying me.
Love this! I’m Harrison, an ex fine dining industry line cook. My stack "The Secret Ingredient" adapts hit restaurant recipes (mostly NYC and L.A.) for easy home cooking. Dm me if interested in a recommendation swap — we’re growing fast!
You certainly picked the right star to be born under, Francis. What a fabulous experience.
When the first Beatles hit arrived, I moved to the streets so as to be around music 24/7 and then became a DJ for bands that later made it big. I was the first in Auckland to feature a moustache to go with my long hair, and also an earring, which in those days, if you had not been in prison or sailed on the Union Steamship Company, got your ring pulled out, which slit the ear lobe. I then became the go-to guy for ear piercings. That was my life for the next four years. Music, music, and anti-war.
I do consider myself extremely lucky to have been born in London at the right time to be part of the birth of the hippy scene. At the time I was also living apart from my parents due to being at school in Romford. Both my parents lived in London, separately by the time I was 13 and, in order to continue at the school, it was arranged that I lodged at a local pub. This provided me with significant freedom and a nice income because, when the cleaner retired, I was on hand to take the early morning cleaning job which, although it sickened me to the stomach, fitted well with continuing to attend school. I also worked at the record department in Woolworths on a Saturday and helped out at the local laundrette on Sundays. All this extra income permitted me to buy fabric for my outrageously bohemian clothes designs and they proved to be very popular with my school friends. I often made original outfits for my friends, using the school sewing room out of hours.
The savings I was able to gather in my Post Office account accumulated very quickly and, as soon as I got married, I had enough to put a deposit on a tumble down wreck of a house in the town centre of Clacton on Sea, Essex where I continued my dressmaking business after my son was born.
One remarkable thing about the late 60s and early 70s was the ease with which we found work and unofficial revenue streams. Something rarely available to youngsters nowadays.
It seems we have more in common than first suspected, Francis. I made my own black coat at that time, the kind with the two brass buttons at the back and brass military buttons on the front. I jokingly told the girls the Beatles sent it to me and, astonishingly, they believed me, which made me godlike. I had Chelsea boots too. LOL.
I tried to get leather for the sleeves from a tailer and he took one look at the coat and offered me an apprenticeship. I declined, having no interest in anything but music and girls. You are right about work; walk out on one bad boss and get a job across the road five minutes later. Work was easy to get. Free trade ended all that. Thatcher destroyed egalitarian Britain. And Australia.
On music, after my kids grew up, at age 70 I started learning to play guitar. Lead only. I can now play lead with my eyes closed, which may prove handy with one eye gone and the other fading. In that event, I will adopt the stage persona of black eyepatch, black stovepipes and stetson and long white hair.
My clearly prophetic great-grandfather gave me his war sabre when I was 7, no doubt having had a vision of my future screaming audience of 36,000 as I race up the frets to fire a salvo of pinch harmonic vibrato into the tense night air, while holding the sabre in my teeth as I gyrate to a Lady Gaga line dance move. So it shall be. LOL.
What a fantastic story! I was expecting you to say you were in the Magical Mystery Tour film which, very oddly, I watched only a few months ago. I'm pretty sure I deleted the download, thinking it wasn't really that good, but I was getting ready to search it out and see where you were.
Also very strange is that I have been to *exactly* that part of Harold Wood. I don't remember spotting a pub but I was picking up a pair of loudspeakers, bought on ebay, from a charity based in the industrial estate next to Harold Wood station. I can't remember which charity it was but it was one of the big and easily recognisible ones. Stranger still, in fact bordering on spooky, is that there's a bakery on that road and I have a personal reason to want to go and revisit it (which I can't go into in public). I do mean to go there at some point.
The King Harold is a huge pub and very popular in its time. It is situated facing the tracks, rather than the station pedestrian entrance. There is a small row of shops adjacent and one of them was a bakery. I am intrigued to know why that little bakery merits a revisit - you will have to let me know privately!
So, you were unpaid 'extras'? Hollywood always has a hand on its wallet. We could share stories of those wonder years but perhaps after Pascha - the actual thing Magical Mystery Tours want to copy and always fail to do, miserably. Xructoc Anesti!
Hollywood? Ffs man. Why don’t you appreciate that in London at that time an opportunity to meet and work with the Beatles was priceless beyond money? Are you so materialistic that the true value of that experience has escaped you completely? It triggered a spiritual development in me that may never have occurred without my conversation with Yoko Ono.
Get your mind out of the physical and try to imagine the joy we all experienced that evening. A memory worth far more than gold.
Very well put indeed! Sadly, for some of us, everything has a monetary/materialistic price. There can be much value in doing something, a service, a job, for free, especially for those who don’t have much. I understand this principle very well and the rewards cannot be bought with money. I am a child from the 60’s - 1962. I did one such job this weekend involving machine and manual work. The satisfaction can be the essential food we need to nourish our hearts, souls and remind us who we are and where we came from….
Perhaps "Hollywood" was not the precise word I should have used. I was once told, when still an impressionable youth, by a front-line military doctor and very wise man, that the Beatles phenomenon, from his unique perspective as a person absolutely untouched by Western social-engineering and propaganda (but a keen observer of both) that, I will try to paraphrase: "The Beatles opened up the children of the middle class to the drug trade."
I heard him and remembered what he had said as I, nevertheless, entered the Tavistock Insitute's and CIA's collaborative experiment with LSD, hallucinogenics and weed on my generation. But I always remained a conscious lab rat. This somewhat shortened my time spent in the wholly-manufactured (this is not controversial) Hippie movement.
It was my recollection of that scam (mass hypnosis event?) in the face of a recent and similar social-engineering event - the forced injection of mRNA experimental gene therapy on, this time, the entire population from infants to the very old - which made my rejection much easier. I had acquired immunity.
The Covid movement had its own internal logic, it's own costumes (masks and hazmat suits) and had all the outer makings of a subculture but was somehow applied to the entire culture. The only thing missing was the music. But as my tastes in music are 'other' than what marketing suggests I listen to, I do not think that the forced silence of lock-downs was the worst effect of lock-downs - a term borrowed from prison culture btw.
The interesting thing in this comparison is that whereas the Hippie movement had a perhaps 5% hardcore adherent population, Covid had, in the West, an approximate 5- 10% rate of 'refuseniks' or anti-vaxxers as the majority dubbed them (us).
Maybe 'they' realized that a manufactured movement, no matter how nicely dressed up and no matter how good the soundtrack accompanying it, cannot top the 10% barrier and that force is needed to reach a magic 100%.
These thoughts are obviously not fully formed and developed, but your very emotional reaction to my suggestion made me go back in time and see what connections can be made. Perhaps we can agree on at least some things, if not all.
You utter fraud and psychological operator! My comment to you was honest and from the heart. To call it a "very emotional reaction" speaks volumes about YOU not me, mate. I am PROUD of my emotions you damned misogynist!
NOW LEARN THE TRUTH!
The hippie movement began in London among the students circa 1965. There were no drugs and we were so young and cash-strapped that we couldn't even afford to drink in the Marquee club, we would sneak an empty glass to the toilets and fill it with water so that we could dance all night. We did not smoke either.
The drugs did not reach us on any scale until the 1970s. The first time I saw cannabis was in 1975 and it was rare even then. The hippy movement was NOT wholly manufactured, it was OUR culture MADE BY US in London in the early 60s.
At the same time we were demonstrating outside the American Embassy against the Vietnam war regularly. That was when we heard about a special unit of police being trained to deal with us. They were brutal and they began searching us for drugs. WE DID NOT KNOW WHAT THEY WERE TALKING ABOUT.
The Tavistock mobsters devised and promoted their drug scene to mess with our heads and quite a few people began to use cannabis. I do not remember LSD actually reaching the streets until much later, maybe 1977 or so when we began to have free festivals.
Too right "These thoughts are obviously not fully formed and developed" - they are barely coherent! They are clutching at slimy rotten straws and promoting a re-writing of actual history!
What a shame that Covid19 and the stinking vaccines have not killed me off along with the rest of my generation. HUH?
The likes of you might get away with your twisted version of my youth if I had been a little less INTELLIGENT, experienced and aware of the filthy games that the Black Nobility international crime syndicate likes to play on us all.
So take your fake history and shove it where the sun NEVER shines i.e., anywhere inside your emotionless deceiving soul.
You fucking yanks are always claiming some psychological nonsense or another, aintcha? How DARE you come to my happy memories and cast aspersions and suspicions all over them?
Go chat it over with your therapist. I know what I lived through and I am not prepared to cave to someone who was not even there but assumes to know better than me. Get on yer bike mate. Be gone.
Wow 🤩 What a tale, Frances - you sure do keep ‘em coming and never cease to amaze with your biographical snippets !! The closest I ever got was Paul McCartney’s autograph when The Beatles were playing at the Finsbury Park Astoria
Frances, I very much enjoyed your essay and the videos that followed. You triggered my own Beatles era memory lane. I never saw them perform live and its hard to imagine their last concert here in the U.S. was even before the Revolver album, playing before a far less than sold out stadium.
Not until today did I realize that we have Paul to thank for holding the band together for their last few albums. (IMO, his best years were behind him when they broke up). Otherwise they may have splintered. Entirely down to earth and approachable they were even as their music was psychedelic at times.
A shame that their best na-na-na-nah version was forever lost :- ) What a thrill being 16 years old and having a best friend (who didn't like music? How did you manage . . . . ?) with parents who owned a pub visited by the original Fleetwood Mac.
The vignettes after the credits were a delight too. Neil Innes' mention of Lennon's scarf spoof on bandmember the late and riotously funny Viv Stanshall. The Bonzos were essential listening in their day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VwksszrDYNw
Victor Spinetti recounting The Fab Four's visit to Salzburg, donning hair comb mustaches whilst doing a bombastic imitation of Hitler before tens of thousands of adoring Austrian youth gathered by their hotel balcony.
I was never a Yoko fan (she was an absolute primal scream wreck at the 1969 Toronto Pop Festival)so I appreciated you speaking kindly of her. Lennon's Working Class Hero truth to power was a gem.
I think I was just two stiff gin-n-tonics away from being able to follow every word of that occasional foreign language (English :- )
Since I was alive at the time and listening intently to music perhaps it's worth offering my subjective experience. At the time the Beatles arrived, music was going astray. Classical music was being vandalised by Stockhausen and Cage and rock and roll had not progressed much from the 12 bar blues and then Doo-wop all used the same 1-VI-!!-V chords over and over. Jazz was also heading into avant garde as musicians like John Coltrane lost their way. (we joked that Free Jazz was for people who did not want to pay). Popular UK singers copying Elvis all had a back up quartet like Cliff Richard and the Shadows - there were some great tunes though. I would say that, outside of the great American pioneers like the Beach Boys and Steve Wonder, the Beatles and Antonio Carlos Jobim (Brazil) saved pop and jazz (Motown sounded way overproduced - but hugely popular in the UK). In contrast you could hear the Beatles playing their instruments and harmonising and tossing the melody around between 3 leads. And they had personalities!
There was a growing influence of Brazilian and Cuban music which affected pop music and jazz in ways I only appreciated later. The film composers like Mancini and Rodgers & Hammerstein saved orchestral composition - their tunes were always on the radio - and it continues to this day. I know I left out a lot of all your favourites but that was my perception while living just up the road from Frances at the time.
A link to all the episodes that make up my autobiography:
https://francesleader.substack.com/p/my-autobiography
Yours has been a captivating life so far. I was drawn into reading the autobiography thread, knowing two was my limit because I had other things to do. By the time I came up for air I must have read half of them and along the way forgotten what at least in part was a reason for doing so in the first place.
To the point, I have two questions: Did the Paul is dead rumor ever make it to your shores when it suddenly became hot topic speculation over here I recall an entrepreneur, sometime disk jockey on this side of the Atlantic had some dialogues with a psychic named Clio (I haven't had this thought in maybe 50 years :- )
My other item of interest is what do you make of and know about the allegation that The Beatles were enabled, facilitated and/or "useful idiots" of the Tavistock Institute?
Both rumours are utter rubbish. Please see my responses to Franz Kafka’s irritating comments on this post.
This fascinating story of watching the Beatles rehearse & perform live undermines the belief in some quarters that the Beatles were deep state fakes who did not write or perform much of their music.
I grew up with Beatles, loved everything about them, but ,unlike you, from a distance.
At the time the whole sixties revolution seemed great fun. Now I believe it also did a lot of harm.
In a world of so much fakery were the Beatles entirely genuine & part of a spontaneous uprising. If so, why did the controllers allow it, even encourage it?
All through the 60s every corner of UK had wannabe bands. I was in one myself from the age of 12! I don’t think any authority could have stopped it because we were playing in small clubs, pubs, church halls and parties. It was a cheap, easy and fun way to socialise.
Of course the Beatles were genuine - they had been playing together since their teenage years and become very proficient. The idea that they were faked appeared decades later from some sceptical Americans who clearly knew nothing of Brit 60s youth culture.
I suppose they were hoping that people in my age group were bumped off by Covid or the jabs and they could spread their lies without opposition now. I have argued with many of these mugs on this post and am disgusted by the weakness of their suspicions.
What harm do you imagine our joyous youth caused?
‘What harm do you imagine our joyous youth caused?’
‘Joyous’ for a fortunate cadre.
Creation of drug culture, detachment from reality through psychedelia, promotion of eastern mysticism (not bad per se but this was shackled to a strong rejection Christianity) - but the promotion of satanism was harmful, through that a promotion of an amoral culture, a form of feminism that began the weakening of the family & community & laid the foundations for transgender ie women are the same as men.
Add to that the sexualisation of everything especially women.
haha, you are such a normie with regard to some conspiracies. There's little about this being a rumour. Over the past year its broken wide open.
Mike Williams
https://www.youtube.com/@MikeWilliamsPaulIsDeadChannel
Sage of Quay
https://sageofquay.com/
Or maybe you don't like him, I would say watch about a dozen of the YT clips on this channel. Over and over again, everyone knows.
https://www.youtube.com/@justiceforjamespaulmccartney
Are you unaware that I have already shattered all those ugly rumours in a previous post? Obviously you missed it.
https://francesleader.substack.com/p/smearing-boomers
I am not online alot nowadays. But I did afterward and replied in another with that being seen. You didn’t do any further or new research for that opinion. You didn’t thoroughly look into the evidence. So we can’t debate it.
Scuse me? How do you know what I have done? Cheeky! I have seen all the rubbishy 'evidence' and read the nonsense theories. They are still rubbish.
"Fucking yanks" ? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1lJFlB-89Q
Sorry to ruffle your limbic side. Sincerely, it must be maddening at times when rubes ask questions that are answered further down the page.
Almost relevant ( - : I'm gonna take a wild guess that you enjoyed neither The Metamorphosis nor The Trial either.
Thanks for clearing that up. I don't have the time to sort through all the rumors so it's good to be connected to someone who's lived it. And doubly comforting that I don't have to resort to a revisionist version of my original memories.
1965 Carnaby Street I equate with the mod movement. Hippies too? How the hell can you have hippies without drugs?
The 1960s were then the latest round of the cyclical back-to-the-land movement but living so close to the other Americas, Central, South and Mexico and with some help from the CIA with their multiple agendas (drugs MK Ultra) saw to it that our hippies soon lost their way. But wait, maybe we should credit the Brits for that too, if not the English, because wasn't our CIA taking orders from The Crown?
This who got there first thing turns into a convoluted mess but if after much research it turns out hippies originated in London, well thank you, I think, for doing your part.
And to round out this pissin' contest, The Merry Pranksters bus got there first (1964) so eat your heart out you Magical Mystery Tour bus :- )
The takeaway here? Reality is for those who can't face drugs.
"1965 Carnaby Street I equate with the mod movement. Hippies too? How the hell can you have hippies without drugs?"
In 60s London we had three simultaneous youth cultures.
First came the Bohemians aka Beatniks, later named by Americans as Hippies but we did not use that name. We didn't use ANY name. We began to grow our hair, dress in bright colours and go bare footed.
Then with Twiggy and Mary Quant, the Mods preferred suits, short neat haircuts and scooters loaded with mirrors. The mini-skirt and hot pants were popular with them.
Finally, in opposition to the Mods but in collaboration with the Hippies came the Rockers who were motorbikes, leathers and clubs crazy.
There were mini wars between the Mods and the Rockers but we Hippies stayed out of that rivalry. We were the smallest group and mainly were students at university.
You asked how the hell we could be hippies without drugs? I laughed a lot at that question. I was dressing in a very bohemian style from 1964 onwards - I was TWELVE.
I had to make my own clothes because the things I wanted to wear did not exist in the shops. Most of my friends did the same. None of us were on drugs because we were still at school.
Drugs for us were pharmaceuticals from the doctor!!!
I realise that in America things changed much later and would appear to have been very much different.
Frankly, drugs were not the central theme of being a hippy in London. It was free love and music that mattered to us. I have no recollection of being offered street drugs until 1975.
Speaking for over here, I've never quite been convinced that our hippies were an evolution of the former Beatniks. It's more like one died and another began. Hippies were outdoor creatures; the Beats were urban cafe dwellers. Their music was primarily jazz, the hipsters were all about rock-n-roll. The common denominator was folk music.
In June 1966 the world saw it's first multiday outdoor rock venue, the Monterrey Pop Festival. In 1967 was the iconic Summer of Love in San Francisco with original clothes boutiques emerging like dandelions. Only recently I realized S.F. wasn't ground zero for the west coast hippy movement. Los Angeles preceded it by at least a couple of years, again music was at the center of the burgeoning movement. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2GjY8DN-7I
Granted, the streets of London pedestrians were more flamboyant in style, attire and appearance than the American hippie city counterparts and yet, as is not unusual in other historical examples, simultaneous developments, namely hippies with and without drugs, thousands of miles apart, occurred seemingly independent of each others influence.
Recall this sober reminder by a few of your countrymen from back then that nostalgia too is a filter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RyE0NedXWpM
Nostalgia is not a filter. The desire for peace and love was the obvious reaction to continual wars.
Thank You, Frances. I very much enjoyed this story of your misspent teen years.
;-}
Never a dull moment with you Frances. What an amazing ride you are on, thank you for sharing it with us!!!🤗
Here are six thousand likes! What an astounding story!
As always, thank you for sharing! 🌼
I just love this story, and I will always say, "you are the most interesting journalist/woman on the planet." i just adore you , Frances. The work you have done for our planet is so much appreciated. You inspire me to be a better person.
Sounds like you met the real Paul, ie, before 9/11/66?
I saw Paul McCartney and the Beatles long before 1966 on TV and in films. I met him in the summer of 1968 when we recorded Hey Jude. There was no fake Paul. Why on earth do you believe a young yank over someone who was THERE??
Then you saw the real one. If you haven’t looked at the vast amount of evidence in those videos, from many different people, then there’s nothing to talk about, much less argue about. Like the JFK hoax fake assassination, its something people have to be willing to look at without attachment.
We wonder why people won’t look at 5G and its the same thing.
You are muddled. The claim is that Paul died in 1966. In which case I met the supposed 'fake' - which he definitely WAS NOT. You just won't allow me to hold to my opinion will you? Stop fucking bullying me.
Wow that was super interesting to read
Lucky you!
A lovely, free spirited story, from a time when our world had an innocence about it. Thank you for telling us about it.
You are very welcome, Philip! xx
Love this! I’m Harrison, an ex fine dining industry line cook. My stack "The Secret Ingredient" adapts hit restaurant recipes (mostly NYC and L.A.) for easy home cooking. Dm me if interested in a recommendation swap — we’re growing fast!
check us out:
https://thesecretingredient.substack.com
You certainly picked the right star to be born under, Francis. What a fabulous experience.
When the first Beatles hit arrived, I moved to the streets so as to be around music 24/7 and then became a DJ for bands that later made it big. I was the first in Auckland to feature a moustache to go with my long hair, and also an earring, which in those days, if you had not been in prison or sailed on the Union Steamship Company, got your ring pulled out, which slit the ear lobe. I then became the go-to guy for ear piercings. That was my life for the next four years. Music, music, and anti-war.
We had the best lives in history, Francis.
I do consider myself extremely lucky to have been born in London at the right time to be part of the birth of the hippy scene. At the time I was also living apart from my parents due to being at school in Romford. Both my parents lived in London, separately by the time I was 13 and, in order to continue at the school, it was arranged that I lodged at a local pub. This provided me with significant freedom and a nice income because, when the cleaner retired, I was on hand to take the early morning cleaning job which, although it sickened me to the stomach, fitted well with continuing to attend school. I also worked at the record department in Woolworths on a Saturday and helped out at the local laundrette on Sundays. All this extra income permitted me to buy fabric for my outrageously bohemian clothes designs and they proved to be very popular with my school friends. I often made original outfits for my friends, using the school sewing room out of hours.
The savings I was able to gather in my Post Office account accumulated very quickly and, as soon as I got married, I had enough to put a deposit on a tumble down wreck of a house in the town centre of Clacton on Sea, Essex where I continued my dressmaking business after my son was born.
One remarkable thing about the late 60s and early 70s was the ease with which we found work and unofficial revenue streams. Something rarely available to youngsters nowadays.
It seems we have more in common than first suspected, Francis. I made my own black coat at that time, the kind with the two brass buttons at the back and brass military buttons on the front. I jokingly told the girls the Beatles sent it to me and, astonishingly, they believed me, which made me godlike. I had Chelsea boots too. LOL.
I tried to get leather for the sleeves from a tailer and he took one look at the coat and offered me an apprenticeship. I declined, having no interest in anything but music and girls. You are right about work; walk out on one bad boss and get a job across the road five minutes later. Work was easy to get. Free trade ended all that. Thatcher destroyed egalitarian Britain. And Australia.
On music, after my kids grew up, at age 70 I started learning to play guitar. Lead only. I can now play lead with my eyes closed, which may prove handy with one eye gone and the other fading. In that event, I will adopt the stage persona of black eyepatch, black stovepipes and stetson and long white hair.
Sounds very pirate to me!
My clearly prophetic great-grandfather gave me his war sabre when I was 7, no doubt having had a vision of my future screaming audience of 36,000 as I race up the frets to fire a salvo of pinch harmonic vibrato into the tense night air, while holding the sabre in my teeth as I gyrate to a Lady Gaga line dance move. So it shall be. LOL.
What a fantastic story! I was expecting you to say you were in the Magical Mystery Tour film which, very oddly, I watched only a few months ago. I'm pretty sure I deleted the download, thinking it wasn't really that good, but I was getting ready to search it out and see where you were.
Also very strange is that I have been to *exactly* that part of Harold Wood. I don't remember spotting a pub but I was picking up a pair of loudspeakers, bought on ebay, from a charity based in the industrial estate next to Harold Wood station. I can't remember which charity it was but it was one of the big and easily recognisible ones. Stranger still, in fact bordering on spooky, is that there's a bakery on that road and I have a personal reason to want to go and revisit it (which I can't go into in public). I do mean to go there at some point.
The King Harold is a huge pub and very popular in its time. It is situated facing the tracks, rather than the station pedestrian entrance. There is a small row of shops adjacent and one of them was a bakery. I am intrigued to know why that little bakery merits a revisit - you will have to let me know privately!
So, you were unpaid 'extras'? Hollywood always has a hand on its wallet. We could share stories of those wonder years but perhaps after Pascha - the actual thing Magical Mystery Tours want to copy and always fail to do, miserably. Xructoc Anesti!
Hollywood? Ffs man. Why don’t you appreciate that in London at that time an opportunity to meet and work with the Beatles was priceless beyond money? Are you so materialistic that the true value of that experience has escaped you completely? It triggered a spiritual development in me that may never have occurred without my conversation with Yoko Ono.
Get your mind out of the physical and try to imagine the joy we all experienced that evening. A memory worth far more than gold.
Very well put indeed! Sadly, for some of us, everything has a monetary/materialistic price. There can be much value in doing something, a service, a job, for free, especially for those who don’t have much. I understand this principle very well and the rewards cannot be bought with money. I am a child from the 60’s - 1962. I did one such job this weekend involving machine and manual work. The satisfaction can be the essential food we need to nourish our hearts, souls and remind us who we are and where we came from….
Perhaps "Hollywood" was not the precise word I should have used. I was once told, when still an impressionable youth, by a front-line military doctor and very wise man, that the Beatles phenomenon, from his unique perspective as a person absolutely untouched by Western social-engineering and propaganda (but a keen observer of both) that, I will try to paraphrase: "The Beatles opened up the children of the middle class to the drug trade."
I heard him and remembered what he had said as I, nevertheless, entered the Tavistock Insitute's and CIA's collaborative experiment with LSD, hallucinogenics and weed on my generation. But I always remained a conscious lab rat. This somewhat shortened my time spent in the wholly-manufactured (this is not controversial) Hippie movement.
It was my recollection of that scam (mass hypnosis event?) in the face of a recent and similar social-engineering event - the forced injection of mRNA experimental gene therapy on, this time, the entire population from infants to the very old - which made my rejection much easier. I had acquired immunity.
The Covid movement had its own internal logic, it's own costumes (masks and hazmat suits) and had all the outer makings of a subculture but was somehow applied to the entire culture. The only thing missing was the music. But as my tastes in music are 'other' than what marketing suggests I listen to, I do not think that the forced silence of lock-downs was the worst effect of lock-downs - a term borrowed from prison culture btw.
The interesting thing in this comparison is that whereas the Hippie movement had a perhaps 5% hardcore adherent population, Covid had, in the West, an approximate 5- 10% rate of 'refuseniks' or anti-vaxxers as the majority dubbed them (us).
Maybe 'they' realized that a manufactured movement, no matter how nicely dressed up and no matter how good the soundtrack accompanying it, cannot top the 10% barrier and that force is needed to reach a magic 100%.
These thoughts are obviously not fully formed and developed, but your very emotional reaction to my suggestion made me go back in time and see what connections can be made. Perhaps we can agree on at least some things, if not all.
You utter fraud and psychological operator! My comment to you was honest and from the heart. To call it a "very emotional reaction" speaks volumes about YOU not me, mate. I am PROUD of my emotions you damned misogynist!
NOW LEARN THE TRUTH!
The hippie movement began in London among the students circa 1965. There were no drugs and we were so young and cash-strapped that we couldn't even afford to drink in the Marquee club, we would sneak an empty glass to the toilets and fill it with water so that we could dance all night. We did not smoke either.
The drugs did not reach us on any scale until the 1970s. The first time I saw cannabis was in 1975 and it was rare even then. The hippy movement was NOT wholly manufactured, it was OUR culture MADE BY US in London in the early 60s.
At the same time we were demonstrating outside the American Embassy against the Vietnam war regularly. That was when we heard about a special unit of police being trained to deal with us. They were brutal and they began searching us for drugs. WE DID NOT KNOW WHAT THEY WERE TALKING ABOUT.
The Tavistock mobsters devised and promoted their drug scene to mess with our heads and quite a few people began to use cannabis. I do not remember LSD actually reaching the streets until much later, maybe 1977 or so when we began to have free festivals.
Too right "These thoughts are obviously not fully formed and developed" - they are barely coherent! They are clutching at slimy rotten straws and promoting a re-writing of actual history!
What a shame that Covid19 and the stinking vaccines have not killed me off along with the rest of my generation. HUH?
The likes of you might get away with your twisted version of my youth if I had been a little less INTELLIGENT, experienced and aware of the filthy games that the Black Nobility international crime syndicate likes to play on us all.
So take your fake history and shove it where the sun NEVER shines i.e., anywhere inside your emotionless deceiving soul.
Beware nostalgia. It colors the past, cripples the imagination and blunts the ability, or even the desire, to discuss.
You fucking yanks are always claiming some psychological nonsense or another, aintcha? How DARE you come to my happy memories and cast aspersions and suspicions all over them?
Go chat it over with your therapist. I know what I lived through and I am not prepared to cave to someone who was not even there but assumes to know better than me. Get on yer bike mate. Be gone.
It actually was never about 'you' at all. You have made it so. I have gone ...for my fire extinguisher.
Wow 🤩 What a tale, Frances - you sure do keep ‘em coming and never cease to amaze with your biographical snippets !! The closest I ever got was Paul McCartney’s autograph when The Beatles were playing at the Finsbury Park Astoria
Frances, I very much enjoyed your essay and the videos that followed. You triggered my own Beatles era memory lane. I never saw them perform live and its hard to imagine their last concert here in the U.S. was even before the Revolver album, playing before a far less than sold out stadium.
Not until today did I realize that we have Paul to thank for holding the band together for their last few albums. (IMO, his best years were behind him when they broke up). Otherwise they may have splintered. Entirely down to earth and approachable they were even as their music was psychedelic at times.
A shame that their best na-na-na-nah version was forever lost :- ) What a thrill being 16 years old and having a best friend (who didn't like music? How did you manage . . . . ?) with parents who owned a pub visited by the original Fleetwood Mac.
The vignettes after the credits were a delight too. Neil Innes' mention of Lennon's scarf spoof on bandmember the late and riotously funny Viv Stanshall. The Bonzos were essential listening in their day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VwksszrDYNw
Victor Spinetti recounting The Fab Four's visit to Salzburg, donning hair comb mustaches whilst doing a bombastic imitation of Hitler before tens of thousands of adoring Austrian youth gathered by their hotel balcony.
I was never a Yoko fan (she was an absolute primal scream wreck at the 1969 Toronto Pop Festival)so I appreciated you speaking kindly of her. Lennon's Working Class Hero truth to power was a gem.
I think I was just two stiff gin-n-tonics away from being able to follow every word of that occasional foreign language (English :- )
Since I was alive at the time and listening intently to music perhaps it's worth offering my subjective experience. At the time the Beatles arrived, music was going astray. Classical music was being vandalised by Stockhausen and Cage and rock and roll had not progressed much from the 12 bar blues and then Doo-wop all used the same 1-VI-!!-V chords over and over. Jazz was also heading into avant garde as musicians like John Coltrane lost their way. (we joked that Free Jazz was for people who did not want to pay). Popular UK singers copying Elvis all had a back up quartet like Cliff Richard and the Shadows - there were some great tunes though. I would say that, outside of the great American pioneers like the Beach Boys and Steve Wonder, the Beatles and Antonio Carlos Jobim (Brazil) saved pop and jazz (Motown sounded way overproduced - but hugely popular in the UK). In contrast you could hear the Beatles playing their instruments and harmonising and tossing the melody around between 3 leads. And they had personalities!
There was a growing influence of Brazilian and Cuban music which affected pop music and jazz in ways I only appreciated later. The film composers like Mancini and Rodgers & Hammerstein saved orchestral composition - their tunes were always on the radio - and it continues to this day. I know I left out a lot of all your favourites but that was my perception while living just up the road from Frances at the time.