Shooting stars... Helen Hunt, Martin Sheen, Lindsay Lohan and others in the Robert Kennedy assassination film, Bobby.
"So where were you in '68?" asked the Sweet in their lost teenage dream epic from 1974, The Six Teens, and, in their own hamfisted way, they hit the nail right on the head. Like Mott the Hoople's All the Young Dudes, The Six Teens was a sharp glam rock examination of the failure of the youth revolution: one of the international events that made 1968 such a dark year - the moment that the optimism of the 60s cracked to leave only extremism and division.
Consider the following events: the Vietcong Tet offensive in January 1968, the one that threatened America's military power and left the US in little doubt that the war in Vietnam was unwinnable; the assassination of Martin Luther King in April; the assassination of newly minted liberal and presidential frontrunner Robert Kennedy in June; the extraordinary police brutality shown towards protestors, the media and the public alike in Chicago during August's Democratic Convention - recorded for all time by Norman Mailer in his brilliant Miami and the Siege of Chicago.
At the same time, there were the spontaneous youth/student uprisings in Paris, Warsaw, Prague, Mexico City and even sleepy old London town. (For more details, see Mark Kurlansky's book, 1968: The Year that Rocked the World). Most of these were in response to specific events or issues, but in general they also recognised the new power of youth as a social and political as well as a consumerist force. These ideas of freedom and possibility would continue to inform political and pop-cult radicals for the next decade: punk was all over 1968, for instance.
It was as though the innocence and gentleness of 1967 had never happened. As a pop-obsessed adolescent of 15, I remember two 1968s. The first offered a continuation of hippie styles: singles like Dave Mason's Just for You, the Kinks' Wonderboy and Grapefruit 's Dear Delilah, that masked their undertow of solitude and loss with phasing, toytown lyrics, and exotic instruments. Then there was the emergence of Heavy: tough chaotic 45's like the Deviants' Let's Loot the Supermarket or proggy epics like Man's awesome Sudden Life.
The big pop TV event of the year was Tony Palmer's extraordinary film All You Need is Love, which mixed film of the period's key players - including the Beatles and the Who - with news footage. In one sequence, shots of the Beatles' futzing around the studio segue into a brutal, snake-fast image. A Vietcong prisoner is dragged along the road: within the blinking of an eye, a high-ranking officer holds a pistol up to his head and fires. You see the blood pouring into the road from the prone body. I saw this clip recently for the first time in nearly 40 years, and it brought back all the nightmares.
