the electric internet

That hot, jangling, joss-scented summer in London, you could buy LSD for less than £1 a trip. You could ‘drop’ it there and then, on a sugar lump or pellet of blotting paper, then walk off into a crowd that was already half-hallucination. You could nibble a pill for just a ‘sparkle’, to make the city shimmer as through water or glass. You could take it that way, or buzzing and searing on the warm air, in music played by new California bands whose names - the Strawberry Alarm Clock, the Electric Prunes - were themselves LSD visions, whose distorted guitars, heavy feedback and incomprehensible lyrics both echoed and complemented the drug-bedazzled mind. You could ‘trip’ almost by reflection - in the lights from the stage at Middle Earth or the UFO club, the colours of clothes boutiques, the whirling flowers, psychedelic pinks, the bright Sergeant Pepper satins, the Buddha bells, the garlands and kaftans and sandals and weird hats. You could shut your eyes and still see colour: you could lie down, it was quite all right. Helplessness, indeed, was all the fashion. Helpless rapture at the music, helpless need for a joint or a ‘snort’; helpless - and so, becoming - inability to control that repository of new visions and wisdoms, your ‘head’.
Meanwhile in High Street Britain and suburban America, ordinary people in ordinary clothes went about their ordinary, somewhat puzzled affairs. ‘Love’ and ‘Peace’, the hippy watch-words, were exhortations possible, it seemed, only to the very young and very rich - to the many elites formed round that ultimate elite whose voices chanted the simple anthem through echo-chambers of impenetrable privilege. For the Beatles, with All You Need Is Love, were, once again, woven into the summer breeze. Ordinary people, meanwhile, stared, a little resentfully. One hot afternoon, near the Sussex village of Heathfield, a Rolls Royce painted in psychedelic colours was forced to stop for mundane traffic lights. A crowd gathered round it, but could see nothing through the black-tinted windows.