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In the Sixties
In 1962 Barry Miles was a student at Cheltenham art school. In 1969 he was running the Beatles' Zapple label and living in New York's Chelsea Hotel. In between, Miles was a major force in founding the UK's counter-culture, and active in every significant underground event of the decade. This expanded edition of In the Sixties illustrates Miles' story using personal and long unseen images of London in the 1960s, including photographs and drawings from pre-Beatles Britain to the post-psychedelic era. Also included in this edition are sound recordings of interviews conducted by Miles with Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Pete Townshend in 1967, with Mick Jagger in 1968, and John Lennon in 1969--which was never published.
392 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2002
About the author
Barry Miles
66 books154 followersBarry Miles is an English author best known for his deep involvement in the 1960s counterculture and for chronicling the era through his prolific writing. He played a key role in shaping and documenting the London underground scene, becoming a central figure among the poets, musicians, and artists who defined the decade's rebellious spirit. A close associate of figures such as Allen Ginsberg and Paul McCartney, Miles not only witnessed the cultural revolution firsthand but also actively participated in it through ventures like the Indica Gallery and the alternative newspaper International Times.
In the early 1960s, Miles began working at Better Books in London, a progressive bookshop that became a hub for the avant-garde. While there, he was instrumental in organizing the International Poetry Incarnation at the Royal Albert Hall in 1965, an event that marked the emergence of the British underground movement and featured prominent poets like Allen Ginsberg. The same year, Miles co-founded the Indica Bookshop and Gallery, which became a gathering place for creatives and countercultural icons. It was here that John Lennon first met Yoko Ono, at one of her art exhibitions.
Miles also played a role in launching International Times, one of the UK's first underground newspapers, which Paul McCartney discreetly funded. Miles introduced McCartney to the people behind the project and facilitated many of his early connections with the underground scene. In 1967, he co-organized The 14 Hour Technicolor Dream, a legendary multimedia event at Alexandra Palace featuring Pink Floyd, Yoko Ono, and John Lennon, among others.
Later in the decade, Miles took on the management of Zapple Records, an experimental subsidiary of Apple Records. During this time, he produced poetry albums, including one by Richard Brautigan. However, his personal relationship with Brautigan became strained after Miles became romantically involved with Brautigan's partner, Valerie Estes. The fallout led to communication only through legal representatives. Although Zapple closed before releasing the Brautigan album, it was eventually issued by another label in 1970.
Miles also produced a recording of Allen Ginsberg's musical interpretation of William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience, which was released in 1970. He briefly lived with Ginsberg in New York before returning to England following the breakdown of his first marriage. He later married travel writer Rosemary Bailey and continued to live and work in London.
In addition to his memoirs In the Sixties and In the Seventies, Miles has written definitive biographies of cultural icons such as Paul McCartney (Many Years from Now), Frank Zappa, William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Charles Bukowski, and Allen Ginsberg. He is also the author of Hippie, a visual and narrative exploration of the 1960s counterculture. His writings often reflect a mix of personal experience and historical documentation, offering insight into the worlds of rock, literature, and art.
Miles is known not only for his historical accounts but also for his critical views, including pointed commentary on musicians like Rush and Frank Zappa, examining the political and commercial aspects of their work. With a career that spans over five decades, Barry Miles remains one of the most insightful chroniclers of the countercultural and musical revolutions of the 20th century.
In the early 1960s, Miles began working at Better Books in London, a progressive bookshop that became a hub for the avant-garde. While there, he was instrumental in organizing the International Poetry Incarnation at the Royal Albert Hall in 1965, an event that marked the emergence of the British underground movement and featured prominent poets like Allen Ginsberg. The same year, Miles co-founded the Indica Bookshop and Gallery, which became a gathering place for creatives and countercultural icons. It was here that John Lennon first met Yoko Ono, at one of her art exhibitions.
Miles also played a role in launching International Times, one of the UK's first underground newspapers, which Paul McCartney discreetly funded. Miles introduced McCartney to the people behind the project and facilitated many of his early connections with the underground scene. In 1967, he co-organized The 14 Hour Technicolor Dream, a legendary multimedia event at Alexandra Palace featuring Pink Floyd, Yoko Ono, and John Lennon, among others.
Later in the decade, Miles took on the management of Zapple Records, an experimental subsidiary of Apple Records. During this time, he produced poetry albums, including one by Richard Brautigan. However, his personal relationship with Brautigan became strained after Miles became romantically involved with Brautigan's partner, Valerie Estes. The fallout led to communication only through legal representatives. Although Zapple closed before releasing the Brautigan album, it was eventually issued by another label in 1970.
Miles also produced a recording of Allen Ginsberg's musical interpretation of William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience, which was released in 1970. He briefly lived with Ginsberg in New York before returning to England following the breakdown of his first marriage. He later married travel writer Rosemary Bailey and continued to live and work in London.
In addition to his memoirs In the Sixties and In the Seventies, Miles has written definitive biographies of cultural icons such as Paul McCartney (Many Years from Now), Frank Zappa, William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Charles Bukowski, and Allen Ginsberg. He is also the author of Hippie, a visual and narrative exploration of the 1960s counterculture. His writings often reflect a mix of personal experience and historical documentation, offering insight into the worlds of rock, literature, and art.
Miles is known not only for his historical accounts but also for his critical views, including pointed commentary on musicians like Rush and Frank Zappa, examining the political and commercial aspects of their work. With a career that spans over five decades, Barry Miles remains one of the most insightful chroniclers of the countercultural and musical revolutions of the 20th century.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
June 14, 2025
Barry Miles was one of the leading lights in the 1960s counterculture (or underground or alternative society - take your pick; it went by several names, none of them entirely accurate). He was the proprietor of Indica Books, an independent bookshop which specialised in the works of the Beat Generation writers, and co-founder of IT (International Times), the underground’s parish magazine.
As this memoir makes clear he knew everyone and was present at pretty much all the now fabled events and happenings of the era. He was one of the organisers of the Royal Albert Hall poetry reading in 1965. Attended by 7,000 people - and climaxed or anti-climaxed by a drunken Allen Ginsberg - this seems to have been more of a party than a reading; what was happening in the private boxes of the venue was clearly more entertaining than most of the poetry. Miles was also involved in the quintessential underground club UFO - where Pink Floyd made their early reputation - and a happening called the 14-Hour Technicolour Dream at Alexandra Palace in April 1967: ten thousand people, a fairground helter-skelter, a fibre-glass igloo for the smoking of banana skins, psychedelic light shows, and Pink Floyd playing Interstellar Overdrive ‘as the first fingers of dawn entered through the enormous rose window’.
Miles was a close friend of the Beatles, particularly Paul McCartney who designed the wrapping paper for Indica and helped to paint the walls and put up the shelves. McCartney turns up frequently in these pages, usually generously dipping into his finances to bail out IT and Indica yet again. IT was often in trouble with the authorities and running an alternative bookshop in the 1960s wasn’t easy either. Indica was once raided by the police in search of ‘obscene’ books - they didn’t find any - and more regularly by hippies who would grab a handful of books, shout ‘Books should be free, man!’, and then run off with them. Miles says that the theft of stock, by those who believed that property was theft, was the main reason the shop eventually went out of business.
In his introduction he provides a short and factual account of how regimented, illiberal, oppressive and just plain dreary British society was at the start of the ‘60s. He writes: ‘We wanted to change all that. We wanted the Church and state to have no part in personal relations. And once we had got rid of them, then would come the great experiment of deciding how to live’. This is about as much as you get in the way of exposition of the philosophy of the counterculture. In the Sixties is strong on anecdotes but almost entirely free of analysis or even opinion. At various points he makes a striking observation in passing - there were a lot of upper class and even aristocratic types involved, or the rock groups associated with the counterculture didn’t necessarily share its values - which begs further examination. Miles, however, just moves on to his next anecdote about the Beatles or UFO. Similarly, he reminisces about his friendships with writers like Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs and Charles Olson, without ever actually discussing their writing. The libertarian ethos, and the rejection of the idea that there is only one valid way to live your life, was certainly the most valuable aspect of the ‘60s counterculture, and its most enduring legacy, but Miles seems to find everything equally interesting - including those poor befuddled souls who believed that King Arthur was hovering above Glastonbury Tor in a UFO.
The book is based on journals he kept and is essentially a diary of his life in the ‘60s. As such it is vivid, comprehensive, informative and entertaining; even if it did tend to confirm my belief that the ‘Swinging Sixties’ was really just a few hundred people having a great time in London. Jonathon Green’s oral history, Days in the Life, is, in my view, the definitive work on the counterculture, but this is also well worth reading, not least because it has some very funny stories. My favourite concerns a trendy antiques dealer who lived in a grand seventeenth-century house in Chelsea. He lent the house to some friends visiting from New York. When he returned everything was fine, except he couldn’t find his 3,000-year-old mummified Egyptian shrew mouse. His guests, thinking it was a block of hash, had smoked it.
As this memoir makes clear he knew everyone and was present at pretty much all the now fabled events and happenings of the era. He was one of the organisers of the Royal Albert Hall poetry reading in 1965. Attended by 7,000 people - and climaxed or anti-climaxed by a drunken Allen Ginsberg - this seems to have been more of a party than a reading; what was happening in the private boxes of the venue was clearly more entertaining than most of the poetry. Miles was also involved in the quintessential underground club UFO - where Pink Floyd made their early reputation - and a happening called the 14-Hour Technicolour Dream at Alexandra Palace in April 1967: ten thousand people, a fairground helter-skelter, a fibre-glass igloo for the smoking of banana skins, psychedelic light shows, and Pink Floyd playing Interstellar Overdrive ‘as the first fingers of dawn entered through the enormous rose window’.
Miles was a close friend of the Beatles, particularly Paul McCartney who designed the wrapping paper for Indica and helped to paint the walls and put up the shelves. McCartney turns up frequently in these pages, usually generously dipping into his finances to bail out IT and Indica yet again. IT was often in trouble with the authorities and running an alternative bookshop in the 1960s wasn’t easy either. Indica was once raided by the police in search of ‘obscene’ books - they didn’t find any - and more regularly by hippies who would grab a handful of books, shout ‘Books should be free, man!’, and then run off with them. Miles says that the theft of stock, by those who believed that property was theft, was the main reason the shop eventually went out of business.
In his introduction he provides a short and factual account of how regimented, illiberal, oppressive and just plain dreary British society was at the start of the ‘60s. He writes: ‘We wanted to change all that. We wanted the Church and state to have no part in personal relations. And once we had got rid of them, then would come the great experiment of deciding how to live’. This is about as much as you get in the way of exposition of the philosophy of the counterculture. In the Sixties is strong on anecdotes but almost entirely free of analysis or even opinion. At various points he makes a striking observation in passing - there were a lot of upper class and even aristocratic types involved, or the rock groups associated with the counterculture didn’t necessarily share its values - which begs further examination. Miles, however, just moves on to his next anecdote about the Beatles or UFO. Similarly, he reminisces about his friendships with writers like Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs and Charles Olson, without ever actually discussing their writing. The libertarian ethos, and the rejection of the idea that there is only one valid way to live your life, was certainly the most valuable aspect of the ‘60s counterculture, and its most enduring legacy, but Miles seems to find everything equally interesting - including those poor befuddled souls who believed that King Arthur was hovering above Glastonbury Tor in a UFO.
The book is based on journals he kept and is essentially a diary of his life in the ‘60s. As such it is vivid, comprehensive, informative and entertaining; even if it did tend to confirm my belief that the ‘Swinging Sixties’ was really just a few hundred people having a great time in London. Jonathon Green’s oral history, Days in the Life, is, in my view, the definitive work on the counterculture, but this is also well worth reading, not least because it has some very funny stories. My favourite concerns a trendy antiques dealer who lived in a grand seventeenth-century house in Chelsea. He lent the house to some friends visiting from New York. When he returned everything was fine, except he couldn’t find his 3,000-year-old mummified Egyptian shrew mouse. His guests, thinking it was a block of hash, had smoked it.
September 2, 2024
Barry Miles was a major figure in the London Counterculture of the 1960s, involved in pretty much everything legendary from that scene: the 1965 London Poetry Reading, the first alternative newspaper International Times, the running of the UFO Club where bands like Pink Floyd debuted, and the Indica bookshop. Not only that, Miles served as a link between the Beats and the London counterculture due to his personal acquaintance with Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and others. He was also a personal friend of Paul McCartney and witnessed the Beatles up close. While Miles was relatively late in publishing his memoirs, in 2001 when many of his fellows had published theirs in the decade or two before, he was able to draw on some personal stories that Allen Ginsberg had asked him to write down in the early 1970s, and so the book feels fresh and able to set the record straight about some previously reported matters.
I already knew a lot about Miles from other books on the London Counterculture where he is a constant presence, but the sheer depth of detail about the myriad fascinating people he met, their quirks and flaws, makes me glad I read his memoirs, too. These memoirs are also particularly interesting in telling of the adventures he had after leaving London: from 1968 on, rather burnt out, he started spending more time in the USA where he did some rock journalism and, on commission from the Beatles’ short-lived spoken-word record Zapple, he recorded various American poets. Thus, the last pages of these memoirs tell of, for example, being a guest at Frank Zappa’s house, witnessing a dying Charles Olson, meeting Leonard Cohen and Patti Smith while staying at the Chelsea Hotel, and drinking beer with Charles Bukowski.
Paul McCartney plays an especially large role in this book in the years 1965–1967. Beatles fans will be amused by just what humble circumstances McCartney was living in even after he was a global superstar and a millionaire, as he was content to dwell in a small attic room at the home of the Asher family, whose daughter Jane he was dating. Miles also shows that it was Paul, not John, who was most connected to the counterculture and to avant-garde music.
I already knew a lot about Miles from other books on the London Counterculture where he is a constant presence, but the sheer depth of detail about the myriad fascinating people he met, their quirks and flaws, makes me glad I read his memoirs, too. These memoirs are also particularly interesting in telling of the adventures he had after leaving London: from 1968 on, rather burnt out, he started spending more time in the USA where he did some rock journalism and, on commission from the Beatles’ short-lived spoken-word record Zapple, he recorded various American poets. Thus, the last pages of these memoirs tell of, for example, being a guest at Frank Zappa’s house, witnessing a dying Charles Olson, meeting Leonard Cohen and Patti Smith while staying at the Chelsea Hotel, and drinking beer with Charles Bukowski.
Paul McCartney plays an especially large role in this book in the years 1965–1967. Beatles fans will be amused by just what humble circumstances McCartney was living in even after he was a global superstar and a millionaire, as he was content to dwell in a small attic room at the home of the Asher family, whose daughter Jane he was dating. Miles also shows that it was Paul, not John, who was most connected to the counterculture and to avant-garde music.
October 26, 2007
Miles was or is the ultimate insider of British pop culture. A friend to Paul McCartney as well to all the living Beats all the time - Miles is one of those guys who writes zillions of biographies on the people he knows. This is an odd one for him, because it's a memoir of his time in London during the 60's.
He started up one of the first independent 'underground' book shops in London, with the backing of McCartney. In fact McCartney got his hammer and nails and worked in the actual store during the height of Beatle mania.
This is a good insider's account of who and what was happening during the 60's. Also it connects the activities of the Beats to the Beatles - and that is something that needs to be documented.
He started up one of the first independent 'underground' book shops in London, with the backing of McCartney. In fact McCartney got his hammer and nails and worked in the actual store during the height of Beatle mania.
This is a good insider's account of who and what was happening during the 60's. Also it connects the activities of the Beats to the Beatles - and that is something that needs to be documented.
June 20, 2013
Fearing the book would be by a "hanger-on" of a select few influential 60s figures, I kept it on the shelf for a few years. I don't know how I hadn't realized I'd already read two or so Miles books, but anyhow, I was pleased to find Miles was in with quite a few people but, besides that, my favourite parts of the book were probably about him in his younger years, before IT & Indica, before he'd really met anyone known today.
Miles is a fine writer & seems like a fine man altogether, & this is easily one of the best (if not THE best) book on the 60s I've ever read (certainly from the British standpoint).
Highly recommended to anyone interested in the 60s counterculture.
Miles is a fine writer & seems like a fine man altogether, & this is easily one of the best (if not THE best) book on the 60s I've ever read (certainly from the British standpoint).
Highly recommended to anyone interested in the 60s counterculture.
June 1, 2014
my era; an interesting read
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews