the teenage round of parties, cigarettes, booze and casual sex.

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In February 1966, they made their debut at The Marquee Club in London’s Wardour Street at an event which came to be known as The Spontaneous Underground. The invitations read: “Who will be there? Poets, pop singers, hoods, Americans, homosexuals, 20 clowns, jazz musicians, one murderer, sculptors, politicians and some girls who defy description, are among those invited.” The audience organised its own entertainment. A girl in white tights played a Bach Prelude and Fugue while The Ginger Johnson African Drummers pounded out furious rhythms all around her. The loudest and most outrageous of all were Pink Floyd who played lengthy, muffled versions of ‘Roadrunner’ and Chuck Berry songs, or simply built up layer upon layer of feedback by turning everything up to full volume.

he stopped thinking Bo Diddley was God, started to deconstruct himself

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'There was a lot of anger at what was happening politically. Everyone hated The Bomb, everyone was afraid to die. I suppose that made people live faster. It made people look at drugs and it made people look at forms of spirituality as a possible escape-route from the horror that was building up. We all came out of that CND liberal ethos and all took different routes. My main schism with the rest of them was that I began to see it as being very, very destructive. Not just to me - which it was, but to everybody else. I got very angry with it because it was a diversion and people were getting damaged. And also in hindsight of course it looks very much like it was pushed to the underground as a kind of semi-conspiracy thing. Acid was made very appealing, with a nice PR campaign, and people got destroyed by it. It blunted the teeth of the so-called 'underground', quite honestly. I don't think that political awareness or even, for that matter, artistic awareness, is aided by continual drug use. I'm not saying that you shouldn't have the odd joint and relax, or have the odd pint down the pub. But you can't build a revolution on it. You can't even build one in your mind. I was very suspicious of Leary and all those people. They had dodgy connections. I wouldn't have trusted them with a bag of peas. I didn't buy those people. I think they did more damage than good.'