Hippie Hippie Shake [Paperback]

There is always room for another book about the SIXTIES, and there is more than a niche market for the good natured and witty eye of RICHARD NEVILLE in his aptly titled HIPPIE HIPPIE SHAKE. The book is perfectly lengthed, is unpretentious, focussing, like a memoir, on those events with which the author was intimately involved. Neville was in the eye of the legendary sex drugs and rock and roll storm and has lived to tell the tale.He gives us a pithy picture of those good ole hazy lazy days when the living was easy and more than the cotton was high. The book reads as fresh as a Sunday morning fruit frappe and is surprisingly generous to those at whom he might have swung an axe. Well he does take a swing or two at Jerry Rubin but the anecdotes about rival Australians who even then were in hard training for the celebrity bigtime, are both amusing and affectionate. Clive James - Mr. Ultra-Square in a shiny blue suit non-inhaling in Neville's Notting Hill basement HQ; Robert Hughes in his acid/motorcycle/leather/pre-Time Magazine period when he had to do a moonlight flit from multifarious credtiors, not to mention a raging Nordic blonde bombshell of a wife. And most notably Germaine Greer (who has refused to read the book but has famously said that she will not sue. "Richard will be lucky if I ever speak to him again.") The narrative concludes of course with Mr. Neville in shining counter culture armour defending himself and his beloved and brilliant Oz Magazine from the forces of cultural and political darkness, his finest hour, the Oz Conspiracy and Obscenity Trial at the Old Bailey, one of the seminal events of the period in England, one that brought down the curtain on the decade and ushered in the horrors and delights of the seventies when we indulged ourselves acting out some of those swinging ideals. The results as we know, were mixed but have kept us going on our long strange trip all the way to the millennium. Where would we be without the sixties? Fortunately, Mr.Neville does not attempt to answer this question but yes, check out HIPPIE HIPPIE SHAKE, laugh and reflect, shed a sweet tear for what was and might have been. Jim Anderson (who was also there but may have forgotten)

Richard Neville, the editor of a little publication called OZ, was a key figure among the international underground of the late 1960s, those freaks, hippies, and political radicals with whom the era is so identified. I first became familiar with his activities during this time by reading his 1970 book PLAYPOWER, a fascinating journalistic chronicle of three years of social change when it seemed the old order of things would be completely done away with by young people with unquashable joie de vivre and international mobility. HIPPIE HIPPIE SHAKE, published in 1995, are Neville's memoirs of his life as a member of the Underground, from his student days in Australia until his 1971 prosecution with other OZ editors for obscenity.

As the late 1960s are the most flamboyant years of his chronicle, Neville could have started the book with his arrival in London in 1966 and still made plenty of readers happy. I'm happy, however, that he dedicates the first 64 pages to his subversive activities in Australia, when he produced the first incarnation of OZ with other students starting in 1962. For all their snubbing of the system, these youngsters in what was then an obscure part of the world led a fair tame life, with this early scene lacking the drugs and participation in international political movements that one normally associates with the Underground. Sexual promiscuity is the only extreme in the lives of these people mostly just lampooning old people. But after two prosecutions for obscenity, Neville felt it necessary to join the massive exodus of young Australians to the UK, and in 1966 he set off overland. He briefly tells of his adventures in Laos, Nepal and India.

The central portion of the book is Neville's life as editor of London OZ, when he dabbled in drugs soporific and hallucinogenic, attended cutting edge rock concerts, and hung out with dropouts from Ibiza to Morocco, from Paris to New York. Figures like Germaine Greer (whom Neville had already met in Australia) and John Lennon make multiple appearances. But the supporting cast of the book is mainly played by Neville's friends who had come from Australia, such as his sweetheart Louise and the artist (and Cream songwriter) Martin Sharp. If you've read PLAYPOWER, you'll see how he learnt of so much of what he reported in that book firsthand.

Finally, the last third of the book is dedicated to his third prosecution for obscenity, which threatened a long jail term. While Neville was in Ibiza, back in London his assistants were putting together a schoolchildren's issue of OZ. This was meant to feature the work of schoolchildren, not be published for schoolchildren. Nonetheless, the British criminal justice system under the new Conservative government had become draconian about publishing and drugs, and wanted to shut OZ and similar publications down for good. While the description of Neville's fight for justice can be a little wearying, it is fascinating to read about how corrupt the court system of an ostensibly free nation was. The judge and a detective following a personal vendetta against Neville are the best of friends. The Aussie clown with no clear political goals is depicted by the Crown as a Communist agent.

When I read PLAYPOWER, I was caught up in Neville's vision of a society changed by the flower children and the freaks, and I longed to know what he felt about how it all came crashing down. While HIPPIE HIPPIE SHAKE doesn't go into his disappointment in depth, he does speak of how he felt the Underground suffered from a move towards violence for political ends (the Weather Underground and the Angry Brigades), and stupid aggressive stunts like Jerry Rubin's crashing of the Frost television programme. Neville doesn't discuss any of his life after he narrowly avoids jail and agrees to stop publishing Oz. He went on to be a reporter for the Australian national broadcasting company and wrote a bestselling biography of the hippie trail serial killer Charles Sobhraj. But there is a moving afterward describing a beach party in Australia in the 1990s where so many features of the old Underground still survive. I hope Neville will write more about the disruptions and continuities between the 1960s and our time.