The Long and Winding Road

It is no coincidence that each story in this collection has a Beatle’s song as its title. When the Beatles and Rolling Stones, exploded onto the music scene in the early Sixties, they transformed the associated London social action mainly from a bunch of small sleazy, smoky clubs, mainly around Soho, playing, mostly American Rock n’ Roll, into a vibrant culture which, for some time, was the only place to be.

They carried with them, a generation of musically and socially dispirited kids, who were determined to shed the remaining shackles of the austerity filled post-war years. The clubs were still smoky, but more interesting, and larger.

I arrived in London just before the Beatles, and whilst too penniless to join in wholeheartedly with the new scene, wallowed in the atmosphere of the personal freedom of the time, those who weren’t there cannot grasp the enormity of what was happening. I was lucky to have been there. It would be inapt if I wrote about my life in London, without telling you why I came in the first place. My story, ‘Yesterday’, does just that.