1967

Advertising man Paul Dane felt the year of 1967 promised to be rather different as he drove south across the river with Susie, high as a kite.

And so the year proved to be.

The Rolling Stones drug bust set the tone..

The first worldwide broadcast of a pop song with ‘All You Need Is Love' brought hope..

The Monterey Festival in California was a triumph..

The women had never been so willing, the countryside never more beautiful, as 'the summer of love' exploded in all its glorious profusion.

As you embark on your roller coaster ride, you may well wonder where you are going to end up.

But then so did the rest of the country and the world as 1967 brought reminders of a distant Merrie England that everyone had thought long buried.

Yet here it was bursting back into life.

Could it get any weirder or wilder? Along comes the Pink Floyd with eerie presentiments of the Space Age.

Hold onto your seats and make sure you are firmly strapped in. The journey has begun, The piper is at the gates of dawn.

But there would inevitably be casualties along the way.

Here is a novel to make you taste, feel, see and experience how it was in the heady days of 1967.

There is a lot of sex. It is '50 shades of grey' but now in glorious psychedelic color.

And there is a lot of rock'n'roll. It is the soundtrack to the year in a way that permeated every crevice, music was everywhere, and it was influential in a way that was all embracing, there was no getting away from the revolution being fermented.

In the background rumble the sounds of war, of the draft, of ugly realities that could be denied but not necessarily escaped.

The book takes you through each kaleidoscopic month of the year, encountering a host of dazzling characters, especially the women who regularly cross Paul Dane's path, and who invariably give as good as they get.

There are the athletic but curious girls from Chicago who are swept away by the raunchy music of the Stones recreating the blues of the Mississippi Delta with a fresh sensuality that sweeps all before.

And it is Jagger's music which persuades Janet, shortly to be married, to spend the night together with Paul Dane so he can instruct her in the ways of the bedroom.

Tineka, a Dutch girl, working as an au pair right next to where John Lennon resides, is invited to a London party where she leaves her virginity behind and discovers a whole new lifestyle.

By the time the golden summer of 1967 arrives the scene has switched to the holiday island of Jersey. Estelle, an art student, finds herself singing about a girl leaving home, it is from the new Beatles record, Sergeant Pepper, as she walks along the coast road with Paul.

Is it also a song about her? She seeks love and understanding, but that she discovers is hard to find with police torchlights playing over her naked form..

Back in London, we meet more American girls checking out the fast moving London scene. A new supergroup, the Pink Floyd, is arising.

For Julia from Florida it is a chance to dip her toe in the waters of a London scene that flows so fast it is difficult to even know what precisely she is experiencing in the shadowed recesses of The Roundhouse and the house where there has been a suicide in the last week.

The imminent tragedy of Brian Jones' destruction figures in the closing months of the year. You encounter him appearing before a vengeful judiciary, winning a reprieve but then completing his own rapid disintegration.

The enigmatic figure of Prince Stanislaus Klossowski de Rola, friend of the Stones, of Paul McCartney, of Syd Barrett from the Pink Floyd, makes several appearances through the book.

He hints at other realities, of other truths, the mystical East beckons, sadly he leaves the shattered Syd Barrett to his demons after realizing he is beyond even his help.

Besides, he has his hands full trying to save Brian Jones, original founder of the Stones.

The year of 1967 ends as mysteriously as it had begun..