A Guardian, Mojo and Rough Trade Book of the Year
Fifty years on from the psychedelic summer of love, acclaimed music writer Rob Chapman explores what was really going on during those heady times. In America he traces the multi-media history of the Light shows, Happenings, Be-Ins and Acid tests, and illustrates the thriving avant-garde scene that existed long before the Grateful Dead and the Fillmore Auditorium came into being.
In the UK, he shows an entirely different history, never before explored in such breath-taking detail, where the sublime and the silly co-existed side by side in a peculiarly British take on flower power that drew inspiration as readily from fairy tales, fairgrounds and music halls, as it did from LSD. With a fascinating new perspective on the role of the Beatles, Psychedelia and Other Colours documents a cultural phenomenon, in psychedelia's seminal text.