Lyric sheet: The Summer of Love

Another golden era is being re-packaged for TV consumption as C4 launches `The

Summer Of Love' this Friday. This coincides with news this week that people suffering the effects of being prescribed huge doses of LSD in the early-Sixties are suing the NHS for more than pounds 4m

According to the history books

The drug got lots of coverage

And everyone was tripping out

Except for Malcolm Muggeridge

However, as a schoolboy

The business flummoxed me

This sacrament-on-sugar-lumps

They all called LSD;

Which vengeful secretaries

Dropped in their bosses' tea

To send them off to Narnia

Psychotic as could be

And several pop aristocrats

Who'd turned their brains to mince

Made albums in the afterglow

Un-equalled ever since

In all the years which followed

We've built on this romance

Though most of what came later

Is actually pants.

In summer 'sixty-seven

Well... where can we begin?

The buses ran as normal

The harvest was brought in

Old Labour banned the pirates

In spite of a campaign

And what we got was Radio One

And Flowers In The Rain

But no one in my area

Drew flowers on their cheeks

As blokes with bogbrush haircuts

Might chase you round for weeks.

Unless you lived in Chelsea

Where being weird was legal

For then you whopped the acid down

And called your love-child Seagull

Spent decades in a commune

In Somerset or Devon

Until you entered Parliament

In nineteen ninety-seven.*

*Probably.