Barry Miles' Memoir of British Counterculture Issued as a Limited Edition

Albany Arts Communications is delighted to announce the publication of an illustrated limited edition of Barry Miles’s memoir, In the Sixties, on 5 October 2017, only at www.inthesixties.com.

In 1962, Miles was a student at Cheltenham art school. By 1969, he was running the Beatles’ Zapple label and living at the Chelsea Hotel in New York. In between, Miles was a major force in the UK’s nascent counterculture, and active in every significant underground event of the decade.

In the Sixties is Miles’s personal memoir of this turbulent period. A friend of Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, Miles helped to organise the pivotal International Poetry Incarnation at the Royal Albert Hall in June 1965. He co-founded and ran the Indica Bookshop in Mason’s Yard, the epicentre for the London underground scene, and published Britain’s first underground newspaper, International Times (IT), from Indica's basement.

Miles's partners in Indica were John Dunbar, then married to Marianne Faithfull, and Peter Asher. Through Asher, Miles became closely involved with the Beatles, particularly Paul McCartney. Other musicians who appear in the pages of In the Sixties include the Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, Leonard Cohen and Frank Zappa; the book also includes memorable portraits of writers and poets such as Ginsberg and Burroughs, Charles Olson, Richard Brautigan and Charles Bukowski.

This expanded edition of In the Sixties illustrates Miles’s story using personal and long-unseen images of London in the 1960s, including photographs and drawings from pre-Beatles Britain through to the post-psychedelic era. Also included in this edition are exclusive sound recordings of interviews conducted by Miles with Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Pete Townshend in 1967, with Mick Jagger in 1968, and a previously unpublished interview with John Lennon in 1969.

Highlights of these unique and unexpurgated interviews include McCartney playing Miles the brand-new acetates of ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ and ‘Penny Lane’; Mick Jagger talking about the Grosvenor Square riots he’d attended the day before; Pete Townshend on plotting for The Who to explode live on television; and John Lennon on making music without the Beatles.

In the Sixties is a record of Miles’s unique position in the history of 1960s and 1970s counterculture: as one commentator has written, ‘He really was there, man, and that is more than most of us can say.’

The book is published by Rocket 88 and will only be available via www.inthesixties.com and the Rocket 88 website. Pre-ordering before the end of June will enable buyers to get a discount on the purchase price, and the chance to have their name printed in the book. 

Image: Barry Miles, Indica Bookshop, Mason’s Yard, 1966