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In 1970, Allen Ginsberg, who loved gossip, kept telling me to write down all the stories about my life in the Sixties, particularly those about the Beatles and other famous figures that I was involved with at the time. At the beginning of the decade I was at art school in Cheltenham; by the end of it I was running the Beatles’ Zapple label and lived in the legendary Chelsea Hotel. This is the story of what happened in between: the beatnik scene surrounding Better Books on the Charing Cross Road; the Albert Hall Poetry Reading of 1965 which occurred when Ginsberg was staying with me; the founding of Indica Books and Gallery with Peter Asher and John Dunbar; Paul McCartney’s involvement in the shop and gallery; the start up of the International Times (IT), Europe’s first underground newspaper, founded by myself and John Hopkins, with the addition of Jim Haynes, Jack Henry Moore and Michael Henshaw; the IT launch party at the Roundhouse in October 1966; the 14-Hour Technicolor Dream; the UFO Club and the Pink Floyd; Beatles recording sessions, including ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’, ‘All You Need Is Love’ and the Sgt Pepper sessions; the Times ‘pot ad’, and finally recording albums with Richard Brautigan, Charles Bukowski, Allen Ginsberg and others in the States.
‘Miles is like a breathing refutation of the gag that if you can remember the 1960s, you weren’t really there: he was right at the epicenter of a cultural earthquake, and he remembers it in surprisingly exact and engaging detail… An intelligent and relatively unabashed defence of the 1960s underground.’ – The Sunday Times.
