You Say You Want a Revolution, the V&A’s new exhibition, explores the birth of late-1960s counterculture that helped spawn Silicon Valley. Alex Needham takes a tour of where it all began, guided by former hippies and subversive visionaries
On 12 July 1967, Florida newspaper the St Petersburg Times had an eye-catching front-page headline: “Dame Margot, Nureyev seized in hippie raid.” Police had busted a party in Haight-Ashbury, San Francisco, and unexpectedly ensnared two world-famous gatecrashers: Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev, who had been in the city all of four hours. “Marijuana cigarettes were found at the scene,” noted the paper, although the two ballet dancers had to be released as there was no evidence that they had been smoking them. A high-spirited Nureyev had, however, performed a jeté into the back of a police van.
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People drew pictures of the psych experience with lot of colours and mandalas, but to me, on acid everything got clear
The show delineates how the world transformed in those seismic years of the 1960s
Many of the originators of San Francisco’s counter- culture headed out to live on communes
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