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Twenties, the “blitz spirit” of World War II. But none of these yearningly recollected, endlessly redramatized epochs even begins to compare with what came over stuffy, staid old London between 1964 and 1969. Although every last trace vanished decades ago, millions of foreign tourists annually still come seeking it. You can see them any day of the week, in their drab blue denim crocodiles, from France, Germany, Scandinavia, Japan—everywhere—picking over the souvenir rubbish that now swamps Carnaby Street, treading the no longer motley pavements of Chelsea and Knightsbridge, or lurching purposelessly amid the garbage and beggars of the modern West End.
    Liverpool, which took so long to recognize its most priceless civic asset, now has a John Lennon Airport and a permanent exhibition, The Beatles Story , housed in the new Albert Dock development and attracting millions of visitors, that—along with Paul McCartney’s LiverpoolInstitute for the Performing Arts—have set the seal on the city’s recent renaissance. Recent donations to The Beatles Story have included the orange-tinted glasses John Lennon wore when writing and first recording “Imagine,” now valued at one million pounds. Echoing Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby , there is also a giant replica of the glasses, their lenses showing images of John’s major creative influences, the Vietnam War, the peace movement, the “beautiful people” in robes and beads who are now grandparents and retirees.
    Other vivid decades seemed grotesque and embarrassing to the ones immediately following. But the swinging Britain of the Beatles grows more modish the further it recedes into history. When Tony Blair brought the Labour Party back to power as New Labour in 1997, he was marketed as the figurehead of a youthful dynamism, creativity, and lightheartedness that evoked the mid-sixties in almost eerie detail. The jaded and broken-down nation Blair’s claque had inherited was rebranded overnight with the sixties-speak imprimatur of “Cool Britannia.” As in the days of his Old Labour predecessor Harold Wilson, 10 Downing Street thronged with pop stars, painters, designers, and couturiers, all eager to hobnob with a premier more hopelessly starstruck and camera-hungry even than the shameless Harold.
    The concurrent “Britpop” movement consisted almost wholly of bands in Beatley haircuts playing Beatley songs with Beatley harmonies and enacting shadow plays from Beatles history, one quartet even being shown skipping over a zebra crossing like on the cover of the Abbey Road album. The supposed rivalry between the two leading Britpop bands, Oasis (working-class northern lads) and Blur (middle-class southern lads), was portrayed in exactly the same terms as that between the Beatles and the Rolling Stones thirty-odd years earlier. Psychedelic colors, microskirts, long-pointed shirt collars, Union Jack designs on tote bags… suddenly they were all in business again. Never had there been so virulent an outbreak of what psychologists have come to define as “nostalgia without memory.”
    It is often said that “if you can remember the sixties, you can’t have been there.” But to the vast majority of the decade’s survivors whose brains were unaddled by pot or Scotch and coke, it never felt quite so dreamily enchanted as it is portrayed in retrospect. The age of so-called love and peace saw the world almost as rife as today with natural disasterand human cruelty. As well as free rock festivals, kipper ties, fun furs, and white lipstick, it brought the Vietnam War, the Arab–Israeli Six-Day War, the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, cataclysmic race riots across America, famine in Bihar, and genocide in Biafra. Even as Britain “swung” with such apparent careless joy, it had to deal with horrors and tragedies like the Aberfan disaster, the Moors murders (to this day still unmatched for depraved child cruelty), and the