Whilst reviewing Juliane Fürst’s Flowers Through Concrete: Explorations in Soviet Hippieland (2021) for this journal, I came across a fascinating interview with the author on a little-known podcast called Talking With The Hippies (TWTH). Fürst’s work had been particularly useful because of its sympathetic engagement with hundreds of oral history interviews from real people involved in Soviet hippie movements. Their idiosyncratic life stories and unconventional attitudes were charted without the judgement that I had come to expect from outside interpreters of controversial or understudied subcultures. The interviewees’ perspectives were then helpfully grouped together into various common threads and thematic interests which had preoccupied such a disparate set of individuals.
In beginning to close the sizeable gap between a detached academic armchair reader and the lived experiences of hippies themselves, Flowers had been very helpful for my own historical research into post-1945 British hippiedom, cultural Indophilia, and post-imperial memory. Yet I could not find a similarly comprehensive oral history record of British hippies, a movement which became culturally significant between the mid-1960s and the early 1970s.
This is despite a constant popular cultural interest in the much-mythologised 1960s, and a renewed focus on some of its key players across mainstream media – most notably, Craig Brown’s Baillie Gifford Prize winning One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time (2020), Peter Jackson’s acclaimed The Beatles: Get Back docuseries (2021), James Mangold’s recent Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown (2024), and the upcoming Sam Mendes quartet of Beatles films. Particularly interesting from an oral history perspective is Jack Pelling and Robin Allender’s Your Own Personal Beatles podcast series, where celebrity guests discuss how their own lives and careers have been affected by their Beatles fandom. Even the most transgressive and much-maligned element of 1960s British hippiedom – the use of LSD – is becoming more readily accepted by the mainstream culture, through the so-called ‘renaissance’ of scientific research into the positive effects of psychedelic drugs.
Through his extensive oral history project to create an archival audio record of a movement in which he was deeply involved and remains emotionally attached to, Tom Widdicombe has helped to fill this substantial archival vacuum in an innovative and entertaining way. TWTH, beginning in November 2021 and continuing into the present, mostly involves free-flowing conversations between Tom and his various guests. Crucially, hippiedom means something slightly different to each of them. It is fitting that many of the guests are themselves creative practitioners, with the majority of TWTH’s episodes beginning and ending with an example of their artistic output. Staying true to an artistic lifestyle, something increasingly difficult due to rising rents and the cost-of-living crisis, is a crucial part of the enduring hippie philosophy.
Each guest featured on the podcast has been touched in some way by hippie values. As Tom explained to me when we met, he has come to believe that every single person can be placed somewhere on this broad spectrum of hippieness, depending upon their level of involvement with unconventional and alternative ways of approaching everyday life. Some will have a little of the hippie in them – and it’s not hard to find examples of those who have very little – whilst some will have a lot. This proves to be as true for the undercover drugs squad officer Steve Bentley, who partially sympathises with the large-scale LSD distributors busted in Operation Julie, as it is for those still attempting to live out their utopian dreams in the alternative community of Tipi Valley.
The podcast format is perfect for these wide-ranging and spontaneous conversations around all aspects of hippie culture. As a lifelong hippie himself, Tom has skin in the game and clearly approaches even the most controversial of countercultural topics – crime, hallucinogenic drugs, political protest, racial and gender dynamics, mental health, religious and spiritual questioning – from an empathetic position of understanding. He also exercises discernment, being careful not to advocate dangerous positions without evidence, advising caution around the use of mind-altering substances, and making each guest feel comfortable to tell their own individual story without judgement.
These free conversations are perhaps unlike more systematised oral history interviews or archives, but this is in many ways reflective of – and authentic to – the original hippie spirit. Jack Kerouac, a Beat writer and American intellectual forerunner to the British hippies, would certainly approve of this highly spontaneous approach to oral history, following the maxim of ‘first thought, best thought’ and letting each conversation flow and breathe.
Tom’s questions are unobtrusive yet remain grounded in their precise historical context where possible, with guests often asked to ‘put a date on that’. It is often joked that those who remember the 1960s were not really there, and it would be a surprise to find out that most hippies attended the free festivals with a pencil in hand, soberly noting down a list of immense cultural historical developments for posterity. Hippiedom was much less a formal club than it was a feeling of belonging and an idealistic shared hope for the future; it is notoriously difficult to fully recreate these inner worlds of actual human beings in an academic work.
Personally, I have benefited from the podcast’s tendency to relinquish control from the interviewer and aim to hold an open conversation without overthinking the thorny issues of audience or reception. When I approached Tom to talk about writing something on his podcast, he kindly agreed to speak to me for several hours on Zoom. The full meeting was recorded, and Tom then turned this into his most recent episodes. What results is an organic conversation around hippie culture and our shared research, demonstrating intergenerational points of agreement about the importance of hippie values to both of us.
As an oral history archive, the podcast provides excellent evidence of many of the opinions and mindsets of those operating within the high watermark of British hippiedom. Their values are well-known but worth reiterating: peace, love, anti-materialism, equality, environmentalism, community-based living, travel, global unity, creativity, simplicity, health and wellness, and finding joy in the present moment. Many interviewees still believe in the importance of pursuing an authentic lifestyle, without selling out to the myriad temptations of a conventional capitalist society. In 1960s hippie slang, those who are too interested in money are dismissed as ‘bread heads’.
There is an obvious connection between 1960s hippie thought and the political preoccupations of young people in Britain today. This tends to express itself in the belief that modern Western society is unequal, corrupt, unsustainable, and that we are all doing something badly wrong, with varying degrees of confidence in the ability of conventional political channels to advance significant change. Whether this has caused young people to swing Left or Right, and the very relevance of this potentially outdated terminology, is currently a source of much debate. Yet the most recent British political figure who consistently comes up in these conversations is Jeremy Corbyn, as a modern exemplar of certain enduring hippie values – support for the CND, anti-interventionism, vegetarianism, pro-Palestinian activism, wealth redistribution, community outreach – who managed to bring disaffected young people back into some level of engagement with Westminster politics. Tom’s previous podcast, Thelma and Tom Look Left, was with former Labour MP Thelma Walker, and it is unsurprising that Keir Starmer has come under fire from many on the Corbynite Left for his ‘hippy-punching’.
The podcast does not shy away from tackling common criticisms of the hippie movement. Such critiques often suggest that British hippies were largely white and middle class, holding the privileged position to be able to drop out of conventional society with relative ease and a familial comfort blanket to fall back on. Racism is discussed in the episode ‘Black and White and Me’ with Georgina Grant and the everyday misogyny of supposedly progressive British hippies is outlined in a fascinating interview with Rose Simpson, formerly a member of The Incredible String Band. Ultimately, Tom admits that hippies attracted a huge spectrum of differing characters, with even such an idealistic group finding it impossible to avoid some of the problems present within wider British society.
TWTH demonstrates the value to oral history of the increasingly popular and accessible podcast medium. Anyone with an affordable laptop and in-built microphone can remotely record the reminiscences of themselves and a wide range of modern historical actors. This is particularly important for a topic like 1960s hippiedom, where many involved in the movement as young people are now approaching their eighties and which has unfortunately been dismissed for too long within academia. Approaching these stories with empathy and understanding is vital to appreciating the cultural historical significance of hippies, as well as the continued impact of hippie thought and hippie values, within a modern society which could learn a lot from them.
