Watching the queues for the nightclubs in Putney High Street, one can sometimes feel that there's little left to connect the sixties generation with their nineties offspring. The short skirts, short hair and heavy make-up bear little relation to the hippy age. But there is something. And midsummer is the time to celebrate it.
Once upon a time today's saggy-faced baldies headed off, guitars strapped to their backs and army-surplus pockets stuffed with amphetamines, to Knebworth and Glastonbury. And now, for some of today's youth at least, it's much the same thing. All right, the music is theoretically different, though behind the latest crop of weird names it is actually strikingly similar to the music of the sixties and seventies. And your days of slithering about in mud and trying to use an astrakhan jacket as a blanket are far behind you. But if not Glastonbury, there's still . . . Well, there's still the opera in a tent at Holland Park and jazz concerts in Kew Gardens and the folk festival at Sidmouth and, across the country, a remarkable number of optimists and idealists running outdoor music events of all kinds.
Even if your Rigoletto in Holland Park is spoilt by a peacock's unscored tenor and the surrounding footballers' oaths, it's still an uplifting way to spend a summer evening. Music becomes less formal and more fun when it moves outdoors and, what with the picnics and the old friends and the booze and the sudden huddlings under beeches when the rain comes, it's very easy to forget that you don't actually like jazz, opera, blues or folk and wouldn't ever listen to it in a concert hall.
In other seasons music is prone to snobbery and habit. But in summer Britain becomes a garden of crooners, pluckers and sax maniacs. And all the better for that.
