The gag "If you can remember the Sixties, you weren't really there" refers to those years as a cultural phenomenon. It always makes me think of an iconic but surprisingly little-remembered 1963 Rolling Stones single, the bluntly titled "Stoned", on which Mick Jagger repeatedly intones the word "stoned". Occasionally he pauses for a couple of beats and then adds, with intense conviction, "out of my mind". The Sixties had a location, too - the underground. Richard Neville, editor of Oz magazine, the most notorious British underground journal, later wrote: "The most memorable experiences underground are when you connect to the music, to the light show, the happening and the movie simultaneously, while being stoned and fucking all at the same time."

The sex, drugs and rock'n'roll accompanied a much wider political agenda: social justice, sexual and racial equality, gay liberation, an end to sexual repressiveness and an end to war. The historian Dominic Sandbrook has recently argued that the Sixties did not really exist, on the bizarre grounds that only a small number of people were involved. I mean, how many Marxes does it take to make a revolution?

Such a dismissal of the Sixties seems particularly odd in the light of current interest in the phenomenon. The Whitechapel Gallery in east London recently held a retrospective of the work of Robert Crumb, the American underground artist supreme and founder in 1967 of Zap Comix, "the comic that frenches your mind". Tate Liverpool has just launched the "Summer of Love" exhibition, a serious exploration of the very concrete Sixties manifestations of psychedelic art and the underground press. And there are plans for two more exhibitions that focus on the extraordinary and fascinating flowering of alternative print media during the period. One show, slated for 2006-2007 and curated by the art historian Andrew Wilson (no relation) and the gallerist James Birch for the British Library, will be a comprehensive overview of the underground press and the alternative scene in Britain, where both flourished.

The other show, planned for summer 2006 and curated for the Guardian's Newsroom Gallery by Richard Adams, will take a detailed look at the outrageous and innovatory art and graphics of these journals. Adams was the designer of Oz magazine, which sprang to notoriety after the trial and imprisonment of its editors on obscenity charges in 1971. One of the most striking contributors to Oz in its later phase was Jim Leon, whose memorial retrospective was recently shown at the Maison Ravier museum in Morestel, France.

While some historians want to write the Sixties out of the record, politicians are given to using it as a stick to beat certain recalcitrant elements of the citizenry. Tony Blair last year denounced the Sixties as a period that "spawned a group of young people . . . without any sense of responsibility to or for others". I am one of that spawn, a child of the Sixties, and a lifelong Labour voter who remains dumbstruck by the Prime Minister's recent actions. "Make love not war" may have been the mantra of a naively idealistic generation, but it still sounds pretty good to me.

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