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The Beatles and the Stones were always about more than the music. Maybe that’s not how they intended it, but that’s how society made it. Parents – including my own – in the 60s and 70s may have objected to the music on purely aesthetic grounds, but I suspect it was actually, for many, the last thing they were objecting to. I was a Rolling Stones fan as a kid, to my parents’ horror. The long hair, the wild clothes, the drugs, the drugs, the drugs – I was really quite a messed up 9 year old. No, seriously, it was the image they projected that was so shocking and alarming. Of course, they could’ve all dressed in business suits and sipped white wine spritzers in public and you still would’ve gotten that image if you listened to the music – but no parents I knew ever did.

So Gordon Thompson’s book, “Please Please Me, Sixties British Pop Inside and Out,” places the Beatles, the Stones, the Kinks, the Who, and the other great British pop bands of the 60s – the first British Invasion – in a larger social/cultural context. And what do we see? This amazing burst of creativity and what has turned out to be music with genuine staying power, coming out of a country facing an economic slump, a war, and an oil crisis. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

Tell us: What was your experience of the British pop bands of the 60s? And what, if anything, can we learn today from that time? Leave a comment.