Barry Miles: In The Sixties

At the beginning of the sixties Barry Miles was at art school in Cheltenham; at the end he was running the Beatles' Zapple label and living in New York's legendary Chelsea Hotel. This is the story of what happened in between.

This is a memoir by one of the key figures of the British counterculture. A friend of Ginsberg and Corso, Miles helped to organise the 1965 Albert Hall poetry reading. He co-founded and ran the Indica Bookshop, the command centre for the London underground scene, and he published Europe's first underground newspaper, 'International Times' (IT), from Indica's basement.

Miles' partners in Indica were John Dunbar, then married to Marianne Faithfull, and Peter Asher. Through Asher, Miles became closely involved with the Beatles, particularly Paul McCartney, and this book is full of intimate glimpses of the Beatles at work and play. Other musicians who appear in its pages include The Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, Leonard Cohen and Frank Zappa.

But Miles' greatest love is for the written word and his book includes memorable portraits of Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Charles Olson, Richard Brautigan and Charles Bukowski. This is the book that everyone interested in the sixties counterculture has been waiting for. The real story, from the inside.