Thanks to meeting some lovely people at the Speaker’s House in Parliament on Wednesday night (more of that some other time) I got to spend yesterday afternoon as a guest at the Victoria & Albert Museum. I was there to see a new exhibition titled, “You Say You Want a Revolution: Records and Rebels 1966-1970”. It really was a remarkable period in Western history. It saw the flower power movement and anti-war activism, the start of the gay rights movement and the black power movement, the burgeoning of second wave feminism, the birth of the environmentalist movement and the first Moon landing. We got a lot wrong back then, primarily because we didn’t talk to each other, but there was much right too.

As the V&A recognizes, music was key to much of what went on. Pop music was a relatively new thing, and musicians were at the forefront of many of the political movements. If you take the headphones around the exhibition you get treated to some of the finest anthems of the era along the way. Cleverly the V&A is selling an album based on the exhibition. It has no Beatles, because they are still very protective of their output, but most of the other important songs are there.

Obviously the exhibition very much caters to people like me who were kids or teenagers at the time. Nevertheless I think it is hugely important right now. We need to recapture that spirit of revolution, and this time we need to do it right.