Since ancient times, people have gathered in celebration of song. Of course, music festivals weren’t a new thing.
Previous years had seen a number of increasingly large outdoor music events. The summer of ’69ĭespite the previous year’s confrontations, 1969 saw the hippie dream of peace and love very much alive. Hope springs eternal, and from the eternity of space, the belief that the 60s was a special decade was reborn. And yet Christmas Eve 1968 offered hope, in the shape of perhaps the most powerful photograph ever taken, as Apollo 8 astronauts were the first to look back at Earth from the Moon. 1967’s Summer Of Love had turned sour in 1968: it had been a year of riots in Paris, Chicago, London, and Prague (among many other cities) the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr, shocked the US and an escalation of the war in Vietnam was proving increasingly unpopular. While The Beatles were holed up in EMI’s studios at Abbey Road recording Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, disaster struck in Florida, when all three of the first Apollo crew were killed in a fire during a test.īut, as the end of the decade drew close, it began to feel as though everything it had promised was going to come together in one glorious summer. With the Soviets first to every landmark on the road to the Moon, Apollo seemed to be suffering nothing but frustration and setbacks.
The same couldn’t be said for the Apollo program in its pursuit of the assassinated JFK’s target of reaching for the stars. As every timeless single was followed by yet more groundbreaking albums, even the sky didn’t seem likely to limit the rise of pop’s masterminds. The ensuing years witnessed triumph upon triumph for The Beatles and their fellow pioneers of pop music. “We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things,” Kennedy concluded, “not because they are easy, but because they are hard because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win, and the others, too.” In these few short sentences, he had committed his nation on a trajectory to undertake the greatest adventure in human history. Gone would be the shackles that had tied humankind to its earthly toil. As the 60s took hold, so too did a new sense of hope that anything was possible. In the post-war years, the western world had gone some way to rebuilding itself, intent on forging a new world without the bloodbaths that had marred the first half of the century. The purpose of his speech was to announce his country’s goal to land a man on the Moon by the end of the decade, and return him safely to earth: “We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people.”
Kennedy addressed a large crowd at the Rice University football stadium. The next day, on a hot afternoon in Houston, Texas, John F. Paired together, they would become the Liverpool band’s first release, signaling the start of a revolution that would reshape the world of music and art completely over the next seven years. Defining moments of the decadeįirstly, on the evening of September 11, 1962, EMI producer Ron Richards oversaw the recording of “Love Me Do” and “PS I Love You” by Parlophone’s new signings, The Beatles. Listen to the Summer Of ’69 playlist on Spotify.
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