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Acid flashback: Tabloid coverage of the Summer of Love was the original fake news
Tabloid press, so much to answer for...
Furthermore, let’s consider the locations of these ‘evil acid parties’. As the Sun never tires of pointing out, convoys of cars roar through sleepy country lanes, steaming endlessly out of London in their droves. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I thought that to drive a car in the UK, a person must be 17 years of age at least. Or is there something more sinister afoot here?
‘MOTORWAY TERROR TODDLERS JOY-RIDING TO EVIL ACID BASH!’
I think I’ve made my point. I mean, it’s embarrassing that when my ex-girlfriend asks what I’ve been up to and I tell her she raises her eyebrows and says, ‘Aren’t you a little old for that kind of thing – I thought only kids went to those parties?’. When I told her that at Sunrise I was talking to a stockbroker, a professional footballer from Ruislip and a French pop star who had flown over from Paris just to attend the party she was a little surprised.
“There is no mileage, no controversy in people dancing"
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Of course, the reasoning behind the tabloid press coverage is not a result of bad arithmetic or blindness on the part of the reporters. The clue comes in the editorial column. Not for the first time, the leader questions the low-key approach of the police! It was so low that it did not appear to exist at all.
By painting grey as black, and exaggerating the activities of some of those in attendance at Sunrise, a horrifying canvas emerges of innocent youth drifting helplessly and hopelessly into some kind of debauched Bacchanalian orgy. The ‘corruption of youth’ has long been an established theme in literature, from the lurid writings of the Marquis de Sade, through The Catcher In The Rye to bestselling paperbacks depicting the extreme cases of mass murderers like Dennis Nilsen and the ‘Moors Murderers’.
Just like the smiling girl on Page Three, the thought of his pure young daughter dancing the night away, surrounded by drug pushers in a field in the middle of nowhere, is guaranteed to raise your father’s blood pressure – which in turn will hopefully raise the circulation figures…
