As co-founding editor Barry Miles tells it, according to journalist Alex Watson, “It’s very, very difficult now to imagine how straight England was, even in the mid 60s. It was a very black and white world then… The idea of anyone from our community writing for the
Guardian or the
Times was inconceivable. None of the papers had any popular music coverage in those days. Our group of people needed somewhere to express themselves, so in early 1966, Hoppy (John Hopkins) and I started to put it together.”
They did so with backing from Miles’ friend Paul McCartney, whom Miles had first introduced to hash brownies with a recipe from