Hippie dream

By and large, I try to keep the night job out of this column. I love musicals, and even derive a gruesome gallows pleasure from the really bad ones but, since I review them for the Telegraph, it feels wrong to write about them here. And I don’t often listen to cast recordings of great shows at home either. If I want to hear numbers from the great American songbook — and I often do — I prefer the interpretations of Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan and Fred Astaire, the last a man who sang as well as he danced, and always served the song rather than his own ego. An exception, however, must be made for the current production of Hair, now playing in the West End with the same American cast who first opened this glorious revival on Broadway.

For an old hippie like me, who saw the original London production in 1968 at the age of 13, this celebration of the flower power dream, and the darkness that shadows it, belongs in the canon of classic musicals. It’s a surprisingly bracing story of the way man’s fallen nature can destroy our hopes of a better world, and the energy and passion of the New York company leaves the audience moved as well as exhilarated. The show’s creators, Galt MacDermot (music) and Gerome Ragni and James Rado (book and lyrics), may never have repeated the success they had with Hair, but what a legacy they left in such hits as ‘Aquarius’, ‘Let the Sunshine In’, ‘Ain’t Got No’ and ‘Good Morning Starshine’. Many of the less famous numbers are almost equally fine — ‘Frank Mills’, in particular, has long struck me as a deliciously touching pop gem.

After seeing Hair again, I found myself going on a binge of psychedelia, digging out old albums by Jefferson Airplane, the Doors, Moby Grape, Cream’s Disraeli Gears and even the Stones’ much-derided Their Satanic Majesties Request, none of which I had listened to for years.