Stuff You Gotta Watch: A Technicolor Dream
San Francisco may have had its Summer of Love, but London’s Alexandra Palace also witnessed a “gathering of the tribes” in spring 1967. Mixing music, art, and performance, its electrifying energy epitomized what the psychedelic underground was all about: the 14-Hour Technicolor Dream.
Forty years later, Stephen Gammond put together A Technicolor Dream in an attempt at making sense of that giant freeform happening. The documentary tells the story of the fascinating event, originally envisioned as a fund-raiser for underground paper International Times. It somehow evolved into a gigantic concert whose organic production seemed to be in tune with the overall vibe among both the audience and the performers. “I remember it was great to be young and good-looking and play music—and that’s about all I remember,” Soft Machine’s Kevin Ayers confesses.
Frequently marketed as a Pink Floyd documentary due to the band having received headline billing (and with an increasingly erratic Syd Barrett still part of the line-up), A Technicolor Dream is an exciting audiovisual testimony of the absolute peak of British psychedelia, documenting the event that marked the turning point between the utopian "before" and the tainted "after." As the establishment began its inevitable appropriation of the movement, euphoria would soon begin to wither—and by 1969, as Barry Miles puts it so himself, "everybody had to crash and go to bed."
Review by Ana Leorne. Check out the full archive of the Stuff You Gotta Watch column.