Hair The Musical: The aged of Aquarius

There is a priceless moment at the end of the London revival of the tribal love-rock musical Hair. All through the show, hairy muslin-flapping hippies have been running through the audience expressing their universal love and free-spirited daring. One lad kissed my (male) friend on the top of his head with the curiously aggressive line: “Love you too, man!” The victim muttered: “Too? Too? Never said I loved him!”

With hippies all over the place, yipping and hugging and burning their Vietnam draft cards, the whole thing is as much a period piece as No, No Nanette. It quite made up for my having been too young, broke, uncool and shy to come to London in 1968 when it first opened. It was the day after the demise of the censorious Lord Chamberlain, and a brief glimpse of dim-lit, dancing genitalia sparked anxious national debate. Anarchy! Indecency! Youth! Oh my ears and whiskers!

How things have changed. In this production, when at the end the audience is invited to come up and dance, you suddenly notice two of the hippies deftly manoeuvring into place the ultimate evidence that it is actually 2010: a handrail. You can’t have emotional middle-aged punters falling off the steps. Next revival, it’ll be a Stannah stairlift. Jim Rado, the sole surviving creator of the musical, winced slightly when I asked him about the health ’n’ safety handrail moment. He murmured: “Wish they hadn’t had to do that…” But they did.

It’s a good moment to meditate on what became of the Summer of Love, and how the Age of Aquarius is doing. Was its dawn aborted in the Seventies by punk, in the Eighties by Thatcher and Reagan? Were the Greenham Women the last fully functional relics of hippiedom? Was there really a chance that the age of love and peace and flowers in the hair would dawn again at the millennium, in that carey-sharey-early-Blairy time when the PM played guitar, wore purple velour jumpsuits and forced the Queen to link arms in the Millennium Dome?

Could it be that the Aquarian dream is returning, slyly, via the rise of chilled-out festival culture at Glastonbury and Latitude, and mass demonstrations against the Iraq war? Did the viciously prudish new Christian Right knock it on the head, or is it dawning again under Obama?

I rather liked the 1960s hippies. I loved the way they stuck flowers in the guns of the National Guard. I too opposed the Vietnam War and quarrelled with my dad about it. I would definitely have gone to San Francisco with flowers in my hair, had I not been immured in a convent school in Tunbridge Wells. I remain a sucker for people selling dreamcatchers off barrows smelling of incense.

Even as a teenager, though, I could see definite fault-lines running through the ideology, and not just the drug abuse. Certain uneasy, recognisable attitudes are reflected in the show. For a start, hippie patriarchs were shockingly unfeminist; girls were 'chicks’ to be passed around, and sexually the men tended to be predatory. The rising generation of today may seem promiscuous to strict traditionalists, but at least they talk earnestly of “relationships”, with the implied assumption that the person you are in bed with is another individual to whom you have to relate in some way.

My experience of hippie-minded men was that for all the talk of love and peace, the rule was that if you didn’t sleep with them you were “uptight”, but that if you did – even if you got pregnant – they would feel under no obligation to be considerate, understanding, supportive or (perish the thought!) faithful. They loved everyone, man! – which handily let them off loving one at a time. To put it bluntly, in rejecting the staid conventions of post-war married life, they threw out the baby with the bathwater and behaved like selfish pigs.

The other fault-line lay in the politics and economics of it all. The Aquarians – baby-boomers in an age of plenty – always knew that if they decided to tune in, turn on and drop out, they were always going to be able to drop back in again when they got back from the hippie trail and sold their floral VW camper-van. Economies were expanding, the competitive globalised workforce hadn’t muscled in yet, so there were jobs waiting provided you hadn’t blown out too many brain cells. None of these neurotic modern struggles for internships: you could let it all hang out for a few years, and tuck it all back in again when you got bored.

Meanwhile, delightfully, the dull old workplace you were fleeing from would have brought in casual Fridays and paternity leave and rules against the boss being mean to you. By the Eighties, even merchant banks didn’t mind chaps having a ponytail.

The fuzziness of hippie ideology found its way into public and private life without necessarily bringing along the non-materialism and gentleness. The Aquarians grew up and took over, ambling out of their squats to buy houses dirt-cheap and watch their value rocket; accustomed to making love, not war, without responsibility, they divorced too readily and moved on smiling and guiltless, leaving trails of baffled children (some of whom turned into Saffy from Absolutely Fabulous). When they got public power – political or educational – they hung on to the vague, noble-savage ideas of individual freedom and kept their old horror of blame, judgement, clarity and setting a definite value on certain behaviours and elements of culture.

The resulting mishmash of muddled kindliness created many kinds of educational and social headaches: from illiteracy and public disorder to extreme political correctness and the exaggerated codification of concepts such as harassment and discrimination.

It also created a moral vacuum into which rushed herds of bigots, far more toxic than the old 1950s parents caricatured so amusingly in Hair. Ironically, dippy-hippiedom helped open the doors to hellfire, homophobic Evangelicals, Islamists whose rage is fuelled by the apparent decadence of Western society, and scientific atheists who reject any spiritual dimension at all.

But hey, man, let’s not get heavy. Pendulums swing. You can’t blame it all on the hairy ones: and as James Rado says, he only ever claimed that the age of Aquarius was dawning – a present participle: “It’s work in progress.”

Meanwhile, I was consoled by running into a friend this week who is too traumatised to go to see the show again, because the first time round – as a teenager – she had to sit through it with the grown-ups, next to a family friend. It was Ted Heath.

She remembers the masturbation-and-sodomy song as particularly taxing (her shoulders tense at the memory). Mr Heath did not, apparently, sing along. Nor run on stage and fling off his pinstripes. But just thinking that he might have gives me a thrill.

• Hair is at the Gielgud Theatre (Shaftesbury Avenue, London, W1).
• Tickets: 0844 482 5130, www.hairthemusical.co.uk

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