The Last of the Hippies

This is a sample chapter of my book, The Last of the Hippies. If you would like a signed copy contact me through HubPages and I'll tell you what to do.

I've said a number of times now that Steve is an alien being from another planet. You probably think that's a metaphor, or a snazzy way of explaining away difficult things. Actually it's both. But it's also true.

It's probably too obvious to say that everyone lives as much in their own heads as they do in the real world. It's so obvious that I'm not certain that anyone has ever said it before. People tell themselves stories, and then live by them. Everyone has a screenplay or a novel (or possibly both) going on in their heads all the time. Sometimes the novel is a detective novel. Sometimes it's a love-story. Or a cowboy book, or a war story, or a spy-novel. Or it's a kitchen-sink drama. In a kitchen-sink drama someone is always doing the washing-up. Sometimes the story is a tragedy, sometimes it's a farce. Usually it is both. In every case the person is the hero of their own on-going tale, and that tale is as real to them as the world. It motivates them in the world, tells them how to act, and therefore it, in turn, affects the world, affecting other people in their on-going story-lines too. What's a fiction and what's a fact? How can you tell the difference?

In Steve's case the story is a kind of tripped out, mystical science fiction love-story, with a bit of sorcery thrown in. He even writes his own sound-track, and adds his own canned-laughter to the funny bits. So he really is an alien being from another planet. How else can he explain his mysteries to himself?

One of those mysteries is the humming noise. All through his late childhood and into his early teens he heard it. It was very loud, like a generator. It would wake him up at night, startling him out of his dreams with a throbbing, crazed insistence. And then he'd go searching for the source of the noise: in the walls, under the bed, out the window, in the hall. He'd go into the bathroom and look behind the cistern. And then down stairs to look in the kitchen. But he could never find the source of that mysterious noise. And on and on it would drone, like his house was on top of an underground UFO factory. Then he would get really frustrated with it, and he'd go and wake up his parents. "Mom, Dad," he'd say, shaking them awake, "what is it that noise? Can you hear it? The noise. Surely you can hear it?" But they couldn't. Sometimes he'd wake his sister up too, trying to find the source of the noise. But no one but Steve ever heard it.

One night they were all out on the landing, Steve having woken them all up, and he was saying, "well surely you can hear it now, it's deafening." But they didn't have the slightest idea what he was talking about.

"What noise?" they said.

And then he was shunted back to bed, his mother muttering about how he was having nightmares, even though he was fully awake. This had been going on for years.

Later, during the period we're dealing with in this book, he'd gone to live in a squat in London. As usual he was chasing some girl. He'd met her at the Windsor Free Festival in 1973, and she'd invited him to London to live with her in this squat. She had a blanket wrapped round her and a funny-looking Alsatian dog with a tattoo. Steve was drinking a pint of milk, and he offered her some. She told him she'd been done for dope-smuggling - it had been in all the papers - and that her parents had disowned her. Then she'd fallen over a cliff on acid. Her arm was all smashed up, and she had gangrene in her wrist. She had a dressing on, which she was supposed to change every day, but she didn't bother. And she'd make her money by busking the one and only song she knew: Don't Think Twice It's Alright, by Bob Dylan. She could earn quite a bit of money doing that, owning less to the fact that she performed it particularly well (she didn't), than to the fact that she got people's sympathy. Injured girl with a scrawny dog. It was a sure-fire money-spinner. She was making about ten pounds a session. This was a lot of money in 1973.

So - as usual - Steve fell for her. And she suggested that, once the festival was over, he should try living in a squat with her in Camden.

He went back to Cardiff after the festival, to pick up his things, and, with another friend, also called Steve, he headed for London. When he got there the girl wasn't even there. She'd gone off hop-picking in Kent with some other guy.

Well - what else could they do? - they stayed in the squat.

It was as repulsive a place as you can imagine. Winos and dossers downstairs, actual turds on the floors and tables, doors all smashed in - they'd been used for firewood - windows broken, no water, no electricity, no gas, no lights. You used a candle if you needed a light. And the rules of the squat were quite simple. If you wanted to keep anything you had to hang on to it, otherwise it was anybody's property to do what they liked with. And if you needed to go to the toilet - assuming you could be bothered with the niceties, that is - you did it out of the window. The back garden was a stinking, steaming mess of shit, piss, cans, bottles, cardboard boxes, plastic containers, wrappers, discarded food, all sorts of rubbish which had been chucked out there, mouldering and festering and coming alive at night.

The floors were packed with people, that night as every other night. And as Steve was going to sleep he felt something running over his leg. He jerked awake.

"What the fuck was that?" he said. "Something just ran over my leg."

Someone said, "it's a rat. Don't worry about it man. There's loads of them here."

Steve managed to spend a week and a half there, waiting for his girl to turn up. She never did turn up, and he never saw her again. In the end he couldn't handle any more.

One of the last days in the squat, him and the other Steve had come back from the pub. The squat was supposed to be haunted, and when they got back there was this icy cold feeling, as they went in through the door. "We both experienced that, what you call a cold spot," he says. They went upstairs and crashed out. They were on downers, so it didn't matter that much. Steve said, "well it's a cold spot, so what?" and joined whoever else was on the floor and crashed out. But then he woke up, suddenly, and the other Steve woke up too. "Droid," he said, "what the fuck is that?" He was hearing Steve's previously unheard humming noise, going groiugngroiugngroiungngroiugngroiugn all around the room like it used to do in Cardiff.

Steve said, "I don't know, I really don't know, but I'm glad you can hear it too." And he told him about how he'd been hearing this noise for a long period of his life. Finally the noise faded out, and they both went back to sleep, and when Steve woke up the following morning he was feeling elated that at last somebody else had heard this noise. So he wasn't crazy after all. After that the noise never came back.

"But I always had that as a sort of a mystery," he says now, "so if I met anyone from psychic circles I used to talk to them about it. I've heard all sorts of explanations."

V (a self-confessed male-female alien being from Andromeda who writes books on psychic transformation, and who Steve writes to regularly) says: "experiencing humming sounds, of which there are various kinds, is not unusual. Often enough they represent pre-initiation adjustments being made to certain parts of our etheric sheath, and/or to actual Chakric points, unfolding petals, which are a bit blocked or sluggish etc."

Jenny Randles (a famous UFO expert) says it is something called Huna Druzz, a psychic training exercise.

Me, I prefer to think it was Steve's alien friends trying to contact him. In which case, they gave up in 1973, in that squat in Camden, and they've never tried again since. Probably they were so disgusted at the way Earthlings chose to live, they decided not to bother to invade the planet after all.

Steve wasn't having a very good time. After the break up with Mandy he'd started taking downers, and drinking beer a lot. He was perennially in love with some girl or another, and always disappointed. The downers served two purposes in his life. Firstly they numbed the pain of his serial disappointment, and secondly they served as ballast for his unstable brain. He was always liable to float away, like a helium balloon in a high wind. He'd become incapable of taking psycho-active drugs. It wasn't just LSD. Even the mildest psychedelics would send him doolally.

One time he was in love with a girl called Philippa. She was very concerned about him. "You take too many bad drugs," she told him. "Downers, beer, they're not good for you. You should smoke dope instead."

So they were at a party. A joint passed by. Always eager to please and impress, Steve took a toke. Just one toke, one tiny little puff. Philippa smiled at him indulgently. All of a sudden he was overtaken by the munchies. He had this irresistible urge to put something into his mouth. He went into the kitchen. It was full, as is the way of parties, then as now. People were standing about and chatting, passing joints, drinking beer, all immersed in their own separate little worlds. Steve found a box of cornflakes, which he began to eat. He was shovelling them into his mouth by the handful, ramming them in, and watching as cornflakes fell from his lips and onto the hairs that poked from his unbuttoned shirt. Steve has a very hairy chest. He also has hairy arms and shoulders. He's a very hairy man.

So he started to think - this idea began to formulate in his brain - that the hair on his chest was there to store food for some future Ice Age, like a hamster stores food in its pouch.

So far, no one had noticed him. Maybe he'd caught one or two people's eye for the voracious way he was shovelling cornflakes into his mouth. But that's all. You see all sorts of things at a party.

Unfortunately Steve now decided he needed to explain things. He felt that everyone in the party ought to know what was going on. He began to address all the people in the kitchen. So he was talking very loudly about hamsters and Ice Ages and hairy chests, and how you store food in them, still chewing mouthfuls of cornflakes - cornflakes flying out of his mouth in crumbled amber sprays, and falling into his beard and onto the floor - while rubbing further cornflakes onto his chest to demonstrate. He'd undone his shirt some more to improve the effect. He'd be grabbing handfuls from the box, and then rubbing them all over his chest. "See? To store food in, see? In the Ice Age. Like hamsters. Look, see. The cornflakes stay there. So when the Ice Age comes, I'll be all right, see. I'll be all right. People without hairy chests won't be all right. Nowhere to store their food, see? But I will be, because I'm adapted to it. See? I'm adapted to the coming Ice Age."

The room went quiet. Except for Steve that is. There was a certain relentless logic pounding through his brain, which kind of forced its way out of his mouth. He had to explain. People started edging from the room, quietly backing away. Soon Steve found himself completely alone. The kitchen was suddenly deserted.

Realising that things had gone badly wrong, yet again, Steve skulked off into the night. He was looking for a place to kip. Eventually he found a spot under a hedge near a park, where he dossed down. And the following day he was on his way home when he bumped into the lovely Philippa, accompanied by some other man.

"Oh God, Droid, it's you. Oh I was wrong, I was wrong. What can I say? I told you to smoke dope cos it's good for you, and it's not good for you at all. And if you're ever going to take acid, let me know, cos I don't even want to be in the same town as you, let alone the same party."

As he was telling me this story Steve was constantly breaking into his characteristic spluttering guffaws. If anyone guffaws, it's Steve. The laughter bursts out of him, huge, explosive, like lava from an erupting volcano. That's what it sounds like: volcanic laughter.

"I felt this big," he said, indicating with the smallest gap between the thumb and forefinger. And then he guffawed again.

So he took downers instead. In the end he'd taken so many that he became addicted to them. And then one day he was at home at his Mom and Dad's house when he threw a fit. He'd run out of pills. His parents persuaded him to see a "specialist". A psychiatrist, in other words. A shrink.

Well he wasn't mad. He was doolally. He was bonkers. He was off his trolley. But he was never insane. He was an alien being from another planet addicted to sleeping pills, crossed in love and often very depressed. But anyone with such an innate capacity to laugh at themselves and the world around them can't be mad. To me, this is the height of sanity. The psychiatrist did him no good whatsoever.

He was prescribed Valium and then he'd go to see the psychiatrist every six weeks or so. Often he'd have to wait in the waiting room for an hour before he could get in for his appointment. He'd be waiting around, tense, dying for a fag. But the nurses would come up to him to ask if he had any cigarettes spare, for the doctors. The Doctors were in their consulting rooms smoking cigarettes which they'd bummed off the patients outside. And once in the consulting room with the psychiatrist, that's all the two of them would do too: smoke fags. Smoke endless fags - sometimes as many as twenty in a session - and argue. They didn't get on at all. In fact, the Doctor told him categorically, that he was only seeing Steve as a favour. "I thought, oh God, here come the hippies again." That's what the Doctor told him he'd thought the first time Steve walked into the room. And the two of them would argue and the Doctor would get very irate, to the point where he would be banging the table. The Doctor told him to read Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. But Steve said, "well all right. But if I read this, then you read Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell." These are books by Aldous Huxley extolling the virtues of psychedelics. The Doctor had, in fact, taken many drugs, as part of his training. He'd taken speed and opiates and a variety of other things. But he'd never taken acid. And this was Steve's point. "Well if you haven't taken acid you don't know what you're talking about, and you can't say what is real and what isn't real. You don't know if you haven't experienced it."

"And then, at the end of all this, he was under stress, and I was under stress, and I was going there because I was under stress and I was leaving there feeling I'd had even more stress," says Steve now. "And he appeared to be quite crazy. And all he ever said was, 'we've got to make an appointment, Steve, see you in six weeks, and keep taking the tablets.'"

Actually, he did say a lot more than this. He was trying to encourage Steve to an academic career. Steve didn't want to go, but he applied for a place anyway, just to keep the Doctor happy. He got a place at Lampeter University. And the last time he saw the Doctor was just before he was due to go.

The Doctor said, "so Steve, are you all ready to go to University?"

"Well no," said Steve, "I've changed my mind, I don't want to go, and I'm not going."

The Doctor's face dropped at this. It was the one thing he'd set his heart on. His heart, note, not Steve's. It was never a question of what was best for Steve. It was so the Doctor felt better, that's all.

There's a postscript to this story. Many, many years later, Steve was back at the mental hospital. But this time it had nothing to do with him. It was Susan, his common-law wife, who had suffered a nervous breakdown due to postnatal depression. And Steve used to sit and wait for her there, while she was in seeing the psychiatrist. One day the head consultant came up to him. This was the other Doctor's superior, so he knew about Steve's case.

"Ah Steve," the Doctor said, while Steve was sitting there waiting, "you've come to see me."

"No I haven't," said Steve.

"Yes, yes, you have," said the Doctor. "I'm the Doctor, and I know that you've come to see me."

"No I haven't," said Steve, "I haven't come to see you."

"Steve, I know perfectly well why you are here, so don't deny it. You've come to see me."

"No, no, I haven't. I haven't come to see you. I'm just trying to sit here waiting. I'm waiting for my girlfriend who's in there seeing one of your colleagues."

"No, no, no, I'm the Doctor, I know you've come to see me. You can't deny it, Steve. Stop trying to deny that you've come to see me."

"You've got it all wrong..."

And on like this, both of them absolutely convinced of their position, until Steve, exasperated, jumped up. "All right," he said, "look, can we just... we'll go in there and we'll sort this out."

So he banged on the door, and the two of them broke into the consultation the other Doctor was having with Susan.

"I'm sorry to disturb you," said Steve, "But your colleague here is insisting that I've come to see him. So can you tell him that I'm not here to see him, but that I'm waiting outside while you're seeing Susan."

"Well yes," the other Doctor said, "that's right."

"I rest my case," said Steve. "I am not here to see you. See? I am not here to see you."

"Oh right, then," said the consultant, "you are not here to see me."

"Well perhaps you can go back outside now," said the other Doctor, "while I continue with the consultation."

And Steve went back outside to resume his waiting, while the consultant went on his way.

Which makes you wonder who was sane and who was not. As Steve puts it now, "I just thought it was so crazy that this top mental Doctor was insisting something was real which was totally unreal. I always used to think that these psychiatrists were equally as crazy as the people they were supposed to be sorting out. It never made any sense to me."

But the consequence of all of this is that Steve ended up as a Valium addict. Months of consultation, argument, fierce debate. Thousands of pounds in fees. Hours of bureaucracy, paperwork, forms to fill in, appointments to be made. Discussions between colleagues, meetings, case studies. A whole industry beavering madly away to turn one addiction into another. It's what they do to heroin addicts too. They turn them into methadone addicts.

The reason that Steve didn't want to go to University is that he had other plans. He wanted to be a rock star.

Just before he'd left school one of the teachers had come up to talk to him.

"So, boy," he said, "have you decided what you want to do?"

"I want to be a rock star," said Steve.

"No, seriously, what would you like to do?"

"I want to be a rock star."

"You've got to be joking. You've no chance of doing that. I mean a serious job, a proper job."

"That is a serious job. I want to be a rock star."

And that was the end of that conversation. And it's a homage to Steve's enduring optimism that it's still what he wants to be to this day. Well why not? Surely the world has room for one more balding, greying, forty-something year old rock star?

The trouble was he had no idea how to go about it. He just thought it would happen, that it would come to him as of right.

He had a few songs. One of them was called Extracting The Latex From A Rubber Ducky. It came to him one night when he was sitting with a friend of his who was schizophrenic. The guy would mutter "rubber ducky, rubber ducky" to himself endlessly. So Steve thought he could write a song about it. He said to his friend, "Paul, I could write a song called Extracting The Latex From A Rubber Ducky."

Paul said, "yeah, well, you know, go for it." And then immersed himself in his "rubber ducky" chant once more.

So Steve went home and wrote the song. Here are the lyrics to the first verse:

"Extracting the latex from a rubber ducky,

gets you in a mess, yes, very mucky,

we'll give you all a try if you're very lucky,

extracting the latex from a rubber ducky."

It wasn't exactly meaningful. But he put a couple of chords to it, and there you are: Steve's first composition.

He started performing at the Chapter Arts Centre in Cardiff. He did Extracting The Latex From A Rubber Ducky, and a couple of other compositions, including He Left His Head In Acapulco, and Pippin The Pigeon. It was all nonsense. Also he did cover versions. The trouble was, he couldn't really play guitar all that well. He could just about strum a few chords, that's all. And one night he was playing in the Arts Centre, doing a cover version of Bob Dylan's A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall, when two of the strings on his guitar broke. So he put on this voice. "Actually this is the Brian Ferry version," he said, and started hamming it up to cover the jangling cacophony of his strangulated guitar. It went down a storm. People loved him. They thought he was a comic genius.

"And then I got stuck doing Brian Ferry versions of everything. So I was doing this stupid Rubber Ducky song, and Brian Ferry voices for covers of other things, and all this rubbish people seemed to be, like, really into."

One time he was at the Windsor Free Festival, with a couple of friends of his, off his head on downers as usual. He decided he wanted to play. He borrowed a guitar from someone and started hassling the organisers for a slot. He was probably drawling, and almost certainly incapable of listening to reason. In the end the organisers agreed, just to get rid of him. This was on the main stage, just after Hawkwind. So he was headlining for Hawkwind on this occasion. And he had this little yellow rubber duck with him, and he and his two friends got up on stage before this massive crowd, with a beat up old guitar and a kazoo and a rubber duck, and started playing the rubber ducky song. The crowd went wild. He had an encore for it.

"I just couldn't relate to it, cos there were all these thousands and thousands of hippie people out there in the field, all going wild about this rubbish."

Some months later he was in London, on his way to a Van Morrison concert. And before the gig he went to a pub to get himself a drink. This was in Finsbury park, an ordinary little pub at the end of a terraced street. So he was at the bar, relaxing with his drink, when this stranger came up to him.

"Oh man," the bloke said, boiling with enthusiasm, "man, man, it's you. You're the guy who does the song about a rubber duck. You're from Wales. Oh, this is too much. There's all these people over here who've heard all about you. Come over and meet my friends. Far out man! Too much."

So Steve was getting his wish. He was actually, without even trying, becoming a rock star. The trouble was, he didn't really like that rubber ducky song.

"I played that song so much that one day I had to kill the rubber ducky. One night, in the Chapter bar in Cardiff, I rearranged some of the lyrics to include the death of the duck, and with some help I stabbed and stamped it into a shoe-box coffin. We even dressed a guy up as an undertaker. Of course, that wasn't the end of the bloody duck. I got calls to do the re-incarnation of the duck. I did it a couple of times, I'm sorry to say. But that time we killed the duck was wild. There were people in the crowd actually crying!"

But it wasn't to be. Steve wasn't going to be a rock star just yet. He was too depressed all the time, too involved with his continuing love quest. Steve's whole life has been a love quest.

He was involved with this student girl called Jo for a while. She was living in one of the halls of residence by the University, and he used to go and see her there. He went out with her a few times and would meet her at parties. But then the Christmas holidays came, and she went home to see her parents. She'd given Steve her address, so Steve decided to go and visit her. The address was somewhere in North Wales. So he hitch-hiked all the way up there, a long, and gruelling journey. It was very cold, frosty first thing in the morning. And he arrived in the town only to discover that there was a new town and an old town, and that the address she'd given him didn't specify which. He looked it up in the telephone book, and there were several places listed with the same name. Also, her surname was Davis, which is a common Welsh name. There were literally thousands of entries under the name. So finding her was going to be more difficult than he expected.

He needed a place to stay. He looked in a post office window, and there was an advert saying: "Are you seeking Truth? Peace? Spiritual Enlightenment?" He recognised the tone. It was the Divine Light Mission, Guru Maharaji's outfit, very in vogue at the time. So he went round to visit them.

"Do you know about Guru Maharaji?" they asked.

"Well, yes, I do. I know a lot about Guru Maharaji, actually, and, to be honest, although I can respect what you're into and that you believe in all this stuff, I'm not. But what I wanted, I just want somewhere to crash, and I'm looking for a girl who lives up here somewhere, and is it all right if I stay here?"

They agreed. So Steve stayed there for a few days, while he got on with the business of trying to find this girl.

Finally he managed to track down the house. It was a large, detached house on an expensive, new housing estate; very smart, very upper middle class. Steve was overjoyed. He thought, "at last, I've found the place." He had a picture with him that he'd made for her. It was a black piece of board with autumn leaves of different colours glued onto it, which he'd varnished and stuck in a frame. It was his gift.

He got to the door and rang the bell. She answered the door, and Steve handed her his gift.

"Oh my god, Droid, what... what are you doing here?" she said.

"Jo, you said come up, and I've come up to see you," he said. "Aren't you pleased to see me?"

But it was obvious she was not. She was just taken aback at seeing him there so unexpectedly.

"Oh God," she said, "well I suppose you'd better come in." And then, noticing the gift which he'd placed in her hands, she said, "and what's this?"

"It's a present," he said.

"My mother will like it," she said.

And Steve thought, "oh well, I made it for you, but your mother will like it. Fine."

"You can't stay long," she continued as she showed him into the house, "because my parents have just gone shopping and they'll be back soon. You're gonna have to go. But would you like an orange or an apple or something? And a cup of coffee?"

So she gave him an apple and a cup of coffee, and then, when he'd finished these, she said, "well, you're gonna have to go now Steve, cos my parents will be coming back any minute now, and they'll freak out if they find you here. I'm sorry like. That's it. I'll see you back in Cardiff."

So he left, crest-fallen. And as he walked away he was thinking, "yes, fine, fine, I've come all this way, I've hitch-hiked up from Cardiff in the middle of winter, I've spent nearly a whole week trying to find you, I've wandered around this twin town, the old town and the new town, I've asked everyone I've met whether they knew you or not, and then finally I've found you, and all I got was an apple and a cup of coffee. And now I've got to go all the way back to Cardiff. Yes, fine."

So he started hitching back. He got a lift from one bloke who took him back to his farmhouse and gave him a smoke, and who then returned him to the main road. And then he was waiting by the road, and another car pulled in. "Great!" thought Steve, "I'm doing all right here. I've got another lift." And he got in the car.

The driver said, "I'm a plain-clothed policeman. We're doing a routine investigation. Would you mind coming to the station to answer a few questions?"

Steve thought, "oh well, it's not such a good lift after all. But at least it's a lift." And he agreed. "Yeah, yeah, sure," he said.

So he went to the police station with the officer. And then they started asking him questions. Like: "where were you at half past two in the morning on Tuesday the 6th July?"

"I don't know," said Steve.

"What were you wearing at half-past two in the morning on Tuesday the 6th July?

"I don't know," said Steve.

They kept asking him the same questions over and over again. And then they were talking in Welsh about him, and laughing. They were calling him Jesus Christ in Welsh. And the questions were getting more and more absurd.

"What kind of trousers are you wearing now?"

"I have on a pair of brown velour trousers."

"And what kind of brown is that?"

"Rusty brown."

"And what kind of shirt do you have on now?"

It was patently absurd, asking him all sorts of questions that they could answer themselves, and then writing it all down and laughing.

After a while they took him into the courthouse.

"You realise what this is?"

"Yes, it's a courthouse."

"You realise you could end up in here?"

"What for?"

But they wouldn't say. They just started asking him the same old stupid questions, over and over again. It was several hours later that they finally told him what it as all about. They were looking for a vagrant who had murdered some man with a pitch-fork several months before, and who had then set light to a barn. It clearly had nothing to do with Steve. The whole thing was put-on, to have a go at the hippie. And then they said, "well you can go now." They led him to the door, showed him out, and then said, "well that's it, you're free to go."

It was cold and dark by now. They'd kept him in the place all day on purpose, to stop him getting a lift. It wasn't till the following day that he finally made it back to Cardiff.

And that's it. The perfect metaphor for Steve's life. Another failed love-quest, an apple and a cup of coffee. And a bunch of hick Welsh policemen taking the piss out of him for looking like a hippie.

No wonder he was depressed.

'Tony Blair was. Half the Cabinet were. And so was your dad, probably. But these days, original hippies are hard to find. Despite the flares, hennaed hands and cheesecloth revival of recent years, only an ashtray-full of die-hards remain. Now C.J. Stone has endeavoured to expose them - and himself at the same time. A professional drop-out for the latter half of his 45 years, Stone's new book, Last of the Hippies, traces the movement to its genesis.' The Times

'A touching memoir .... Stone writes with intelligence, wit and sensitivity about being a working-class, belated hippie who has been hanging out with assorted no-hopers in places like Cardiff and Birmingham. This is a book written from within the hippie phenomenon by someone looking sceptically out.' Times Literary Supplement

'Ambivalence rather than embarrassment is what fuels this engagingly candid memoir ... Much as he likes to protest his disillusion, Stone's commitment to an underfunded life spent in squats, at free festivals and Green Gatherings blazes, or flickers, at least, off every page.' Sunday Times

'In a converted ambulance, Stone traverses a refreshingly uncool landscape (Birmingham, Hull) digging out friends from a quarter of a century ago. They are his counter-cultural characters, but now they are living in council houses surrounded buy pictures of crop circles.' Independent

'C.J. is surprisingly engaging for a self-confessed hippie. Last of the Hippies is something of a diary of his life from the day he decided to grow his hair (centre parting not optional). You've got to love him just for the way he confesses from the off that the prospect of free love was what really sold it to him.' Big Issue

'Hippies - a word conjuring up a cool, far-out generation, beads and tin bells jangling around their necks, flowers in their tangled hair, the sweet pungency of joss sticks everywhere. Everyone knows, or knew, one - no one wanted their children to grow up to be one. But Where Are They Now? ... Last of the Hippies is a sometimes sad, sometimes funny-whimsical look at a generation.' Yorkshire Post