Nothing You Can See That Isn't Shown

It might have been the age of imagination, but the material remains of the sixties’ social battlegrounds still hold great value. through a new exhibition at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum, GQ’s Charlie Burton tells the story of the counterculture.

- Charlie Burton

The phone was ringing and the hour was unsettlingly early. Caroline Coon picked up the receiver. George Harrison was on the line and he was in trouble. It was March 1969 and Harrison had been busted by the drugs squad. Coon was working for the drug-user charity Release and if the police swooped she was the person you called for advice. “The thing is, I kept my pot in a nice little box on my sitting room table,” Harrison told Coon. “What’s upsetting me is that the police searched the house and they said they had found a big lump of pot in my wardrobe and, honestly, that wasn’t there.” It was something Coon had heard many times before. “If they were busting a pop star,” she tells GQ, nearly five decades on, “they didn’t want to come away with nothing. It was such a shock that the Great British police – ‘The best in the world, your honour’ – were doing that.”