The 1960s, as we understand them, really began in 1965. Until then, the attitudes and mores of the post-war 1950s had bled into the following decade. By 1968, Terence Stamp was already a film star, Far From The Madding Crowd with Julie Christie had seen to that. He was perhaps typical of the changes the 1960s had wrought: an East End boy who had not allowed lack of education or social class to get in his way.
Terence's brother, Chris, had chosen another 1960s route to fame and fortune: pop music. Most famously, with Kit Lambert, Chris Stamp discovered and managed The Who. Through his brother and through his girlfriend, the model Jean Shrimpton, Terence Stamp was at the epicentre of happening London, though it was music, he believes, that was the key. "I travelled a lot in 1968, but wherever I was - Rome, Amsterdam, London, LA - everybody was excited about the same music. `Have you heard the White Album? Do you know The Animals? Have you heard this and have you heard that?' It was a global thing. Boundaries, countries, passports suddenly seemed ludicrous."
The change in perception, Stamp believes, started when John Glenn circled the earth in 1962, bringing back pictures of Earth taken from space. "There was a new way of looking at things - and it wasn't drugs! There was a sense of `we're all in this together and we're all custodians of this amazing planet'."
In July of 1968, theatre censorship was abolished and the first production to take advantage of this was the musical, Hair. "I knew the music wasn't fantastic but the fact that it was on was extraordinary - that you could strip your clothes off and walk up on the stage and stand there. . . "The insights it gave were quite difficult to formulate because we had come out of the 1950s which were black and white with roll-ons and corsets. Any girl who had sex was a slut: it was hard to get laid and `girls didn't like it'. And suddenly there was the pill and girls wore short skirts. Hair was a manifestation of what was happening."
For Terence Stamp, 1968 is marked out less by the great moments in history than by personal encounters, such as the day he spent with Jim Morrison of The Doors ("He was like a sort of cherub that had lost a few feathers") and his first encounter with Jimi Hendrix. "My brother Chris rang to say that he had just signed this new act and was going to launch him at a theatre he and Brian Epstein rented on Sundays. I had never seen anything like it. I had never seen anybody play the guitar like Hendrix.
"Afterwards, as usual, Epstein would ask all the faces back to a party at his place. That night, sitting in a huddle in a corner there was Ginger Baker, Jack Bruce, Pete Townsend and Eric Clapton. And my brother Chris said: `Don't worry guys. There'll always be work for good white guitarists.' It was obvious they thought their careers were over."
The assassination of Robert Kennedy and the invasion of Czechoslovakia he sees as a "terrifying backlash" of the old guard. Stamp had met Kennedy in Rome and had been very impressed. "There was something laser-like about him and when he was killed I felt it was really the end, the end of the possibility of a real change which I still felt then had to come from the top. But then I remember a programme on television with the leaders of the student movements, like Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Tariq Ali. They weren't like people one had ever seen on TV. They weren't politicians lying to keep their seats. They were talking about how they really felt and saying these extraordinary things like, there shouldn't be money, and while there's money there will be all these class divisions and borders. And for a moment, the answer seemed so simple.
Terence Stamp in conversation with Penelope Dening