THURSDAY BACKTRACK: Music and news from 60 years ago - week ending 19 August 1961

 At #5 this week is Petula Clark's 'Romeo':

Some memorable events (via Wikipedia):

13 August: The first move is made to construct the Berlin Wall - a barbed wire barrier: 

East German soldiers, left, set up barbed-wire barricades at the border separating East and West Berlin on August 13, 1961. West Berlin citizens, right, watch the work.

This photo and others of the Wall over time can be found here: 

https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/rise-berlin-wall-1961-1989/

14 August: East African Kikuyu rebel Jomo Kenyatta is released from prison. In 1963 Kenya becomes an independent State, Kenyatta its first Prime Minister, and in 1964 its first President.

19 August: Harvard professor Timothy Leary delivers a lecture in Copenhagen titled 'How To Change Behavior.' It is inspired by his experience of taking the psychedelic drugs psilocybin and LSD, both legal in the United States at that time. His first taste of 'magic mushrooms' was twelve months before in Cuernavaca, some 50 miles south of Mexico City; he called it 'the deepest religious experience of my life.' 

    Also at the Copenhagen conference is the English writer Aldous Huxley, who had been experimenting with mescaline since 1954 and who speaks before Leary - a transcript of his talk entitled 'Visionary experience' can be found here: https://www.organism.earth/library/document/visionary-experience (htp: this blog.) Both lectures are later published together in one volume, in 1963: https://www.lornebair.com/pages/books/46531/drugs-aldous-huxley-timothy-leary/visionary-experience-and-how-to-change-behavior . Huxley also uses LSD and takes two doses while he is dying, two years later on 22 November 1963.

    Huxley has been invited to the conference by Richard Alpert, who is working with Leary on the Psilocybin Project at Harvard (both professors are later dismissed, in 1963.) In 1967 Alpert, continuing his spiritual search, travels to India and meets a Hindu guru called Neem Karoli Baba who persuades him to give up drugs and renames him Ram Dass, with a mission to help others on their quest.

    Roughly coincidentally in time and place, Cuernavaca is also the place where Roman Catholic priest and radical thinker Ivan Illich founded his Centre for Intercultural Formation (CIF), originally a training centre for missionaries to Latin America (incorporated March 3, 1961.)

UK chart hits, week ending 12 August 1961 (tracks in italics have been played in earlier posts)

Htp: Clint's labour-of love compilation https://www.sixtiescity.net/charts/61chart.htm

1	You Don't Know	Helen Shapiro	Columbia
2	Well I Ask You	Eden Kane	Decca
3	Johnny Remember Me	John Leyton	Top Rank
4	Halfway To Paradise	Billy Fury	Decca
5	Romeo	Petula Clark	Pye
6	Reach For The Stars / Climb Every Mountain	Shirley Bassey	Columbia
7	A Girl Like You	Cliff Richard and The Shadows	Columbia
8	Time	Craig Douglas	Top Rank
9	Pasadena	The Temperance Seven	Parlophone
10	Hello Mary Lou / Travellin' Man	Ricky Nelson	London
11	You Always Hurt The One You Love	Clarence 'Frogman' Henry	Pye
12	Temptation	The Everly Brothers	Warner Brothers
13	Quarter To Three	The U.S. Bonds	Top Rank
14	Runaway	Del Shannon	London
15	Don't You Know It	Adam Faith	Parlophone
16	The Frightened City	The Shadows	Columbia
17	Cupid	Sam Cooke	RCA
18	The Writing On The Wall	Tommy Steele	Decca
19	That's My Home	Acker Bilk	Columbia
20	How Many Tears	Bobby Vee	London