Bombed out...but counterculture veteran Jeff Nuttall reckons all that sex, drugs and rock'n'roll has degraded art and life' A revolution that was turned on its arse, a vocabulary that was stolen and used against it.' This summation of the counterculture comes from a man who was there at the start. Born in 1933, Jeff Nuttall has been a poet, cartoonist, painter, performance artist, art lecturer and character actor. In 1968 he wrote Bomb Culture, which exposed the cynicism that complemented the naivety of the flower children and their predecessors. Three decades later he has just finished the follow-up, to be published early in 1999 either as The Destruction of Art or (Nuttall's preferred title) The Degradation of Awareness. Whatever the name, the message is the same: the countercultural triptych of sex, drugs and rock'n'roll has brought us to a new and degraded existence. 'We believed that violence was due to sexual repression', Nuttall explains. Hence the proverb 'fuck a bloke and stop a fight'. But it all went 'badly wrong'. Where 'people previously embraced politics, now [from the sixties] they merely embraced and went off into their corner'. Sex became mere masturbation assisted by others, 'preferably a stranger'. Counterculturists, Nuttall recalls, 'compared orgasms like possessions' and craved bigger and better ones, 'borrowing a psychological pattern from narcotics addiction'. 'My pleasure is mine, my stash is mine.' For Nuttall, the drug experience was soon as solipsistic as the new sexuality. He thinks it is relevant that 'drugs are receptive of and productive of information that is not true' and he is wary of the falsehoods which they catalyse. He dismisses marijuana as 'a great postponer which silences all alarms and renders people incapable of punctuality'. He thinks cocaine is 'murderous', and that 'incontinence' was the only contribution made by the recreational use of barbiturates. As for LSD, Nuttall notes that‚ despite the separate character of each individual's trip, in the visions experienced by the tripper, 'each object is restricted to its genre, obscuring the unique character of unfolding events...each fuck is just a fuck'. In this respect the LSD mindset 'assists structuralism' and reduces experience to a mere cipher. Nuttall believes that the counterculturists, who were 'previously disdainful of anything commercial', bought into rock'n'roll because, convinced that mainstream society was on the road to destruction, they wanted 'instant survival, immediate inoculation' to put 'cultural distance' between themselves and the rest of the world. From then on 'you didn't have to read Being and Nothingness to step outside society'; you could just turn on Jimi Hendrix and be nothing instantaneously. Nuttall is scathing about the supposed revolutionary connotations of rock'n'roll. He remembers a meeting in 1969 with the music editor of IT (the premier underground paper) who told him 'if you want a revolution, Jeff, you have one'. He does not believe in the fabled optimism of the sixties either. In a comment which recalls the title of his first book, Bomb Culture, Nuttall maintains that the choice was 'to die in a nuclear holocaust or burn ourselves out like fireflies'; hence the 'feckless fashion for risk and self-destruction' and the absence of 'a vocabulary for old age' - or even adulthood. By 1970‚ as Nuttall recalls it, rock'n'roll was the core element in a 'cultural package deal' that was simplistic (the promotion of 'Attitude removes the need to ask "what attitude?"'), conservative and repetitious, while peddling 'delusions of genius and historical importance'. While 'history was lost in a soup of generalisations', the alternative initiates 'munched afterbirth' and felt 'protected by the belief that they were the bearers of a new, explosive consciousness a special wisdom'. They were 'brave'‚ in their way, he concedes, but three decades later their outlook has turned into a smug superiority along the lines of 'the world is damned but I am not'. In a chapter in his forthcoming book headed 'Dumbing down the law', Nuttall describes how the cultural package deal has now been translated into new forms of social control which he labels 'ludic cruelty' - playpower as coercion. Describing himself as 'a very disappointed Marxist', he looks with fear and loathing at today's 'homogeneous consciousness' based on 'the suburban ethic of personal space', and asks, belligerently, how so much conformism can have come out of the rebellious aspirations of his contemporaries. Andrew Calcutt