ALBERY, Nicholas, as Alan Beam.

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Rehearsal for the Year 2000 First edition, first impression, of this autobiographical history of the late Sixties and early Seventies by an Oxford dropout and Anti-University alumni. Albery narrates a decade of his life, from his first acid trip at the age of 18 through to the birth of his first child.The work takes us from a teenage Albery dabbling in drugs before his first term at Oxford, through his pilgrimage to Haight-Ashbury with hash-stuffed shoes, his role in the establishment of the Arts Labs and Commune Movement back in London, and his successful suing of David Holdsworth, the Thames Valley Chief Constable, for his role in the violent police attack on revellers at the Windsor Free Festival in 1974.His friends, lightly disguised by pseudonyms to discourage authorities from pursuing them for a long list of misdemeanours (and sometimes more significant crimes), included Nicholas Saunders (the founder of Neal's Yard wholefoods), theatre innovator Peter Wynne-Willson, and the "psychedelic debutante" Susie Gawler-Wright.The rear cover reprints from Seed Magazine David Miskin's review: "Autobiographies are my favourite mode of writing, but Alan Beam, the bloke who wrote this one, has really gone a bit too far - what a nerve publishing his memoirs at the grand old age of 28".

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