Groovy Bob: The Life and Times of Robert Fraser

Groovy Bob: The Life and Times of Robert Fraser by Vyner, Harriet. hardcover edition. ISBN: 9780571196272.

In this new biography, the first to have the complete co-operation of Frasers family and friends, Harriet Vyner has not only recreated an extraordinary figure but an exciting and colourful era - sixties London. Told through the voices of those who knew Fraser best - Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Marianne Faithfull, Jim Dine, Kenneth Anger, Dennis Hopper and Vyner herself - Groovy Bob is both a biography and a portrait of the most exhilarating period in post-war British social history. Fraser brought together many of the elements that made up Swinging London: pop music, fashion, drugs, art and cinema. Yet he was himself a curious representative of this culture. He was an Eton-educated, former Kings African Rifles officer, the son of a highly successful banker, who bridged two very different worlds. He had, Jagger said, an aura; he was a tastemaker, a hedonist, a lousy businessman whose artists adored him, a promiscuous homosexual who avoided the gay scene. By the time of his death from AIDS in 1986 he had become an almost forgotten figure, his vision no longer in tune with the conservatism of the eighties from which the sixties was a brief departure.