In this new biography, the first to have the complete co-operation of Fraser's 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.
"More than any other figure I can think of, Robert Fraser personifies the Sixties as I remember them." --Paul McCartney
Arrested for possession of drugs with Mick Jagger and Keith Richards in the infamous 1967 Redlands bust, Robert Fraser embodied many of the elements that made up Swinging London in the 1960s: pop music, fashion, drugs, art, and cinema. A trendsetter, hedonist, and lousy businessman, he was also the visionary art dealer responsible for introducing Roy Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, and Jim Dine to the London art world. But by the time of his death in 1986 he had become an almost forgotten figure, his sixties vision out of tune with the conservatism of the eighties. In this biography, told through the voices of those who knew Fraser best -- Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Marianne Faithfull, Kenneth Anger, Dennis Hopper, and many others -- Harriet Vyner has resurrected an extraordinary cultural figure.
Harriet Vyner is currently at work on two documentaries -- one on Robert Fraser and one on Francis Bacon. She lives in London.
