The Summer of Love in 1967 has been much in my mind in the past few days, its music having been featured in the first half of Tony Blackburn’s superb Pick of the Pops show on Saturday.

This was the chart dominated for weeks on end by Procol Harum’s A Whiter Shade of Pale, a song so good that it provoked the envy of The Beatles.

John Lennon drove around London in his psychedelically painted Rolls-Royce Phantom, playing the tune continuously on the car’s primitive sound system and angry that his band could not produce something to match it.

The year was an important one, too, in the world of classical music, for it was in June 1967 that the Queen opened Snape Maltings as the principal venue for the Aldeburgh Festival (only to see it ravaged by fire on the first night of the event two years later).

On Friday – to kick off a period in which, at 63, I intend to do a number of things long overdue – I paid my first visit to the place for a superb concert by the Monteverdi Choir and the English Baroque Soloists, under John Eliot Gardiner.

They gave a peerless performance of Bach’s Tauerode and Mozart’s Requiem.

Though I hugely enjoyed it, I had to wait till Monday, and Anna Picard’s review in The Times, to discover that this was probably on account of “the bright, sexless sopranos” and “beery basses”. Had the latter been tucking in (as we had) to the Adnam’s ales in the adjoining Plough and Sail pub?

Sculpture is famously an attraction at the Maltings. The Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth works permanently on show have been joined this year by a delightful work by Tracey Emin.

Pictured below, it is a tiny bronze bird atop a 13ft column. Such a contrast to Maggi Hambling’s mighty (and controversial) scallop-shell memorial to Britten on Aldeburgh beach.