Sibylla's

[1] The club's launch on 22 June 1966 was attended by many artists and celebrities, including the Beatles, members of the Rolling Stones, Michael Caine, Julie Christie, David Bailey and Mary Quant.

Its major shareholders and owners were advertising copywriter Kevin Macdonald, photographer Terry Howard, and property developer Bruce Higham, while baronet and champion horse rider William Pigott-Brown provided much of the finance for the venture.

[2] As a great-nephew of newspaper proprietor Lord Northcliffe, MacDonald was from an aristocratic family, yet his interest was in establishing an elite that was not governed along lines of social class.

[5] George Harrison of the Beatles, a friend of Howard, was given a 10 per cent shareholding, on the understanding that his name could be used to attract publicity, and disc jockey Alan Freeman was also a stakeholder.

"[14] In his book on 1960s London, Shawn Levy states that, in their policy for Sibylla's, Macdonald, Howard and Higham allowed exclusivity based on "hipness" to replace the old class divisions of "breeding, schooling and wealth".

[17][nb 2] According to MacDonald, in its "marrying up" of working-class artists and photographers with members of high society, Sibylla's was the realisation of the psychedelic aesthetic, a trend that had emerged in contemporary music that year.

Author Steve Turner describes him as an early casualty among London's psychedelic drug users, at a time when the full psychological effects of LSD were not widely known.

[23] According to cultural historian David Simonelli, MacDonald's suicide was indicative of the downside of "the changes in British society and its sociocultural image" in the psychedelic era.