Images of the first Summer of Love - soundtracked by Scott MacKenzie's asinine, opportunistic, but oddly likeable psych-folk hit "San Francisco (Be Sure To Wear Some Flowers In Your Hair)" - are ingrained into our collective consciousness, but we never see footage of what the flower children did when the winter set in.But we do know what they did when they grew up and got rich They went on holiday. "Summertime Blues" tells it like it really is for the less well-off kids who have to toil while everyone else is out partying: "I tried to call my baby, I tried to get a date/ The boss said 'No dice son, you've gotta work late'." (Eddie felt my prawn cocktail-hawking pain.)Four years after the Pistols' finest moment, a summertime smash came along which, if it didn't spark a riot, chimed with an outbreak of urban strife with spooky synchronicity. A couple of degrees higher, and they're too docile for a ding-dong. But when the mercury hits 74.9, it all kicks off.Perhaps this is why, amid all the more traditional summer sounds, there has always been an undercurrent of insurrection in the summertime charts. This is the critical temperature at which large crowds of people are most likely to become irascible and erupt into rioting.The correlation was first researched by Robert A Baron and Victoria M Ransberger in their 1978 study Ambient Temperature and the Occurrence of Collective Violence: The Long Hot Summer Revisited, with particular reference to the Tulsa race riots in 1921.

For the mischievous, postmodern, politicised Scousers, whose enormous hit "Two Tribes" was specifically intended to create panic that a nuclear war was about to start, summertime was all about "strife".There is, it is said, a specific temperature which police forces the world over fear It's 74.9 degrees fahrenheit. They found the connection to be a curvilinear one: a couple of degrees lower, and the mob are full of summery love. If Wham! were about getting your kicks at the Club Tropicana - "drinks are free, fun and sunshine, there's enough for everyone" - then Frankie Goes To Hollywood were the polar opposite. ("Strawberry Letter 23" by the Brothers Johnson may not specifically refer to summer, but try playing it at Christmas - it doesn't work.) You can hear it in Eighties hits like the Style Council's "Long Hot Summer", which proceeds at a pace intended to suggest days when it's too hot to walk at anything other than a benign, phlegmatic amble.It's this literalist camp into which Wham!, with their Sun-In highlights, permatans, glo-white teeth and sunshiney, Motown-inspired music, fell (with just one obvious, jingle bell-laden exception).

The unbroken process of imitation and influence from one composer to the next, the chain of inherited conventions, means that it is almost impossible to answer definitively the chicken-and-egg question: are certain types of music intrinsically "summery", or do we just associate them with summer because we are taught to?The balance of probability leans towards the former. And each band encapsulated a very different approach to making music for the summertime.The idea that certain musical modes can suggest or even replicate certain moods and atmospheres is not recent. Every infant-school pupil learns about it the first time their music teacher plays them Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf. Many classical composers - Vivaldi (The Four Seasons) and Delius (In a Summer Garden) being the most obvious examples, although Tchaikovsky, Mendelssohn, Beethoven, Massenet, Debussy and Rimsky-Korsakov all had a pop - have tried to create a kind of aural onomatopoeia for summertime, even a "synaesthesia", in the belief that the sensation of certain sounds in the human ear can mimic the sensation of the warm sun on your skin.Sometimes they achieved this by imitating the indigenous musics of hotter countries (most frequently Spain), but more often they did so by using certain recognised tricks and motifs. I was 16 years old, and for the first time in my life I had money in my pocket.

In Greece they can be hung out to dry in the sun, but cooks elsewhere must find a way to drive off the water and concentrate the taste. 1 x 1kg/2lb 4oz whole octopus 2 garlic cloves 125mI/4fl oz virgin olive oil 2 tablespoons aged Corinthian red-wine vinegar 1 bunch thyme, leaves onlyPlace a large, heavy-bottomed pot on heat When hot, put octopus in and cover Turn heat down to low and cook for about 50 minutes. When octopus is tender (test by cutting thickest part of leg), remove and let it cool Reduce the pot juices to 100ml (31/2fl oz). Slice meat, dress it with the cooking juices and eat with a runner-bean salad.'Real Greek Food' by Theodore Kyriakou & Charles Campion is published by Pavilion, £14.99; 'The Real Greek at Home' is published by Mitchell Beazley, £20; Kyriakou is doing cookery demos at Harvey Nichols stores from 3 August, for details, tel: 020 7201 8689. What they wore on their torsos, however, spoke volumes about their allegiances. In previous summers, the tribal divide over the island had been among the males: mods versus skins, our generation's feeble re-enactment of the Sixties pitched beach battles. Rows of unattended Lambrettas were kicked over like dominoes and set alight. Loitering at the Space Invader machines in the arcades, you could get your face punched in for wearing a Jam badge next to a Specials one, and not giving a sufficiently fast or convincing answer to the question: "What are you - a mod or a rude boy?" (Mixed loyalties were verboten.) But in '84, the battleground was female.In most details, the girls all looked the same: Princess Di haircuts, ankle bracelets, ra-ra skirts.