On Wednesday night, the music world took a small step closer to the realms of science fiction. Roy Orbison, 30 years dead, stood in front of a packed Hammersmith Apollo. It wasn't a resurrection, of course, but a hologram, and a damn fine one. Virtual Roy wiggled, turned around and occasionally thanked the audience. At one point he even looked like he was going to pick his nose (it turned out to be just a wipe). The audience responded with plentiful applause and open-mouthed wonder.

Born into the late 1950s, I was too young to be a 68er, though I remember watching it all on TV: the protests in Red Lion Square and Grosvenor Square, where Tariq Ali and Vanessa Redgrave were the leading lights, demonstrating against Vietnam; Paris, where student protests, strikes and sit-ins quickly spread across the country, and General de Gaulle fled briefly to Germany; the riots across the United States that followed Martin Luther King's death, and at the Democratic Convention in Chicago; and of course the

The press ad for Spirit’s debut album wasn’t shy. “Five came together for a purpose: to blow the sum of man’s musical experience apart and bring it together in more universal forms. They became a single musical being: Spirit. It happens in the first album.” Of the band’s bassist Mark Andes, it declared “the strings are his nerve endings”. Drummer Ed Cassidy apparently “hears tomorrow and he plays it now”.

David Bailey taught Nureyev to dance at the Ad Lib club in London in the Sixties. “He was very stiff. He could do all that Swan Lake stuff but he couldn’t do the twist,” remembers Bailey in one of My Generation’s voiceover interviews, some vintage, some in conversation today.

This year the state of Israel marks its 70th birthday. Which means it will also be the year Palestinians remember the Nakba, the catastrophe, the mass dispossession.

 “That colourful character Zoot Money has recently been writing at length in support of psychedelic music. Now, what’s the score Zoot, has it got a contribution to make to the scene?” It’s 14 January 1967 and BBC presenter Brian Matthew is putting his guest on the spot.

“What angel wakes me from my flowery bed?” Hang on a minute, Tytania, there are no flowers. Instead, as Britten’s ominously low strings slither and tremble up and down the scale, the curtain rises on a huge, near-acidic emerald green hilly slope lying against a seemingly fathomless International Klein Blue cyclorama broken only by a glowing crescent moon. Except it’s not just a hill: it’s also a giant bed; the perfect bed, in fact, in which to spend one wonderful midsummer’s night.

“Chestnut-brown canary, ruby-throated sparrow” sang Stephen Stills in his “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes”, a song from CSNY’s 1969 debut album to Judy Collins, with whom he was ending a two-year affair. Collins’s big baby-blue eyes haven’t faded with time. Nor has her voice – indeed, it is far more secure now than it was 40 years ago, when she was battling pills and booze, a fight she’s documented in a number of books.

Collins was a star in 1969; CSNY were making their celebrated Woodstock debut and that iconic first album had harmonies that were spine-chillingly beautiful and pitch-perfect. The tie-dye and patchouli may have dated but the CSNY sound has not. Collins’s career has ebbed and flowed, though she is still a significant draw in the US, and there’s no denying her musicianship (she was destined to become a classical pianist before she discovered folk music) or her ear for a good song. Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen, whose 1988 song from I’m Your Man gives this collection its title, were both her discoveries.

Everybody Knows marks a 50-year relationship between Collins and Stills, who fell in love as Collins was recording Who Knows Where the Time Goes – Stills played on the Sandy Denny title track. They’ve lately been on the road together and this album makes you hope they cross the Atlantic and tour the UK.

They tackle some terrific songs, and the opening cover of the Traveling Wilburys' hit "Handle With Care" draws you immediately in – it's not quite Roy, Bob and company, but it's a wonderfully energising, spirited cover. Sandy Denny’s aforementioned classic is revisited: Collins's voice is straight out of ‘68, and Stills noodles beautifully over her Martin 12-string while Russell Walden provides piano in-fills. From Stills's Just Roll Tape, recorded in NYC in 1968, comes “Judy”. For her part, Collins offers a new song, “River of Gold”, alongside Stills’s “So Begins the Task”, and "Houses" from Judith, in which Collins reflects on her (then recent) relationship with Stills. “Reasons to Believe” is a reminder of Tim Hardin, and their cover of Bob Dylan’s “Girl from the North Country”, all jangling acoustics, is affecting. “Questions” has a real CSN&Y feel to it.

As a celebration of a half-decade musical friendship, it’s a great outing. As Collins says, “When people hear us together they’re reminded not only of our story but of their own. People return to their youthful love affairs. It spins out like a double helix with many purposes.”

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Overleaf: Watch the album trailer for Stephen Stills & Judy Collins's Everybody Knows