Druggy, loony and shaggy-looking Australian personality and former editor of Oz who was prosecuted at the Old Bailey for corrupting public morals. Enfant terrible of the swinging Sixties cum non-conformist journalist who has just written Playing Around. Militant, gregarious and energetic erstwhile hippy and leading figure in the London underground.

Is this the real Richard Neville?

We are sitting in the Hyde Park Hotel, but he wants to go and sit on the grass in the park. The last time he was there someone spiked his tea with acid. ‘Five minutes later I was outside Harvey Nichols having a cosmic experience.’

He’s wearing a large navy jacket, maroon shirt and khaki trousers. ‘If I’m in the Blue Mountains, where I live, I wear skungy old gear. If I’m getting out of bed just to write, I wear pyjamas all day.’ Clothes don’t loom large in his domestic rural Australian life.

He thrusts his hand in the air, speaking in antipodean accent and mellifluous tone. His was once the alternative voice of London. Richard Neville has another incarnation as a TV personality, ‘mouthing off about culture’. Then he wears ‘a kind of colourful jacket, shirt and pleated trousers’. He tries not to make the clothes intrusive between the idea and the audience.

He has full lips with a melting smile, big eyes, massive eyelashes, and a nose that is slightly broken and crooked; the lived-in face of quite a dishy former hippy. What does he see in the mirror?

‘Because of the wrinkles, I immediately see W H Auden.’ These lines appeared overnight to a man ‘with a Peter Pan temperament who is 49 years old but ready to become 50.’

He has been compared to an Apache Indian in looks. ‘I think I look like gnarled mallee root (a spindly native root). I’m not particularly attractive. I’ve never thought of myself as attractive.’

This particular mallee root sprouts hair that is long at the back. ‘I have an ingrained scruffiness no matter what I do. Occasionally I think I should buy a spray to do something about my hair. But the scruffy aura is inconquerable by me.’

Was he very into orgies? Wow! Into saving the world with a group grope? ‘I was into them in theory – but I always got the address wrong. I had a few group-sex experiences in the Sixties which I’m sure I enjoyed more than the other participants.’ He laughs uproariously. ‘Because they were mainly female.’

‘I enjoyed having the great fortune to make love to more than one woman simultaneously. But since my marriage, I’ve been faithful.’ He married in 1980, and the subject of monogamy and fidelity is part of his book Playing Around.

‘My wife was really firm about being monogamous. And I kind of drifted into fidelity. Besides, I live in the Australian bush. If I lived in New York my answer might be different. I am as lusty and full of desires as anyone else. But I don’t mess around as much as I used to . . . er, just kidding! I can see I have to be really careful here.’

He is a lovely gentle man, charming and straight-talking. He appears at ease with himself, contented and calm, the picture of health. He is also gregarious. ‘I think I’m reasonably spontaneous,’ he says, looking up to the ceiling.

‘I’m flexible, which is good. Disorganised, that’s bad. Bit lazy, bit selfish, opinionated. I keep trying to learn things about life, which is a good quality. And there’s a bit more of a marriage between mind and body than there has been in the past, probably due to yoga if that doesn’t sound too New Age.

‘I lack visual aesthetic sensitivity. I’m as truthful as one is able to be with oneself – let’s presume that on the whole my untruths are unconscious. I’m not as kind to loved ones as I should be – that’s a weakness. Not mad about cats and dogs because they screw up the environment.’ He laughs. ‘I’m trying to say things the English will dislike me for.’

He’s an unreconstructed hippy in some ways – but not one who lives in a commune spouting flower power. ‘The issues I’m interested in are ecological, environmental and spiritual, the legacy of the Sixties. But I don’t live in an intellectual equivalent of kaftans and platform heels. I don’t live in the Notting Hill of the mind.’

Is he non-conformist and unconventional? ‘I know there’s a lot in me that is conformist, just like my retired colonel father who tends to look at train timetables. Perhaps I was just being conventional by smoking joints and wearing crushed velvets,’ says this direct descendant of the beatniks who used to have posters of Che Guevara and pledge solidarity with the rioting students of Paris in 1968.

Did he do a lot of drugs? ‘People were so exasperated with me in London in the Sixties because they were all busy getting stoned and I was too busy going to the printer. I think marijuana opened a door for me that would have remained shut – I would have just stayed in rational organisational mode – but after a number of years I closed that door. I’ve never knowingly touched hard drugs. I don’t think smack is groovy.’

He thinks he is made up of a lot of different personalities. ‘Our heads are talk shows.’ Can he name the cast? ‘Ha ha ha one of them would be the conformist, retired colonel. He’s the one who likes achieving goals and wanted to finish this book.

‘Then there’s the flamboyant show-off. And, naturally, the little boy who didn’t feel he got enough love and generates the hyper sexual activity I’ve sometimes been associated with.

‘There’s definitely a woman there, she likes other women and enjoys gossiping over cups of tea. Then there’s the swashbuckling dare-devil fighter who fights to win if a battle comes up – he came out for the Oz trial. This is getting very self-indulgent and I can see the readers vomiting.’

He thinks his calmness is due to aging and yoga. ‘Yoga is good for calming you down without taking the fire from your belly. I know that’ll make city-bound intellectuals puke . . . I think it is fantastic to get passionate and inflamed about ideas and at the same time to know who you are. ‘The search to know who I am sums up everything about me.’