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Seventies a success after all
HOWARD SOUNES Howard Sounes is author of Seventies: The Sights, Sounds and Ideas of a Brilliant Decade, published by Simon & Schuster, priced £18.99.
THIRTY years after David Bowie first crooned his disco-slick hit, Golden Years, the 1970s seem to be a lustrous period in our cultural history, even though Britain was mired in economic problems, and despite the commonplace observation that the 70s was "the decade that taste forgot".
That tired witticism has been the tenor of many recent television shows in which so-called celebrity pundits reminisce about the 1970s, talking essentially about what they remember doing as children: bouncing on a Space Hopper to the sweet shop to buy a Curly-Wurly, watching Starsky and Hutch on
TV, bopping along to Tiger Feet by Mud.
Nostalgia for one's childhood is fine, in its place. I was a kid myself during the 1970s. But, as a precocious teenager in the latter half of the decade, I saw that a much headier mix of entertainment was on offer.
To my impressionable adolescent eyes, it was apparent that one was living through an exciting and dynamic period. Since then, the
1970s has assumed even more significance.
It was a time of modern classics, to use a publishing analogy. Certainly many books were published that are now read as classics. The library shelf of the decade boasts Germaine Greer's 1970 polemic, The Female Eunuch, the New Journalism of Hunter S. Thompson (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, 1972) and Norman Mailer (The Executioner's Song, 1979), as well as key novels by John Updike and Iris Murdoch, whose 1978 book The Sea, The Sea may be her most enduring story.
It was literature that gave Western readers the best insight into life behind the Iron Curtain during the long years of the Cold War, thanks to Alexander Solzhenitsyn. From such vivid books as Cancer Ward (published in English in 1972) and The Gulag Archipelago (1973) we discovered the truth about the USSR. Behind the televised military displays from Moscow, the Soviet Union was a broken-down empire of lies.
The author was a hero for writing the truth about his country, despite state intimidation, even a KGB assassination attempt. He never wavered.
"One word of truth shall outweigh the whole world," he wrote in his acceptance speech for the 1970 Nobel Prize for Literature. His books were indispensable; his personal story is inspirational.
Solzhenitsyn disdained Western pop culture as the trivial manifestation of a godless society. Yet rock music was an intoxicating font of ideas as well as sounds during the decade.
The spirit of invention that had been the hallmark of music in the 1960s had not stopped in 1969, but rushed on into the new decade. Many established artists surpassed themselves: not least Bob Dylan, whose 1975 album, Blood on the Tracks, may be the best record he ever made, with lyrics that glow like burning coals, to paraphrase Tangled Up in Blue.
Then there was the bonus of Bowie, Bob Marley, and Roxy Music. Later came the Sex Pistols and The Clash. If you still think the Pistols were mere hype, listen again to John Lydon singing on Bodies or God Save the Queen. There is passion, power and poetry here.
Cinema was brilliant in the 1970s. Studios allowed directors such as Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola to make bold, personal movies including Annie Hall (1977), Taxi Driver (1976) and the extraordinary Apocalypse Now (1979).
Britain's Nic Roeg created a string of masterpieces: Walkabout (1970), Don't Look Now (1973) and perhaps most amazing of all, The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), starring David Bowie. Never has a rock star been better cast.
Their outstanding television work aside, let us also not forget the contribution the Monty Python team made to cinema, not least with their 1979 comedy, Monty Python's Life of Brian.
This was first-class film-making, the jokes clever and funny, and the picture made telling theological points, so much so that Life of
Brian caused an international
furore.
It is evidence of how far ahead of its time Life of Brian was in 1979 that it took until 1991, fully 12 years later, for regulators to permit its broadcast on British television.
It was not only moving pictures that were exceptional. That great Yorkshireman, David Hockney, rediscovered naturalism in his painting early in the decade, creating perhaps the most popular picture in modern British art when he painted Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy (1971). This portrait was voted one of Britain's 10 greatest paintings in a recent Radio 4 poll – the only picture on the shortlist from the 20th century.
It is worth looking again at the painting. It is a double portrait of Hockney's friends, the fashion designer, Ossie Clark, and his wife Celia Birtwell, both famous in their day for making quintessentially 70s clothes, which they wear with aplomb in the picture: Celia dressed in a long black crpe dress, Ossie in a chiffon floral-pattern shirt.
Notice that his trousers are flared – that apparently unforgivable faux pas of 70s fashion. Yet how stylish both he and Celia look.
Furthermore, see the room Mr and Mrs Clark are in: the bedroom of their north London flat, depicted by Hockney in minute detail. It is a chic and stylish room, proving not all British homes were a garish mismatch of ideas in the 1970s.
In fact, the interior design of the decade could be excellent, as was often the case with architecture.
The Pompidou Centre, co-designed by Richard Rogers in the early
1970s, remains one of the most popular destinations for tourists visiting Paris. Its revolutionary inside-out design was adapted by Rogers for his even more impressive Lloyd's Building in the City of London (a 70s' design built in the 1980s).
Perhaps the outstanding public building of the entire 20th century is the Sydney Opera House, opened in 1973.
Considering the evidence, it is surely high time we reassessed this recent period in our history, and celebrated the rich cultural legacy of the 1970s.
To order a copy of Seventies: The Sights, Sounds and Ideas of a Brilliant Decade from the Yorkshire Post Bookshop, call free on 0800 0153232. Postage and packing costs 1.95. Order on-line at www.yorkshirepostbookshop.co.uk
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