In the song ‘All the Young Dudes’, David Bowie gamely tried to reassure the youth of the Seventies that, despite what their Sixties elders were always telling them, they hadn’t been born too late after all. On the contrary: it was the ‘brother back at home with his Beatles and his Stones’ who was missing out.
Sadly, for those of us growing up at the time, even Bowie at his most thrilling wasn’t quite as persuasive as we’d have liked. OK, so it was definitely annoying to be surrounded by people banging on about how great the Sixties were. But once we’d heard the music, there was an uncomfortable sense that they might also be right.
Four decades later, the banging on continues — although these days in a rather more elegiac way, as the era of pop music being a major cultural force perhaps comes to a once-unthinkable end. On Sunday, for example, BBC4 brought us Arena: 1966 — 50 Years Ago Today, based on a book by Jon Savage and co-written by him and the director Paul Tickell.
Not surprisingly given that provenance, the programme was firmly from the chin-stroking end of the cultural-studies spectrum, with a solid emphasis on the avant-garde and only the odd sheepish acknowledgment that in ‘a year of relentlessly stylistic experiment’, the bestselling singles were by the likes of Jim Reeves and Ken Dodd.
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