Not all Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)

Born in 1965, Howard Sounes was scarcely out of short trousers by the time that Margaret Thatcher took power and kicked us out of the mire of complacent consensus and began to crush the tyranny of the unions. Perhaps his vivacious and enjoyable new book about the culture of the Seventies does romanticise ‘a low dishonest decade’ that he did not fully experience, but there is something to be said for his refusal to follow the common view that it was an era merely ‘amusingly stupid and vulgar… all about flared trousers, Starsky and Hutch, Chopper bikes and Showaddywaddy’.

Of course, there is a danger that thinking decennially presupposes that everything conveniently changes gear with the calendar, and there is something naive about Sounes’s claim that, far from being ‘trivial or foolish’, the Seventies were ‘a time of modern classics’. The Seventies undoubtedly did contain much triviality and foolishness; so did the more ideologically intense Thirties and Sixties.