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. Culture, however defined, always contains its own contradictions: punk, for example, became fashionable at the same time as millions hailed the Queen’s Jubilee and Star Wars and Evita were the big hits.
But although Sounes’s thesis scarcely holds water, and I looked in vain for much of what I fondly remember as characterising the Seventies — Rising Damp, Upstairs, Downstairs, The Muppets, Cabaret, the Oz case, Watership Down, Biba, Cosmopolitan, the Sloane Rangers and the ballets of Kenneth MacMillan — he does locate some fascinating histories and phenomena along the way, etched in a clear, easy prose devoid of rock-journalist affectation. And even if he wasn’t there himself, he has done some solid research and interviewed those who were.
The figure who most broadly encapsulates Seventies’ sensibility is David Bowie — not so much because of his own large talent as because of the trends that criss-cross his performing style, both as influence and effluence.
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