The REAL 1970s: The 70s - a Decade of Revivals

Saturday, August 06, 2005

The 70s - a Decade of Revivals

The 1970s were a time of recession, and the decade played host to many revivals. The 1950s were huge, 1940s boutiques flourished, platform shoes were dragged out of the 1930s and the 1960s look - flared trousers and all - stuck around and stagnated.

Here is a newspaper article from 1971 (Cambridge Evening News, England, UK) detailing the blossoming 50s revival (70s music leant heavily on the 50s - from Roy Wood and Abba to the Sex Pistols).

Later in the 70s, the 60s began to shine again (and we were only just beginning to shake off the 60s flares!) with a revival of interest in the Mods/Rockers and Ska scenes.

Being a child in the 70s has given me a lasting love of 1950s and 60s music!

INTRODUCTION

This is one of a series of three blogs - the other two cover the 1960s (Spacehopper), and the 1980s ('80s Actual).

After all the '70s hype of the last ten years or so, this is a chance to relive the decade as it really was in England, through newspaper and magazine clippings and memories.

This is the REAL 1970s, not the BBC or Wikipedia's versions, which hype the decade to death and bolster it up with 1960s and 1980s pop culture.

The '70s were often grim, far slower moving than today, and saw the '60s hippie spell rapidly fading to be replaced by economic gloom and a glut of anger - which manifested itself in the Punk era.

It's the decade where we liked the Wombles, chucked frisbees, watched Upstairs, Downstairs and Starsky & Hutch, and witnessed the gloriously tacky but hugely danceable rise of a type of music called "Disco" - a new soundtrack for the discotheques, which had been established before the decade began. With its rich influences, including Soul and Pop, Disco was a wow. Though not with everybody.

Very few people had a video recorder (only 5% of UK households had one by 1980), there were no mobile phones, and although colour TV had been around in this country since 1967, they didn't come cheap and many of us poorer folk stuck to black and white.

Tristram of George & Mildred got "Pong" at Christmas 1979, but nobody I knew had a TV games system, which became available, at a price, late in the decade.

Many of us were dirt poor, inflation rocketed, in 1979 interest rates soared to 17% - the highest since records began in 1694, decimalisation (the coins were designed in the late '60s ready for "D" day in 1971) was controversial - was it bumping up prices? - and the Queen's Silver Jubilee Day saw the Sex Pistols in the pop charts with a song which certainly did not express loyal greetings...

Come back to the REAL 1970s, no rosy coloured specs, no rewriting of the decade to include pop culture belonging to the '60s or '80s, but as clear a view as I can possibly give of the decade!

This blog is largely based on English magazine and newspaper clippings and my memories, but I hope that it will also be useful and enjoyable to those living in the other UK nations - and much further afield.

Saturday, August 06, 2005

The 70s - a Decade of Revivals

INTRODUCTION

Links

The Real 1970s...