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| If you had very long hair, then you could wear anything. You know, you could wear an old man's mackintosh or a plastic mac or something and because you had long hair it looked vaguely sort of hip. But if you had short hair you just looked like a prat in a mackintosh. |
| The problem with the sixties show was nobody knew how to bring it to an end. It had come from nowhere and nobody knew how to bring the curtain down on it, so it just dribbled on and on and on, and the acts got more and more peculiar and the audience eventually knew that the show had left them, that it was no longer theirs, and it was finished long before it was finished. |
| Old flares never dye, they only fade away, and get more patches and more stains and become very ragged round the bottom. So it was with the hippies: the dregs of the movement lumbered on into the seventies, the undead, unable to be set to rest with a stake through the heart because there wasn't a heart any more. They say that, after death, the hair keeps on growing. The hippies continued to attract recruits because, if you didn't want to be bourgeois on the one hand or a shaven-headed moron on the other, there wasn't much else to be in 1971, but they knew they'd missed the magic bus. |
I just regretted that I was born into the wrong age really. It felt like a bit of bad luck. Remembering the sixties, everything seemed to close up in the seventies and you could almost visualise it being a darker period. I can sort of remember sunny days in the sixties, and in the seventies it didn't seem so apparent.
There is an internal mechanism which drives all cultural movements towards mannerism, the meaningless repetition of outer forms which gradually become more extreme without recapturing the lost essence of the classic period. In the case of the hippies it took the form of shabbier clothes, more and harder drugs, louder and more pretentious music. |
You all wore battered, tattered clothes that you wouldn't nowadays give to a jumble sale, and the more battered and tattered you looked, the more of a hippie you were.
Anti-fashion - it's actually not caring about what you wear. I mean of course you do. I mean if you're going to object to fashion through some conscious demonstration of dressing unfashionably, then that's actually caring enough not to care, if you see what I mean.
I used to look a real mess. I look back at photographs and I think 'Christ, if that was one of mine I wouldn't want to be seen out with it.'
My jeans were literally a sea of patches. I used to take great care in sewing new patches on, and it was also useful for hiding dope in. |
| One of the outer forms to which the hippie dregs clung ever more assiduously was underground music, now itself fragmented into a hundred styles of 'progressive rock' and encompassing also the introspections of James Taylor, Carole King and others. This was music designed to be heard in one of two ways: either in a huge stadium over an earth-trembling P.A. system, or at home on a very expensive stereo hi-fi. |
Records started to become a private thing; until then they had been a public thing, they were background music or they were for dancing. Now, in the early seventies, you listened to them in a darkened room and learned the finer points. It was loud and all-encompassing and there were no distractions. That was the intensity of it.
As soon as I got a record-player it sort of liberated me from my parents, and I ended up staying in my bedroom for most of the seventies, playing records, having friends up and the joss-sticks would go on and we stayed up till two in the morning and then crawled out for school next morning. That was the major form of entertainment really. |
| Record sales in Britain, which had declined in the mid-sixties from their 1964 peak, climbed steadily throughout the early seventies until they were double the figure for the Beatles' heyday, at 200,000,000 units sold. Moreover most of these were LPs, which in 1970 began to out-sell singles. In 1972 the American music industry outgrossed Hollywood. As the underground press declined, the circulations of the music papers such as Melody Maker and New Musical Express increased. In the first four years of the decade they went up by 50%. A significant number of rock stars became multi-millionaires, having grown wise in the ways of tax avoidance and profit maximisation (live abroad, write and publish your own songs, start your own record company). Mick Jagger had a villa in France, a house in Ireland, a flat in Chelsea and a mansion in Jamaica. Since it was now ludicrous for such people to hold the hippie pose, the period was marked by a gradual shedding, on the part of the rock heroes, of their hypocrisy about money. |
| In pop's innocent years, the teenagers bought records because they liked them. Then they bought the records because they liked the groups. Now they bought the records because they liked the musicians who played in the groups. Individual superstars, 'guitar heroes', formed and re-formed endless 'super-groups', their every split and coalescence breathlessly charted by the music press. Bands began to sound like firms of solicitors: Emerson, Lake and Palmer; Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young; Bruce, West and Laing. The guitar hero became the most potent fantasy image of the time. |
In fact my school report summed it up: 'Studies played a poor second to extra-curricular activities' it said on my final exam report, which didn't mean that I dropped out and failed miserably, it just meant that I dreamed a bit in school. I'd gaze out of the window and see myself in a classic rock pose, playing bass guitar with one foot on the stack and my eyes leering at the audience.
That thing of, like, a three-piece band, you know, drums, bass and lead guitar, and they can really ROCK, you know? 'It was so LOUD, oh God, I went there and it was SO LOUD, you know, I mean it was just LOUD!' That sort of thing.
The bigger the stack the better the band. If you went to the Free Trade Hall and looked at the stage and the guitarist had four four-by-twelve cabinets, you were convinced they were going to be a great band. Why? Because they were louder than the last band you'd seen. |
| In this atmosphere of dedicated connoisseurship, concert audiences became as dour as those at the Royal Festival Hall. The serious fan looked askance at the loonies in the front row who waved their arms in the air, and doubly askance at anyone who had the temerity to get up and dance. |
Everyone would sit round on the floor, cross-legged of course, until the band came on. If they were very boring, people would stay sat on the floor. If not, they would generally stand and watch until the end of the number and then they'd just clap. But there was some movement towards dancing, with people generally known as the 'idiot dancers'. It involved keeping the legs rigid and just generally looning around from one leg to the other and waving their arms about as much as possible, behaving like idiots. It was quite a spectacle.
I'd judge everything by guitar solos. And if I went to a concert now and was subjected to a drum solo, I'd walk out, whereas in 1975 if I didn't hear one I wouldn't go and see that band again.
It became a cliche that every drummer sort of thrashed around for a quarter of an hour while you tried to appear a fervent fan, when actually you were bored stiff with all the clanging and the rat-tat-tatting. |
| Pretension in the music bred pretension in the fans; points were won or lost according to an individual's knowledge of the minutiae of the music scene, and groups, albums, musicians gained and lost 'credibility' with bewildering speed. |
The aim was to be 'into' a group that nobody had ever heard of, and if you could persuade other people to like them as well, that was a bonus. Some people picked Van Der Graaf Generator for that reason.
I always remember vividly leaving school and getting on a bus and standing at bus stops, and even though it was pouring with rain you would never find my Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd or Deep Purple albums in a bag. I'd rather have the sleeve wet and let people know what I was into. I mean, it was important to let the girls from the girls' school know that I was a weirdo and a progressive fan. |
The line between progressive rock fans and devotees of disco soul music, which dominated the singles market in the early seventies, bore a remarkable resemblance to the line between the middle and working classes. An article in New Society in March 1973 showed that taste in music was related to academic success:
The great majority of the early school-leavers identified themselves as 'skins' or 'smooths' and described their fellow reggae and soul fans as 'people with a bit of taste', 'people who liked to dance' and 'people who are in with the crowd'. They dismissed supporters of progressive rock as 'weirdos', 'freaks', 'scoobies' (the local derisory term for college students) and 'wankers' (that is, physically incompetent and effeminate). The academically successful pupils reciprocated by dismissing reggae fans as 'stupid skins' and 'CSE cretins'. |
From these replies and subsequent conversations it was evident that pop preferences were one of the main ways through which respondents publicly signified and confirmed their subcultural identifications. Nor is this unique to our sample. A glance at the personal columns of pop music papers like Sounds reveals numerous ads such as 'Guy and chick seek same, into Genesis, Cohen, Tolkien. No skins, peace, ta'; or 'Scots skin wants bird, digs Slade, reggae, Tamla'. |
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Kinace Records
16 Temple Road
MANCHESTER
M33 2FP |
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