OK, going in a car crash is fine, but it’s not like Buddy Holly dying in a plane crash or James Dean crashing in a sports car. Marc Bolan died in a mini. That’s the seventies.
In their 1976 essay 'Beyond the Skinheads', Ian Taylor and Dave Wall describe 'the youth culture of consumer capitalism' as one which:
... celebrates existing forms as universal and inevitable, rather than particular and open to change, instrumentality (music for relaxation, dancing, and sexual conquest) rather than expressivity (music of an alternative life-style, imaginativeness or protest) and, most crucially, financial consumption rather than human participation.
It would be very easy to select from among the best-selling singles of the early seventies a list of records which would demonstrate not so much that rock'n'roll was dead as that it had never existed in the first place. This would not have mattered if the charts had been dismissed, as they were by the first-generation rock'n'rollers, as irrelevant; but now, wherever teenagers gathered to dance, at youth club, party, disco or wedding reception, the parrot cries that greeted the disc jockey were 'Play something we know ... something in the charts ... something we can dance to.' Junior Walker and Booker T emptied the dance floor in a trice: 'Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep' by Middle of the Road filled it again. The musical taste of the average fifteen-year-old had never been more corrupt: discrimination was nil; supermarkets did a roaring trade in LPs on which session singers and musicians delivered bad copies of the current Top Twenty; the Wombles were huge. The music industry had discovered that its best-selling lines were the aural equivalents of wedding cakes and tinned baby-food, so those who wanted a good square meal were driven to the junk shops in search of Phil Spector, Jerry Lee Lewis and other obscurities.
All the people that were in the charts you generally hated, you know, like Sweet and Chicory Tip and Terry Dactyl and the Dinosaurs doing that 'Seaside Shuffle' or whatever. I mean there were all sorts. Jonathan King under every possible disguise you could imagine, wheeling out his terrible old rubbish. And we used to insist that we watched ' Top of the Pops' every week. Your father, who wanted to watch the last bit of the cricket or whatever, would be shouted down and you'd sit there all through it saying 'Oh no! Oh no-o-o! Not Demis Roussos!' and your dad would be saying 'Why the bloody hell are you watching this if you don't like any of it?'
The most powerful force in British music was Radio One, which had set out in 1967 to replace the outlawed pirate stations. It based its daytime programming on records that were, or were thought likely to become, best-sellers. The result of this process of second-guessing popular taste by playing safe was, firstly, to produce musical stagnation (anyone who had a hit would get their follow-up played, so that would become a hit, so they'd get the follow-up played...) and secondly, to confirm and accelerate the trend towards unadventurous and purely commercial pop music.
Moreover, because Radio One was unwilling to alienate the housewife listener, it programmed music that was least likely to make anyone actually switch off. This of course, meant excluding an awful lot of the music that was most likely to make some people turn up the volume.
John Walters, who produced a late-evening programme in which more interesting music was allowed air-time, remarked (in a Radio Four interview): “Radio One is creating a market for records which are only suitable for Radio One, in the sense that companies are tempted to produce something like 'Sugar Sugar', 'Knock three times on the ceiling if you want me' kind of records, which a producer will listen to and say ‘Great. That's a Radio One record, it's short, bright, bouncy...'
Music was now far removed from the control of the teenagers: they would buy what they were given and like it; the idea of their attempting to buy instruments and sound like either Deep Purple on the one hand or Lynsey de Paul on the other was quite ludicrous. In the same way, the other elements of youth culture, such as venues, magazines and clothing fashions, were gradually being standardised and marketed in a way that effectively removed the possibility of consumer choice. Do-it-yourself was not an option.
In cities, where there had once been a variety of cheap, separately-owned cellar clubs catering for different clienteles, there were now large, glossy discotheques and chicken-in-the basket palaces owned by national concerns like Bailey's, Fiesta and Top Rank, which brought a Butlins flavour to the teens-and-twenties night out. The survival of the 'Northern soul' tradition at the Wigan Casino and similar venues was evidence that the kids still wanted their own private culture based on dance and music; but for every disco in which athletic lads in baggy trousers did the splits to sixties soul records of the utmost obscurity, there were a hundred in which bored, blank-faced girls in hot-pants shuffled round their handbags to the sound of Tony Christie.
Girls always used to wear the same clothes and they always used to dance the same at discos. They also used to have these square handbags that looked like little suitcases, often made out of patent leather, and they used to carry them sort of on their wrist. But when they danced in groups they used to take their shoes off, I suppose for comfort, and then they'd put these little suitcase handbags down on the floor and dance round them, or sometimes they'd dance in lines, and they'd all do exactly the same thing, and there was great pleasure in all doing the same thing and not having any quirk. You know, nobody was trying to be different at all. We didn't do anything except dance and pose about. We didn't think about anything or even discuss or care about anything, you know, politically or anything like that. But on the other hand, at that time we did become more involved with coloured people at discos where they played soul music, and perhaps we became more aware of them and some of the difficulties they had getting into clubs and things like that. If any discos allowed any trousers at all for girls they had to be white, because it went with the fluorescent lights you see, and everybody was going 'Ok look at her, she's got a speck on her trousers!' Everything had to be white. It was a very clean image.
A particular kind of soul music, which bore the same relation to James Brown and Otis Redding as processed cheese to Gorgonzola, was supplied for disco consumption. The Stylistics, Chi-lites, Al Green and Barry White led the way, to be followed later in the decade by the synthesised pulsations of Donna Summer, Boney M (both, significantly enough, produced in Germany), Gloria Gaynor and the Three Degrees. In the end it turned out that the group who churned out disco soul most successfully, the Bee Gees, were white.
Just as the Top Rank Suite replaced the Heaven and Hell Club, so the 'Man About Town' and 'Teen Miss' departments of the high-street stores replaced the boutiques (those that survived went way up-market). As the aftermath of hippie fashion merged with the new chain-store trendiness, some peculiar combinations of clothing appeared on the streets.
Around about '71 my brother got married. If you look back al his wedding photos, you see he had the platform shoes, he had the silly hair, bright checked jacket, green shirt and dark red velvet bow tie. God knows what he was wearing for trousers. He'd run out of things to make clash with it really. He'll forgive me for saying this, but he looks a sight.
Loon pants! You know, people used to boast about how wide their trousers were round the bottom. They were hipster loons and they were advertised on the back of Sounds magazine with this drooping figure with drooping hair and these drooping loon pant trousers.
Platform soles! I had these brilliant blue platforms, just five-inch-high blocks of wood that had huge great brass studs on the side and leather over the top of them, and I used to stagger round on those.
Tank tops! What you'd now call a sleeveless pullover, but then it was called a tank top. They had stripes on them and in fact I knitted one myself. In fact it was the first garment I ever managed to knit for myself and get even tension and get the ribbing proper on the bottom. I felt really proud of that, but I'm sure it isn't cool for skinheads to be proud of something that they've knitted themselves.
We used to wear Indian sort of embroidered smock-tops, and we used to go to C & A and buy these horrible long cardigans.
I remember I got a Crimplene trouser-suit as a present for passing my Eleven-plus, and when hotpants came in, my mother cut down the Crimplene trousers and made a pair of hotpants. Now at that stage I was still in my chubby phase and they must have looked the pits. I mean, you know, what a cruel fashion! Awful. And those awful wet-look boots that had elastic round the tops and cut off all the circulation to your feet, and they were plastic and you used to hear these dreadful horror stories of people standing too near the fire and their boots would melt into their skin and they'd have to have skin grafts.
