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| Things like Ethiopia, most people I know just laugh it off and say 'Ha ha, it's not me is it?' I don't think they really want to put their minds to big issues. You know, they'd rather have fun. |
| I don't like what they're doing with records now, like donating all their money. I mean it's a good cause but they're doing it far too often now. We're just thinking of everyone else and the money's going out and things aren't exactly brilliant for us either. Yeah, we are better off than them. I mean, at least we've got food and clothes on our backs and that. But in a way, they don't know any different. |
| In 1985. a number of pop stars assembled under the name 'Artists United Against Apartheid', to record a song pledging themselves not to perform in 'Sun City', the South African resort in Bophuthatswana. |
| Apartheid very definitely makes me hot under the collar, but I don't really do anything about it except go out and buy 'Sun City'. I don't really know what I can do about it, and being a lazy, selfish teenager I don't bother to find out. |
Newspapers continued to express surprise at the apathetic conservatism which emerged whenever an opinion poll investigated the attitudes of British youth. An NOP inquiry in 1983 linked this to the growth of pessimism about the state of the world and about their generation's prospects of improving it. The Daily Mail reported:
"Pessimism among Britain's fifteen to twenty-year-olds about unemployment and their own futures casts a gloomy pall across their young lives. As they look towards the end of the century, increasing numbers of them see the mushroom-clouds of global war blotting out the horizon." |
| Perhaps it should not have surprised anyone that whereas the optimism of youth in the sixties had found expression in a variety of causes from CND to Save the Whale, the pessimism of the eighties led to an outbreak of patriotic sentiment and cries of 'I'm All Right Jack'. |
| A MORI poll during the Falklands conflict found that young people were more in favour of military action against Argentina than were their elders. In the NOP poll of 1983, a majority supported the reintroduction of National Service. |
| I don't think the bomb will drop in my lifetime. Maybe some time towards the end of the next century. It is inevitable sooner or later. |
| You have to be worried about it but then again there's no point in worrying yourself over something you don't have that much hold over. It is very frightening, but it doesn't worry me. |
| I don't actively support CND because I haven't the time. That sounds awful, doesn't it? |
| I don't feel that there's a great feeling of love and peace amongst young people any more, because everybody has to look after themselves. People don't trust each other like they trusted each other in the late sixties. |
| There's so much despair among young people. I think there's a lot of despair. They feel 'Well, it's so remote from me that no government is of any concern to me.' I think they've got a point. I think there's a reason for them not being that basically aware. I don't think it would make that much difference if Mr Kinnock got in tomorrow for five years. I think overall it wouldn't affect my life, it wouldn't affect my family's life. It might affect someone who's homeless, because they're more likely to get a home under Neil Kinnock than Mrs Thatcher. I personally am more supportive of someone like the SDP. |
| What remained of the 'counter-culture' in the eighties was still largely in the hands and heads of the generations that created it. The hippies still trundled round Wales and the West Country in their old buses, upsetting landowners, visiting free festivals and thanking the Earth Goddess for their supplies of firewood, herbal teas and magic mushrooms. They attracted new recruits from among displaced punks and skinheads who have more fun sleeping under tarpaulins than living on council estates, but the leaders were veterans of the Isle of Wight. |
| Unfortunately, the Women's Movement remained more of a preoccupation of middle-class graduates in their twenties than a major influence on either the working class in general or on teenage girls in particular. In fact, the force of economic circumstance had actually pushed girls back into the stereotype role from which the Movement set out to free them. According to Professor Coffield, speaking at the 1984 conference quoted earlier, young women were being drawn back into the family, where they worked extremely hard for no pay. "They disappear from the youth clubs, from the streets, from any interesting activities in which they have been involved." Another speaker at the conference, Graham Swain, of the National Youth Bureau, said that girls were retreating into early marriage, or, failing that, pregnancy. "They are not doing it through choice, but through economic necessity, and that's a bad thing. It's the only way they are finding a purpose and identity in adult life." |
| There was still idealism among the young and it took many forms, from militant vegetarianism to attending concerts in support of the Labour Party, but it was minimal by comparison with support for CND in the early sixties or even the Anti-Nazi League in the late seventies. |
| The significant thing was that Trafalgar Square was not regularly crammed with angry, unemployed teenagers demanding a change of government; inner-city riots were not regular occurrences; the very word 'demo' had a quaint, old-fashioned ring to it. As a group, teenagers did not feel powerful. |
As Tony Tyler, ex-Deputy Editor of New Musical Express, put it:
"I think one of the things to lament, perhaps, about the teen boom of the fifties through the seventies is that it force-fed a couple of generations with false expectations. It made them seem to themselves more important than they really are. I don't mean that in any nasty way. They're not very important. What can teenagers do? Not very much. What can teenagers know? Not very much. They might have tons of charm and potential, and that's really where the interest in teenagers lies, it's in their potential. That's what's sad about teenagers out of work today: they're not getting a chance to fulfil that potential. I don't know what the answer is.
It's certainly true that, problems though there are today, it was just as bad in another way in the fifties and sixties when they were over-indulged to the point of crass stupidity. A great deal of the angst that kids have today is because they know the respect and adulation that their elder brothers and sisters got - or even their parents, if they've got young parents - and it seems unfair to them that they don't get the same. And I quite understand how they feel. But the truth is that it was unfair to give their parents and their older brothers that kind of treatment. They didn't deserve it. They were only kids. But they were a market and it was essentially a market force. And I'm afraid when you take away the market, you take away the interest. That's why it's finding its own level again. It's rather sad.
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| Tyler's analysis makes sense as a description of what had happened to the British teenager, but it paints the cloud and leaves out the silver lining. When one looks back over sixty years of teen-age history, one observation achieves the force of obvious truth: it is that youth culture - fashion, music and philosophy evolved by teenagers for themselves - has been most alive and creative during the periods when society at large has taken least notice of it. This was true of the rock'n'roll craze before it was taken up by Tin Pan Alley, of Merseybeat before the Beatles became megastars, of mods before Clacton, of hippies before the Flower Pot Men and of punk before Zandra Rhodes invented the sequinned safety pin. |
| The longer the cork stays in the bottle, the stronger becomes the brew. Part of the problem for youth culture in the seventies and eighties was the determination of record company A & R men, rock journalists, fashion buyers and television producers to sniff, sample, label and decant the 'Next Big Thing' before it had had a chance to ferment. To vary the metaphor, every time teenagers picked up a new toy it was snatched from their hands, polished, mass-produced and sold back to them at a profit. |
| 'It wasn't us', said the men of commerce. 'It came from the streets.' |
In the spring of 1986, Bruce Mitchell, who handled the lighting for several of the Manchester clubs that promoted live music, said:
"The Next Big Thing? There is no Next Big Thing because there are too many next little things, but more kids are getting together and starting bands than ever before, they're all playing different kinds of music, they're all open to what one another are doing and they're having a wonderful time."
If you're sixteen now, I mean, it can't be all gloom. There must be some optimism, just from the fact of being sixteen. |
POSTSCRIPT: WHAT HAPPENED NEXT
I wrote this book in 1986 and ended it with these words:
When something radically new emerges from this creative stew, my wish for it is that it may be a long time before anyone over twenty-five finds out about it.
My wish came true.
For example I had described Bruce Mitchell as a lighting technician (which he was and is) but not as the drummer in Durutti Column (which he was and is). Durutti Column was one of the first bands to sign with Factory Records when the label was launched in 1978 and played at the Haçienda when it opened in May 1982. The Haçienda begat Madchester which begat Britpop. |
I had missed the significance of the then-new party drug, ecstasy, and the importance of the emerging techno and acid-house genres of dance music.
I hadn’t mentioned MTV, the first all-pop-video channel, which was launched as a New York cable network in August 1981, let alone foreseen its baleful influence on youth culture.
Forgivably, I failed to mention the launch in 1985 of the Nintendo Entertainment System with a game called Super Mario Bros. Video games, back then, didn’t seem important.
Above all I failed to spot the significance of digital music (which then meant the compact disc but would later also mean internet downloads and i-pods). Digital recording has changed utterly the ways in which teenagers collect, appreciate and are influenced by music. A few obscurities apart, it has made the entire range of recorded music available to anyone, any time. It has abolished the past, and therefore the future, replacing both with a continuous present in which Hendrix and Dylan ’62 and Springsteen and Lennon and Jolson and Scott Joplin and Janis Joplin and the Clash and Vera Lynn (number one in the UK album chart, September 2009) and Dylan ’76 and a hundred thousand other performers continuously jostle for attention.
But that’s another book. |
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Kinace Records
16 Temple Road
MANCHESTER
M33 2FP |
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