Bryan Appleyard: Reassessing the Seventies
Louis de Bernières’s new novel, A Partisan’s Daughter, is set in the 1970s. Its hero has a car, a “shit-brown Allegro”. The Austin Allegro was a horror, expelled from the death throes of British mass car production. Everything about it was bad, including, in this case, the colour. The moment it is mentioned in the novel, the reader knows exactly what it means – that there was something horribly wrong with the 1970s.
For the contemporary historian Dominic Sandbrook, John le Carré’s novel Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, published in 1974, makes the same point. Suffused with shabbiness, disappointment and – in spite of the fact that it was about the great global confrontation of the cold war – littleness, it portrays the defence of the realm as a series of sordid betrayals. Yet Sandbrook is now writing two books on what at first sight appears to be a benighted decade, one on the American 1970s and one on the British. For the truth is, there’s a lot more to the 1970s than Allegros and betrayal.
There’s also a lot more than Abba and bad clothes. For at least two decades, from 1980 to 2000, the 1970s were dismissed as a 10-year-long bad hair day. How we laughed at the loon pants and the afros! From the pop world, only punk seemed to survive with any kind of credibility. Above all, the 1970s had the appalling misfortune not to be the 1960s. And, to the enormous irritation of those who came of age in the 1970s, everybody knows and everybody keeps saying how great the 1960s were. “The Seventies generation,” writes Dave Haslam in his book Young Hearts Run Free, “has forever been the victim of the nostalgia of others. We arrived too late, the generation before us told us then, and have been telling us ever since.”
Haslam’s book, and Howard Sounes’s Seventies, are texts of the great but very popcentric reassessment that has taken place in the past eight or nine years. Haslam and Sounes are serious, but most of this reassessment is just froth and fashion. Mamma Mia!, the Abba musical (to appear as a film later this year), opened in 1999 amid a general rediscovery of decent 1970s pop. As for punk – well, it was real. Sid Vicious did self-destruction so much more convincingly than Pete Doherty. Furthermore, there have been plenty of upmarket signs of reassessment. Halston, the supreme 1970s designer label, was recently relaunched in New York. And just go down to Alfies, a big antiques emporium in London, and you will find 1970s lights and furniture selling at hedge-funder prices. Not so long ago, all these things would have been regarded as ugly beyond redemption. But these are, in the eyes of history, ephemera....
Read entire article at Times (UK)
For the contemporary historian Dominic Sandbrook, John le Carré’s novel Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, published in 1974, makes the same point. Suffused with shabbiness, disappointment and – in spite of the fact that it was about the great global confrontation of the cold war – littleness, it portrays the defence of the realm as a series of sordid betrayals. Yet Sandbrook is now writing two books on what at first sight appears to be a benighted decade, one on the American 1970s and one on the British. For the truth is, there’s a lot more to the 1970s than Allegros and betrayal.
There’s also a lot more than Abba and bad clothes. For at least two decades, from 1980 to 2000, the 1970s were dismissed as a 10-year-long bad hair day. How we laughed at the loon pants and the afros! From the pop world, only punk seemed to survive with any kind of credibility. Above all, the 1970s had the appalling misfortune not to be the 1960s. And, to the enormous irritation of those who came of age in the 1970s, everybody knows and everybody keeps saying how great the 1960s were. “The Seventies generation,” writes Dave Haslam in his book Young Hearts Run Free, “has forever been the victim of the nostalgia of others. We arrived too late, the generation before us told us then, and have been telling us ever since.”
Haslam’s book, and Howard Sounes’s Seventies, are texts of the great but very popcentric reassessment that has taken place in the past eight or nine years. Haslam and Sounes are serious, but most of this reassessment is just froth and fashion. Mamma Mia!, the Abba musical (to appear as a film later this year), opened in 1999 amid a general rediscovery of decent 1970s pop. As for punk – well, it was real. Sid Vicious did self-destruction so much more convincingly than Pete Doherty. Furthermore, there have been plenty of upmarket signs of reassessment. Halston, the supreme 1970s designer label, was recently relaunched in New York. And just go down to Alfies, a big antiques emporium in London, and you will find 1970s lights and furniture selling at hedge-funder prices. Not so long ago, all these things would have been regarded as ugly beyond redemption. But these are, in the eyes of history, ephemera....