The 70’s: The Decade That Addled Our Brains Part I

I imagine some will groan when they see ‘Part I’ as they will realise that I am going to ramble on a bit longer than I usually do which, for some, or perhaps many, may be a form of anathema verging on a desire for euthanasia.

Mind you, if it is then why are you reading this? It must be a bit like the ‘moth to a flame’ thing I suppose.

I’ve had a thought.

This is, as some of you will know, a fairly rare occurrence so I would appreciate you treating it gently as, being such a rare beastie as it is it needs nurturing to ensure that somewhere over the next decade or two I have another.

The 1970’s. Remember them?

The Partridge Family, Barnie Miller, Happy Days, The Waltons, Kojak, Charlie’s Angels, David Bowie, Roxy Music, Marc Bolan, Alice Cooper, punk rock, the Mod revival, the Ska revival. Wasn’t the world a better place in the 70’s?

Well, all right, we had Nixon and Thatcher, Baader Meinhof, The I.R.A and so forth but, on the whole, they didn’t addle our brains. Neither come to that, did The Partridge Family (I had such a crush on Susan Dey)

A number of things, if you were a 70’s child like me, addled our brains. One of the major culprits in brain addling 70’s style were music lyrics. You disagree? Check this out.

We sang along to the hits of the day, often feeling that the lyrics expressed our views as teenagers that we struggled to express for ourselves.

Roxy Music’s ‘Virginia Plain’ :

Take me on a roller coaster
Take me for an airplane ride
Take me for a six day wonder, but don’t you
Don’t you throw my pride aside, besides

What’s real and make believe
Baby Jane’s in Acapulco
We are flyin’ down to Rio

Marc Bolan’s T. Rex and ‘Metal Guru’ :

Metal guru could it be
You’re gonna bring my baby to me
She’ll be wild you know
A rock ‘n’ roll child

Metal guru has it been
Just like a silver-studded sabre-tooth dream
I’ll be clean you know
Pollution machine

So there we have it. Roxy Music and T. Rex expressing our 70’s teenage angst that we could find no other way of expressing.

And we wondered why our parents didn’t understand us?

Now schools of the 70’s were interesting – well they were in Great Britain anyway. Personally I attended a ‘Grammar School’. A ‘Grammar School’ was the type of school that either the very intelligent or the ‘one’s whose parents could afford it’ sort of kids attended – I leave it to you to decide into which category I fitted.

Corporal punishment was the order of the day.

“Show me the hand that wrote this!” would screech the Latin Master, (note they were called ‘Master’ not ‘teacher’) and, due to a small error in ‘Filius patris mei sum ‘ (I am the son of my father) the edge of a wooden ruler would be brought down with extraordinary force onto the ball of one’s thumb. The resulting words emanating from one’s mouth bore no resemblance what so ever to Latin.

“Where is your homework boy??!!” bellowed the Head Master.

“Er – I left it at home Sir” the frightened child would reply.

“Bend over and touch your toes!!!” the Head would scream and duly whack said boys bottom very hard with his bamboo cane. ‘Six of the best’ was the term to describe this as you received six whacks across the bum. On particularly severe occasions you would be obliged to drop your trousers and pants prior to bending over to receive said ‘six of the best’ on your bare bottom.

Perhaps it is of little wonder that we sought refuge with The Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band and their oft played late 60’s hit ‘The Urban Spaceman’. Lyrically it made a damn sight more sense than some adult male hitting our bare behinds with a bamboo cane.

Soon into the seventies we had achieved ‘full teen status’ and the aforementioned ‘Masters’ showed increasing reluctance to ask us to drop our trousers or hit us on the base of our thumbs as we were pretty much as big as them and, most of us at any rate, would have beaten the crap out of them had they tried.

Indeed, I became a notional hero of my class after hitting a ‘Master’ on the head with his board duster but, in my defence, he had accidentally hit me with the same board duster after throwing it at the boy sitting directly behind me.

So, after suffering years of fear and abuse at school only combated by bizarre pop lyrics we arrived beyond puberty and, on the whole, managed to avoid becoming abusers of young ladies.

Certainly we only wanted to shag them with minimal or no emotional attachment but, given our educational and pop lyrical upbringing it is, I think, startling to realise that we hadn’t all evolved into sadistic perverts.

The 1970’s. Often described as ‘The Decade That Fashion Forgot’ – mainly relating to the early 70’s in the fashion sense.

1970 – 1972 was a time of complete trauma and abuse from school ‘masters’ hell bent on using violence to knock education into our thick young skulls. A time of awakening to ‘pop lyrics’ that meant absolutely nothing what so ever to the band / singer other than lots of money but, often bizarrely, meant a ridiculous amount to the young boys and girls singing along to the bewilderment of their parents who had suddenly realised Elvis Presley wasn’t actually so bad after all.

1972 to 75 was the time we became fully fledged ‘teens’, threw chairs at our ‘Master’, got caught shagging girls in the school army cadet truck, told our parents to ‘fuck off’ and generally behaved like untrained puppy dogs.

God! (If you will pardon the expression), 72 – 75 was a GAS!

Then, of course, the 70’s arrived at 1976. In 1976 a programme was broadcast on television. Television. The domain of adults if you excluded programmes exclusively designed for children. Programmes for teenagers didn’t really exist outside of the minds of TV producers who thought we, the teenagers, would be happy with ‘Happy Days’.

In 1976 a TV programme was broadcast that was supposed to have rock super group Queen as the special guests. Queen hadn’t actually arrived at ‘super group’ status by then but they were certainly well on their way. For some reason lost in the mists of time Queen couldn’t make it and the programme had to find a replacement quick time. They did.

The band in question that replaced Queen were The Sex Pistols.

The 70’s would never be the same again.

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