Keeping alive the glorious spirit of 1976
1. Concorde enters service On January 21st 1976 a British Airways Concorde took off from London Heathrow airport with a full compliment of passengers destined for Bahrain, while at the exact same time Air France’s maiden Concorde flight left the runway at Paris’ Orly airport for Rio de Janeiro. After initially having been refused permission […]
Continue ReadingImagine a world in which there was no internet and no mobile phones. If you wanted to call someone you rang their landline, and if they were out you rang them back again when they were in. No internet of course meant no e-mail, so if what you had to say needed to be put […]
Continue ReadingIf there ever was an enduring cultural icon of the 1970s it was the Raleigh Chopper bicycle. For kids of a certain age, it was necessary to be the proud owner either of a racing bike, or of a Chopper. One was practical, fast and, when ridden correctly, relatively safe. The other was the coolest […]
Continue ReadingIt is often said that what you’ve never had you never miss. Back in the early 1970s nobody in the UK, beyond the well-travelled few, had had anything remotely resembling what would today be called ice cream. Sure, we’d had some puffy yellowy-white stuff in a block served to us out of a wrapper, in […]
Continue ReadingIf you are fortunate enough to have a da Vinci or a Rembrandt hanging in your lobby you are unlikely ever to want for much. But what do you think would be the going rate for a Sexton? Far from being a painter, Sexton Blake of course was a fictional detective. And being a Londoner, […]
Continue ReadingThere was something else about 1974, and thereabouts, which deserves a mention. Those who, like me, first discovered pop music when it was at its glammiest, in my case during the peak Slade-Sweet-Glitter era of 1972-73, felt just a twinge of disconcertment when the genre seemed to tweak itself in the direction of 1950s nostalgia a year or so later.
Continue ReadingHoly Holy is led by Mick “Woody” Woodmansey, the legendary drummer and sole surviving member of The Spiders From Mars, the quartet fronted by David Bowie during his Ziggy Stardust period in the early 1970s. The band’s description of itself as a “supergroup” is audacious and assertive, but entirely justified. I’ve seen a whole bunch of tribute bands, some of them very good, but this is something so immeasurably different as to be off the scale.
Continue ReadingOn Friday evening just gone I was lucky enough to have been given a ticket to see two men who, together but in their slightly different ways, played a major role in defining that decade of explosive creativity and unsurpassed musical innovation that was the 1970s.
Continue ReadingSeeing your favourite artist or band on film is these days simply a matter of logging into YouTube or something similar and typing your choice into the search bar, but it wasn’t always so. Time was, one was compelled to wait patiently in eager anticipation of their next appearance on Top Of The Pops. Unless, […]
Continue ReadingMy introduction to “pop” music came, peculiarly, in the person of Michael Jackson. We were at primary school, I was ten years old. For reasons which I cannot recall, one particular day was declared to be a “free” day – no lessons, no classwork, no booky stuff. Instead we were invited to bring in our 45s, to be played to the class on the old record player brought into school by the teacher.
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