Keeping alive the glorious spirit of 1976
. Us children of the 1970s may bore our kids into slumber with our tales of how great life was back in “our day”, but what was it that made our adolescence so special? There are literally hundreds of things that made that decade stand out amongst all the times in which to be growing […]
Continue ReadingWhenever I hear an upbeat, mid-1970s dance classic, of which there were so many, I dance in my head and wish I was back there, performing the moves that I lacked either the self-confidence or the co-ordination (probably both) to step out to at the time.
Continue ReadingFor those of us to whom amassing our own personal collection of 45s was the teenage pursuit of the 1970s, the Chinnichap moniker always served to lend the latest 7-inch vinyl cut the ultimate seal of authenticity. Whether it came packaged in the stark orange of RCA Records or the pale blue colours of RAK, […]
Continue ReadingNostalgia, defined by Merriam-Webster as “a wistful or excessively sentimental yearning for return to or of some past period”, is one of the most powerful emotions there is. This is why so many great songs have been written which invoke a longing for the past, typically either ruing the loss of a treasured relationship or […]
Continue ReadingThe Irish radio presenter Henry Kelly once drily remarked that “1976 was a good year because we were so much younger then.” He was right, of course. And just possibly he was pushing back at the avalanche of nostalgic sentiment that would appear to surround that year in particular, with its sporting achievements and its […]
Continue Reading. To those of us who were yet to reach our teens back in the very early 1970s, bands like Humble Pie meant very little. Certainly we’d seen their names in the columns of the music papers, and the scribblings of the bigger kids on the school desks gave some hint that there was a […]
Continue ReadingTo understand the unique place that 1976 holds in the annals of popular music and culture, it is first necessary to reflect awhile on what had gone immediately before. As the Summer of Love passed into the realms of ever more distant memory and the seemingly interminable 1960s – with its mods and rockers, beats […]
Continue ReadingTo those of us whose day it was, for so many years all human existence revolved around Thursday evenings and the thirty-minute broadcast on BBC1 which brought us news of all the latest movements from the UK singles’ charts. Whichever football team one supported, which school one went to – Top of the Pops was […]
Continue ReadingIt is pretty much unthinkable that anyone who remembers the 1970s would not recall the determined interventions of Mrs. Constance Mary Whitehouse, CBE, guardian of the nation’s conscience, which were frequent and resolute. An evangelical Christian and former sex education teacher, for the best part of three decades Mary Whitehouse and her much-feared letters of […]
Continue ReadingWhen I had the honour of putting a question to music legend Steve Harley during a recent radio show, I asked him whether he considered himself to be a seventies’ artist who had managed to adapt his routine in order to keep going, or whether he saw himself as one who had simply begun at that time and who is continually evolving.
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