Keeping alive the glorious spirit of 1976
Well here we are. It is hard to credit that a full half-century has passed since 1976, the year which gave us that long hot summer which is talked about even today, which provided with so much great television, cinema and memorable events in sport, and which in music served as a cultural crossroads of a kind that we have never quite seen the likes of since.
Continue ReadingHowever memorable they may have been in popular cultural terms, the 1970s were also a time of almost unparalleled economic and political upheaval. Nationally and internationally, crises abounded, and it seemed as if as each one of them abated another lay in waiting to take its place. The Cold War, the Cod War, strikes, power […]
Continue Reading. 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 Reading. Mention Björn Borg in the context of Wimbledon and most people will think back to 1980 and his epic battle with John McEnroe. The sheer contrast in personalities between the fiery American and the cool Swede nicknamed The Ice Borg ensured that this would be a duel that would live long in the memory. […]
Continue ReadingOne of my fondest televisual memories of the 1970s was the Saturday evening treat that was Candid Camera. Not the American version which (unknown to me at the time) had been running since 1948, but the one which, despite having borrowed the name and the format from our transatlantic cousins, revelled in a style of […]
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 Reading. Think of this iconic 1976 sci-fi movie and the mind becomes inexorably fixed upon a vision of the gaunt, pallid figure with wavy red locks that was David Bowie playing Thomas Jerome Newton, the visitor from another planet come to Earth to find water with which to sate the desperate thirsts of his drought-stricken […]
Continue ReadingHere is the text of the submission I made this morning to the self-publishing platform CreateSpace, in response to four questions put to me about my novel The Best Year Of Our Lives:
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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