INTRODUCTION

In music, the term ‘unplugged’ originally referred to concerts in which rock musicians played only acoustic instruments, leaving their electric equipment in the trailer. The term has since come to mean something unprocessed – without synthetic enhancement. That is the aim here. The first plug I’m pulling belongs to ABBA, the band that embodied nearly every tired Seventies cliché. It’s hard to come to terms with the decade if, in the background, four Swedes dressed in phosphorescent spandex sing ‘Dancing Queen’. While we’re at it, let’s pull the plug on David Essex, the Bee Gees, Donna Summer and Gary Glitter. Granted, some of those artists produced noteworthy music. But if we want to get to grips with the 1970s, we need to peel away the polyester.

So, what lies beneath? Or, as a student asked when I announced I was writing a sequel to The Sixties Unplugged: ‘What’s the thrust this time?’ I was momentarily flummoxed because, unlike the Sixties and the Eighties, for which themes abound, the Seventies seems a decade in-between, a black hole of meaning. Indeed, Peter Carroll titled his history of America in the 1970s: It Seemed Like Nothing Happened.

The operative word is, however, ‘seemed’. I started with the purpose of rehabilitating the decade by showing that something meaningful did happen. I sold the book to my publisher on that premise, promising a chronicle of notable, even noble, achievements. I aimed to show that much of the progress commonly associated with the Sixties actually occurred in the Seventies.

I still believe that – to an extent. The decade was packed with profound achievement. Dictatorial regimes ended in Portugal, Spain, Nicaragua, Rhodesia and Greece. Accord between nations was established at Camp David, Beijing, Moscow, Geneva and Brussels. For feminists, environmentalists and homosexuals, the Seventies was the decade of hope. In cultural terms, it brought the Sydney Opera House, Monty Python, Annie Hall, David Hockney and M*A*S*H. The music, with or without ABBA, was simply brilliant. For sheer diversity of output (not to mention talent) the decade outshines the much-celebrated Sixties.

But there’s always a ‘but’. Despite my efforts to rehabilitate the decade, I couldn’t escape what Jonathan Coe, in The Rotters’ Club, called ‘the ungodly strangeness . . . the weird things that were happening all the time’. By any calculation, Marabel Morgan, the Christian fundamentalist who encouraged women to titillate their husbands by wrapping themselves in cling film, was weird. So too were Jim Jones, Idi Amin, Bobby Fischer, Anita Bryant, Sid Vicious and Bobby Riggs, not to mention pet rocks, shag carpets, platform shoes and the AMC Gremlin. Don’t even ask what I wore to my senior prom.1

The weird might have been wonderful if not for the fact that it was so often violent. As time passed, that theme dominated. That was a rude epiphany, since the Seventies was my golden decade. Looking back, it seems that the mellow harmonies of Carole King and James Taylor, when combined with a lot of acrid smoke, obscured much of the terrible violence. True to the spirit of the ‘me’ decade, most of us retreated into the best worlds we could construct. We knew something of Jonestown, Vietnam, Palestine and Belfast, but the bloodletting in the Philippines, Chile, Zaire, Uganda and Bangladesh largely escaped our notice. The truth about Cambodia emerged only after the skulls were stacked away. Even today, ignorance remains endemic. How many people are aware that 8,000 acts of terrorist violence occurred in Italy during the 1970s?

The brutality of nations is a constant throughout history, but what is striking about the 1970s is the way perfectly ordinary people easily surrendered to violence. Linda Hager Morse, formerly a model child and A-student, explained to a court in Chicago that she had bought a gun and learned karate because the police riot at the 1968 Democratic convention had changed her ‘from being a pacifist to the realization that we had to defend ourselves’. She had decided that ‘a nonviolent revolution was impossible’. Where, indeed, had all the flowers gone? ‘We’re not trying to end wars!’ shouted a Weatherman during the 1969 Days of Rage. ‘We’re starting to fight war.’ The educational psychologist Kenneth Keniston diagnosed an epidemic:

Nominally opposing violence and suffering violence from others, some fringes of the counterculture became infected by the very violence it opposed. The shouted obscenity calculated to offend the policeman was . . . a form of violence; so, too, was the categorization of the opponents of the student movement as subhuman – as pigs. And above all, that ideological argument which led a few members of the youth movement to consider their fear for violence a ‘bourgeois hang-up’ to be overcome by the practice of terrorism – this was no less a symptom of . . . pathological violence . . . than were the police riots . . . in Chicago in 1968 or our indiscriminate bombing in Southeast Asia.

The Times commented on the ‘extent to which the terrorist bomb has developed into the standard international protest during the last decade’. Violence had become fashionable, a point driven home with peculiar irony when the Angry Brigade bombed a boutique. In Paris, a petrol bomb was left at the home of a member of the committee entrusted with selecting the Prix Goncourt literary prize.2

Nor was violence confined to the usual suspects – armies, terrorists, psychopathic dictators, cocaine barons and radical students. It was everywhere. Punk, whatever its musical merit, was violent sound. Skinhead style was aggressive even when its practitioners were not actually fighting. The Seventies was the decade of football hooliganism, hardhat riots, gays running amok and the National Front fighting the Anti-Nazi League. Much of the violence was simply gratuitous – an expression of nothing more substantial than nihilism. The British teenager Jayne Casey liked Bowie, salmon pink trousers and boys who wore make-up. She was neither punk nor skinhead, football hooligan, fascist or anti-fascist. She was simply angry. ‘We were well prepared to have a fight because we’d all grown up fighting. We weren’t soft kids, we came from heavy working class backgrounds and we knew how to fight . . . We’d shock them . . . and [then] we’d batter them! We attracted violence, every night, which was good; we hated the world and expected the world to hate us.’ Joe Strummer of The Clash used to strut on stage wearing a T-shirt with the slogan ‘Hate and War’ – proof indeed that the decade of peace and love was over. Hate proved a much more durable social glue than love ever had.3

The Sixties was wonderful, the Seventies dire – or so it seems. To believe the Sixties heavenly requires ignoring its horror. Likewise, to judge the Seventies horrible requires ignoring its abundant good. Problems arise when we insist on seeing one decade as the antithesis of the other; in searching for contrast, we neglect continuum. Memory has been kind to the Sixties. So, too, has coincidence: so much of what was rotten about the decade did not surface until after 1970. It is perhaps best to see the Seventies as a time when Sixties chickens came home to roost, a decade when dreams died, hope was thwarted, problems long ignored finally exploded, and optimism repeatedly crushed gave way to frustration. No wonder, then, that macro turned into micro and grandiose dreams gave way to small pleasures. Surrounded by the detritus of forlorn ambition, people quite understandably turned inward, to family and individual fulfilment.

The Seventies Unplugged is not meant to be an international history of the decade, but it is more international than most Seventies books. The great problem with breadth, however, is lack of depth; in trying to cover everything one inevitably sacrifices substance. In an attempt to address that problem, I have taken the pointillist approach – fifty separate stories together provide an intriguing, albeit incomplete, portrait of the decade. Some are predictable, others not. There are notable gaps, but that is inevitable with this approach and the tyranny of a word limit. I hope, however, that the book will be judged by what it includes, not by what it neglects. In some cases, big issues are purposefully examined through small lenses. Thus, instead of Nixon goes to China we have Ping-Pong diplomacy; instead of Microsoft we have Pong. The stories are like parables, though readers can draw their own grand moral conclusions.

As I wrote in the introduction to The Sixties Unplugged, the metaphor of the kaleidoscope is useful. A brilliantly simple invention, it consists of a tube, a lens, some bevelled mirrors and some coloured pieces of glass. Look through the lens and a complex pattern appears. Twist it and a different pattern, a reality equally logical, emerges. That is the effect I have tried to achieve here. My short sections are designed to stand alone, without linking narrative. They are the shiny pieces of glass capable of being arranged into myriad patterns. How they are arranged depends in large part on how the reader manipulates the kaleidoscope.

Books make enemies, but also, thankfully, friends. As a result of The Sixties Unplugged, I met (in cyberspace) a man called Rebel. He is a former student radical, Vietnam vet, reader of history and biker. I’m delighted we met, if only for the way he has challenged my conformist prejudices. I wasn’t aware that bikers read the Journal of American History or the novels of Stephen Crane. I’m also delighted that we agree on so many of the events of our youth. But the fact that we agree does not mean we are right. History, no matter how carefully crafted, cannot completely banish perspective.

I’m told that since the eyes of two people cannot occupy the same point in space at the same time, each observer sees a different rainbow. The same, I think, could be said of the past. The past is what happened, history the way we remember. Rebel once reminded me of something Friedrich Nietzsche said about the way we look back. ‘I have done that,’ says memory. ‘I cannot have done that,’ says pride. The conflict between memory and pride made writing about the Sixties a hazardous endeavour, especially when baby boomer critics took aim. I suspect that the Seventies does not inspire the same passion, but I am prepared to be surprised.