50 Book Challenge: Book 38
Not Abba: the real story of the 1970s – Dave Haslam
I wasn’t quite born at the dawn of the 70s but I came along pretty quickly afterwards. And Dave Haslam’s book has convinced me that it’s not so much the decade of your childhood that shapes you as the decade of your teenage years. That makes me squarely one of Thatcher’s Children, going on a Gen Xer, and I’m not so sure I feel altogether comfortable with at least the first part of that. Of course I remember the strikes, the power cuts, the IRA bombs, the shortages in supermarkets, the National Front marches and naturally the long, hot summer of 1976 when we were sent home from school so as to not die of heat exhaustion. The Silver Jubilee, the birth of skateboarding, the hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper, the Rhodesian elections, Mary Whitehouse and the Iranian revolution all managed to impinge on my pre-teen consciousness. However the underlying trends in racial and equality politics, the social divisions, the musical trends like Northern soul, the first stirrings of punk and, thankfully, the worst of the fashion trends went straight over my head. (Although there are some childhood photos I definitely won’t be making public any time soon.) Similarly I remember virtually nothing first-hand about the Vietnam War, the Rock Against Racism movement (though I was certainly keen enough on bands like The Clash once I’d got a bit older), Steve Biko’s death, Watergate or the Baader-Meinhof gang.
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All this means that Haslam’s book, which is an interesting mix of national and international politics, music, counter-culture and first-person social history, with the occasional nod towards other art forms, feels like it’s filling in a number of important gaps in my mental landscape. Things that I can just about remember going past but didn’t understand at the time – and certainly haven’t be able to fill in from the 70s nostalgia shows that Haslam is railing against in this book’s title. I’ve already managed to turn this into a list of my personal recollections and this is exactly the crime that Haslam is accused of in many of the reviews – too anecdotal, too personal, trying to deal with too much by cramming a decade of music, culture and politics into a little over 300 pages.
I can think of a couple of responses to this. Firstly we are barely 30 years out of the 70s – and, if blogs are history’s rough draft then I think that a book like this might fairly be called its publishers’ proofs. What it lacks in balance and distance it more than makes up for in immediacy, enthusiasm for its subject-matter and first-person recollections, not only by the author but by the various people he interviews. Certainly it could prove an excellent source of primary-source material for later historians. The other point I think the reviewers miss is that this is an intensely political book with a strong left-liberal slant. I remember being taught in my first term at university that history is never told from a neutral perspective. And this book certainly isn’t. It’s a rallying cry for music and counter-culture as forces that can really change society for the better. In an age when it appears that the sole ambition of many young people is to be a Big Brother contestant or a ‘celebrity’ famous for not very much.
Where’s the rebellion now? The counter-culture, the political engagement these days, I ask you? I look around and I can’t see much of it. Feminism’s a dirty word; sexuality, music and youth culture are commodities; being gay is a marketing demographic and racial politics are perhaps in the worst state that they’ve been in since the decade this book deals with.
Maybe this is the most important point that it has to make.
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