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Did the pound in your pocket stretch to the great smell of brut and Vesta Curry? Do your fingers twitch at the thought of a Rubik's cube or Klackers? Were you liberated by Marc Bolan and David Bowie or Germaine Greer and Kate Millett? Did you swoon to Donny Osmond or David Cassidy? Sing along to Abba or stomp with The Bay City Rollers? Did you embrace punk or stick with rock? Were you among the first to have the vote at 18? Were you thrilled by Concorde's first landing at Heathrow? Do you recall Watergate, the miners' strike and Bloody Sunday? Did 'Women in Love' shock you? Or 'The Exorcist' and 'Last Tango in Paris'? Did you freeze in the Winter of Discontent and melt in the longest, hottest summer of the twentieth century?
If any of the above start bells ringing and have you reaching for your flares, platforms and glitter makeup, the chances are you were young in the 1970s!
The Seventies: Good Times, Bad Taste takes you through the history and spirit of the decade - 'The Style': the look; from hippie to punk - looks at clothes; afghan coats; haircuts and punk style; 'The Sights and Sounds': music, dancing and the media - from David Cassidy and Donny Osmond to glam rock, funky-soul, the death of Elvis, discos, Monty Python, Charlie's Angels, Dr Who and Jackie magazine. 'The Lifestyle': daily life in the Seventies from the type of food we ate to squats, abortions, marriage, drink and drugs and social change. 'The Wider World': A decade of decline, disillusionment and defiance - politics such as the three-day week and the women's movement.
"Autumn 1971 was the first term at Birmingham University - the miners' strike. I remember being in my bedsitter, in bed at nine o'clock in the evening, a power cut, candles too expensive, listening to the Organist Entertains on the radio my mother had got me with Green Shield Stamps - feeling I wasn't perhaps getting as much out of being a student as I might...."
(Victoria Wood)
The Seventies: Good Times, Bad Taste is illustrated with original ephemera and advertising material and personal photographs that perfectly capture the era that gave us Monty Python and Fawlty Towers, the three-day week and riots in Soweto, and saw the end of the Vietnam nightmare, the Beatles and Chi Chi the giant panda.
Adding to the recollections of the seventies generation, celebrated figures of the present day - Tina Brown, Carmen Callil, Jonathon Coe, John Diamond, Stephen Fry, Valerie Grove, Joyce Hopkirk, Frieda Hughes, Caitlin Moran, Blake Morrison, John Walsh, Francis Wheen and Victoria Wood - offer their memories of the decade, triggering a bitter sweet nostalgia for ten unforgettable years.
Author Details
Alison Pressley, bestelling author of 'The Best of Times' and 'Changing Times', has once again collected the reminiscences, magic moments and turbulent times of a new generation in The Seventies: Good Times, Bad Taste. Seventies teenagers were the last to enjoy the new prosperity and freedom of the sixties and the first to taste the new consumerism and ethos of Mrs Thatcher's eighties upheaval and great escapism, but at the very least they were interesting times.
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