Revealingly, however, most children seem to have had similar tastes to their parents; while they liked novelty and appreciated realism, they were reluctant to dispense with old favourites, much to the despair of progressive teachers. A survey in 1972 found that Enid Blyton was still ‘easily the most popular’ writer among children from 6 to 11, followed by C. S. Lewis and Beatrix Potter. And while Captain W. E. Johns, the creator of Biggles, was clearly in decline, Arthur Ransome, E. Nesbit and A. A. Milne were still far more popular than most of their modern competitors; in fact, only Michael Bond, the creator of Paddington Bear, came close. At the time, critics insisted that the survey must be biased towards middle-class children, and could not possibly represent the tastes of the nation. But when the Schools Council carried out a wider poll in 1977, it turned out that the three most widely read children’s books in Britain were C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and Enid Blyton’s The Secret Seven and Five on a Treasure Island – published in 1950, 1949 and 1942 respectively, and unashamedly old-fashioned even when they were written. Old values died hard – as the success of J. K. Rowling, who spent the 1970s as a Gloucestershire schoolgirl writing fantasy stories to entertain her younger sister, would later confirm.35
In the 1970s, as in other decades, teenagers were the focus of considerable social anxiety, blamed for everything from street crime and promiscuous sexuality to the decline of patriotism and the plight of the economy. Young people, wrote J. B. Priestley in his survey of The English (1973), were ‘inept, shiftless, slovenly, messy’, because ‘unlike their fathers and grandfathers, they have not been disciplined by grim circumstances’. This last bit was true, but there was no evidence that they were any more shiftless or slovenly than previous generations; only that attitudes and discipline had softened, which meant that they wore their hair longer and more scruffily, or refused to give their elders the automatic respect they demanded. There was certainly little evidence of a yawning cultural generation gap: when Jeremy Seabrook visited Blackburn, he found that local teenagers were just as suspicious of immigrants and keen on hanging as their parents. Like teenagers everywhere, they worried that they were missing out on some wildly debauched metropolitan party to which everyone else had been invited: life in Blackburn, they complained, was ‘bloody boring’. They were ‘sensual, acquisitive and fundamentally quiescent’, Seabrook thought, and, despite their flared jeans and long hair, they differed from their parents only in their ‘commitment to enjoyment and consumption’, for which he puritanically blamed the affluent society.36
Actually, Seabrook’s verdict was not much fairer than Priestley’s. It is hard to accept that young people were greedier and more selfish, given that this was a decade in which more teenagers than ever gave their time to charity, in which membership of the Cubs, Brownies, Scouts and Guides reached record levels, in which the number of Community Service volunteers increased by six times, and in which tens of thousands worked for their voluntary Duke of Edinburgh awards. And despite the stereotype that sees young people in the 1970s evolve from hairy hippies into spittle-flecked punks, a glance at photographs from the decade confirms that most were neither. They might make half-hearted gestures towards rebellion – growing their hair, perhaps, or buying an ill-advised pair of leather trousers – but most stayed on the straight and narrow. As a survey of 16-year-old girls found in 1975, the vast majority dreamed of getting married and having children, just like their parents before them, with only a minority worrying about getting good jobs, and none of them mentioning rebelling or dropping out. And it is worth bearing in mind that of all age groups, the biggest swing to Mrs Thatcher in 1979 came among voters aged between 18 and 24 – in other words, precisely those people who a few years earlier had been chewing their pens in O-level physics classes, dreaming of Marc Bolan or Olivia Newton-John, and trying to ignore the headlines that condemned them as feckless wastrels.37
What dominated teenagers’ cultural lives, just as in the 1950s and 1960s, was pop music. Some things had changed: most independent labels had died out, and almost all major British artists had signed with the big multinational conglomerates: EMI, Decca, Polydor, RCA and CBS. Many independent record shops, too, were struggling: by 1977, 34 per cent of all singles and 30 per cent of albums were bought in Boots, Woolworths and WH Smith, which had moved in to dominate the music market. Television, meanwhile, wielded enormous influence over teenage tastes. Every Thursday, some 15 million people tuned in to watch Top of the Pops, which meant that invitations to appear were highly prized. When groups could not make it (or more rarely, refused to come), they were replaced with nubile dance troupes like Pan’s People, conceived as a treat for the dads. But most weekly line-ups were both impressively star-studded and bizarrely eclectic. On 18 April 1974, for example, the Essex teenager recorded her delight at seeing ‘the Wombles, Glitter Band, Mott the Hoople, Sunny, Limmie & Family Cooking, Jimmy Osmond, Terry Jacks, Abba, Bay City Rollers, Wizzard’. A week later, to her horror, she missed it, having been forced to help her parents tow their caravan to Chelmsford. But she made sure to catch the next edition, in which Abba, the Wombles and the Bay City Rollers returned and were joined by Peters and Lee, Status Quo and the crooner Vince Hill, whose lustre had faded since his heyday in the early 1960s – an indication of how quickly teenage tastes had changed. ‘I feel sorry for him,’ she confided, ‘coz he appeared and he’s not really appreciated.’38
The other obvious difference from the teenage culture of the 1960s was the extraordinary tribalism of musical tastes. Of course this had always been there in embryo, in the division between Mods and Rockers for instance, or between hippies and skinheads. But as the critic Ian MacDonald points out, pop music in the 1960s was a ‘half-invented art form’. Artists as different as, say, Cilla Black and the Rolling Stones were still seen as part of the same world, while the Beatles and the Kinks experimented wildly with different instruments, lyrical styles and even musical genres, so that their admirers ‘never knew from bar to bar what was coming next’. Between about 1967 and 1969, however, a gulf opened up between pop on the one hand, and rock on the other, reflecting not just the difference between singles and albums, but between younger and older listeners, the latter now demanding more self-consciously serious and stimulating material. To people who loathed all popular music, the difference between Slade and the Bay City Rollers, or between Nick Drake and Leo Sayer, must have seemed footling and arbitrary; but to teenagers in the early 1970s, it loomed very large indeed. Pop music was catchy and commercial, designed for the radio and the singles charts; rock songs were meant to be authentic and artistic, and often lasted for what seemed hours. Rock was worthy but difficult; pop was cheerful but trite. Rock appealed to adults, pop to teenagers. ‘Rock was not only a thousand watts louder,’ writes Philip Norman; ‘it was also a thousand times more serious.’39
With artists under such pressure to conform to established, market-friendly stereotypes – the fresh-faced young balladeer, the dreamy-eyed singer-songwriter, the badly behaved long-haired rockers – it is not surprising that magazines like Melody Maker and the New Musical Express lamented the death of creativity. In February 1972 the NME’s assistant editor Nick Logan dismissed what he called ‘mini-phenomena’ like the Faces, Slade, and T.Rex, and complained that he had spent ‘three or four years waiting in a post-Beatles limbo for a new real phenomenon to present itself’. Even David Bowie, perhaps the only chart star of the early 1970s who preserved the old spirit of permanent reinvention, came in for criticism: to the NME’s Roy Carr, for example, he was a triumph of ‘hype and hoax’, a ‘singing boutique who appeals only to freaks’. Revealingly, both Logan and Carr had started writing for the magazine in the late 1960s, and while they may have been only ten years older than their readers, ten years is an enormously long time to a teenager. But then generational battles are as much a part of teenage culture as surliness, spots and self-loathing. When T.Rex released ‘Children of the Revolution’ in September 1972, the NME’s
reviewer Danny Holloway dismissed its ‘nursery-school lyrics’ before mournfully predicting that ‘the soldiers of Teenage Wasteland will send this one straight to Number One’. (In fact, it peaked at number two, breaking T.Rex’s sequence of four consecutive chart-topping singles.) And the magazine’s letters pages often smouldered with teenage fury at the snobbery of its 25-year-old critics. ‘I’m sick and tired of letters from people who say yesterday’s music has a higher standard than today,’ wrote an angry B. Randall of London SE9. They must be ‘deaf or daft or both to think that the oldies can be compared with today’s music. Can’t they see the music scene has changed? Or are they all locked away in dark rooms, listening to wind-up gramophones?’40
What really defined pop and rock music in the early 1970s, though, was its sheer fragmentation. No group dominated the charts, the media or the imagination of the young in the same way that the Beatles and Rolling Stones had done a few years before. At the end of 1971, it seemed possible that Marc Bolan’s group T.Rex, whose theatrical style epitomized the new craze for ‘glam rock’, might establish themselves as an enduring force. Their singles ‘Get It On’, ‘Ride a White Swan’ and ‘Hot Love’ accounted for almost 4 per cent of all British record sales that year, both Paul McCartney and John Lennon anointed them as their successors, and ‘Whispering’ Bob Harris, host of the BBC’s The Old Grey Whistle Test, announced that they had ‘got to be the next Beatles, if they’re not already’. By early 1972, with the band’s album The Slider boasting 100,000 advance orders, the press was talking excitedly of ‘T.Rexstasy’ and Bolan’s self-satisfied features seemed likely to become a defining image of the decade. However, he then lost his way, partly because of his own narcissism and fondness for the bottle, but also because it was extremely difficult to combine artistic ambitions with making chart-topping records for 14-year-old girls.41
By 1975 Bolan had almost vanished from sight; now the great phenomenon was the Bay City Rollers, a clean-cut, tartan-clad group from Edinburgh, whose single ‘Bye Bye Baby’ held the number one spot for six weeks and sold almost a million copies. Like T.Rex, the Rollers’ public appearances inspired scenes of hysteria reminiscent of the Beatles at their peak. ‘Their audience is aged between 10 and 15, and their enthusiasm can realistically be compared with Hitler’s Nuremberg rallies,’ reported Melody Maker after one concert in Edinburgh. ‘Girls were being trodden underfoot in the melee and the front row of seats became dislodged from the floor and smashed as more and more surged into the crowd. There were at least a dozen cases of fainting, and twice girls pretended to be overcome in order to be lifted up stagewards.’42
But while the band’s domineering manager Tam Paton (later convicted of gross indecency with teenage boys) boasted that they would be ‘as big as the Beatles’, nobody took him seriously. The market was now far too sophisticated and the audience far too fragmented – by age, class and region, as well as by taste and temperament – for any group to repeat the Liverpool quartet’s extraordinary commercial and critical success. Between, for example, Slade and Genesis, two emblematic bands of the early 1970s, there yawned a vast cultural chasm. Both enjoyed dressing up: Slade’s Noddy Holder usually sported a top hat decorated with silver discs, while Genesis’s Peter Gabriel wore costumes so ludicrous – fluorescent bat-wings, a flower-petal mask, a diamond helmet – that he would have made a first-class monster on Doctor Who. Beyond that, however, they had almost nothing in common. Holder was the son of a Wolverhampton window-cleaner, whose skinhead band had become the epitome of cheerful, unpretentious glam rock. Gabriel, on the other hand, was a former Charterhouse boy who claimed inspiration from J. R. R. Tolkien and Arthur C. Clarke and said that his twenty-three-minute epic ‘Supper’s Ready’ (1972) described ‘the ultimate cosmic battle for Armageddon between good and evil in which man is destroyed, but the deaths of countless thousands atone for mankind, reborn no longer as Homo Sapiens’. Never less than ambitious, Gabriel once remarked that his band’s ‘role as musicians … may well be providing bourgeois escapism’. What Noddy Holder would have thought of this can only be guessed at: he was content, he said, to be a ‘Black Country yobbo’.43
By this stage, pop music had already lost the exaggerated subversive, utopian associations of Swinging London and the Summer of Love. If anything, it had reverted to something very similar to the picture before the Beatles’ breakthrough in 1963: a bewildering kaleidoscope of singers and bands, competing for attention in a highly crowded but socially fractured market, with the singles charts often dominated by one-hit wonders and novelty records like Middle of the Road’s ‘Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep’ (1971), or the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards’ version of ‘Amazing Grace’, the biggest-selling single of 1972. And although bands like the prototypical heavy metal outfit Led Zeppelin – who refused to release singles, let alone appear on Top of the Pops – continued to make headlines for outlandishly bad behaviour, pop music in the age of Pink Floyd and Elton John seemed to have lost much of its ability to shock. By the end of 1973, the days when John Lennon and Mick Jagger had been media folk devils, hailed as champions of a new generation and voices of protest against the established moral order, seemed long gone. Looking back on a year that had produced Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells, Emerson, Lake and Palmer’s Brain Salad Surgery, Yes’s Tales from Topographic Oceans, Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, Genesis’s Selling England by the Pound and, hilariously, Rick Wakeman’s The Six Wives of Henry VIII, not even the most defiantly countercultural critic could deny that rock had become distinctly respectable. And when The Times was hailing Tales from Topographic Oceans as ‘the ultimate bridging of the gap between the music of the academy and the tunes of the discotheque’, and predicting that its ‘third movement’ would be ‘studied 25 years hence as a significant turning point in modern music’, then the Mods and Rockers really did seem like ancient history.44
In January 1974, when the glam-rockers the Sweet released their new single ‘Teenage Rampage’, its co-writer Nicky Chinn told Melody Maker that he was ‘trying to convey the changing behaviour of kids, who now more than ever before are going rampant’. Teenagers, he said, were ‘having a bigger effect on life than ever’ and ‘to ask whatever happened to the teenage dream is a load of cock’. The band’s guitarist Andy Scott, however, was rather less bullish. ‘We’ve only released the song for the sake of having a hit,’ he said bluntly, adding that he didn’t even like it himself. And when Melody Maker asked young music fans for their reaction to ‘Teenage Rampage’, it turned out that very few agreed with the 28-year-old Chinn. Many hated the teenage label. ‘I think of myself as a person, not as part of an anonymous horde,’ said Christine Harrison, 15, from Manchester. People like Chinn ‘put teenagers in a bad light’, said 16-year-old Ada McMahon from Edinburgh, adding that ‘parents are too easily influenced.’ Pop records were a ‘gross exploitation of teenagers’ views and feelings’, agreed Tim Potts from Newcastle, while Oldham’s Kevin Lee thought that adults who ‘use the word [teenage] for song titles should be treated with contempt’. It should be ‘a criminal offence,’ he added, ‘to cash in on the idiot hordes of 13 to 16-year olds who are brainwashed into thinking they’re the same just because their age group is mentioned’.
But the last word belongs to 15-year-old Steven Knight of Crouch Hill, London. The very mention of the word ‘teenager’, he said scornfully, merely made him think of surfboards and 1950s rock and roll. ‘I visualise a useless, worthless struggle of kids arguing with their parents as to how late they can stay out,’ he went on, ‘a struggle which they would soon grow out of and be ashamed of when reminded.’ Given that so many of the teenagers of 1974 would vote for Mrs Thatcher five years later, perhaps he was not far wrong.45
For a small minority of children and teenagers, life was very different from middle-class fantasies of suburban bliss. In 1970, when the Child Poverty Action Group claimed that 3 million children were growing up in poverty, many people objected that it had included families able to afford was
hing machines and televisions. But while no definition of poverty won universal agreement, other studies published that same year showed that many children were clearly blighted by their poor upbringing. An LSE study showed that one in five large families in London was living below the government’s official poverty level, some children even having to make do with coats instead of blankets in winter. A conference organized by the housing group Shelter produced the claim that 7 to 10 million Britons were ‘camped on, or down beyond, the boglands of poverty’, being shut out from the delights of the affluent society, deprived of luxuries and leisure, and forced to make do with welfare handouts, poor diets and damp, dilapidated council accommodation. And in January 1971, the chairman of the Child Poverty Action Group, the future Labour maverick Frank Field, issued a revised estimate that one million children grew up in families beneath an income level of £16 a week, which was the poverty line agreed by the government’s Supplementary Benefits Commission. More likely to be smacked by their exhausted parents, to suffer from illnesses, to have bad diets and bad teeth, they were also less likely to have help with their school work, to go on holidays and outings, and even to be read to at night. And for the unluckiest children, falling through the welfare net, disadvantage could turn into abuse. In 1973 the nation was horrified by the case of Maria Colwell, a 7-year-old girl battered to death by her stepfather after social services ignored more than thirty complaints from her Brighton council-house neighbours – and not the last tragedy of its kind.46
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