Crisis? What Crisis?

by Alwyn Turner

  Because of its textual nature, Forum was generally considered to be a middle-class publication and therefore seldom of great interest to the law. Indeed it was never clear quite what was of interest to the law, since the legislation and the legal precedents were so confused and contradictory, but the fact that the law was interested could not be doubted. There were, estimated the Observer in 1971, around a hundred shops selling nothing but pornography, half of them in London and thus under the purview of the Obscene Publications Squad of the Metropolitan Police, colloquially known as the dirty books squad. The real profits here were to be made on imported material from Sweden and Denmark, as David Sullivan, the future newspaper proprietor and owner of Birmingham City Football Club, pointed out in 1975: ‘I was offered 10,000 Scandinavian magazines for £2,500. That’s five shillings a book. Well, they could be sold for not less than £3 to £5, so you’ve got a factor there of twelve or twenty times the buying price.’ The potential profit on the deal (which Sullivan declined) was £47,500. In such a world it was hardly surprising that there was no shortage of people looking for their own cut of the action, a fact which the Met Commissioner, Robert Mark, the man who did much to clean up Scotland Yard, couldn’t fail to notice: ‘The real fear of the pornographers was not of the courts but of harassment, either by strong-arm men seeking protection money or by police doing, in effect, the same thing.’

  When, however, the fact was revealed that members of the dirty books squad were taking massive backhanders from the proprietors of sex shops (and, in the case of the squad’s operational chief, even offering to write for the spanking magazine Janus), the public and the courts were shocked. The Sweeney might show Flying Squad officers mixing with the criminal classes, but there was nothing in the series to indicate that, for example, James Humphreys, a leading Soho porn baron, ‘was considered a suitable guest to be invited to the annual dinner of the Flying Squad in the autumn of 1970’. In a high-profile series of trials, five officers were sentenced in 1976, and a further ten the following year, for terms of up to twelve years, having been found guilty of conspiracy and other offences relating to bribery and corruption in the Soho porn industry.

  With the association between pornography, the criminal underworld and bent coppers now in the public domain, an attempt to clean up the trade was launched. Several leading publishers came together to form the Kingsley committee in 1977 in the hope of regulating the industry on a voluntary basis; as a spokesman said: ‘We have been going too far recently. We feel it is time to put our own house in order before the authorities impose their censorship upon us.’ The resultant board of control was chaired by one of Whitehouse’s long-standing foes, John Trevelyan, who had been a liberal figure at the BBFC. In reality, though, the whole enterprise might already have been too late for those who remembered the mega-profits that had been enjoyed at the start of the decade; a report the same year claimed that sales of porn magazines were down by 20 per cent.

  But even if the feverish days of expansion were passing, there was some compensation in that pornography had by this stage became an established fact of British society, with the image of the consumer having moved on from earlier perceptions. In the television series Budgie, the eponymous hero Ronald ‘Budgie’ Bird (Adam Faith) spent much of his time hanging around a Soho bookshop, where in a 1971 episode, he encounters one of his former schoolteachers, Marcus Lake (John Franklyn-Robbins). ‘It’s a drug, pornography’s a drug,’ explains Lake, trying to justify his habit as much to himself as to Budgie. ‘I’m not an adulterer. I don’t visit prostitutes. I don’t molest little boys or little girls. I don’t make obscene telephone calls. I don’t expose myself on canal banks. I have my secret, expensive little vice. And I fight it, I fight it.’ A more extreme portrayal of the same attitude was to be found in Last Bus to Woodstock, the first novel featuring the detective Inspector Morse, as well as a character named John Sanders, who shared Lake’s addiction: ‘He realizes well enough that his dedication to pornography is coarsening whatever sensibilities he may once have possessed; that his craving is settling like some cancerous, malignant growth upon his mind, a mind crying out with ever-increasing desperation for its instant, morbid gratification. But he can do nothing about it.’ As Morse puts it: ‘He’s sick, Lewis, and he knows he’s sick . . .’

  These, however, were extreme cases. Already a more tolerant attitude to the typical user was being expressed. When, in 1972, Coronation Street’s Stan Ogden was accused of being a peeping Tom, his wife Hilda reassures him that she doesn’t believe him capable of such offences: ‘I know you look at pin-ups and things like that, but then all men do, don’t they? But that’s different.’ By 1977 even a mainstream sitcom like George and Mildred felt comfortable addressing the issue, in an episode where Mildred inadvertently donates George’s collection of magazines – with such splendid titles as Nudge, Wink and Titter – to the vicar’s jumble sale, much to her husband’s dismay. ‘It took me years, that collection,’ he whines. ‘Be hard to replace some of them. Especially the Swedish ones.’ Even Jeffrey Fourmile next door is seen sharing his indulgence, and defending it to his own wife: ‘It’s not so much people like you or I,’ he argues. ‘I mean, we can handle it. It’s the working class – salt of the earth, goes without saying – but they are easily inflamed. They don’t have the training and self-control that we have.’

  In political terms, of course, the whole issue of pornography remained a minefield to be avoided if at all possible, save by the most courageous. The great liberalizing moves of the 1960s had come when Roy Jenkins was home secretary, but his successor, Jim Callaghan, was much more concerned with the world outside fashionable London circles. ‘What worries me about the libertarians is that they may lose our supporters,’ he had mused; ‘the people in the Cardiff back streets who I know and feel at home with.’ He was not alone in his reservations, but it was still something of a surprise when Keith Joseph, as a senior front-bench politician, explicitly paid tribute to Mary Whitehouse in his ‘human stock’ speech at Edgbaston: ‘We can see in her a shining example of what one person can do single-handedly when inspired by faith and compassion,’ he declared. ‘Look at the scale of the opposing forces. On the one side, the whole of the new establishment with their sharp words and sneers poised; against them stood this one middle-aged woman.’

  In fact the conflict was somewhat greater than this; Whitehouse had had to endure more than ‘sharp words and sneers’. The loathing she engendered was comparable to that inspired by Tony Benn, and she suffered much the same experience of obscene phone calls, death threats and media snooping on her children. The fact that she survived, despite her lack of preparedness for such hostility, was testament to the courage of the long-distance crusader. ‘This is the Cross,’ she wrote in her diary; ‘to realize there is no glamour, no appreciation to be asked or expected, nothing but ridicule, pain and loss.’ One didn’t have to share her obsession with obscenity to recognize that, like Benn, she was something of a heroic figure.

  Joseph’s endorsement of Whitehouse on behalf of the Conservative Party was formalized when William Whitelaw, the deputy leader, spoke at VALA’s 1978 conference. ‘There will always be those who regard any action by the State to protect its citizens and maintain standards of society as unjustified censorship and interference,’ he said. ‘Such people regard as antiquated and prudish prigs those, among whom I include myself, who believe that we have a duty to conserve the moral standards on which our society has been based, and so preserve them for future generations.’

  The real prize, of course, would have been the unequivocal backing of Margaret Thatcher, and here there were some grounds for hope. Her voting record on the liberalizing bills of the late ’60s was mixed but promising: she had supported the legalizing of homosexuality and abortion, but opposed the divorce reforms and the abolition of capital punishment. This latter position was entirely in accord with what she boasted was her one rebellion against the party whip, when she had voted in 1961 for the r
eintroduction of ‘birching or caning for young violent offenders’. Even so, her mostly tacit support for Whitehouse – the two women did meet and shared many of the same views – appeared to be based more on the common cultural assumptions of a decent, Christian society than on any active engagement with the issues that so troubled VALA. Indeed, while Whitehouse was only too aware of the failings of the flesh, a fact that helped make her so powerful a voice, Thatcher seldom gave the impression that she had entirely mastered the moral brief. When in 1973 Earl Jellicoe, the Tory leader of the House of Lords, resigned after admitting to having used prostitutes, it was reported that she had asked her permanent secretary at the education department in naive amazement: ‘Do men really pay for that kind of thing?’ For those who sought the rolling back of the permissive society, it was not an entirely auspicious comment.

  9

  Nostalgia

  ‘Driving me backwards’

  JUAN: Remember, we opened in 1974. That was a long time ago. It was the heyday of the elegant renaissance – Bryan Ferry in his white dinner jacket, a great era.

  Howard Schuman, Rock Follies (1976)

  TOM BATES: I simply want the world to stop just where it is. And go back a bit.

  Dennis Potter, Brimstone and Treacle (1976)

  I guess I really learned a lot since then,

  Cause I can really do it now it’s back again.

  The Rubettes, ‘I Can Do It’ (1975)

  As Britain drifted into crisis, three of the country’s most creative and innovative rock musicians appeared to take a step backwards, recording albums that consisted entirely of cover versions: David Bowie’s Pin-Ups, Bryan Ferry’s These Foolish Things and John Lennon’s Rock ’n’ Roll (the first two were released in 1973, while the third – containing tracks from sessions in that year – did not emerge until 1975). The motivations behind the three records, however, were quite distinct. Lennon’s album was an act of simple homage and affection, revisiting the records of his adolescence, the first-generation rock sounds that he had fallen in love with, while Ferry’s eclectic exploration of the history of popular songs, stripped of their original context, had the effect of establishing an alternative, solo career, one with better long-term prospects than his arty day job in Roxy Music could ever provide.

  Bowie, on the other hand, was doing something very different. The music he covered on Pin-Ups was that of his near-contemporaries, the bands that – in his fantasies – he would have liked to consider his peers when he was starting his career. Three of the songs date from 1964, the year he released his first single, with all but one of the remainder from 1965–66. This was a harking back to the very peak of ’60s creativity, a time when Britain’s pop culture was at its most optimistic and confident, when mod briefly ruled the world of cool in the shape of the Who, the Yardbirds, the Kinks and the Pretty Things. The cut-off point of 1967 (the Pink Floyd’s ‘See Emily Play’, included to provide financial support for its drug-damaged composer, Syd Barrett) was significant, for that was the year when the peacock-proud pantheon of Swinging London began to lose its sense of progress, as the Beatles adopted antique uniforms and music hall elements on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, as the influence of Aubrey Beardsley sparked a reawakening of interest in art nouveau and as The Forsyte Saga became the BBC’s biggest drama series. It was also when the wheels came off Harold Wilson’s modernizing bandwagon, the year of his ‘pound in your pocket’ devaluation of the currency and of the rejection – again – of Britain’s entry into the EEC. In December 1967 Biba moved from the mini- to the maxi-skirt, and the fashion press reported that hemlines were falling ‘as swiftly as the pound sterling’.

  This turn to the past continued for a while to spark artistic exploration, but it also suggested a certain nervousness, a loss of faith in the present and of hope for the future. Over the next few years, the element of nostalgia in popular culture continued to grow, so that by the time Bowie released Pin-Ups the album looked as though it were part of the prevailing mood; in fact, though, by providing a reminder of the last time that British pop had been entirely forward-looking, it was precisely the opposite – an implicit rejection of the revivalist trend, an attempt to reconnect to the creative impulses of a more optimistic era.

  Nonetheless, the nostalgia continued. The rock & roll revival that was heralded in Britain by Dave Edmunds’s #1 cover of the Smiley Lewis song ‘I Hear You Knocking’, and that was manifest in a 1972 gig at Wembley Stadium (the first rock show there) starring Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard, became an established feature of cultural life. A new self-awareness of rock’s own history was now evident, reflected in David Hare’s play Teeth ’n’ Smiles, first staged in 1975 but set in the dying days of the ’60s; as a band falls apart, their manager recalls the glory years: ‘It’ll never get better than 1956,’ he reflects. ‘Tat. Utter tat. But inspired. The obvious repeated many times. Simple things said well. Then along came those boys who could really play. They spoilt it of course. Ruined it.’

  At its peak in 1972–73 the glam rock movement led by Bowie and Roxy Music had drawn on this mood, though it blended its love of 1950s rhythms and its pre-Beatles celebration of artificial stardom with a diversity of other influences, from Dylanesque wordplay to Warholian pop art to Berlin cabaret. But as the moment passed, and the leading artists departed for fresh territory, what remained was little more than a pale pastiche of the past, with groups such as Showaddywaddy, the Rubettes and Mud dominating the singles charts with recreations of American high school pop from the Kennedy years. The most successful of these post-glam bands were the Bay City Rollers, whose four top 10 singles in 1974 provoked a wave of teen hysteria (swiftly named Rollermania, in the hope of evoking Beatlemania) and were followed the next year by a brace of #1 hits, starting with the old Four Seasons song ‘Bye Bye Baby’. This was a perfectly fine pop record, and in its own way it did mark a new era for the band – not least because they actually played the music on it, the earlier hits having been the work of seasoned session men like Clem Cattini and Chris Rae – but the choice of material merely maintained the image conjured up by their previous songwriting team of Bill Martin and Phil Coulter: ‘Remember (Sha La La)’, ‘Shang-a-Lang’, ‘Summerlove Sensation’. So adept had the British music industry become at reworking the history of American pop that when Brian Wilson heard the Beach Boys-derived sounds of ‘Beach Baby’ (1974) by studio band the First Class, he assumed it was an original piece of Californian pop from the early ’60s, a misunderstanding which session singer Tony Burrows cited as one of his proudest moments.

  The fact that the Rollers got to #1 with an old song was hardly noteworthy in 1975. Within weeks it was followed at the top of the singles charts by Mud’s slowed-down version of Buddy Holly’s ‘Oh Boy’, and by Windsor Davies and Don Estelle’s comic rework of the Inkspots’ ‘Whispering Grass’. In between those two came Tammy Wynette’s ‘Stand by Your Man’, a track recorded seven years earlier, signalling another trend of the year – the reissued record from the ’60s – which brought new life to hits by Chris Farlowe, the Small Faces and even Bowie (‘Space Oddity’ finally gave him a #1, six years after its original release). Even older stars, who thought their chart career had ended with the Beatles, also found their way back to the Top of the Pops studio in the persons of Chubby Checker, Duane Eddy and Brian Hyland. And for those who found all this too modern, there was that Christmas a debut hit single for Laurel and Hardy, while the hippest clubs were busy exploring a Glenn Miller revival. It was also a golden age for novelty singles, with Telly Savalas, Billy Connolly and Typically Tropical reaching the top with ‘If’, ‘D.I.V.O.R.C.E.’ and ‘Barbados’ respectively. Meanwhile Englebert Humperdinck, Jim Reeves and Perry Como all had greatest hits albums at #1 that year, followed in 1976 by Roy Orbison, Slim Whitman, Bert Weedon and Glen Campbell, and in 1977 by Frank Sinatra, Johnny Mathis and Connie Francis. It was entirely in keeping with the spirit of the times that 5,000 latter-day Teddy boys should
march on Broadcasting House in May 1976, demanding that Radio One play more rock & roll.

  What all this amounted to was a crisis of confidence in the future of British pop music. Ten years earlier it had been a radical, vital art form, the driving force that sold British culture around the world – even three or four years earlier, glam had restored some much needed vigour to the format of the 7" single – but now it seemed moribund, sinking into an inherited dotage. (So desperate had the situation become that the nation’s teenyboppers began to turn their attention to the Swedish tennis player Björn Borg, upsetting traditionalists at Wimbledon by screaming at their idol.) There were new acts being promoted, but there was a distinct nervousness in the approach of the record companies; John Miles, who had built a local cult following in Newcastle with singles on the independent Orange label, was signed to Decca in 1975 and launched with Rebel, an album whose title and cover photograph – by Terry O’Neill – saddled him with a gimmicky James Dean image that was entirely inappropriate and from which he struggled to escape. The one truly revolutionary hit of 1975 was Kraftwerk’s ‘Autobahn’, imported from Germany, and even that was at the time regarded as yet another novelty.

  Rock was not alone in being in thrall to the past. It was unusual perhaps only in that its own timeline was so short (barely two decades), while much of the rest of British culture had considerably longer memories. A new-found and seemingly insatiable public appetite for nostalgia could be discovered at every turn. On television there was a ten-year waiting list to be in the audience for the music hall revival show The Good Old Days; the hugely popular ITV drama series Upstairs, Downstairs spent five years recreating the world of a wealthy family in Belgravia between 1903 and 1930; and Dennis Potter’s Pennies from Heaven attracted critical acclaim and sizeable audiences with its characters miming to popular hits of the 1930s, even though Potter claimed to hate nostalgia, calling it ‘a very second-order emotion’. In the world of publishing, Alf Wight became a best-selling author under the pen name James Herriot, with episodic, autobiographical tales about his life as a vet in Yorkshire from 1939 onwards that spawned movie and TV adaptations, and Edith Holden, who had died as a little-known artist in 1920, became a posthumous star when her notebooks from 1907 were published as The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady. In fashion, Laura Ashley’s rustic romanticism took her fabrics business from a turnover of a third of a million pounds at the decade’s start to £25 million by its end, and even Vivienne Westwood, later to be canonized as the patron saint of enfants terribles everywhere, started in 1971 with the shop Let It Rock, selling sacred relics from 1950s Britain. Similarly the ceramics firm Portmeirion Pottery, which had achieved a certain vogue in the 1960s with its ‘daring originality and confidence in its own tastes’, really became a household name in 1972 when its founder, Susan Williams-Ellis, bought a copy of Thomas Green’s nineteenth-century book The Universal Herbal and began to reuse its colour plates, printing them on tea and dinner sets; the resulting range, known as Botanic Garden, was one of the successes of the decade (‘shops find it difficult to keep enough stock to satisfy the demand’, reported the press), bringing old-world charm to the suburban dining table.