Ian versus Young Ian
Things We Didn’t Have in the 1970s
Part One
Health and Safety
Many people decry the nanny state and how health and safety regulation has constricted people’s lives. To give but one example, I could safely and healthily drink a cup of hot coffee without a lid on the cup but nowadays, takeaway coffee must be served in a cup with a lid on. I once protested that I’d be fine. The lady serving looked at me.
‘Well you say that, but what if you pour the coffee all down your face?’
‘Then I’m a fucking idiot,’ I said. ‘And I deserve a burnt face.’
She stared at me.
‘More than that,’ I continued, ‘I resent the inference that I might.’
I feel like I was walking towards the coffee shop and they were looking at me and whispering to each other, ‘Get the lids out. This bloke will hurt himself.’ She was unbending. I removed the lid as soon as I left the shop, like the maverick that I am.
In the 1970s, we had both health and safety but they weren’t considered a joint enterprise. Consequently, the most innocent of activities involved a degree of danger. Children’s playgrounds were built almost entirely on concrete. If you came off the swings and landed on your head and got brain damage, it was seen as natural selection. That was how we weeded out the stupid people.
Chapter Two
But you’d better listen man, because the kids know where it’s at
‘You dirty fucker.’
Like a lot of teenagers back then, hearing these three words, uttered on an early evening TV show in late 1976, changed my life. I’d heard swearing before of course. I went to an inner-London comprehensive school. I went to football most weeks. I also lived with my parents. But I’d never heard swearing on live TV just after six o’clock on a weekday evening. It wasn’t considered suitable to broadcast someone calling someone else a dirty fucker, even if he probably was, while people were having their tea. It still isn’t. I never normally watched the Today programme but for some reason I’d decided to tune in and I was tremendously impressed. I thought that I may have to watch it more often. As someone who was just starting out on my swearing career, it was a huge shot in the arm to see people not much older than myself swearing on national telly at teatime.
My mother was also watching and she wasn’t quite as impressed as I was.
‘That’s not nice,’ she said.
What she couldn’t see was that that was entirely the point. That was why I liked them. Because they upset my mother. She tutted loudly and then went back to her Woman’s Own. If she could have been bothered, she would’ve changed channels but the programme finished straight away. Our TV was tuned to ITV most of the time anyway and there was nothing much on the other side. Plus turning the TV over involved getting up from the sofa and pushing a button on the telly, so ITV was where it often stayed.
In hindsight, it’s easy to see how things went so wrong. Bill Grundy was a mainstream TV presenter who was used to fronting an early evening magazine programme presenting upbeat little items of ‘news’ from around the country. Stories about a farmer who, after his combined harvester had overturned had walked away without a scratch; that sort of thing. He would never have encountered anything like this. He was meant to interview the band Queen, which would’ve made interesting telly in itself. Bill Grundy and Freddie Mercury would not be soulmates. But Queen cancelled and The Sex Pistols stepped in at the last minute. The band turned up drunk and could barely contain their contempt. The feeling was mutual. They had an entourage which included a man wearing a swastika armband, another thing my mother thought was not nice; she may have had a point there. Also with the band was a very young Siouxsie Sioux, who said to Grundy that she’d always wanted to meet him. He said they should meet afterwards. It looked predatory enough then but now it’s positively creepy. The interview rapidly descended from there, with Grundy encouraging the band to use worse and worse language. It ended with the credits rolling, the entourage dancing to the theme tune and Steve Jones calling Grundy a dirty fucker.
The reaction the next day was predictable. The newspapers were apoplectic. These people had to be stopped. Filth seemed to be the operative word. There were headlines like ‘The Filth and The Fury’ and variations like ‘TV Fury at Rock Cult Filth’. (It was only eight years after Charles Manson so everyone was still a bit on edge for anything that might seem a bit cult-like. To me, there’s a world of difference between smoking, drinking and swearing on daytime TV and human sacrifice, but perhaps that’s how it starts.) It was reported that a man was so incensed by the language that he had put his foot through his television rather than listen to ‘that filth’. I imagine that when he calmed down and surveyed his smashed up TV, he might have uttered the odd filthy word himself.
As the scandal rumbled on, there were earnest articles tutting over the bad language and moralising about the drop in standards. Meanwhile, teenagers everywhere bought the Sex Pistols single ‘Anarchy in the U.K.’. And the record companies, suddenly alert to any possibility that might make them money, rounded up any group of pissed-off looking young men with even a modicum of musical ability, and quite a few without even that, and shoved them into a recording studio.
The whole thing was a massive shock to the music business. It needed it. Finding good music back then was much more difficult than it is now. I lived in a musically illiterate house. My mother didn’t listen to music much by then. My father liked musicals and was a big fan of the tenor Mario Lanza. If I think hard enough, I can still hear ‘Only a Rose’ blasting out of the stereo.
I had an eclectic collection. ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’ by Paul McCartney and Wings was the first record I ever bought. (Give me a break, I was only nine.) I had ‘Tiger Feet’ by Mud, ‘Ballroom Blitz’ by Sweet and ‘California Man’ by The Move. I bought all the Slade singles and I still listen to some of them today. I had a couple of the Top of the Pops compilation albums. These were collections of hit songs recorded by cover bands. There was a sexy young woman on the cover wearing hot pants or another fashion item of the day. I’m prepared to admit that I might have bought the albums because of that.
Mainstream shows like Top of the Pops (and we only ever watched mainstream shows in my house) churned out a mixture of classic soul tunes and all sorts of terrible rubbish. Brass bands, girls’ school choirs, someone called Lieutenant Pigeon. ‘Save Your Kisses for Me’ by Brotherhood of Man had been number one for what felt like my entire childhood. The radio stations were not much better. Radio 2 played easy listening tunes. I didn’t find them easy to listen to at all. Radio 1 played chart hits. That meant a constant diet of anodyne, saccharine rubbish interspersed with the odd decent tune. Plus you had to put up with the DJs who were for the most part wankers, or in some cases, much much worse. Simon Bates, who I later met at a gig and turned out to be a very nice bloke, had Our Tune. He told incredibly sad stories about people with terminal illness (it’s possible that there aren’t many happy stories about people with terminal illness), some of whom would no doubt have been happier to die rather than listen to any more stories about other people with terminal illness. And the tunes they’d request would be maudlin and sentimental nonsense like ‘I’ve Never Been to Me’ by Charlene (‘I’ve been undressed by Kings and I’ve seen some things that a woman aint s’posed to see’ might be my favourite ridiculous lyric of all time), or ‘Seasons in the Sun’ by Terry Jacks. Personally, if I’d suffered a bereavement, I’d want something a bit more upbeat. Noel Edmonds presented the Breakfast show and he thought he was much funnier than he actually was. So did Dave Lee Travis. He had a jingle that went ‘Quack Quack Oops’. No wonder there was social unrest.
The only show that was really worth listening to was at ten in the evening. John Peel was different from the other Radio 1 DJs. He didn’t seem to feel the need to sound enthusiastic. If he liked something, he said so but he didn’t make a big deal about