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Seventies: The Sights, Sounds and Ideas of a Brilliant Decade
When people think of culture in the 1970s they usually conjure up a confetti of kitsch, a jumble of trash in which pet rocks vie for space with the Partridge Family to the tune of the Bay City Rollers. It was the decade that taste forgot, a cultural wasteland compared to the decade that preceded it or those that have followed it.
480 pages, Paperback
First published September 29, 2006
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About the author
Howard Sounes
20 books118 followersBiographer of Bob Dylan, Charles Bukowski and Paul McCartney. Also histories and true crime - Fred & Rose, Heist - with The Fred West Tapes new in 2025.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
February 9, 2025
L'ho cercato per anni, trovato su vinted a 3 euro, ero pazza di gioia.
Mi aspettavo altro, è una carrellata dal 1970 al 1979 di annedoti legati a film, musicisti, fotografi, ecc.
Credevo fosse un saggio, una analisi di un periodo storico estremamente fecondo, non questo saltellare fra un disco, un film, un libro ed altro.
Peccato.
Mi aspettavo altro, è una carrellata dal 1970 al 1979 di annedoti legati a film, musicisti, fotografi, ecc.
Credevo fosse un saggio, una analisi di un periodo storico estremamente fecondo, non questo saltellare fra un disco, un film, un libro ed altro.
Peccato.
June 15, 2021
A trawl through the culture of a decade that I remember with great fondness. It goes all over the place; from Monty Python to the Sydney Opera House through Peanuts, Jaws, Bowie, Bob Marley, Woody Allen, Germaine Greer, Apocalypse Now, David Hockney & The Sex Pistols. Immensely enjoyable.
March 8, 2016
As a survey of the 1970s, this doesn't really hang together, being more a loose sequence of journalistic essays on aspects of that decade which its author considers significant. He claims in his introduction to offer it as a counterbalance to those inane "Rock'n'roll Years"-style travesties of recent history which simplify, abstract, and package memory in superficial categories without context, yet by its nature his own project is doomed to the same fate. Without an overarching historical theme, it can only be a series of highly-selective reflections on almost-random aspects of social and cultural life between 1970 and 1979, and although a clear preference emerges for certain areas of that period's phenomena - film, popular music, architecture, writing and painting - these are limited both in scope and depth, and are geographically and culturally-abstracted (i.e. they refer only to UK, US and, in one sole case each, Australian and Soviet experiences.
For example, only three (or four) visual artists are dealt with in anything resembling depth: David Hockney, Andy Warhol and Gilbert & George (four, or five, if you count Terry Gilliam of Monty Python). This hardly gives an idea of the cultural complexity or the "brilliance" (a word which Sounes keeps, annoyingly, returning to) of the decade's artistic life, and completely neglects the minimalism, abstraction, multimedia and (G&G excepted) performance art that were so richly controversial at the time. Although the book does not pretend to be an art criticism text, it is nevertheless selling its subjects (and their 'brilliance') short by failing to place them in anything but the most rudimentary cultural and historical context.
The same goes for all the other areas covered by Sounes's essays. In fact, the best piece in the whole collection is the one which deals with Francis Ford Coppola's great film "Apocalypse Now", for two simple reasons: it focuses entirely on the one subject, and it retells so many of the myriad good anecdotes its lengthy making generated.
It's also, as far as I can see, reasonably accurate. There are irritating lapses of fact throughout the rest of the book which undermine it, some trivial (the Monty Python sketch being filmed at Torquay when the team discovered the Gleneagles Hotel was "Scott of the Sahara", *not* "the Antarctic" - that juxtaposition being the actual joke - and some which miss the history to suit the author's thesis. For example, "Jaws" (novel and film) is not the pure pulp plot Sounes attributes to it, being roughly based on Ibsen's "An Enemy of the People".
There's nothing particularly wrong with an author bundling together a book made of individual impressions of aspects of a particular period, but the mistake made here is to present it as somehow a comprehensive explanation or exegesis of that period. That Sounes aspires to do this is present in what look like rather desperate attempts to make links between people featured, which are tenuous to say the least. These include attributing some sort of synchronicity to Hockney and Gilliam both being familiar with Renaissance pieces in the National Gallery in London, to Diane Arbus and Woody Allen both occasionally walking across Central Park in New York, and my favourite, to Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Bob Marley both considering themselves outsiders... There's also a degree of playing fast-and-loose with what qualifies as 'the 70s', particularly where long-term projects such as architecture are concerned. Thus, the World Trade Center and Sydney Opera House, both built in the previous decade, are '70s' by dint of being opened then; the Lloyd's Building, which wasn't begun until 1980, is 70s because its plans were published the year before !
So, a brave try, and entertaining enough for the most part, though if I have to read another account of the rise and fall of the Sex Pistols (which occupies three chapters out of 28 here - surely disproportionate ?) I think I will spit.
For example, only three (or four) visual artists are dealt with in anything resembling depth: David Hockney, Andy Warhol and Gilbert & George (four, or five, if you count Terry Gilliam of Monty Python). This hardly gives an idea of the cultural complexity or the "brilliance" (a word which Sounes keeps, annoyingly, returning to) of the decade's artistic life, and completely neglects the minimalism, abstraction, multimedia and (G&G excepted) performance art that were so richly controversial at the time. Although the book does not pretend to be an art criticism text, it is nevertheless selling its subjects (and their 'brilliance') short by failing to place them in anything but the most rudimentary cultural and historical context.
The same goes for all the other areas covered by Sounes's essays. In fact, the best piece in the whole collection is the one which deals with Francis Ford Coppola's great film "Apocalypse Now", for two simple reasons: it focuses entirely on the one subject, and it retells so many of the myriad good anecdotes its lengthy making generated.
It's also, as far as I can see, reasonably accurate. There are irritating lapses of fact throughout the rest of the book which undermine it, some trivial (the Monty Python sketch being filmed at Torquay when the team discovered the Gleneagles Hotel was "Scott of the Sahara", *not* "the Antarctic" - that juxtaposition being the actual joke - and some which miss the history to suit the author's thesis. For example, "Jaws" (novel and film) is not the pure pulp plot Sounes attributes to it, being roughly based on Ibsen's "An Enemy of the People".
There's nothing particularly wrong with an author bundling together a book made of individual impressions of aspects of a particular period, but the mistake made here is to present it as somehow a comprehensive explanation or exegesis of that period. That Sounes aspires to do this is present in what look like rather desperate attempts to make links between people featured, which are tenuous to say the least. These include attributing some sort of synchronicity to Hockney and Gilliam both being familiar with Renaissance pieces in the National Gallery in London, to Diane Arbus and Woody Allen both occasionally walking across Central Park in New York, and my favourite, to Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Bob Marley both considering themselves outsiders... There's also a degree of playing fast-and-loose with what qualifies as 'the 70s', particularly where long-term projects such as architecture are concerned. Thus, the World Trade Center and Sydney Opera House, both built in the previous decade, are '70s' by dint of being opened then; the Lloyd's Building, which wasn't begun until 1980, is 70s because its plans were published the year before !
So, a brave try, and entertaining enough for the most part, though if I have to read another account of the rise and fall of the Sex Pistols (which occupies three chapters out of 28 here - surely disproportionate ?) I think I will spit.
August 24, 2012
If one would be completely unaware of the great culture of the 1970s, this book might be a small revelation. However, for me this was an interesting read about the personal, perhaps rather snobbish, preferences of mr Sounes. It was interesting, quite well written and it had lots of interesting new tidbits of information about subjects that I thought I knew quite a bit about, but it still gave of a feeling of only scratching the surface of this fabulous decade from a certain perspective: an Anglican (not much was untouched by anglophone influence, even the one building in France was designed by an Englishman), popculture connoisseur with certain tastes perhaps hipsterishly trying to veer a bit left from the mainstream, but still coming up with mostly well known examples. That being said, this was a very readable work that delivered its promises in many ways something that a more ambitious project wouldn't probably have been able to do. And my review and experience might, of course, have been different had I not been at least as snobbish connoisseur myself. :)
July 26, 2009
This book just hit the spot for me, because I was THERE.
Space-hoppers, Ker-plunk, Etch-a-Sketch, Bill Grundy and the Sex Pistols.... I was THERE.
Space-hoppers, Ker-plunk, Etch-a-Sketch, Bill Grundy and the Sex Pistols.... I was THERE.
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July 27, 2011Adequate - a collection of anecdotes, rather than the Grand Unifying Theory concerning the all round goodness of the 1970s, as promised on the cover. Never mind...
November 4, 2014
This was a very pleasant read. The topics chosen through the chronology and the vivid descriptions of people and places brought the feeling of the 1970s back to life.
February 24, 2024
I could have given this 4 stars more but the fact that so much about 70s music is mentioned and yet nothing about 'Queen' or 'Freddie Mercury' is spoken is a blasphemy to me.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews