Grumpy Old Man on the Music of the 70s

I'm a grumpy old man in my mid-50's and, like many of my friends, have a soft spot for the music of the 70's - my teenage years. We tend to romanticise the era and its music, waxing lyrical on the proto-metal groups (Black Sabbath, Deep Purple and Uriah Heep), the mould-breaking glam rockers (David Bowie, Marc Bolan & T-Rex, Kiss), some of the pompous Prog Rock acts (Focus, Pavlov's Dog, Rick Wakeman, Led Zeppelin), the punk ground-breakers who blew it all away at the end of the decade, in under 2 minutes 59 (The Sex Pistols, The Clash, The Ramones, Ian Dury & the Blockheads) and the electronica that came of age in parallel to it all (Kraftwerk, Gary Numan, et. al).

Nice. All good and well. But - fucking hell - it wasn't all good music in the 70's. And being isolated in a pariah state at the arse end of Africa, under draconian international sanctions and with censored, state-controlled radio made it even worse. At the time, I hated the effing-70's. We had no TV, very little international exposure and on the radio, we didn't hear any of the bands I've mentioned above. The politically-approved dross (disguised as music) that we were fed, was abysmal and the only way that I heard about the music scene in the rest of the world was via the large antenna I constructed on the roof of my parent's home to pick up the feint "LM Radio" signal from Mozambique, and the UK music magazines that I encouraged my mother to buy for me, in lieu of a slice of my pocket money.

It was through these publications that I got a peek into what was happening beyond the borders of apartheid, and where I first read about metal, Bowie, Bolan, Slade, Kiss, punk, Marley, Tosh and reggae (although I had no idea how to pronounce the latter as I'd never heard anyone actually speaking the word)!

So just how bad was mainstream music in the 70's? I trip to my local charity shop a couple of weekends ago quickly reminded me of the crap that your average man in the street was listening to back then. For 99 pence I bought an original 1975 pressing of "16 Chart Hits - Volume 19"...purely because I saw that it included Kraftwerk's seminal track "Autobahn".

So I got the album home and, while cleaning it up, noticed that the disk did not match the sleeve - instead I'd got "Volume 17" with only one vaguely redeeming track, namely BTO's "Rolling on Down the Highway". But surely there must have been at least a few more listenable tracks on the disk?

Dear friends - if you want to remind yourself just how bad Joe Public's music was in the 1970's, dig up one of these old albums. The music was formulaic, insipid, honey‐lipped, mealy‐mouthed crap! Sickening...and it flashed me back to those brown corduroy bell-bottoms that I hated so much! Urrgh - get out of there. Come to think of it, in an era where manufactured boy/girl groups dominate the airwaves, we've probably gone full circle. Utterly depressing, and I look forward to the next Sex Pistols / Nirvana to step up and kick the music industry in the bollocks :-)

Cheers, MAlfaRK ©