 
A
decade where the best selling albums came from K-Tel
and Ronco - The same people who brought us such labour-saving
devices as the Fishin' Magician and the Buttonmatic.
A decade where adverts for tobacco
featured semi-naked women chasing a bald bloke down the street,
and cigars were advertised by rampant women swinging through the
jungle.
The psychedelics had chuffed off
and the Woodstock generation had gone
their own ways, pausing only to cash the cheque.
The Vietnam War had killed off all
those naïve ideas about youth culture changing anything as surely
as if the napalm had been dropped on them, and now the world
belonged to the pop star, the football star and any local lad with
a Raleigh Chopper or Ford
Capri.
 In
Britain, everything had ended, as it had started, with The
Beatles - They split up and, as they did, so too did the rest
of youth culture. John sat
in bed. Paul did a spot of
farming. George went off
and saved Bangladesh, and Ringo,
bless him, just sat on the platform and waited for Thomas The Tank
Engine to pull in.
School dinners showed little
sign of improving, while glitter and glam permeated everything we
touched: Clothes, music, cars, sweets and even the telly.
The Seventies were about having a good time all of the time.
People were too busy having sex, getting drunk and/or stoned,
eating fish and chips, smoking Woodbine and posing in front of
their bedroom mirrors with tennis racquets to worry about the
underlying problems.
But while all was glitter-coated and flared denim on the
surface, underneath was a mixed bag of unemployment, three-day
weeks, Thatcher the Milk Snatcher,
Northern Ireland and bovver-boy football hooligans on Inter-City
trains.
 And in 1976 as the last Socialist dream was fading in the
reflection of Jim Callaghan's
spectacles and Farrah Fawcett was
flogging shampoo in the US, Johnny
Rotten and Joe Strummer were
spitting in the eye of a storm which would be whipped up into a
full-scale social revolution by a few swear words on tea-time
television.
And
almost as soon as the mirror balls had started spinning in discos
all over the Western World, a new movement was born - the boy
looked at Johnny, and liked what he saw.
Clothes were ripped, make-up was
plastered on eyes with a trowel, cheeks were pierced with
safety-pins . . . and nobody smiled anymore. The simple pleasures
of glitter and gloss were all too quickly forgotten.
From Klackers and Curly-Wurly's
to The Sex Pistols and Anarchy In The UK via Glitter, Glam
and Disco: The seventies remain
our favourite era and given half a chance and a bottle of Old
Spice we'd be back there again before you could say "Shang-A-Lang".
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