Dan Atkinson's always excellent blog included this weekend a couple of fine quotes from fiction in the early 1970s about the way that the maverick was being forced out by unadventurous corporate thinking.
In Regan, the pilot TV movie that led to The Sweeney, a senior police officer spells it out: 'Jack, the days of the one-man band are over; now we're an orchestra.'
Len Deighton's novel, Yesterday's Spy (1975), strikes much the same note: '"The days of the entrepreneur are over, Steve," I told him. "Now it's the organisation man who gets the Christmas bonus and the mileage allowance. People like you are called 'heroes', and don't mistake it for a compliment."'
The struggle between the misfit maverick and a faceless bureaucracy was one of the great themes of popular culture in the 1970s, and one that helped pave the way for the rise of Margaret Thatcher. But it also played into a much longer strand in British society about the decline of the nation. This is a paragraph from my book, The Man Who Invented the Daleks, in a section where I explore the childhood reading of Terry Nation:
'John Buchan’s novel, The Island of
Sheep (1936), the last to feature his secret agent Richard Hannay, begins
with our hero on a suburban train in southern England, reminiscing about the
great days at the turn of the century when "the afterglow of Cecil Rhodes’s
spell still lay on Africa, and men could dream dreams". As he looks "round the
compartment at the flabby eupeptic faces" of commuters returning home from the
City, he reflects melancholically on the realities of modern Britain: "Brains
and high ambition had perished, and the world was for the comfortable folk like
the man opposite me."'
The economic dimensions of that long decline are, as it happens, examined in the highyl recommended Going South: Why Britain Will Have a Third World Economy by 2014, written by Dan and Larry Elliott.
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There seemed to be a similar phenomenon in post-Vietnam 70s US popular culture eg 'Badlands' and Travis Buckle. Does the former film also act as a bleak counter to the then contemporary nostalgia for the 50s?
Not just Vietnam, of course - there's also the trauma of Watergate to deal with. The first time the Prsident is forced to resign coinciding with the first defeat in a war, all against the backdrop of recession.
Taxi Driver, like Death Wish a couple of years earlier, seems to me, though, to have an even more pressing concern: the decline of New York City, and political concerns that it had become too lawless to be a viable entity.
In a book I wrote with Roger Crimlis about rock imagery in the 1970s, we argued that this was why New York music played so well in Britain. We were the sick man of Europe, NY was the sick man of America. Out of this sense of being pariahs came glam and punk.
Badlands, on the other hand, I'm just about to watch again, as a double-bill with Bonnie & Clyde. I'm writing a bit about that period again, and - from my memories of the two films - the contrast is intriguing. I don't want to prejudge my response, having not seen it for several years, but I think you're right about Badlands as being the anti-nostalgia.
Thanks for this. I've always been interested in the fact that during the late 70s elements of both the new left and right almost converged in a general critique of the existing political dispensation: The adoption by the Thatcherite new right of the language of individualism against an overpowrful state. David 'two brains' Willets once suhggested that Thatcherism was the Woodstock ethos in conversation with the suburbs (or something to that affect!).
I understand you are going to write a book about Glam rock? Are you going to analyse it within the political/social/cultural context of the early 70s? I've read the Barney Hoskyns book and several similar tomes and whilst they are very good there is no reference the legacy of late 60s dandyism, Heath, The three day week etc. I thought this was a failing and marred otherwise excellent studies of the glam phenomenon. Will you ask the delightful Janice Atkinson-Small to write the forword?!
Hi Tyrone. The answer is: Yes, I am working on such a book, which I hope will correct the failings of previous accounts. But I can't really talk about it at the moment, for reasons that almost certainly won't become clear.
Give it a month or so, however, and I'll be in a position to speak more freely.
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