h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

What can one say about the seventies in London...everything really...it was all there.Fabulous fashions,magic music,foreign foods,new horizons.I don't know when the phrase sex,drugs and rock and roll was first coined,but i doubt if it was ever more appropiate than in the seventies.

It started of course on the back of the sixties,permissiveness,the man on the moon,the birth of disco,skinheads,greasers and hippies.Foreign travel was just becoming accessible to all,the first chinese restaurants were appearing,it was a shrinking world,and for a teenager like myself it was a time of raw excitement.The feeling was,the sixties opened the doors,now we were refining it all and really showing them how to party.At the same time ,somewhere deep down the little voice was asking "what the heck is it all about",i didn't know so i didn't worry too much,i just got on with making the absolute most of it.

The fashions were increasingly varied,from the hippy type afghan coats,over bell bottoms and flowery shirts with long rounded collars,more often than not accompanied by long hair and straggly beards(or bumfluff),to the ben sherman/stay pressed suede heads,with braces and doc martins or monkey boots,harringtons or crombies,the leather jacket,faded light blue jeans of the greaser,chrome plated comb in the back pocket and beetle crushers.
As the decade wore on there were of course many changes,glam rock to punk,skinheads to bobheads,at one stage ,i think around 1977 everyone was walking around in clothing from the second world war army and navy stores...and dancing to big band music,that didn't last for too long though.It was a decade of change and experiment.

Personally i went from 15 to 25 years old,and the truth is i was out of home when i was about 16 so it was a particularly wild time throughout for me,with little or no restriction whatsoever.I have to admit that it would be easy for me to cringe if i took it all too seriously,but that was the seventies,nothing was serious or for ever,nothing really mattered,but everything was happening and changing.

By 1976 i was an old hand already.I spent that entire summer partying,i will never forget it.Drugs played a large part,Thursday night it would be a couple of "blues"(speed... which in those days was from the chemist),down the pub and out till about 2am clubbing,had to go to work on a friday because it was payday.Friday night it would be a "black bomber"The pub,a club and then up town.Saturday it would be two black bombers,pub,party or big bash somewhere.Sunday night,always my favourite because there were only party people around by now,it would be a couple of blues to get up for the night and probably home before 2am as i had to go to work.A couple of blues to get through monday,down the pub to discuss the weekend and a fairly early night...midnight perhaps after a chinese.Tuesday and wednesdays would normally be fairly quiet nights then back boogieing again on thursdays and repeating the procedures.All the time drinking like fish and getting laid as often as possible.(i just wanna lie down thinking about it)...madness is a word that comes to mind.I am not suggesting that everyone was doing it ,but a lot were.

On one hand it all seems a bit mindless but the fact is that all the time doors inside the mind were being opened and explored or remembered with a view to explore later.

Butlins holiday camps were the places to go to at the beginning of the seventies,but they were dying out and package holidays were taking over.My first in 1973 to Majorca was a defining moment in my life.I ended up working there for a couple of summers which really gave me the travel bug,and by the end of the seventies travelling was a major part of my life.

Concerts were a big part of life too with regular visits to the Hammersmith Odeon,The Rainbow rooms(i think that was the name).I saw most of the big names but i would say that the most memorable were War and Bob marley.

By the time the eighties arrived i was in distant lands,still partying and experiencing and living large,(that didn't stop until the middle nineties i am happy to say) but i knew that the seventies were something very special and i was very pleased that i had been part of it.I think that there was very definately a feeling of "i survived".Many didn't of course,which is possibly one of the saddest things about those times.

Another thing that happened very early in the seventies,in fact i think it was 1970,or late 1969 was the change over to decimal money.At the time i was a barrow boy so it all came very easy to me,but to the older folk it was a nightmare,the older they were ,the worse it was.For a whippersnapper like me it made me wonder why i should listen to all the advice that i was given when clearly these folk were not as smart as they thought they were.It was also the beginning of real inflation,a la rip off...of that there is no question in my mind.Just the changeover alone put prices up exorbitantly...no matter what records may show that is a fact.