David Hockney with his friend Celia Birtwell -- the “Mrs Clark” of Hockney’s great 1971 painting Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy. (© Howard Sounes)

Howard Sounes explains why he wrote Seventies

A Decade of Modern Classics

I was born in the suburbs of south east London, Welling to be precise, in 1965, and was a child essentially during the whole of the 1970s. Much of the tat that is commonly associated with "the decade that taste forgot" was ubiquitous in the London Borough of Bexley: space hoppers, Showaddywaddy fans and orange flared trousers abounded. Yet by the end of the decade, as a young teenager who read widely, went to art galleries, and searched out unusual films and music, it became evident to me that I was living in an exciting and dynamic time in the arts, a time in fact of modern classics.

Certainly many books were published that are now read as classics, including: John Updike's Rabbit Redux, The Sea, The Sea, by Iris Murdoch and Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch. Meanwhile, the truth about the Soviet Union was revealed in the novels of Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

Rock music was superb, the list of classic albums being almost endless, ranging from Joni Mitchell's languorous Hissing of Summer Lawns to the clarion London Calling. Dylan, whom I have also written about, was arguably at his best in the mid-'70s. Lou Reed released the delightful Transformer. The Stones made Exile on Main Street. In addition there was the bonus of Bowie, Roxy Music, Stevie Wonder, and the Sex Pistols.

Masterpieces

Few decades have yielded so many classic movies: The Godfather, The Man Who Fell to Earth, Manhattan, Harold & Maude, Five Easy Pieces, and Apocalypse Now to mention only a few masterpieces.

Architects such as Richard Rogers created amazing new buildings, not least his Pompidou Centre. The Sydney Opera House, perhaps the greatest public building of the twentieth century, was opened in 1973. Monty Python changed television comedy. Gilbert & George made radical new art, while David Hockney painted such great pictures as Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy.

In recent years there has been a plethora of clip-based television shows that look back on the 1970s, but they generally ignore this important and exciting work in favour of the trivia of the decade, often simply because so many of today's media pundits were children at the time, and best remember childish things: bouncing to the sweet shop on their spacehoppers to stock up on Curly-Wurlys before Top of the Pops. I set out to write Seventies to redress that balance.