Oh 70′s London, My Velvet Goldmine…

A sunny day on the island of Malta. I meet 3 friends for lunch and a catch up. All 3 are younger than me, they are 80′s babies. ’Granny” L  is 29 (or as she says in semi-horror “I am going to be 30 next year”), “Middle” C is 25 and Little Lew-Lew, the littlest of the bunch is only 24.

And then there is me, the old bag who was born in the mid 70′s.

Granny L starts talking about children’s TV shows, and with reference to one of them looks at me and asks ”Do you remember…?! “

*PAUSE*

 ”Actually, you wouldn’t remember” she says. ”You were not really a child anymore in the 80′s”.

We all laugh, I pretend to feel old and miserable. And in a way I am amused that despite being so ‘dusty’ , these ‘kids’ seem to enjoy my company.

Very young at heart, I feel that like a good bottle of red wine I am definitely improving with age.  I love the opportunities the world we live in provides us with (if utilised peacefully), and am excited about how the rest of our stories may unfold in future as we move into the 2nd decade of the 21st century. Even if it means that I have to come to terms with letting go of the Dorian Gray in me. 

Having said that, and although I was very young in the 70′s – something about that decade will always magically tantalize me.

Born in ’75, I grew up in North West London just a few minutes walk from The Beatles’ recording studio on Abbey Road. My Dad knew Paul… or should I say Sir Paul McCartney, he knew David Hockney, Sir John Gielgud, John Hurt, Jeanne Moreau, Alain Resnais and other truly great women and men of that time. Our house was, at times, doubling as a little red carpet for the Stars. From playwrights to actors, directors to musicians, painters to the less known intelligentsia, the colourful and crazy bohemian world of arts, drama, literature & culture all naturally blended together, filled our St. John’s Wood home with richness and lingered in its rooms even after the ’parties’ were over.

I was very young during those years, and was obviously busy with the really important things in life such as spending most of my time discovering & defining the boundaries of my culinary experimentalism (my mother found me on many occasions sitting under the kitchen table eating raw unpeeled garlic or devouring table spoons of butter ‘au natural’) and I guess I was pretty oblivious to the genius calibre of people who surrounded me. However, as an uber-sensory beast, some of the vibes, the auras, the colours, the sounds, the ideas and the beating pulses still managed to filter into my mental DNA.

I was (what felt like) “ripped” away from my English roots in the early 80′s when I moved with my mother to the Middle East and probably, as a result, always looked back at 70′s London with much admiration and painful longing. The fashion, the music, the cinema & the arts of that decade always made this Alice (who was so far away from her Wonderland) curiouser and curiouser. But it wasnt until I was in my early 20′s when I went to the National Film Institute to watch Todd Haynes’  movie “The Velvet Goldmine”, that my real 70′s fascination kicked-in.

The movie was my first acquaintance with the brilliant Jonathan Rhys Meyers, but it was also the first time that the darker side of the 70′s and its ’hard core’ Glam Rock really grabbed me. I was utterly hypnotised by the movie and the way in which it represented a side to the 70′s that was much less innocent than the one I knew as a garlic eating toddler.

The movie blasted me to the past. I don’t have too many crystal clear memories of my childhood in 70′s London but I do remember certain sensations, tastes, smells and sounds which, when I come across them as an adult, send my tummy into a totally hyperactive, wild and exploding feast of familiar excitement. However, part way through the movie, during the ballad of Maxwell Demon;

 

I suddenly had a very vivid memory of myself, at the age of 5 years old, peaking from my hiding spot (behind the sitting room sofa) at David Bowie’s ‘Ashes to Ashes’ music video on TV. I was petrified and disturbed by it, yet totally mesmerised, intrigued and drawn to it in a way that at the time I could not understand (true, it was already 1980, but still very much 70′s in its essence).

From that moment onwards, I started to piece bits of my 70′s “likes” together and realised I was very much a 70′s child. Fascinated with Bowie, addicted to Kate Bush, Engaged in a strange love affair with Pink Floyd, and melting with desire into Bryan Ferry’s smooth, warm and embracing voice.

I was twistedly excited, time after time, watching The Rocky Horror Picture Show (An American production but written by the British Richard O’Brien), so much so that my best ever Halloween night was the night I took on the persona of Magenta  

(most people at the costume party thought I was a hotel maid… each with their own cultural influences/references I suppose), I fell off my chair laughing at the bizarre brilliance of the Pythons, I swam effortlessly in an underwater fantasy world with “The Water Babies”, and “Gay” seemed as natural to me as blue hair dye and ‘pussies’ were, thanks to “Are You Being Served”.

As my fascination for the 70′s became very much an integral part of me, and after a certain night of a Led-Zeppelin ’high’ (and no, I don’t do drugs, but if I did I am certain that the night I lay on the floor staring at the ceiling and listening to Led Zep for 2 hours with my eyes closed would probably make any drug-induced ‘high’ pale in comparison!) I wondered what it would be like if I was an adult in the 70′s rather than a decade-unaware child.

I couldn’t help but wonder if I would have had the chance to experience the same kind of life style that the people from the above mentioned milieu have had (for better or for worse, with its highs and its lows).

I mean, when you think about it, during those years amazing things happened world-wide; the advocacy of world peace, environmentalist movements started to grow, the roles of women in society were profoundly altered, the gay movement made a huge step forward with the election of Harvey Milk for public office, and the bell-bottom trousers were introduced (sorry, but I have to admit, they are a brilliant fashion creation).

But above all these, it seems like there was something almost colorfully & modernly primal in that decade, something that didn’t exist in any other. It was a decade that was simultaneously androgynous and hermaphroditic, a decade of daring, experimentalism, glamour and rock. A decade with an air of change and openness to the new and the different,  a decade of social, sexual, mental and creative revolution.

A decade that, if you close your eyes tightly and try to sense it, you might feel as though you are being hypnotised whilst psychedelically floating in a big sea of molasses wearing nothing but your birthday suit.  A sea of recreational drugs, oozing with sexual “anything goes”, where men were glamorous and girls wore suits, minds drifted into space, whilst the bodies themselves were engaged in feasts of the flesh.

Dear friends, as you read this, I am curious to know what decade you would have liked your time tunnel to take you to if you were given just once chance to time-travel.

I love my today, I look forward to my tomorrow and I will forever cherish my yesterday. But the kid in me – who effortlessly, innocently and absent-mindedly breathed those 70′s into her lungs as if they were a cigarette between the yellow decaying teeth of a hard-core smoker – still seems to have some unfinished business with that decade. Unfinished business that I am not sure how to resolve… but equipped with a passionate imagination, I truly hope I will find a way (even if it means I have to go searching for my own Dr. Emmett Brown & Marty McFly!).

As for my younger friends, I adore you all, but you can make fun of this glorious old bag until you are blue in the face because I will, forever, have something that you never will. I will always have the 70′s.

Peace & Love

Bex

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