Strange Days Indeed: The Golden Age of Paranoia. Francis Wheen

critical eyebrows were raised in 1999 at the launch of Mamma Mia!, a stage show of ABBA hits; it has been running ever since (as has a similarly plotless ‘musical’ cobbled together around songs by Queen), and the film version went on to conquer the world. Like Sounes’s book, these presented a feel-good, poptastic view of the decade that wouldn’t frighten the coach parties. More remarkable, perhaps, was the tremendous popular appeal of Life on Mars (named after the David Bowie song), a BBC television drama of 2006 based on the ‘high concept’ that a Manchester detective inspector, Sam Tyler, is transported back to 1973, an age when the abbreviation PC had nothing to do with political correctness or personal computers. (When he demands a PC terminal, a puzzled colleague replies: ‘What, you want a constable in here?’ There’s similar bafflement when Tyler says he needs his mobile: ‘Your mobile what?’) Tyler’s the very model of a modern DI who believes in doing things ‘by the book’, whereas his new guv’nor, DCI Gene Hunt, is a rough-hewn, hard-drinking, heavy-smoking Neanderthal who prowls the city like a sheriff in the Wild West, driven by only one imperative: lock up the bad guys. Tyler’s initial reaction to Hunt and his kipper-tied colleagues evokes another line from Bowie’s title song: ‘Oh man, look at those cavemen go …’

      Each episode of Life on Mars began with a voice-over from the time-travelling cop: ‘My name is Sam Tyler. I had an accident and I woke up in 1973. Am I mad, in a coma, or back in time? Whatever’s happened, it’s like I’ve landed on a different planet.’ Yet the most striking thing about this rough-hewn planet was how attractive it began to seem: given the choice between harsh reality in 1973 and virtual reality today, many viewers and critics sided with DCI Gene Hunt. So, eventually, did Tyler himself: having spent most of the first series yearning to ‘go home’ he chose to stay in the Seventies after all, heading off to the pub with Hunt for a celebratory pint or three of Watney’s Red Barrel. And, no doubt, a packet or two of cigarettes: incredible though it will seem to future generations, in those days you could smoke pretty well continuously throughout the day – on the bus or train to work, at your desk in the office, and then in the pub or cinema afterwards. I have an abiding memory from the late Seventies of my first encounter with a puppyish young barrister named Tony Blair, who turned up at the New Statesman offering a short article about a High Court judgment and then accompanied me to our local pub in High Holborn, where he bought a packet of fags and lit up. Cherie Booth later ordered him to kick the habit as a precondition for marrying her; in 2006, as prime minister, he avenged himself by banning smoking in all public buildings. Having a ciggy in the saloon bar is now as unthinkable as driving without a seatbelt. But then the Seventies themselves are now largely unimaginable and irrecoverable, at least for students or journalists whose only source is the Internet: the decade has fallen down a pre-digital memory hole.

What do I mean by ‘the Seventies’? Don’t believe the calendar: decades have no fixed duration. What many of us think of as ‘the Sixties’ – a fizzy cocktail of protest and pop music, pot and the Pill – started in Britain three years behind schedule, sometime, as Philip Larkin observed, between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles’ first LP. Elsewhere they were later still. When the publisher of Lady Chatterley’s Lover was acquitted by a London jury which had been asked, ‘Is it a book you would have lying around in your own house? Is it a book you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?’, the Australian Prime Minister announced that in his country, at least, the novel must remain banned, because he certainly wouldn’t allow his wife to read it. Geoffrey Robertson, a schoolboy in Australia at the time of the Lady Chatterley trial, reckons that ‘Australia did not enter the Sixties until it was dragged into them by Gough Whitlam’s Labor government in 1972.’ By then, many Americans and West Europeans were already writing the decade’s obituary; and Geoffrey Robertson had moved to London, where he came to public notice as a young defence barrister at the Oz trial – an attempt by the old British Establishment to snuff out the ludic and anarchic style of the 1960s.^*

      When did the spirit of the Sixties die? ‘Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on 9 August 1969,’ Joan Didion writes in The White Album (named, fittingly, after one of the Beatles’ last LPs). This was the date on which spaced-out psychedelia yielded to apocalyptic psychopathy, when Charles Manson’s disciples murdered the actress Sharon Tate and four other people at 10050 Cielo Drive in Benedict Canyon, Los Angeles, inscribing ‘PIG’ in her blood on the front door. They had been partly inspired by secret messages that Manson believed he had found in ‘Helter Skelter’, a song from The White Album. ‘Word of the murders on Cielo Drive travelled like brush fire through the community,’ Didion reports. ‘The tension broke that day. The paranoia was fulfilled.’

      To other chroniclers, the pivotal event – the public burial of peace, love and flower power – was the killing of Meredith Hunter four months later, at a concert in Altamont for which the Rolling Stones had rashly hired Hell’s Angels as security guards. ‘As the life ebbed away from Meredith Hunter,’ Harry Shapiro writes in Waiting for the Man, ‘the spirit of the Sixties went with it.’ For the historian Milton Viorst, the spirit lingered on until the following spring, when National Guardsmen shot anti-war protesters at Kent State University, Ohio: ‘It happened on 4 May 1970, in the bright sunshine, just after midday, at a campus demonstration which was like so many others except that, in thirteen seconds of crackling gunfire, four students were killed … What passion remained of the 1960s was extinguished in that fusillade.’ Another American historian, Edward D. Berkowitz, prefers 30 April 1974, the day on which Richard Nixon released the profanity-strewn transcripts of his White House conversations and thus ‘stripped the presidency of much of its dignity and ended the postwar presidential mystique. The Seventies were firmly launched.’

      In Britain, the writer Kenneth Tynan pronounced the Sixties dead in the early hours of 9 March 1971, while he sat in a London cinema watching a live telecast of Muhammad Ali’s defeat by Joe Frazier. ‘Belated epitaph of the Sixties: flair, audacity, imagination, outrageous aplomb, cut down by stubborn, obdurate, “hard-hat” persistence,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘We may come to look back on the Sixties as the Indian summer of the Western imagination, of the last aristocrats of Western taste. Beginning with Kennedy, the era ends with Nixon and Joe Frazier, his hatchet-man … Cavaliers had better beware. The Roundheads are back in force.’

Take your pick. Even Joan Didion, while proposing that ‘in a sense’ the Sixties ended with the Manson murders, says that in another sense ‘the Sixties did not truly end for me until January of 1971’, when she moved from Hollywood to a house by the sea.^* So it goes for most of us as we try to reconcile our private histories with a public narrative. Philip Larkin, recording the start of free love in 1963, lamented that this was ‘rather late for me’. For me, alas, it was rather too early. I came to the party a full decade later, on 27 December 1973, when I caught a train to London from suburban Kent, having left a note on the kitchen table advising my parents that I’d gone to join the alternative society and wouldn’t be back. An hour or so later, clutching my rucksack and guitar, I arrived at the ‘BIT Alternative Help and Information Centre’, a hippy hang-out on Westbourne Park Road which I’d often seen mentioned in the underground press. ‘Hi,’ I chirruped. ‘I’ve dropped out.’ I may even have babbled something about wanting to build the counter-culture. This boyish enthusiasm was met by groans from a furry freak slumped on the threadbare sofa. ‘Drop back in, man,’ he muttered through a dense foliage of beard. ‘You’re too late … It’s over.’ And so it was. The Prime Minister, Edward Heath, had declared a state of emergency in November, his fifth in just over three years, to conserve fuel supplies during an overtime ban by the National Union of Mineworkers: street lighting was switched off, floodlit football matches cancelled, electric heating outlawed in offices and factories. In mid-December, two weeks before I caught the last train to hippyville, he announced that British industry would be limited to a three-day week from 1 January 1974. The word that appeared in news bulletins almost daily – ‘stoppage’ – was all too apt. After a while it became hard to remember a time when there weren’t blank television screens, electricity shortages or train cancellations.