Louis de Bernières’s new novel, A Partisan’s Daughter, is set in the 1970s. Its hero has a car, a “shit-brown Allegro”. The Austin Allegro was a horror, expelled from the death throes of British mass car production. Everything about it was bad, including, in this case, the colour. The moment it is mentioned in the novel, the reader knows exactly what it means – that there was something horribly wrong with the 1970s.

For the contemporary historian Dominic Sandbrook, John le Carré’s novel Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, published in 1974, makes the same point. Suffused with shabbiness, disappointment and – in spite of the fact that it was about the great global confrontation of the cold war – littleness, it portrays the defence of the realm as a series of sordid betrayals. Yet Sandbrook is now writing two books on what at first sight appears to be a benighted decade, one on the American 1970s and one on the British. For the truth is, there’s a lot more to the 1970s than Allegros and betrayal.

There’s also a lot more than Abba and bad clothes. For at least two decades, from 1980 to 2000, the 1970s were dismissed as a 10-year-long bad hair day. How we laughed at the loon pants and the afros! From the pop world, only punk seemed to survive with any kind of credibility. Above all, the 1970s had the appalling misfortune not to be the 1960s. And, to the enormous irritation of those who came of age in the 1970s, everybody knows and everybody keeps saying how great the 1960s were. “The Seventies generation,” writes Dave Haslam in his book Young Hearts Run Free, “has forever been the victim of the nostalgia of others. We arrived too late, the generation before us told us then, and have been telling us ever since.”

Haslam’s book, and Howard Sounes’s Seventies, are texts of the great but very popcentric reassessment that has taken place in the past eight or nine years. Haslam and Sounes are serious, but most of this reassessment is just froth and fashion. Mamma Mia!, the Abba musical (to appear as a film later this year), opened in 1999 amid a general rediscovery of decent 1970s pop. As for punk – well, it was real. Sid Vicious did self-destruction so much more convincingly than Pete Doherty. Furthermore, there have been plenty of upmarket signs of reassessment. Halston, the supreme 1970s designer label, was recently relaunched in New York. And just go down to Alfies, a big antiques emporium in London, and you will find 1970s lights and furniture selling at hedge-funder prices. Not so long ago, all these things would have been regarded as ugly beyond redemption. But these are, in the eyes of history, ephemera.

No, the real reassessment of the decade is only just beginning. Sandbrook’s two books are one pointer, and so are upcoming 1970s novels by De Bernières, Philip Hensher, Hari Kunzru, Hanif Kureishi and others. In part, this is a matter of simple chronology. The first wave of baby-boomers, who came of age in the 1960s, have had their say, and now it’s time for the second wave – who, in Haslam’s terms, “arrived too late” – to have theirs.

But there are two much more important factors. First, from a suitable distance we can now see the true political, cultural and artistic depth of the era. And, second, it is now clear that the “Noughties” have much in common with the 1970s. It is, I am sure, no accident that Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, the supreme 1970s movie, has many similarities to Paul Thomas Anderson’s new There Will Be Blood. Both involve dark forces, a sinister tycoon, a precious resource – water or oil – and a bleak, violent, hopeless conclusion. Daniel Day-Lewis’s Daniel Plainview is set to become this generation’s version of John Huston’s Noah Cross.

And it is certainly no accident that Life on Mars, the best British television series of recent years, portrayed a contemporary cop thrust back into the harshness and brutality of the 1970s – nor, indeed, that our hero, when given the choice between then and now, chose then.

What has so far been left out of the reassessment is the big political and economic picture. Bruce Schulman, professor of history at Boston University, tells me that “the shape of contemporary America was born in the crucible of the 1970s”. He speaks of “the long 1970s”, lasting from 1968 to 1984. From 1968, he argues in his book TheSeven-ties: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics, the postwar settlement began to crumble. In politics, the leftish consensus, known as Butskellism in Britain, was proving incapable of adapting to the demands of affluence. The hyper-individualismthat was the flip side of 1960s idealism was undermining the communality of the old consensus. The power of the liberal, consensual northeastern American intellectuals was undermined by the new assertiveness of the southern “sunbelt”. Schulman points out that, given that Gerald Ford was never elected, every US president since 1964 has come from the sunbelt. For Schulman, 1984 represents the end of this phase, as Ronald Reagan’s reelection – his first win was largely a reaction against Jimmy Carter – signalled that the new, individualistic conservatism had won. In other words, the long 1970s was the period in which “then” became “now”.

The shocks associated with this radical transition were intensified by waves of terrorist movements – Black September, the Angry Brigade, the Provisional IRA. It was all captured in one photograph, of the abducted heiress Patty Hearst clutching a machinegun in front of the symbol of the Symbionese Liberation Army, a vicious urban guerrilla group. Next came the enormous oil-price rises that turned the 1970s into the most economically depressed decade since the 1930s. In Britain, the economy and the industrial strife caused by the failing centre-left consensus had, by 1979, brought the country to its knees. Some speculated that we might be the first case of a First World economy reverting to Third World status. By any standards, it was a dark, troubled, brutal, but – as Sam Tyler found in Life on Mars – exciting time.

The effect of all this was to produce a tremendous seriousness. Gay rights, feminism and environmentalism were all well under way in the 1960s, but in the 1970s they stopped being marginal and entered, irrevocably, into the political and social mainstream. In the arts, this new seriousness led to a creative flowering that was to eclipse the previous decade. Most obviously, the inventive wackiness of the 1960s gave way to a terrible unease. Scorsese’s films Mean Streets and Taxi Driver showed an individualistic, Hobbesian war of all against all as the systems and laws of the old consensus collapsed. Coppola’s Apocalypse Now threatened the defeat of a demoralised West. Chinatown portrayed an irredeemably brutal and evil world of illegible systems. Meanwhile, Terrence Malick’s two masterpieces, Days of Heaven and Badlands, showed old, apparently cohesive societies as riven with violence and dislocation.

Less immediately obvious was a painting: David Hockney’s Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy, from 1970-71. Not long ago, it was voted the most popular painting in Britain, perhaps because of its exquisite decorative quality. But look more closely – the two figures (the designers Ossie Clark and Celia Birtwell) are isolated and incommunicative, locked in themselves and their fashionable possessions. Also less obviously, in 1975, John Ashbery published Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, for me the great poem of the postwar era. It is about the hyper-individualised, urban self contemplating its absolute disconnection.

The more abstract visual arts abandoned the idea of the self entirely, as if it had never really existed. Inspired more by Marcel Duchamp, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida than by Picasso, conceptual artists such as Hans Haacke entered the mainstream. The idea was to see the world as an aggregation not of people, but of systems, reflecting both the arrival of fast and available computers and the same sense of a malign corporate conspiracy that underpinned Coppola’s Apocalypse Now and The Conversation, Chinatown, Michael Crichton’s Coma and many more of the key films of the period. In music, composers including Michael Nyman and Terry Riley, and the German rock band Kraft-werk, embraced a machine aesthetic. The birth of the new individualism was, ironically, accompanied by the disturbing sense that the individual either did not exist at all or was too intolerably lonely to function.

But it was not, of course, all bleak. The Sydney Opera House, perhaps the greatest building of the 20th century, was completed in 1973. It is pure celebration, formed out of the extreme individualism of the architect, Jorn Utzon, and the superb systems technology of its engineer, Peter Rice. It had, however, a touch of the bleak 1970s in the fact that politics and trade unions drove Utzon off the site before he could complete the interior. Rice was also the engineer of Piano and Rogers’s Pompidou Centre, completed in 1977: another celebratory gesture. It was a last gasp of 1960s idealism before it was finally strangled by the greed-is-good individualism of the 1980s.

And in popular culture, though the Presley-Beatles era of innocence may have ended when the Fab Four foundered in 1969, the mannerist rock era that followed was far from being a failure. The rock critic Jon Savage has suggested that the 1970s really began in 1967, with the release of the Velvet Underground’s first album, a work that anticipated the urban brutality of the decade. Its influence was undoubtedly huge, but not necessarily brutal. David Bowie had a disordered, fantastic charm, and Roxy Music introduced a highly mannered form of techno/retro cool that was to outlast disco, the era’s other great, and definitely overrated, form.

The full reassessment of the 1970s must, therefore, take into account two great truths. First, it was the age of transition from then to now. Battles were fought and won that made us who we are today. Some victories were benign – few now would argue against the liberation of gays and women, and environmentalism. Others were distinctly ambiguous – hyper-individualism has gone, everybody agrees, too far, though nobody knows how to restrain its excesses. Second, it was a period that produced a disproportionate share of the greatest art of the postwar period. Sam Tyler was right to leap off that building back into the era of Gene Hunt and Mark III Cortinas. It felt more alive. The 1970s had the Allegro, but they weren’t “shit-brown”. They were golden.

www.bryanappleyard.com

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