That's what they all say.

Do you think the following words could have been written by anybody who was normal?

Beneath your perfume and make-up
You're just a baby in disguise
And though you know
That it's wrong to be
Alone with me
That come on look is in your eyes

I was a kid in the 70's and It was a great time to be a kid where I lived, yes it was a poor council estate but there were lots of kids and we played together in the street everyday, we never stayed indoors unless it was someones birthday.

We made our own go-karts, skateboards and played games like Bulldog and rounders in the street, before rushing in to watch Starsky and Hutch etc...

We were dirty scruffy kids but we had a great time and I wouldn't have had it any other way.

What on earth are you on about, normal? It's a minefield out there for young men. Facebook is full of selfies of 12 year old girls who are made up to look like they're 18, pouting into their mirrors. There's always been the precocious promiscuous ones, there certainly were in my class at school, and they used to lie about how old they were. (Most of us did, come to that - I never lied about my age for sex, but I certainly did for cinemas and pubs. ) My best friend at school was tall and slim, with curves in the right places, and looked 18 when she was 12, and that was without using make-up. She'd had a dozen different blokes before she was 16, and some of them had no idea she was so young.

I dated plenty of older boys in the 70's they would have been horrified to find out how old I actually was, I was always going to things that I was officially too young for I remember going to see The Exorcist & Enter the Dragon which were both X rated movies at the time when I only 13/14

were you awake?.... even people i knew who disliked punk understood the reason why a generation rebelled.

try being told you had no future, that you were either going to work (if you could) in the local factory or pit, or join the army. or musically , what tf was all that prog rock crap on about? how could young people who had a bleak outlook mainly from poorer homes relate to that? so NO things were NOT going along just fine!

punk rock was the expression used to say sod all that! it was a rejection of what society was telling us - from 'youre not good enough for...' through the crap sexist, racist, homophobic 'comedies' peddled by tv.


exactly! .... it was commonplace for girls as young as 13 (but a 'mature looking 13 year old) to date older guys - especially those with cars. guys didnt ask girls their age, the oh so vital 16 year old benchmark didnt really matter - if the girl looked old enough and 'had the goods', she was dateable .

it might seem wrong by todays standards (which are arguably over sensitive, an 18 year old having sex with a 15 year old doesnt make him a paedo imho), but it went on back then with no real issue.

I get where you're coming from, really I do and yes, of course I was awake - how else could I have enjoyed all those great sounds around at the time?

For me as a young man of twenty-something in the early 70's, I was already doing OK in both my career and my home life. Perhaps you'll understand therefore that I had very little to rebel about and why the outpouring of vitriolic, reactionary non-music (aka punk) should have grated on me and my friends in the way it did.

Prog rock, as it came to be known, was fantastic - if you liked it! I never felt a particular need to 'identify' with anything in the music scene, I just heard stuff, listened some more and took it from there, either buying the album (often on the strength of hearing just one track) or going to the gigs. I was far more influenced by the overall sound of a recording, paying more attention to the instruments and the musicianship than to the words of the songs themselves. The eclectic nature of my CD collection bears testament to this.

I'll maintain to my dying day that punk was horrible and for many people at the time it very nearly killed their love of popular music.

yep i can understand why you in your position didnt connect to punk, but surely you can see why others did?.

you identify with a musical style or song by default... if a track speaks to you then it does, im sure you undrstand that!

i totally disagree with 'punk nearly killing peoples love of popular music' , punk was the catalyst for a huge uptake in interest in music - not punk itself but the ethos 'do it yourself' lead to many new rich and great sounds that enriched the charts in the subsequent years. you can see evidence for this in the sales of singles that were very low by 76, but peaked in 83-4.

dont forget, punk was about far more then a musical style, the music soon faded into a minor market but the ethos went right through most of the 80's , even rave culture had the punk ethos of 'do it yourself' .

And that is one thing the OP would have hated about the 1970s - the relative inaccessibility of music. A child or teenager with not much spending money was severely limited with the music they could hear.

When a new album came out, we had little opportunity to listen before buying. If we were lucky, some tracks might get played on the radio, otherwise we went to a record shop that had listening booths (and not all of them did) where we would probably have to make do with hearing one side of the album at most. Ideally, someone we knew might buy it and lend it to us, or let us listen to it.

There are many artists at the time that I completely missed out on, because there just wasn't the opportunity to hear their music. On the bright side, it does mean I've made some great if belated discoveries over the years since.

My Dad had a thing for Sally Carr, but refused to admit it.

Lol.... I speak as someone who was a Yes/Genesis/ELP fan who saw the light of punk and then new wave. I realised that basically Yes had a couple of tunes dragged out over four sides of a double album whereas The Clash and The Pistols could express more about culture and society in a 3 minute song.

Some of the greatest British music ever emerged from the lates 70s early 80s, Joy Division, Siouxsie, The Smiths, The Cure, The Specials..articulate, poetic, innovatory, expressive, liberating and that is irrespective of its polemics.

Oh for a (silver) time machine.