The Diamond Decades: The 1970s There was so much that was deeply naff about the decade that it is hard to look back without cringing, or laughing, or both. Post-hippy fashion was awful, a conformist fantasy of nonconformity, dressed up in tank tops and denim bell bottoms. The decade can seem crudely naive and even innocent. Information was still slow moving, and trends changed incrementally. Bowie may have been transforming himself from apocalyptic space-age mutant to decadent cocaine lounge lizard, but turn on the television and you were likely to see Captain & Tennille bouncing around in knitwear trilling Love Will Keep Us Together. Although my parents were British, I grew up in Ireland, and the version of Britain I got was filtered through a wobbly BBC signal that disintegrated into electronic snow if the wind was blowing from the south. My view of America might have owed more to Dallas than Watergate were it not for the Adelphi on Grafton Street and a subscription to Photoplay magazine. Nowhere is the Seventies" collision of realism and escapism more apparent than in American cinema. A mood of bittersweet fatalism wove through the work of a new generation of film-makers raised on rock-and-roll and educated in movie school. The downbeat lyricism of directors like Martin Scorsese, Peter Bogdanovich, Francis Ford Coppola, Bob Rafelson, Michael Cimino, Terrence Malick and Robert Altman was brilliantly served by a post-Brando cadre of character-acting leading men: Jack Nicholson, Gene Hackman, Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Dustin Hoffman. A sense of adult seriousness infused new classics like Chinatown, The Godfather, One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, Taxi Driver, The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now. The Seventies was a golden age of modern cinema: bold directors and big stars scoring audience-pleasing box-office hits with complex, tragic stories rooted in real life. Some of that attitude can be located in Seventies painting, particularly among such enduring British artists as Bacon, Hockney, Freud and Auerbach, who rejected minimalism, conceptualism and most other isms of the Sixties avant-garde to reinvigorate the canvas in ways that were essentially figurative and emotional. In drama, too, there was a shift from the wayward edge of experimentalism to something simultaneously highbrow and grounded, in the work of Pinter, Stoppard, Hare and Ayckbourn. Even the boom in musicals, led by Stephen Sondheim and Andrew Lloyd Webber, located its popular and artistic successes in a marriage of the inherently escapist form with dark material: Sweeney Todd and Jesus Christ Superstar. I could still sing the part of Judas Iscariot to this day: "Every time I look at you I don't understand/Why you let the things you did get so out of hand?" Popular literature was dominated by big, blockbusting stories. I would see my parents leafing through the all-encompassing sagas of E L Doctorow and Leon Uris, or the horror operas of Stephen King, but there was a leaner, sharper tone in such emerging voices as Martin Amis, Don De Lillo, Cormac McCarthy and Ian McEwan. Kurt Vonnegut was my personal guide to the times, punctuating satirical sci-fi mischief with his stoic catchphrase: "So it goes." Everywhere in the Seventies you find the same dynamic: escapism wrestling with realism, the art of disillusionment. The decade exalted a brand of retro-flavoured fantasy full of nostalgic yearning for simpler times. There is genius in the daydream of Star Wars, yet George Lucas and his escapist ally Steven Spielberg paved the way for the triumph of the nerds: film-makers whose only point of reference is other films. Saturday Night Fever is a better archetype of the period: a gritty, urban drama where the fantasy of escape is located in the slinky grooves of the Bee Gees and slick, sexy moves of disco dancers. Pop music was the other great crucible of the decade's tensions. It was crammed with the naff and ridiculous, the naive and overblown, but the organic glory of the best of the Seventies is still hard to beat: Zeppelin, Springsteen, Floyd, Dylan, Wonder, Marley, Abba, Blondie, Queen, Chic and all the rest, from Steely Dan to Kraftwerk. Punk rock was my moment. Tuning into the late-night static of the John Peel show blowing across the Irish Sea, I was rudely, gloriously awakened to the transformative possibilities of art. For me, 1977 is the year the Seventies pivots around. From the font of New York's art punks (the Ramones, Talking Heads, Patti Smith) to the explosive nihilism of London's Sex Pistols and the Clash, pop culture was convulsed by disorder and rejection. Newspapers frothed into a front-page rage against this pop filth. Television and radio blanked it. Local government banned it. The shock of the new has never been so shocking, and probably never will be again, such were the gaping holes torn through the last, tattered barriers of Britain's unspoken notion of establishment propriety. Punk is the antithetical spectre that still haunts Britain, at once revolutionary and reactionary. Its effectiveness at puncturing pomposity lurks mischievously in all contemporary art, ready to take down anyone or anything that gets too big for its boots. By the end of that strange, awkward decade, the world seemed to have changed utterly. Old certainties of class, sex and society that had been rudely tumbled over in the Sixties finally disintegrated. Rubbish in the streets exposed the fantasy of Britain's vainglorious self-image, Harold Wilson's white heat of technology doused in a stagnant puddle of grimy reality. On the week of the Silver Jubilee, the Sex Pistols had the biggest-selling single in the land (even if the craven BBC refused to acknowledge it) with God Save The Queen, its sentiments savagely at odds with the title. "There is no future in England's dreaming," howled Johnny Rotten. After the Seventies, it would no longer be possible for art to be subservient to old conformities without looking ridiculous. Read the latest on the Queen's Diamond Jubilee 1970s bestselling albums 1 Bridge Over Troubled Water Simon & Garfunkel 1970 2 Simon & Garfunkel's Greatest Hits Simon & Garfunkel 1972 3 Rumours Fleetwood Mac 1977 4 Dark Side of the Moon Pink Floyd 1973 5 Tubular Bells Mike Oldfield 1973 6 Greatest Hits Abba 1975 7 Bat Out Of Hell Meat Loaf 1977 8 Saturday Night Fever Soundtrack 1977 9 And I Love You So Perry Como 1973 10 The Singles 1969-1973 The Carpenters 1974 1 Mull Of Kintyre Wings 1977 2 Rivers Of Babylon/Brown Girl In The Ring Boney M 1978 3 You're The One That I Want 1978 John Travolta & Olivia Newton John 4 Mary's Boy Child - Oh My Lord Boney M 1978 5 Summer Nights JT & ONJ 1978 6 YMCA Village People 1978 7 Bohemian Rhapsody Queen 1975 8 Heart Of Glass Blondie 1979 9 Bright Eyes Art Garfunkel 1979 10 Don't Give Up On Us David Soul 1976 1 Star Wars 1977 2 Grease 1978 4 The Spy Who Loved Me 1977 5 The Towering Inferno 1975 6 The Sting 1974 7 The Godfather 1972 8 Superman 1979 9 A Clockwork Orange 1972 10 One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest 1976 1 Jesus Christ Superstar 1972 2 Rocky Horror Show 1973 4 Oh! Calcutta! 5 Rip-Off 1976 6 Murder in the Vicarage 1976 7 Dirty Linen/New Found Land 1976 8 Deathtrap 1978 10 Philanthropist 1970