A 1970s Teenager E-Book

Simon Webb

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

What was it like being a teenager in a world without computers, smartphones, DVD players, games consoles or the Internet? Imagine a time when sharing music meant taking a record round to your friend's house; when making a quick phone call could involve queuing outside a red telephone box! This book looks at the fads and fashions, music, hobbies and TV programmes which defined the '70s for many youngsters. If you remember riding a chopper, reading Jackie during the 'Winter of Discontent' or watching the Bay City Rollers on Top of the Pops during the long, hot summer of 1976; this book is for you. A 1970s Teenager is a nostalgic and colourful account of what it was like to be young in the most exciting decade of all!

Leseprobe

Acknowledgements

Thank you to the following people: Chris Arthur, Terry Barlow, Mary A. Barker, Paul Clarke, Katherine Cassidy, Geoffrey C. Feldman, David Ford, Esther M. Hannigan, Pat Howard, Theresa O. Littlestone, Gillian V. Pettitt, Sarah P. Moran, Martin O’Connell, Mick Parker, Polly Reynolds, K.A. Silverstone, Maria T. Valentine, Christopher Walker, and Nina Webb.

Contents

Title

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1. Music

2. Communications

3. Fashion

4. Alcohol and Drugs

5. Sex

6. Getting Around

7. Politics

8. Television

9. School

10. Work

11. Belongings

12. Relaxing

13. The Generation Gap

14. The Alternative Society

15. We’re All Teenagers Now

16. The Teenage Tribes of the 1970s

Plates

Copyright

Introduction

For those who were teenagers then, the 1970s must surely have been the most exciting decade there has ever been. It is fashionable now to be dismissive about many of the visual features of those years, dismissing it as ‘The decade style forgot’, but at the time it all seemed so fantastically vibrant and colourful. This book is a celebration of the 1970s; ‘the good, the bad and ugly.’ There was, after all, more to those times than just Abigail’s Party, the Bay City Rollers, platform shoes, and flared trousers.

I do not believe that there has ever been a better time to be a teenager than the seventies! It was brash and noisy, the fashions were ghastly, but it was all tremendous fun. Our music was being heard everywhere, those of us who were working always seemed to have plenty of money and the atmosphere of crisis which permeated the whole decade served only to make it seem richer and more exotic. The various strikes and riots, the IRA attacks on the mainland, the Winter of Discontent and Thatcher being elected; even at the time I knew that we were living through a momentous period of change. (Polly Reynolds)

Although they could not have fully known it at the time, teenagers of the 1970s were growing to maturity on the very cusp of the transition from the post-war years to the modern world. This was when the twentieth century began to gear up and ready itself for the change to the twenty-first century. At the beginning of the decade, the technology in use had changed little since the end of Queen Victoria’s reign; slide rules, mechanical typewriters, telephones, clockwork watches and even gramophones were still in use. By 1979, the electronic revolution had begun and there were digital watches, pocket calculators, Walkmans and even the first personal computers.

I was born in 1960 and the changes that I saw taking place during my teenage years, from 1973-9, were absolutely dizzying. It was like watching the birth of the modern world. Every year there was something new. I remember seeing a video recorder in somebody’s house for the first time, using a push button telephone instead of one with a dial, my first digital watch, and computer games in amusement arcades and pubs. Although at that age you don’t recognise the full significance of what you are seeing, I realised that the world was changing very fast. (Paul Clarke)

Teenagers who grew up over the course of the 1970s were witness to these changes. A thirteen-year-old attending school in 1970 would have been using a slide rule; by the time he was twenty he would probably have had a pocket calculator. In 1970, most televisions were black and white; by 1980, not only were colour televisions more commonplace, but one could even record programmes to watch later. Computer games like Space Invaders were also making an appearance at this time. Those whose teenage years spanned the 1970s saw more changes taking place than any other generation since the Industrial Revolution.

Of course, young people adapt much more easily to change than old people. There was so much happening in the seventies, from the end of pounds, shillings and pence in 1971, to the first woman Prime Minister in 1979. I know my parents felt a little bewildered at the pace of change and my grandparents could not keep track of things at all. Because I was a teenager I had nothing to compare it to, but my parents had seen slow and steady changes and gradual development from the twenties through to the sixties. Suddenly, the pace accelerated and things were changing faster and faster. You had no sooner seen about computer games or portable calculators on Tomorrow’s World, than they were in the shops or people’s homes. It was a great time to be young! (Terry Barlow)

The term ‘teenager’ was not an invention of the 1970s; the expression dates back to the late 1940s. Pop music had been around since the 1950s and so too had various other features of 1970s teenage life. However, the fads, fashions and foibles of teenagers changed during those years from being footnotes in the news to becoming a dominant force in British culture. This was when the cult of youth began in this country and being young, or at least behaving as though one were young, became, for some, something to covet.

When I was a kid in the sixties, my father even used to wear a collar and tie on the beach. By the time the eighties arrived, he was wearing jeans at the weekend. I could see that people his age were becoming more informal in their dress and it struck me then that it was because they were becoming a little wistful that they were not themselves young any more. Of course, I do exactly the same thing myself today, sharing clothes with my younger daughter. I suppose it would be fair to say that at the age of fifty, I don’t want to grow up myself. (Anon)

The technology at the start of the 1970s had, essentially, remained unchanged for many decades and so too had the way that the average person dressed. At the end of the 1960s, only a teenager or person in their early twenties would have worn a pair of blue jeans in public; by 1980, even middle-aged men were wearing jeans and leaving their shirts unbuttoned. Photographs of families relaxing on the beach in the 1950s and ’60s show men wearing sports jackets and even collars and ties. This would have been unthinkable by the 1980s. The 1970s saw a relaxation of the dress codes that had held sway since the end of the First World War. It was the decade when everybody wanted to appear young; when being a teenager was suddenly an admirable ambition, even for men and women in their forties.

It was pretty embarrassing when my parents decided to become more ‘with it’, as they would have put it. Something that you always notice about parents when they try to act young is that their use of slang is often a bit out of style. Beatniks in the fifties might have been ‘with it’, but to hear my father using the phrase in the late seventies was a little bit of an anachronism. Anyway, they began to listen to music like ABBA and take an interest in what young people were doing and saying. I think now that they felt that teenagers were having all the fun and so they should get into the swing of things. I noticed in the pub at that time that you would see more and more middle-aged men hoping to look young and ‘with it’. (David Ford)

The division between the various stages in life definitely began to become blurred for the first time during the late seventies. Before that, you were a schoolchild, then a young man or woman, followed by becoming middle aged and then old. At each stage in the process, there were accepted styles of dress, clothing, hairstyle and behaviour. For example, middle-aged women had their hair permed, rather than hanging long and loose. Old women had white hair, also permed. Young men might wear more casual clothes, but right up to the beginning of the seventies, middle-aged men were expected to be a bit more conservative. By the time you were an old man, which happened in those days at about the age of sixty, you would be wearing a collar and tie, even on a picnic! All this faded away as the seventies progressed.

Older women were allowing their hair to be long and natural, middle-aged men were wearing jeans and open-necked shirts; the divisions between the ages were breaking down and older people wanted to look as much like teenagers as they dared; not all of them, of course, but it was certainly a noticeable trend. (Polly Reynolds)

For some years, the term ‘pop music’ had been used in a pejorative sense to denote the type of light music enjoyed by the young. By the 1970s it was being heard everywhere and enjoyed by all ages. Parents were as likely to enjoy listening to Simon and Garfunkel or ABBA as their children were, a trend which has continued to this day.

Looking back at the sixties, when I was growing up, I do remember that most television programmes had people speaking with very clear, what we would now call ‘posh’, accents and the background music was likely to be a string quartet or chamber orchestra. Some time during the seventies that all began to change and you would hear guitar music and modern stuff. It was as though the television producers made a conscious decision sometime around 1975 that they wanted their programmes not to sound so old-fashioned and that a good way of emphasising this was to have popular music instead of classical or baroque. It was all to do with sounding younger and more modern. (Paul Clarke)

Throughout the 1970s, music was, in a sense, the social glue that held teenage groups together, much as it is today.

1

Music

In the 1970s, music was the binding agent which helped to keep members of different teenage groups, or ‘tribes’, together. Teenagers were fanatically partisan about the style of music they favoured and even the individual artistes within the genre. It was not enough to like your own type of music; you had to actively dislike the music associated with rival teenage groups. To be eclectic in one’s musical tastes would, at best, invite ridicule and could even amount to social suicide. The biker whose friends were into Black Sabbath or Deep Purple would never in a million years dare to mention that he quite liked some of Donny Osmond’s songs! It would be almost as bad as a hippy admitting to his comrades that he was partial to Mantovani.

We turned up unexpectedly at this guy’s house one day, in around the mid-seventies. We surprised him while he was listening to an Engelbert Humperdinck record on his parent’s stereo! It took him a year or so to live this down and it was something we used to bring up at odd moments whenever we were discussing music. He was never allowed to forget it. (K.A. Silverstone)

Some teenage groups were more open about this sort of thing than others, hippies in particular. For example, they could freely enjoy both Simon and Garfunkel and Led Zeppelin, but even within this group there were limits; it would have been going too far to tell people that you played your sister’s David Cassidy LPs from time to time. Talking about popular music, reading about the musicians in magazines and watching their performances, either on television or in real life, was a big part of the group identity of young people.

There were a number of different and distinct styles of popular music when I was a teenager. There was a sort of snobbishness about which you favoured. Those who liked heavy rock like Black Sabbath would be a little ‘sneery’ about gentle stuff like James Taylor or Joni Mitchell, say. Those who liked Carole King would feel that their tastes were superior to somebody who liked ABBA and so on. Occasionally there was crossover from one type of music to another, but often teenagers were insular and conservative when it came to other people’s music. (Anon)

The music we listened to was an important part of who we were. Some of the lyrics seemed to speak directly to us and we felt that whoever wrote those things had a lot in common with us. Now, although my tastes ran to bands like The Who, I happen to know that my little sister had exactly the same idea about this when she was listening to her Donny Osmond records. Perhaps this is a bit like good poetry, it comes across as being personal, even though the man who wrote it might have been dead for centuries. So I listened to songs that said things like: ‘I’ve seen the needle and the damage done, a little part of it in everyone, but every junky’s like the setting sun’, and it would make me think about some of the drug users I had known. My sister listened to ‘Puppy Love’ and felt just the same; it spoke to her. (Geoffrey C. Feldman)

In the days before downloads and streaming, the acquisition of music was an important part of many teenager’s lives; it was not (as is often the case these days) a solitary activity but a communal enterprise. Friends would visit each other and sit in a bedroom listening to an album. This would be done while leafing through fan magazines, with posters of the singer or band looking down on them from the wall.

The girls that I hung round with from school used to meet round each others’ houses and just sit in bedrooms listening to David Cassidy or Donny Osmond. There were no videos then and so we used to do the next best thing. Sitting on the floor or laying on the bed with a record playing, the walls nearly always covered with posters, while we looked at magazines containing more black and white photographs. I don’t know why, but nearly every bed had a candlewick bedspread in those days; you never seem to see them these days. (Sarah P. Moran)

Today, nearly every teenager can access any song required with the click of a mouse and it can then be listened to alone or sent electronically to friends in a split second. In the 1970s, buying and sharing music was a physical act which required interaction with other people at every stage of the process. Buying a record would entail a trip to a shop. You might have had a chance to stand in an open booth to listen to the record first. Record shops were places to meet friends and talk about the latest music; even if you had no money to buy anything, they were a free place to hang out and chat. Having bought your record and taken it home to listen to again and again on a record player or, if you were lucky, a stereo system, you might wish to lend it to a friend.

There was a record shop where we all used to go on Saturday mornings. You could ask to listen to a record in one of the booths. These were not closed off and more than one person could squeeze in. The owner used to get a bit irritable, telling us that it wasn’t a youth club and that if we weren’t going to buy anything could we make room for those who were. It was the whole thing, looking through the racks of records together, talking about the singers and so on. It was how I spent most of my Saturday mornings during 1971 and ’72. We couldn’t often afford LPs and even buying single 45s was not something we did every week. (Polly Reynolds)

Talking face-to-face with friends about music was something of a feature of my life in those days. I know teenagers today, who watch loads of clips on YouTube of their favourite bands, but watching any music in the seventies simply had to be a group activity; either you watched them on the television or at the cinema in films like Woodstock, or sometimes at live concerts. This idea of watching a band play on your own would have been a very strange one in those days. Listening to music was a shared experience too, whether on the radio or stereo; it was part of the thing. This business now, where each person has a set of earphones plugged into their head and they alone can hear the music, still looks a bit odd to me. I was on the tube recently and there was a group of girls, aged fifteen or sixteen. Two of them had earphones in and the others were looking at their mobiles. There was no shared sense of being a group at all. In my day we would have been chattering away and sharing our thoughts. (Anon)

Lending records to friends was a whole activity in itself. It would often involve getting on the bus with the LP or single, going up to somebody’s bedroom to listen to it together, while perhaps gazing at a poster of the singer on the wall. It must be borne in mind that listening to these analogue recordings while looking at still photographs was pretty much the only way of experiencing a singer or pop group in those days. Few could afford to own many records and so lending and borrowing was very common. These vinyl records were delicate though and had to be cleaned carefully and treated with respect. Friendships had been forever destroyed by somebody borrowing a Donny Osmond LP and returning it with a scratch, marring for all time his soul-searing rendition of ‘Puppy Love’.

I lent a close friend my favourite album, ‘Ladies of the Canyon’ by Joni Mitchell. When she returned it, it was in a dreadful state. She had obviously left it lying around out of the cover. In addition to a few little scratches, there was fluff and dust on it that could only have been picked up from a carpet. It is impossible to explain to the youth of today what a serious matter that was. I certainly couldn’t afford to buy a new copy just like that and in fact this particular record had been a birthday present. Our friendship never really recovered. (Katherine Cassidy)

The whole thing about music at that time was how ephemeral it was. You might see a singer on television and then that performance would be gone forever. The only reliable way of hearing a song again was by means of records or tapes. Lending these to each other was a physical operation and also a social interaction with friends. One actually had to lug the album from A to B and then have a conversation, face-to-face. This is something which, to me, does not appear to take place quite so much with teenagers today. Much of their connection, not only in sharing music, is taking place in cyberspace now. The new ways of listening to and acquiring music are making it possible to see and hear practically any singer or group at any time, but it is no longer a joint enterprise for teenagers in the way it once was. (K.A. Silverstone)

If one wanted to see the singer in person then, short of the occasional concert, there was only one way to do it and that was by watching them on television. In the days before video this could be a tricky business, as it was necessary to commandeer the family television set for half an hour on Thursday evenings to watch Top of the Pops. But suppose that one’s mother and father wanted to watch something themselves on a Thursday evening? This could be a disaster and precipitate tantrums and hysteria, particularly if a singer was making a special appearance. Just imagine, David Cassidy is about to sing his latest hit and your mum and dad want to watch It Ain’t Half Hot Mum on the other side!

I remember that on one occasion the Osmonds were on Top of the Pops in 1973 and I was desperate to watch them sing ‘Let Me In’. But no, my father wanted to watch some play on BBC 2 and no matter how much I pleaded and begged he remained adamant. Everybody I knew was watching the Osmonds that November night except for me. I stormed up to my bedroom in tears and felt that this was the cruellest and most unjust thing that had ever happened since the world began. (Sarah P. Moran)

Watching Top of the Pops was never a real pleasure when I was fourteen or fifteen. My parents were pretty good about letting me take over the TV at that time every Thursday, but neither of them could ever restrain themselves from making comments of the ‘Gawd, you can’t tell if it’s a boy or a girl!’ or ‘Blimey, what a racket!’ variety. It sounds silly now, but this sort of thing used to ruin the programme for me. My father in particular used to make jokes about my favourite singers or just stand there shaking his head in a sort of mime show. I would far rather have been able to watch it all by myself, but I could hardly have expected as a fourteen-year-old to be able to order my parents from the family living room. (Paul Clarke)

This situation, where one has to watch a screen at one particular time on a certain day or risk missing the event completely, is something which may seem incomprehensible to some teenagers today. They are able to view clips of their favourite singers on YouTube and DVDs, able to record programmes, and watch shows on BBC iPlayer and other modern media.

You would wait all week if some favourite band like the Bay City Rollers was due to appear on Top of the Pops. I have tried to explain to some young people that I know how important an event it was to see these stars actually performing on the screen, but I honestly don’t think that they get it. Why would they want to sit in the same room as their mum and dad to listen to and watch some popular band? The state of affairs now is so utterly different. If they want to see any singer performing, all they have to do is Google it and they can track down film of a performance in a matter of seconds. At risk of sounding like an old fogy, I think that they miss a lot like this. There is no pleasurable anticipation, no counting off the days until it’s time for the show. (Esther M. Hannigan)

An important reason for watching Top of the Pops, quite apart from the enjoyment of seeing your favourite group perform, was that this became itself a social event the following day at school or in the pub. ‘Did you see so and so last night? Wasn’t he dreamy? I must get that single on Saturday.’ The inability to record and play back television programmes like Top of the Pops meant that magazines and newspapers aimed at teenagers were an important way of keeping up with your chosen singers, even when you couldn’t actually watch them.

If you didn’t read Melody Maker, you would soon find yourself being out of touch. It was the only way of finding out when an album was being released, the dates of concerts, news about the bands and all the rest of it. Now you would only need to Google some singer’s name and you would be able to find out everything about him. Some of them Tweet, which means that you might know five minutes later what he had for breakfast. Forty years ago though, all the information came from papers like Melody Maker. Some people belonged to fan clubs and they would get magazines or newsletters about particular singers or bands, but for the rest of the time you had to rely upon the papers. (Mary A. Barker)

Melody Maker and New Musical Express were read each week for news of the pop and rock scene. Magazines like Jackie gave girls the personal information that they required about the singers upon whom they had crushes. Take the 28th June 1975 issue, for example. It included a long piece about Elton John, telling about his relationship with his mother, how he gets depressed sometimes and how he relaxes – all the little details that teenage girls wanted to know, except, of course, the crucial fact that he was gay!

My father used to crack jokes about Elton John being gay and I found it really upsetting. His newspaper had apparently carried a piece which hinted about it. I think it was to the effect that Elton John was known by a girl’s name among some circle of friends, Beryl I think. I know it sounds silly, but the thought that he might be gay was terribly upsetting, because of course it wrecked my fantasy of Elton John meeting me and then falling madly in love with me. It would be hard to imagine a singer today managing to keep something like that off the internet for long! (Polly Reynolds)

Today, any information about the private life of any pop singer spreads like wildfire across the internet. It is impossible to control personal details about anybody in the public eye. During the 1970s though, it was still possible to keep the lid on scandals and unconventional or unsavoury aspects of a singer’s life. Despite the fan clubs and interviews in magazines like Jackie, fans were very much kept in the dark about their idols. Some even married without it becoming public knowledge, something which would be exceedingly hard in this day and age.

Parents would often dismiss any music being listened to by their teenage children as being a terrible racket, although this did change a bit towards the later years of the decade.

My father used to claim that he couldn’t actually hear any music when I had one of my records on. He said that it just sounded like a noise to him and that all he could hear was the boom, boom, boom of the bass. Another of his complaints was that he couldn’t hear the words and that when he could, the lyrics didn’t seem to make any sense. It is quite funny in retrospect, because I now realise that he was trying to wind me up and succeeded very well. I used to get furiously angry about what I saw as his philistinism. (Esther M. Hannigan)

Parents’ claiming that the music their children listen to is noisy and unmelodic was not something which began in the 1970s. It could be that some of the most treasured classical music was once dismissed by the older generation of the time as being a frightful racket.

I was a great fan of James Taylor and used to listen to him in my room all the time when I was sixteen. My father would sometimes come in and listen for a minute or two and then ask why he always sounded so gloomy. He made the same comment about some of my other favourites, Neil Young for instance. He used to reminisce about some of the bands of his youth in the thirties and tell me that they always sounded a lot more cheerful. I have listened lately to an awful lot of the music that I enjoyed from say nineteen seventy-one to seventy-five and in fact I see now that my father had a point; it does sound a little gloomy. The singers always sound as though things aren’t going right for them. I suppose since that’s how teenagers feel a lot of the time anyway, music like that is calculated to appeal to them. (Theresa O. Littlestone)

Music Technology

When the decade began, most teenagers hoping to listen to the music of their choice were restricted to a record player that was usually mono. Vinyl records were what everybody listened to, but by the end of the decade cassette tapes were also fairly common, although records were what most people wanted. There was something satisfying about a large, cardboard LP case which the small plastic cassettes did not have.

When you bought an LP, you had a tangible object, a possession. Everything about it was satisfying. The cover art, the fact that there were likely to be photographs of the singer, possibly the lyrics printed on the sleeve. My children download music all the time now, but they don’t actually have anything. My collection of albums in some way defined who I was. Anybody looking through them could have told a lot about me, just from seeing those records. You had to think carefully about which records you were going to buy, because of course you couldn’t afford all the music you would like to have available to play. This made us think more about our music; it was not just a free commodity the way it is now for kids on the internet. (David Ford)

There was something pleasurable about buying an album. They were large, they were substantial and you felt that you had obtained value for the £1.50 or £2 which you handed over. There was something richly fulfilling about carrying home an LP and knowing that it was now yours and that you could listen to the songs on it as often as you wished to do so. The thing to remember is that most teenagers did not have all that many LPs and you could get a little tired of hearing the same ones all the time. It was a real treat to have a new lot of songs to hear on demand. This is not a pleasure that most teenagers have today. They have unlimited access to music, as much as they want really. Most people have something like Spotify, and even for those who don’t, they are always sending each other music or watching it on YouTube. (Terry Barlow)

Stereos were expensive and usually owned by parents rather than their children. Since these were generally installed in the living room or lounge, and considering that most parents did not want to listen to their teenage offspring’s pop music, this usually meant relying on a record player in the bedroom.

In the late 1950s, my parents bought a record player. Then, ten years later, they bought a proper stereo system. I inherited the old record player, which I had in my bedroom. It was a pretty primitive thing really, it was just mono. Even so, I thought it wonderful that I could actually sit in my room and choose what I listened to. I got a Saturday job after that, mainly so that I could afford to buy records. Simon and Garfunkel, James Taylor, Joni Mitchell; my friends used to come round and we would just sit there in my room listening to our favourite singers and talking. This was the biggest part of our social lives in the seventies, just sitting in each other’s bedrooms and listening to old record players. (Nina Webb)

Putting a record on to play demanded surgical precision, in order to not scratch it. The needle had to be lowered slowly and carefully onto precisely the right place. On the more expensive record players and stereos, this could be done automatically and the arms themselves were finely balanced, but on the sort of old model to be found in the average teenager’s bedroom, the operation had to be carried out by hand. Sometimes, you might want to listen to a particular track in the middle of an album and this required even more finely gauged movements. The problem was that, in contrast to today’s digital technology, the piece of music represented by a record was really a one-off. Few teenagers could afford to buy replacements for records if they were damaged and so they took good care of them.

Taking care of records was practically a hobby in itself. You had to make quite sure to put them back in the paper sleeve and then the cardboard cover. I had a special felt brush that was used to remove dust from records and also cleaning fluids. The stylus had to be changed pretty regularly too otherwise your records could get damaged by one that was too worn. (Geoffrey C. Feldman)

You forget how much care you had to take of vinyl records. Most of the gadgets that kids use today to listen to music – their mobiles and MP3 players – are pretty robust and can be left around. Not so with vinyl records. They quite literally used to attract dirt through static electricity. You had to use a special cloth or brush to attract the dirt back out of the grooves. Handling a record was like dealing with some priceless and irreplaceable artefact. You had to hold them by the edge, heaven forbid that you should allow them to get finger marks on the surface. If you left the thing out of its case it would be sure to get a scratch, which could make it unplayable. Since these were expensive items, you took great care of them. An ordinary album in the mid-seventies cost £2, which would be the equivalent of maybe £20 or £25 today. Your record collection was worth something. At a pinch, if you were really hard up, you could always flog a few albums. (Gillian V. Pettitt)

By the end of the 1970s, the price of stereos had fallen and they became more accessible to young people. Portable cassette players were on the market by 1970, but they were not particularly cheap either. A stereo system on which to play cassettes cost around £70 in 1970, the equivalent to perhaps £1,000 in modern terms, way beyond the reach of most teenagers.

Something which those who grew up in the age of digital music will never understand is how fragile our old music was. I remember that my James Taylor album got scratched, right at the beginning of ‘Fire and Rain’. This was a major disaster; I couldn’t afford to go out and buy another copy. We had to take great care of our records, they were all but irreplaceable. My own children download stuff all the time, the idea of treasuring a record is quite alien to them. (Nina Webb)

In today’s era of universal access to music, this can be a quite hard concept to grasp. It explains why it was so vital for the young person to be allowed to watch television programmes like Top of the Pops. The closest thing to downloading music from the internet came in the latter part of the 1970s, when cassette recorders became more common. It was then possible to copy records onto tapes and to also record radio programmes. This could be a nerve-racking business though. Unless you had a special connection to the stereo, you would have to put the tape recorder’s microphone near to the record player and record it that way. It was almost a certainty that under such circumstances, one’s mother would be sure to knock on the door during the recording to announce that tea was ready.

I remember taping albums in my bedroom. I suppose that these were the first illegal downloads. We certainly knew that it was against the law to copy music and circulate it in this way. One person would have a record and then we would borrow it and tape it onto cassette. The quality was not brilliant, but it was better than nothing. I had a microphone for my portable cassette player, but only a record player to record from. This meant setting the record up to play and then positioning the microphone near the speaker – primitive stuff indeed. (Anon)

One modern invention that was released at the end of the decade was the personal stereo, the Walkman. These were hugely expensive to begin with, but the novelty of walking down the street, privately listening to your own music, was seen to be unbelievably cool at the time. In the 1960s, teenagers used to walk along holding a transistor radio to their ear, now they used earphones and the enjoyment of music was changing from being a social activity to a private pleasure.

There were transistor radios with little earplugs way back in the sixties, but the idea of having both ears closed up like that and listening to something which nobody else could hear was a bit strange. Of course, at home you could clamp a gigantic pair of headphones on, but that was not common. The Walkman was revolutionary in that it meant that the music you listened to was for you alone. It was not intended to be shared. Today, it is very common to see people with earphones in listening to MP3 players, but back in 1979 the idea was radical in the extreme. (Paul Clarke)

During this period, teenagers took enormous care of the devices which played their music. A broken record player would have been a major disaster for many teenagers. Things like cassette players and stereos were very expensive and were the kind of thing that one would have to save up for, or perhaps receive as a birthday or Christmas present. There was certainly not an endless stream of such gadgets, as there is today.

I had a cassette player in 1972, before the price fell dramatically and they became something that everybody had laying around. Anyway, I used it for taping music and playing cassettes. One day, disaster struck. I spilled a cup of tea all over it and it stopped working. This was a terrible thing to happen, because there was no question of just going out and buying a new one straight away. Until I had saved up enough for a new one, that was it; I just couldn’t play any of my music. My own children lose or break MP3 players, phones and so on all the time. They always seem to find a way to replace them though. (Chris Arthur)

I remember buying my first stereo in 1976. I was eighteen and had just moved into a place of my own, which was a bedsit. The one thing that I simply had to have to make life bearable was a stereo. They were pretty expensive, so I bought a fairly basic system with a deck and speakers for £45. That was a week’s wages for me at the time and I only managed it because my parents gave me some money for my birthday. Having a stereo was one of those essential things when you moved out of home. I could put up without a lot, but not being able to hear Neil Young was not one of them. (Terry Barlow)

We can hardly leave the subject of music technology without touching upon one of the great icons of the 1970s, the ultimate dream of many teenagers as the coolest and most up-to-date way of playing music at home – the 8 Track Stereo.