Alwyn W Turner - Crisis? What Crisis?

[dem bones]

Alwyn W Turner - Crisis? What Crisis? (Aurum, 2008)

Coming very soon (May 8th) from our friend Alwyn W Turner of Trash Fiction fame:

Crisis? What Crisis? Britain in the 1970s (Aurum, 2008).

Meticulously researched, this confident, engaging and well-argued history of the 1970s features dozens of original interviews with contemporary politicians, rock stars, actors, designers, as well as drawing on the books, films, sitcoms and media of the time. This is not an insider's account of the crises that wracked Britain in that decade. Rather it is the consumer's version, a world seen through the eyes of the mass media, in which Tony Benn, Mary Whitehouse and environmentalists jostle for space with David Bowie, Hilda Ogden and skinheads.

Alwyn writes: "If you've got the stomach for possibly the worst single ever made, there's a trailer for the book here:

Crisis? What Crisis? video"

Oh, that is exquisitely ghastly! Treat yourself!

[franklinmarsh]

www.newstatesman.com/books/2008/05/crisis-decade-popular

Rather nice review from no less a personage than Francis Wheen.

[dem bones]

Alwyn W. Turner - Crisis? What Crisis? Britain In The 1970s (Aurum paperbacks, 2013)

Note on the 2013 Edition
Intro: Seventies: 'This is the modern world'

Part One: HANG ON TO YOURSELF 1970-74
The Heath Years: 'The party on the left is now the party on the right'
Rivals: 'This town ain't big enough for both of us'
Environment: 'All I need is the air that I breathe'
Violence: 'It's the only thing that'll make you see sense'
Unions: 'I can ruin the government's plan'

Part Two: GOLDEN YEARS 1974-76
The Wilson Years: 'Did you miss me?'
Opposition: 'I think I got something to say to you'
Obscenity: 'I wanna take dirty pictures of you'
Nostalgia: 'Driving me backwards'
Europe: 'This year we're off to sunny Spain'

Part Three: SENSE OF DOUBT 1976-79
The Callaghan Years: 'Falling apart at the seams'
Race: 'I was born here just like you'
Fringes: 'It's coming some time, so maybe...'
Sexualities: 'The buggers are legal now'
Crisis: 'Sending out an S.O.S.'
Farewell: 'It's cold outside'

References
Bibliography
Credits
Acknowledgements
index

'VIVID, BRILLIANTLY RESEARCHED' FRANCIS WHEEN, NEW STATESMAN

The 1970s. They were the best of times and the worst of times. Wealth inequality was at a record low, yet industrial strife was at a record high. These were the glory years of Doctor Who and glarn rock, but the darkest days of the Northern Ireland conflict. Beset by strikes, inflation, power cuts and the rise of the far right, the cosy Britain of the post-war consensus was unravelling - in spectacularly lurid style.

Fusing high politics and low culture, Crisis? What Crisis? presents a world in which Enoch Powell, Ted Heath and Tony Benn jostle for space with David Bowie, Hilda Ogden and Margo Leadbetter, and reveals why a country exhausted by decline eventually turned to Margaret Thatcher for salvation.

'An adventurous and enjoyable reassessment of a much-maligned decade' - BBC HISTORY MAGAZINE
'Fascinating ... an affectionate but unflinching portrait of the era' - INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY.

Author Alwyn W. Turner first came to our attention via the work of genius that is his Trash Fiction website but, as Crisis? What Crisis proves, he has gone on to even better things. OK, so Crisis? What Crisis? is not a bibliography per se, but a sociological study of a decade viewed through the eyes of the day's party politics and popular culture. If you can imagine Denim's The Osmonds expanded to book length, you're getting warm.

When a Conservative Prime Minister, Edward Hearth, rages against "the unacceptable face of Capitalism,"you know we're in trouble, and Britain during the so-called 'decade that style forgot' had trouble, lots and lots of trouble. Bloody Sunday and the subsequent reprisals both in Northern Ireland and on the mainland, the IRA, the Miners strike, football hooligans, skinheads, police corruption, racial and sexual discrimination, the rise of the far right, the Grunwick dispute, the Festival of Light, revolutionaries in loon pants, the Notting Hill riots, the three day week, blackouts (if the energy industry are to be believed, we can look forward to a revival this winter).

Honest, there is just too much to encapsulate in one of my lamentable 'reviews', even had i not been too busy enjoying the ride to bother with note-taking (try it yourself and you'll see what i mean). Take the (mostly) paperbacks. Everything from Norman Tebbit's Upwardly Mobile and Enoch Powell's Freedom & Reality to Waler Harris's Saliva and Charlie Williams' Ee - I've had Some Laughs, via Germaine Greer's The Female Eunoch, Gillian Freeman's The Leader, Timothy Lea's Confessions of a Window Cleaner Richard Allen's Skinhead books - Moffat's anti-heroes , he suggests, would return in an altogether more horrific guise; as James Herbert's The Rats. The chapter on ecology references NEL, Hamlyn & Co's 'when animals attack' nasties, with GNS's Night Of The Crabs among those titles coming under scrutiny. And then there's anti-filth campaigner Lord Longford's finest hour: "When Longford's report emerged in 1972 it was an immediate best-seller, largely because it was marketed as a fat paperback with the single word, Pornography, displayed in huge letters on the cover, and because it retailed at a very competitive 60p." Similarly, the increasingly bitter class struggle is reflected, not only through Parliamentary outbursts and often hysterical newspaper editorials, but some choice dialogue from such popular sit coms as George & Mildred and The Good Life.

On the music scene there was Bowie, glam, punk , disco, Middle of the Road - both the group of that name and the much despised but commercially phenomenal easy listening genre as a whole - and an abundance of novelty songs (I don't think i caught any reference to metal, or prog rock beyond Pink Floyd, but we do get a bit of folk). MP Leo Abse called for Alice Cooper to be banned from Britain on the grounds that his horror theatrics were "sick." COUM, the proto-Throbbing Gristle, took the outrage a step further with their notorious Prostitution exhibition at the ICA which saw Tory MP Nicholas Fairbairn denounce them in the Daily Mail as "the wreckers of civilisation" (an epithet they treasured ever after")

You get the feeling that, if it were humanely possible, Mr. Turner would read, watch and listen to everything produced prior to and after the decade to make sure he'd not left anything out. Anybody who sees fit to include Vault in the bibliography is either obsessively meticulous or too plain charitable for their own good, but incredibly,you'll find our mk 1 incarnation sat alongside such on-line heavyweights as the Margaret Thatcher Foundation, Socialist Labour Party, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, and the Knitting Circle as a website of some interest!

Seems entirely relevant to again quote Lawrence's Denim's classic: "In the seventies I was just a kid, still knew what it was all about, I sucked it in, now it's all dripping out." The same might be said of Mr. Turner with equal justification.

******

Aurum have since published Mr. Turner's Rejoice! Rejoice!: Britain In The Eighties and as recently as last month, A Classless Society: Britain In The Nineties. God only knows what he has in store for us for the new millennium.

[killercrab]

I'll be honest and say I read 2/3rds of this before drifting away. It's choc full of detail , particularly on the political side I seem to remember. I'll no doub't finish it one day...

KC

[dem bones]

Oct 12, 2013 19:08:46 GMT killercrab said:

I'll be honest and say I read 2/3rds of this before drifting away. It's choc full of detail , particularly on the political side I seem to remember. I'll no doub't finish it one day...

KC

If it's a pure nostalgia fest you're after and you've not already done so, you might like to hunt down a copy of another Aurum title, Jeremy Novick & Mick Middles' Wham Bam Thank You Glam: A Celebration of the Seventies which covers similar territory with far less emphasis on the political situation. Have read a lot of non-fiction this year, some mentioned on here, much that isn't, and have to say, Crisis, What Crisis? is up there with the very best.

In a fit of masochism, I've since ordered Mr. Turner's Rejoice! Rejoice! Britain In The Eighties from the idea morgue. Now that really was a decade of proper horror: every second of every minute of every day for ten years solid.