Yet another cannibalisation from Vault mk. 1. Franklin started this one way back on Sep 5th, 2005 !!!
The original thread runs for three pages and starts
here. I've just swiped the start. There was also a companion
You know you're in the 1980s when... which got distracted by miss jumbo perm, cover starlet of the first
The Witches book, so if anybody fancies giving that another go?
Franklin Marsh Just throwing this up (Bleurgh!) as a preparation for things to come. It will directly apply to the Confessions and Richard Allen etc but interesting to see if any of the contemporary horrors can get in on the act. I mean of course references to Ted Heath, Harold Wilson. the product placement of items long gone, television programmes disappeared, cars no longer manufactured, records in the charts etc - anything that while you're engrossed in a paperback penny dreadful screams THE NINETEEN-SEVENTIES!!! YOU WERE THERE!!! at you. In time-honoured FM tradition I've no examples to hand but will return here whenever something leaps out at me. Oh, all right "The Most Precious in Pan Book Horror Stories" No 8 whose punchline shouts 1960s (or possibly 50s)
demonik Truly inspired Franklin! Needless to say, I can't think of one lousy example, either...
Tell a lie. I already mentioned this on the Fontana forum, but Sydney J. Bounds'
Young Blood from the
4th Fontana Book Of Great Horror Stories fits the bill - which is a bit saucy, as it was first published in August 1969.
Shouldn't go into too much detail - the story only lasts for 3 pages - but the doomed heroine and her girlfriend's demeanor (all mascara, miniskirt and fishnets), the fact that the club they're visiting is The Swing-In, the hip-speak ("simply fab", "the top of the pops!"), etc.,
scream "The Seventies!" to me. Trust me, this one's the literary equivalent of
Dracula: AD 1972: Hell, It couldn't be more 'seventies if Dana Gillespie circa
Weren't Born A Man suddenly burst in on a spacehopper.
You're so right about the Allen and Lea books too - not for the contents but the covers, and none more-so than
Boot Boys (for some reason - probably Altamont - anything with an Angel photographed on the cover translates as 'sixties, no matter when it was written).
Ramsey Cambell looking like this on the dust-jacket of
Superhorror aka
The Far Reaches of Fear (W. H. Allen, 1976) takes some beating.
More Campbell: Girls in mini-skirts/dresses haunt the pages of
Demons By Daylight (1973), but two stories already mentioned elsewhere are particularly appropriate to this thread:
Potential is littered with references to 'make love, not war' badges, joss-sticks and Indian Dancing, features bands named the Titus Groans and Faveolate Colossi (the latter shower their fans with flowers) and, when one hippy doesn't reckon Birchester's first Love-in is up to much, he threatens to report the organisers to
The International Times. Bonus point for gratuitous reference to some hairy smoking a
Woodbine. OK, so it's probably more 'sixties than 'seventies, but these types were still knocking about at the time "Demons ..." was published.
More hippies: Ramsey's
The Second Staircase (guest-starring Michel Parry) name-drops George Harrison & Ravi Shankar, Wimpy Bars,
The Golden Egg and the magazines
Castle of Frankenstein,
Gothique and
What's on in London? The perils of
vampire-hunting in a mini-skirt are laid bare in Kenneth Bulmer's
Under The Flagstones (David Sutton's
New Tales of The Supernatural: Vol 1, Sphere, 1971). Charley Randall, with-it leader of the local Van Helsing lager corps, reckons he's seen a tombstone "move" in the recently desanctified St. Dominic's churchyard while he was getting it on with Gloria. The groovy gang go take a look ... Around the time this was published, embarking on an impromptu anti-V**p*re search & destroy mission from the pub (in this case,
The Sphere) was a very popular pursuit in a certain N. London district.
"Dolly birds"!
I've been running through a few old
Fontana Horrors of late, and they're liberally sprinkled with references to "Dolly birds". How 'seventies is that?
Haven't discovered any terrifying tank-tops, elephantine flares or haunted hot-pants just yet, but we live in hope. I'm trying to find out if there was a novelisation of
Horror Hospital, because, if it's anything like the movie, we've struck pay dirt!
Franklin MarshThere used to be a Golden Egg in Slough. Ramsey's picture is worth a thousand words. You've got my memory churning. Alwen on TrashFiction noted the in-joke band Siddhartha in The Bikers bearing more than a passing resemblance to Steppenwolf. In The Devils' Rider there's a band called the Dearly Departed (who bear more than a passing resemblance to The Grateful Dead) playing at The Scala.
A young boy in Graham Masterton's 'The Wells Of Hell' is wearing Six Million Dollar Man pyjamas. Masterton obviously liked this series - the word 'bionic' has cropped up. Nils Lofgren is playing on the radio.
Some good stuff in Martin Jenson's
An Odour Of Decay. Our three heroines all have their own cars (call me an hideously unfunny bloated sexist monster but I'd say pretty good going for '75) a red mini, an MG and a Scimitar (?). Sarah is giving it a go with her cornflower blue dress, long and cut in Victorian style, trendily offset by 8 strings of yellow and red karma beads. Belinda's fiance, Terence is 'tall, grey-haired, lean and tanned, a pipe smoking commercial made flesh'. Sounds like he'd get on with Guy N Smith. Heck if he had a beard he could be Guy N Smith. More interesting is Nan's boyfriend Lance. (Is there such a thing as a 70s name? Lance would seem to fit the bill.) There's something a bit shifty about him, and 'was a pop-orientated, bell-bottomed, pun-dropping oaf with long hair that did not suit him'. To go further 'Standing there, in a mauve velvet jacket, black flares and dome-toed shoes' - see what I mean? I hope something nasty happens to Terence and Lance.
demonik I hope that something nasty happens to all of them.
And whoever sold you this book.
