Clint West’s Americana Plus: The 1970’s – Heaven or Hell?

There was a time not so long ago where, on a fairly regular basis, the Tories would issue dire warnings that Labour would “take Britain back to the 1970s”. You don’t hear that so much now that Labour seems more intent on taking us back to a kind of Cameron/Clegg model of liberal conservatism. However, the jibe always used to mystify me somewhat because you know what – I liked the 1970s! I went to school in the 1970s, I fell in love with music in the 1970s, bought my first car in the 1970s and I met my first girlfriend in the 1970s. I was totally unaware that I was was a supposed to be having a miserable time. Power cuts? I remember those, the perfect excuse for not doing your homework. Rubbish piled up in the streets? A vast resource of scrap wood and metal to make stuff out of. I remember constructing a go-kart and even found some pram wheels for it. It was legalised fly-tipping, people got rid of all sorts of junk, or treasure as this young boy saw it.

The 1970s were fun. I’d go out for hours on end on my bike, with no mobile phone and not even a watch – it was time to go home when it started to get dark. There was great freedom and far less paranoia about the terrible things that might happen to us. I went regularly to late-night rock gigs with mates from the age of 14/15. I went to my first festival (Reading 1977) at the age of 16 and it was brilliant! So for me the 1970s were a great time and the idea of Labour taking us back there was really quite appealing – only this time I’d like a Ford Capri, rather than the battered and rusty Escort that I actually bought for £100 as my first car.

Sorry to be vague here, but I can remember a TV show a while back that consisted of various people advocating for different decades as the ‘greatest decade in music’. I recall that David Quantick was the advocate for the 1970s and that he didn’t do a particularly good job of it, but it won anyway, quite rightly of course. As well as the obvious big-name artists at their peak during that decade (Zeppelin, Sabbath, Floyd, Bowie etc.) there was so much more going in the 1970s: pub-rock, punk and new wave, the emergence of funk and disco, the whole Jamaican reggae scene etc.

What there wasn’t, was an ‘americana’ scene. Well at least nothing that bore that sobriquet as the name didn’t exist at that time. Does that mean that nobody was playing music influenced by America’s great folk, country and roots heritage? Absolutely not, loads of songwriters and musicians were doing exactly that, only as the americana pigeonhole hadn’t yest appeared those artists were likely to place in the folk, singer-songwriter, or country-rock sections of your local record shop.

The ’Seventies Segment’ of my Clint West’s Americana Plus radio show celebrates just those artists; those that might well be labelled as ‘americana’ had they emerged today, rather than in the 1970s. In this section last week, the programme featured Commander Cody and his Lost Planet Airman and Gram Parsons. Other weeks have featured more low-profile artists and recently I chose Meal Ticket and Racing Cars just to demonstrate the British were in on the act too. If you have any suggestions for 1970s ‘americana’ acts that you think I should feature on the show, please drop a note in the comments below.

‘Clint West’s Americana Plus’ is broadcast every Tuesday night from 8pm – 10pm on http://socialmusicradio.uk

You can also listen to the show anytime by using the ‘Rewind’ facility on the same link.

Here is last weeks show.