Simon Armitage: 1970 and all that

The Seventies are usually derided as the decade that taste forgot. But, says Simon Armitage, author of an acclaimed new novel about the period, they were actually a golden age for culture and children's freedom

I don't have an earliest memory. I can bring to mind an image of me and my sister leaning against an iron railing on a sunlit afternoon, me with my hands stuffed in my pockets, my sister sporting a pair of shorts made from a beach towel. But that's a photograph, taken when she was three and I was 18 months younger. Like all my early recollections, it isn't a memory at all, but a Kodak moment. In fact, for the first seven years of my life I was asleep. Sound asleep. I didn't hear the bullet from the grassy knoll that shattered JFK's skull. Beatlemania was just a background hum. Bobby Moore might as well have been holding an ice-cream cornet in the air at Wembley for all I knew, and the Moon landing was way past my bedtime. I think it was the roar of the first ever jumbo jet passing through British airspace that woke me. I blinked a few times, looked out of the window, and it was the Seventies.

Of course, I didn't know it was a historical period. It felt like the present, but that is the great con trick time plays on us all. As proof of the crime, and also the ugliness of the era, I'd offer Kevin Keegan's wedding photograph. The perm, for one thing, but also the white (leather? leatherette?) suit with lapels that owed more to aeronautics than tailoring. At least the width and length of the flared trousers hid what could only have been platform shoes – the type requiring special planning permission and a police escort.

Fashion, like drink, is a good friend but a terrible enemy, and the Seventies, as a decade, was more unforgiving than most. For almost 10 years, danger was everywhere, especially in any encounter with music and clothes. Few came through unscathed. The lucky ones got away with patch pockets and a few Flintlock singles. Others, though, succumbed to the full indignity of the age, including a swatch of Top of the Pops albums (featuring "20 unoriginal artists") and a test-card tank-top. And if the tartan turn-ups didn't get you, the clackers or the Peter Powell Stunt Kite did. It was a minefield. It was an asylum of sound, colour and shape. A zoo.

Given the horror I'm describing, the current obsession among Seventies survivors for trips down memory lane might seem surprising, even masochistic. Sure, it's cheap telly, all that archive footage of Space Hoppers and Chopper bikes. And nostalgia is always useful when it comes to stimulating sales figures. But there are, I'd argue, important philosophical and sociological reasons why people of my generation want to sound off about Love Hearts and Spangles, or pride themselves on a thorough knowledge of public information films, or can reel off the full roll-call of Trumpton's fire-brigade or The Whacky Races' starting grid by heart.

For one thing, it's relief and, speaking as a man, it emanates from the firm understanding that never again will I have to subject my groin to the double torture of nylon undies and undersized silk-effect shorts. Secondly, it's a form of power, in the sense that control of recent history has finally been wrested from our forebears and their friends, for whom the Sixties were the last word in rebellion and change. No one would question the importance of that era as a turning point in human relations. But Jesus, would we ever hear the end of it? On top of that, the Sixties had quickly become a commodity, an industry, and with reformed hippies and lapsed revolutionaries now controlling media networks and editorial policy, the opportunity for flashback and rewind to those swinging times was unending and interminable and everywhere.

Against that backdrop, it must have been with some timidity that somebody, somewhere, filling a gap in the conversation, and apropos of nothing, opined that in his or her judgement, the cartoon series Scooby Doo was never the same after the introduction of his irksome, pint-size accomplice, Scrappy. A quizzical silence might have ensued, followed by another voice, declaring, "Yeah, and if it hadn't been for you meddling kids, I would have got away with it."

And thus the Seventies, as a retrospective, was born. From now on, such nagging subjects as the best way of whitening a pair of Dunlop Green Flash or the traumatising effect of The Singing Ringing Tree could be discussed with passion and impunity. In fact, the great thing about the Seventies, in comparison with the previous decade, was precisely the lack of context. It wasn't a counter-blast to anything. We weren't wearing those five-button waistbands and feathered haircuts as a political statement. It was freedom in the true sense of the word.

And rightly or wrongly, I think of the Seventies as an age of wonder and innocence. It was an era when material possessions were tantalisingly close and yet essentially, except for the tat and the tack, still out of reach. Of goodies that were acquired, analogue mechanics meant that broken toys or games could be taken to pieces, mended, and put back together again. They could be understood. Today, even a Happy Meal gift comes with a finite power source housed in a moulded plastic case, and arrives with a strong whiff of disposability. In the Seventies, electrical equipment, such as tape recorders, calculators and LED watches, was nothing less than miraculous.

Also, cynicism and irony still hadn't permeated the atmosphere. How else, except in a mood of true naivety, could we have willingly gone next door to watch the stud-farm wedding of Princess Anne and Captain Mark Phillips on my Auntie Elsie's new colour telly, specially bought for the occasion? The fragmentation of the broadcasting media can only mean fewer and fewer moments of cultural consensus. I'm thinking of those mornings at the school-bus stop, when everyone agreed that the best way to escape the attention of a Dalek was to throw a tea-towel over its head or run upstairs.

It was the same kind of innocence, or blissful ignorance, perhaps, that led to a type of independence that our own children will never be allowed to know. I'm talking about "playing out" – quite literally, playing out of doors in the absence of parental supervision, and from a very early age. True, there are some bad people in this world, almost entirely men, with sweets in their pockets and sinister thoughts in their brains and dangerous stirrings in their loins. In fact, my sister and I once met one of them, in an alleyway known locally as Socialist Club End. He didn't want us to join the Labour Party, or even take us home and show us his rabbits. But he did want to open his raincoat and expose his shortcomings, at which point we raced for home, me on my five-speed drop-handlebar, my sister on her metallic red Raleigh 14. Don't get me wrong, I'm as paranoid as the next dad, especially in the park on a Sunday. But I am happy I grew up at a time when cotton wool was used for swabbing bloody knees, not for wrapping kids in, and where the outside world was a place of adventure and experience, not an inconvenience separating one interior from the next.

The other day, driving through town, I glanced over towards the park, which 20 years ago boasted half-a-dozen swings, a huge metal slide, a set of monkey bars, a five-seater rocking horse like some medieval battering ram, and a witch's hat roundabout left over from the Spanish Inquisition. Today, the park contains nothing more than a few lame-looking pieces of fabricated ironwork no more than two feet high, with several tons of bark chippings scattered underneath. No self-respecting glue-sniffer would be seen dead in the place, let alone a clump of moody adolescents looking for somewhere to drink and smoke. Pathetic. Faced with that alternative, it's no wonder we're rearing a generation of bedroom anarchists, downloading Slipknot concerts and reading Marilyn Manson lyrics under the duvet. And no wonder us lot – their parents – are already harping on about the Seventies like they were some kind of golden age, like they were the good old days.

'Little Green Man' by Simon Armitage is published by Viking at £12.99