21 Years Ago. . .: Exactly how bad were the Seventies? KEVIN JACKSON dons a greatcoat and a 'ravy dongler' and boldly travels back to the years that taste forgot

IT IS A COLD SATURDAY MORNING IN DECEMBER 1971 AND THE TIMES ARE AS DARK AS THE OVERCAST SKIES - WAR IS RAGING BETWEEN INDIA AND PAKISTAN - PRESIDENT NIXON AND THE UNITED STATES AIR FORCE ARE PREPARING TO RESUME AIR RAIDS ON NORTH VIETNAM - COLONEL GADDAFI HAS SEIZED pounds 80 MILLION OF BRITISH ASSETS IN LIBYA - IN LONDON, THE JORDANIAN AMBASSADOR NARROWLY ESCAPES A MACHINE-GUN ATTACK BY BLACK SEPTEMBER GUERRILLAS - THE IRA IS STEPPING UP ITS BOMBING CAMPAIGNS IN ULSTER WHERE YOUNG GIRLS ARE BEING TARRED AND FEATHERED FOR DATING BRITISH SOLDIERS - ON THE MAINLAND THE POST OFFICE TOWER HAS BEEN BLASTED - THE ANGRY BRIGADE HAS BOMBED THE HOME OF THE MINISTER FOR EMPLOYMENT - THE NUMBER OF JOBLESS BRITISH WORKERS HAS RISEN TO 970,000 - THE CHANCELLOR IS TALKING ABOUT GALVANISING THE MORIBUND ECONOMY BY CUTTING PURCHASE TAX - AND THE CHRISTMAS CONCERT AT THE ROYAL ALBERT HALL (TICKETS FROM 80p TO pounds 1.50) WILL BE BY A BAND CALLED QUINTESSENCE . . .

DARK TIMES indeed, but if at this juncture of world history you happen to be a member of the Lower Sixth with a fierce loyalty to 'Progressive' music, it is only the last of these facts which really troubles your composure this December morning. You've heard about Bangladesh, of course, because of George Harrison's benefit concert with Eric Clapton, Ravi Shankar and Bob Dylan back in August. You've even heard of the black militant George Jackson and his violent death, because Dylan's latest single (a taster for the More Bob Dylan Greatest Hits album) is all about him. What's more, the ever more radical John Lennon has found inspiration for a song in September's bloody riot in the Attica State Correction Facility.

What is it about that Quintessence gig that bothers you, then? It's not so much the fact that this group's particular brand of Asiatic vagueness, rock ragas and general doodling around with Eastern promise seems grotesquely inapposite at a time when Indian planes have just bombed an orphanage in Dacca. It's more that, though you've already sent off to the RAH for your tickets, the prospect isn't quite so thrilling as it might be. Dare you admit - even to yourself - let alone to your mates, who never leave home without stacks of the right albums held conspicuously under their great-coated arms like chivalric blazons - that you actually find Quintessence a bit, well, boring?

Indeed, does the same nagging doubt not apply to most of the vinyl on which you have been blowing your limited pocket money - all those LPs by Soft Machine and Santana and yes, even - whisper it softly, for this verges on blasphemy - Meddle and Ummagumma, by 'the Floyd'? Doesn't it sometimes seem as if your stupid little sister, with her hot pants and her poster of Noddy Holder, is having a lot more fun from popular music? You shudder with unease.

For rock, as opposed to pop, is taken with almost scholarly solemnity by the young these days. What else is there to think and care about? Television? Well, there's the Whistle Test, and Star Trek is good, but the rest is all Top of the Pops (watched on the sly in case Deep Purple or the Who appear) and The Saint with Roger Moore and The Persuaders with Roger Moore and Tony Curtis and Softly Softly Task Force with Stratford Johns, and then there are all those repellent Northern stand-up jokers in evening dress on The Comedians, and even, God help us, the nostalgia-fest of A Family at War . . . all polished off at midnight on the dot with Ivor Emmanuel Sings.

The cinema? True, a couple of really heavy rock films have just opened - Gimme Shelter, about the Stones' Altamont concert, and Frank Zappa's psychedelic whimsy 200 Motels - but otherwise it hasn't been a great year for young viewers. A Clockwork Orange was well worth sneaking into illegally, and Shaft and The French Connection were all right in their way, but that's about it unless you are really pretentious. Theatre? That's strictly for the junior English master, who keeps raving about the trapezes in Peter Brook's A Midsummer Night's Dream, which has come to the RSC at the Aldwych. Art? Please.

Comedy, then? Well, there may be some giggles to be had from the Monty Python albums on the thoroughly hip Charisma label, and the 'Jiving K Boots' column in Melody Maker is quite funny, but otherwise there isn't much to laugh about at the tail end of 1971. No, it is rock which provides the chief cultural means for transcending adolescent and post-adolescent boredom, frustration and all-round resentment. So it's back to Quintessence, and 'Dive Deep'.

What a drag. Fortunately, though, your morale is given an instant boost by the noise of Radio 1 coming through the wall from your little sister's tranny. They're playing the country's number one single: 'Ernie (The Fastest Milkman in the West)' by Benny Hill, which has just knocked Slade's 'Coz I Luv You' from the top slot. You grin with relief, and snort derisively: singles]

Only teenyboppers and mumsies and grannies buy singles these days - I mean, just look at the other contenders in the Top Thirty: Tom Jones, Olivia Newton-John (you grin again: Keith Emerson from ELP gave her a really good drubbing in the Melody Maker the other week), Vince Hill, Cilla Black, Shirley Bassey, Cliff Richard, Gilbert O'Sullivan, Tony Christie ('Is This the Way to Amarillo?') and the Carpenters. And hard on the hooves of Ernie's carthorse comes that ghastly new single adapted from the Coke adverts, 'I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing (in Perfect Harmony)', by the New Seekers. Oh wow.

Invigorated by the wave of adrenalin which accompanies this sudden renewal of faith, you throw back your eiderdown, check your face for the latest eruptions and start to dress for your shopping expedition. No school uniform today, so it's straight into the weekend gear: crushed velvet loon pants ( pounds 2.25 plus 15p postage and packing from the mail-order boutique), starred scoop-neck T-shirt ( pounds 1 plus 15p p&p), leather boots with 2 1/2 inch wooden-effect heels ( pounds 16).

The thickness of your maxi-length Afghan (pricey but worth it at pounds 25) allows you to get away without a sweater, so, stuffing your pocket with Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five and completing the ensemble with your 'ravy dongler' medallion (45p) and a dash of patchouli, you set off to check out that new record shop in the Finchley Road, called Our Price Records. Your mate 'Keef' said that it looked interesting, but what with Virgin's mail-order service and all, it probably wouldn't last more than six months . . .

WITH THE BENEFIT of 21 years of hindsight, it might seem as if Our Price Records made its first venture into the marketplace at precisely the nadir of twentieth- century popular music. The cultural division between those who nodded along to albums and those who bopped around to singles was almost as complete as our archetypal sixth-former believed at the time, and both factions of the musical civil war now sound simply awful.

On the one side, there were the old crooners, the family entertainers, the novelty hits ('Johnny Reggae' by Jonathan King's group the Piglets was in the Top 10, though reggae itself, in those pre-Marley days, was not) and - just about the only teenybopper act for which earnest teenage snobs might nurse a mild, self-conscious indulgence - T Rex.

On the other side were the Progressive bands on Harvest and Island and Vertigo and such; the art-and jazz-rockers, the merchants of pomp and flash: ELP, King Crimson, Barclay James Harvest, Yes, Curved Air, Deep Purple, Wishbone Ash, Jethro Tull and the Moody Blues among the more or less commonly remembered, and Centipede, Egg, Ekseption, Fields and Formerly Fat Harry among the more or less completely forgotten. These bands were intensely 'serious', though usually not in any way that obliged them (unlike those Sixties graduates Dylan, Harrison and Lennon) to pay much attention to events in India, Vietnam or Belfast.

Lyrical nebulousness was as much the order of the day with these bands as soaring mock-orchestral strains from the mellotron. In terms of acuteness, profundity and poetic bite there probably wasn't that much to choose between the turgid verses which sprawled across double-spread inner sleeves and the words to, say, 'Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep', one of 1971's big bubblegum hits. Indeed, there were even times when a taste for sonorous kitsch united the two warring factions of Rock and Pop.

In December 1971, the advertisements for King Crimson's new album Islands bore a text by Kahil Gibran ('A madman is not less a musician than you or myself; only the instrument on which he plays is a little out of tune'); that same month saw the release of the first of many singles versions of Desiderata ('Go placidly amid the noise and haste . . .'; thank you, but I have other plans), a po-faced recitation from an American colonial text introduced to the rock world by King Crimson's resident lyricist, Pete Sinfield.

A plague on both their musical houses, then? Well, not quite. Probably the most surprising thing about the musical scene in December 1971 is how many of the albums then in the Top Thirty - and especially those belonging to what was then known as the 'singer / songwriter' genre - are still familiar names in 1992 and, what's more, are still moderately respectable-sounding or better. Some listeners, indeed, would consider them classics.

Consider the candidates: Every Picture Tells a Story by Rod Stewart, Imagine by John Lennon, Bridge Over Troubled Water by Simon and Garfunkel, Tapestry by Carole King, Blue by Joni Mitchell, Surf's Up by the Beach Boys, Madman Across the Water by Elton John; there are a couple of albums by Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin's fourth album, and Who's Next; the pre-Islamic Cat Stevens is offering Teaser and the Firecat, and James Taylor had Mud Slide Slim; best of all, some would say (though Progressive fans would definitely have snorted at the suggestion) two offerings from Motown - Chartbusters Volume Six and Diana Ross's I'm Still Waiting.

TWENTY-ONE years on, it's a fair bet that most of the young people who pulled two quid from their pockets, moaned about the exorbitant price of LPs (why did they have go up from 32s 6d?) and bought one of those titles will now think that they made a surprisingly good investment. Long after record collections have shed their embarrassing copies of E Pluribus Funk or Foxtrot or Pilgrimage, many albums from the class of '71 will have survived to be stacked against the matt black speakers - or, at any rate, will have been carefully replaced by their CD counterparts.

Held up to close scrutiny, that is to say, the greatly maligned Musical Dark Ages of the early Seventies soon prove to contain some remarkably bright and shining moments. Many of its performers are far less contemptible than routine cynicism might suggest, and the one real irony of the time is that so many otherwise bright youngsters should have thought Jethro Tull more worthy of respectful attention than Diana Ross.

Apart from Ian Anderson and his colleagues, the only people who would agree with such a proposition in 1992 are either hopeless nostalgists or the DJs

and fans of American FM stations. Our archetypal sixth-former, now greying and a little tubby but still homesick for the power chords of yesteryear, should consider throwing in that cushy computing job in Milton Keynes and emigrating to the States.

For there, on all those 'Classic Rock' stations in Maine and Montana and downtown Miami, Aqualung is still thumping and tootling away just like it used to; and, right now and for years and years and years to come, it is still and will no doubt forever be the winter of 1971.-

(Photographs omitted)