In the 1970s, British soccer had a bad reputation. It had a rap sheet full of gang fights, stabbings, riots, and murder. Football fans were labeled hooligans. Thugs who, according to some newspaper editors, were on the verge of taking over the streets and destroying society. No one was safe.

Most weeks the tabloids churned out tales of some aggro outside a stadium. The red tops were peddling fear. The public bought it. Once the news starts reporting on something, it becomes real.

These gang fights between rival soccer fans were mixed in with tales of skinheads, bovver boys, razor gangs, and thugs who dressed like Alex and his droogs from A Clockwork Orange out for a little bit of ye old ultra-violence. There was truth in the stories, but soccer violence wasn’t as widespread as often reported. Certain clubs attracted gangs who were more interested in a punch-up on a Saturday afternoon than watching the “beautiful game.”

To put it context, these were kids who had missed the mythical nirvana of sixties excess. The sex, drugs and so-called revolution of the swinging sixties only applied to about a few dozen people who were rich and famous and living in London. For everybody else, the sixties were dire, poverty-ridden, and filmed in black-and-white. Only American TV shows like The Man From U.N.C.L.E., Batman, and Lost in Space gave any hint there might be a better, more colorful world out there.

When the seventies arrived, for most of the public it was like suffering the biggest hangover after a party to which you had never been invited. Unemployment was on the up. Strikes were almost every week. Power blackouts meant kids lived by candlelight on whatever their mothers could spoon out of a tin. Under the new Tory Prime Minister Edward Heath, a pompous condescending charlatan, politics was being removed from the grubby hands of the working class. Politicians despised the populace. Heath signed up to Europe and the world of white middle class technocrats and academics who would attempt to disenfranchise the working class and their so-called ignorant opinions over the coming decades.

The press were happy to go along with this. They tarred youngsters as ne’er-do-wells, thugs, hooligans, filthy little fuckers who should be sent into the army. Pop fans were deluded. Soccer fans were thugs waiting to kick your fucking head in.

Most of the people who thought this—politicians, journalists, religious leaders—wanted to crush the young. These people were mainly middle-aged ex-soldiers who had fought in the Second World War and returned to a country impoverished, in ruin, and held captive by rationing. The seventies soccer fan represented everything they feared—thuggish mobs ready for violence who if they were ever smart enough to get together might one day topple the establishment. Fat chance.

This was one way of looking at it. The other was how the fans saw it. Soccer was a release. A pleasure to be shared with passion. Something that made youngsters feel part of a community. Fans created their own fashions. Decked their clothes with players’ names, managers, and their club crests. They had their own beliefs. And their politics changed from xenophobic and racist to becoming supportive and champions of multi-ethnicity. White working class football fans had more friends from different ethnicities than any white male government or media broadcaster or board of directors.
 

 
Between 1976-1977, Edinburgh-born photographer Iain S. P. Reid documented fans of Manchester United and Manchester City. Reid had graduated in Fine Arts from Sunderland University. He then moved to Manchester where he was studying for his Masters in Fine Art when he picked up his Leica camera and started photographing the two sets of rival fans.

In 1978, an exhibition of his work was held at the Frontline Books, Piccadilly, Manchester. In his introduction to this exhibition, Reid wrote:

I worked on a series of portraits of football supporters. I was given a grant by the Arts Council to facilitate this project. As can be imagined, this caused a minor furore in the local Manchester press. I was infamous for a while. Most of the work was exhibited in 1978 in the Frontline bookshop, 1 Newton Street, Piccadilly.

The chief interest in the whole body of work was the way in which the football supporters of Manchester United and Manchester City used to dress and treat the whole match as if it were a carnival. Despite all press reports, there was very little violence, and the fans I found most helpful in assisting with the project. They were always aware of the angle I was taking with the work. I carried around copies of the photos I was going to be using to show them I was not exploiting them by misrepresenting them in any way.

In the late seventies, Reid moved to Aberdeen, Scotland, where he worked on an oil platform. He then became a social worker. He had a passion for helping others and spent his time working with drug addicts and the homeless.

Reid died in November 2000 from cancer. After his death, boxes of his photographs were discovered. These are now shared via a Facebook page, are available as art prints, and will be published in a book with 15% of profits going to a cancer charity. Reid’s photographs capture more of the joy and camaraderie of seventies’ football fans than all the tales of violence peddled by the media. See more of Reid’s work here.
 

 

 
See more of Iain S. P. Reid’s work, after the jump…
 

 
The argument at the back of the bar was about which decade produced the best films. The noughties didn’t make it, nor did the teens, unless that was the nineteen-teens. The shortlist was whittled down and we agreed upon the forties, the fifties, the sixties, but were almost unanimous on the seventies. That glorious decade when movies had something important to say as told by actors, writers, and directors and not CGI. The decade that gave us Taxi Driver, The Godfather, The French Connection, Deliverance, Apocalypse Now, Mean Streets, The Conversation, The Exorcist, The Last Detail, Chinatown, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Don’t Look Now, Tommy, Roma, Jubilee, Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Jaws, A Clockwork Orange, and a marathon-length movie like Lindsay Anderson’s O Lucky Man! among many, many other cinematic classics.

Malcolm McDowell had the original idea for O Lucky Man! He wanted to work again with director Lindsay Anderson after their success on the class war fantasy If… in 1968. McDowell had an idea for a film based around his own experiences working as a coffee salesman. In August 1970, twenty pages were written in collaboration with If… screenwriter David Sherwin. These were then shown to Anderson, who thought the story of a coffee salesman being mistaken for a spy “too mini and naturalistic.” Nevertheless, he encouraged McDowell and Sherwin to keep on working and get it away from “just being about selling coffee.” Anderson wanted something “epic” and suggested they read Heaven’s My Destination about a bible salesman, Franz Kafka’s Amerika, and Voltaire’s Candide.

On August 21st 1970, Sherwin was at McDowell’s flat talking ideas back-and-forth “trying to find the essence of [their twenty-page script] Coffee Man, trying to make it ‘epic’ for Lindsay,” as Sherwin noted in his diary.

McDowell recalled the Sales Director, Gloria Rowe, who he often talked to when training on the shop floor.

“I wasn’t really training—I was just walking around with a clipboard looking for something to do—she used to say to me, ‘Malcolm, you’ll either end up a duke or a dustman.’ And I’d always been told I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth. I always believed I would be lucky.”

Sherwin jumped up and said “That’s it!”
“What?” said McDowell.
“Luck—luck’s the essence. You’ve always believed you’ll be lucky.”
“Yes—luck—Lucky Man.”
“Lucky Man!” they yelled in unison.

Now they had a title and the essence of what they hoped would be their next film. They drove round to tell Anderson.

“We’ve got the title, Lindsay, Lucky Man.”
Anderson made the inside of his cheek pop with his forefinger—“an annoying habit” he had when considering the merit of something. He then said, “No.” And gave pause for full dramatic effect before adding it should be O Lucky Man, like [one of his earlier films], O Dreamland or even the stage show Oh! Calcutta. The title should also have an exclamation mark—but where to put it?
“After the ‘O’?” ventured Sherwin.
‘No,” said Anderson, “At the end.”

Anderson always had the demeanor of one who knows best. The tetchy grown-up lecturing the kids. It was an artifice he used to hide his own insecurities, his lack of confidence, and to repress his sexuality. His personality became, as the actor Alan Bates noted, abrasive which irked critics and producers alike and eventually “lost him the opportunity to make more films.” Bates was similarly closeted about his own homosexuality—never acknowledging his gay lovers or admitting his sexual orientation. Anderson was born into a military family in Bangalore, India, in 1923. His parents separated and his father cut his family out of his life, an experience which made Anderson distrustful of sharing his emotions. After university and military service in the Second World War, Anderson had considered becoming an actor before focussing on a career as a film critic and then film and stage director. In 1956, he co-founded the Free Cinema movement with Karel Reisz, Tony Richardson and Lorenza Mazzetti. Their belief was that “no film could be too personal.” That the image was more important than sound and “a belief in freedom, in the importance of people and the significance of the everyday.”

Though Anderson spent more time working in theater, he still managed to make an impressive catalog of innovative and highly controversial films like O Dreamland, This Sporting Life, If…, O Lucky Man! and Britannia Hospital.
 

 
Full photo-spread for ‘O Lucky Man!,’ after the jump…
 

 
Pan’s People were the reason so many dads watched Top of the Pops. They would sit and moan and ask daft rhetorical questions about all the acts that appeared on the BBC’s legendary chart show saying things like “You call that music?” or “Is that a man or a woman? Why’s he got makeup on, then?....” while the likes of Marc Bolan, or David Bowie, or Slade lip-synched to their latest hit single. But when Pan’s People came on, these scoffing dads would fall suddenly silent and breath rather heavily as their attention zoomed in on the all-female dance troupe who gyrated their hips to the latest grooves.

Pan’s People consisted of five dancers: Babs Lord, Dee Dee Wilde, Ruth Pearson, Louise Clarke, and Cherry Gillespie. They had formed Pan’s People out of two different TV dance groups: the Beat Girls and Top of the Pops first dance troupe the Go-Jos in 1968. Each of these dancers was exceedingly beautiful and supple and performed, what was for the time, rather risque sets in fashionably arousing outfits. For many males, even those not very interested in music, Pan’s People made Top of the Pops essential viewing.

Pan’s People usually performed their routines to tracks that had charted when the artists (either by being on tour or based over in America) weren’t able to appear on the show. Each week, choreographer Flick Colby had to devise a new routine for the girls to perform. This sometimes led to strange literal interpretations like the time they all danced Gilbert O’Sullivan’s hit “Get Down” to a pack of dogs all because the song had the lyric “I told you once before, And I won’t tell you no more, Get down, Get down, Get down. You’re a bad dog, baby, I don’t want you hanging around.” Sometimes there was no lyric as in this promo made for the show featuring John Barry’s theme music for the Roger Moore and Tony Curtis series The Persuaders.

This little insert film is a strange kind of Ballardian fantasy where gangs of suited-up molls carry out half-remembered rituals that are still tinged with power and meaning. It’s a superbly informative piece of televisual history that captures so much about the culture at the time. It has to be remembered that women wearing trouser suits or dressing like men was outré and still considered shocking. It was a time when casinos and gambling were thought of as dangerous, illicit and deeply exciting. A time when women smoking a cigarillo—or even driving a car on their own—was seen as striking a blow for Women’s Liberation. Nowadays, I guess most young’uns would (sadly) swipe left in search of something far more explicit if one of Pan’s Peoples’ routines appeared on their tablets. “But what do kids know?” as some of those dads asked aloud to no-one, in particular, all those years ago.
 

 
And now, some more choice moments of the fabulous Pan’s People.
 
More fab dance routines from Pan’s People, after the jump…

 
September 1982: Hit rock ‘n’ roll singer Shakin’ Stevens can’t make his scheduled appearance on BBC chart show Top of the Pops. Panicked producers make the life-changing decision to fill the gap left by Shaky with an unknown pop group by the name of Culture Club. Minutes after the band’s debut television appearance on the show, phones start ringing at the BBC switchboard asking What the hell did we just watch?. Next day, newspapers run similar stories filled with offensive mock outrage questions: “Who is Boy George?” “Is he a boy or a girl?” Within weeks, Culture Club was number one and Boy George was the nation’s sweetheart.

But how did it come to this? Where did Boy George come from? What shaped the life of this brilliant, iconic “gender-bending” singer?

Well, these are some of the many questions answered by the lad himself as Boy George aka George O’Dowd takes the viewer on a very personal pop culture trip through the decade that shaped him—the 1970s.

The seventies are all too often dismissed by the more, shall we say, snobbish cultural critic as “the decade that fashion forgot,” ridiculed for its supposedly bad taste in fashion, politics, sex, music and hair. Yet for Boy George, the seventies was a “glorious decade…all about Bowie, Bolan, dressing up and going out.” The “last bonkers decade,” when the young teenage George discovered all these “amazing things… punk rock, electro music, fashion, all of that.”

Of course, there was the downside to all of this heady excitement: the political crisis, the three-day working weeks, the strikes, power cuts, mass unemployment, grim poverty, and racism. But George was too young to know much about any of this. He was too busy finding out about music and glamor and miming to Shirley Bassey in his parent’s front room. He was about to hit puberty. He felt different from the other kids and was looking for a sign that he was not alone in this gray suburban south London landscape.

Then came the sign he’d been hoping for: the day he saw David Bowie performing on Top of the Pops in 1972. That’s when George knew he wasn’t alone. The androgynous Bowie in his fire-red hair, make-up, and jumpsuit with his nail polished hand slung defiantly over Mick Ronson’s shoulder as they sang “Starman.” This was a sign that life could be extraordinary and was just an adventure to be gained.

Save Me from Suburbia is more than just Boy George telling his life story, it is an essential history of the events and pop culture that shaped a nation during ten heady years from skinheads and strikes to punk and Margaret Thatcher. George takes us on an utterly fascinating tour through the decade with a little help from his friends and accomplices like Rusty Egan, Princess Julia, Martin Degville (Sigue Sigue Sputnik), Andy Polaris (Animal Nightlife), and Caryn Franklin—and most revealingly his mother.
 
Watch Boy George’s revealing pop culture trip through the 1970s, after the jump…

American Motorcyclist Association.
 
I’ll ‘fess up to owning a Laurel and Hardy t-shirt when I was a child. I also had one with Humphrey Bogart saying something memorable from Casablanca. Damned if I can remember what it was now. This was as far as I would go with my counter-culture wardrobe. Most of my school friends were of similar mind. They opted for plus fours, smoking jackets and a fine selection of Arran-knit cardigans. Life was so different in Scotland then.

Of course, there were some who sported denim jackets decked out in assorted patches imported from America. These mass-produced novelties of old men saying things like “Keep on truckin’” or cartoon dogs offering advice about not eating yellow snow always struck me as frightfully quaint yet rather dumb. I suppose I was just confused as to what these badges were supposed to mean. But what did I know? I was merely an innocent child out of step with the current fashion trends.

Soon nearly every youngster across our fabled tartan nation was dressed-up like Joseph in his amazing Technicolored Dreamcoat or at least a brazen tatterdemalion. These patches all signified the same thing. I am unique. I am an individual. These are my likes and dislikes. And look, haven’t I got a wacky sense of humor?

Sad to say, all of this fun passed me by far too quickly and I missed out in the pleasures of actually becoming an individual. My taste in t-shirts was understandably laughed at by those far more in tune with the heady zeitgeist of the day. Laurel and Hardy could never compete with some twee tee saying Pepsi was the “real thing.”

Most of the fashionable peeps wore the American patches and t-shirts. Soon, these were rivaled by our very own homegrown patches declaring a love for the Bay City Rollers or tops saying “My girlfriend went to Arbroath and all she got me was this lousy t-shirt.” That kind of thing.

Those crazy delights of that faraway decade can be enjoyed with this fine selection of adverts selling counter-culture t-shirts and some ads and fine examples of the quirkier patches which were then available. If this whets the appetite then I suggest a visit to Mitch O’Connell’s blog which will leave you positively sated.
 

Hustler 1975.
 

Gilda Radner in CREEM magazine t-shirt ad.
 
More crazy delights from the heady 1970s, after the jump…

 
Everyone’s done shit they are embarrassed by. You know the kinda of stuff—that late night drunken text that you thought was oh so witty—but only got you a restraining order. Or maybe the time you turned up as Hitler at the fancy dress party for Hymie’s bar mitzvah. Or, that Christmas party when you woke up in bed with your girlfriend’s mother. No? Maybe that was just me then….?

Anyhow….

That embarrassing shit we’ve all done—that we’re still so sickeningly ashamed about—well, that was the seventies… Except the seventies didn’t give a fuck. The seventies wore all that bad taste stuff out in public like it was the Nobel-fucking-Peace Prize for ending war, starvation and world poverty.

And you know something—I gotta be honest—I kinda respect that attitude of not giving a fuck about what anyone else thinks. Just enough to tip the hat to the boys and girls who were brave enough to wear these cheesy (maybe not the right word to use here…), shockingly bad taste underwear.

British Bulldog produced a range of seventies underwear that was “funtawear.” There was no subtlety here. Just saucy innuendo with straplines like “Slippery when wet,” “The Big One,” “Rub Here,” and “No Shortage….”  Someone, somewhere obviously thought such humor would be a big turn on when stripping off in front of a hot date.

And why the hell not.
 

 

 
Have a peek at more saucy underpants, after the jump…

 
Japanese movie posters of the sixties and seventies kick ass. They always seemed more exciting than their American or British counterparts, managing to take choice images and compose them like frames from a comic book. Even when the posters were just cut and paste jobs there always a sense of drama, as if you have joined the story at a key scene—explosions blossom, machine guns rip, heroes do battle.

This little mix of classy posters show how good graphic art can make average movies like Caged Heat, Serpico, Black Belt Jones and Dracula A.D. 1972 seem like masterpieces.
 

 

 

 
More Japanese movie posters, after the jump…