This is a book about that most distant of times, the day before yesterday. I discovered for myself just how remote the Seventies are when, in 2006, I wrote a TV drama about Harold Wilson’s last government, covering the period from 1974 to 1976. Although the thirtysomething producer liked the script, she found many of the allusions baffling. What was a ‘prices and incomes policy’? Or a ‘balance of payments crisis’? These appeared almost daily in British headlines during the 1970s; only a generation later, they were as incomprehensible as Babylonic cuneiform. One scene that the producer queried had Wilson using a public payphone in Oxford to ring an aide. When I pointed out that it actually happened, she conceded that this might be so, but nevertheless insisted that viewers under the age of forty would be unable to believe that the Prime Minister had no mobile phone. The scene was deleted.

To those of us who lived through that era of polyester, platform shoes and power cuts, one thing seemed certain: no one would ever wish to revisit it. As Christopher Booker wrote in The Seventies, an end-of-term report published in 1980, it was ‘a decade of unending hard slog through the quicksands … hardly a time which in years to come is likely to inspire us with an overpowering sense of nostalgia’ For the next quarter-century or so this prediction was largely fulfilled, apart from a few eccentric gestures such as Bill Clinton’s adoption of ‘Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow’ by Fleetwood Mac as his theme tune in the 1992 presidential election, or occasional ‘ironic’ tributes to lava lamps or tank tops, Burt Reynolds’s toupee or Roger Moore’s lapels – so naff they’re cool, even if they pong a bit. When people did stop thinking about tomorrow their minds usually strayed back to the Sixties, or perhaps to the Second World War; anywhere but the day before yesterday. The pattern had been set in 1979, when the decade was brought to a juddering halt by the Iranian revolution and the election of Margaret Thatcher: the new Islamic fundamentalists wanted to turn the clock back about 1,500 years; the market fundamentalists’ atavistic project, only slightly less ambitious, was to re-establish the ‘Victorian values’ of self-help, private philanthropy and laissez faire. On one point the Imam and the grocer’s daughter would certainly have agreed: the clock must never be turned back to the Seventies.

Recently, however, the decade that time forgot has been fished out of the sewer, hosed down and found to be not so whiffy after all. The subtitle of Howard Sounes’s Seventies: The Sights, Sounds and Ideas of a Brilliant Decade (2006) speaks for itself: the book is a breathless celebration of the decade’s greatest songs, sitcoms and films. Very enjoyable it is, too: so long as you keep the spotlight on David Bowie and the Clash, The Godfather and Fawlty Towers, while leaving much of the social and political backdrop in shadow, you can almost persuade readers to murmur ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive …’ But hang on a moment. Bowie’s cocaine-fuelled Nietzschean ramblings in 1976 prompted the formation of Rock Against Racism and the Anti-Nazi League. (‘As I see it, I am the only alternative for the premier in England,’ he drawled. ‘I believe Britain could benefit from a fascist leader.’ Suddenly that line in one of his songs about making way for a Homo superior acquired a creepy new resonance.) Two years later I watched the Clash performing at a huge Rock Against Racism carnival in Victoria Park, in the East End of London, and urging British youths not to heed Bowie’s siren call: the band’s angry fervour, like their name, was a direct reaction to the godawfulness of Britain in the 1970s. And what’s the message of The Godfather? Don’t trust police and judges. They’re corrupt: we should know, we corrupted them. Even Fawlty Towers, one of the most perfectly conceived and enduringly hilarious TV comedies, is hardly innocent fun. Most of the laughs come from watching a man, driven beyond exasperation, who teeters constantly on the brink of a nervous breakdown.

‘Hardly a time which in years to come is likely to inspire us with an overpowering sense of nostalgia,’ Christopher Booker wrote. Little did he know. Mildly incredulous critical eyebrows were raised in 1999 at the launch of Mamma Mia!, a stage show of ABBA hits; it has been running ever since (as has a similarly plotless ‘musical’ cobbled together around songs by Queen), and the film version went on to conquer the world. Like Sounes’s book, these presented a feel-good, poptastic view of the decade that wouldn’t frighten the coach parties. More remarkable, perhaps, was the tremendous popular appeal of Life on Mars (named after the David Bowie song), a BBC television drama of 2006 based on the ‘high concept’ that a Manchester detective inspector, Sam Tyler, is transported back to 1973, an age when the abbreviation PC had nothing to do with political correctness or personal computers. (When he demands a PC terminal, a puzzled colleague replies: ‘What, you want a constable in here?’ There’s similar bafflement when Tyler says he needs his mobile: ‘Your mobile what?’) Tyler’s the very model of a modern DI who believes in doing things ‘by the book’, whereas his new guv’nor, DCI Gene Hunt, is a rough-hewn, hard-drinking, heavy-smoking Neanderthal who prowls the city like a sheriff in the Wild West, driven by only one imperative: lock up the bad guys. Tyler’s initial reaction to Hunt and his kipper-tied colleagues evokes another line from Bowie’s title song: ‘Oh man, look at those cavemen go …’

Each episode of Life on Mars began with a voice-over from the time-travelling cop: ‘My name is Sam Tyler. I had an accident and I woke up in 1973. Am I mad, in a coma, or back in time? Whatever’s happened, it’s like I’ve landed on a different planet.’ Yet the most striking thing about this rough-hewn planet was how attractive it began to seem: given the choice between harsh reality in 1973 and virtual reality today, many viewers and critics sided with DCI Gene Hunt. So, eventually, did Tyler himself: having spent most of the first series yearning to ‘go home’ he chose to stay in the Seventies after all, heading off to the pub with Hunt for a celebratory pint or three of Watney’s Red Barrel. And, no doubt, a packet or two of cigarettes: incredible though it will seem to future generations, in those days you could smoke pretty well continuously throughout the day – on the bus or train to work, at your desk in the office, and then in the pub or cinema afterwards. I have an abiding memory from the late Seventies of my first encounter with a puppyish young barrister named Tony Blair, who turned up at the New Statesman offering a short article about a High Court judgment and then accompanied me to our local pub in High Holborn, where he bought a packet of fags and lit up. Cherie Booth later ordered him to kick the habit as a precondition for marrying her; in 2006, as prime minister, he avenged himself by banning smoking in all public buildings. Having a ciggy in the saloon bar is now as unthinkable as driving without a seatbelt. But then the Seventies themselves are now largely unimaginable and irrecoverable, at least for students or journalists whose only source is the Internet: the decade has fallen down a pre-digital memory hole.

What do I mean by ‘the Seventies’? Don’t believe the calendar: decades have no fixed duration. What many of us think of as ‘the Sixties’ – a fizzy cocktail of protest and pop music, pot and the Pill – started in Britain three years behind schedule, sometime, as Philip Larkin observed, between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles’ first LP. Elsewhere they were later still. When the publisher of Lady Chatterley’s Lover was acquitted by a London jury which had been asked, ‘Is it a book you would have lying around in your own house? Is it a book you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?’, the Australian Prime Minister announced that in his country, at least, the novel must remain banned, because he certainly wouldn’t allow his wife to read it. Geoffrey Robertson, a schoolboy in Australia at the time of the Lady Chatterley trial, reckons that ‘Australia did not enter the Sixties until it was dragged into them by Gough Whitlam’s Labor government in 1972.’ By then, many Americans and West Europeans were already writing the decade’s obituary; and Geoffrey Robertson had moved to London, where he came to public notice as a young defence barrister at the Oz trial – an attempt by the old British Establishment to snuff out the ludic and anarchic style of the 1960s.^*

When did the spirit of the Sixties die? ‘Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on 9 August 1969,’ Joan Didion writes in The White Album (named, fittingly, after one of the Beatles’ last LPs). This was the date on which spaced-out psychedelia yielded to apocalyptic psychopathy, when Charles Manson’s disciples murdered the actress Sharon Tate and four other people at 10050 Cielo Drive in Benedict Canyon, Los Angeles, inscribing ‘PIG’ in her blood on the front door. They had been partly inspired by secret messages that Manson believed he had found in ‘Helter Skelter’, a song from The White Album. ‘Word of the murders on Cielo Drive travelled like brush fire through the community,’ Didion reports. ‘The tension broke that day. The paranoia was fulfilled.’

To other chroniclers, the pivotal event – the public burial of peace, love and flower power – was the killing of Meredith Hunter four months later, at a concert in Altamont for which the Rolling Stones had rashly hired Hell’s Angels as security guards. ‘As the life ebbed away from Meredith Hunter,’ Harry Shapiro writes in Waiting for the Man, ‘the spirit of the Sixties went with it.’ For the historian Milton Viorst, the spirit lingered on until the following spring, when National Guardsmen shot anti-war protesters at Kent State University, Ohio: ‘It happened on 4 May 1970, in the bright sunshine, just after midday, at a campus demonstration which was like so many others except that, in thirteen seconds of crackling gunfire, four students were killed … What passion remained of the 1960s was extinguished in that fusillade.’ Another American historian, Edward D. Berkowitz, prefers 30 April 1974, the day on which Richard Nixon released the profanity-strewn transcripts of his White House conversations and thus ‘stripped the presidency of much of its dignity and ended the postwar presidential mystique. The Seventies were firmly launched.’

In Britain, the writer Kenneth Tynan pronounced the Sixties dead in the early hours of 9 March 1971, while he sat in a London cinema watching a live telecast of Muhammad Ali’s defeat by Joe Frazier. ‘Belated epitaph of the Sixties: flair, audacity, imagination, outrageous aplomb, cut down by stubborn, obdurate, “hard-hat” persistence,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘We may come to look back on the Sixties as the Indian summer of the Western imagination, of the last aristocrats of Western taste. Beginning with Kennedy, the era ends with Nixon and Joe Frazier, his hatchet-man … Cavaliers had better beware. The Roundheads are back in force.’

Take your pick. Even Joan Didion, while proposing that ‘in a sense’ the Sixties ended with the Manson murders, says that in another sense ‘the Sixties did not truly end for me until January of 1971’, when she moved from Hollywood to a house by the sea.^* So it goes for most of us as we try to reconcile our private histories with a public narrative. Philip Larkin, recording the start of free love in 1963, lamented that this was ‘rather late for me’. For me, alas, it was rather too early. I came to the party a full decade later, on 27 December 1973, when I caught a train to London from suburban Kent, having left a note on the kitchen table advising my parents that I’d gone to join the alternative society and wouldn’t be back. An hour or so later, clutching my rucksack and guitar, I arrived at the ‘BIT Alternative Help and Information Centre’, a hippy hang-out on Westbourne Park Road which I’d often seen mentioned in the underground press. ‘Hi,’ I chirruped. ‘I’ve dropped out.’ I may even have babbled something about wanting to build the counter-culture. This boyish enthusiasm was met by groans from a furry freak slumped on the threadbare sofa. ‘Drop back in, man,’ he muttered through a dense foliage of beard. ‘You’re too late … It’s over.’ And so it was. The Prime Minister, Edward Heath, had declared a state of emergency in November, his fifth in just over three years, to conserve fuel supplies during an overtime ban by the National Union of Mineworkers: street lighting was switched off, floodlit football matches cancelled, electric heating outlawed in offices and factories. In mid-December, two weeks before I caught the last train to hippyville, he announced that British industry would be limited to a three-day week from 1 January 1974. The word that appeared in news bulletins almost daily – ‘stoppage’ – was all too apt. After a while it became hard to remember a time when there weren’t blank television screens, electricity shortages or train cancellations. The nation was blocked, choked, paralysed, waiting for the end. As Margaret Drabble wrote in her novel The Ice Age (1977): ‘The old headline phrases of freeze and squeeze had for the first time become for everyone – not merely for the old and unemployed – a living image, a reality: millions who had groaned over them in steadily increasing prosperity were now obliged to think again. A huge icy fist, with large cold fingers, was squeezing and chilling the people of Britain.’

The decade’s birthdate may be debatable, but what of its character? ‘If it were not for our quasi-religious modern obsession with anniversaries, decades and other arbitrary spans of time, it might at first sight seem a crazy proposition to essay an account of the Nineteen Seventies,’ Christopher Booker declared on the first page of The Seventies. ‘Of all the decades of the twentieth century, it would be hard to pick out one with a less distinctive, recognisable character.’ We could easily summon up a picture of, say, the Twenties – the Charleston, Model T Fords, Charlie Chaplin, the Wall Street boom. Similarly, the Thirties, Forties and Fifties all carried their own packages of associations, while the Sixties instantly evoked perhaps the clearest images of all – Beatlemania and mini-skirts, JFK and Vietnam, Swinging London and LSD. ‘But what in years to come will evoke the sober, gloomy Seventies,’ Booker wondered, ‘which in so many ways seemed like little more than a prolonged anti-climax to the manic excitements of the Sixties?’

Well, ‘gloomy’ is a good start, and not just for those of us who were peeved at having missed the frolicsome Sixties because we were still at school. (‘The Seventies generation has forever been the victim of the nostalgia of others,’ the British disc jockey Dave Haslam complains. ‘We arrived too late, the generation before us told us then, and have been telling us ever since.’) But sober? Even when I first read Booker’s account, in 1980, I remember wondering if he’d spent the previous few years hibernating in a Somerset hay barn: the Seventies were about as sober as a meths-swilling vagrant waylaying passers-by to tell them that the Archbishop of Canterbury has planted electrodes in his brain. The adjective applied by Booker to the Sixties – ‘manic’ – seems nearer the mark. ‘Unless the British government transforms itself into a ruthless dictatorship, one is forced to predict the eventual breakdown of political control,’ the ecologist Teddy Goldsmith wrote in Can Britain Survive?, published in 1971. ‘The social system most likely to emerge is best described as feudal. People will gather round whichever strong men can provide the basic necessities of life, and offer protection against marauding bands from the dying cities.’ Never mind Britain: could the world survive? ‘Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable,’ Professor Peter Gunter of North Texas State University wrote in 1970, on the occasion of the first Earth Day. ‘By 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions … By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America and Australia, will be in famine.’ In the bestseller lists of the early Seventies, Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb jostled for top place with B.F. Skinner’s Beyond Freedom and Dignity (‘If all of modern science and technology cannot change man’s environment, can man be saved?’) and Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth (which foresaw ‘the coming of an Antichrist’ and ‘a war which will bring man to the brink of destruction’). ‘I’m scared,’ Ehrlich said in 1970. ‘I have a 14-year-old daughter whom I love very much. I know a lot of young people, and their world is being destroyed. My world is being destroyed. I’m 37 and I’d kind of like to live to be 67 in a reasonably pleasant world, and not die in some kind of holocaust in the next decade.’

Slice the Seventies where you will, the flavour is unmistakable – a pungent mélange of apocalyptic dread and conspiratorial fever. You can find it in the words of Chairman Mao’s wife in 1971: ‘I have been feeling as if I am going to die any minute, as if some catastrophe is about to happen tomorrow. I feel full of terror all the time.’ Or in the advice given by Harold Wilson to two BBC reporters in 1976, weeks after his resignation as British prime minister, as he urged them to investigate plots against him by the security services: ‘I see myself as a big fat spider in the corner of the room. Sometimes I speak when I’m asleep. You should both listen. Occasionally when we meet I might tell you to go to the Charing Cross Road and kick a blind man standing on the corner. That blind man may tell you something, lead you somewhere.’ It is omnipresent in the private conversations of President Richard Nixon, preserved for posterity by the White House’s voice-activated recording system which he installed in 1971 – and which provided the evidence that compelled his resignation three years later. ‘Homosexuality, dope, immorality in general – these are the enemies of strong societies,’ he tells his aide Bob Haldeman, in a typical exchange. ‘That’s why the Communists and the left-wingers are pushing the stuff, they’re trying to destroy us! … You know it’s a funny thing, every one of the bastards that are out for legalising marijuana is Jewish. What the Christ is the matter with the Jews, Bob? What is the matter with them?’ You can see it, at its bleakest, in the closing scene of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974): the surveillance expert Harry Caul sits alone in the ruins of his own apartment, which he has comprehensively dissected in a vain search for the hidden bugs which he knows must be there. ‘The Watergate affair makes it quite plain,’ Marshall McLuhan wrote in 1974, ‘that the entire planet has become a whispering gallery, with a large portion of mankind engaged in making its living by keeping the rest of mankind under surveillance.’

The paranoid style exemplified by Nixon and Wilson – and Madame Mao and Harry Caul, Idi Amin and Bobby Fischer, the Rev. Jim Jones and the Baader-Meinhof gang, Taxi Driver and Gravity’s Rainbow – saturated the 1970s. Conservatives feared that the very fabric of the state was under imminent threat – whether from Communists, gays, dope-smokers or even rock stars. (Elvis Presley warned Nixon that the Beatles had been ‘a real force for anti-American spirit’; John Lennon was duly added to the President’s ‘enemies’ list’ and put under surveillance by the FBI.) In Britain, retired generals formed private armies to save the country from anarchy, industrial moguls plotted coups against the government and malcontents in the security services bugged and burgled their way across London in a quest for proof that the Prime Minister was employed by the KGB.

On the Left, mistrust of political, military and business institutions found violent new expression. Groups such as the Weather Underground in the US or the Angry Brigade in Britain had few active members but forced themselves into public consciousness and official demonology through spectacular stunts – the kidnapping of heiress Patty Hearst by the Symbionese Liberation Army, the murder of former Italian prime minister Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades. In 1971 an opinion poll found that 20 per cent of West Germans under the age of thirty had ‘a certain sympathy’ with the Red Army Faction, also known as the Baader-Meinhof group, whose avowed aim was to overthrow the government by force.^* The reborn IRA brought carnage and mayhem to Northern Ireland and mainland Britain; the British state retaliated with a ‘dirty war’ of assassination and misinformation, details of which are only now beginning to emerge. The Provisional IRA was remarkably effective despite being so heavily infiltrated that in due course undercover agents were unwittingly informing on other undercover agents to British intelligence – just as in G.K. Chesterton’s novel The Man Who Was Thursday (1908), where the police infiltrate a secret society so comprehensively that the anarchists they’re pursuing turn out to be themselves. It was an era of missing persons – the desparacidos in South America, the innumerable Cambodians murdered by Pol Pot, the assassination victims in Northern Ireland whose final resting places are still unknown. The British politician John Stonehouse faked his suicide on a Miami beach in November 1974; when the Australian police found him hiding in Melbourne a month later, they assumed he was another missing person, the fugitive Lord Lucan. The Soviet dissident Anatoly Shcharansky was whisked away from his apartment on 15 March 1977, not to reappear again until sixteen months later, on trial for his life.

There was, in short, plenty to be paranoid about. As the Rolling Stone journalist Ralph J. Gleason advised his readers: no matter how paranoid you are, what the government is really doing is worse than you could possibly imagine. A committee chaired by Senator Frank Church published a series of reports in the mid-1970s exposing illegal operations conducted by the CIA and the FBI. ‘Many of the techniques used would be intolerable in a democratic society even if all of the targets had been involved in violent activity,’ Church wrote. But these dirty tricks went far beyond that: they were ‘a sophisticated vigilante operation aimed squarely at preventing the exercise of First Amendment rights of speech and association, on the theory that preventing the growth of dangerous groups and the propagation of dangerous ideas would protect the national security and deter violence’. As Haldeman said to Nixon in 1971 after the leaking of the Pentagon Papers, which showed how the government had misled the public about the Vietnam War: ‘To the ordinary guy, all this is a bunch of gobbledygook. But out of the gobbledygook comes a very clear thing: you can’t trust the government; you can’t believe what they say.’ A year later, in a judgment which concluded that much of the FBI’s surveillance and infiltration of anti-war groups had been illegal, the US Supreme Court spoke of ‘a national seizure of paranoia’.

No wonder this was a golden age of claustrophobic conspiracy thrillers such as The Conversation, Chinatown and Three Days of the Condor. The message of Alan Pakula’s vertiginous ‘paranoia trilogy’ (Klute, The Parallax View and All the President’s Men) was that a moral sickness had infected the heart of America – families, businesses and the government itself. The shadowy, all-powerful corporation organising political assassinations in The Parallax View might once have seemed fantastical; by the time the film was released in 1974, after the ITT corporation and the CIA had been accused of helping to topple Salvador Allende’s government in Chile, it seemed all too plausible. As if to confirm that fact had outpaced fantasy, this was soon followed by All the President’s Men, an equally incredible tale which happened to be the unembellished truth. ‘What a curiosity is our Democracy, what a mystery,’ Norman Mailer said after reading the transcripts of President Nixon’s conversations. ‘No novelist unwinds a narrative so well.’ By the summer of 1973 Watergate had supplanted Coronation Street as my favourite soap opera: the daily plot twists and the rococo cast of characters – G. Gordon Liddy, E. Howard Hunt, Egil ‘Bud’ Krogh, Jeb Stuart Magruder – were far more enthralling than the chatter of Ena Sharples and Albert Tatlock over their glasses of milk stout in the Rover’s Return.

The truth was stranger than the most outlandish fiction – though there was no shortage of outlandish fiction too, including Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbowy Robert Anton Wilson’s Illuminatus! Trilogy and William Pierce’s The Turner Diaries, which remains an inspirational text for right-wingers who see black helicopters everywhere. These fell on fertile ground in a polity whose citizens were obliged to suspend their disbelief every time they opened a newspaper. ‘Always keep them guessing,’ Ishmael Reed said of his novel Mumbo Jumbo (1972), a post-modern conspiratorial epic about the struggle between black Americans and a secret society of Knights Templar which controls the white Establishment. That way, he explained, ‘they won’t know whether we’re serious or whether we are writing fiction’. Although it was sent to the publishers in April 1971, long before the Watergate scandal, the book included a group photo of three future Watergate conspirators – John Dean, John Mitchell and Richard Kleindienst – standing on a balcony, watching Yippies dancing in the street. Asked to explain this prophetic coup, Reed replied: ‘It’s necromancy.’

I’d prefer to call it pre-emptive paranoia. Some novelists seemed to know things that we didn’t, and a glance at their CVs strengthened that impression. E. Howard Hunt, who organised the Watergate burglary, was not only a veteran spook but also a prolific author whose first book, East of Farewell (1942), was praised by the New York Times as ‘a crashing start for a new writer’.^* During his two decades as a CIA officer, in spare moments between overthrowing the Guatemalan government and planning the invasion of Cuba, he wrote more than thirty spy thrillers, each of which had to be submitted to his superiors for vetting. ‘I made a conscientious effort to fudge details, blurring locations and identities so they couldn’t be recognised,’ he recalled, but sometimes a scene would be censored ‘and I’d learn that some episode I thought I’d made up from whole cloth had described an actual operation – one that I’d never heard about’. In his novel On Hazardous Duty (1965) he even managed to describe the Watergate break-in, a full seven years before the event:

The agent who had planted the mike in the target office had tested the key, so the first barrier would yield. But the lock on the office door was a later model – pin and tumbler – and they would have to make its key on the spot … ‘All right,’ Peter said curtly, ‘I don’t want heroes, just the contents of the safe.’

Necromancy again – or simply a self-fulfilling paranoid prophecy by a man who was described in his New York Times obituary as ‘totally self-absorbed, totally amoral and a danger to himself and anybody around him’?

In his classic lecture on ‘The Paranoid Style in American Politics’, delivered only a few days before the assassination of President Kennedy in November 1963, the historian Richard Hofstadter traced the lineage of that style from early anti-Masonism and anti-Catholicism through to McCarthyite anti-Communism in the 1950s. ‘I call it the paranoid style,’ he said, ‘simply because no other word adequately evokes the qualities of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind.’ He was not using the phrase in a clinical sense, merely borrowing a clinical term for other purposes:

I have neither the competence nor the desire to classify any figures of the past or present as certifiable lunatics. In fact, the idea of the paranoid style would have little contemporary relevance or historical value if it were applied only to people with profoundly disturbed minds. It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant. When I speak of the paranoid style, I use the term much as a historian of art might speak of the baroque or the mannerist style. It is, above all, a way of seeing the world and of expressing oneself.