Funny review of new album in the Grauniad:
Review
“You wouldn’t believe what it was like then,” Ian “Lemmy” Kilmister recently informed a young journalist. “If you could go back, you wouldn’t come back here.” It’s worth noting that the burnished and halcyon era to which he refers is 1975 – the year of race riots in Leeds, Margaret Thatcher’s election to the leadership of the Conservative party, and 261 deaths in terrorist attacks related to the Troubles in Northern Ireland, in both mainland Britain and Northern Ireland itself. On the plus side, of course, you could smoke in pubs.
This was followed by lots of comments including this classic..
You know, you can pull out bad news and bad events from any damned year you care to name. Doing so doesn’t refute a suggestion that a given period was, overall, for some people, a better place to be and to live. I have incredibly fond memories of the late seventies and those memories have nothing to do with the bad things going on at the time. They have to do with the really good things that were going on at the time.
I would go back to those days in a heartbeat, although I admit I’d miss the internet and the vast improvements in British food. Those are honestly the only things I’d miss, though. Music was better then. Pubs were better then (no **** TVs in them for a start). Sex was better then – no AIDS, no need for condoms, a healthier, more liberal attitude all round. In a weird way, the fact that our pleasures weren’t so ubiquitous and easy to download… I mean attain… made them more intense and more valued. Buying a new album was an event. You had this wonderful big artefact and you’d pore over the sleeve notes and the art. You’d actually bother to know the names of each track and who played what on them. If you wanted to copy the music it was cassette tapes and that was your only option. You treasured these things.
We had civil liberties back then. No CCTV, far less state intrusion into our lives and if the old Bill decided to get a bit arsey we weren’t averse to getting a bit arsey back; reminding them who they were supposed to be serving. Some may find this hard to believe but , certainly amongst educated youth, feminism was more advanced then than it is now. If a lap-dancing club had opened anywhere near my uni it would have been picketed out of existence, and not just by women either. Now we hear of students becoming lap-dancers to pay for their tuition fees. Yeah, that’s another thing – I had a grant from the government to pay for my university education. That’s right, the government gave me money so that i could go to university. As a working class kid I couldn’t have gone at all without that. We didn’t do multi-thousand-pound loans in those days. We did grants. I left university after three excellent, beer-swilling, joyful years with this much debt: none at all.
But hey, now we have bloody cellphones so that we can be contactable for inane, pointless conversations all the time. Now we have communications technology that means we’re never really away from the bloody desk. Now we have global warming and a level of overpopulation we would barely have believed back in the seventies. Now we have X-boxes and X-Factors and shitty, drab, unoriginal, unexciting little indie bands like the bloody xx.
Christ, I hate this age. I hate what this country has become. I’m with you, Lemmy. Let’s go shoot some pool, play some arrows and drink some Jack in a smokey old seventies boozer. I’ll go stick some rock on the juke.