Friday, March 04, 2011

The seventies and mine


My seventies started last year, and today is my seventy-first birthday, a good time, I think, to look both backwards and forwards.

In the rear-view mirror I see how things were half a lifetime ago.


Yes, my 1970s were characterized by a certain louche hedonism. But in all truth, from the sixties until the end of the century my professional activities and my occasional entrepreneurial ventures invariably had a sexy subtext frankly advocating permissivity. It was definitely a component when I was promoting pop stars in the sixties, managing photographers and making movies in the seventies and later in the nineties the soap operas I produced were precisely targeted at a youthful demographic for whom relationships were the all-consuming issue and anundercurrent of eroticism had direct resonance.

All of this meant that my work was both challenging and satisfying.


But for my last ten working years those lovely girls have been strangely replaced by automobiles! I have never understood, being a life-long non-driver, how the male of the species seems inclined to sublimate various urges by concentrating on icons and objects of lust with four wheels rather than two legs!

At least back in the seventies I did occasionally test drive some of the more exciting models!

Now, looking ahead, a strange perspective is demanded. At my age the future is an amorphous thing - something which can perfectly well be a matter of weeks or, equally plausibly, another couple of decades.

I think that in my seventies more of the mood of ‘the seventies’, that frisson – if not any replay of the adventures of the era which at my age would be both undignified and unwise – would be very welcome in my day-to-day work.

After all, I’m not about to learn to drive!

1 comment:

nzm said...

Happy belated birthday, Malcolm.

We saw a couple of Morris Minors being raced around Hampton Downs Raceway in New Zealand on Sunday. It was a trip down nostalgia lane with all the Cortinas, Hillman Imps, Minis and Austins.