“A really, really good read about a forgotten era, by a provincial”
He’s back. Semantic Origami, the music critic who sounds as if he is thick as two short planks but is actually so, so often right. Today he is reviewing a new book about 1976 with customary insight
I HAVE BEEN reading John L Williams’ fine, not-quite-forensic account of one of my favourite years, 1976. Heatwave: the Summer of Britain at Boiling Point. And when I say “not-quite-forensic”, I do not mean it as criticism. It’s because he leaves lots of stones unturned that his book works so well. Who was it that said, “The secret of good History is knowing when to keep the windows shut and the lid on the biscuit tin”?
No, me neither. But I don’t think it was Froissart. He was a chronicler, really — they didn’t have history back then. Nor was it Gibbon. Walpole, maybe?
No matter. Whoever it was, they understood that the purpose of history is not to tell you everything that happened, but to do the good bits, so they add up to make a really good story and give you the gist, so that you can really grasp the vibe of what was going on back then, rather than the detail, which only clutters things up. And that’s what John does here (I call him John, because I have actually met him, otherwise it would be the much cooler-toned L Williams).
He starts with those striking women at Brentford Nylons and then continues as he means to go on, sort of chronologically — but in clumps. We get a clump on the Southall Set-To, as it is popularly known, and that is quite forensic, actually. Moving too. Then gayness and Tom Robinson. That’s quite moving as well, although I could never stand “Sing If You’re Glad to be Gay”. Not because I’m anti-gay, no no no, don’t get me wrong or cancel me or anything — but because I hate tunes that go “all together, now!” in the chorus. Ugh.
There are lots of bits of social realism telling us all what it was like to wear flares in the seconds before they went out of fashion, and what hot weather is like, which is harder than you think. There’s loads of kids playing in the spray from stand-pipes, or fire hydrants as they are properly called. And ducks looking for ponds. And there’s a welcome chunk (rather than clump) about Joan Armatrading. Yes, her! I had that album too and played it a lot and then stopped one day and never played it again. I wonder what it sounds like now?
Then there’s the cricket, which was the best ever. Pitches were yellow that year for some reason. But it didn’t stop the Windies from stuffing it up the England captain, the mile-high South African Tony “Grovel” Greig, who memorably said that he was “going to make these West Indians wish they’d never colonised England” and was then made to eat his terrible words by Michael Holding stuffing it up a generation of old-bastard batsmen with no hair who’d been playing forward defensives since the end of the Second World War. The spirit of the Blitz was all too visibly present, but England still lost. Which was right, I think, in hindsight.
But you can tell that what the author really likes is punk and he goes on a lot about that, usually from the position of the jealous provincial. Well, we can’t all come from Bromley, John, can we? He is in fact from Wales, which rather surprises me because I didn’t think that punk had reached Wales yet (joke! No honestly, it is one). But it doesn’t seem to have inhibited him at all and he writes with a real passion — and with a provincial’s eye for irrelevant detail.
Then there’s the 1976 Carnival. Blimey, that was a set-to and a half, wasn’t it. Must have been quite scary. And L Williams is suitably serious and forensic about Carnival’s history and why it is that policemen like to twerk.
And then it starts raining and he has to stop writing, just like that, because the book is called Heatwave and he might then be vulnerable to prosecutions of the Trade Descriptions Act. But it’s a really, really good read about a forgotten era, which is surprisingly moving in parts and really quite still in others. And that, dear reader, is what they call a joke too!
Talking of eras, I shall be presenting some extracts from my own memoir over coming weeks, which is never still and is full of an almost punk energy. It’s entitled That Was The Me That Was or TWTMTW for short and it will correct some of the inaccuracies and misapprehensions of all those who think they know Bromley but weren’t actually there at the time, unlike me, because they were too sodding provincial.
‘Heatwave: The Summer of 1976, Britain at Boiling Point’ by John “L” Williams is published by Monoray
My wife was pregnant in January. Bob Marley and the Wailers’ Them Belly Full was the soundtrack. We were woken at night and drove through a thunderstorm to the hospital. The marriage lasted 10 minutes. The heat, when it came, set about destroyinging us. My son has just turned 49. He’s a sweetheart.