Check out the visual accompaniment to Richard Harris's original rendition of 'MacArthur Park'. In black and white (as seems somehow fitting).
I find these black and white images, taken in the decade in which I was growing up (slowly) to be oddly enticing. The same goes for Noel Harrison singing 'The Windmills Of Your Mind'. That's something I remember hearing, probably on the radio, around 1969. Wasn't it from 'The Thomas Crown Affair'?
The girls then all seemed to look so pretty, so alluring: the era of Carol White and Eleanor Bron, Suzy Kendall and Cathy McGowan in England, Bardot in France, Loren in Italy. Nothing and no-one to touch them now.
I’m sure the film directors who did touch them are quaking in their boots now.
I love watching stuff like this. ‘Grim London in the rain 1960’s - 70’s’ is a favourite.
Just normal people going about their day. It’s so important not to subscribe to the idea that everything was fab and groovy. And if you’d have hung around Carnaby St. long enough in you’re top hat and Sgt. Pepper jacket, you probably would have bumped into Twiggy and The Beatles dancing round union flag covered lamp posts. Also to realise that everyone wasn’t living in some kind of god awful drama.
I think these two great lies have been peddled from that day to this.
The girls though? Yeah. Not difficult to compete with today’s example though. Now the sun’s out they’re all shuffling round in their mini skirts. Proudly showing off their white lumpy legs covered in ink.
Last edited by Spendthrift (2022-05-07 02:40:54)
Some old 'Modernist' said that Carnaby Street was just a smelly little alleyway in his day. I vaguely remember my one and only visit, in 1967. But I was deeply in love with London by 1970 and am envious of my wife for having lived there, even if it was in a rather drab area like Enfield.
Many of the people in the YouTube film are far from ordinary but, for a very different view of life in the 60s might I recommend Ken Coates' film about the St.Anne's area of Nottingham?
A shame that young girls feel peer pressure to adopt the appearances they do now, orange fake tan, tons of slap, absurd false eyelashes and nails, hair extensions, revealing clothing worn but often the cellulite and tattoos that are thereby revealed make one wish they hadn’t bothered.
Mrs W and I went to Warsaw a few years ago and the first thing that struck us was that everyone was two or three stone lighter. The first thing that struck me was the lovely, natural looking, slender girls everywhere wearing very little makeup and modestly dressed. The older women were comfortable in themselves as well and weren’t trying to dress like teenagers.
Oh dear, what a sexist post, I must go off and re-do the online diversity course again to punish myself.
‘MacArthur Park’ and ‘Windmills of your mind’ are two incredibly naff songs that sum up the worst of that decade.
Richard Harris should have concentrated on getting pissed while being feted as a ‘hell raiser’.
Sorry, U2? was of course a little play on words: that banal phrase # MeToo (or whatever) of which even my deeply feminist younger daughter is sceptical. Back in the bad old days of Howard Hughes and Harry Cohn it was known as 'the casting couch'. Didn't Larry Parnes go in for similar shenanigans with pretty boy pop singers all wanting to be the next Billy Fury?
Carnaby street in the late 60s early 70s was, for me, a dump. I preferred going down the King's Road with my mates. Tourists and middle class hippies seemed to think Carnaby Street was the place to be. Not cool.
That area was full of twats and wanabies. My tribe stayed well clear, except for Brewer Street , of course
Last edited by RobbieB (2022-05-07 08:37:48)
I expect, like Alec Clifton-Taylor before him, Kingers is more of a 'Skinhead Moon Stomp' or 'Al Capone' man. Frankly, I'll take the slightly cloying words of Mr. Webb or M.Legrand to any amount of old skinhead music just as I'll take a cappuccino and almond croissant over three jugs of ale in one of Tim Martin's dismal establishments.
Woof makes some interesting points about the English female. We went for Chinese take-out last evening, the premises being in an area where the houses often have five bedrooms and are, well, pretty expensive. Two female customers, one straight after the other, looking like dock workers. One even had tattooing across her knuckles, something no self-respecting tattooist would have considered doing on a man forty or fifty years ago. One also - old enough to know better - had her skirt slit well up her thigh. I remember some young women looking a bit beefy circa 1970 but surely they couldn't have looked as awful as they do now. Just to redress the 'sexist' balance, their men look worse. But we knew that already.