Heatwave: remembering the summer of ’76

I was browsing the “out now” shelf in my local library and I saw a book called Heatwave. Obviously I had to get it. It was 30 degrees outside. 

Also, the book is about 1976 and everyone’s talking about 1976. Some people are talking about the 50th anniversary of punk and some are talking about climate. Whatever the reason, a lot of people are looking back.

And then, “Burnham to drag us back to the 1970s” shouts the front page of a right-wing rag at the weekend. And friends of my generation are going: bring it on.  Great music, strong trade unions, student grants, a working NHS and public services that were still in public hands. What’s not to like?

Well, actually a lot, if you look at the history. Especially if you were female. Or Black. Or Asian. Or gay.

Heatwave, the book, is by John L Williams and it’s just out now in paperback. It’s a social history of that summer, covering music and culture, sport, news (national and international) and of course the weather. It describes that period as a turning point in British history, even while there are parallels to our own time. 

It’s a lot more than standpipes and ladybirds. It’s even a lot more than the Sex Pistols. It’s about things that I vaguely heard about at the time, like the Notting Hill Carnival riot and the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and things I had never heard of, like the Trico strike (21 weeks out, until the women got equal pay). 

I spent most of that summer indoors, because my holiday job was child-minding and I used the time to work my way through my university reading list. So I didn’t notice the weather much, and I hadn’t been on the earth long enough to realise it was exceptional. In fact, I remember saying: “It’s exam time so it’s always hot.” I thought that was the rule.

Also, I didn’t follow the news much, so I missed a lot of what was happening in the world. My 1976 turning point wasn’t the summer but moving to Liverpool in the autumn. (That’s why my memoir Atypical Girl starts in October.)

All the same, there is some crossover between what’s described in the book and what I can remember. I saw The Who at Charlton in 1976, although I don’t remember the audience violence described in the book. I knew a bit about the way the police used the Sus laws to stop anyone they didn’t like. Mostly Black men, it’s true, but there weren’t many where I lived so they picked on our (white) boyfriends instead. Because they had long hair.

I don’t remember reading about the Sex Pistols in the NME, even though I was an avid reader of the three main music papers. I don’t think I noticed Mick Farren’s famous think-piece The Titanic Sails At Dawn. I was more of a Charles Shaar Murray fan. 

I remember when disco was good. And as an adopted Scouser I was pleased to read a chapter about The Real Thing, whose You To Me Are Everything was, the book tells us, the first record by a Black British group to get to number one.

I remember Doctors of Madness, who get a brief mention as one of the almost-were transitional bands that paved the way for something new and then got left behind. (They are included in Alex Petridis’s recent Guardian article about what most of us were actually listening to during that year.) 

And I did buy the Eddie and the Hot Rods Live at the Marquee EP (“arguably the first British punk record”).

Reading about all this didn’t make me nostalgic, but it did make me think.  As Williams reminds us: “Britain in the seventies was, in large part, little changed from the fifties”. Which meant some pretty regressive attitudes towards large parts of the population. 

We were, I supposed, used to the Everyday Sexism that was part of 1970s culture but in hindsight it’s shocking to read how bad it all was. Police (and courts) that didn’t take violence against women and girls seriously. Misogynist murders gone unsolved. Newspapers that used sexual assault for tabloid titillation. Even when it was against under-age girls. Rape used routinely as a joke. Women not having careers. Industrial tribunals that sided with management when workers tried to invoke the Equal Pay Act. 

For that, and for many other reasons covered in the book, things had to change. Williams’ theory is that the summer of 1976 was a catalyst, and that the heat itself “caused widespread change”.  He could be right, but I couldn't help thinking of the saying "be careful what you wish for." My heart sank when I read his final sentence about a “new era” and “the promise of unstoppable change”. Like our new prime minister, I remember Thatcherism.

P.S. There’s a playlist. You might want to skip Peter Frampton.