Get Down and Boogie Written by Gail Walter Close your eyes for a minute. Imagine this: a shimmering dance floor, a lithe figure clad in a skintight white suit, left hip thrust out, right hand pointing skywards. The music throbs with an irresistible beat and your shiny, pointy-toed shoes just can’t stop themselves from tapping. This was disco, an unprecedented phenomenon that emerged in the seventies with figures like John Travolta teaching us how to own a dance floor. They called it performance dancing because that’s exactly what it was. No more modest clinches on a modest dance floor that …
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Get Down and Boogie
The First Night
Written by Gail Walter Now, I don’t really know if I should be talking about this…the thing is, it was pivotal. Funny also. It was the first time I ever spent a night with a man, a boy as it happened… We were both seventeen, both the eldest child in our respective families and both careering towards one another with a kind of cosmic momentum that we were at first quite unaware of. When my friend Susan told me she had another crush, this time, on a new boy at her school, I knew the drill. I mean we’d done …
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Fashion Sense
Written by Gail Walter In the summer of 1973 I had a dress that I absolutely loved. It was patterned with pink and grey swirls and had two bites taken out of it, or so it seemed. The resulting holes revealed the teasing curves of a waist that 15-year-old girls take for granted. When I wore this dress I felt like a million dollars. The pale pink in the fabric brought out the healthy tan of my skin. The short skirt revealed audacious lengths of tanned leg and the back zip pulled the fabric snug across my teenage hips. This …
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Best Friends
Written by Gail Walter I had never been one to socialize en masse, one or two good friends was all I needed. In fact, one is what I had…right through the seventies. When I think about Susan, hmmm… yes, what do I think? Well, firstly, and inadvertently I think of her, or thought of her, as criminally slim. She wore the streamlined fashion of the day like a store mannequin. It hung where it was supposed to hang and where it clung it was aesthetically pleasing. This is always a challenge for a friendship, especially between teenage girls. Couple this …
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Shopping in the 70s
We all use to buy our stuff from the corner shops, but before long those gleaming supermarkets would be forming all over town, and they were cheaper, if you excluded the cost of buying the car to get there and back, or the bus and taxis. But we really changed our ways of shopping in the 1970′s, not just in supermarkets but other high street shops. How many of these do you remember, as these have all gone to shop heaven now. FINE FARE these were everywhere in the 1970′s, I should know as I worked in many of them. …
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70’s Fashion
In the summer of 1973 I had a dress that I absolutely loved. It was patterned with pink and grey swirls and had two bites taken out of it, or so it seemed. The resulting holes revealed the teasing curves of a waist that 15-year-old girls take for granted. When I wore this dress I felt like a million dollars. The pale pink in the fabric brought out the healthy tan of my skin. The short skirt revealed audacious lengths of tanned leg and the back zip pulled the fabric snug across my teenage hips. This was the seventies. Clothes, …
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Old Grannies and Oxford Bags
A lot of things had not yet been discovered in the seventies. There was no Internet, no cell phones and no Ipods. There were also no small sizes. Here was a world — hip and cool in every way — that failed to recognize the needs of the smaller person. I was a hip and cool person in the seventies. I was also small, smaller than the smallest jean size. This meant that, though I WAS cool, I did not look it. When Oxford bags came into fashion my pants were almost as wide around the waist as they were …
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The 70s actual reality vs. virtual reality.
Now, consider the seventies. Yes, there were televisions, telephones, record players and airplanes, but technology wasn’t nearly as dominant as it is today. There were spaces and places that were completely without gadgetry. You could go on long drives in the country and absolutely no-one could contact you and remind you of your responsibilities. This is what many of us remember about growing up in the Seventies. It was vivid and dynamic but we weren’t being eaten alive by a pace that left no space for wonder. In the seventies there were still places that you walked to and walked …
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The Seventies
I really don’t understand why it’s the 70s that always gets slated. Whether it be the music or clothes, furniture or hairstyles the 70s is always the era that gets derided and I would just like to set the record straight. The 70s were fun, sorry that should read the 70s were FUN!. Is that clear enough for you? Whilst the 60s were “heavy man” the 70s was totally groovy and it showed. People weren’t happy anymore sitting in their homes hiding under bland colours contemplating the meaning of life. No, the 70s were all about living it. The bands …
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