Top 10 books about the 1970s

The 1970s have been much reviled and much revived, as Andy Beckett – author of the excellent When the Lights Went Out (Faber) – put it so well. Francis Wheen’s Strange Days Indeed (Fourth Estate) and Alwyn Turner’s Crisis? What Crisis? (Aurum Press) are also worth picking up. All approach their political and social studies of the 70s with wit and balance. Yet there were subcultural and political phenomena of the 70s meriting their own books. The music, art, fashion and design worlds were all mutating, in their own important ways, as the first arenas of tolerance. Gays, blacks and women were better accepted, setting the trend for subsequent wider progress. In sport and television, not so much.

That’s one reason why the 70s were such a fascinating era for football. It was still a sport largely watched by working-class males, but was suffering a decline in interest, thanks to violence, poor stadiums, and negative tactics. Racism and macho culture were endemic. In my book Rock’n’Roll Soccer, I examine how the North American Soccer League (NASL) briefly gave the global game a much-needed kick in the backside, aiming to entertain fans, not alienate them, and cheerfully bending the sacred laws of the sport while encouraging flair and self-expression.

For better or worse, the Premier League aped much of the NASL’s business model. Like many events and movements of the 1970s, few people back then knew just how influential they would prove to be. Here are 10 magnificent books in a similar vein – not about the 70s, as such, but very much entrenched in that decade.

1. What the Heck Are You Up To, Mr President? Jimmy Carter, America’s “Malaise”, and the Speech That Should Have Changed the Country by Kevin Mattson (Bloomsbury, 2010)

“This is not a message of happiness or reassurance, but it is the truth and it is a warning,” President Carter told the US in July 1979. Although Carter’s remarkably honest speech about the need for an enlightened energy policy resonated with the public, the media and the Moral Majority savaged the president for the “malaise” he supposedly believed was afflicting America (he never used that word). A fine book about the brave speech that sounded the death knell of the 70s.

2. What You Want Is in the Limo by Michael Walker (Spiegel & Grau, 2013)

In 1973 The Who, Led Zeppelin and Alice Cooper all undertook ambitious tours of the US as stadium rock concerts became the preferred way of experiencing live music in the harder, louder times that followed flower power. Walker tells the stories of each tour, and it says a lot for this book that I’ve never cared for these three bands, yet still devoured and loved every page of multi-level excess.

3. Grovel! The Story and Legacy of the Summer of 1976 by David Tossell (Pitch Publishing, 2012)

Before the first Test between England and West Indies in the parched summer of 1976, home captain Tony Greig promised to make the tourists “grovel”. The racially charged gaffe fired up a young, dynamic West Indies team facing a host desperate enough to recall the 45-year-old Brian Close. This superbly researched account draws on frank interviews with the main participants to tell how England succumbed to their opponent’s fast, borderline-illegal bowling and almighty batting powers. Greig gamely grovelled in front of WIndies fans after the final test.

4. The Death of Mao: The Tangshan Earthquake and the Birth of the New China by James Palmer (Faber, 2012)

As Chairman Mao’s health waned in the summer of 1976, China sensed changes were afoot after the brutal Cultural Revolution. The July earthquake that killed half a million people in Hebei province was seen as further portent of a new direction. When Mao died, the Gang of Four shaped up for power, little realising that the denounced Deng Xiaoping was much better placed to step in and lead the country. Palmer’s objective, breezy and brilliant volume tells how modern China tentatively emerged from decades of mass violence and rule by terror.

5. Nice to See It, to See It, Nice: The 1970s in Front of the Telly by Brian Viner (Pocket Books, 2010)

If you missed The Sweeney in pre-video times because your parents wouldn’t let you stay up after nine, or because they thought ITV was “a bit council house”, then you were ostracised in the school yard. Of all the 70s nostalgia books, this one resonates the most in terms of “Yes!” moments. Peppered with insight, interviews and raucous anecdotes.

6. A Thousand Lives: The Untold Story of Hope, Deception, and Survival at Jonestown by Julia Scheeres (Simon & Schuster, 2011)

An absorbing study in mind control that humanises the victims. In the 70s, individuals sought solace in new philosophies and religions, and sects ensnared the vulnerable, the lonely and the destitute. Scheeres delves into declassified FBI archives related to the Jonestown massacre in 1978, when Jim Jones – who’d relocated his Peoples Temple to the Guyana jungle – descended into madness and forced several hundred followers to their deaths through murder or suicide.

7. 70s Style and Design by Dominic Lutyens and Kirsty Hislop (Thames and Hudson, 2009)

Lutyens and Hislop destroy the fallacy that the 70s were “the decade that taste forgot”, noting that “the 1970s benefited from an explosion of new visual languages”. Conventional forms were challenged in architecture and design, while in fashion “eclecticism and individuality ruled, there was no ‘right’ look”. Talent counted above celebrity, and risk above business. Tells and shows the 70s in full colour glam and glory.

8. Shah of Shahs by Ryszard Kapuscinski (Harcourt, 1985)

Kapuscinski’s objective, dispassionate style is perfectly suited to describing the first truly world-shaking event that mesmerised my 13-year-old self – the 1979 Iranian revolution. Kapuscinski’s lucid account should be required literature for newly minted Foreign Office officials wishing to develop a long-term lens.

9. The Best of Roy of the Rovers: The 1970s by Tom Tully and David Sque (Titan Books, 2009)

Roy of the Rovers was required reading for teenage boys in the late 70s if you were a devotee of uninterrupted lunch-break sarcasm (who wasn’t at that age?). Its two-dimensional artwork, one-dimensional characters, ludicrous dialogue, and plots as flimsy and throwaway as the comic itself provided easy material for ridicule and parody. Roy in book form is just as hard to put down as he was back then – despite the mockery, we all wanted to know what would happen next week.

10. G.P.O. Versus G.P-O: A Chronicle of Mail Art on Trial by Genesis P-Orridge (Jrp Ringier, 2013)

Mail art was a 1970s movement of artists posting individualised cards, periodically assembled for exhibitions. Genesis P-Orridge collaged images of naked bodies and was heavily fined for sending “a postal packet which had thereon an indecent design”. This compilation of letters and cuttings offers a glimpse of the dead-eyed official attitude towards artistic expression and anything remotely different in 70s Britain.

• Ian Plenderleith’s Rock’n’Roll Soccer: The Short Life and Fast Times of the North American Soccer League is published by Icon Books.