It Took Seconds

Three minutes and thirty seconds: I have been listening a lot to early 70s rock recently. I dunno why exactly, it’s good music to fall asleep to for one thing. Which I mean as a complement, of course. When I started getting into pop the early 70s were seen as a bit of a dead zone - kind of like rock’s Middle Ages! The high rock era had finished, punk hadn’t happened yet, and instead there was all this embarrassing stuff you weren’t meant to think about. And reggae, which everyone approved of. And Bowie, obviously. A  lot of people sensibly disagreed with that consensus and dug deeper, I was lucky enough to meet some of them so that idea of the 70s didn’t infect me much.

But everything that happened back then has been rehabilitated and now they seem like an amazingly rich period, in part because the crosstown traffic between the “good” stuff and the “embarassing” stuff is much easier to appreciate. A lot of what was good about specifically rock at that point is in Mott The Hoople’s “All The Young Dudes”. Bowie as widescreen and sentimental as he ever got; terrace-pop scarf-waving singalongs; Mick Ronson; sweet glitter hooks and posing; a bit of androgyny. And most of all that brilliantly caught younger brother mix of defiance, resentment and regret, the bittersweet sense of a spoiled inheritance.

What would your 3’30” be?