“At least they can play their instruments.” Trevor Bolder, bassist in David Bowie’s backing band in late 1970, allegedly spoke these words on watching the wigged and made-up ensemble accompanying Alice Cooper at the Rainbow Theatre in London. David Hepworth claims that this comment from a man who, six months later, began propping up the effete antics of Bowie’s alter ego Ziggy Stardust was “the authentic voice of 1971”. He might have added this line from Carly Simon’s song “Anticipation”, released that year: “These are the good old days.”
The temptation with any cultural project focused on a particular year – and there have been several, including Jon Savage’s 1966 and Mark Kurlansky’s 1968 – is to treat the nutshelled twelvemonth as a narrative microcosm. From a music-subcultural perspective, there are strong cases to be made for those years, just as there are for the psychedelic year of 1967. Hepworth, who was buying his first records in north London in 1971 and went on to co-host Whistle Test for the BBC and set up Q and The Word magazines, has written countless columns singing the praises of that particularly fecund period. In 1971: Never a Dull Moment, which shares its subtitle with the name of a near-contemporaneous Rod Stewart album, he knits it all together in a month-by-month chronology that is laced with a wisdom gathered over many years as a journalist and industry insider, and with an enthusiasm for the music and an understanding of the economics driving the evolution of popular culture.
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