The Beatles? They were a popular mop-topped beat combo from Merseyside who, after a string of toe-tapping, chart-topping discs, disbanded in 1970, nine years before Margaret Thatcher came to power. As for colour television, Blair is telling a half-truth; he was 14 before this small communications revolution. The Beatles’ spiritual heirs, Oasis, will barely remember the days before Maggie stormed into No 10. Their television has always been colour, and they have been brought up in a vibrant culture that is already remote from the Britain of 18 years ago.
It must be hard for artists, writers, musicians, television producers and architects of Liam and Noel Gallagher’s age to imagine just how restricting things were for their predecessors in 1979. When Maggie took over, British culture was still recognisably that, a more-or-less monolithic entity, despite the Beatles, despite punk, held in check by patronising bureaucracies and government agencies, archaic licensing laws and media outlets controlled by old-school (white-collar and blue-collar) oligarchies, themselves battered and occasionally squeezed into uncomfortable corners by powerful trade unions.
Britain was decidely little. Connections with Europe, for artists, for professionals, for the business community were only beginning to open up. A British designer would no more expect to show at the Milan Fair than the youthful Tony Blair would attend a Tory party rally.
The Design Council, a creaking body of besuited worthies in search of CBEs and knighthoods, could seriously give one of its once-prestigious “Design Council Approved” labels to the Austin Montego, a car with even less charisma than its excruciatingly dull (British-built) successor, the Nissan Primera. The design boom that characterised the Eighties was not set off by the chaps and chapesses at the Design Council; it was led by retailers at the top end of the market, picked up and magnified by the post-Wapping media.The computer and computer-driven communications industries were in their infancy. Men in suits who spoke of the information technology revolution were considered a number of apples short of a picnic. Within a few years, thousands would be buying laptops from high-street chains which had more power than the electronic brain in the Apollo 11 capsule that took Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to the moon when the Beatles were still going strong.Architects, strangers yet to CAD (computer-aided design), were not allowed to advertise their skills in 1979 (too vulgar), nor to appear in the adverts of others (touting for cash). Today Sir Norman Foster, the world’s most successful architect, appears in swish adverts for Rolex watches.
Whatever one thinks of Rolex watches, no one would accuse Stormin’ Norman, a multi- millionaire, of touting for cash.The best architecture, like much that was good in the arts, was largely state-funded. Smart architects turned their sensitive noses up at the very idea of designing shops and bars when they were used to working for Oxbridge dons and dealing with the intelligentsia. Within a few years, many of the best young architects make their names designing chic bars and fashionable cafes.The arts were subsidised, but rarely sponsored. In a trice, Maggie’s Blues had turned sponsorship (of sport, of the arts) from what seemed like a vulgar gimmick to a necessity. If sponsorship meant rows of empty seats in the Royal Opera House while the City chaps whose banks had paid for their seats got sloshed on champagne and Kiri Te Kanawa sang her heart out to a less-than-capacity audience, who cared?The connection between money and the arts developed into an unprecedented symbiosis. Business folk began to enjoy the arts and the artists began to benefit.
