From Clive Dunn’s Grandad in 1970 to the St Winifred’s School Choir’s There’s No One Quite Like Grandma in 1980, the singalong pop of 70s Britain is generally dismissed as naff, sentimental, unstylish and just plain bad. Can these songs so firmly sewn into the fabric of British life really be so awful? Don’t they have something to say about the era they came from? That was the inspiration for my book In Perfect Harmony: a serious look at family favourites that have been derided by the critical minds of the day as, to use one embittered songwriter’s colourful description, vomit.
Britain in the 1970s was beset with ballooning inflation, national strikes, angry debates on European integration and fears of an environmental apocalypse – a bit like 2020s Britain, in fact. Amid all this, Slade’s Merry Xmas Everybody was the anthem of the 1974 three-day week, the Wombles responded to 1976’s punishing drought with the eco-disco hit Rainmaker and the Brotherhood of Man’s 1970 ballad United We Stand was the rallying cry for an emerging gay rights movement. They were socially significant, in other words. Here are 10 more socio-political singalong smashes.
