by Carl Halling

Created on: July 08, 2007

My late teens in the early-mid 1970s:
The Genesis of a Gentleman

The following is an account concocted as accurately as possible, given that I was looking back at some three and a half decades ago, of how I came to be conditioned by my environment in the early 1970s, following my departure from Pangbourne College where I'd been a boarder between the 9th of September 1968 or thereabouts and the end of the summer term of 1972. It was a time of constant, frenetic social and cultural change in Britain, which couldn't help but exert an immensely powerful influence on an impressionable adolescent of 16 or 17, such as I was.

Glam Rock Stomp

In the summer of 1972, it was mutually decided between my longsuffering father and the authorities of Pangbourne, a nautical college close by to the Thames village of Pangbourne in Berkshire that it was best I leave after a year in the fifth form and four years in the college itself.
1972 could be said to be the year in which the infamously anticlimactic 1970s began in earnest following the sixties twilight. My parents, brother and I had moved to a little village suburb some dozen miles from the centre of London at the turn of the decade. Thence, I was something of a fish out of water, being no longer either in west London where I grew up, nor at the boarding school that had been my whole world for four long years and where I'd formed so many intensely close friendships.
The sixties were finally good and over and as absurd as it might seem today, for many the early seventies were like the hangover following a long wild party. Long hair was now omnipresent, and being sported by innumerous jack the lads across the land including one-time skinheads. Many of the popular songs of the era reflected this trend, being like football chants set to a stomping Glam Rock beat.
I had long looked askance at commercial chart Pop, being a typical product of a boarding school background and so a lover of rock, and especially progressive rock. However, little by little I was warming to the brash new epoch.
I saw a former bubblegum outfit I'd once scorned on a long-forgotten teenage programme in late '72 called "Lift off with Ayesha" and was fascinated by their prancing antics. And some time after watching a certain nascent Glam luminary on the chat show Russell Harty Plus in January 1973, I wholeheatedly entered into the spirit of this strange culture.

Rehabilitation of a Problem Child

I'd been a would-be lout at Pangbourne, but were I to have attempted to

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