Fourth Estate £12.99 pp359

One of the most interesting things about the culture surrounding pop music is the way it is forever rearranging its own past. Take 1967, for instance, the year of the fabled “summer of love”. Judged on their measurable popularity, this was the golden moment for a couple of sideburned schmaltz merchants, Engelbert Humperdinck and Tom Jones, whose songs Release Me and The Green, Green Grass of Home kept them at the top of the charts for 27 out of 52 weeks. Not even a 7in masterpiece by the Beatles, featuring Penny Lane on one side and Strawberry Fields Forever on the other, could interrupt the nation’s love affair with gloopy middle-of-the-road ballads. Needless to say, this is not how we prefer to remember 1967, or for that matter any other period of the swinging, psychedelic 1960s.

Where the 1970s is concerned, the distorting lens of memory has tended to operate in the opposite direction. Here it is the frivolous, the kitsch and the camp that speak loudest across the years. The 1970s is often mockingly referred to as the “bad-taste decade” — a riot of outrageous perms, precarious footwear and escapist music epitomised by preening disco anthems such as Rod Stewart’s Do Ya Think I’m Sexy? and the triumphalist Europop of Abba.

The DJ and writer Dave Haslam grew up in Birmingham in the 1970s, and he is understandably fed up with what he calls the “abbafication” of his teenage years. His book mounts a blistering, sometimes blustering attack on the nostalgic sanitisation of a troubled decade and offers a good-taste guide to its music.

Like most serious fans at the time, Haslam paid no attention to Sweden’s premier export and not a lot to the commercial repackaging of gay dance music as “disco”. The stuff he liked (northern soul, Bolan and Bowie, American r’n’b, punk rock and the ska revival) was not trying to wish the world away in a haze of glitterballs, giant flares and jolly oompah melodies.

For Haslam, the 1970s was pre-eminently a period when music engaged head on with pressing social issues. The androgynous posturing of the glam rockers questioned traditional masculinity. Racial disharmony was never far from the thoughts of the great soul singers such as Marvin Gaye, and it became the centrepiece of the 2-Tone movement and its political spin-off, Rock against Racism. Punk raged against anything and everything, from Britain’s post-war decline and lengthening dole queues to the monarchy, tedious guitar solos and boring old hippies. Never, Haslam argues, has pop music had a more impassioned agenda or a darker political backdrop. The violence of football hooligans, union militants and supporters of the National Front was never far away for young city-dwellers like him. Which is why he gets so cross, as Not Abba opens, reporting the goings-on in a tacky 1970s theme bar in Wolverhampton called Flares where the DJ wears a purple wig and plays nonstop disco hits to a crowd of forlorn teenagers and tipsy fiftysomethings. Appalled by this travesty, Haslam vows to go back and tell it like it was, “to rewrite the rewriting of history”.

This is a worthwhile job, but it’s a big one, too, and by the end you wish the author had slimmed it down and stuck more to his own recollections and those of his nine interviewees. When we hear from proto-punk Jayne in Liverpool, or from the young black Londoner Paul Gilroy, Britain in the 1970s really starts to feel like another country — much scarier, stranger and, above all, more distant from us now than the 1960s. How these kids came to terms with a world where, with jobs a distant memory, pop went seriously tribal and the wrong haircut could get your head kicked in, is always interesting. Haslam’s anti-London bias is a nice touch, too. His chapter on northern soul has a lively authority rooted in his love of the music; and it’s good to learn how a mainly white city such as Newcastle rocked to a different beat from the ethnically mixed West Midlands.

At other times, Not Abba reads a bit like that old BBC television series, The Rock and Roll Years. Offering a different song as the signature of each year is fine. Riders on the Storm by the Doors is an inspired choice to characterise the faded optimism of 1971. But instead of sticking with what he knows well, Haslam can’t resist painting the bigger picture. In a book this length, the social history of a decade inevitably descends into headlines, lists and much use of the word “meanwhile”. An unfortunate reminder, in a big-hearted book, that glibness is not exclusive to the proprietors of 1970s theme bars.

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