Reimagining my 1970s Dutch childhood

I was four years old in 1970 and fourteen in 1980. If it is true that you form your first memories around your fourth birthday, then my conscious childhood coincided entirely with the 1970s. Looking back, those childhood years seem sunny and carefree, and they probably were. I grew up in the Netherlands, where the summers were endless, the family I grew up in was warm and secure, and my friends and I played, swam, and played football until late in the evening.

Naturally, like everyone else, I look back on my childhood with nostalgia. The bittersweet realization that that time will never return (and probably wasn’t as golden as I now think) gives every reflection a melancholic weight. But for a long time, my memories of the seventies have had a deeper, darker layer: I also experienced that time as unsettling and strange, with an unknown threat lurking beneath the surface.

This specific, uncanny feeling is central to The Dark Side of the Seventies.

For years, I have been trying to rediscover this feeling; initially without truly realizing it, but now quite deliberately. And I am not alone. Especially in Great Britain, a generation that grew up in the 1970s shares this collective cultural experience. Their youth was characterized by what Bob Fischer calls a ‘cosy wrongness’ in his influential essay The Haunted Generation.

Now that they are grown up, artists, musicians, and writers — such as the band Boards of Canada, the label Ghost Box Records, and the art project Scarfolk — are trying to evoke and shape that elusive feeling of the 1970s once again. This British-dominated movement is called ‘hauntology,’ a term for the somewhat vague idea that the past, or a future we envisioned in the past, continues to linger in the present.

Children growing up during that era were afforded far less protection from the harsher realities of the world. This pervasive mood is perfectly encapsulated in the title of a book and podcast series dedicated to British pop culture of the seventies: Scarred for Life. In stark contrast to the highly sanitized, comforting children’s programming of today, kids in the seventies were routinely confronted with boundary-pushing art, unsettling narratives, and deeply eerie folklore, broadcasting straight into their living rooms.

Many youth series, educational television programs, and Public Information Films from that time had an ominous atmosphere, often enhanced by experimental electronic music. The feeling of uncomfortable nostalgia lies not only in the stories but also in the imperfections of the technology of the day: distorted analog synthesizers, noisy TV broadcasts, and grainy black-and-white images. It all left an indelible mark on many Britons – and has now become a cultural source of inspiration.

A striking illustration of this fascination is Scarfolk, a fictional, bleak British town permanently stuck in 1979. The creator of Scarfolk, Richard Littler, designs fantastic ironic posters. They are inspired by the cold, blunt, and bureaucratic government campaigns of the seventies, which were often intended to genuinely frighten children about all the dangers around them. The dreary aesthetics of brutalist architecture, concrete housing estates, nuclear power plants, and power lines also play a significant role.

The hauntology movement may seem very British at first glance, but the deeper feeling beneath it is more universal and recognizable to those who grew up in the modern West during the 1970s. After all, here in the Low Countries, we were also familiar with the mysterious atmosphere of television series like Q&Q or the terrifying witch Eucalypta from Paulus de Boskabouter, to name just two.

On this website, I try to capture that feeling, to describe it and, if possible, to explain it.

Do you recognize that underlying tension and nostalgic alienation from your youth? Then dive into the articles on my blog and be sure to leave a comment. I would love to hear which images, sounds, or shows from the seventies have always stuck with you.