Still exploring at what point in youth culture we changed without realising we were being changed by those influencing tastes. There was a plethora of largely positive songs where male and female looked at each other at least … why did it change?

Aspiration and avarice … bands tried to become more complicated for street cred, hence the wow factor with jarring guitars competing, music was almost dead by 1968/9, then came the turgid Pink Floyds and the screaming Black Sabbath and Cream … and the change of path from fun to … whatever … cleverness … was signposted by Led Zeppelin in 1971, after the Beatles had gone Swami and broken up, after the drug-addled, STD ridden Woodstock, also the change in education into regressive, uneducated … Hendrix died, Joplin, Jim Morrison …

… and Plant had sung about it in Stairway to Heaven … there are two paths … youth had been heading upwards or so it seemed, so bands like Zeppelin and Jefferson Airplane, plus the new metal speed guitar freaks, turned it onto the road to hell and youth dutifully followed, as if behind a Pied Piper … anything melodic was passé, twee … the hidden culture makers behind the scenes were directing it, as they had created flower power, beat generation, hippies … Leary and psychedelics … now it was the road to hell, which yoof saw as kool.

Kids or just past kidhood … we had to be kool, man, had to be with the latest wow … we were led away from “wholesome” … that was so L7 … for the newest cheap, risque trick … as kids are wowed by. Punk was light years from the melodic … it was all frenzied darkness … except the Ramones who at least brought old rockabilly back into it.

When did Ian Curtis suicide? 1980, just as ska was enjoying a couple of years … then the depressing 80s … decade of nothingness … kids had grown up, were having families themselves or else it was all sex and no commitment … late 80s was acid house, followed by Betty Boo and rap style … everything dark in nature. Or else yuppy paradise for the aspiring new, powerdressed middle.

First half of the 90s was at least some attempt to bring back music, but it was lost by 1997, just as the lost generation started … Gen Zee … generation of being sold short, badly educated, diverted into perversion, as primary children. Not unlike the Eloi. May as well not even mention the 2000s and later … and here we are.

Naturally, most will not accept my case above … some might.