When you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up? I vacillated between the noble aspirations of stuntman, cartoonist and actor (ideally with permed hair); but the only constant dream that I nursed was to be a smoker. I would have written to Jim’ll Fix It to ask for his help, but the renowned altruist had ignored my other pleas to play for Liverpool and with Adam and the Ants, so I thought bollocks to him. (Dodged a bullet there). Besides, I had easy access to cigarettes. It was ‘Fags R Us’ at our house. The lounge was like a Victorian pea-souper. We collected Embassy vouchers, we had hundreds, but fuck knows what we ever traded these in for, more packets of Embassy I suspect. And we had ash-trays everywhere, ash-trays bought as presents, ash-trays nicked from restaurants and pubs and places we visited and those posh ash-trays on stands with sliding panels.
And this is because in the 70s cigarettes were GREAT! They came in different coloured boxes with cool designs, not like today when they’re all in the same dark green packet with photos of diseased bodily organs on them. How can you tell which is which? Does Embassy even exist anymore? Oh, it’s the one with the mouth close up on it, the black-gummed, tombstone teethed health warning photo that no one believes because you never see anyone with a gob like that; because actually you’d have to smoke 300 a day to look that bad and no one has been able to afford 300 fags a day since the 70s when they were sensibly priced, and not much more than sweet cigarettes in those days in fact.
But I’ve read that these days it takes just one packet to make your teeth fall out and your gums look like toes on a tramp with trenchfoot. This is because they put all kinds of shit in modern cigarettes - rat poison, anthrax, talcum powder, toe-nails, pig’s eye lashes, paving stones, garlic, maybe even Pot Noodle powder. Back in the 70s, it was good old fashioned tobacco, tar and some pleasantly addictive chemicals. And you could tell the difference between fags as well. Silk Cut (Slut) were your starter pack - pretty bland and innocuous, like plain crisps. Then you might move onto Benson and Hedges, medium tar, bit more of a scratchy feel at the back of your throat, like Monster Munch. From there, you might go Rothmans, but that was like inhaling razor blades and you couldn’t regress back down to Embassy, because your mum smoked them and they were too short; so you’d go a bit exotic and plum for Camel with their mild dung flavouring.
Don’t get me wrong, my parents never encouraged me to smoke. Each time I went to shop to buy their fags for them, I knew I’d get into massive trouble if I smoked one on the way home. So, I had to make do with lighting their dog ends, fresh from the ash-tray, when they were out of the room. They’d never notice. It’s not like I’d smell any more like cigarettes, after all.
But adults were role models and back then there were some clear cultural norms in relation to how men and women should hold their cigarettes. Women had to gently pinch a cigarette between the tips of their elongated fingers and hold their hands up so that the fag was at head height, swaying in time with the rhythm of their speech. Men shoved the cigarette down low in the fingers, near the knuckle, hand half clenched, ideally holding something manly like a pint, a tool or their penis. And when you needed two hands to manipulate any one of those things, you’d let the fag hang limply from your lips, eyes half closed to look cool, whereas in fact you’d be squinting in response to feeling like you were having a napalm eye-bath.
And what was lovely about smoking, was that no one gave a shit about you doing it. Nowadays, you could take a dump on someone’s lap on a train and everyone would look away too polite to comment; but light up a cigarette in a carriage and you’d get a chorus of excuse mes and do you minds. Remember how before the mid 80s you’d NEVER see anyone smoking on a train? That’s because there was so much smoke you’d never see anything. A tube would pull into a station with smoking and non-smoking carriages and it was the latter that had all the available seats, because most people were crammed somewhere inside the smog of the smoking ones. In a token effort to cater for the sensibilities of ‘non-smokers’ (or poofters as they were sometimes known in those politically indifferent days) buses and aeroplanes sectioned off areas where you weren’t allowed to smoke. They overlooked the fact that smoke tends to travel and often it only had to travel a few inches to expose the whole absurdity of non-smoking sections.
For the record, my first cigarette was when I was about 8 or 9, sat on a garage roof with my mate Brett (hard bastard, made his Dad blind by throwing sand in his eye), sharing a pack of John Player No. 6. Then at school in science we’d roll a piece of paper, set it on fire from the Bunsen burner, blow it out and quickly inhale through the tube the little bit of smoke smouldering from the end. After that, it was as I said, the final vestiges of a discarded dog end when your mum punctuated her own smoking with a quick pop to the lav.
Like I always say, the 70s were a better time. A time when culture demanded that we share cigarettes (you never saw anyone open a packet and not make an offer to others, helped by the fact that the cost didnt work out as 50p a fag); a time when people didn’t get their knickers in a twist over the fact that you were making their clothes smell or giving them lung cancer just by smoking in a confined space with them; a time when non-smokers had to fuck off outside a building and stand in the cold to indulge in their minority habit.
And best of all, cigarettes make you look cool. Much much cooler than a battery operated metal toy that emits clouds of strawberry smelling vapour, anyway.
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