An arresting sentence in Sebastian Faulks’s fine novel Engleby (2007) brought a smile to my lips as soon as I read it. “I couldn’t stand another article about 1970s fashion, Abba or tank-tops. This kind of decade-drivel used to be the territory of Chicks’ Own or Bunty but has now run through whole sections of once-serious newspapers.”

Chicks’ Own? Was there such a magazine? There was certainly a Bunty, though I am surprised to find Faulks knew of it. Perhaps, like me, he had a sister whose weekly copy he would seize, as I did, eager for the latest adventures of ballerina Moira Kent or that inseparable quartet from St Elmo’s School, The Four Marys. All through my adult life I have been able to amaze (and appal) people with my ability to rattle off the surnames of the foursome — Cotter, Radleigh, Simpson, and Field, since you ask — throwing in those of their form mistress (Miss Creef) and school head (Dr Gull) for good measure. Don’t worry, in more masculine vein I also remember Captain Hurricane and his faithful batman ‘Maggot’ Malone from the fearsomely macho contemporary boys’ comic, Valiant.

What I do not recall, in any shape or form, was any ‘decade-drivel’ in Bunty. Perhaps this has been a more recent innovation.

As it happens, I am not averse to decade-drivel, eager for any opportunity to wallow in nostalgia. Engleby, in fact, supplied it in buckets.

Since Faulks and I are exact contemporaries, give or take a month or two, his memories coincide precisely with mine. References to such records as Procol Harum’s Grand Hotel, A Song For Me by Family (“with Roger Chapman on vocals and John ‘Poli’ Palmer on vibes”), Split by the Groundhogs, Stoned Henge by Ten Years After — all these strike a chord, so to speak. Of The Groundhogs, for instance, I had not thought for years. A girl I knew at the dawn of the 1970s became the girlfriend of the lead guitarist Tony McPhee. Where is she now, I wonder. Of Roger Chapman, Faulks may have added “on vocals and tambourine”. He was to this percussion instrument what Pete Townshend was, in destructive terms, to the guitar: I lost count of the number he got through during a frantic performance in May 1969 at London’s Roundhouse, which during my earlier trainspotting days had an entirely different role as Camden Town shed, home to many hissing giants of steam. This, incidentally, was a benefit concert for the family of Fairport Convention’s drummer Martin Lamble who had been killed, aged 19, in an accident involving the band’s van. Others on the bill included the The Pretty Things, Eclection, Pink Floyd and Blossom Toes.

By strange chance, I had just written the foregoing paragraph when I noticed an advertisement in last week’s Oxford Times for a 40th anniversary party at The Friars Aylesbury featuring both The Pretty Things and The Groundhogs. With them was another survival of the late 1960s/early 1970s, the terminally boring Edgar Broughton Band.

Mention of Broughton’s outfit, with its facile brand of revolutionary right-on appeal (Out Demons, Out), reminds one of the fashionable political posturings of the period. These are examined in depth in Andy Beckett’s hugely impressive new book When The Lights Went Out — Britain in the Seventies, (Faber & Faber, £20) wherein Broughton, in fact, is given a name-check.

It comes in the chapter amusingly entitled Marxism at Lunchtime whose starting point is a booklet, the Little Red Struggler, produced in Manchester by the National Student Committee of the Communist Party.

“For 60 busy pages,” writes Beckett, “a whole dead political world sprang to life. There were London contact details for Marxists in Medicine, The Women’s Liberation Workshop, The Angola Solidarity Committee, and the British Campaign for Peace in Vietnam. There was a surprisingly objective guide to ‘political groupings in the student movement’ from the Workers’ Revolutionary Party to the International Marxist Group to the Communist Party itself.”

Apropos the then frequent university student occupations, the guide provides a fascinating list of Do’s and Don’ts. Among the latter category, most surprisingly in retrospect, is advice not to “smoke dope, get drunk, damage the place, leave a mess when it’s all over”.

A chronology of notable political interventions included sit-ins and protests at Keele, Stirling, Essex, Warwick and Lancaster — which were even then considered (but not as yet called) ‘the usual suspects’. At Keele, in May 1970, the booklet noted: “Situationists, helped by Edgar Broughton Band and spray cans ‘liberate’ Keele.”

Not long afterwards came a series of similar demonstrations in Oxford, many of them concerned with the demand (never met) for a Central Students’ Union. Coverage of these was one of my earliest journalistic tasks here, in company (as I later discovered) with one Peter Mandelson, then a writer for the student magazine, Cherwell. But that, as they say, is another story . . .