SWELTERING THROUGH the heatwave, one’s mind returns to the famously hot summer of 1976, when reservoirs dried up, roads melted and punk rock was born. Britain may have been mired in industrial disputes 30 years ago, suffering from inflation and record unemployment, as well as a drought of historic severity, but culturally the 1970s were a brilliant decade.

One can make too much of punk rock, which had its share of nonsense. But if you still think the Sex Pistols were mere hype, listen again to John Lydon singing on Bodies and God Save the Queen. There is passion, power and poetry here. The design ideas associated with the band, the collages by Jamie Reid and clothes by Vivienne Westwood, now look like fine art.

The Pistols package was so complete, so clever, that their arch-rivals the Clash seemed second-rate. Still, the Clash’s 1979 LP, London Calling, may be the best double album by a British band since the Rolling Stones made Exile on Main Street (another great Seventies record).

The spirit of innovation that was the hallmark of 1960s music did not stop in 1969, but continued into the new decade, with many established stars going from strength to strength. And there was the bonus of David Bowie, Roxy Music and Bob Marley.

The Seventies were also a golden age of cinema, when directors broke from the tyranny of the studio system to make personal, realistic pictures. Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese, Nicholas Roeg and Francis Ford Coppola all did their best work.

“It became permission time,” the movie director Bob Rafelson told me. “Permission was granted in the Seventies to behave (and) make work that, in fact, was something you were thinking about doing in the Sixties, but nobody gave you permission to do.” In 1970, Rafelson made Five Easy Pieces, a wonderful little picture that launched Jack Nicholson as one of the premier movie stars of the era. Apart from Robert De Niro — another son of Seventies cinema — we haven’t seen such a charismatic leading man since.

While the rock music and movies of the decade are widely held to be excellent, painting, sculpture, literature, architecture and design are all too often overlooked or, worse, ridiculed.

Recently there’s been a plethora of television shows in which riff-raff “celebrities” talk nostalgically about the 1970s. They amount to little more than their memories of bouncing to the sweet shop on a Space Hopper to stock up on Curly Wurlys before Top of the Pops.

The impression given is that the culture of the 1970s reached no higher than these pundits’ childish remembrances, that the music was trivial, the TV trashy and the clothes so ghastly we can only smile about “the decade that taste forgot”. Architecture, if mentioned, is dismissed as concrete brutalism (as if that is necessarily pejorative).

In truth the Seventies were a time of modern classics in almost every aspect of the arts, certainly publishing. John Updike’s Rabbit books are among the best and most popular of all modern novels. The series hit its stride in 1971 with the publication of Rabbit Redux. Norman Mailer pushed the new journalism to its limit with his brilliant Executioner’s Song (1979) and the late, great Iris Murdoch wrote her most enduring novel, The Sea, The Sea, deservedly winner of the 1978 Booker Prize.

Among these literary giants, perhaps Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn stands tallest, for opening up the secret world of the Soviet Union through his vivid and heroic novels, written in the face of state intimidation, and even a KGB assassination attempt. “One word of truth shall outweigh the whole world,” the author exclaimed fearlessly in his acceptance speech for the 1970 Nobel prize. Books such as The Gulag Archipelago were indispensable reading. His personal story makes one humble.

In art, David Hockney rediscovered naturalism with marvellous results. Last year Radio 4 listeners voted his double portrait of 1971, Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy, one of Britain’s ten greatest paintings — the only picture on the shortlist made in the 20th century. Look again at the painting. It shows the clothes designers Ossie Clark and Celia Birtwella, fashionable young couple of the day, in their London apartment. See how chic their home is, and how stylish they look.

And, yes, Ossie is wearing flares.

The idea of writing a book that would help to rescue the reputation of the 1970s came to me when I attended a recent concert by Lou Reed at the Barbican Centre in London — the Barbican being part of the laudable spirit of bold design in the 1970s, largely built as it was during that decade. Once mocked, this massive concrete fortress has matured into a superb cultural centre with a happy residential community.

For me Reed has always been closely associated with the 1970s, primarily because of his 1972 album Transformer which transcends glam rock to achieve a timeless louche elegance. His concert at the Barbican Hall was sold out, with 2,000 or so people, all in what may broadly be termed middle life, held rapt by songs such as Perfect Day and Satellite of Love.

Like so much of the work of the 1970s, it came home to me during the show that these songs have become part of the core culture of many lives. So have the best movies of the 1970s, its paintings, sculpture, architecture and literature. It is high time we celebrated a misjudged and underrated decade.

Howard Sounes is author of Seventies: The Sights, Sounds and Ideas of a Brilliant Decade, published next week by Simon & Schuster

Times Recommends

• In the real world, the public sector must pay
• Playing politics in a land of double Dutch
• Be like the plinth people: not set in stone