What Happened in 1979?

New inventions in 1979

  • Sony Walkman – ‘This is the product that will satisfy young people who want to listen to music all day’.
  • Burton Snowboard
  • McDonald’s Happy Meal
  • Leg Warmers
  • The World of Strawberry Shortcake
  • Trivial Pursuit Quiz Game

Music of 1979

  • I will survive by Gloria Gaynor
  • Heart of Glass by Blondie
  • Hot Stuff and Bad Girls by Donna Summer
  • Ring My Bell by Anita Summer
  • Rapper’s Delight by The Sugar Hill Gang – considered the first commercial rap hit
  • Chic by Le Freak
  • Too Much Heaven and Tragedy by the Bee Gees
  • Do ya think I’m sexy by Rod Stewart
  • Knock on Wood by Amii Stewart
  • My Sharona by the Knack
  • Pop Muzik by M
  • Don’t Stop till You Get Enough, by Michael Jackson
  • Babe by Styx
  • Heartache Tonight by the Eagles
  • No More Tears (Enough is Enough) by Barbara Streisdand and Donna Summer
  • Still by Commodores
  • Escape (The Pina Colada Song) by Rupert Holmes
  • Village People Y.M.C.A.
  • The Wall by Pink Floyd 
  • Mike Oldfield’s Tour of Europe
  • I Don’t Like Mondays by the Boomtown Rats
  • Other bands were Billy Joel, Foreignor, Electric Light Orchestra (ELO), Chaka Kahn, Olivia Newton-John, John Travolta, Kenny Rogers, Kool and the Gang, Sister Sledge, Steely Dan, Village People, Barry Manilow

Films and TV

  • Walter Hill Drama Film The Warriors released sparking gang violence 
  • The China Syndrome, a move about a nuclear meltdown caused by a faulty sensor reading and a stuck-open pressure release value, is released 12 days prior to the 3 Mile Island Meltdown caused by a faulty sensor reading and a stuck open pressure release valve!
  • The Amityville Horror
  • Apocalypse Now  – with the saying  ‘I love the smell of napalm in the morning’ Robert Duvall 
  • All That Jazz
  • Kramer vs. Kramer
  • Superman
  • Mad Max
  • Monty Python’s Life of Brian
  • The Muppet Movie
  • Alien
  • Star Trek
  • 60 Minutes
  • M*A*S*H
  • Dallas
  • The Dukes of Hazzard

Theatre and Arts

  • Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine premieres in London
  • Focus Theatre Dublin presents an annual season including Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, He Who gets Slapped by Leonid Andreyev, Old Times by Harold Pinter and Samuel Beckett’s Endgame and Not I.
  • Druid Theatre in Ireland, led by Artistic Director Gary Hynes, being work on renovating their new theatre space on Chapel Street, Galway
  • Vanessa Redgrave wins best performance as an actor in the 1979 Evening Standard Theatre Awards with Victoria Wood winning most promising playwright
  • The Stars Art Group (Xing Xing) a contemporary Chinese avant-garde movement of artists who championed individualism and freedom of expression, make history in 1979 when they stage an ‘unofficial exhibition’ in a park adjacent to the National Art Museum in Beijing 
  • Amelia Stein works as a performing arts photographer from 1979 – 2000

Books

  • Offshore by Penelope Fitzgerald
  • The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories by Angela Carter
  • A Man by Oriana Fallaci
  • On Lies, Secrets and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978 by Adrienne Riche
  • Rites of Passage by William Goulding
  • If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino
  • The Dead Zone by Stephen King
  • The Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer
  • Black Tickets by Jayne Anne Phillips
  • Sophie’s Choice by William Styron
  • The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe
  • Man’s Search for Ultimate Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl
  • Kindred by Octavia
  • The White Album by Joan Didion

Political Happenings in 1979

  • Oil Tanker in Bantry Bay, Ireland  blows up killing 512
  • Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant Accident in US
  • China institutes the one child per family rule
  • USSR Invades Afghanistan with world protests
  • Margaret Thatcher elected Prime Minister of UK, the first woman in UK history, as Conservatives win British General Election
  • Lord Mountbatten, a British Royal Navy Officer, statesman, and second cousin once removed to Queen Elizabeth II, of England, is murdered in Ireland by the paramilitary group, the IRA
  • Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe agrees to new constitution
  • Exiled Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, a fundamentalist Muslim leader, returns and  Iran becomes an Islamic Republic
  • 63 Americans are taken hostage in the American Embassy in Tehran 
  • China invades Vietnam, marking the start of the Sino-Vietnamese War
  • Vietnamese troops take the Cambodian capital of  Phnon Penh and topple the brutal regime of Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge
  • Margaret Mead, anthropologist is posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by then US President Jimmy Carter
  • Martina Navratilova, Czech tennis star, retains her WTA Tour Championship with a 6-3, 3-6, 6-2 win over American teenager Tracey Austin in NYC
  • The Cleveland Elementary School Shooting happened in 1979 in San Diego, California when 16 year old Brenda Spencer kills the principle and a custodian and injured 8 children and a police officer.  When asked why she did it she said ‘I don’t like Mondays’.
  • In Northern Ireland 11 ‘loyalists’ known as the Shankill Butchers are sentenced to life in prison for 19 murders; the gang was named for its late-night kidnapping, torture and murder (by throat slashing) of random Catholic civilians in Belfast.
  • A large number of Swedish people call in sick to work with a ‘case of being homosexual’ in protest at homosexuality being labeled an illness
  • The Grateful Dead play a final concert in San Francisco on New Year’s Eve 1978 which lasted over 8 hours
  • In 1979 you can ring an 1-800 number and listen to messages from Star Wars characters Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, C3PQ and Darth Vadar.
  • Edward Delaney’s statue of Wolf Tone blown up in Dublin

Climate

  • Snow falls in the Sahara Desert
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