Fascinated to learn that Old Grey Whistle Test veteran David Hepworth has a book out in which he focuses in on the year 1971 as the biggest year in history for rock music with some amazingly seminal and iconic songs and albums and happenings from Bowie’s Starman to Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven.
The book’s blurb spouts thusly:
The Sixties ended a year late – on New Year’s Eve 1970, when Paul McCartney initiated proceedings to wind up The Beatles. Music would never be the same again. The next day would see the dawning of a new era. 1971 saw the release of more monumental albums than any year before or since and the establishment of a pantheon of stars to dominate the next forty years – Led Zeppelin, David Bowie, the Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, Marvin Gaye, Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Rod Stewart, the solo Beatles and more.
I feel somewhat vindicated to have stuck to my guns with the golden oldies in our band’s repertoire, with Rod Stewart’s Maggie May, the aforementioned Bowie classic, Carole King’s It’s too Late, America’s A horse with no name and John Denver’s Take me home (Country Roads) still in our setlist. (Admittedly, some of those were initially suggested by fellow band members). Hepworth also recently created a list of 71 critical cultural moments in ’71 to reinforce his argument about the year he was 21 and I was five years old.
Among the other great songs that year were Baba O’Riley, Shaft, Mercy Mercy Me, Brown Sugar, Gypsies Tramps and Thieves, Have you seen her, Slade’s Coz I luv you, and of course the immortal Benny Hill and Ernie. Andrea T, who sings with me in C5 suggested that, “Presumably a lot of it’s down to a sort of culmination of what was going on in the Sixties, all the various strands of revolution and creativity coming together and moving into a new phase…” I’d have to agree (not least for the sake of having any of those inevitable “musical differences” that seem to lead to bands breaking up. Andrea also points out that there’s a theory that all ‘decades’ as we think of them culturally actually start and end a year or two later?
I definitely think it’s partly down to all that went on in the 60s and people trying to break away from that stuff in writing and recording stuff in 1970 that would ultimately be released and become famous in 1971. It does seem to be a golden year. There are some rotten tomatoes in 1970 and 1972 (Long-haired lover from Liverpool, Puppy Love, Rock and Roll Pt 2) that boosts Hepworth’s claim. But, one might cherrypick any year and perhaps even show that there are persisten classics from 1981, 1991, 2001, etc…or indeed any other year. I wonder whether he’s done a statistical analysis.
As to Andrea’s point about the decadal lag. That could be because the pioneering avant garde hipsters of any period create the fashions and come up with new ideas that the fashionistas and poseurs adopt and only much later wend their way into the mainstream. Look at Bowie, almost always ahead of the curve, created the audio-video artwork of Ashes to Ashes, presumably as conceptualised encapsulation of late 79 early 80 proto New Romantics, just as the were waltzing in and out of the Blitz nightclub with their collars and cuffs and their exuberant cheakbones and pre-duckface pouts. Indeed, one imagines that they would’ve have admitted they were all trying to be as original and individual as Bowie in a knowing post-punk, post-glam way anyway at least a year or two before Strange, Durannies and Spandau were mainstream and the avant garde had thrust forward to the next thing.
Weirdly though if 1981 were the New Romantic’s peak, then the stand out songs seem to be Kim Carnes’ Bette Davis Eyes, Bowie-Queen Under Pressure, Christopher Cross’ Arthur’s Theme, the perennial Rolling Stones’ Start Me Up (later assimilated by Borg Gates for his operating system ads), electronic pioneers in pursuit of the sounds of Germanic experimental instrumental on a Yorkshire budget Human League with Love action, and of course, everyone’s all-time hatevorite The Birdie Song…