Gone to Pop!

BBC Four have spent, virtually, the entire month of January trying to decide which was the best decade for pop music, beginning with the Fifties and ending with the Nineties. In the end, the choice came down to the one in which you were a teenager! I was a teenager in the Seventies and, surprise, surprise, the Seventies won. Looking at it in a more detached way, although my favourite decade of pop is the Seventies, I believe the Sixties was actually the most creative… if only because of The Beatles. I don’t mention them in the gooey-eyed nostalgic sense but when you listen to the records themselves, while they do contain terrific melodies and harmonies, they are simultaneously very experimental. And, it’s not just their later songs but also those released at the very beginning of their career. The Beatles were adventurous right from the off. Many people tend to choose “Sgt. Pepper”, from 1967, as the definitive album by the Fab Four but my preference is for the release that followed later the same year, namely “Magical Mystery Tour”. Certainly, many people cite the double A-sided single “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Penny Lane” as the best seven inch of the Sixties and both tracks appear on the album. Also included is the seminal anthem “All You Need is Love”. But, for me, the two songs that mark the record apart are Paul McCartney’s “The Fool on the Hill”, with its deliberately out of tune recorders, and especially John Lennon’s richly orchestrated “I am the Walrus”. How bizarre is the end of this song? Ringo chants “Oompa, oompa, stick it up your joompa” while a transistor radio is tuned and retuned over the strident strings. It sounds haphazard but, whether by luck or design, the song works. Chance played an important part in classical music of the time so, with producer George Martin’s guidance, this may be an influential factor worth taking into consideration.

So, in the face of The Beatles, why did the Seventies triumph? Put succinctly, Glam Rock and Punk! It was a decade of two halves. As The Beatles went their separate ways, Marc Bolan took centre stage with his glam band T-Rex and a succession of number one hit singles. He laid the foundations for David Bowie and Bryan Ferry to develop the genre further. These days Ferry is mistaken for a crooner but, like Lennon before him, he was an experimentalist. England had heard nothing like the sonorities to be found on Roxy Music’s debut single “Virginia Plain”. It certainly changed my life in 1972. I ended up composing and studying modern classical music at university for seven years because of it! Early Bowie seemed space obsessed and in the same year as the aforementioned Roxy record he penned and sang backing vocals on my all-time favourite single, “All the Young Dudes” by Mott the Hoople. In the latter half of the decade, the very foundations of society trembled as Johnny Rotten spat out his rebellious lyrics with such vehemence and raw energy that no one could escape the onslaught. The Sex Pistols were over almost as quickly as they began with one proper album to their name lasting not much over thirty minutes in duration! But what an album with no less than four blinding singles. My preference, at the time, was for The Stranglers but there can be no denying the lasting influence, on the world of rock ‘n’ roll, of “Never Mind the Bollocks”! It’s not the easiest thing, to condense two decades of pop music into two paragraphs. I could’ve chosen different music entirely and talked about the impact of “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” by The Rolling Stones or “Lola” by The Kinks. I might’ve discussed “Make Me Smile (Come Up and See Me)” by the underrated Steve Harley and Cockney Rebel or any number of bitter-sweet love songs by The Buzzcocks, such was the diversity of these two decades!