reflected in music-loving Johnny Plee's fave fifteen singles of that year
let the vinyl countdown / slowdown begin!
15
14
13
12
11
10
christ on a bike, never heard / heard of that before
09
the Frampton tune - says John Peel during the December 19th 1975 broadcast - was his #1 for much of the year - but then was overtaken by second-half-75 releases....
08
07
only artist to appear twice in this countdown, Joan Armorplating
06
as "Imagine" ends, Peel opines thus: "despite what other people say, I think this has been a great year for records, 1975 - and I think from this point on, all of the singles that I've chosen would actually get into my all-time Top 50"
and unbelievably, the next one is
05
04
pretty cool, that one, admittedly
03
02
01
finally a bit of energy (i'm not counting that Jack the Lad horror of bumptiousness)
apart from that though, you'd never guess that we are just one year - actually, really just a few months - from punk - Ramones debut, "Anarchy in the U.K.", "New Rose"
The full countdown:
Peter Skellern - Hold On To Love (Decca)
Laurel And Hardy with The Avalon Boys - The Trail Of The Lonesome Pine (United Artists)
Mike Oldfield - In Dulci Jubilo (Virgin)
Joan Armatrading - Back To The Night (A and M)
10CC - I'm Not In Love (Mercury)
Bob Sargeant - First Starring Role (RCA)
Peter Frampton - Show Me The Way (A and M)
Bob Marley and The Wailers - No Woman No Cry (Island)
Joan Armatrading - Dry Land (A and M)
John Lennon - Imagine (Apple)
Rod Stewart - Sailing (Warner Bros)
Roy Harper - When An Old Cricketer Leaves The Crease (Harvest)
Jack The Lad - Gentleman Soldier (Charisma)
Millie Jackson - Loving Arms (Polydor)
Be Bop Delux - Maid In Heaven (Harvest)
Peter Frampton - Show Me The Way (A and M)
Bob Marley and The Wailers - No Woman No Cry (Island)
Joan Armatrading - Dry Land (A and M)
John Lennon - Imagine (Apple)
Rod Stewart - Sailing (Warner Bros)
Roy Harper - When An Old Cricketer Leaves The Crease (Harvest)
Jack The Lad - Gentleman Soldier (Charisma)
Millie Jackson - Loving Arms (Polydor)
Be Bop Delux - Maid In Heaven (Harvest)
7 comments:
It should be also pointed out that, in a year freq seen as a nadir for the charts, Make Me Smile (Come Up and See Me), Love is the Drug, Love to Love You Baby, L.O.V.E. Love, Autobahn and Get in the Swing were all Top 30 hits...
Jack The Lad were Lindisfarne minus Alan Hull and no better for it
Yeah Steven Daly (as in Orange Juice, later a journalist) wrote a whole piece based around the NME's critics poll of best albums of 1975 - the gist of it being that while at the time things felt inertial, looking back at '75 from the present (i think the piece was written in the early 2000s), it seemed like a ruddy golden age such that you wondered what on earth people were complaining about. The albums list included Joni's Hissing of Summer Lawns, Bob's Blood on the Tracks, Little Feat, Physical Graffiti etc etc - in a certain sense, rock reaching a peak of maturity and sophistication. I think there was a deficit of teenage rampaging thrills and aggressive hard rock though. A good year for sophisto-rock and soft rock. And black music - from the US and Jamaica.
Only three proper bands. That's one of the things I've noticed before about this 75/76/77 end-phase of boomer generation rock/pop. Most of the big artists are soloists - Rod, Elton, Joni, McCartney, Paul Simon etc. These are the only people who can still release albums year on year. What bloated bands are left can only release albums every three or so years (think The Who, Pink Floyd, the Stones).
What is lacking (and probably was frustrating at the time) is a sense of a cohesive movement heading in a particular direction. The music of this period is kind of the equivalent of a post-coital cigarette. Fine in itself, but not the main event.
that's a good point Phil - and it makes 1975 a bit like 1970 which was a year of bands breaking up, solo albums, and also a few short-lived supergroups.
I think by '75 one of the issues afflicting bands was the economics - being a band was too expensive and the profit pie was divided up too thinly. Roxy basically had to disband because they were so in debt - their only hope of paying off the debts to the label was breaking America, which is why Country Life and even more so Siren are so streamlined and conventional cf the first three albums. Then they had to basically pause for a bit.
Around then was when Robert Fripp comes with his own Small Mobile Intelligent Unit concept - megabands like King Crimson are too unwieldly and expensive, the future is the solo operator working with temporary agglomerations of players.
The record industry always prefers to work with solo stars - easier to deal with than the unruly democracy of a band, and an easier sell when there's one face.
That last point doesn't always work, tho'. A good example was Badfinger. Their great tragedy was that they had no sense of internal democracy or comradeship. The songwriters jealously competed against each other, and the drummer was treated as basically an employee and deliberately kept out of decision making.
This was what made them so easy to rip off. All their manager had to do was play the egos against each other, and there was no-one grounded enough to see what was going on. Some bands are living hells, and Badfinger was one of them.
But I realise I'm digressing here...
What you both say regarding lack of musical movements,energy in black music and solo acts vs bands pertain to the present and the foreseeable future too. Was 1975 the real year zero?
Think 1983/4/5 was the year zero personally. Once sampling (i.e. literal recycling rather than "genius steals") arrived in the mid-eighties then popular culture was essentially in scavenger mode. Synthesizers are the equivalent of modernist architecture (conscious break from the past) and sampling the equivalent of post-modernist (unlikely juxtapositions of themes). The latter marks the end of the popular music's "culture" phase.
From now on it's "civilization" i.e. Spenglerian patternwork, the repetition of tried and tested forms. This has been happening for some time already of course, just as it has been in architecture (Quinlan Terry etc.) The difference will be that patternwork will become increasingly dominant. Again, you can see this happening in architecture, in the rebuilding of long demolished old buildings, entire new streets in Tudor/Georgian/Victorian vernacular.
The future from now on will be the past.
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