I hope you’ll dig my latest mix of a year from the 70’s – this one is 1979 and is pretty much most of the music that I was listening to at 17.
Roxy Music : Trash
XTC : Scissor Man
Gang Of Four : At Home He’s A Tourist
The Stranglers : Dead Loss Angeles
Pink Floyd : Young Lust
The Cure : 10:15 Saturday Night
The Damned : Smash It Up – parts 1 and 2
Nick Lowe : Cracking Up
Marianne Faithfull : Why D’Ya Do It
Talking Heads : I Zimbra
Wire : I Should Have Known Better
Ry Cooder : The Very Thing That Makes You Rich (Makes Me Poor)
Joe Jackson : Sunday Papers
Iggy Pop : I’m Bored
The Tubes : Turn Me On
Ian Dury & The Blockheads : Uneasy Sunny Day Hotsy Totsy
The Specials : A Message To You Rudy
Elvis Costello : Green Shirt
John Stewart : Gold
The Human League : Empire State Human
Dave Edmunds : Crawling from the Wreckage
Squeeze : Up The Junction
John Cooper Clarke : Twat!
Frank Zappa : I’m So Cute
The Clash : Brand New Cadillac
Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers : Refugee
Pretenders : Tattooed Love Boys
Thin Lizzy : Get Out Of Here
David Bowie : DJ
Wings : Getting Closer
Rickie Lee Jones : Weasel And The White Boys Cool
Phil Lynott : Talk In ‘79
After much past deliberation, I cite 1979 as peak year in music – so much diversity in charts, the first year I took real notice of Top Of The Pops (Dave Edmunds – Girls Talk stands as the moment music and football started fighting for wall space), and the year I got my first tape recorder (music was now mine, and not just Radio 2 and the odd Carpenters album my parents played).
How is it the choice of best year in music falls a couple of years before you actually start buying the stuff.
If I can be presumptuous (and living up to my name), 1979 was also the year the Stiff Little Fingers released their debut album Inflammable Material.
Trivia note: the first independent released album to make the UK Top 10 – boosted the Rough Trade coffers (and reputation) muchly.
(even though it seems to be written out of Geoff Travis’s memory)
Possible argument says: No SLF, No Smiths
We have done this before (twice?) and there was the only unanimous decision ever that it was the best year for singles that made the charts 😉
Not quite unanimous, but probably when a lot of the AW demographic were in their teens…
“Unanimous” was a joke. It does depend a lot on age. However I think 79 was a perfect storm with so many styles of music in the charts. Pop, disco, punk, new wave, heavy metal, rock, reggae, even prog. Don’t think it was ever quite the same before or after that
Yeah, I got the winky emoji, but I took the bait as well – just trying to keep things a bit lively as many of the AWgent provocateurs seem to have gone off to Bluesky.
I vaguely remember 1979. Though as a rural Worcestershire 10 year old, it would have been Blondie, The Police, Quo, 2 tone that was making an impression, and I wouldn’t have heard (of) any of the songs in the OP. Even now, there are only 3 there that I recognise.
It’s probably why the great love expressed on here for many of those bands listed completely passes me by.
Probably my second favourite year for music is 1966. I was 4, so knew none of it at the time.
* I remember Yellow Submarine being played but that was probably later when the film came out
Many of the albums I bought were after the event. I was partly learning the classics. 1966 is also one of the best years for me, for singles as much as anything. 1969 is pretty sensational too but there I’m thinking more albums.
67 pretty much equally good for me
Cripes, don’t tell Deram……
Don’t worry Retro, none of them would know Rock ‘n’ Roll if it kicked ’em up the arse… unlike, bizarrely, the people who they always reference.
Isn’t he supposed to like the 60s? 79 on the other hand, dangerously near the dire.
Sal, if you were 10, me and Rigid were 8/9, so it wasn’t our peak record-buying teens, but I do find myself still listening to (and discovering) a lot of music from 1979. I didn’t really start buying it for myself until 1981.
I don’t still do anything else I did then (although a 55-year-old man turning up at Cub Scouts might raise questions), so it must have been a pretty good year for music, for me to keep going back to it.
I was twenty three in ’79. I returned to art education that year and yes it was a good year for music. However all years contain some good, some not so good and some not for me thanks. 1979 is no different.
Well, yes, quite. Watching ToTP re-runs is a reminder of that.
I’ll have to take your word on that as I don’t watch them. I’ve never been overly interested in pop. Not for the first time I find myself to be a very poor fit hereabouts.
I’m not a regular viewer, either, but I recently happened upon Legs & Co dancing to the Sex Pistols and had to retire to a darkened room.
fs, RD – you may be younger than me (although the same age as my uni friends who I’m still in touch with), but I sense you’re far more advanced in life than I am (grandkids!), and that probably was true back then as well. I’ve always been a late developer/ trailing edge kind of guy. Pop music only really for interesting for me in 1981, and I’ve never seen the need to address that gap. Seventies music (apart from heavy rock/ metal) is almost completely terra incognita for me – effectively before time began/ the decade that taste forgot.
The sixties are probably the same, though because of the ubiquitous presence of British and US bands from that era, it doesn’t seem so remote.
Pencilsqueezer says on this thread that his disinterest in pop makes him a “very poor fit hereabouts”, and I often think my lack of knowledge/ interest in 70’s music makes me the same, but for different reasons.
I dont think that matters, in fact I think the AW would be a lot poorer without the outliers from the 70s fanbase – not that there’s anything wrong with them, of course.
This selection is just my personal choice, I missed out so many – or they were in other years and I tried not to repeat the same artist if possible. I have left 1977 until last as that is going to be the hardest one for me!
Why? Because you were suspended in transition from Rolling Stone taste to NME taste?
I used the NME in ’77, I was 14
I used Izal medicated. That stung as well.
As in the Elvis song?
Surely you mean the Johnny Cash song?
It’s great stuff, Gardener, but if you’re doing 1979, you’ve gotta have some Disco! It was after all, the annus mirrorballus of Disco, everyone went Disco in 1979. I think this thread needs to be introduced to Junior’s Disco thread over there on the right.
ahh I was never a DISCO kid
I was also 17, a definitive age for pop music. Here is that thread includes a Spotify playlist somewhere and DISCO! 6 years ago, oh my!
In my mind 1979 is skinny ties and spiky hair, new wave and post punk and a helping of disco and 2-tone on the side. In reality there’s a lot of mid-seventies soft rock, long hair and flares, guitar solos and sax, Supertramp and others. At the same time London Calling sold well contrary to snideism elsewhere. I find my view of that time is even more positive than previously since I am open to a wider range of styles than ever. Hello Christopher Cross, Donna Summer, Toto, George Benson, and many more.
It was a mixed time. I liked Steve Hillage and Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Specials and the Tubes, Little Feat and Iggy Pop. Didn’t mind dancy funky rhythms as long as the song was good, either; Earth, Wind and Fire, Ian Dury funking up a bit …
Great Dury and Costello choices. I like this playlist.
Well compiled.
1979 was a corking year, my last before my extended adolescence ended, before grown up responsibilities of employment and relationships became reality. As such, many of the songs are imprinted hard.
Working for the Yankee Dollar by Skids was 1979. What a great song. Baffling lyrics of course.
No mention of rum and coca cola though.
I was 21 in 1979 and not especially interested in singles but when I was 17 this was what I heard. As good a mix of the good, the bad and the mad as most years throw up.
Position Artist Title
01 Bay City Rollers Bye Bye Baby
02 Rod Stewart Sailing
03 Windsor Davies & Don Estelle Whispering Grass
04 Queen Bohemian Rhapsody
05 Tammy Wynette Stand By Your Man
06 The Stylistics I Can’t Give You Anything (But My Love)
07 David Essex Hold Me Close
08 Art Garfunkel I Only Have Eyes For You
09 Typically Tropical Barbados
10 Johnny Nash Tears On My Pillow
11 Bay City Rollers Give A Little Love
12 10cc I’m Not In Love
13 Roger Whittaker The Last Farewell
14 David Bowie Space Oddity
15 Pilot January
16 Telly Savalas If
17 Hot Chocolate You Sexy Thing
18 Mud Oh Boy
19 Steve Harley & Cockney Rebel Make Me Smile (Come Up And See Me)
20 The Drifters There Goes My First Love
21 Van McCoy The Hustle
22 Showaddywaddy Three Steps To Heaven
23 Guys ‘N’ Dolls There’s A Whole Lot Of Loving
24 Jasper Carrott Funky Moped / Magic Roundabout
25 Minnie Riperton Lovin’ You
26 The Carpenters Please Mr Postman
27 The Sweet Fox On The Run
28 Billy Connolly DIVORCE
29 Kenny The Bump
30 Ray Stevens Misty
31 The Tymes Ms Grace
32 Gladys Knight & The Pips The Way We Were
33 Bobby Goldsboro Honey
34 Roxy Music Love Is The Drug
35 Fox Only You Can
36 The Stylistics Sing Baby Sing
37 Ralph McTell Streets Of London
38 Gloria Gaynor Never Can Say Goodbye
39 Laurel & Hardy With The Avalon Boys featuring Chill Wills The Trail Of The Lonesome Pine
40 Leo Sayer Moonlighting
are ANY of those 1979?
Nope, 1975. When I was 17.
Throw up is right.
Windsor Davies & Don Estelle, Jasper Carrott, Billy Connolly, Laurel & Hardy – this is what the charts need, more novelty.
1974 to (about) 1979 – many comedy albums in the charts, a moment in time killed of by video?
Video Killed The Comedy Album
The first and only UK comedy album to top the UK charts was this, and a cracker it is too boyo!
https://i.ibb.co/6JYS4zWZ/ib.jpg
Prefer Live at Treorchy myself…
As ever, the answer to “what was the Golden Year of Pop?” is – whenever you were 16.
So another vote for 1979 it is, then.
I was 16 in 1986.
1979 in music was better.
I was 16 in 1984 (best year for singles) and 1985 (best year for albums).
Yeah, I checked, and ’86 was pretty – I don’t believe it! – dire.
I blame the post- Live Aid slump.
Me too … Lady In Red at number 1 for 3 weeks (it felt longer).
As ever with @gardener ‘s mixes, the non-music inserts are beautifully apposite. If it weren’t so devalued by overuse I’d say ‘curated’, or maybe even nudge into ‘mise en scene’. Great stuff, any road.
cheers BB x
Absolutely agree with this – a masterclass in seguing from track to track.