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Great things from 1973

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Just for fun, but I am looking for help in a list I am compiling.

I turn 50 this year, and I was born in 1973. I want to create a list of 50 great things of 1973. (Do I need to justify why I want to create a list? No I don’t. This is the Afterword). It started out as just 50 great films (for a film discussion group I am in) but I am widening it to albums, TV shows, books, art, etc as I just can’t find enough things to fill the list.

Suffice to say, all the obvious things I believe I have already, including (but not limited to) Dark Side of the Moon, The Wicker Man, Don’t Look Now, The Princess Bride, You’re So Vain, Tubular Bells, The Sting, etc etc etc.

Looking for suggestions as I’m still struggling. Anything created/released in 1973. I’m sure I must be missing some obvious stuff I haven’t thought of. I would share my list so you can see what I don’t have, but I don’t want to spoil it. Will share it with you once I’ve written it!

I need at least 50 things better than Tie A Yellow Ribbon Round The Old Oak Tree to prevent it from making an appearance on the list. So the situation is rather desperate.

Anyone who can make a suggestion I agree with and I don’t have already will get a complimentary DVD of Carry On Girls.

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Comments

    • I’m going to be brutally honest here Colin. I looked this up when I was compiling this, and I gave it a good listen as I’ve never given it the time of day before. I thought it was a load of old twiddly widdly nonsense.

      I fully accept I may just not have the right ears to dig it, but I just couldn’t make sense of it whatsoever. Given my proximity to the half-century, I’m unlikely to have a conversion now.

      So no. Sorry. It’s not on the list.

      • No worries, Arthur – we’re all different 🙂 I might be able to delight you with two of my other all-time favourites, also from 1973: Focus III and Arlo Guthrie’s Last of the Brooklyn Cowboys…

            • Actually, I like the idea of including concerts that have been filmed. I didn’t think of that. I was thinking of ruling out concerts because I wasn’t there so I can’t judge: but filmed performances are a different matter. I’ll need to revisit those OGWT listing…..

              • Well in that case, can I recommend this poignant half-hour film of the Pentangle, first broadcast on RTBF (Belgium) on 4 January 1973, filmed a couple of months earlier. It’s the last extant film of the 1967-72 Pentangle (they officially announced the split in March 1973 but really it happened around New Year’s Eve 1972) – it captures a great band in its winter. Renbourn doesn’t even make it to the end of the show, such was the drinking at the time – yet there’s magic in there, especially in the Quadrangle at the end.

    • Hmm. I’m not familiar with that song (or album) but I’ll give the album a listen and see if it makes the cut. I want to try and avoid new discoveries generally though, as I want to focus on things I have found naturally over the years!

      This song sounds strangely like the Grange Hill theme….

      (I had originally intended to add Do It Again (the one Dan song I know and love) but that came out the year before)

  5. Some albums from 1973. I’m sure there are lots more I’ve missed.

    Fripp & Eno – No Pussyfooting
    David Bowie – Aladdin Sane
    Man – Back Into The Future
    Bill Withers Live At Carnegie Hall
    Mahavishnu Orchestra – Birds Of Fire
    Funkadelic – Cosmic Slop
    Steely Dan – Countdown To Ecstasy
    Little Feat – Dixie Chicken
    Gong – Flying Teapot
    Roxy Music – For Your Pleasure
    Herbie Hancock – Head Hunters
    Brian Eno – Here Come The Warm Jets
    Dr. John – In The Right Place
    Stevie Wonder – Innervisions
    King Crimson – Larks’ Tongues In Aspic
    The Who – Quadrophenia
    Iggy & The Stooges – Raw Power
    Terry Reid – River
    Genesis – Selling England By The Pound
    John Martyn – Solid Air
    Frank Zappa/Mothers – Over-Nite Sensation
    Paul Simon – There Goes Rhymin’ Simon
    Mike Oldfield – Tubular Bells

    • Lots of good suggestions there.

      I know I’m making this difficult for myself, but I’m trying to restrict it to albums I already know, but I’m going to have to do a bit of a deep dive as well because maybe the problem is I am too fickle.

      Anyway – a good many of those I have on my list already (Paul Simon, Innervisions, Genesis, Bowie….)… and No Pussyfooting is one I have overlooked, so thanks! Some are just ones I can’t get into: Quadrophenia, Solid Air, Roxy Music…

    • There is nothing on that list that I don’t love and listen to to this day. I was 13 that year and life was wonderful and a constant series of discoveries.

      I’d also add:

      Rick Wakeman – The Six Wives of Henry VIII
      Elton – Don’t Shoot Me I’m only The Piano Player
      John Cale – Paris 1919
      Argent In Deep
      Kevin Ayers – Bananamour
      10cc
      Billy Cobham – Spectrum
      ELP – Brain Salad Surgery
      McCartney – Band On The Run

      I could go on…

    • Aladdin Sane – definitely, got it on my list already.

      Burnin’ – I can tell I am burnin’ my Afterword bridges here, and I will regret saying this, but I just can’t get with Bob Marley. Leaves me cold. (ha)

      • I think the trick with Bob is to imagine that he’s an incredibly obscure artist that only you and a couple of thousand people around the globe know about…but understand. Also listen to the musicians rather than the vocals, good though those are too.

  8. I was 12, looked like Roland Browning, and liked cleverer glam rock – Alice, Lou, Dolls, Bowie, Roxy … I would have liked Iggy, but I couldn’t afford albums, let alone imports as I got 30p pocket money a week. That paid for a matinee at the Granada, Portland Road (15p) or the uncovered east stand at Brighton and Hove Albion (15p) plus a bag of crisps or some other comestible. I started buying week-old NMEs and Sounds which were half price with the bus fare I sometimes avoided paying, and read both avidly and cover to cover, including loon pant ads and the classifieds. My brother’s heavier hippie friends introduced me to progressive music and jazz rock that year. As an album I go back to from then which still impresses me, I’ll go for “Stranded” by Roxy Music. Ver ‘Quo, it wasn’t.

  15. Some more albums to check out if you haven’t already:

    Mott The Hoople – Mott
    Alice Cooper – Billion Dollar Babies
    Joe Walsh – The Smoker You Drink The Player You Get

  17. I’m not the site’s biggest Beatles fan – but I think the release of the Red and Blue albums in 1973 constitutes an Event. Probably their best two albums evah! Well, for amateurs like me, anyway…

  20. We joined the EEC. A 15 year old me write in his diary “we joined the common market. Big deal”. My thinking has evolved a bit since then.

    It’s also a good album by Josh Rouse, before he went AOR.

  21. I was 15 at the time and heavily influenced by my pals older brothers records. Looking at wiki I found

    Jackson Browne- For Everyman
    Allman Brothers Band- Brothers and Sisters
    Tom Waits – Closing Time
    Lynyrd Skynyrd – Pronounced

  22. Sladest was released in 1973. Others you might like include

    Springsteen Greeting from Asbury Park
    Stooges Raw Power
    Faces ooh la la
    Marvin Gaye Lets get it on
    Wailers Catch a Fire
    Gladys Knight Imagination
    Roberta Flack Killing me Softly
    3+3 Isleys
    James Brown Payback
    Eagles Desperado
    ZZ Top Tres Hombres
    Black Sabbbath Sabbath Bloody Sabbath
    Willie Nelson Shotgun Willie
    SAHB Next
    Alice Cooper Billion Dollar Babies
    Hawkwind Space Ritual
    Lynyrd Skynyrd Pronounced …
    Status Quo Hello
    Todd Rundgren A wizard..
    Billy Joel Piano man
    Carole King Fantasy
    Little Feat Dixie Chicken
    Sparks A woofer…
    Paul Simon There goes rhymin Simon
    Gram Parsons GP

  23. Hello! by Status Quo. 1973 was when they were good and Telecastering out this album.

    It’s got Caroline on it, but that’s not why we’re here.

    It’s for this one. Softer Ride. I’ve just learned to play this and it’s a joyful experience.

  27. The 3 day week, electricity cuts, queueing up to buy a Sunblest white bread loaf, not getting a chopper bike for Christmas, no pet rabbit allowed and the Bay City Rollers starting to become known

    A great year!

    Just for balance.

    But all eclipsed by the best single of the year…

  28. 1973 was a pretty decent year for the movies.

    In Europe there was

    Day for Night – Truffaut
    Amarcord – Fellini
    Scenes from a Marriage – Bergman
    Spirit of the Beehive – Erice

    In the Anglophone world there was..

    The Exorcist – Friedkin
    The Sting – George Roy Hill
    Don’t Look Now – Roeg
    Paper Moon – Bogdanivich
    American Graffiti – Lucas
    O Lucky Man! Lindsay Anderson
    Sleeper – Woody Allen
    Serpico – Sidney Lumet

    I took the films from this list but saw them all back in the day.

    https://www.imdb.com/list/ls070441582/

  31. The Wombles, Whatever Happened To The Likely Lads and Some Mothers Do ‘Ave Em first aired in 1973.
    As did Prisoner and Escort (the pilot episode of Porridge).

    Then again, 1973 also gave us Are You Being Served and Last Of The Summer Wine …

    • Last of the Summer Wine really dragged on – Compo (or later equivalent) is out of control on a skateboard/pram/penny farthing hurtling down a hill shouting “oo ‘eck!” Until he crashes through a fence and then face first into Nora Batty’s vast white bloomers that are hung on her washing line. The other lads eventually catch up and survey the mayhem. There is an eerie silence. They exchange looks and remove their caps and bow their heads. And then…”WAHEY!” Compo emerges joyfully and we see him energetically masturbating into Nora’s underwear. “Eeh you mucky article!” shouts a flustered Batty and whacks him repeatedly with a broom.

      Peter Sallis says something profound and they quietly leave the scene. Credits.

        • Songs of Praise. This used to be broadcast at tea time on Sundays during my schooldays. It was the soundtrack to thousands of homeworks around the nation finally being listlessly attempted. Mine anyway.

          Hymns have always since been a trigger for me of abject bloody misery.

  33. 1973 was a big year for me. It was when we moved to England, I started a new school in a new area. Was seriously getting into music and going to my first gigs, discovering all sorts of books and movies. I think it was probably that year that I discovered Dylan, Van Morrison, Neil Young, Rory Gallagher and others. The gigs included these boys whose seminal album came out in that year

  34. And there’s more :

    King Crimson Larks Tongues
    Herbie Hancock Head Hunters
    Bill Withers Live at Carnegie Hall
    Neil Young Time Fades Away
    Marshall Tucker Band
    Joe Walsh The smoker you…
    Magma – Melanie…
    MFSB Love is the message
    Kevin Coyne Marjory Razorblade
    Betty Davis
    Steelye Span A parcel of rogues
    Horslips The Tain
    David Essex Rock on ( the album)

  35. Honestly, Arthur, I really don’t want to transform your tread into a quagmire of lascivious fornication, BUT…

    What was the non-fiction book that millions were reading in 1973?

    The Joy of Sex.

    Here’s an excellent TV programme about it featuring artist Julie Verhoeven.

    Philip Larkin reckons that sexual intercourse kicked off in 1963.

    “Sexual intercourse began
    In nineteen sixty-three
    (which was rather late for me) –
    Between the end of the “Chatterley” ban
    And the Beatles’ first LP.!

    A decade later in 1973, the nation were at it like rabbits.

  37. A Little Touch Of Schmilsson In The Night. Some say it is bland it I find it hypnotic. Those songs, that creamy caramel voice, the beautifully arranged strings. It’s an album I’ve come to appreciate more as my ears mature. The very antithesis of the dirty, filthy Rock of Goat and Aladdin Sane.

  38. We tend to think of ‘classical’ music as something from the distant past. But one of the all time greats was still composing in 1973. That year saw the premiere of his 14th, and penultimate, string quartet; a fine addition to a wonderful series of works

  39. British Leyland introduced the Austin Allegro, which initially featured an innovative oblong shaped steering wheel, for no obvious reason.

    You know how some cars have come to be considered as design classics? Absolutely, definitely, not the Allegro though. Unless you admire the structural qualities of rust.

  40. 1973 was a pretty good year for books.

    Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
    Martin Amis, The Rachel Papers
    J G Ballard, Crash
    Graham Greene, The Honorary Consul
    J G Farrell, The Siege of Krishnapur
    Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
    Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions
    Patrick White, The Eye of the Storm
    Cormac McCarthy, Child of God
    Susan Cooper, The Dark is Rising
    Oliver Sacks, Awakenings
    Erica Jong, Fear of Flying
    E F Schumacher, Small is Beautiful
    Tim O’Brien, If I Die in a Combat Zone
    Nina Bawden, Carrie’s War
    Italo Calvino, The Castle of Crossed Destinies
    William Burroughs, Exterminator!
    Tom Sharpe, Indecent Exposure
    Alan Garner, Red Shift
    Etc

    • I have a couple of those on my list (plus The Princess Bride, which is one of my favourite books). I suppose I’m not hugely widely read: a few of those on your list I know only from film adaptations!

      • I enjoy reading, don’t know (or care) if I’m “widely read” or not, but I haven’t read any of the books on that list. But then I’d guess that list hasn’t read any of my favourite books.
        Talking of which B.S. Johnson died in 1973.

        • Full disclosure: I’ve read ten of them. But it wasn’t a bragging list, it was a list of notable books published in in 1973 that were bestsellers then (mostly) and are still read today. Which was what Arthur was after, I thought.

            • “Having read books” ain’t all that. I could come out with a great voluminous list of all the hoity-toity pointyheaded books I’ve read and you would be very impressed, until it becomes clear that I cannot remember a fucking word of any of them.

              • I can remember loads of words, me. Literally loads. I can’t count how many right now, cos I’m at the dentist’s, but trust me, must be dozens. S’why I’m so good at Wordiply.

                  • I shall tell you forthwith the why not: today’s word was “nonreturnable”. I put “unreturnable”, which was a valid and valiant attempt, unlike “nonreturnable” which is not a proper word as I define them. It’s two words. Or at least a hyphenated word. But one word? No way! I refuse to accept that. So I refused to participate in such a travesty of rule breaking proportions and butchery of my mother tongue. Instead wrote a stern letter of admonishment to the newspaper’s editor.

                    Also, I was at the dentist’s.

    • Has anyone here actually read and enjoyed ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’?

      I ask because I ploughed through ‘V’ over a couple of weeks whilst roasting on beaches in the cyclades in the late 70s. Having convinced myself that by and large I’d enjoyed the experience, on my return to locales where one could buy books in English, I bought a copy of said tome and commenced to devour it. Oh dear. I thought ‘Foucault’s Pendulum’ had already taken the title for most up-it’s-own-arse novel, and would never be toppled. But Pynchon seemed to be well and truly going for it.

      Your thoughts, folks?

      • With both V and GR I would have used the expression “pleased with itself” but “up it’s own arse” is much more apposite.

        Agree about Fookin Pendulous, it’s like the well-deserved acclaim for The Name of the Rose went to his head. A kind of literary Be Here Now.

        • To my surprise one of the people I follow on BookTube recently read Gravity’s Rainbow and loved it – she said that she didn’t understand it, but loved the experience of reading it. I’ve never felt the need to try myself.

          My dad claims to like Foucault’s pendulum, I found it very boring despite being a huge Eco fan. When he’s good he’s great, when he isn’t, he’s unreadable (if we’re talking novels; his essay collections are always pure gold!)

          • If I had a pound for every time, etc…I know the opening chapter practically off by heart, but whenever I get to the end of it that seems achievement enough. Not that there isn’t good stuff in it, mind you:

            ‘Far to the east, down in the pink sky, something has just sparked, very brightly. A new star, nothing less noticeable. He leans on the parapet to watch. The brilliant point has already become a short vertical white line. It must be somewhere out over the North Sea… at least that far… icefields below and a cold smear of sun…

            ‘What is it? Nothing like this ever happens. But Pirate knows it, after all. He has seen it in a film, just in the last fortnight… it’s a vapor trail. Already a finger’s width higher now. But not from an airplane. Airplanes are not launched vertically. This is the new, and still Most Secret, German rocket bomb.

            ‘“Incoming mail.” Did he whisper that, or only think it?’

            But then he gets going with his bloody Bartley Gobbitch, DeCoverley Pox, Teddie Bloat, Osbie Feel…

            I was actually Pynchon’s paperback publisher for a few years in the 70s/80s, which simply meant I inherited V, The Crying of Lot 49 and GR. Had no dealings with him though, and there were no new books during my tenure.

    • I haven’t looked on that list, but I can tell you that the people I was at school with were an absolute shower. It’s the generation that’s currently in government, for a start .

      Born late 73 I’m the same school year as Robbie Williams and Ryan Adams. Fills me with pride, obviously….

  42. “See My Baby Jive” by Wizzard – best thing Roy Wood ever did, has everything including the kitchen sink; missed it completely when It was on the radio (how I missed it when a transistor radio was my one connection to the world of music is a mystery), but seeing it on a ’73 New Years Eve all-night pop marathon on TV brought me up to speed pronto.

  45. Just seen this. It might be useful….

  47. Future Days and Ralf & Florian has been mentioned already, but some other key releases from Germany that year

    Neu 2
    Tangerine Dream – Atem
    Faust IV, The Faust Tapes Outside The Dream Syndicate (with Tony Conrad)

  50. 1973 record releases. A small supplement:

    Sun Ra – Space Is The Place
    Carlos Santana & John McLaughlin – Love, Devotion, Surrender.
    Henry Cow – Legend

    OTOH, in the world of jazz:
    Tubby Hayes, Willie “The Lion” Smith, Joe Harriott and Ben Webster all died in ’73.

    • Godspell as well! Both on my list.

      *Edit – I’m not being ironic by the way. I know Andrew Lloyd Weber causes an adverse reaction in Musically Discerning People (me included) but the Jesus musical is one of his Good Things. Some cracking tunes in there. And Godspell has some magical moments as well (no doubt bolstered by a good dose of nostalgia, as my parents had the soundtrack album when I was growing up). *

    • Top movie, top soundtrack, top songs. I have the double vinyl soundtrack album (thanks, Dad!) and I treasure it. It’s one of those elpees that I can sing (to myself, I hasten to add) word perfect from start to finish. Which goes to prove that a gatefold sleeve and a full libretto are ESSENTIAL to have. Shove streaming, gimme a vinly.

  52. Just an update. Thanks to everyone for all the suggestions, I’m quite pleasantly surprised by the amount of responses but I suppose I’m tapping into the right demographic here. (“A list? Music? Movies? The early 70s? Hold me back…”)

    I’ve now bolstered out my list and am at 49 items. I might just add Tie A Yellow Ribbon as number 50 as it was number one when I was born, so it seems fitting.

    I’ll be back to share my final list once I’ve written this up! It will be a blog or something, not sure yet.

  54. 199 comments, eh? Please no one comment further: I wouldn’t want to be accused of using cheap tactics to get to 200 and get a double hamper. 🙂

    (What would be in a 1973 themed hamper? Spangles and a tin of spam?)

  55. I mentioned 4 great albums earlier on in the thread that nobody seemed to give a monkey’s about, so I will give you your double hamper by mentioning Van Morrison’s double live effort called ‘It’s Too Late To Stop Now’.

  56. I remember Jane Eyre on TV. The wife who was locked up really disturbed me at the time. It presented a rather unenlightened view of such a person. There was also Thriller a lurid series, a woman in a white dress splattered in crimson blood, oddly clear images on tape rather than film that came in then. Quite troubling for me at the time in a titillating sort of way. You get to an age when you become aware of these things, when you stay up later, on your own.

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