Daily Mail, April 7, 2016
Do you have a favourite year in music? Most of us do. We tell ourselves that songs and records were better at a certain time in our lives, and that their lyrics spoke to us in a way that other songs at other moments failed to do. And they probably did.
Perhaps Adele singing Rolling In The Deep will make 2011 your favourite music year for the rest of your life. Or was it Soft Cell’s Tainted Love in 1981? Almost certainly there must be legions of women in their early thirties who reckon the Spice Girls’ Wannabe made 1996 the best time ever. Hard to believe, I know, but probably true.
In their individual ways all these records were well crafted, but the reason that the time they topped the charts is looked back upon now with such fond nostalgia lies within us as much as them.
Because popular music, like nothing else, reminds us of what we call ‘our time’, that sublime moment when our youthful hormones really started kicking in, when summer and parties were the most exciting things ever, when romance and heartbreak were only a glance away, and when the lyrics to our favourite songs seemed to be all about us.
So, when I saw that David Hepworth, music journalist, sometime disc jockey and all round pop music expert, whom, incidentally, I’ve never met, has chosen 1971 as rock’s golden year in his book Never A Dull Moment, my first thought was to calculate that he must be around sixty, and pondering on his lost youth.
Actually, he’s sixty five, which means his best year was when he was twenty one, and which, by my reckoning, makes him a slightly late developer – fourteen to nineteen being, by my reckoning, the key age band for freezing time and music together. Nevertheless, from an academic point of view, I can see why he chose 1971.
Musically a vacuum had emerged after the dissolution of the Beatles the previous year, into which singer-songwriters had flooded. Within a few months Cat Stevens, Rod Stewart, Elton John and Don Maclean all had hit albums, bringing with them classic songs such as, respectively, Morning Has Broken, Maggie May, Your Song and, in the last month of the year, American Pie. While James Taylor was given You’ve Got A Friend by Carole King – since she already had three other hits, including, It’s Too Late, on her first solo album Tapestry.
They were certainly fertile musical times with Neil Young and Paul Simon now embarking on solo careers and David Bowie recording Life On Mars. I must admit, though, I never quite got Marc Bolan and T Rex.
He was pretty enough in a puppy dog sort of way, with his hair done and the sparkles stuck on his face like starry pimples, and Get It On was a cheery rocking pop. But, just when I thought the daftness had gone out of pop with the withering of the late Sixties hippies, he showed me it was still with us, when, during an interview, he told me that he could levitate.
Never having witnessed such a supernatural event, I asked him to show me. But, flakey as they come, he’d already gone off the idea. He couldn’t be bothered, he said – which was disappointing.
I don’t know whether David Hepworth was offered sight of the same miracle, but the way he saw 1971 was that rock was more exciting and creative than any of the other popular forms of entertainment of the time.
That might well have been true of television, which was cosily middle aged then, but I can hardly agree that, unlike music, ‘movies were in retreat’ then.
There were some terrific films that year – The French Connection, Klute, Dirty Harry, A Clockwork Orange – and some pretty appalling massive hit records, too, to mention only Clive Dunn singing Grandma. I make allowances for Benny Hill singing Ernie (The Fastest Milkman In The West) because it still makes me laugh.
I suppose, though, if you were going through your own rites of passage in 1971, in hot pants or flares, queuing up outside a phone box because most parents didn’t have a phone at home, struggling with acne and so uncertain of your looks you couldn’t pass a mirror without a quick look for reassurance, smoking because it was the cool thing to do…well, all right, it must have been a very good year.
It certainly was for me, my journalist’s cuttings book telling me that I had four lovely days in May lounging around the pool at a swanky hotel in St Tropez waiting as lawyers for Mick Jagger and Bianca, his wife to be, settled on a pre-nup before their marriage could go ahead. That wasn’t bad.
Then there was sitting in the front row at Madison Square Gardens in New York in August at George Harrison’s charity Concert for Bangladesh, before making my getaway across the stage and into a waiting limo to be driven up to John Lennon’s suite on Central Park South where I was staying in his absence. That was okay too.
And, oh yes, I interviewed Muhammad Ali that year, too.
But though some of the songs playing through all this were terrific, records like the Rolling Stones’ Brown Sugar, Dave Edmunds’ I Hear Your Knocking, Neil Diamond’s Sweet Caroline and John Lennon’s Imagine, none of them matched the thrill I got when, collecting my mother’s new car in 1960, I switched on the radio (just imagine a radio in a car!) and first heard Elvis Presley singing The Girl Of My Best Friend.
My last year at school and my first at university, falling out of love all the time, and there on the radio to console me in my anguish would be Roy Orbison singing Only the Lonely and the Everly Brothers’ self-abasement in Cathy’s Clown.
Not that it was all tears. The father of a friend had what I thought was the best job in the world in that he drove around the North West supplying juke boxes with new records, a goodly number of which inevitably found their way into my hands, too .
I still have my free copies – the Shadows’ Apache, Eddie Cochran’s Three Steps To Heaven, the Drifters’ Save The Last Dance For Me and Duane Eddy’s Because They’re Young – the title of which said it all, really.
I suspect most of David Hepworth’s peer group might have chosen 1966, as their best year, if only for The Beatles’ Revolver album and Eleanor Rigby and the Beach Boys God Only Knows and Good Vibrations, but to him those records must just have been foundation stones.
For me, longer in the tooth than Hepworth, the foundations were laid when I was 15 in 1956 with Elvis’s revolutionary Heartbreak Hotel, the Teenagers’ Why Do Fools Fall In Love and Fats Domino’s I’m In Love Again.
Nothing was ever the same for me after those records. But as always, there was some terrible stuff around that year, too. Does anyone else still recoil at the thought of Anne Shelton’s Lay Down Your Arms (and surrender to me)? It was terrible and never off the radio.
I truth, there never was and never will be any agreed particular golden year of great music, although obviously the songs for some periods are more inventive and creative than those of others.
It’s all just too subjective. Most of us fall in love with the music of our youth and the records we heard when we were going through adolescence, when all our changes occurred…songs which froze the emotions and excitement of those times for us for ever.
