1977 – He got an ice pick, which made his ears burn

This is a year lauded as a special one in the history of music. Punk rock spelled the end of prog rock, although it was the death of Elvis which left a gaping hole in rock’n’roll. As for me, there was less of a feeling that the sands were shifting in such a momentous way. After all, I had more important things to worry about – like ‘O’ levels.

It transpired that 1977’s biggest sellers followed each other to the top spot from January to March. For all the new genres, David Soul seemed to create one of his own. Already popular as one half of TV’s detectives ‘Starsky and Hutch’, Soul set about dominating the UK singles charts with some rather plaintive piano ’n’ strings love songs led by ‘Don’t Give On Us Baby’. I preferred the slightly rockier ‘Silver Lady’, a number one in October.

Leo Sayer achieved his greatest success with another dreary ballad, ‘When I Need You’, and ABBA’s march to near-global supremacy with ‘The Name of the Game’ and another four minutes of pop perfection in ‘Knowing Me, Knowing You’. Cue shots of snowy landscapes, front- and side-on close-ups and bittersweet lyrics. A-ha-ahhhh.

A period of big musicals was set in motion by Evita. Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber had enjoyed some hits from ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ but they were dwarfed by the popularity of the Act 2 scene-stealer, ‘Don’t Cry For Me, Argentina’. Julie Covington’s beautiful rendition was in the top ten for seemingly forever. Accept no imposters like Madonna or assorted Pussycat Dolls! I wasn’t a fan of the song but it’s an undeniable giant of West End musical theatre. Years later I was to see a lot of London musicals but somehow Evita has always eluded me.

Winter was setting in when I first heard a new record by Paul McCartney and Wings. I was happy to say aloud that the simple celebration of rural Scotland would never be a hit. Ever the man with his finger on the pulse of British pop taste, I was proved wrong as never before or since; ‘Mull of Kintyre’ sold two million copies in the UK alone! Not even ‘Sgt Dave Hutchinson’ (aka D Soul) could compete with acoustic guitar, an ex-Beatle and bagpipes.

In contrast to the above, the lens of retrospective specs reveals that there were indeed some pretty pivotal singles released. At the time, I just took them at face value. And that was just the ones I heard. The Clash wouldn’t have been seen dead performing ‘White Riot’ on TOTP, nor do I recall watching Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Don’t Stop’; neither managed to scrape in to the top 30.

Until 1977 all of my favourites tended to be top-tenners. However, while freed from school class attendance obligations during the exam period, I listened to Radio 1 shows beyond the usual Top 20 and Jimmy Savile. I think it may have been Tony Blackburn following the Noel Edmonds breakfast show, so I became familiar with his irritating ways and preferences. Of course, he probably had little say in the tracks played, as there were new releases besides those who’d already climbed the charts. As a result, I got to know, and like, a lot of singles which, despite heavy airplay, were left languishing in the twenties or thirties.

For example, another of the tracks from Fleetwood Mac’s epoch-making ‘Rumours’ album was ‘Dreams’. I loved the soft rock rhythm, the bassline and, of course, Stevie Nicks’ idiosyncratic vocals. I dispute her assertion that “thunder only happens when it’s raining” but it was a cracking record all the same. Yet it peaked at just 24 in the UK.

Another mostly British band who crossed the Atlantic to achieve success were Supertramp. I’d been drawn to a previous hit ‘Dreamer’ and in ’77, it was the turn of the less manic ‘Give A Little Bit’. Even more surprising today is the realisation that David Bowie’s evergreen ‘Heroes’ was another song whose class didn’t translate into contemporary sales. Robert Fripp’s legendary guitar work sounded so, well, heroic, and for me Bowie’s voice was never better. Yet by far his biggest hit of the year was ‘Sound and Vision’, the first half of which was instrumental. I had a friend who really loved Bowie, then seen as way ahead of his time. Perhaps, but that just meant most of us hated his material.

I had a few friends who raved about American country rockers The Eagles. I never really shared their enthusiasm, but they were never far from my ears or eyes in 1977. It was the year when the album ‘Hotel California’ was released. I didn’t really like the first single, ‘New Kid in Town’, but the title track boasted that intriguing lengthy intro and that (then) unusual guitar duet by Joe Walsh and Don Felder at the end. I’d no idea it would become such an iconic rock song, but it eased into the UK top ten, and the performance in this clip from the same year captures their languid LA style to perfection.  

Talking of classics, Boston’s ‘More Than a Feeling’ and Joe Walsh’s ‘Rocky Mountain Way’ made little impression on me or anyone else. However, the year gave us two British rock-pop staples by home-grown giants. Queen’s ‘We Are the Champions’ and Status Quo’s ‘Rockin’ All Over the World’ were top three singles which appealed to me, although they hardly blew my mind.

The voice of Lionel Richie is so familiar now, it feels like we were born with it in our brains but probably the first time I heard it was in 1977 on The Commodores’ ‘Easy’. It may have been ‘easy on a Sunday morning’ but on the Sunday evening chart show it was a bit of a yawnathon. The only redeeming feature was that guitar solo!

Manhattan Transfer topped the chart in March with ‘Chanson d’Amour’. Their 40s pastiche didn’t appeal to me at all and I was surprised that a few classmates actually sang along to it. It did introduce the saxophone as a supposed instrument of gratuitous sophistication to pop, for which the Transfer should grovel for forgiveness. ‘Chanson…’ already had a French title. There was no need to add a sax solo; the record was pretentious enough as it was! Thank goodness for ‘Baker Street’ and ‘Will You’ for delivering the sax from jazz and pop hell! 

Those weekday breakfasts spent listening to Radio 1, delaying another summer session of tedious revision, also left me with some real turkeys filling my head. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Alessi’s ‘O Lori’, Tony Etoria’s ‘I Can Prove It’ and ‘You’re Gonna Get Next To Me’ by Bo Kirkland and Ruth Davis. Yuk! There were some goodies, though. At the end of June, Hot Chocolate finally achieved number one status with ‘So You Win Again’. Even then, we all knew that Errol Brown et al had never topped the singles charts so perhaps the great British public heard the new song and bought it out of sympathy. It wasn’t their best, but a reliable mid-tempo ‘lost love’ number which I couldn’t help liking either. 

Less successful was ‘Heaven on the Seventh Floor’, the latest in a line of unassuming lively ditties from Paul Nicholas, but Smokie reached five with ‘It’s Your Life’. Back then I was unfamiliar with Emerson, Lake and Palmer’s prog rock reputation. I didn’t even know what prog rock was. Nevertheless, if ‘Fanfare of the Common Man’ was anything to go by, I’d sing its praises. The radio edit soared like Keith Emerson’s keyboards to number two, but if TOTP had featured the full eight minutes of their frost-filled performance in the Montreal Olympic stadium, I would surely have re-considered.

Considerable airplay was also given to Boney M’s ‘Ma Baker’. Their third consecutive top-tenner, I loved it. Opening with that snarling "Freeze, I'm Ma Baker, put your hands in the air! Gimme all your money", it opened out into a great dance track. German producer-guru Frank Farian had assembled a visually-arresting quartet of West Indian singers and dancers, the most notable being Bobby Farrell and his afro. His gyrations rarely appeared to be in time with the music, and he famously mimed to Farian’s vocals. I recall watching a clip from a German TV show where Boney M sang ‘Daddy Cool’ live. It became crystal clear why Farrell didn’t sing on the recordings. All he needed to do was get five words in tune but no, he was hopeless! 

Hot Chocolate were followed at the top by a record which undoubtedly did make my jaw drop when I first heard it. Donna Summer’s previous hit ‘Love to Love You Baby’ had been banned because of its unambiguous groans and sighs. However, when ‘I Feel Love’ launched into that synthesizer sequencer line, I felt I had been transported into the future. Indeed I had. Giorgio Moroder’s productions were no strangers to the charts but, assisted by Donna’s sexy voice, this innovative use of the Moog and key changes influenced a new generation of musicians, let alone clubbers or ordinary listeners like me. It was disco, but not as we knew it.

Tavares, Trammps and Rose Royce had more conventional disco hits, not really to my taste, but one of my favourite up-tempo hits of 1977 was Heatwave’s ‘Boogie Nights’. A rare British giant of the genre, this was another record which grabbed you by the throat on first exposure. It sounds quite tame nowadays, but in Spring 1977 that funky growling guitar line seemed really heavy. Their moves in this video are laughable, but it was the sound which blew me away.

It wasn’t only Giorgio Moroder pioneering electronic music in the charts. In France, a twenty-something composer and synth wizard released his LP ‘Oxygene’ to an unsuspecting world. The fourth ‘track’, ‘Oxygene IV’ captured the imagination. It sounded so clean, so crisp, so… new! Totally instrumental, of course, but it led to a new genre of boring-bloke-behind-synths-with-laser-show concerts. Later open-air gigs attracted crowds of a million-plus but not sure how many of them would have seen Monsieur Jarre actually doing his thing. It made four in our charts, and the album also did rather well.

Yet it wasn’t even my favourite French electronic instrumental of the year; that was Space’s ‘Magic Fly’. The helmets in the video were a precursor to the shy, mysterious image so beloved of twenty-first century dancemeisters Daft Punk but the synth melody, bass and drums, together with the visuals, made for such a futuristic package I was instantly hooked. A shame that it was held at number two for three weeks in September, but it was perhaps understandable given the circumstances which began on 16^th August. 

I distinctly remember sitting in a rather austere hotel restaurant in Rimini having breakfast. We were talking about the previous night’s awesome firework display marking the Feast of the Assumption. Then, whether it was seeing the front page on someone’s newspaper or other Brits in our group telling us, I forget, but that was the morning we discovered that Elvis Presley had died.

It was more of a shock to Mum who, while hardly a rock’n’roller, was the same age as Elvis, and who had probably been a major part of her musical soundtrack through the Fifties. My generation was less attached to him and his music, but his singles had continued to sprinkle the charts throughout my life. Apart from the re-released ‘Girl of My Best Friend’ in 1976, I hadn’t liked any of them particularly. However, I knew from the Jimmy Savile show how much of a legend he had been; all those groundbreaking chart-toppers such as ‘Jailhouse Rock’ and ‘It’s Now Or Never’ plus tearjerkers like ‘In The Ghetto’.

His voice and charisma were unmistakeable, even to a child of the ‘60s and ‘70s like me. It’s just that his music didn’t speak to me the way it had done to the previous generation. Unsurprisingly, sales of his recent compilations soared, and his new single ‘Way Down’ predictably went to number one. It didn’t change my opinion of his music but there was no escaping it for a few weeks. There was also the dreadful by-product in the form of the commemorative single ‘I Remember Elvis Presley’ by Dutch producer-singer Danny Mirror. Thousands of people fell for it and it went to number four. It was simply WRONG!

The Fifties and Sixties had already generated huge LP sales that year. The Shadows, Slim Whitman, The Supremes and others all led the album charts. Prog rockers like Pink Floyd, Yes, ELP and Genesis were also in the mainstream. Despite the hiccup of post-Presley grief purchases, the scene was set for a new set of rockers to register their protest against the old guard of music and politicians. They were, of course, the Punks. 

This isn’t a history of pop so I’ll focus on my own belated introduction to the strange world of sneers, safety pins and two-minute bursts of frenetic energy. Malcolm McLaren had been marketing his pet band The Sex Pistols for a while, but it took the nation’s preoccupation with the Queen’s Silver Jubilee to provide the fertile seedbed from which a powerful brand grew into the mainstream with alarming speed.  As the Union Flag bunting mushroomed around the streets of Britain, and pressure mounted on all of us to commemorate Liz 2’s twenty-five years on the throne, it was a clever move to release a snarling alternative anthem appealing to the working classes unimpressed by the real thing. The Pistols’ ‘God Save the Queen’ featuring Johnny Rotten’s biting vocals was banned by the BBC and the main record stores and famously thwarted from taking the number one position in Jubilee week by Rod Stewart. Much as I enjoyed ‘The First Cut is the Deepest’, I would have appreciated the opportunity to hear the record everyone was either talking about or desperately trying to ignore.

When I did manage to catch it, I realised it was nothing special. The follow-up, ‘Pretty Vacant’ was far superior. I recall the TOTP presenter - Kid Jensen, I think it was – linking another doomed and forgettable Cilla Black effort with this film. ‘I also quite liked ‘Holidays in the Sun’, another single from the ‘Never Mind the Bollocks…’ album. However, it was really only the descending guitar riff, ripped off The Jam’s ‘In The City’ and the first verse. The rest degenerated into Johnny wailing on about the Berlin Wall. Eh?

Punk rock was hardly aimed at comfortable middle-class kids like me, but it did have an impact on many teenagers in leafy Billericay. I remember waiting to go into a class and one of the girls – well spoken and certainly no wild child – was raving about a Damned gig she’d been to the night before: “They were gobbing and everything!” she enthused. It was obvious that there was a new world order in pop music. 

TOTP had to change, too. Blackburn, Edmonds, Savile and their ilk needed to give way to presenters like Jensen, Mike Read and Peter Powell. The latter actually appeared to like the New Wave bands he was introducing, and his enthusiasm rubbed off on teens like me. Nevertheless, it was DLT who did the honours for probably the most memorable live TOTP performance EVER. His words were apposite; the world really wasn’t ready for John Otway and Wild Willy Barrett’s ramshackle rendition of ‘Really Free’! It only scraped into the top 30 but was a talking point in our sixth form common room. 

If Otway and even the Pistols had a fairly short singles chart shelf life, the same wasn’t true of The Stranglers. I first saw them on TOTP in around June, Jean-Jacques Burnel bounding around miming to ‘Go Buddy Go’, wielding a guitar with no strings! At least they didn’t wreck their set. They had an ugly reputation for concert violence and even been banned from the Exeter University Great Hall after one fiery gig. A great shame because they were great musicians and songwriters. They were hardly young tearaways, either; drummer Jet Black was already pushing forty! I didn’t appreciate some of their other early hits like ‘Something Better Change’ and ‘Hanging Around’ until later, but ‘No More Heroes’ was in my opinion one of the best records of 1977. With Hugh Cornwell’s superior vocals, J-J’s filthy bass sound and Dave Greenfield’s swirling keyboards to the fore, it had that punk vibe but a great melody, too. The following year or two gave us more terrific hits like ‘5 Minutes’, ‘Nice ‘n’ Sleazy’ and ‘Walk On By’. The Stranglers were notoriously lazy lip-synchers, though. Cornwell and Burnel never seemed to take their TV performances seriously, but I suppose that was part of the image. They were punks and so obviously didn’t care! They also demonstrated that with some quality songs I could be a bit of a punk, too. In spirit, at least.

The Stranglers thus became my favourite band. But the song I accorded the title of favourite song of the year could not have provided a more dramatic contrast. It was Berni Flint’s sweet ‘I Don’t Want to Put a Hold on You’. Acoustic guitar, no instrument destruction, an artist graduating from ITV’s ‘Opportunity Knocks’. Definitely not the new wave. My musical tastes were as broad as ever.