The new year is always about the new year. What films might turn out to be tolerable. What TV shows will be remembered a week after broadcast. And so on. But each new year is also always about certain old years. The modern cultural human is fired by anniversaries. In 2025 we will get to read about Virginia Woolf publishing Mrs Dalloway 100 years ago. Cineastes will focus on Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin from the same year (a real biggie). And so on.
Popular music being what it is, however, most attention there be directed towards the golden jubilee of records from what seems like an interregnum period. The 1970s was among those decades that only retrospectively came to be seen as golden eras for music. The 1960s had a long, long hangover.
There was a sense, even as late as 1975, that music enthusiasts were living through a pallid retread of the previous, lauded decade. Nothing illustrates that better than a partial attempt to retrench from one of the era’s most influential music critics. “We needn’t bow our heads in shame because this is the best album of 1975,” Robert Christgau wrote of a prominent release. “It would have been the best album of 1967, too.”
Christgau was talking about the much-delayed emergence of Bob Dylan’s The Basement Tapes. The double album gathered together tracks recorded eight years earlier at two locations in New York state. Most of the songs had appeared on bootlegs, but this was the first time they were available legally in record stores. Christgau tells his readers not to bow their heads, but there is still a sense of admitting defeat. That feeling was heightened by the astonishing music sounding as if it had been dragged dripping from primeval swamps. Just 20 years after Elvis Presley’s Sun Sessions rock was already turning in on itself. The game was over.
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This was certainly the line put out by future punkist historians. By 1975 the music had ossified into pretension and pomposity. (This is them, not me.) The self-mythology of Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here. The grandiosity of Led Zeppelin’s Physical Graffiti. A period of late Roman decadence was inviting the Vandals – in the form of the Sex Pistols and The Clash – to sack the citadel and introduce rude energy back into the culture. If we may shift the historical analogy back a few centuries further, a glance down the year’s releases finds a Jane the Baptist prophesising rearrangement. Patti Smith’s Horses, which will be celebrated at a 50th anniversary concert at Carnegie Hall in March, completed the punk experiment before it had officially begun (outside downtown New York, anyway).
So that’s clear. The incoming golden-anniversary special editions will, a few predictive exceptions aside, be celebrating a fatuous array of hollow indulgences. You know? Terrible records such as Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run, Joni Mitchell’s The Hissing of Summer Lawns and Neil Young’s Tonight’s the Night. I’m joking of course. All great albums. But there isn’t a great sense of fresh blood there. Born to Run may have been Springsteen’s breakthrough, but he’d been kicking round the recording studio for a few years.
Ploughing through the end-of-year top 10s from 1975, we find that the best-reviewed album looks to be another Dylan release: Blood on the Tracks. Pointy-headed futurists could gesture towards German albums such as the great Neu! ’75, by Neu! Keith Jarrett, moving away from common jazz shapes, moulded the extraordinary The Köln Concert and then immediately broke that mould again. (An array of celebratory gigs is incoming in 2025.) But the notion that the frontline had given in to complacency does not seem completely insane. This was not a year of upending change.
And yet. It depends who you were and where you looked. In his terrific book A Fabulous Creation: How the LP Saved Our Lives, David Hepworth remembers, in the spring of 1975, “a customer from overseas” coming into the record shop where he worked to ask if the future author had “any sex music”. It transpired that the punter was in search of Love to Love You Baby by Donna Summer.
The list of albums above is, you will notice, conspicuously vanilla in shade. White fans were still weirdly reluctant to embrace black music outside occasional forays into Motown. David Bowie had noticed that and, in 1975, responded with the soul-heavy Young Americans. Summer’s still mind-blowing record prepared the world for disco. It was the year of Bob Marley and the Wailers’ Live! – location of the most-played version of No Woman, No Cry – and the arrival of reggae as a force in British music. Looking back, there really is the sense of a cosseted culture waking up. That is worth celebrating.
