Aged like sparkling wine – the Rolling Stones’ Hackney Diamonds

Let’s get over the whining. Let’s forget the persistent grumbling. Let’s just quietly ignore the fact that the Rolling Stones are long past their raw original reinterpretation of the blues and the blatant cultural appropriation that fuelled their emergence, together with the sexually-charged mischief that set them apart from That Other Band. Instead, let’s revel in Hackney Diamonds, their first collection of original new songs for 18 years.

Because, for the first part, it defies logic: it doesn’t sound like a band led by an 80-year-old lead singer, with a near-80-year-old pirate-guitarist and his 76-year-old ‘younger brother’ combining to produce the sort of energy emitted by outfits a quarter of their history. Even if you view the Stones today as barely bothering to masquerade their self-parody, they’re still capable of doing something that no one else is capable of: being the Rolling Stones. 

That point hit me someway through their set in June last year at their historically significant Hyde Park Calling gig. On what was my fifth time seeing the Stones live, and with Charlie Watts 10 months gone (his absence still raw within the band), they lived up to their moniker - The Greatest Rock And Roll Band In The World™. Because in the course of those two hours they didn’t put a step out of place to in any way diminish the Rolling Stones brand. And, yet, I couldn’t get out of my head the fact that this was an outfit then celebrating 61 years since former schoolboy friends Mick Jagger and Keith Richards reunited on a platform at Dartford Railway Station, forging a musical partnership that, even with frequent schisms in their own relationship, endures to this day. 

Not that they need the work. Their last, Covid-interrupted tour had barely ended before there was news of a new album, their 24th (or 26th if you’re counting US releases), although Jagger has maintained that none of them were in any “urgency” to record new material. And, yet, here we are, with Hackney Diamonds - 12 new songs, including final appearances from Charlie Watts (on the tracks Mess It Up and Live By The Sword, which also features Bill Wyman), involvement from Sir Paul McCartney and Lady Gaga.

“Everyone seemed happy to do a tour every few years and nothing for the rest of the time,” Jagger recently told The Times, adding that the business has flipped. “In the old days, the tour used to be a promotion for the record and the record was the thing. These days you make loads of money on the road and you don’t make much money on the record, which means you’re still selling tickets even when you don’t have a new album to promote.”

Picture: Facebook/Rolling Stones

He suggests that it reduces the incentive to make something new: “You end up thinking ‘They just want to hear Paint It Black [on tour]. They don’t want to hear anything else. They’re quite happy. Who cares about our new record?’”

Jagger clearly did, and corralled Richards, Ron Wood and drummer Steve Jordan, Watts’ anointed understudy, into the studio this time last year, setting the target of releasing it now, a deadline they met, reflecting the consummate efficiency with which Rolling Stones Inc. operates. 

In the end it took them just three weeks in a Los Angeles studio to complete, making use of chums who were around at the time, like Lady Gaga, who sings on the luscious, gospel-influenced Sweet Sounds Of Heaven, which also includes keyboard work from Stevie Wonder. Sir Elton John turns up playing keys on Get Close and Piano, while McCartney adds bass on the punky Bite My Head Off.

Viewed through the prism of the kind of commentary I opened this post with, it’s very easy to see Hackney Diamonds as The Stones By Numbers. As is the customary gag, they even let Keith sing on one (Tell Me Straight). But that ignores the fact that the Stones’ very essence runs through the album from start to finish (which, incidentally, ends with a cover of the song that birthed the band - Muddy Waters’ Rolling Stone Blues).

It is a very good Rolling Stones album indeed, and by a country mile an improvement on the somewhat pointless Blue & Lonesome. Some have suggested that it’s their best album since Some Girls, the album that signalled the end of their prime (Tattoo You, which followed in 1982, was cast in the same period and can be seen as largely a collection of ’70s outtakes). 

Here’s where they’re clever: from the outset, Angry, to the conclusion, you will think you’ve heard it all before, except you haven’t. No one ever bought a Stones record for Beatles or Bowie-like progression, so there’s not likely to be any disappointment with Hackney Diamonds. It’s a Rolling Stones record. It’s what they do. It’s what they do that no one else does. And it is brilliant.

Cinema for the ears: Steven Wilson’s The Harmony Codex

Let me toot my own horn a little: in his memoir Limited Edition Of One, polymath musician, songwriter and producer Steven Wilson mentions me in a section about David Bowie (he traces his love of The Dame to the purchase, by my parents, of a copy each of The Laughing Gnome for our respective birthdays in 1973, which are only eight days apart, having known each other since infancy thanks to our mums meeting at post-natal clinic).

The only reason I mention this, apart from showing off, is that the same book contains a short story written by Wilson called The Harmony Codex. “Dystopian sci-fi,” he described it recently to the NME. “Like a lot of my music, it had a very dreamlike quality”. 

As the story was coming together Wilson was also working – in his customary restless manner – on his seventh full solo album under his own name. “As I was writing the story I was beginning to develop the initial ideas for this record [which has just been released and takes its name from the short story]. It felt logical to have a narrative feel to the songs, to match the cinematic quality of the music,” he continued in his NME interview. “It made sense to write an imaginary soundtrack for that short story, writing music based on its characters and ideas.”

The result is a multidimensional experience that is Wilson’s best solo record to date. But before I get into that, a little context: he has been at this game a very long time, producing his first music while still at school in Hemel Hempstead, and very quickly started building a music career via various projects and outfits like No-Man (with Tim Bowness) and Bass Communion. In the process he has explored myriad genres from trip-hop to jazz, ambient to prog rock (most notably with Porcupine Tree). His last solo album The Future Bites featured a spoken vocal appearance from no less than Sir Elton John, and its predecessor To The Bone included the ABBA-esque Permanating. None of this is pastiche, but a reverence and love for the panoply of popular music including, yes, pure pop (don’t get him going about The Rubettes…).

Despite all this, the standard line is to describe Wilson as one of those artists who people who know, know (implying that those who don’t, won’t). His reputation has been augmented further by becoming the go-to producer of multi-channel remixes of classic albums from everyone from King Crimson and Jethro Tull to Chic and ABC. And yet, if you sat opposite him on the Tube many probably wouldn’t recognise him as someone who has and does sell out arenas.

Die-hard fans, who packed out Wembley Arena last November (notably on my birthday) for a temporarily reformed Porcupine Tree concert indicated the level of fanaticism that follows Wilson around the world. “I’m in the enviable position of having a fanbase who almost expect me to do the unexpected,” he told the NME. “If they feel like I’m making concessions to the music industry, they spot it a mile off and rightly pick me up on it.”

A cute sentiment, but Wilson is also in the enviable position of being able to do exactly whatever he wants. With each solo album since 2008’s Insurgentes he has continually changed the complexion of his music, confounding those still of the stubborn view that he is a prog rocker in the tradition of bands like King Crimson and Genesis. In truth, Bowie has probably been his touchstone, just simply for never conforming to any one genre, and never standing still, either. And that’s quite a feat in itself.

“I always talk about people like Bowie and Zappa and Neil Young and Kate Bush as being role models, in the sense of how they conducted their careers - that constant sense of reinvention and confronting audience expectations,” he told that august organ The Spectator a couple of years ago (the interview’s standfirst contained the line “The most successful musician you’ve never heard of”). 

“At the same time, I’m also conscious that it was easier for them, because I live in the age of social media. The problem with social media is that you get a response within five minutes of doing anything. You release a new song into the world, which might be different to anything you’ve done before, and literally within minutes you have an incredible wave of feedback, much of which will be negative. And I’ve come to like that. Maybe I’m a masochist. I prefer that to the indifference that most bands who just recycle everything over and over again get. Like the fans will go, ‘We love this. More of the same’. I feel that’s too easy and too lazy.”

Lazy he has never been. Peter Gabriel has been working on i/o, his first album of brand new songs for 21 years and it still hasn’t seen the light of day as a complete work. I actually can’t count how much material Wilson has released in that time.

A limited edition of one - Steven Wilson
Picture: Hajo Mueller

You certainly wouldn’t call The Harmony Codex “more of the same”. Whereas The Future Bites took a knowing lurch into pop, it’s successor is still accessible but with more musical tangents, and arguably more interesting for it. Inclination opens the record with a pulsing drum beat reminiscent of the aforementioned Gabriel’s stunning work on The Last Temptation Of Christ soundtrack, and builds over four minutes into something similarly rooted in the desert heat of The Holy Land. It is more electronica than anything, with Slovak guitarist David Kollar performing a guitar solo that defies the laws of ‘soaring’ axe work in traditional rock music.

It is notable that for a musician who, in Porcupine Tree and the first part of his solo career drove an at-times heavy, metal-like thrash, electric guitars are used sparingly and texturally throughout The Harmony Codex. In their application, guitars are just some of the brushes in the artist’s jar, not driving songs but contributing to their palette.

Into this, Wilson has put together an extraordinary collection of guest musicians, contributing something distinctive to the different directions each song takes. Pink Floyd/David Gilmour alum Guy Pratt adds bass to the single What Life Brings (which also features longtime Wilson cohort Craig Blundell on drums). Another regular collaborator, keyboard player Adam Holzman (son of legendary Elektra Records boss Jac Holzman) pops up throughout the album, most prominently on Impossible Tightrope, a frenetic jazz-rock workout which harks back to Wilson’s third solo release, The Raven That Refused to Sing (And Other Stories). Another member of that album’s cohort, Theo Travis, provides a bonkers sax solo.

A calmer moment is provided by Rock Bottom, a duet with another of Wilson’s closest musical friends, the Israeli singer Ninet Tayeb (who also co-wrote it), and it is a beautiful, if slightly dark, love song which is also emblematic of the entire album’s exquisite production. It is in this regard that you recognise Wilson’s professed desire to create “cinema for the ears”. It’s no wonder, either, that he has invested a great deal of effort in the use of spatial audio technologies, and publicised the album’s release with a series of listening sessions around the world in which lucky punters were exposed to its full multidimensional effect.

I can’t begin to imagine what The Harmony Codex’s title song – for me an absolute highlight – must have sounded like in those listening environments. At almost ten minutes in length, it is a dreamlike experience, invoking the short story that inspired it. It reminds me greatly of Vangelis’s music for – yes, another film  - Blade Runner, and includes ethereal electric piano from Holzman as well as the first of two spoken word contributions on the album from Wilson’s delightful wife Rotem. It is as enigmatic as it is transporting. It is also unconventional, an ambient moment in the middle of an album, rather than the ‘slow one’ that traditionally ends it. “Part of this record is confidence from having done this for a long time now,” Wilson explained to the NME, “which means I can think ‘No, fuck it! I can put a 10-minute ambient piece on the same record as an acoustic song and an electronic pop song.’ It’s good to embrace that.”

The song that does end the ten-track album is Staircase, an epic, reflective track that warrants the involvement of Holzman and Blundell again, as well as Nick Beggs, another member of Wilson’s touring bands (and currently on the road with Howard Jones), who combine to create a song that both typifies past approaches (i.e. prog-ish) as well as Wilson’s drive to expand. 

It, too, is cinematic in its expanse, drawing reference to the Dutch conceptual artist MC Escher’s never-ending staircase (suggested in the album artwork). Written from a perspective that, I suspect, all of us in our mid-50s ponder on – the journey that has taken us to now – it also provides commentary on modernity: “Plagued by poor health/But you stockpile more wealth/Congratulate yourself/A sense of proportion/An act of extortion/There's too much distortion/You sink in stages/As you're approaching middle ages (You're up to here in debt)” trills its third verse. It ends with another appearance from Rotem Wilson, again speaking as the album oozes into another dreamscape facilitated by vintage synths (including the ARP 2600 that was a staple of the 70s).

For those who want more of The Harmony Codex there is more: an expanded edition includes remixes by, among others, Manic Street Preachers and Tears For Fears’ Roland Orzabal, underlining the point that for all of Wilson’s apparent anonymity, he can command the attention and involvement of some very heavy hitters indeed. 

It’s only what is deserved. He’s hardly flown under the radar these last thirty-odd years, and while some of that has probably suited him, to be at this stage of a career and still producing albums of this ingenuity, ambition and immersion, and not resorting to a lazy covers project, deserves commercial success as much as the acclaim that continues to come Wilson’s way.

The Harmony Codex is out now on Virgin Records

So it’s not just me then

As if you needed another reason not to buy The Sun, it managed to vicariously troll me last week with the headline you see to the left.

“Nears” 60? WTAF?! Gallagher only turned 56 at the end of May - and I will do the same in November. Speaking on our joint behalf, we are not near 60 at all. Just not as near 50 as either of us, I’m sure, would prefer.

That said, Gallagher has previously spoken about ageing in a manner that resonated alarmingly readily with me. He told DJ Ken Bruce last year that his 50s had been “one thing after another”, healthwise: “The slightest knock stays with you for ages. And then once that’s cleared up it’s something else, and then once that’s cleared up it’s something else. I can’t wait to get my mobility scooter if I’m being honest.”

With one or two health-related aggravations I can empathise with Gallagher’s kvetching. Two years ago I was hospitalised by a foot blister that nearly led to me losing a toe, I’m now ultra-paranoid: a simple insect bite on holiday had me thinking I’d developed a leg ulcer; mild indigestion will have my thumb hovering over the number 9 on my phone. Hypochondria, maybe, but the odds are stacked against me. I may be only 55, and not 85, but “the march of time”, as Gallagher recently described it, shows itself far too easily. 

Talking to Matt Morgan on his Patreon podcast, Gallagher revealed that he’s beginning to forget words to his own songs on the current High Flying Birds tour. “I’ve found myself on this tour consciously thinking ‘What’s the next line to this song?’,” Gallagher told Morgan. “It’s like, you’ve just got to think about it.” 

When asked if he needed to use a teleprompter he said that: “I’m sure, eventually, I’ll need one”. He wouldn’t be alone if he did: Bruce Springsteen (73) now uses one as does Sir Elton John (76). Three years ago Sir Paul McCartney - now 81 and still performing songs first recorded by The Beatles almost 60 years ago - confessed to using a prompter, blaming age for his distractible mind: “Sometimes I’ll be doing a song, like Eleanor Rigby or something, and I’m on autopilot. And I’m starting to think, ‘Oh, what am I gonna have for dinner?’ Then I go, ‘Stop!’ because I’m singing Eleanor Rigby! I’ve separated myself not only from Paul and fame, but a couple of bits in my head are going in different places.“

Noel Gallagher might be renown for his dry humour but there’s a fair chance his admission is genuine. And it would be a relief, too. I’m only four months Gallagher’s junior, and like him, I’m increasingly experiencing complete blanks, mostly when trying to remember names. It’s an increasing source of frustration, especially given that my head is - or at least used to be - crammed full of useless trivia. 

Bands, albums, films, TV shows, actors and other inconsequential cultural obscurities. Some things do remain hardwired - I can still reel off lyrics from 1971 Genesis songs (Return Of The Giant Hogweed, anyone?), but occasionally struggle to remember the name of someone I’ve been recently introduced to. Thank God for the Internet: an actor’s name is only a few IMDB clicks away, an album title retrievable from Wikipedia. I do, though, worry that I’m simply not using my brain enough, and given in to the iPad I seem to nurse throughout any evening spent in front of the TV. 

For some part, I’ve accepted all of this as a normal part of ageing, that my head is so full of stuff there’s no more space for any more. Some degree of memory decline is a normal part of getting older. For the most part it’s just forgetfulness - walking into a room and then asking what you’re dong there, or misplacing reading glasses (another symbol of age). Even momentarily forgetting a name. 

Medical professionals will reassure you that such events are not unusual - the brain undergoes numerous structural changes over time, with even certain regions of the organ shrinking. This can affect communication between brain cells, leading to slower information processing and memory recall. Hormonal changes, too, play a crucial role in memory and cognitive function, so that as hormone levels evolve with age, so too can memory processes. Another factor is changes to neurotransmitters, the chemicals that transmit signals between nerve cells, which can also affect memory formation and retrieval.

However, the unavoidable elephant in the room, if I can apply a metaphor citing an animal with a reputation for a solid memory: dementia. My father had Alzheimer’s (he died from it four years ago tomorrow at the age of 90) and my grandfather had it too. You’ll understand my inherent sense of dread at being condemned to the same fate, especially as I also have Type 2 diabetes, which has been suggested as an accelerant, along with other forms of cardiovascular impairment.

Experts strive to make clear distinction between normal age-related memory changes and such severe cognitive disorders as Alzheimer’s and dementia, and the vascular factors that can lead to such conditions. Mitigating these factors means being as active - mentally and physically as possible. Reading, doing puzzles, learning new skills will help, as well regular exercise (my biggest downfall). Since I was diagnosed with diabetes, my diet has improved out of all recognition, but that still means I need to consume plenty of antioxidants, omega-3 fatty acids and nutrients like vitamin E can contribute to brain health. And exercise is still a challenge.

Less obvious measures include maintaining strong social connections, which have been linked to better cognitive outcomes in older adults, as well as applying stress management techniques. Arguably, though, one of the hardest mitigations is getting a good, quality night’s sleep, which is essential for memory consolidation and overall brain function.

The bottom line is that, as we journey through life, our bodies and minds inevitably undergo changes. Some - like putting on weight - can be somewhat self-inflicted. Some of it is down to genetics. But much is simply down to the very march of time Noel Gallagher invoked. If only all that entailed was hair sprouting from places that didn’t previously host it.

Under doctor's orders: Foo Fighters' Medicine At Midnight

Full disclosure: this is the first time I’ve ever attempted to review a Foo Fighters album, and I’m somewhat apprehensive. Not because there are people I know who worship the very ground “ver Foos” walk on, or because I have friends who loathe the very idea of the band. No, it’s because they’re a bona fide rawk-and-roll group who, on an interplanetary scale, are gargantuan and yet still hard to know where they are pitched. 

They’ve been with us for more than 25 years, releasing ten albums in that time, a length of service and respondent following that is comparable with the great legends of classic heavy rock whose DNA clearly courses through the Foos’ veins. They are a Major Stadium Band, with Dave Grohl generally thought of as the Nicest Man In Rock™. Some fans lust after him, others just want to hang out with him in the blokey sense. Indeed such is Grohl's avuncularity - and, indeed, that of all six Foos - that he can eff-and-blind his way through gigs and still have grannies digging him, even the songs on which he screams his vocals. 

There is, then, something polished about the Foo Fighters. Yes, the music has an edge, but it’s cultivated. If you turn down the volume a notch, they offer comfortable rock and roll, ideal for mass arm-waving summer festival singalongs. The brothers Gallagher would probably baulk at this, but at times the Foo Fighters' music resembled an Americanised Oasis. In some respects they are the Three Bears of rock - the bowl of porridge that is 'just' right. But there is a nagging sense with me of ‘So what?’. Nice band, a few catchy daytime rock radio staples, but nothing artistically groundbreaking. Like the Volkswagen Golf, nicely designed, superbly constructed and brilliantly executed, but, you know…

Which begs the question: will their new album, Medicine At Midnight, do anything for the doubters or, equally, for the already confirmed? Well, let’s start with its premise. Grohl says that, for their tenth album and 25th anniversary (last year, when they were originally intending to release it), they wanted to do something different. “When you look back at all the records we've made in the last 25 years, it's like 'OK, we've done the noisy punk rock crap... We've done the sleepy acoustic stuff...,” Grohl explained to Radio.com. “We've done the three-and-a-half minute-long, fun pop-rock song. Hard rock, heavy stuff...‘What's the one thing we haven't done?’. I was like, ‘You know we haven't made our David Bowie's Let's Dance record. We haven't made the Stones' Tattoo You or, like, a Power Station record. We haven't made a rock band record that you could shake your ass to.”

So, instead of making some mellow AOR record, Grohl thought they’d make a party album. “A lot of our favourite records have these big grooves and riffs,” he told the NME. “I hate to call it a funk or dance record, but it’s more energetic in a lot of ways than anything we’ve ever done and it was really designed to be that Saturday night party album.” Wait - a party album? Well, yes. “It was written and sequenced in a way that you put on, and nine songs later you’ll just put it on again,” says Grohl. So let’s see if that’s the outcome. 

When it was released in November, lead-in single Shame Shame gave some hint at Medicine At Midnight’s direction of travel, with its pizzicato strings, bass riff and Taylor Hawkins’ hi-hat-heavy drum pattern seemingly drawing on the aforementioned Power Station. It is, however, arguably the album's weakest track, and for all its pleasantry, doesn’t really represent the party vibe Grohl speaks of. Far better is the track preceding it, Making A Fire which kicks off the album with a bright blast of happy-clappy, na-na-na-na-chorused drive up Pacific Coast Highway on a gloriously sunny day.

When it does come, the Bowie reference is not immediately obvious. Midway through the album, the title track opens up with an ambience that does indeed appear to emulate that of the sonics found on Let's Dance. By the time of its funk-blues guitar solo, which bears a strong resemblance to Stevie Ray Vaughan's on the Bowie hit, the reference is complete. You can sort of seeing where Grohl is coming from, even if it's also a good soundbite on his part. The better reference point, in my opinion, is indeed The Power Station, that mid-80s supergroup formed by Duran Duran’s Andy Taylor and John Taylor with Robert Palmer and Tony Thompson, the former Chic drummer, working with producer Bernard Edwards, who co-created Chic with - guess who? - Nile Rodgers, Bowie's arch-collaborator on Lets Dance. Perhaps now I get it, but it would be a stretch to say that Bowie/Rodgers' influence courses through the sonic framework of the album as a whole. Cloudspotter might have a trace about it, but only a trace, and Making A Fire does contain some funk chops (Grohl says it's rooted in Sly & The Family Stone).

However, this album is not a discoification of the Foo Fighters’ stock-in-trade. For the most part, Medicine At Midnight it grown-up heavyish rock, with plenty of riffing by the guitar triumvirate of Grohl, Pat Smear and Chris Shiflett. Holding The Poison is almost Foo-by-numbers. There are mellower moments, such as Chasing Birds and the gently reflective Waiting On A War, which recalls the shared childhood of, I think, all of us who grew up in the shadow of nuclear threat. Coming four tracks in, it diverts from the party spirit somewhat, but affords the opportunity Grohl to expound on the modern-day risk of global conflict, a thought triggered by his daughter one day while out in the car. It does, however, evolve into the closest thing on this record to the bombastic stadium stompers that blasted them into rock’s top tier to begin with. In similar vein there’s No Son Of Mine (no, not a Genesis cover…), apparently a tribute to the late Lemmy of Motörhead and, yes, it does resemble Ace of Spades, a song which, if you think about it, actually provides part of the Foo Fighters' original blueprint.

There is no known music lore that dictates how long any album should be: Marvin Gaye’s masterpiece What’s Going On clocks in at 35 minutes; Elton John’s classic early 70s trio of Tumbleweed Connection, Madman Across The Water and Honky Château all ran to no more than three-quarters of an hour apiece; the record for shortest album is probably still held by The Beach Boys’ Wild Honey, a miserly 23 minutes and 58 seconds. So, at 37 minutes long, it’s hard to see what kind of party Grohl had in mind when he cast Medicine At Midnight as the soundtrack of a romping night in. But, then, given modern attention spans, an album you can listen to in the time it takes for my lunchtime constitutional is not that unusual. “So we picked the nine songs that we really enjoyed and thought, ‘Great.’ Okay, it’s 37 minutes,” he recently told The Irish Times, pointing out that to his teenage daughter “37 minutes would be like Gandhi or War And Peace.”

So, to describe the Foo Fighters' celebration of a quarter-century as a functioning musical entity as some sort of liberating milestone would be a misnomer. But you can see what Dave Grohl means. He also knows that the band could, simply, keep on pumping out clones of My Hero or Best Of You, just to keep their hardcore fans happy. In truth, Medicine At Midnight doesn’t stray all that far from the formula, but nor does it slip on trademark quality. This band may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but there’s nothing here that’s really not to like. And right now, that’s no bad thing.

Universal exports - David Hepworth's Overpaid, Oversexed And Over There

In early December 1992, 25 years of age and recently furnished with a decent redundancy package, I touched down at Los Angeles International Airport with mouth agape. The America I’d grown up with, vicariously, through the myriad TV shows recorded in Southern California, was finally right in front of me. And it didn’t feel in any way unusual. 

Normally, when you travel abroad, you are immediately assaulted by new sights, sounds and smells. You visit a local supermarket and, by a rite of passage, groceries with amusingly rude brand names bring out the inner sniggering schoolboy in you. But not in LA. There, the sky was as blue as I’d seen it on The Rockford Files and the Six Million Dollar Man, my childhood television staples. The freeways were just as they were on CHiPs, the mountains just as they were used to substitute for Korea in M*A*S*H. And, yes, Santa Monica Beach was just as it appeared on Baywatch. Even the Hollywood sign didn’t seem that startling: “Oh yeah, that,” as I made the first of many ridiculous attempts to find the perfect vantage point in Beachwood Canyon to photograph it.

Of course, I loved it, and that visit to California became the first of many, including two years living there and living the dream for real. Four months after my maiden trip to the US of A, I went to New York (also, the first of many visits since). This proved to be a cultural reawakening of similar stature to my Californian experience, walking the steel and concrete canyons of Manhattan, doing the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island tours, splurging on cheaper CDs at Tower Records, eating in diners and enjoying the exchange rate benefit by cleaning out Macy’s of clothing at more than two dollars to the pound. You can repeat these patterns in any one of a number of pleasure and work trips in the 28 years since that first visit.

All of this is brought to mind by Overpaid, Oversexed And Over There, the latest instalment of David Hepworth's impressive run of brilliantly researched book-essays on pop music culture. It starts with the premise of the so-called ‘British Invasion’, the wave of British pop bands which commenced with The Beatles travelling to America in 1964, closely followed by the Rolling Stones, The Yardbirds and many others. Collectively, they effectively imported the very rock and roll that had been exported via somewhat nebulous supply lines, be they Elvis Presley’s music heard fertively via offshore radio stations, Bill Hailey’s Rock Around The Clock in cinemas, or the blues records entering Britain via its seaports, which so famously found, in that fateful meeting at Dartford railway station, kindred spirits in Mick Jagger and Keith Richards.

Britain, it shouldn’t be forgotten, wasn’t long out of the economic and social austerity of World War Two when John, Paul, George and Ringo landed at Kennedy Airport to make the first of three appearances in February 1964 on The Ed Sullivan Show, the top-rated Sunday evening institution on the CBS network. They had, actually, appeared before on American television the previous November when a news report covered Beatlemania in Britain. Such was the interest it generated that 4,000 fans turned out to meet the band at JFK when they landed on 7 February. While my first visit to the US wasn’t met with anywhere near the same fervour - in fact no fervour at all - Hepworth examines what it must have been like for The Beatles, four twentysomethings from lower middle class Liverpool backgrounds, to suddenly experience an America they probably had significantly less cultural experience of than I had. At least I’d seen Charlie’s Angels on a weekly basis.

David Hepworth

What must still be admired today about the Fabs’ arrival in America - their first live appearance on the Sullivan show garnered an audience of 73 million - is that it established a new relationship between the United States and the United Kingdom. Just twenty years before, more than a million GIs had been been based on British shores in anticipation of D-Day, grabbing the girls and splashing their not insignificant disposable income around in country pubs to the annoyance of impoverished, ration book-imposed, horny local adolescents. “We saved your ass,” was probably the inbound refrain. But here, in Hepworth’s book, a reverse tide made gods from state-to-state out of young British men, playing mail order-purchased, American-made Fender guitars, as the rock and roll and blues America had inadvertently sent our way, was brought back in spades by these Limey upstarts. 

The Rolling Stones, Hepworth cites, were prime examples of this. Starting out as exclusively a covers band, their evolution into “the greatest rock and roll band in the world” - a description they continue to earn, 56 years later - was founded in America. Hepworth notes that their first signature hit, Satisfaction, came to Keith Richards as a riff while staying at a Florida motel. Lyrically it’s a song about American life, not a lad from a bombsite suburb in Kent who’d never set foot abroad until a couple of years before. Whether Satisfaction was autobiographical or simply a song that worked, it, Hepworth demonstrates, undoubtedly channeled the America that Richards had been infusing via his Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters imports.

While some of these fresh-off-the-boat young men (and they were, exclusively, young men) inevitably found themselves guppy-mouthed at king-sized beds and en-suite hotel bathrooms, as opposed to the provincial B&Bs they’d had to endure in Britain, Hepworth moves on from the initial landings and teen-screamfests to examine how these bands evolved in an America that, itself, was undergoing social movement with the emerging war in Vietnam in the background. 

One of the most interesting sections of the book examines what made Led Zeppelin, ultimately, the most successful British band in the US during their tenure. The contrast, Hepworth notes, is that while the early British invaders - even the Rolling Stones - had a certain cuteness about them, which somewhat appealed to American heartlanders, Zeppelin built their case with sex appeal, musicianship, amplification and sheer momentum (so the legend goes, the band were totally different animals while touring the US, or during their notorious stays at the ‘Riot House’ Hyatt hotel on LA’s Sunset Boulevard, than they were when back home in their bucolic English country piles). While U2’s proclivities aren’t as documented - or even existed at all - Hepworth also examines their ambition to conquer America. Arguably, it took The Joshua Tree and all its Mojave desert imagery to do so - but, like Led Zeppelin, they found the US to be a receptive market, and set to master it, “give it what it considers it wants and needs,” Hepworth quotes a modest Bono saying in 1981.

By the time that U2 started to break America, along with bands like Culture Club (with Boy George causing quite the sensation - remember his appearance in an episode of The A-Team?), British bands had blazed a trail. American charts in the 1970s had been dominated by the likes of Elton John, David Bowie, Pink Floyd and even Fleetwood Mac, if you can consider their ‘classic’ line-up three-fifths British. It is, perhaps, no surprise, that American comedy scion Rob Reiner chose, with co-writers and American actors Christopher Guest, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer, to spoof a British touring rock band in This Is Spinal Tap. Led Zeppelin’s notorious tours, in which manager Peter Grant literally took suitcases of cash away from gigs, provided a model for British acts to be as gargantuan, stadia-fillingly successful in America.

Overpaid, Oversexed And Over There is the latest in a seemingly endless stream of Hepworth tomes that brilliantly and richly get under the skin of popular music. Like it’s most recent predecessor, Nothing Is Real, and the earlier Uncommon People, A Fabulous Creation and 1971 - Never A Dull Moment it is another collection of artfully considered, not to mention highly entertaining thoughts about the music business. Each has been a superbly researched gathering of thoughts around a single theme - be it the rise of rock stars, the LP as a limited concept, or 1971 as the year everything happened (and forget anyone who says otherwise about ’66, ’67 or ’70…). 

The level of detail in Hepworth’s books is always impressive - if you like the history books of an Anthony Beevor or John Julius Norwich you will appreciate the same degree of narrative and insight - but not without the wit that Hepworth has applied in his music journalism career, in particular as editor of Smash Hits and founder editor of The Word, but also his period as co-presenter of Whistle Test with old mucker Mark Ellen. Indeed, I’ve had the pleasure of spending many highly entertaining evenings in both their company for recordings of their Word In Your Ear podcasts, pre-lockdown, in which they gently interrogate authors of similar books about music on their specialist subjects. Hepworth’s own books are also quite substantial, too, which means that, at his current rate of output, another - like the DFS Sale and the Oscars - will be coming around shortly. Which means I’d better get a move on in finishing the new one.

Classic rock über alles

Picture: Led Zeppelin/Dick Barnatt

I feel vindicated. The other night, before she went to bed, my girlfriend's 15-year-old daughter was listening to Led Zeppelin's Good Times Bad Times, the opening track of their self-titled 1969 debut album. The next morning I woke to read that the music I grew up with, from the 1970s and 1980s, is finding new audiences along with it original listenership thanks to streaming services.

In its latest yearbook, the BPI, the British record industry association, has revealed what the nation was listening to in 2019 via streaming services, and it is reassuring - from this old head's perspective, at least - to see how pop and rock's annals from the last six decades figure in that consumption. With the purchase of physical formats continuing their long-term decline (despite sales of vinyl records - pre-lockdown - remaining robust), music streaming in the UK grew by 7.5% in 2019, according to the BPI, which also noted that there were 114 billion plays on streaming services. Of particular note is that the '70s and '80s accounted for a greater share of so-called "catalogue plays" in 2019 than anything else, with two acts more prominent than anyone else - Elton John and Queen. No great surprise, given the success of the biopics Rocket Man and Bohemian Rhapsody: both films provided gateways to the music of two of the decades' most prolific artists, with John in particular bringing attention to both his colourful life in the 1970s as well as the extraordinary run of albums he recorded, with Tumbleweed Connection, Madman Across The Water, Honky Honky Château and Goodbye Yellow Brick Road amongst the 12 recorded between 1970 and 1979 alone.

David Hepworth's brilliant book 1971 - Never A Dull Moment pondered the rich output of that specific year (Led Zeppelin IV, Who’s Next, Jethro Tull’s Aqualung, The Doors’ LA Woman, Carole King’s Tapestry, et al), but the BPI stats reveal that 1977 - the year of the Queen's silver jubilee - accounted for the most number of albums from the '70s streamed in 2019, with ELO’s Out Of The Blue (featuring the feelgood Mr Blue Sky), Fleetwood Mac’s perennial Rumours (The Chain was its most-streamed song), and The Bee Gees' Stayin’ Alive figuring heavily. As did Queen’s News Of The World, thanks to We Will Rock You and We Are The Champions.

Go back further, and the 1960s provided a steady appetite of pop, rock and soul music last year. Not surprisingly The Beatles figure prominently: the Fabs' catalogue was a relative latecomer to streaming, only first becoming available on the likes of Spotify, Apple Music, Google Play, Tidal and Amazon Prime Music at Christmas 2015, seen at the time as an important effort to maintain the band's legacy. Four years on, their latter output dominated streams of '60s material, with the 50th anniversary edition of Abbey Road prominent, along with David Bowie's Space Oddity, various Rolling Stones tracks, and a healthy slew of Motown material, including Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell's Ain't No Mountain High Enough (the second most-streamed '60s track), the Jacksons' I Want You Back, My Girl by The Temptations and Ben E King's Stand By Me.

Further forward, the 1980s also featured significantly in the BPI's numbers, some 9.2% of all streamed in 2019, with Queen once again demonstrating - whether you like them or not - just how much they dominated British music for the better part of two decades, and up until Freddie Mercury's death in 1991. Another One Bites The Dust was the most-streamed song from 1980. Given that many a lockdown family Zoom get together will inevitably descend into violent disagreement over which era - and generation of music - was the best, the 1980s often miss out on a fair hearing, largely due to the association people make with their own memories of shoulder pads and puffball skirts on Top Of The Pops, and the ubiquitous clatter of gated reverb (and the ubiquitous clatter of Phil Collins...). Thus, Britons helped themselves to the likes of  A-Ha's Take On Me, Bryan Adams' Summer Of '69, Kenny Loggins' Footloose, Bruce Springsteen's Dancing In The Dark and Tina Turner's The Best looming large in the 2019 streaming landscape.

So what, then, of more recent output? In any given week the most popular songs are always dominated by new material, and last year songs released in 2019 accounted for over a fifth of streamed plays, with those from 2018 slightly behind. In fact the top two streamed tracks for 2019 were released the previous year - Lewis Capaldi’s Someone You Loved and Lil Nas X’s Old Town Road (no, me neither), along with 2019 releases from Billy Eilish, Stormzy and Ed Sheeran. Contemporary events also had an impact on streaming choices, too. Along with the Elton John and Queen biopics, songs featuring in TV and film productions drew people to streaming tracks like Bruce Springsteen's Blinded By The Light and, randomly, Limahl’s Never Ending Story appearing in the Netflix supernatural drama Stranger Things.

Picture: Twitter/Glastonbury Festival

There was also a boost caused by last year's Glastonbury Festival, with The Cure being a notable beneficiary thanks to their headline set. Given that there won't be a Glasto this year - or, for the time being, any marquee music events anywhere - it'll be interesting to see what the 2020 figures reveal. That said, with so many of us currently in lockdown and potentially exhausting physical record collections, streaming might possibly be coming into its own. "The reasons certain songs resonate with us are many and varied, says Rob Crutchley, author of the BPI's What The UK Streamed In 2019 report. "They can lift our mood, reflect how we’re feeling at a certain time, or evoke a particular happy memory. Older songs can enjoy a renaissance at any time, maybe by being used in a film or TV show, being shared online via social media or by being discovered in a playlist. A much-loved artist going on tour can spike interest and there is a wealth of catalogue classics that are always in great demand at Christmas time – we’re streaming the hits of today in huge numbers but we’re also enjoying delving into our rich musical heritage."

The full What The UK Streamed In 2019 report can be read here.

A Bowie biopic? Start cringing now

No sooner have I stopped reflecting on the beatific glow created by Francis Whately's wonderful David Bowie documentary, Finding Fame, on Saturday evening that I discover - belatedly, it seems - that there are ghouls abound planning a biopic about The Dame.

I have form on such things: rock star biopics, in particular, make me cringe. Even the supposedly good ones, like What’s Love Got To Do With It, La Bamba, The Doors or Control. The trouble with them, usually, is that they attempt to animate characters who are or were, by nature, animated already. Even Bowie himself once said "They never seem to get them right." So, did we really need a biopic about Queen, a band whose lead singer took flamboyance and excess to new extremes and which were pretty much widely known already? Frankly, I could have just watched a compilation of clips of Queen playing live, as that is what counted. However salacious an existence Freddy Mercury led, the biopic that got made turned it into something of a cartoon, albeit with a strong central performance by Rami Malik. We didn’t, however, need to see Mercury's life re-enacted when a documentary of the depth and quality of Whately's Bowie trilogy would have served the purpose far better.

Later this year we will get Rocketman, described as "an epic musical fantasy about the uncensored human story of Sir Elton John’s breakthrough years." Made by the same team responsible for the entertaining Eddie The Eagle, and starring Taron Egerton (who played Eddie Edwards) as Elton John, it too smacks of the superfluous. Any serious biographer or documentary maker could do a better job of recording John's life than any live cartoon about him. Which is what fills me with absolute dread about Stardust, the film announced last month that would focus on Bowie's first trip to America in 1971. It certainly won’t be about Bowie's music: Salon Pictures, who are making the film, said in a somewhat terse statement that: "The film was written as an ‘origins story’ about the beginning of David’s journey as he invented his Ziggy Stardust character, and focuses on the character study of the artist, as opposed to a hits driven ‘music’ biopic.” The statement added: "We would like to clarify that this film is not a biopic, it is a moment-in-time film at a turning point in David’s life, and is not reliant on Bowie’s music”. Salon also make the clarification that Stardust will use "...period music and songs that Bowie covered, but not his original tracks." In other words, 'we don’t have the rights to use Bowie's music'.

Duncan Jones, Bowie's film director son, poured ice cold water on the project last month, tweeting: "Pretty certain nobody has been granted music rights for ANY biopic... I would know." followed by "I'm not saying this movie is not happening. I honestly wouldn't know. I'm saying that as it stands, this movie won't have any of dads music in it, & I can't imagine that changing." "If you want to see a biopic without his music," he added in another tweet, "or the families [sic] blessing, that's up to the audience." Bowie's lifelong friend George Underwood (who, as a schoolboy, was the cause of the singer's permanently dilated pupil, leading to the myth that he had different coloured eyes) has also waded in, telling the NME that he was dreading the film: "They never seem to get those right. Although I did like the Freddie Mercury one [Bohemian Rhapsody], but they’re never accurate. All of the books about David are copies of things that just aren’t quite right then it gets worse and worse.” Francis Whately himself has called it correctly, telling the NME that biopics like Stardust will only emphasise the "wrong aspects" of Bowie's life and career. “What I’m glad to have been able to do is make three 90-minute films on David Bowie as a musician, the artist, not anything else. That’s what’s important."

Johnny Flynn, best known for TV's Vanity Fair and Les Miserables is slated to play Bowie in Stardust. As Malek demonstrated in Bohemian Rhapsody, of course, with the right voice coaching and prosthetics, Hollywood can turn you into anyone. But Bowie - just like Mercury - was distinctive throughout his career. It’s what made his career. He went from character to character, constantly reinventing himself, adopting new masks and costumes in the process. Ziggy Stardust was, after all, one of those characters, a vessel for Bowie to play out his imagination through, musically and theatrically, and one of the most powerful memes ever devised in popular art. Frankly, we don’t need an actor impersonating that, even if with the editorial intent of informing the audience. Safe to say I, for one, will be avoiding Stardust like the plague.

Misty Mountain Hop: Father John Misty at the Eventim Apollo

© Simon Poulter 2017

It's a mark of my age that, on crossing Hammersmith Broadway, I could only think of the venue for this congregation for Father John Misty as the "Hammersmith Odeon". This is despite it having gone through numerous changes of sponsor over the last 30-odd years: Labatt's Apollo, Hammersmith Apollo, Carling Apollo, HMV Hammersmith Apollo and latterly the Eventim Apollo. But whomever's name sits above that distinctive, Grade-II listed art deco frontispiece, 'Hammy Odeon' will forever be one of London's most celebrated concert venues, thanks in part to being where Bruce Springsteen made his UK live debut in 1975, where Bowie ended the Ziggy Stardust tour two years before, and being venue of numerous live albums, most famously Motörhead's legendary No Sleep 'til Hammersmith.

It is, then, with this significant '70s rock heritage that in should roll Misty, the current incarnation of Josh Tillman, and the persona of a louche '70s rock star, plying wry, heartfelt folk-rock as if straight from West Hollywood's very own Troubadour. Tillman is blessed with all the accoutrements of the LA Canyon Cowboy, with great, long rock god hair, a magnificent beard, and a dry, cynical humour, all redolent of Billy Crudup’s Russell Hammond in Almost Famous. On top of this, he has a wonderful voice, melodic talent and stage presence to make Springsteen and indeed Jagger look like shrinking violets.

Now, re-read those musical reference points again: it’s no surprise that the Misty ‘character’ is, essentially, a distillation of all that made 1970s rock stardom what it was. That Tillman pirouettes and prances like Jagger, and assembled a huge stage band with the same attention to layered detail as Springsteen, feeds that brew. Throw in that voice - oh so similar to Elton John's in his 'classic' period (essentially, from Tumbleweed Connection and Madman Across The Water through to Captain Fantastic And The Brown Dirt Cowboy), and the strength of his deeply personal, cynical songwriting and you have a compelling live proposition.

And thus it proved to be. With three albums as Misty behind him, Tillman had 24 songs drawn from all three, opening up with the first four tracks in sequence from this year's brilliant Pure Comedy. Despite its title, it's an album of serious topics and thinking, taking broad, sweeping shots at the state of the world, from politics and religion to celebrity culture, subjects that Tillman has found outlets to comment on elsewhere, but in his stage delivery, actually fuel the intensity of it. Opening with Pure Comedy, and just Tillman and a piano, the song builds to the full might of what he, essentially, has on stage with him, a small orchestra, to play through Total Entertainment Forever, Things It Would Have Been Helpful To Know Before The Revolution and Ballad Of The Dying Man.

If his song titles are long, there is a paradox to it, since Tillman doesn't engage in a great deal of audience badinage (save for a few sharp retorts to noisy dickheads clearly experiencing alcohol for the first time, and one over-enthusiastic stage crasher removed by security - "I didn't know folk-rock could get you wild"). But that doesn't diminish his stage presence, with even the stage layout designed to create a wide aisle down which Misty could leap and twist and stretch when not at the microphone, like some crazed evangelical preacher (Tillman was raised in a strong, Pentecostal family on the outskirts of Washington DC), even falling his knees, James Brown-style, a couple of times. Together with a lot of strong backlighting and dry ice, very often Misty himself was, well, misty - obscured in silhouette. This may not have gone down well with the adoring female contingent in the audience, not that he would probably care that much, since the cult of celebrity is one of Tillman's many targets for barbs (along with music bloggers, so I'd better be careful...).

© Simon Poulter 2017

For all of Tillman's individual theatrics, this was a show somewhat devoid of it. A confetti burst after just the third song seemed oddly out of place - a finale stunt at best - and Tillman made a joke of it, though one would have thought that pyrotechnics would have been worked out at the time the stage show was being conceived. It was either an odd stunt, or an odd idea of when to bring levity to the show. On this basis, and Tillman's lyrics not withstanding, you could conclude that this was a excursion into muso humour. And while the show was [thankfully] light on rock and roll stuntery (save for Tillman tossing his guitar, somewhat riskily, to his guitar tech during a lively version of Nothing Good Ever Happens At The Goddamn Thirsty Crow) you couldn't help walking out having felt that you'd witnessed - or even experienced - a true spectacle. The Elton John/folk/rock/country reference points may provide a central guideline to what you expect from Father John Misty, but there is plenty of space for other things between the cracks and around the edges, such as the shuddering, pounding electronica-infused True Affection, as well as the singalong pop of I Love You, Honeybear, title track of Tillman's second Misty album.

From start to finish, via the ebb and flow of confessional lyric and solid country rock, this was a knowing presentation of an artist confident in his skin and confident of his own capabilities. Throughout, his voice remained magnificent, one of delightful purity. The former R. Dwight of Pinner might be one point of reference, but the tones of Jackson Browne or Niels Lofgren also come to mind.

As he reached the finale, with The Ideal Husband, it was impossible not to think that Tillman/Misty is well on his way to join the ranks of the other famed alumni of the Hammersmith 'Your Sponsor's Name Here' Odeon. If I had one reservation, it's that Tillman can come across as being somewhat aloof. But, then, isn't that how a proper rock star should be?

1971: the year it all began

Ask anyone who knows their Elvis C from their Elvis P and you will never reach any consensus on when pop music was at its most vibrant.

For every proponent of 1954 (the year Presley invented rock and roll by recording That's Alright Mama at Sun Studios), there will be another to champion 1964 (the year Beatlemania exploded in America). The Beatles also have a claim on 1966, the year they released Revolver, which included Tomorrow Never Knows, the track that for so many reasons probably changed the course of music more than any other.

Move on to 1977 and the arrival of punk, 1982 and Thriller, The Smiths' This Charming Man and New Order's Blue Monday a year later, Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit in '92, Britpop in '95 - I could go on, but we'll never, ever, reach any conclusion. But if there is one year which, simply because of the volume of milestone releases, is inescapably more significant than most others it's 1971.

Music journalist, Smash Hits co-founder and former Whistle Test presenter David Hepworth came to this conclusion four years ago when, having previously noted how much of an annus mirabilis (in his words) it had been, he compiled a 121-track Spotify playlist from the albums released that year (also published in this blog post).

It is likely that you and I will beg to differ on just how much these were landmark songs, or even whether those making were any bigger than anyone since, but when you look at the compilation - below - of albums released in 1971, it's inescapable that this year in particular witnessed momentum unlike any other in pop history.

• Led Zeppelin - IV
• David Bowie - Hunky Dory
• The Who - Who's Next
• Marvin Gaye - What's Going On
• T-Rex - Electric Warrior
• The Rolling Stones - Sticky Fingers
• Carole King - Tapestry
• Paul McCartney - Ram
• John Lennon - Imagine
• Elton John - Madman Across The Water
• Rod Stewart - Every Picture Tells A Story
• Faces - A Nod Is As Good As A Wink...To A Blind Horse
• The Doors - LA Woman
• Joni Mitchell - Blue
• Stevie Wonder - Where I'm Coming From
• Genesis - Nursery Cryme
• Pink Floyd - Meddle
• Jethro Tull - Aqualung
• Emerson, Lake & Palmer - Tarkus
• King Crimson - Islands
• Nick Drake - Bryter Later
• John Martyn - Bless The Weather
• James Taylor - Mud Slide Slim And The Blue Horizon
• Rory Gallagher - Rory Gallagher
• Humble Pie - Rockin' The Filmore
• ZZ Top - ZZ Top's First Album
• Yes - The Yes Album
• Earth, Wind & Fire - Earth, Wind & Fire
• Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young - 4 Way Street
• Don McLean - American Pie

I may have been four years old at the time (though I believe I was already in possession of my first album, Songs From Chigley And Trumpton), but almost half a century on, it would be hard not to regard Led Zeppelin IV as one of the most important rock albums of all time, or Hunky Dory as the album that created David Bowie, the songwriting from S to F of Who's Next, What's Going On's social commentary, McCartney and Lennon's solo albums breaking out of The Beatles' shadow, Carole King's landmark Tapestry (which she'll be performing in full this summer in London), and even Stevie Marriott and Pete Frampton defining the live album for years to come with Humble Pie's ear wax bothering Rockin' The Filmore.

In his excellent new book, 1971: Never A Dull Moment, Hepworth has returned to chronologically explore 12-months that bore “more influential albums than any year before or since”. From the outset, he states the case that 1971 wasn't just an extraordinary year for releases, but effectively the start of the rock era. Of course, it wasn't exactly Year Zero: rock had emerged when Chuck Berry cranked up his Gibson for the first time, and was then followed by The Beatles, the Stones, The Kinks, The Who, the Beach Boys and myriad others blurring and stretching the boundaries of pop and rock in the 60s. But Hepworth's argument - which is bang on the money - was that '71 established the longevity with which these artists would endure, in many cases long after their peak, and in some cases as we push on into the new millennium, long after they've left us.

Starting from New Year's Eve 1970, when Paul McCartney effectively wound up the Fabs, Hepworth writes that the next day would herald "the busiest, most creative, most innovative, most interesting and longest-resounding year of that era". To support his argument, he doesn't just trawl the albums and the stories behind them, but provides context, too - the political and economic environments of the early 1970s, the cultural emancipation that teenagers enjoyed in the 60s that endured into the 70s as owning records became as affordable a hobby as creating bubblegum cards had been in childhood.

There was, also, the attraction of the form itself - the gatefold sleeves, the Hipgnosis and Roger Dean artwork - but more importantly, the lack of other distractions which inhibits attention to the long-form recording today. In 1971, youths didn't have iPhones and iTunes, PlayStations or even their own TV sets. Immersing oneself in two sides of a 43-minute album (or four if it was a prog act's latest overblown double) was an escape from the grey skies and prevailing austerity outside if you were in Britain, or the horrors of being at war in Vietnam if you were American.

Even if, now, you might consider the 23 minutes of Echoes that consumed the entire second half of Floyd's Echoes, or the eight-minute duration of Zeppelin's Stairway To Heaven, grossly over-indulgent or patronisingly "of their time" on the part of the bands, it would be churlish in the extreme to dismiss their virtuosity, and that, Hepworth suggests, underpins the richness of what appeared in 1971. This was was the year, he asserts, that the rock era truly began. But it was also the year when pure creativity and raw talent, before many of these artists ascended into superstardom, and then descended into drug-addled mediocrity later in the decade.

Hepworth notes how this was a time when bands were able to do more or less what they wanted to, artistically, but they did so on the back of paying their dues. More or less every one of these landmark albums was a product of artists who performed relentlessly, using gigs in provincial ballrooms and university refectories to hone material before committing it to the studio, before going out on tour again with the new album and developing even more material for the next recording - which might even appear in the same year.

Old heads like me will have an inbuilt interest in Hepworth's tome, even though, at 48, I've clearly come to the releases of 1971 retrospectively. But as the owner of a good 90% of the albums listed above, I've come to them as modern classics, as vital to my cultural development as reading 1984, The Catcher In The Rye, On The Road or Hamlet.

I may have come to Bowie via Ashes To Ashes, but it proved to be essential to go back to the very beginning to see how he progressed from Hunky Dory through Ziggy and all the other guises to reach the 1980s. As a Beatle fan, I was compelled to find out what happened next, and with Lennon being tragically taken from us in 1980, listening to Imagine, released nine years before, became part of the mourning process. I was introduced to Genesis via Follow You, Follow Me, a love song, but was intrigued by Nursery Cryme and the frankly dark goings on in The Musical Box. You could even argue that with so many hip-hop artists sampling Bonzo's drums on When The Levee Breaks (recorded in a toilet at Headley Grange for its unique acoustics), 1971's tail has stretched long into the subsequent decades.

In 2011, on the 40th anniversary release of 1971's Aqualung by Jethro Tull, my friend and contemporary Steven Wilson - who had just remixed the album - told Classic Rock magazine that he thought that by '71 the record industry had finally recognised that rock music was an art form. "There seems to be something leading up to 1971," Wilson said, "which is when record labels started to get interested. That's usually when scenes start to die, but I think you can see 1971 as the zenith of creative expression for experimental music. The records were still very ambitious after that, but there's something about the spirit of '71 that was special."

In chronicling, month-by-month, the major albums released in 1971, Hepworth doesn't just present a giant coincidence, but perhaps by coincidence, the year's progress tells a story (as Hepworth relays) that began with The Beatles breaking up and ended with Don McClean's American Pie telling a tale of loss of innocence.

1971 was, then, a year of profound confluence, a year in which the album, itself, found its place as one of the most important artistic mediums, alongside books and cinema; in which the groundwork done by Pet Sounds and Sgt. Pepper created the album artist as a thing in its own right. It was the year in which the music business began tapping into rock music for the next decade or two, at least, as its great money spinner.

So, if you have any interest in what happened along the way, then you'll want to know what fired the starting gun. Hepworth expertly dusts the trigger for prints with 1971: Never A Dull Moment, compiling a fascinating, entertaining and revealing examination of rock music's genetic structure from the events of the year which, arguably, brought it all together.