UK Charts: 1972-1975

1972

1972's first crime against music is elevating The New Seekers' "I'd Like To Teach The World To Sing" to #1 in January, earning it what felt like a permanent place in the repertoire of every youth pastor with a battered acoustic guitar and a slightly terrifying amount of enthusiasm. I say that, maybe it was just my primary school where we were routinely terrorised with this thing, entire assembly halls made to belt it out in cultish unison.

Thing is, this was an advertising jingle, originally for apple pie but more famously for Coca-Cola. The Coca-Cola Company had used pop music as part of their sales strategy for most of the '60s, inviting various groups to record variations on 1963's slogan "Things Go Better With Coke", some of which were themselves recycled from other songs (compare Golden Earring's "Things Go Better" with their record from earlier in 1966, "That Day". Apparently this bit of environmentally conscious songwriting paid for a new tour van, up until a roadie crashed it.)

This is a record which stumbles about gracelessly in a lumpen, overwrought pastiche of Peter Paul & Mary, full of gratingly off-key harmonies coming in all over the place. I think the assemblies where we had to listen to it were genuinely crueller than that time when they crammed a whole school year into a tiny room and played us the video where a kid goes on fire because they touched an electricity pylon.

At least I enjoyed it when we did "Streets of London".

Reaching #4 in January '72 is Melanie's "Brand New Key", and if like me you saw the title without knowing any more and considered making a Wurzels joke then congratulations, because this is the song on which "The Combine Harvester" is based. I hate to say it, but I think the Wurzels did it better. At least you don't have to ask the awkward question of quite why this record sounds so much like Melanie doing an impression of Mungo Jerry.

'72 does at least have the decency to give us a smattering of vintage classics further into January, with America's "A Horse With No Name" at #3 with those heavy Crosby, Stills Nash & Young influences, Al Green's "Let's Stay Together" reaching #7 going into February, and bouncy Faces rocker "Stay With Me" making #6 that same month.

Greyhound have a fun and quite sweet reggae cover of "Moon River" at #12, although I feel this is crying out for a dub version. It just needs to be denser and heavier, you know?

But February '72 is all about a four-pack of massive hit singles, one of those moments like late 1968 where there's not enough Number One slots to go round for everyone.

First to the post at the beginning of February are T. Rex with "Telegram Sam". It's one of those records where the band absolutely nail their iconic sound: the beeping guitar, the wavering lyrics and barely intelligible verses, the fuzz-toned rhythm and lurching beat keeping it all together. Oddly, for all the brash '70s pomp, it's a very '60s single when it comes to the content: a big old word soup that's all about the group's favourite drug dealer.

Displacing it from that top slot two weeks later are Chicory Tip with "Son Of My Father". This one had a long gestation, started out in 1971 as a German-language song co-written by Giorgio Moroder, Michael Holm's "Nachts scheint die Sonne". Many of the elements are there in protozoic form, but it's Moroder's own English-language recording, "Son Of My Father" where the signature Moog lines slot into place.

Moroder's version crossed the attention of Roger Easterby, who thought, "you know what, if this was precisely 19.4 percent less weird it'd probably sell really well". Some persuasion later, and Chicory Tip were walking out of George Martin's studio with a version 22.3 percent less weird than Moroder's warbling and echo-laden recording. Eh, they got it close enough, it was still #1.

Really the difference here is as much down to Easterby and co-producer Des Champ, because it's all about the high-gloss sheen. And yet somehow they've done it while leaning into the weirdness, making that Moog really squelch. What we lose listening to this now is that was a brand new sound for a high-charting single; yes the Who might have had a synth on "Baba O'Riley" but that song was still built around good old fashioned guitar power chords. Take the synth lines out of "Son Of My Father" and all you're left with is three minutes consisting mostly of awkward silence.

It also got one of those endearingly crap music videos in which the band take a Minimoog to a seaside town I still failed to identify after about half an hour staring at photos of piers, and mime the song while members of the public walk awkwardly past doing their best not to pay any attention.

For some reason this record gets lumped in as part of the general labelling of '70s pop music as terrible, and I struggle to see why. It's interesting, innovative, has a bit of a story behind it and is good fun. I think someone was trying to pin the blame on the New Seekers and slipped.

This is the point at which 1972 runs out of space to give every enormous single a #1 slot, and so Don McLean's "American Pie" tops out at #2 around the beginning of March. It's astonishingly long and complex for something that sold so many copies, having to be split into two separate 4-minute plus parts to fit on a 45 rpm single. No B-sides here! It's not even a good split, just an arbitrary "may as well do it here" with one side fading out mid-chorus and the other crashing in equally in the middle of things. I guess there's not much choice when you're already out of space. Radio stations soon started playing the full eight and a half minutes off an LP copy, because any canny DJ knows an opportunity to sneak out for a wee when they see one.

Pinching that #1 in March was Nilsson's "Without You", one of those records I really have to be in the mood for. Right now I am, so I can tell you it's a soaring three minute wail of pain, a simplistic lyric given the kind of unsubtle but all-in treatment it needs to shine. Although you can probably spot from that assessment the seeds of what I think when I'm not in the mood for it.

This flurry manages to pass by the ever-unlucky Badfinger, "Day After Day" making a respectable #10 and sounding like one of the great lost Beatles records. Better than a great lost Beatles record, because it's enjoyable and not insufferably twee. This time it's George Harrison's turn to contribute, playing slide guitar and producing, although you might notice how much of a convincing Ringo impersonation Mike Gibbins pulls in places.

Michael Jackson made his solo debut in 1972, with "Got To Be There" going to #5 early in March. Listening to it, I keep wondering where the Bee Gees have gone, because other than the vocals this doesn't half feel like one of theirs. I'm trying to avoid clichés around the word "maturing" but there is a definite change between this and those late '60s Jacksons records; the difference between being good at this for a preteen and being just generally good at this.

The phrase "Paul Simon reggae single" has something unsettlingly implausible about it, so enjoy Paul Simon reggae single "Mother and Child Reunion" (#5 March '72). Maybe I'm overselling that, but it's heavily influenced by Desmond Dekker and was recorded in Jamaica with Jimmy Cliff's backing group. Compare this to andGarfunkel swansong "Bridge Over Troubled Water" and you can see that the man who wanted out had definitely found it.

I seem to have a whole bunch of #5s here, and I'd be doing my intro a disservice if I didn't track the concept of the terrible football anthem back through the years to the Chelsea Football Team's "Blue Is The Colour". Other than twenty or so years and a very different team, there's little separating this from "Come On You Reds". Same sort of jaunty tune and same easily-remembered lyrics, although the fading memories of 1971's UEFA cup victory might not compare to Manchester United's silverware-hogging early '90s performance.

Before I get any more dangerously close to actually knowing something about football, let's move on the the last March #5 on my list, Lindisfarne's "Meet Me On The Corner". This soft, folkish pop was very much in the mode of the early '70s, a style used to great effect in 1973's The Wicker Man film. Meanwhile back in 1972, the "Fog On The Tyne" album from which "Meet Me On The Corner" sprang topped the album charts, with earlier non-charting single "Lady Eleanor" being reissued and finding success this time round. (#3 June '72).

After all that, we're back at the New Seekers for late March #2 "Beg Steal Or Borrow", crashing in with the unwarranted enthusiasm of an RE teacher who wants you to really engage with the subject. Look, this one isn't so bad. There are some nice Harrison-esque guitar lines and the Seekers Nouveau seem more suited to doing this sort of bubblegummy pop than pretending to be a folk band. It was a Eurovision entry; perhaps we felt a bit embarrassed to admit to our European friends quite how bad things had got over on the other side of the sea. In said contest it made a pretty decent second, losing out to Luxembourg's entry "Après Toi". Which is the better record, if only in that excessively ornamented late '60s style.

At #3 going into April '72 we have Gilbert O'Sullivan's "Alone Again (Naturally)", another one of those records which gets unfairly caught up in the trashing of everything '70s for no greater sin than being a bit uncool. It's a lovely slice of soft pop rock with some surprisingly weighty lyrical themes. Also notable for being the record involved in Grand Upright Music vs. Warner Brothers, the court case which determined sampling without permission (in this case, repurposing bits of O'Sullivan for Biz Markie's "Alone Again") represented copyright infringement.

Now if we want to go all-in on a good old-fashioned kicking of '70s naffness, we should look down to #11 where The Partridge Family give us "It's One Of Those Nights". In a world of studio concoctions and TV tie-in bands, this was one of the most obnoxiously contrived: a sitcom about a family deciding to start a music career, full of celebrity guests and with singles from it crossing over to the real world in the well-tracked vein of the Monkees or, indeed, Archies.

Bizarrely, this was all based on a true story - that of the Cowsills, whose 1968 album "Captain Sad and His Ship of Fools" is a stalwart of bad album art compendiums everywhere, along with rather less musically successful family singing group The Shaggs, an outfit whose origin story involves a supposed psychic prediction and whose output brings to mind The Fugs having a really, really bad day. Now that would have made an interesting sitcom.

Indeed, the Cowsills themselves were considered to play the part of the Partridges, but by 1970 the siblings were too old and would need to be trained how to act anyway. Instead, the role of head child and lead singer Keith Partridge went to David Cassidy, a role he would grow to hate for how much it dominated his life.

Musically the series followed the standard and well-established template where you get an established producer (in this case Wes Farrell, who by coincidence had produced several Cowsills records) and invite along a bunch of the Wrecking Crew to help put things together. As a result "It's One Of Those Nights" is competent, although the hard work in the studio can't escape that it's still a pretty bland record, no matter how well you record it and how many perfect little accents you add around the edges.

Look, I'm not going to be giving much of a kicking, but we're a long way from surpassing "Sugar, Sugar" here.

A moment of quiet respect for "Too Beautiful To Last", Engelbert Humperdinck's last visit to the Top 40 in his original run, peaking at #14. It's from an album that featured largely contemporary covers, including "Day After Day" and "Without You", but it's far from the man at his imperial best. As I say, a moment of quiet respect for the final bow of one of our regulars. That "Ten Guitars" wasn't all that bad really, was it?

Olivia Newton-John put out yet another unexpectedly faithful George Harrison cover with April #16 "What Is Life", although I mostly mention this because I'm not going to pass up an opportunity to mention the best songwriter the Beatles never properly appreciated. Perhaps a more worthy mention would be Neil Young at #10 with "Heart Of Gold", which I nearly credited as "Heart Of Golf" because apparently listen to enough terrible early '70s records and I lose the ability to type.

I say that, but other than the New Seekers Incident back in January, 1972 hasn't treated us particularly badly yet. Even the discovery of a bagpipe-centric cover of "Amazing Grace" by the Pipes And Drums And The Military Band Of The Royal Scots Dragoon Guard jumping almost straight to #1 within a couple of weeks in April '72 is hard to find true fault with, given it does no more or less than what it says on the tin. "Amazing Grace" was a popular hymn through the early '70s, I can't rage at people just for loving themselves some bagpipes. Although the additional presence of a military band on this record did result in someone being summoned to Edinburgh for the crime of "demeaning the pipes". I approve of this. All of you who bought a copy of "Grandad" around 1971, I summon you to Edinburgh for demeaning well, basically everything.

Taking the #2 spot below it at the end of April was Ringo Starr's "Back Off Boogaloo", an attempt to something a bit T. Rex-y which is notable for sounding almost nothing of the sort, and more reminiscent in retrospect of that kind of big rhythm and blues band thing Jools Holland liked doing in the early 2000s. George Harrison is present for a bit of tidying up and production duties, although uncredited.

Elvis had a #5 with an old Buffy Sainte-Marie song, "Until It's Time For You To Go". It's a bit soporific, and does feel a little bit like what you'd get if you asked an AI to reimagine something "in the style of Elvis Presley". I guess what I'm saying is this is far from essential, especially when you consider Buffy's 1965 original comes with the excellent "The Flower And The Apple Tree" on the flip side. Also, that you probably shouldn't look too closely at the fingers, they always come out wrong with these things.

Tom Jones! "The Young New Mexican Puppeteer" hit #6 on the way out of April '72. I'm not sure what's going on here but I have the feeling Tom's not been able to get to the shops before they closed, looked in the fridge, and realised all that's left are mariachi horns, offcuts from Disney's "Pinocchio", some deranged nonsense about puppets and two thirds of the ingredients for a decent civil rights anthem. He still gives it his all, because I'm not sure the man is capable of doing anything less.

You know how I mentioned Vicky Leandros' "Après Toi" was a deserving Eurovision winner? Well, it turned out the British public thought the same, because they propelled anglicised version "Come What May" to #2 in, well, May. Having mentioned Tom Jones!, this one got a bit of a jump up in intensity to go along with its new set of English lyrics. Both versions don't half remind me of "Don't Cry For Me Argentina", though.

Choir-assisted country romp "A Thing Called Love" gave Johnny Cash a #4 the same month, and my is this ever a fun record. You never really associate Cash with a sense of humour, but once you start looking for it you find it all over the place even without counting the between-songs banter of the live records.

1972 is the point where after many, many years of paying dues and taking session gigs it finally starts coming good for Elton John. "Rocket Man" hits #2 in June, album "Honky Château" sells about a zillion copies and the train didn't look like running out of steam until the end of the decade was looming. Ever noticed the synthesiser on this? It's a lot more obvious when you listen to it amongst a bunch of records which, Moroder and Chicory Tip aside, have no such thing.

'72 is also the year of the Rolling Stone's drugged-up, ramshackle double album "Exile On Main St.", arguably the last great Stones album because if I call it here there's definitely going to be an argument. "Tumbling Dice" is the advance single, reaching #5 in May and giving a good insight into the loose, freewheeling and occasionally straight up can't-be-bothered nature of those two LPs. And I say last great album, but part of me wants to rescind that title and give it to "Sticky Fingers", because the slide into excess and eventual dullness clearly starts now at this here heroin party.

There's another football song lurking down at #10 in the shape of "Leeds United", but this is a genre which sticks pretty strongly to one theme and I'm rapidly losing the desire to dwell on every instance of it, given I'd probably rather not remind everyone of that week or so in 1994 I liked "Come On You Reds".

If I'm looking further down the charts around the end of April it's for the 1972 re-release of "A Whiter Shade of Pale", peaking at #13 in June. This is another one of those three-track bundle deals, disposing of the original's B-side "Lime Street Blues" and replacing it with "A Salty Dog" followed by 1968's "Homburg", a track which I used to listen to a lot in the late '90s because it reminded me of a girl I fancied at the time. Don't know why. She didn't wear a hat and her overcoat was, as far as I could ascertain, the correct length.

Let's get out of here and look at #1s, because two of them enter the Top 40 for their first time on the week ending 13th May 1972. A week later T. Rex have taken their entry to the top. "Metal Guru" is a record where I must have spent about 20 years mishearing the lyrics and now I listen to it again I can't even figure out what it was I misheard it as. I guess my headphone budget is higher these days.

Our other #1 didn't get there until 11th June, Don McLean's "Vincent". It's a folky, acoustic biography of Vincent Van Gogh as told through a description of the artist's "The Starry Night". I feel a pang of regret that in the '90s we only knew McLean for "American Pie", and even then only because he said "Chevy" and American trucks were cool to us kids. This is lovely. I'm consistently surprised by 1972. With the New Seekers Incident beginning the year I was expecting to spend most of the year with my head in my hands and instead I'm coming away with a list of things for further investigation. I fear this will end soon.

Clouds are indeed beginning to gather. The Move, responsible four years ago for one of my favourite B-sides of all time, are mining '50s rock'n'roll via Mungo Jerry for "California Man", #7 in June. It's not entirely unlikable, and you can hear nascent strains of the sound Roy Wood would develop with Wizzard, particularly the parpy sax which constantly dances around proceedings. It gets better as it goes on, although by three and a half minutes I'm starting to be worn down by the obnoxious, "look at us, aren't we having a great time" nature of proceedings.

I have a realisation I've never listened to a Chicory Tip song that isn't "Son Of My Father" and am slightly dreading it, so let me say with relief that June #13 "What's Your Name" is a lot of fun. It's full of those pleasing early synth sounds with a satisfying amount of squelch and a solo that starts making me think the Cybermen have just appeared on screen. I'm not saying this is an enduring musical statement but it's one hell of a pop record.

Michael Jackson is singing "Rockin' Robin", and he shouldn't. This is horrible. All of the progress we've made with not sounding like the aftermath of too much Pic'n'Mix and eschewing the trappings of novelty is gone. "Rockin' Robin" is "Got To Be There"'s painting in the attic.

We haven't heard from Paul McCartney in a while, mostly because he's been busy with Linda recording "Ram", darling of many a greatest albums ever list but not one to trouble the singles charts with highest performer "The Back Seat Of My Car" spending a single week at #39.

Off the back of that he formed Wings, or Paul McCartney and Wings as they were billed on all but the first few singles and some side projects under different names. I skipped over first single "Give Ireland Back To The Irish" (#16 March '72), because I'm not sure how to cover what is 50% bona fide banned-from-the-BBC protest song and 50% the worst excesses of McCartney, with some truly excruciating lyrics between the more serious bits.

But this is Paul, and he's not going to give me a break. If I skip over "Mary Had A Little Lamb" (#9 June '72) then I'm missing quite a lot of the beginnings of one of the big bands of the '70s, so let's accept this is the World's Most Infuriatingly Twee Songwriter making an earnest attempt at writing a children's song and adjust our expectations accordingly. And yes, it's sappy, inconsequential nonsense. There's a lot of retrospective attempts to pin negative reviews in the early '70s on "anti-McCartney sentiment in the press" as a supposed result on his calling time on the Beatles, but on the evidence here I think this negativity was justified. Perhaps it's a good thing the Beatles existed only as a legal concept in 1972, because if they'd put out something like this with George Harrison still limited to two songs per album maximum I don't think I'd have been able to accept it.

Roberta Flack's cover of "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" is a surprisingly late chart in the UK (#14 July '72), given much of its fame came from use in Clint Eastwood's directorial debut "Play Misty For Me" late in 1971. Even allowing for the fact this was long before synchronised global releases and the film didn't hit UK cinemas until January 1972, that's a bit of a gap to get a single in the charts. It's worth the wait, though - soft and smoky, the kind of thing I'd love to be playing in a quiet cocktail bar before it gets busy.

Heading to quite the opposite end of the dynamic spectrum, Slade have their first properly Slade #1 with "Take Me Bak 'Ome", prototypically simple rock labelled with even simpler spelling. This is absolutely distilled '70s, plain old meat and potatoes rock with none of those pretentious flavourings.

At #2 in July '72 is another '70s cliché, disgraced paedophile Gary Glitter. Real name Paul Gadd, he'd tried performing as Paul Raven before taking on the stage persona of Gary Glitter the next decade, complete with Elvis jackets, exposed chest and a hairstyle that by 1974 is most accurately described as "flammable". Sadly there were no Arthur Brown-style self-immolation incidents and instead we had to wait for history's most infamous visit to the PC World service desk for the truth about Glitter to start emerging, something which would not fully happen and see him properly brought to justice until well into the 2010s.

"Rock 'n' Roll (Parts 1 and 2)" is, on average, a big slab of meh. Part 1 is a sort of '70s-themed auditory wallpaper, trite lyrics about the most banal elements of rock'n'roll history with a chorus consisting of the title shouted over and over. Part 2 is somewhat more interesting, which is unexpected as it's just the instrumental bits of Part 1 with the occasional "hey", but even so there's a reason its main reputation these days is from people sampling it as a joke. While it may have seen some service as a walk-on song for sports teams, it has long since been retired from that duty thanks to its inseparability from the man who recorded it. Also, c'mon people, there are better records.

Donny Osmond's "Puppy Love" (#1 July '72) is not one of them. This was a low bar, and we've gone clattering into it and stumbled away with one of those expressions Frank Spencer used to make to the sounds of excessive studio laughter. Up to this point the Osmonds had been a problem largely confined to the United States, a sort of overnumerous teenage barbershop quartet who became a part of the Andy Williams show but saw little success as recording artists despite a well-received tour of Sweden in the mid '60s.

By the '70s they'd decided the variety-show image was the thing holding back that recording career and shaken it off in favour of becoming a pure pop act. They had a reputation for professionalism which helped unlock recording contracts, and working with producer Rick Hall the hits started coming on the other side of the Atlantic throughout 1971.

Over here though, it was youngest of the original performing siblings Donny Osmond who brought the family to the charts. "Puppy Love" was by that point nearly as old as the then 14-year-old Donny, written in 1960 by Paul Anka. I feel like saying it should have stayed in 1960, but what's going on here isn't really the song's fault. The backing track is typical studio-confected bubblegum, if a little emotionless, but Osmond's vocal reminds me why "professionalism" is the compliment showbusiness only uses when it genuinely can't think of anything else nice to say. It's overdone. I mean, really overdone. On a technical level he hits every inflection asked for, but does so by whanging into it with the elegance of an untethered trampoline during a storm. Listening to it is three minutes of gritting your teeth hoping it doesn't go near anything valuable.

Thankfully, The Sweet are here to save us with "Little Willy" (#4 June '72). It's not even a particularly great record, but at least it's a bit of fun. Which is kind of what you hope for from The Sweet - not the last word in musical sophistication, but at least you'll have a laugh. Writing partnership Nicky Chinn and Mike Chapman knew what they were aiming at.

Unfortunately 1972 has suddenly found a theme and it's going to mine it, underlining the point by having another New Seekers Incident in the shape of "Circles" (#4 July '72). In fairness this is relatively inoffensive, give or take the kind of simplistic philosophical statement you can just imagine being shared on Facebook in the form of a badly-drawn cartoon by someone who thought it was really, y'know, deep. Elton John did it better on the Lion King soundtrack.

Elvis hit #8 in that last week of June with "An American Trilogy", which most people of my age and musical heritage will know best in Lancashire pottery. (Have fun with that reference!) This, people and enablers of Osmonds, is how you do sappy. Because it may be empty, it may be cliché, it may crash suddenly into one of the most unjustifiable and out-of-nowhere grand crescendos of pop history, but this is absolute gaudy joy and glamour from people who knew how to keep it under control even if it's clearly up on two wheels for some of those sharper corners. I think I even detect that really farty trumpet from "The Wonder Of You".

Stepping carefully over inconsequential "Ooh-Wakka-Doo-Wakka-Day" nonsense from Gilbert O'Sullivan and a reissue of 10-year-old instrumental "Nut Rocker", we come to another one of those absolutely beautiful 1972 songs, "Sylvia's Mother" from Dr Hook And The Medicine Show (#2 July '72). Shel Silverstein wrote it, and the kind of storytelling that kept "A Boy Named Sue" going works to great effect when placed in a more serious and maudlin context.

Entering the Top 40 the same week and going to #5 is ever-enduring Johnny Nash number, "I Can See Clearly Now". The synths have started to get their electronic tendrils into the charts, with this full of sawtooth waves and electronic squelches.

Of course it's still the early '70s and we have the Partridge Family covering Neil Sedaka classic, "Breaking Up Is Hard To Do" (#3 August '72). And it is okay. I know these records have the most commercial and inauspicious of origins, but they were designed to sell and part of that was doing a decent job in the studio. Look, I've suffered through enough Mungo Jerry to appreciate someone achieving at least the basic criteria of listenability.

Besides, I'm in a positive mood because I'm looking at what displaced it from #3 the following week: Hawkwind's "Silver Machine", one single movable chord of space rock taken from a live performance with a bit of re-recording and a record achieving the unexpected feat of being both bizarre and straightforward at the same time.

Hawkwind (originally Hawkwind Zoo for a brief few months) were at this point a mere two and a bit years into a career that has lasted to the present day, give or take a few arguments over who owns precisely what band name. As with many long-lived bands, this is best viewed as a revolving ensemble of whoever Dave Brock hasn't fallen out with yet, but in 1972 they had one of the classic line-ups. Barney Bubbles doing design. Robert Calvert writing supplementary materials and the occasional lyric. Dik Mik and Del Dettmar both contributing their own weird and frequently disconnected electronic sounds from homemade synths. Nik Turner's distorted sax. Fantasy author Michael Moorcock turning up to provide themes and ideas. A frequently-naked dancer called Stacia. And a guy called Lemmy Kilminster on bass.

If so many of those roles seem tangential to the task of creating music and putting it on a record, it's because Hawkwind were not so much a band as a psychedelic experience, the type of thing The Pink Floyd aimed at when they still had a definite article. This perhaps peaked with the Space Ritual, a live show and double LP full of lighting effects, spoken word poetry and much on-stage weirdness, but Hawkwind always seemed to be about more than the music, whether it was including booklets purporting to be logs from far-future space missions or packaging an LP in a gatefold sleeve that opens up to a gigantic cardboard shield that says "chaos" on it.

Also copious quantities of recreational narcotics, right from the early days of playing on double-billed shows with fellow West London band the Pink Fairies.

While they may have been reduced to a one-word joke by the 1980s, demonstrated aptly by the opening credits to "The Young Ones", I found myself discovering Hawkwind's back catalogue toward the end of this 20 year career nadir - appropriately enough, given that TV show, as a university student. I think at the time I was looking for impenetrable music, music that said "don't touch me". I got into a lot of late '70s punk at about the same time.

Which is what makes "Silver Machine" an oddity, because while it's clearly of the school of thought which brought us relentless 4/4 signatures repeated until they can underpin 9 minutes of dense electronic fog, it's still accessible. If you're not paying attention you could almost mistake it for glam rock. I once got away with playing it as an end-of-set victory lap for a music society whose most important founding rule was "No Hawkwind", because it turned out that while they were very much against Hawkwind they didn't have any idea what it was or how to identify it.

For the number of good records he'd made since 1969's "David Bowie" ("The Man Who Sold The World", "Hunky Dory"), David Bowie had released only one single, "Changes", and that had been a flop. Even "Starman" only made #10 in July '72. Things would change, but not with anything from "The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars". In fact until 1974 "Starman" was the only single released from the album. And yet this does make some sense, because if you're going to pick the classic run of Bowie albums it's between these three at the start of the decade and the so-called "Berlin trilogy" at the end of it. For me there's no contest; '70-'72 is more consistent, more enjoyable, and ends with perhaps his definitive work. Plus they are album albums, working together as one unified whole, whereas I always feel the Berlin ones are distorted by the gravity of their singles pulling light away from the more experimental pieces.

I have an awful sense of foreboding about a record by a band called "Terry Dactyl and The Dinosaurs" and August #2 "Sea Side Shuffle" confirms my fears; a novelty version of "In The Summertime" that namechecks towns along the A23 and relates a bunch of dull anecdotes about being by the seaside. I'll grudgingly admit it's an improvement on the original but in the same way stepping in a muddy puddle is an improvement on stepping on a dog egg. Also all that jaunty accordion makes it sound like a game soundtrack. (Specifically, The Sims: Unleashed from 2002).

Still, there's a lot of good stuff to distract us. My underdog pick is Chairmen of the Board's "Working On A Building Of Love" (#20 August '72), one of those great upbeat soul records. It's only a footnote compared to Faron Young's "It's Four In The Morning", spending 19 weeks in the Top 40 and reaching #3 in September. We might not have bought that much country music in the UK, but when we saw a record we liked we went for it.

There are much better-known records entering the charts along with these, though. August sees Alice Cooper's "School's Out" at #1, kicking off 50 years of lazy soundtrack choices to signify the end of term or, for the slightly more ambitious, the destruction of an educational facility. It's a conscious attempt to bottle the end-of-term feeling, that point where even though you'll be back six weeks later in September it does truly feel like school is out forever.

At #5 though, we have the most direct statement yet that the synthesiser has arrived. I said that Chicory Tip would have some awkward silences if you cut the electrics, but take the Moog out of Hot Butter's "Popcorn" and all you've got is two and a half minutes of someone banging a tambourine.

Thing is, this isn't so much innovation as being in the right place for the synthesiser's time to have come. While the most famous version, this instrumental originated in 1969 with Gershon Kingsley's album-only "Pop Corn". Kingsley, incidentally, having worked with other 1969 synth pioneer Buffy Sainte-Marie in the mid-'60s on more conventional orchestral arrangements. I love the original. It's got that sense of weirdness and going on a journey that made so many early electronic records great. The weird rubbery sounds and the points at which instruments or recording equipment noticeably misbehave give it a more organic, living feel.

But the commercialisation of this weird stab into the unknown isn't Hot Butter's either. Kingsley recorded another version in 1972 with the First Moog Quartet, now titled as the single word "Popcorn". It's now recognisably the standard version, with the same tempo and oscillating rhythm line, but still beautifully weird. Where the 1969 version is alien and otherworldly, the 1972 is mechanical and sharp-edged, a soundtrack for bustling computers and rattling teletypes in the gleaming cities of a future now past. Also, still album-only.

So, y'know, we should give Hot Butter some credit for having the commercial nous to realise there's a pop single lurking in there, that if you make it more straightforward and less of a deliberate technical exercise then it will no longer be the exclusive domain of people with interesting beards. And thus did "Popcorn" become this utter phenomenon, with approximately 7 billion versions recorded since and instant recognisability assured until the end of time itself, i.e. the point at which the last note of "Hey Jude" is finally played. I first heard it on a 1983 PC game called "Digger". How's that for staying power?

More great news in that the Brothers Gibb are back Beeing and Geeing in the UK charts, with "Run To Me" hitting #9 in August '72. It took a while, given they'd reformed in 1970 with a promise to never split again, but this is a solid slice of quality. Even I will admit it comes across a little dated in the brave new synthy and glammy world of the early '70s, feeling almost like a late '60s track in places, but who cares when they've done it so nicely? All vocal harmonies, counterpoints and string accents.

Perhaps one reason why The Move went out on a low is their last few recordings were done to raise money for something Roy Wood and Jeff Lynne were far more interested in: their Electric Light Orchestra project. This would first bear fruit in the singles charts with early recording "10538 Overture", taking the #9 spot from the Bee Gees at the end of August. However, things weren't going as smoothly as the Gibbs with their new-found never-split-again harmony; Wood swiftly got fed up with bad live sound mixes and poor management and left the new band to form Wizzard, leaving Lynne in charge.

At #7 in that same late-August chart is wife-stealing anthem "Layla" by Derek & The Dominos, a thinly-disguised Eric Clapton pseudonym for a band he'd formed with some of the Friends from Delaney & Bonnie. The single had originally been released in 1971 in its short version, but it turned out what buyers really wanted was an extra four minutes of piano-accompanied noodling, compressing so much on one side of a 45 rpm single the audio quality on original copies noticeably suffers. And let's be honest, the public are correct here. The second bit really is the best bit, because it's soft, calming, and most importantly Eric finally shuts up and just plays guitar for a bit.

Displacing Alice Cooper from #1 at the end of August into September is Rod Stewart with "You Wear It Well", which recycles "Maggie May" in a way which manages to sound approximately 50% more like a Faces record. It's okay, but very clearly the same record done again slightly less well.

Let's look a week further on in September and down to the #3 slot, though. Because 1972 is giving us yet another one of those all time great classic records, the one David Bowie wrote and spend the rest of his career regretting giving away: Mott The Hoople's "All The Young Dudes". If "The Young Ones" was Suede's "Trash" for 1962, this is the same thing applied ten years later to an uncertain and confused early '70s, a youth responding to the "Five Years" Ziggy Stardust told us we had left. Bowie produced, and you can hear his influence running all the way through it.

1.1-hit wonders (they did have a later single week at #36) Blackfoot Sue joined the glam rock bandwagon with September #4 "Standing In The Road". The heavy, hard-rocking sound is here to stay, with Slade notching up another #1 the same month with "Mama Weer All Crazee Now", the band catapulted so quickly into superstardom that Noddy Holder would later claim the most accurate depiction of that crazy year were those Reeves and Mortimer sketches where they all sat around their living room in Walsall arguing over whose turn it was to make the Cup-A-Soups.

Another one on the heavy side is Roxy Music's chart debut, "Virginia Plain" (#4 September '72). It's a genuine surprise to me how many Greatest Records Of All Time we're getting in this short space of time in a year I expected to be rubbish. I kind of dimly knew they came from some point in the '70s, but didn't expect them to be so closely-spaced or so consistently successful.

There's still some reggae floating around in these charts too. Admittedly one is a bit of a novelty artist. Judge Dread may have been white and English, but was on a bona-fide Trojan Records contract and had hits in Jamaica. "Big Six" (#11 October '72) was an answer record to Prince Buster's "Big 5", and being the '70s this is also, with some inevitability, saucy comedy. Well, possibly a bit more straight-up lewd; the BBC seemed to take a special delight in banning as many Judge Dread records as they could.

At least Trojan label-mate Dandy Livingstone's cover of "Suzanne Beware Of The Devil" (#14 October '72) is firmly not in the novelty camp, being a straight-up great record with a lot of enjoyable bounce to it.

Sadly this run of quality is about to be broken, no matter how much I point at alternately moody and celebratory September #2 from T. Rex, "Children Of The Revolution". The villains are back, and in greater numbers.

Specifically, #1. David Cassidy takes this at the end of September with "How Can I Be Sure". I may have found the previous couple of Partridge Family records inoffensive, but my word this one's overwrought. It mashes together the kind of bits that you'd imagine going into a Tom Jones! record, but without any real conviction and in the process revealing just how much those things rely on Treforest's loudest son for structural support.

Then at #5 in the same week we have Donny Osmond with "Too Young", a graceless anthem for teenyboppers who probably really are too young. As before Osmond's vocal careens around treating the key moments of the song like a pinball table, one which tries to rescue itself with a big drum hit 2:30 in only for the "TILT" light to come on. Instrumentally I suppose it's technically without flaw, but I can feel my teeth rotting as I listen to it.

Gary Glitter jumps on the "nearly the same record again" roundabout for "I Didn't Know I Loved You ('Till I Saw You Rock And Roll)", #4 in October '72 despite suffering from the same utter banality of lyrics and lack of ideas for anything to do as "Rock And Roll (Parts Whatever And Who Cares)", which is no surprise because structurally it's mostly the same record. Horrible man, horrible music.

We're really into the '70s I expected here - Bread are over there doing something worthy but dull, the Carpenters are over here being boring, and I'm fairly sure I saw Cliff Richard skulking around the lower reaches of the chart asking if anybody wanted some Facebook-tier platitudes set to a musical accompaniment even the Shaggs consistently achieved better than, despite having no clue what they were doing.

Yet of all the records here in this little September/October pit of despair it's the ridiculous novelty record I don't have any beef with. And I'm not using The Sweet's smile-raising "Wig-Wam Bam" (#4 October '72) as an obvious get-out to make this statement, because it's not a novelty record. It's a Sweet record.

No, for in amongst these teeny-boppers and greasy rotters are the remains of Stavely Makepeace, better known as Lieutenant Pigeon. "Mouldy Old Dough", #1 in October '72 and the starring number on a one-track playlist I once made called "Lieutenant Pigeon's Greatest Hit". (A lie because they did, improbably, have more than one).

How do I make the case for this grumbled oddity, recorded in the front room of a semi-detached house in Coventry, presumably to the consternation of the neighbours? I could aim for the get-out clause of nostalgia for a wasted youth spent watching banger racing at the weekend, but we always went to bangers at the old Wimbledon Greyhound Stadium which was notable for being one of the few not to play "Mouldy Old Dough" during races. (Instead, they played "A Swingin' Safari" before the start, which let me tell you takes on some odd tones when reproduced through a stadium PA that hasn't been serviced since, well, "A Swingin' Safari" first came out).

I think really it's no more than that. "Mouldy Old Dough" as this massive #1 selling nearly 800,000 copies in the UK is an oddity. It's an almost deliberately bad record by a band who treated their Top of the Pops appearance as an opportunity to dress as witches and pirates and bring a big rubber pigeon to decorate the stage. An appearance for which they replaced one of the lyrics with a quite aggressively drawled "dirty old man" and accidentally used the F-word on television. I like to imagine it's because Gary Glitter was present. (Or that other person whose long and undesirable association with Top of the Pops prevents much of this vintage '70s footage from being usable today). Well. The swearing was down to band members pulling each other's hats over their eyes because, and I think this is what I like about this record, no-one was taking anything here in the slightest bit seriously.

Perhaps this is what leads to someone like Jarvis Cocker claiming it as a desert island disc. (He also had quite a bit of time for "Ten Guitars", as I recall.)

I have a harder time figuring out what to make of 10cc's deliberate parody record "Donna", which hews awfully close to reproducing all the worst elements of the things it's poking fun without then making you laugh about them. It seems they timed it well for the public's sudden desire for oddness though, going to #2 in October. Even a reissue of bizarre motorcycle-revving 1964 death disc "Leader Of The Pack" went to #3 in November.

Still, things are looking up, with Bowie's poppy "John I'm Only Dancing" hitting #12 in October. Peter Skellern's "You're A Lady" is a decent easy listening #3 from October '72, even if the lyrics do read like the stumblingly awkward way I'd fail to ask a girl out when I was about 15.

Perhaps I should have taken lessons from Elvis. You kinda feel that would have been one smouldering look and an "uh-huh?", although possibly a little tragic and worn-out by the '70s. As is "Burning Love" (#7 October '72), Elvis making what sounds like an attempt at replicating the more conventional end of '70s pop. It's a decent enough job, but there's no end of people who can do this sort of thing. C'mon Presley, wheel out your farty trumpet and implausibly top-heavy arrangements, you know it's what I'm here for.

Alice Cooper is back in the charts for October, with "Elected" going to #4 by the end of the month. It's a cynical rock single about a candidate who thinks they should be elected because they're rich and cool, even though they don't really care about solving anything for anyone. Prescient.

Johnny Nash's "There Are More Questions Than Answers" is a sweet, lilting #9 from the same month. It's got all these lovely reggae notes and then suddenly, out of nowhere, comes country-tinged pedal steel guitar. It makes an unexpectedly pleasant combination.

Gilbert O'Sullivan's "Clair" is a huge #1 from November '72, although it sounds an awful lot like I imagine a Donny Osmond record would sound if he wasn't weaving haphazardly down the street clattering into the bins with the vocal performance. This sort of sappy nonsense isn't exclusive to the '70s but it seems particularly light and devoid of heft here.

While big-selling it didn't spend long at #1, being displaced after a couple of weeks by horrible Chuck Berry novelty song "My Ding-A-Ling". This is the third saucy comedy record I've had to listen to in the process of documenting this decade and they are getting rapidly worse. At least "Ernie" had some charm to it. Mary Whitehouse attempted to get this one banned, one of the few times I find myself agreeing with her, although probably for different reasons.

At #4 is Jonathan King with another one of his more unpleasant pseudonymous novelty records, "Loop Di Love", this time under the name of Shag. It's a port of a German schlager pop number, that sneerily mocks the throaty performances of schlager artists like Heino, he of many an Internet parade of bad album covers. (Perhaps unfairly, given the awkward expressions and later habit of wearing dark sunglasses are down to a genuine medical condition of exophthalmos.)

A brief respite for late October entry and December '72 #12 "Lay Down", an unlikely tilt at progressive-tinged glam rock from Strawbs, a band who had not up to this point been anywhere near so deliberately commercial. I love this. The little bit of added complexity in a style of rock that had become very meat'n'taters by late '72 elevates it.

Sadly this is a brief respite, for Osmond Mania is about to strike and from this point we're not going to be able to escape one or other of the little blighters having something somewhere in the chart. First of these is ensemble effort "Crazy Horses" (#2 November '72), an inexplicable effort to turn the wholesome bubblegum pop band into something more akin to Black Sabbath. It's weird, unsettling, but also far from unlistenable. The horse-neighing sound effect is a bit overdone but this is a surprisingly solid attempt at early '70s hard rock complete with scuzzy guitar solo.

At #3 going into December is Donny Osmond with "Why". Evidently the family had done some sort of market segmentation exercise, because this is more soft bubblegum pop carefully concocted not to startle anyone, no matter how timid. Donny seems to have finally calmed down a bit, and while I'm not saying this is a good record at least you're not worrying where the vocal's going to go next.

There's more to come but for now Elton John is back with deliberately superficial but still enjoyable "Crocodile Rock" (#5 November '72). This, if you're listening Mr Gadd, is how you do a rock'n'roll retrospective. A fun story, a few synths, some bouncy rhythm and a little bit of romance. Not just bashing on a drum and shouting, "Rock'n'roll. It existed." for three minutes.

Blue Mink's "Stay With Me" (#11 December '72) is just as nowhere-going as "Melting Pot", and Jackson 5 outing "Lookin' Through The Windows" is a shop display full of gimmickry and little else.

Rod Stewart's doing alright, though, with a double A-side going to #4 in December. One of those sides is "Angel", a gravelly cover of a decent Jimi Hendrix record. It's a bit more unpretentious in this edition, kind of like Hendrix as rendered by the now medium-sized Faces, but tolerates that treatment well. Flip it over and you've got country cover "What's Made Milwaukee Famous (Has Made A Loser Out Of Me)". I'm putting this one out here, whatever may happen later, early '70s Rod Stewart is some good stuff. Plus he likes model railways, so he can't be all bad.

Slade are merrily Slading along with "Gudbuy T'Jane", a song title so questionably spelled I'm not sure if it's talking about a farewell or a bargain. I know it's a simple formula, but even by those standards it feels a little bit Slade-by-numbers, doing little more than retreading "Mama Weer All Crazee Now" with less interesting lyrics. Still, enough for a #2 in December.

Michael Jackson makes up for that rather flimsy Jackson 5 record with "Ben" (#7 December '72). It's not one of the greats, but we're getting to the point where we've almost shaken out all of that ear-piercing "child performer" jerkiness and are starting to produce pop singles which stand in their own right. Almost. Which is to say, some of it still does exist.

I mentioned David Cassidy's distaste for how much the Partridge Family came to dominate his life, and "Rock Me Baby" (#11 December '72) from the album of the same name is his first obvious attempt to move beyond that teenybopping, "whatever they ask me to sing I sing it" image. It's not all that bad, although I find it more interesting as an illustration of how many things in 1972 are converging around various tough, no-nonsense forms of rock. The Osmonds have a hard rock album, Jonathan King's writing novelty records in the form, David Cassidy's doing pub rock, Rod Stewart is simplifying Hendrix and of course the run of chart success everyone's envious of is Slade, with song titles that glorify the simplistic dumbness of the songs themselves.

Still, there's room for some oddness, with Gladys Knight and The Pips producing a slowed-down, near spoken word cover of Kris Kristofferson's classic down-and-out romance "Help Me Make It Through The Night". It spent 15 weeks in the Top 40, peaking at #11 in January '73.

But this is the Time Of Osmonds, and the time for the worst of them: Little Jimmy Osmond with "Long Haired Lover From Liverpool", an unjustifiable December '72 #1 with 22 regrettable weeks in the Top 40. Other than sounding oddly like the Leisure Suit Larry theme, possibly the closest this record gets to a redeeming feature, this is everything you could think of to make a record unlistenable without going too far the other way and making it interesting. A shrill, voice-cracking performance from the 9 year old Jimmy, the musical structure of a particularly bad New Seekers record and obnoxiously plinky banjo or ukelele. I'd try to figure out which, but I have no desire to listen to any more of this.

Thankfully a brace of decent records enter the Top 40 the following week. T. Rex have "Solid Gold Easy Action" (#2 January '73), an energetic workout that's perhaps a little too energetic for my tastes, although the chorus redeems it.

No such criticism for Bowie's "The Jean Genie" (also #2 in January '73), another notch on the post for solid unpretentious rock. While Bowie's sound had been heavy and rock-focused since 1970, this was the point at which he really started to engage with classic rock'n'roll structures, both for originals on the "Aladdin Sane" album and a developing fascination with cover versions, which would provide useful the next year when RCA came demanding another album and he didn't have much in the way of new original material.

Few contemporary rockers come simpler than "Hi, Hi, Hi", one side of a double-A from Wings, the other being another regrettable McCartney tilt at reggae with "C Moon". I will give it the acknowledgement that it gets a bit closer to the art form than "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da" did. Whichever side you prefer, they went to #5 in January, despite the BBC banning the record in fear that all that talking of "hi" was something to do with drugs.

More ex-Beatle efforts come in the shape of John and Yoko and the Plastic Ono Band with the Harlem Community Choir on "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)", the first of the many '70s attempts at having a big-hitting Christmas single which was overtly about Christmas. This one peaked at #4 in December, although this would not be its only visit to the charts. I'll get to that in about 9 years' time.

1972 has been an enormous year and it's not letting up even as we get into the middle of December, with a week (10th-16th December '72) that's absolutely packed with records worth talking about.

First up is Carly Simon with "You're So Vain", eventual #3 going into February '73. This is one of those great storytelling records, but it's just as much as those instrumental accents; the violins, the fuzzy guitar riffs, the drums which perfectly punctuate the lyrics. It also sparked five decades of speculation over exactly who the song is about, with clues being released a single letter at a time until we get to the present day where our best understanding is that each verse is about a different man, and the second one is Warren Beatty.

Next is eventual January '73 #6, Wizzard's "Ball Park Incident". Yes, Roy Wood has returned and perfected his good-time party sound. One which is far less obnoxious than most, possibly because they're not using at as cover for not being very good. The thing with Wizzard is just how much old-fashioned rock'n'roll is there in the mix, with the kind of frantic disconnected sax we haven't heard since the late '50s and piano Fats Domino would have been proud of. And in the tradition of the Pirates, if only by accident, playing their many Top Of The Pops appearances in ridiculous costumes with Roy looking like he's just come off the face painting stall at the village fête. Lieutenant Pigeon would be proud.

Speaking of whom, they are having their other hit. "Desperate Dan" only just about qualifies for that statement with a #17 peak in January '73 and is kind of more of the same, but less memorable. I feel a bit more justified in there being only one record on my "Lieutenant Pigeon's Greatest Hit" playlist now. However, this one may be more about the B-side, the freewheeling and psychedelic "Opus 300" that answers the question, "what if Mouldy Old Dough had been recorded in 1967 after a certain amount of chemical perceptual enhancement?". There's everything in there, from early reggae to a touch of the Bonzo Dog Band.

Judge Dread is following up "Big Six" with "Big Seven" but it's pretty much the same record with slightly ruder lyrics so there's not much to report on here. At least it arrests the trend of these saucy records to get worse by being no better or worse than the first attempt.

No, I'd rather spend my time on Cat Stevens' "Can't Keep It In" (#13 January '73), a growling record with a jerky rhythm that is nevertheless great to listen to. For a year which has made simplicity a rallying cry, this is so joyously complex, full of layers and always trying to catch you out with a new twist or turn.

Or I would, if it wasn't for Elvis. The first commercially successful cover (#9 January '73) of Wayne Carson, Johnny Christopher and Mark James' country standard "Always On My Mind". He's left his farty trumpet in the box, but otherwise this is everything I love about late period Elvis. Sugar-coated (the proper stuff, none of that artificial sweetener), overtly opulent, and with one of those inevitable last-minute fades before it comes back stronger for the big finale. It's even got a bit of a nod to his own history, with that backing choir reminiscent of earlier records with the Jordanaires.

But this is 1972. We started the year with the New Seekers Incident, and the last Top 40 entry on my spreadsheet is that same band with "Come Softly To Me". It sits in an awkward gap between bubblegum and folk where it's not really good at either, full of awkward gear changes. Even at barely over two minutes long it still feels like there are too many time-filling "dum dum doo dee dum" vocals and no real ideas. Alright, maybe some of the little guitar accents are nice. Perhaps the people of the '70s thought so too, as this never got higher than #20.

And that finally ends 1972, an absolute monster of a year in which it feels like about a decade's worth of stuff has happened. I really did not expect that many classic records, that many things to talk about, or for so many of those bywords for naffness to actually be not that bad, once you give them a listen.

Still. We've got another 7 years left yet.

1973

1973 gets off to a good start with "Blockbuster!" hitting #1 in January, one of those definitive Sweet records and an absolute chart stormer. I love this one. It's so relentlessly fun, wailing sirens set around a pounding rock'n'roll beat. Maybe there's a bit too much accidental similarity to Bowie's "The Jean Genie" but hey, it's a good record, we can have two built around the same riff.

Free bow out of the charts with a heavy mix of elements from the last decade or so of the pop charts, "Wishing Well" (#7 February '73). See how many other records you can recognise in there! There's definitely some "House of the Rising Sun" for a starter.

Given how much '72 was the time of simple meat and potatoes rock, it's a surprise how much of their cod-psychedelic past Status Quo still wear on "Paper Plane", a heavy rock'n'roller that nevertheless could still just about have fit in in the swirling heights of 1968.

At the extreme opposite end from all these hard-rocking efforts is Harold Melvin and the Bluenotes with "If You Don't Know Me By Now", #9 in January '73. I suspect the enduring nature of this is perhaps down to Simply Red's 1989 cover with a near-identical arrangement, but this one is a nice soft soul moment.

Gary Glitter is back with "Do You Wanna Touch Me? (Oh Yeah!)", going up to #2 in the week leading into February '73. No, Gary. Nobody wants to touch you. You ended up in prison for not understanding this. With records like this, it's a wonder nobody figured him out earlier. Musically it's essentially yet another retread on the well-worn format, a sort of "Rock'n'Roll (Part Four)" give or take lyrics putting in mind concepts I'd rather not think about.

Never mind. We have soft Elton John number "Daniel" (#4 February '73) to enjoy, possibly a very late Vietnam protest song given Bernie Taupin based the lyrics on a veteran uncomfortable about the attention he was getting after returning home injured. There's some great work here on the Fender Rhodes, and that flute in the intro comes courtesy of everyone's favourite temperamental tape-based sampler, the Mellotron. Being keyboard instruments, these are of course both played by Elton. Nice job, Reg.

Out-of-nowhere meme song "Take Me Home Country Roads" gets into the UK charts via the most unexpected route, a gospel-tinged cover by Olivia Newton-John. It was never a huge seller, peaking at #15, but did sell consistently with 12 weeks in the Top 40. You can probably annoy Internet people by playing it and confounding their tiny minds with the idea that this is the recognisable thing, but also at the same time it isn't.

Strawbs are back with the much more folkish "Part Of The Union", a song that has gone from celebrating trade unions, to being used to mock them, to advertising Norwich Union. It hit #2 in February '73, and was originally intended as a supportive anthem detailing the benefits of unionisation. While a little plodding and heavyfooted of beat in places, it's not a bad record.

Hitting #4 in February are Focus with "Sylvia", double-charting as they also have "Hocus Pocus" down at #20. We've seen things which hint at progressive rock ever since Procol Harum failed to spell a cat name back in '67, but "Sylvia" is the first single I'd pick out as being a pure prog rocker, much as it owes a debt to the Nice with all that Hammond organ. There's not much in the way of vocals, although what's there might help you pick out the band as hailing from the Netherlands.

Electric Light Orchestra might be a name more associated with the progressive sound, but February '73 #6 "Roll Over Beethoven" is still a clumsy combination of classical and rock themes, which for all its energetic violin and synth still feels to me a little bit like someone tried to buy their progressive rock single from Wish.

On to one of my favourite singles, Thin Lizzy's lyrical mangling of traditional folk song "Whiskey In The Jar" (#6 February '73). It had been recorded many times before this point, three times in the '60s by the Dubliners, but Phil Lynott and company's rock version swiftly became the standard, with subsequent covers copying both the arrangement and the somewhat inaccurate lyrics. Not like I care. You can buy me off cheap with a nice guitar solo.

A note for Stevie Wonder's February #11 "Superstition". At the '60s and '70s music society I occasionally mention as extra flavour for my engagement with these records we used to get these two girls who'd turn up to every night we ran and religiously request this record. Slightly awkward for me as I rarely if ever played a soul set when I was in the booth, but I'd usually forward it on for whoever did because it absolutely made their night when someone who had it in their collection did get round to playing it. Still, that didn't stop me from viewing it with the slight ire any DJ has for the records which get consistently requested without any reference to the current genre or tempo being played. 20 years after all of that? It's okay, I guess.

At #9 in February we have the Partridge Family covering "Looking Through The Eyes Of Love". I'd tell you about it, but I got about a minute in and went in search of the far superior Gene Pitney original, and even that's not the greatest of records, although tolerable in its mid-'60s Big Pop way. Sigh. I guess we have to do this. It's essentially the Gene Pitney version with a blandness filter applied, and some pretty wonky backing vocals. Living through the '90s and its unsavoury love of saccharined-up cover versions, I detect much the same thing happening here. At least we had Jarvis Cocker to sing sardonic songs about them.

Faces boogie "Cindy Incidentally" takes #2 in March '73, although something about the ramshackle nature makes me yearn for the much smaller Faces of yore, who did this thing so much better. I think this is what bugs me about so much '70s music once you get out of the obvious disposable teenybop and the myriad works of Glitter; the general okayness of it. Not necessarily bad, just the feeling that so long as you sounded a bit bluesy you could get away with anything.

March #4 soul-by-numbers "Feel The Need In Me" from the Detroit Emeralds does little to dispel my frustration that there's a bit of going through the motions here. Jackson 5 #9 "Doctor My Eyes" leaves me cold, and with the feeling the band didn't have much more than just this one thing. You know my feelings about over-excitable lyrics by now.

At least we're in Alice Cooper's classic era, and inconsistently-spelled cover version "Hello Hurray" (or Hooray, but the official chart has it as the former) hits #6 in March. Given how much is this is designed as an album opener (Judy Collins' original is also first track on its corresponding LP) it feels a little odd as a single, all that celebratory swaggering in anticipation of something that never happens. Well, unless you flip it over and play "Generation Landslide".

Taking #6 from it at the end of March is Roberta Flack's "Killing Me Softly With His Song", a song that would become very well known in the '90s. But more of that anon, if I ever get there. Roberta Flack's version is the first successful version, another soft, smoky cocktail bar record with some great electric piano giving it extra richness. It was originally written about Don McLean, apparently, although two of the song's co-writers changed their story around 1997 after many years of fallings-out.

Slade make another of their many visits to the #1 slot in March with "Cum on Feel The Noize", a title that has become rather more unfortunate as time has worn on. Poor old Feel The Noize. In an era where hits tended to climb the charts slowly this managed the unexpected feat of going straight in at the top, selling hot and fast thanks to radio stations playing it before the official release. It possibly helps that the lyrics function as a mission statement for Slade, while behind them the band revel in the simplicity of good old-fashioned dumb rock songs.

Unfortunately we cannot have nice things, and Donny Osmond displaced it from #1 before March was out with "The Twelfth Of Never", a cautionary tale about why you don't do that big ol' mid-'60s easy listening sound unless you've got a big ol' mid-'60s voice to go with it in the vein of a Walker or Humperdinck. This is not a big voice, it's not even one you can quite trust to be in the right place at the right time, and there's a kind of perfunctory soullessness throughout.

1973's run of post-Slade #1s might look like it doesn't get any better with Gilbert O'Sullivan's "Get Down" next on the top spot, but this one is weird and interesting if you've been used to slow ballads like "Clair". O'Sullivan suddenly decided he wanted to be more like Deep Purple, or at least not have to be so damn polite, and so we get a "Superstition"-influenced rocker with a lot of electronic keyboards. I'm warming to it.

Sadly, it's displaced by another infamously naff '70s moment, novelty-rockers Dawn teaming up with Tony Orlando for "Tie A Yellow Ribbon Round The Ole Oak Tree". I say this, and then much like "Knock Three Times" I find a certain winsome charm to it. People, it's happening. I've listened to enough of these things that I am starting to become afflicted by the same creeping mind virus which attacked the record buyers of the '70s. Look, it might be winsome but it's still not deserving of #1, let alone the 35 sodding weeks it spent in the Top 40. In the case against the 1970s, the prosecution presents exhibit... er, I would say "A" but there have already been quite a lot of Osmonds records by this point.

Like a sort of Home Counties-native vulture that feeds on bad music, Cliff Richard is in there at #4 with "Power To All Our Friends". I figured this would have been a Eurovision entry from the title alone, and indeed this was the UK's emissary for 1973, going down surprisingly well in the competition with a close third place. That's still not going to stop me dismissing it as the mashing together of a bunch of ripped-off Beatles tropes, tied together with some sub-Lennon nonsense because apparently once you've put "Power" in the title of your song you may as well rip off "Power to the People".

All of this and yet the record-buying public could only find space in their hearts to send T. Rex anthem "20th Century Boy" to #3, slipping out of the Top 40 after a mere 9 weeks. That's still respectable enough, but put it this way, you don't see "Tie A Yellow Ribbon..." and "Twelth Of Never" on any compilations featuring the best records of the 20th century, do you? Except possibly really bad ones which should feel ashamed of themselves.

David Cassidy has a double A-side with "I'm A Clown" / "Some Kind Of Summer" hitting #3 in April '73. The former opens with a promising Everly-esque spoken word monologue, but it's really little more than a self-indulgent lament. Dave Davies did clown metaphors better. Meanwhile, "Some Kind Of Summer" is one of those incredibly laid-back early '70s record, big on the Fender Rhodes as seems to be rather popular this year, and almost certainly the better of the two sides.

Little Jimmy Osmond's "Tweedle Dee" is frankly offensive, and a sign that we really should have been checking the water supply the moment Osmond-mania started because this... thing, this affront, somehow ended up at #4 in April '73. It also hews uncomfortably close to the showtune-esque Fast Template, and I really don't want to consider that we're 21 years in by this point and that thing is still rearing its head every time the musical taste of a nation looks weak.

As if to underline the problematic nature of these charts, Gary Glitter has a massive #2 all over them in both the literal and metaphorical sense with "Hello! Hello! I'm Back Again", more of exactly the same boring "let's repeat the song title over and over" thing which made us want him to go away in the first place. Glitter is that guy, isn't he. The one who narrates their own movements with "ho ho ho, here comes trouble!" and shouts, "hello, hello, it's me, I'm back again" when entering a pub full of strangers, none of whom know him except for one person who just stares grimly at their pint and mutters, "I wish his hair would go on fire".

These feel like desperate times, with even the duelling banjos bit from "Deliverance" making #17. Then we get the two weeks between 8th-21st April with an almost '72-esque brace of classic singles entering the Top 40 for the first time and making respectable chart positions.

Bowie's tribute to doo-wop and those slow rock'n'roll numbers "Drive In Saturday" peaked at #3 in May '73, one he originally tried to give away to Mott the Hoople only for the band to reject it. It's sci-fi Bowie filtered through inscrutably Dylanesque lyrics, full of sly references and wordplay. Also, it sounds great. There's just enough nod to its inspiration without getting lost in unthinkingly recreating the same thing.

Roger Daltrey of the Who makes a solo debut with "Giving It All Away" (#5 May '73), produced by Adam Faith of all people and written by a then-unknown Leo Sayer. It's obviously Who-like in places and reminiscent of the softer parts of "Who's Next", but also carries its own identity, a little smoother and more reflectively positive than the bitter melancholy of that album's slower numbers.

More electric piano for Hot Chocolate's moody funk number "Brother Louie" (#7 May '73), another case for Hot Chocolate as a much better and certainly much more thoughtful band than their later reputation would suggest. Wings round out this first week with "My Love", the weakest of the four by far both musically and in chart performance (#9 April '73) and I really only include it because there's yet more soft electric piano going on in the background.

Next week gives us Alice Cooper's "No More Mr. Nice Guy", a song which unfairly gets used as a statement of retribution when if you listen to the lyrics it's about other people's reaction to Cooper's on-stage persona and show. Which is highly unfair. He's one of the few people helping us defend against the continuing offenses of Osmond-mania, even if #10 in May '73 isn't the most effective defence here.

Judge Dread has the presence of mind to realise retreading the same record over and over gets old quickly, so while "Big Eight" (#14 May '73) may be another lewd comedy record thumbing its nose at the BBC it's to a very different rhythm, and quite a nice reggae rhythm. Glitter, take note. New song = different record.

But only one of these records takes the #1 slot, and that honour goes to Roy Wood, with Wizzard's "See My Baby Jive" making its way there in mid-May. This is simple joyous pop, Wizzard's homemade wall of sound working to great effect with those instantly recognisable "bomp-a-bomp-a-bomp" saxophones. Sophisticated of craft and dumb of output, this is a great pop record and I'm feeling a lot better about 1973 again.

While one Osmond or other may have hewed closely to the format, it's a while since we've had a Template record. While it's a name very much associated with them, I'm not sure Perry Como's "And I Love You" (#3 May '73) truly counts. Yes, there are elements there, but it puts in me in mind more of mid-'60s easy listening, which took what the Template tried to do and replaced it with something, well, rather easier to listen to. I don't want to pronounce this thing dead yet but looking at the big hits it feels like the Template's long shadow over the charts is finally receding with the early '70s.

It may be that these are charts infatuated with two things: rock and gimmickry. Sweet's "Hell Raiser" (#2 May '73) provides ample amounts of both, with added sound effects and yelping a capella vocal interludes that could have been straight out of rock'n'roll's original infatuation with the gimmick circa 1958. I think it's still just about saved by its energy and sense of fun.

More blues rock with Medicine Head, "One And One Is One" being the biggest hit of their career at #3 in June. The band were championed by John Peel, helped along by John Lennon and even had ex-Yardbird Keith Relf guest on a record or two, but it still took five years for a hit single to emerge. Peel's favourite remained demo track "His Guiding Hand", released as-is on a single in 1969, and one he kept in his infamous box of the records he'd rescue first from a house fire right until his death in 2004.

I'm going to call 1973 the year of the Fender Rhodes though, and Eumir Deodato is playing one to great effect on a jazz-funk version of "Also Sprach Zarathustra (2001)", #7 in May and mentioning 1968's "2001: A Space Odyssey" right there on the cover for anyone who wasn't so up on classical music and just wanted a funky version of that music from the sci-fi film where all the apes bash stuff up. Even in the condensed 5-minute version found on a 45 rpm single it's still a gloriously mad idea.

The Velvet Underground got softer and more radio-friendly over their career, and Lou Reed continued this trend toward softer music while keeping up the risqué lyrics for "Walk On The Wild Side", his first solo charting single (#10 June '73). He even finds time for one of those characteristically blunt drug references where he just straight-up names the thing without calling it sugar lumps or some other euphemism du jour. Bowie and Spiders From Mars guitarist Mick Ronson turn up to produce. As a side note there seems to be some confusion over whether this was a double-A or not with "Perfect Day"; while I can't tell for sure all my primary sources list it as a standard A/B deal, most of the markets with picture sleeves suggest similar, and while there are no clear side markings on the single it was standard RCA practice to not print these at the time. My suspicion is the latter popularity of "Perfect Day" has retrospectively elevated its importance.

Slade's seemingly unassailable popularity in these early '70s charts seems to have spread to their touring support act Suzi Quatro, whose "Can The Can" hit #1 in June. On this record, Quatro is a furious one-woman Slade, with the obligatory blues shuffle guitar, pounding drums and screaming lyrics. Getting all this on vinyl and into record shops was Mickie Most, whose new Rak Records label was developing a roster of up-and-coming '70s acts (including Hot Chocolate) alongside reissues of old Hermits and Animals records under their Rak Replay imprint.

Such reissues continued to turn up in the charts, with CBS putting out Fleetwood Mac's "Albatross" with other 1968 single "Need Your Love So Bad" on the B-side for their "Hall Of Fame Hits" reissue series, peaking at #2 late in June '73.

The Partridge Family are also treading old territory with a rather emotionless cover of Mann, Weil and Spector classic "Walking In The Rain", originally a fabulous Ronettes single from 1964. London Records did put that one out in the UK, but in the beat group dominated world of October '64 it failed to chart. You may notice that I care rather more about this version than the clock-punching Cassidy & Co one.

Entering the chart the same week is Stealers Wheel's "Stuck In The Middle With You" (#8 June '73), which saw a resurgence in popularity in the '90s thanks to Reservoir Dogs. Everyone in my peer group was too young to be allowed to watch it until it was quite an old film, but we knew it existed, it was cool, and this was music from it. Gerry Rafferty sang the song as a parody of Dylan, complete with the obligatory lyrical references to clowns, jokers, and the relative positions thereof.

#1 at the end of June is 10cc's "Rubber Bullets", which manages to disguise itself enough as Slade-style dumb fun rock'n'roll that the lyrics about police brutality fly rather under the radar. The BBC kept a nervous eye on it, given how much of the lyrical content could apply to British actions in Northern Ireland, but never went so far as to ban it. Possibly Judge Dread was keeping them too busy.

There is worse to come in that spot. I fear I've tempted fate by mentioning the T-word, because displacing 10cc from the top of the charts in July are serial Opportunity Knocks winners Peters and Lee, and guess which style they've chosen as their form of musical expression. Modernised it may be, a touch of the countrypolitan added here, a little pop-folk there, and about coming home rather than going on holiday, but listen to "Welcome Home" and see how much you can spot. The brass stabs, the donkey trot of the rhythm section, even a little crescendo at the end.

That said, I think this does illustrate a point, because even the artists who've been around since the Template was new have discovered that Matt Monro and Tom Jones! exist and do more interesting things. We may be seeing Template and Template-like records, but here in 1973 they're coming from novelty acts; those who are popular mainly for appearing on talent competitions or being children. The music doesn't really matter, and schmaltzy '50s-style pop just happens to be a convenient way to construct a single that doesn't place too many demands on the performer. I'd like to see them try to rescue "The Young New Mexican Puppeteer" into something listenable the way Tom! does.

Hotshots take a reggae version of irksome novelty "Snoopy Versus The Red Baron" to #4 in July and I think I've discovered my weakness with novelty records, because I find the reggae ones far more bearable. I'm not saying this is good, but other than some teeth-gritting sound effect sections it's at least bearable. But it suggests something worrying for the fate of reggae in these charts: novelty and gimmickry tends to herald the death of a genre, at least in terms of being a force in the singles chart. One might raise the question with the sheer amount of novelty and gimmickry in these early '70s charts whether the fundamental idea of music as a concept is about to keel over. Lovers of bluesy toe-tapping rock devoid of any electronic accoutrement may claim it indeed did some time around 1975.

There's some ex-Beatlage to look at, with George Harrison's "Give Me Love (Give Me Peace On Earth)" (#8 June '73) just edging out Wings and their Bond theme "Live And Let Die" peaking at #9 in the same week.

I'll deal with the latter first because while it's constrained by the trappings of film themes, "Live And Let Die" is something we haven't seen in these charts yet, a decent Wings single. There's certainly a lot to it. Possibly a bit too much, although that's mainly my belief that while an action film score is fine for watching someone dodging between explosions or whatever they do in these things, it gets a bit wearing on a record. Still, there's some clever transitions and most importantly it is one of those rare moments where a McCartney composition is Not Insufferably Twee.

Harrison, though, is still reaping the benefits of that early '70s songwriting productivity, setting one of those simple and universal hippy messages of peace to a mix of soft folk rock and Hindu devotional. It works so much better nestled between soothing slide guitar than it does as clapping and chanting, possibly because doing it this way doesn't demand these statements carry a record they're often too simplistic and naive to.

Lesser-known T. Rex track "The Groover" hit #4 in June, their last top 10 single. If I were to criticise, things have gotten a little formulaic by this point and certainly less exciting than that first time we heard "Ride a White Swan". Of course if we're talking riding a formula then the champions of that are Slade, racking up another #1 with "Skweeze Me, Pleeze Me" and recyling enough of "Cum On Feel The Noize" it should get an award for environmental conscientiousness.

Stacked up against this, Bowie's July #3 "Life On Mars?" is from out of nowhere. Another planet, one could say. Full of halting, jerky rhythms and in a time of straightforward guitar-based rock eschewing all of that in favour of Rick Wakeman's ornate piano. Not even a Fender Rhodes. It's supposedly based around the bones of "My Way" with the liner notes to "Hunky Dory" crediting Sinatra for the influence, but it's been through so many iterations and alterations that the intended parody is almost undetectable. Maybe they're about equally big-sounding, even if in very different ways.

There's a little band called Mud entering the Top 40 for the second time, with "Hypnosis" peaking at #16 in August. This and March #12 "Crazy" put me in mind a little of a Dave Dee et. al. updated for the '70s, at least the less out-there moments. Mud had been making attempts at the chart from that band's '67 heyday, but it was was a switch to Rak Records which finally got them there. During that era they shared the writing partnership of Nicky Chinn and Mike Chapman with Sweet, a duo who got what the '70s was looking for and would give Mud far bigger hits.

Sadly there's a lot of mediocre records to get through first. I'll start with August #2 "Yesterday Once More" from the Carpenters. I'm almost certain to irritate someone calling it mediocre, but c'mon, isn't it just a bit... boring? I don't know what it is with me and the Carps, but I find it all too insipid. At least the Mamas and Papas had that bit of melancholy edge to them. Look, it's fine, it's competent, I'm just bored.

Besides, I should save my energy for Mungo Jerry, a band I am growing to loathe, with August #3 "Alright, Alright, Alright" doing little to change my mind. I'll admit it doesn't make the situation any worse, it's just relatively inoffensive stompy rock that feels like it's been turned over in about 10 minutes total, but this feels like in any decent chart it'd be the kind of filler that skulks around the low 30s for a few weeks before having the grace to disappear without ever being played on Top of the Pops.

The Osmonds "Goin' Home" (#4 August '73) is something I find myself wishing the younger members of their group would do, but other than guilt by association it's not that bad a record. The choice of straightforward rock with a bit of synth embellishment is much better than the unbearable faux-showtune and Template stylings of Little Jimmy and Donny, and while there's not much of lasting appeal here you wouldn't be immediately fumbling at the radio the moment it came on.

That would be reserved for late July #1, Gary Glitter's "I'm The Leader Of The Gang (I Am!)" Glitter's love for this sort of, "I'm great, me" pronouncements annoys me even before the record starts, and when it does the situation doesn't improve. It's a bunch of excitedly shouted self-referential lyrics, a rhythm that's just a less good version of "Blockbuster!" and of course that famous question repeated over and over. Nobody wants to be in your gang, Gary. The reason you're the leader is it contains only one member. You.

It's no wonder 1973 is deciding to go all the way back to 1952 and do it all over again starting with Al Martino. At least, it's buying Al Martino records, with a reissue of 1965's "Spanish Eyes" making #5 in August despite not grazing the Top 40 originally. It's not bad, although owes most of that to being built around Bert Kaempfert instrumental "Moon Over Naples".

Suzi Quatro's August #3 "48 Crash" is another one from the pen of Chapman and Chinn, who also produced. Between Mud, Sweet and Quatro they appeared to find a sound and a template which just worked for the mid '70s, patterned after the long shadow of Slade with unpretentious rock backdrops, glam stylings and a succession of chantable three-syllable phrases (e.g. "wig-wam bam", "silk sash bash")

The UK's love of the family ensemble continued, with Limmie and the Family Cookin' going to #3 in September with "You Can Do Magic". Limmie Snell and his Ohio family come across as a less childishly excitable Jackson 5, which I realise is me coming perilously close to assessing them as a better Jackson 5. Putting this up against some of the weaker Jacksons records, I'm not sure I'm wrong. Sadly for the Family Cookin', by 1973 this "the whole family sings!" (whether genuine or TV artifice) was a crowded arena and they received little attention except in the UK.

I should keep moving on, but I want to make a brief stop at Elvis self-flagellation "Fool" (#15 August '73) because I just want something fun and self-indulgent before I have to listen to another Donny Osmond record. It's a track from an album composed largely of leftovers, and belies that a little by doing two and a half minutes of mostly the same thing then ending arbitrarily, but that's not going to stop me from enjoying it.

Sadly even playing it twice I've only staved off Donny Osmond's "Young Love" (#1 August '73) by about five minutes. If that title sounds familiar it's because we've seen it way back in 1957 from Tab Hunter, in a chart that was struggling to escape the then-strong grasp of the Template. At the time I assessed Hunter's version as a strange mix of all those struggling ideas bound together by the very things they were trying to escape.

Donny Osmond's version is the opposite - a record trying to hold progress back, mining that era of the '57s for big string breaks, choirs, and even the exact guitar line which sounded three years ahead of its time when Tab Hunter sang over it and feels about 13 years behinds its time now. I should give Osmond credit that he's shaken off the last of that waywardness, and this is a solidly competent record, just one which is determined to not be of its time. C'mon, only a few weeks ago we had "Life On Mars?"

Another infamous name of '70s naffness is David Essex, and one that's always felt a little unfair to me since the main performance I know him for is "Jeff Wayne's Musical Version of The War of the Worlds" where there's little to complain about either acting or singing. Indeed, while he'd started attempting a singing career after childhood dreams of becoming a footballer did not come to fruition, his first success came as a stage actor, progressing to a starring role in rock'n'roll retrospective film "That'll Be The Day" in 1973.

"Rock On" is his first charting single (#3 September '73) and after the backward-looking schmaltz of those solo Osmond efforts is very different indeed. A record for a future now past, perhaps, with that same Jeff Wayne providing a stark, spare minor-key arrangement full of unexpected stops and a cappella vocals. I'm not sure it's entirely successful, but it is interesting.

I may criticise some of these records - well, okay, the solo Osmonds ones - for looking backward, but that's because they so slavishly copy the past without adding anything or having much to say about it. September #1 "Angel Fingers" by Wizzard (who else?) shows how to look back in style. It's got the "Be My Baby" drum beat in the opening, it's full of '50s rock'n'roll sax, it's got a revving motorbike for lovers of "Leader Of The Pack", it even slips in a little run of pizzicato strings like the most overblown of the '50s crooners, but you would not mistake this for any other time period.

Although you might mistake it for the Red Dwarf end credits theme at times. Howard Goodall must have been a fan.

It's a bit of a comedown from this to the Stones' "Angie" (#5 September '73), a ramshackle lament that takes a bit of time to get going but is decent once it gets there. I do fear we're a bit into the decline of the Stones here, and I certainly find myself wishing for more of the louche seediness of the "Exile" era in this, but it's more than listenable.

Perry Como is starting to be a bit of a chart regular, with Kris Kristofferson cover "For The Good Times" making #7 in October. It feels a little incongruous to hear the pressed-sweater man covering a song written by someone you typically imagine sitting in an alleyway throwing an empty beer bottle at a wall, but there's something about this that works. I think it's that Como doesn't try to rob the song of its plaintive note.

Como's high placing suggests a chart happy to buy old artists, and indeed the infatuation with both old records and novelty records continued. Bowie's "Laughing Gnome" went to #6 in October on reissue, and Boris Pickett and the Crypt-Kickers' "Monster Mash" from all the way back in 1962 was #3 in the same month.

Rod Stewart is covering old Goffin/King number "Oh No Not My Baby" (#6 September '73), although not unpleasantly so even if the chorus gets bit of overdone time-filling around a little before the three minute mark. Covered at one point in the '60s by Manfred Mann, from whom keyboardist... well, Manfred Mann had started a new band called Manfred Mann's Earth Band, at #9 in October with "Joybringer".

Status Quo finally find the sound they've been looking for on "Caroline" (#5 October '73). What's noticeable is just how current this sound is, how easily it sits alongside Slade, Mud, Suzi Quatro and all the others. A bit heavier, a bit more serious, but clearly of the same ilk, much as the Quo fit in back in '68 with their brief psychedelic excursion. I now imagine an alternative universe where Status Quo never stopped trying to ape whatever sound was current.

The record-buying public of '73 continue to do bizarre things, buying up a TV theme in the shape of the Simon Park Orchestra's "Eye Level", enough for it to top the charts at the end of September. Even more bizarrely, this was a reissue, having flopped on its first release in 1972 when the TV show it was attached to, "Van der Valk", first came out. On the B-side is "Distant Hills", which became the theme to ITV's long-running "Crown Court" series, a proving ground for many a British character actor thanks to the sheer number of episodes requiring new defendants, witnesses and counsel.

Ike & Tina Turner hit #4 in October with "Nutbush City Limits", a funked-up record full of whistling Moog lines, sharp brass and a scuzzy guitar riff that successfully distracts from the small issue that Nutbush sounds like somewhere there really isn't much at all to do.

The Sweet's tale of a bottling (their own, in Kilmarnock) "Ballroom Blitz" went to #2 in September. They sound unexpectedly positive about it, although it's possible they saw it as a good opportunity to wander off and go to the pub instead. This is a fun record - if you took the manic grabbing of ideas from one of the Daves, Dees and that lot's better efforts then rendered them all in the straightforward rock style of the early '70s, I feel you'd end up with something not far from this.

Slade, of all people, are having a tilt at being more musically complex. This is Slade we're talking about, so October '73 #2 "My Friend Stan" isn't something that'd feel out of place in the oeuvre of a pub rock band, but that's still more complex than usual. It's the better for it, with a clear Beatles influence running through from the prominent piano line to the guitar tone.

Surprisingly low-charting for a record which has over 300 million streams at the time of writing (most of these records here have 0.01 times that!) at #6 is one of Elton John's very best records, "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road". Alright, this is very much a "buy the album" deal because that double LP is full of recognisable titles, but I still want this to have done better because it's such a great song. Wistful and beautifully instrumented, Taupin's lyrics chime with that '70s desire to get back to rural simplicity I think I've mentioned at some point in all this mess.

David Bowie's parsimonious attitude to singles continued for stop-gap covers album "Pin Ups", with only "Sorrow" making it to 45. It got to #3 in November, one better than the Merseys. This is probably the best resolved cover from an album which really does feel like a quickly-recorded stopgap, much as I find the heavy version of "Here Comes The Night" fun. But while an album of glam rock covers of hits from the previous decade may seem a bit of a derivative idea (Bryan Ferry certainly thought so, having started work on "These Foolish Things" earlier, with "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" from it hitting #10 at the end of October) there's an interesting selection of tracks with a fair representation of The Pretty Things.

Reaching #14 in November is Bob Dylan's "Knockin' On Heaven's Door" - and no, it's not 1991 yet, but this will make you realise just how faithful the Guns N' Roses cover is. Dylan's whole soundtrack for "Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid" is a great piece of work. I know the '70s gets a bad rep musically, but the folk song film soundtrack is an idea that definitely should come back.

Unfortunately that bad rep is somewhat deserved.  I don't want to kick down assertively religious spoken-word Max Bygraves effort "Deck of Cards" (#13 November '73) too much, because it's not that horrible for what it is, but you still have people buying a sugary, sentimental record from an act whose main period of relevance was so long ago the charts didn't even exist until the latter half of it. Something must have been in the water as Wink Martindale's 1959 version also charted at around the same time, peaking at #22.

The teeth-itching confection that is David Cassidy's "Daydreamer" (b/w awful wink at the Jazz Age "Puppy Song") is a far bigger strike against the decade, being #1 for the first half of November. It got worse after that, but let's keep our ire in one place at a time. This is a whole pile of things I dislike about '70s teeny bop: the artificial sweetness, the unnecessarily breathy vocals, that swinging beat which perhaps owes more than a little to the donkey plod of the Template.

Stomping off from this in a bad mood, I'm surprised to find a Carpenters record I actually like, the country-tinged "Top Of The World" (#5 November '73). It's a little on the sugary side in places, and I half wonder what Nancy & Lee might have done with it, but I think this makes me realise what I'm missing from so many of those TV-derived acts. There's a sense of craft here; those little turns and accents feel like someone cared about this record, rather than putting it together as a sort of checkbox-ticking exercise on things you need to have a hit.

I've oft championed Ringo Starr's casual drumming style as the saviour of many a Beatles song, and further evidence those "worst Beatle" jibes are unfair comes from "Photograph", co-written with George Harrison and for me, one of the best post-Beatles solo singles. It's also a statement of what could be done with the multi-track recording becoming the standard in studios. Look back on the great Beach Boys/Beatles/Stones battle of '67 to see who could push the four track tape recorder to its limits, and compare it to the impossibly lush, clean sound of this.

"Photograph" made #8, while at #4 we have Mud's first top 10 hit, "Dyna-Mite". This is a Chapman/Chinn number, originally intended for the Sweet, and you can definitely hear it. If I seem overwhelmingly negative about the confected pop of child stars and TV show bands, then it must be balanced by my love of this simple, disposable glam. It screams time and place to me, in that while I was not alive in late 1973 I can listen to this and immediately picture it in my head.

Unfortunately my joyous mental image of 1973 is about to be spoilt by its musical reality.

The Osmonds' attempt to be a rock band was odd, but also short-lived, and with November #2 "Let Me In" they are back to the sentimental ballad. I have mixed feelings here. No, I do not like that this could have been released at any point from the 1964 easy listening boom, but I think that also saves it; this is Big Pop, played straight. It reaches for heights that maybe Donny and Merrill can't quite carry, but if you think I'm not going to give them credit for trying to reach them you must have missed the last 100,000 words.

Donny's own "When I Fall In Love" (#4 November '73) is more what I expected. Where "Let Me In" reaches for its heights, "When I Fall In Love" gets to the foothills, decides that looks a bit too much effort and trudges back to the car park with a noticeable sinking feel. It never feels like it's trying, and even the ending happens mid-passage as if someone glanced at the clock and went, "right lads, that's it, I've got a train to catch".

It's now time for one of the odder stories of the pop charts, that of Bernard William Jewry. Back in the 1950s Jewry became a roadie for northern England skiffle group Johnny Theakston and the Tremeloes. Heading into 1960, Theakston decided that skiffle was over, but rock'n'roll still had some commercial opportunity, especially for a band which felt a bit more American. So he adopted the stage persona of Shane Fenton, renaming the band to the Fentones.

This all went well enough, with demo tapes being recorded and a BBC invite being sent, until Theakston/Fenton fell ill with rheumatic fever and sadly died mere days before an audition. Theakston's parents and the band decided on a novel solution: since Shane Fenton was a stage persona, anyone could be it, and nominated Jewry become the new Shane Fenton.

The band had a minor early '60s career, with "I'm A Moody Guy" reaching #22 in November '61, a footnote of a record with a little Cliff Richard here, a little Adam Faith there, and a dose of Buddy Holly for good measure. It's got a definite charm to it, even if I didn't consider it big enough to mention at the time. They bumped around the lower reaches of the charts for a couple of years, with Everly-esque 1962 single "Cindy's Birthday" being their last to chart and their highest at #19. It's another nice record, but then a little thing called "Love Me Do" happened at the end of the year and like so much of early rock'n'roll the Fentones never evolved their sound to catch up with the new world, disbanding in 1964 with Jewry only playing small local venues afterward.

Why is any of this relevant nearly a decade later? Well, Magnet Records co-founder Peter Shelley had spotted the popularity of glam and, inspired by David Bowie's creation of Ziggy Stardust, created the idea of Alvin Stardust (surname intentional) - a sort of less awful Gary Glitter. He recorded "My Coo-Ca-Choo", a stompy piece of glam rock that owes rather a debt to "Spirit In The Sky". Shelley's only problem was not wanting to be the public face of Alvin Stardust.

In steps Jewry to assume yet another identity, less a Plastic Ono Band than a Plastic Ono Performer. We are yet to hear his take on the character as "Coo-Ca-Choo" is all Shelley, but the appearance was clear: greaser rock'n'roll with leather jacket, exposed chest as was de rigeur for the '70s, and a bouffant hairstyle which if not outright flammable should certainly be registered as a safety hazard.

"My Coo-Ca-Choo" hit #2 at the end of November, and in the midst of a year that was going mad for simple, straightforward rock I can't object to that. The stage persona may seem a bit naff looking back through the years but the record's not bad.

Sitting above it at #1 is Gary Glitter, with "I Love You Love Me Love". This is... better, somehow? Maybe I've been worn down slowly by all of 1973, but while it's a little slurring and awkward there's at least something more than going, "ooh, that rock'n'roll, eh?" over exactly the same rhythm. Although I think this might be the same drum beat, just slower. But still, I stand here a broken man, realising there is a Gary Glitter single which, even if I still don't like it, have to admit is at least OK. Functional, I suppose.

It was certainly functional for Glitter, providing him with his biggest hit and, with 14 weeks in the top 40 at consistently high positions, being one of the biggest singles of the year.

The Osmond situation continues to require monitoring, and its mining of mid-'60s sound continues with Marie Osmond's determinedly countrypolitan "Paper Roses" (#2 December '73). Bloody hell this is good. It's finally happened, 1973 has completely broken me. I can't even disdainfully assess this as technically fine but not my thing, I genuinely love this record. I think it's that it's so well done, even if delightfully corny with big dramatic gear changes and all. It helps that I'm not constantly questioning the vocals as with so many other solo Osmond efforts; Marie remains very much in control of this thing throughout.

David Essex #7 "Lamplight" is all a bit weird after that. I find myself warming to it over its spare and moody verses, but there's still too much being self-consciously odd, especially as the song closes out. Sorry, arbiters of musical taste, I would have found myself walking out of the shop with "Paper Roses" if these were the only choices.

Of course they weren't, and in reality my money would go on December #8 "Roll Away The Stone" from Mott the Hoople. A prime slice of big-sounding rock music, with lovely scale-descending vocals and the kind of sax and "sha-la-la" vocals Wizzard wouldn't have sniffed at.

Speaking of Wizzard, there's one last iconic moment of 1973 left. For this is the year of the big Christmas single battle.

Let's start with the effort from Wood & co., "I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day". Of course it's instantly recognisable, given it's been an annual fixture for the last 49 years, and with good reason. It's Wizzard through and through, the trademark bomping sax chugging along beneath a big wall of sound. What surprises me is just how long it is; four and a half minutes, and the band keep it moving forward constantly right up until the choral coda that marks the last 30 seconds, complete with the occasional vocal aside from Wood. Final score: #4.

Next up, one which has only really started entering Christmas playlists in the last few years, Elton John's "Step Into Christmas". Elton takes the pleasant step of welcoming you to this, his own Christmas song, and then throws in this inexplicable out-of-nowhere electronic sound effect a minute in, which is never referenced until the end of the record suddenly goes mad with it. It's another lively one, and I swear if you listen to it long enough you can hear the bones of a Ronettes song under there. And when I say most of the popularity of this is latter I mean it; while my data shows it peaking at #8 that is in fact a position from January 2020, and if we go back to the 1970s the real final score is: #24.

But there is only one Christmas Number One per year, and by a process of elimination you almost certainly already know what it is: Slade's "Merry Xmas Everybody". This was an absolutely huge single, staying in the charts until the back end of February '74 and returning to them regularly even in the era before streaming made Christmas songs December chart regulars, with physical sales propelling it into the charts for a few Christmases in the '80s and beyond.

How can I write about this, listening to a Christmas single on a bright September morning and knowing it's something so familiar that most people's experience of it is over-familiarity, or to be more precise being fed up with hearing the damn thing?

By pretending to go back to 1973, that's how. Simple, basic rock is huge. At the top of that rock pile sit Slade, four lads from Wolverhampton who became famous so fast they later admitted they genuinely did struggle to think of what to spend their money on other than a lot of Cup-a-Soups. There's going to be a big chart battle for Christmas #1 and all your favourites are involved. You've got more than 40 years until that statement makes you grit your teeth and hope, "please not sausage rolls again, anything but that".

And Slade deliver. They are simple, they are dumb, they are fun, and what you get is exactly what you'd hope for from a collision of the terms "Christmas single" and "Slade". Y'know, one of the biggest acts of the era, bang in the middle of a genre the year has taken to heart. I will not make the case here for some untold brilliance or great thing you're missing, but that's the point of Slade: it's all there on the surface. It's a riotous good time. You might even agree, if you can forget having already heard it about a zillion times.

Besides, it sums up 1973 like nothing else.

1974

1974 opens with yet another New Seekers incident, "You Won't Find Another Fool Like Me" going to #1 in January with an intro that really worries me it's trying to ape Wizzard. It's more up the "Beg Steal Or Borrow" end of the band's oeuvre, but still has way too much enthusiasm and that curse of the can't-be-bothered record, a "la-la-la" verse.

It's a little bit of a cheat me calling this a 1974 record, as it first hit the Top 40 back in November '73, but had to wait its turn on the top spot until we'd finished having our battle for Christmas-themed Christmas number one.

Another record I skipped over to tell that story is no-nonsense Faces rocker "Pool Hall Richard", hitting #8 in January. Rod Stewart is on good form for this, a record which seems to get increasingly pub rock over its four and a half minute runtime, even including a piano break and a key change which, dare I say it, strays a little beyond Stewart's vocal range. It's a good time nevertheless.

I fear I've not really narrated any new musical developments for quite a while, but I think this might be the problem that there haven't really been any. Osmond-mania might have been big, but it seemed content to mine mid-'60s sounds, and more grown-up music rarely strayed more than a few steps from simplistic pub rock, even if the acts themselves were glammed up.

Displacing the New Seekers from #1 with exactly that were Mud, and perhaps their signature song "Tiger Feet". As a Chapman/Chinn composition it's noticeable in context just how easily this could have gone to the Sweet. Who were sitting just one spot below at #2 with "Teenage Rampage" two chord rocking like an irreverent Status Quo.

I wonder if this lack of either progress or sophistication is what gives this era such a bad name critically. There's certainly a lot you could pan it for if you want flashy musicianship, or indeed anything more than three chords and about two choices of guitar tone. And I'm not above such things, having done much the same for rock'n'roll's failure to innovate beyond repeating the same few song structures with more gimmicks and mugging to the audience in the late 1950s.

But there's a difference. I'm having fun. This might just be that I grew up with this sort of thing on shop radios and as background music in pubs and there's a background subconscious nostalgia going on, but I engage so much more with this simple good time party music than the deliberate wackiness which blighted the original rock'n'roll era from pretty much the moment it started.

Mungo Jerry can still do one, though.

Maybe the odd Golden Earring or Leo Sayer record hinted at a desire for things to get a little heavier and more serious as if pining for early-decade Black Sabbath or Deep Purple, and Alice Cooper sounded tired of glam on February #12 "Teenage Lament '74", but the '70s seemed to have found a thing it was willing to stick to as firmly as the '50s clung to the Template.

Even though Bowie was on production duties along with guitarist Mick Ronson, Lulu's cover of "The Man Who Sold The World" takes an itchy and angular album cut and turns it into about as straightforward a rocker as you can get without totally betraying its source material.

The one sadness I have about this is the domination of rock had all but squeezed out the other genres which had made the charts at the turn of the decade such an interesting mix. Reggae had almost completely disappeared from the Top 40 other than novelty records, soul records tended to come infrequently and bump around the middle ranges of the charts when they did, and the background melange of country records, psychedelia and oddities that was once so present seemed missing in action.

The only thing it didn't displace was novelty. Most novelty records would be one-hit (or maybe 1.5-hit) wonders, but in 1974 we were introduced to one of the decade's most consistent and prolific novelty acts. The Wombles, hitting #4 in February with extended TV theme "The Wombling Song".

The furry little tyrants maintained an iron grip over the charts for much of the rest of the decade, but let's try to give the people of 1974 some benefit of the doubt and figure out what's going on here.

What is going on here really is Mike Batt. I first encountered his works through the theme to '90s animated series The Dreamstone, which is odd because I don't recall watching the thing but I definitely recall the soundtrack, in particular theme song "Better Than A Dream". This I suspect is the '90s not really being that much better than the '70s, and us having the soundtrack album on CD but not a video of the cartoon itself.

Anyway, what I meant to get into with that diversion is Batt had the kind of musical chops which got people buying soundtracks to cartoons ahead of buying the VHS tapes that would allow one to see said cartoons, and also some small amount of commercial nous from failed projects earlier in the '70s. Which meant the payment he asked for to provide the film to the stop-motion TV adaptation of Elizabeth Beresford's Wombles books was not the standard £200, but instead the rights to use the characters for any musical project he desired.

This suggests a certain amount of confidence in being able to use those rights rather than being able to immediately come home with £200 worth of Cup-a-Soups, quite the volume of instant soup in 1974, but that confidence was not misplaced. Because there's a real pop sensibility in "The Wombling Song", almost a very tame and rather more recycling-oriented Wizzard if you squint enough.

What I'm saying is this is not quite as horrific as it may appear on the surface. Yes, the 1970s charted another novelty record, and it shouldn't be entirely forgiven for that, but this isn't mawkish sentimentality in the form of "Grandad" or tedious parody a la "Sea Side Shuffle"; it's a vaguely decent pop record even if clearly one designed to do service as a TV theme.

If anything, I'm more worried by the looming threat of gimmickry lapping at the edges of Suzi Quatro's February #1 "Devil Gate Drive". It plays things straight for long enough that I'm not quite yet considering pronouncing the imminent death of meat and potatoes rock, but this sort of self-parody and embrace of silliness is what did for rock'n'roll after its own period of staleness so it does hint the decade might not be entirely pub and glam rock.

Entering the Top 40 the same week but not hitting its peak of #2 until March is The Hollies with "The Air That I Breathe", a record that I always thought was earlier because I mentally associate that band with the '60s, even though this laid-back number is noticeably more mature than their earlier output. Yet again we have one of those all-time classic records surfacing in the middle of what is supposed to be the naffest of eras. C'mon, it's sharing chart space with the Wombles.

More in keeping with the theme is Alvin Stardust's first #1, this time with Jewry on record as well as being the public face of the name, "Jealous Mind". It's half throwback, half modern, and all vaguely okay in a slightly forgettable way. Maybe I am starting to get slightly tired of this glam rock template, and a little more than three years after the introduction of T. Rex we're finally getting to the point where everything which can be done in a fairly simplistic genre has been done. Once again, I look nervously at those gimmicks on "Devil Gate Drive".

More nervously, I look at "Remember (Sha-la-la-la)". It's #6 in March '74 and after that tease in '71 Rollermania is finally here. It's a while since I listened to "Keep On Dancing" (and if you were following in real time, this would be nearly three years), but I feel this has got a bit softer and, dare I say it, teen-ier. I'm not sure it's outright bad, but feels calculatedly inoffensive.

Inoffensiveness also casts a pall over Paper Lace's generically anti-war song "Billy Don't Be A Hero", #1 in March. Frustratingly forgettable, I'm not sure it even deserves its place on the Rolling Stone "Worst Songs of the 1970s" poll; there's just nothing here, and with half a decade yet to go I'd be nominating most of Gary Glitter's discography well ahead of this even before we start to raise the spectres of the New Seekers, multiple Osmond perpetrations and, of course, "Grandad".

Me having lamented the absence of country music barely a few weeks prior, Charlie Rich gets "The Most Beautiful Girl" to #2 at the end of March. I realise how much I've missed the glorious mess of genres that marked the charts up until the last couple of years. It's not even the greatest of country songs and that ending fade-out is clumsy in the extreme, but I'm enjoying just having something different to cleanse the palate.

Ringo Starr reminds us of some less fortunate tendencies of those earlier charts with showtune rendition of "You're Sixteen" reaching #4 in March. I think this sort of thing might be why I love "Photograph" but I don't love the album "Ringo" as a whole, because this grates on multiple levels. The fact this ode to noncehood is given the kind of jauntily twee treatment you'd normally associate with McCartney doesn't help. Ringo, you're going home with a "could do better" on your report card.

Speaking of McCartney, he's around at #7 with Wings for "Jet", a song which switches around the usual expectation by taking ages to get going rather than forever to finish. It's bold, but I also fear a little overwrought; the kind of thing that gets votes for the greatest record ever because you don't want to admit that actually, you don't really get it.

The New Seekers continue to exist, despite March #5 "I Get A little Sentimental Over You" being 50% "Beg, Steal or Borrow" and 50% a less good "Wombling Song". I guess like the macro environment of the early 1970s, they've found a thing and stuck to it.

Elton John takes Bernie Taupin's tribute to Marilyn Monroe "Candle In The Wind" to #11. This original would be later eclipsed by certain other events in 1997, and I feel that's a little unfair because in its proper context this version is a rather lovely little thing. It's got that sort of genuine melancholy the '70s did so well, at least before pub rock took over, and evidently no-one told Elton this had a best before date of 1971 because he makes one hell of a dish with it.

April 1974 is about to bring one of those long tangents of mine, so let's stave it off by looking at Hot Chocolate's #3 of that month, "Emma". I've said before that Hot Chocolate were unfairly relegated to cheese status by the use of their late '70s material in certain '90s media, and while I don't think "Emma" is their best it's certainly interesting and moody in a way a lot of contemporary records aren't.

But I must move on, for at #12 is a reissue of now 20-year-old (give or take a month) record "Rock Around The Clock". No, wait. That's not the interesting one. It's not even the first time "Rock Around The Clock" re-charted, with a reissue racking up a few sales some time around 1968.

At #10 is a little record called "Seven Seas Of Rhye". Here is where I derail everything, because Queen was my first love as a band. These are records about which I cannot be impartial, although it's not like I've exactly tried for any of the others I've mentioned. Queen was the first band for whom I tried to collect everything, and the fact that 29 years later I still don't own the Flash soundtrack or any of the live albums should give you some idea quite how bad I am at getting things done.

In those few years just before Britpop truly took off, before I was able to assert my own tastes and mostly had to listen to a combination of what my parents had on and whatever background music was playing in the shopping centres we visited, Queen fascinated me. I was aware there was this chronology of albums, and you'd get no more than two or three in a row before things would be radically different - clearly the same band, but mining a different sound in different ways.

Now this would also be true of the Beatles or, if you were a serious student of R&B copyism versus ramshackle country-influenced benders, the Stones. If I'd waited a couple of years I could even have seen it become true in real time for Suede or the Manic Street Preachers. The difference for me with Queen was the existence of a double-VHS collection in the parental video library: 1991's Box of Flix, comprising of music video collections Greatest Flix I and Greatest Flix II.

See, as kids we weren't allowed to interfere in the music collection but we were allowed to put on videos as we pleased, despite CDs being essentially foolproof and VHS having a dozen failure modes before you've even put the tape in the machine. I guess it felt somehow chunkier and more kid-friendly than those fancy shiny circles.

There were a few tapes which I gravitated to, in particular the Beatles' Yellow Submarine cartoon and those two aforementioned collections of Queen music videos. Yellow Submarine was enjoyable, but you were getting one specific era of the band. Whereas with the Queen tapes, you saw the whole evolution, from prancing around on stage in leotards doing an unnecessarily elongated version of "Liar" in 1973 to a gaunt Mercury singing "I'm Going Slightly Mad" circa 1991 in a monochrome video which would now be described as Tim Burton-esque.

The thing with experiencing the band in such a condensed fashion, two decades of albums and adventures condensed into two video tapes, was the evolution seemed to come at breakneck speed. Barely an hour and one swapped tape after they're playing "Spread Your Wings" in a cold, snow-draped garden, and they're soaring around Metropolis for "Radio Ga-Ga".

It helped that Queen were a very visual band. I should cover this a bit later, but as a youngster this combination of music and video reached me on some level that plain old records didn't. If you've ever seen a toddler stare unblinkingly for hours on end at the myriad outputs of Pinkfong then, well, I guess what I'm saying is this still hasn't entirely left the system by the preteen years.

So I collected Queen. I got to know them really well, and by extension saw an evolution in music so many acts paralleled. From proudly eschewing synthesisers in favour of "real" instruments to embracing them. The awkward and fumbling transition into the 1980s. The sad loss of a vital band member, and how the band dealt with it knowing that death from AIDS is something which happens (or at least, did in the late '80s) with unavoidable but escalating inevitability over a long period.

Queen also taught me the idea that even a band you liked could make missteps and do things you didn't like, whether it be duff album tracks, the occasional duff album in entirety, or their willingness to play gigs in apartheid countries under the guise of being apolitical - something the band would, in fairness, later regret. Also I didn't really care about that when I was about 11 because we didn't even get taught what apartheid was until 6 months later but, y'know, it bears mentioning.

The other thing with Queen is my love of the band matured along with my music taste. Early on I liked the brasher, noisier records like "Hammer To Fall" or "I Want It All", and would listen to a cassette copy of "The Miracle" album on repeat. Then when odds and remnants album "Made In Heaven" came out in 1995 I loved that, because it was new, sounded like what I thought "current" ought to sound like, and also because evidently I had no critical faculties to my name yet. Well, I did just tell you I liked Marie Osmond's "Paper Roses" only a little while ago, but I still feel that's less a musical sin than thinking what amounts to a CD of leftovers is a significant artistic statement.

As I got older, though, I found that the Queen I really liked was early, weird Queen. The albums where they were still hedging their bets over who would make the best singer - and if that seems odd looking back, remember that Roger Taylor does have a fantastic gravel-throated rock'n'roll voice. The times when they weren't under the pressure of being multinational best-sellers and were content just to be a bunch of nerdy science students. (Okay, so Freddie went to art school, but that just meant he could design the band's coat of arms).

Peak early Queen for me is their 1974 album "Queen II", which ends with - what else? "Seven Seas Of Rhye". As indeed does "Queen I", in a somewhat less finished iteration of the song. The opening piano motif is something the band had clearly been playing with for a while, and it's interesting seeing their working compared to what became their third single and first Top 40 hit.

What strikes me listening to this in context is just how different it is to the established rock norm in the charts: harder, heavier, but also with a level of obvious musical talent which had been punted under the surface in favour of straightforwardness by most other contemporaries. The arpeggiated piano! The harmonies! The little accents from Brian May on his home-made guitar! Even the fade to "I do like to be beside the seaside" (also on the single whatever errant online encyclopaedias might tell you about album-only content) feels avant-garde in the present company. What I guess I'm saying is discovering Queen from the other end of their career is just as much an eye-opener as it was for young me slotting half of Box of Flix into the VCR some time in 1993.

At #1 in April is Terry Jacks' "Seasons In The Sun", an English-language adaptation of a 1961 Jacques Brel song first recorded by the Kingston Trio in 1964. This arrangement was originally intended for the Beach Boys and you can hear elements of that in the organ line. It's pleasant in a slightly mawkish way, which makes me wonder whether a Beach Boys version would have been a bit faster and more energetic.

This was also one of those records which got wheeled out as evidence for the prosecution in the '70s being the naffest of musical decades, a combination of its slightness and the feeling that any deliberately sentimental record was playing on easy mode as far as chart success was concerned. Which means for me, now, it's a bit of a "never heard of 'em", and perhaps that lack of familiarity makes that judgement feel unfair; I wouldn't say this is something I'd go back and want to listen to again and again but the charts have and indeed would continue to do far worse, only some of it during the 1970s.

Gary Glitter is now a two-pronged attack on the charts, with both soupy slow rocker "Remember Me This Way" at #3 and his backing band at #4 with "Angel Face". And oh great, barely a few seconds in and we get one of those, "wahey, sixteen years old, perving is now acceptable" lyrics. Musically I think this is more tolerable than their output with Glitter up front, although there's still a few gratuitous "hey"s spread around, but I can't get over the skeevy lyrics.

But while Glitter may still be at large with yet more simple rock, the presence of Queen and "Seasons In The Sun" suggest a chart which is starting to get a bit more diverse. This is around the rise of what I'm going to term "bedroom soul" - slow, often string-heavy arrangements, bass vocals, and maybe a sprinkling of waka-chicka guitar. Barry White's Love Unlimited Orchestra was the most prototypical, and February '73 #10 "Love's Theme" ticks most of these boxes apart from being an instrumental.

Diana Ross and Marvin Gaye's "You Are Everything" (#5 April '74) is deliberately sensual, with a spoken word intro, a free hand with the strings and a ponderous beat.

Even Slade seem to have found something in the water, because April #3 "Everyday" is a most un-Slade record, with a slow piano intro and pained vocals. Much as I associate the band with simple noise, I must admit I'm enjoying this. I wonder about an alternate history where the band hadn't tried to break the US and instead kept getting increasingly complex, becoming a very odd version of Queen.

Mud's #2 "The Cat Crept In" is far more what you'd expect, although that does mean it's starting to feel a bit much of the same thing over and over. Mungo Jerry's "Long Legged Woman Dressed In Black" (#13 May '74) is again something an AI could probably dream up based on the previous Mungo Jerry records, with repeating lyrics, sudden a capella sections, and more piano rakes than should be legally permitted in the space of three minutes.

When I say the Wombles ruled the charts with an iron fist I mean it, and in early April they're back with "Remember You're A Womble", rising to #3 by May. Much the same applies, in that while these might be outright novelty Mike Batt still knew how to write a pop song, and here wasn't constrained by it also having to a TV theme. Again I get those shades of a tamer Wizzard, Roy Wood evidently leaving a lot of his discards lying around Wimbledon Common.

Down the lower reaches of the chart we get more weirdness - we've seen old rock'n'roll records being bought, but how about ragtime? Marvin Hamlisch's version of "The Entertainer" is really at #25 because it's the theme to "The Sting", a successful caper film.

At #21 is Genesis' "I Know What I Like (In Your Wardrobe)". Progressive rock was huge in the '70s; fourth best selling record of all time "Dark Side of the Moon" came out in 1973, and you can browse through almost any second-hand record shop's rock racks and come away with yet another '70s progressive rock album you've never heard of before (with quite a hefty price tag in the case of some Gentle Giant LPs).

But this was an album genre. Indeed, progressive rock is perhaps the album genre, with single tracks occupying an entire side of 12" vinyl to clock in at 23 minutes, and even individual songs being mixed together into long suites where track markers seem almost arbitrary (and would often come with i., ii., iii. sub-markers to make it clear these eight minutes are in fact composed of multiple movements).

This was something I knew I'd always have to reckon with making this exercise purely about the singles chart. Even in the '90s, the album chart was "music for us" and the singles chart was "music for them". But the turn of the 1970s took this to an extreme. Bowie released parsimoniously few singles from his albums. Led Zeppelin didn't release any. Elton John might have been big if you looked at single sales, but as an album seller he was a titan. Hard rock and progressive rock flourished on albums full of tracks too long to fit on a mere seven inches of vinyl.

In April 1974, the album charts do reflect what was going on in the singles world. Slade are in there, Queen are in there, even the Wombles have a best-selling album. But there's also a strong element of looking backward. Topping the chart at the end of April is The Carpenters' "Singles 1969-1973" compilation. No less than three Beatles albums are in there, two of them greatest hits compilations.

There's also a lot we're not even seeing on the singles chart, unless we want to slow this exercise even further by looking at things which grazed #36 for a couple of weeks. "Tubular Bells", "Dark Side of the Moon", "Tales From Topographic Oceans". Deep Purple are in there. Emerson, Lake & Palmer are in there. Tangerine Dream are charting! Even the album "I Know What I Like" is from, "Selling England By The Pound".

This in some sense is the weakest part of this exercise. Can you really have a music history that almost entirely misses out hard rock and progressive rock, two of the most important genres of the early '70s and ones which would influence or catalyse music well into the '80s? A history that never references a Led Zeppelin record, due to their album-only release policy?

I posit yes. Because this is not the history of what the muso or the hi-fi enthusiast bought. It's not the history of what the critics thought best or what has endured to the present day, although to a certain extent I'll never be able to avoid the latter. It's the history of what ordinary people bought and listened to, in a market so democratic anyone with a paper round could participate, even if what they bought was the Bay City Rollers' "Shang-a-Lang" (#2 May '74). Because I can listen to it and find that it is not, objectively, all that terrible.

It's also the story of things which influence people who don't have a deliberately cultivated air of musical sophistication to maintain, such as the talent contests which gave us Peters and Lee, #3 in May with "Don't Stay Away Too Long" and proving sticky, over-sweet production has been the curse of these talent show alumni things for as long as they've existed.

Most notorious of those talent competitions is the Eurovision Song Contest, and we've already seen how easily it influenced the singles charts - elevating a stinker well above its natural position, or creating demand for an English-language version of a particularly good foreign winner.

1974 as far as Eurovision was concerned was a big year. A rule that had been in place since 1966 demanding all entries were in each country's official native language had been lifted for the 1973 contest. At the same time, a Swedish band in their late 20s, named after both the country's major fish canning plant and the initials of each band member in a joke which definitely doesn't travel, were making a very deliberate attempt to win the national Melodifestivalen, knowing victory meant Eurovision and Eurovision meant exposure to an international audience.

Going full-tilt at commercial appeal, they took their existing Spectoresque wall of sound style and added what they thought was the most popular influence from the UK pop scene - inevitably, glam rock. Melodifesten: cleared. And with one last piece falling into place, they decided to take advantage of the year-old rule change and sing not in Swedish, but English.

I refer, of course, to ABBA's "Waterloo", one of the most infamous contest winners and a massive #1 smash going into May '74. What's immediately noticeable listening in this company is the sheer craft, and despite the glam influences how much it swerves away from the simplistic and increasingly tired rock sound that had dominated the charts up until now.

What we got on record was the band in their final, polished incarnation. The endearingly nervous demeanour and noticeable Swedish accent from the Eurovision appearance were gone. But this was always a great record, even the original Swedish version with its gloriously fat Moog lines, toned down or replaced with piano accents in the later version for maximum appeal and minimum weirdness.

In concentrating on the singles chart I can see just how much this fits in. Yes, it moves the game on in terms of finding a pure pop sound, but then see how many elements are also present in the works of Wizzard, such as May #6 "Rock and Roll Winter". Even though that is a bit of an oddity, both in releasing a very winter-themed song in late April, and the backward-looking nature of it with the occasional deliberate nod to a rock'n'roll gimmick.

Displacing ABBA from #1 were The Rubettes with "Sugar Baby Love", a record whose original has sadly been buried beneath an avalanche of K-Tel-esque soundalikes on most streaming platforms. I'm not saying you're missing some great musical moment here, but at least an original 45 gets the original intent across properly, which was to mix post-bubblegum teeny bop with classic doo-wop, coming away with something not a million miles from a collision between the Bay City Rollers and Frankie Valli. In true bubblegum style, this was a studio invention and the Rubettes were a combination of the session backing band with background vocal singer Alan Williams moved to a lead role. (Those falsetto vocals on "Sugar Baby Love" come from Paul Da Vinci)

If the seeds for a movement beyond meat and potatoes rock had been sown, nobody had told Status Quo, with late May #8 "Break The Rules" seeing them settle into the basic 12-bar shuffle they became synonymous with.

Hitting #2 at the end of the month are Sparks with "This Town Ain't Big Enough For Both Of Us". Sparks are one of those bands where people I know mention having followed them for ages, and yet I've never really listened because there's only so much time and I have a lot of mid-tier 1960s psychedelia to get through when I'm not slowly despairing at old pop charts.

What's interesting to me is how much they beat Queen to this sort of oddly structured, quasi-operatic style, the latter band not really getting into that until 1975's "A Night At The Opera". "Town" was written by band member Ron Mael with no respect for his brother Russell's vocal range, with the intent of visiting a different movie cliché every verse. It didn't end up that way, settling on just that one classic Western line, but we still got something very odd and a long way from that unending carpet of simple rock.

I think the country might have collectively woken up from a rock-based somnolence in 1974, with thoroughly excellent Northern Soul classic R. Dean Taylor's "There's A Ghost In My House" hitting #3 in June. It's a 1967 record and sounds it, but I love this sudden out-of-nowhere resurgence of something I thought had dropped out of the charts long ago.

Even Alvin Stardust's #7 "Red Dress" picks up a synthesiser, adding a welcome bit of texture.

We get a bit of Eurovision detritus with second-placing entrant Gigliola Cinquetti taking "Go (before you break my heart)" to #8 at the end of May. This was an English-language version of contest entry "Si", carrying across those same Big Pop sensibilities with the soft solo verses and belted-out choruses. I do have a bit of a soft spot for this stuff, and even if that's me trying to rationalise spending my spare time watching Eurovisions from several decades ago I'm not going to be throwing this one out for the Wombles to pick up. Also, I'm quite a long way from Wimbledon.

One of my biggest early record collecting disappointments was Cockney Rebel, whose "Judy Teen" hit #5 in June. Mainly because I picked up a greatest hits record off the back of both this and "Come Up And See Me", and nothing ever seemed to reach the same heights. I think this might be the downside to experiencing an artist through a Greatest Hits; if there's only one or two particular eras you enjoy, you're going to end up with a lot of guff. I'm certainly enjoying listening to a selection of tracks from 1973's "The Human Menagerie" far more.

Yet more Eurovision with Dutch duo Mouth & MacNeal's "I See A Star" going to #8 in June. This feels very much a Eurovision song with that bubbling calliope and the soft/loud/soft sections clearly arranged to fit around on-stage choreography and lighting, but within those constraints it's not too bad. 1974 must have been a great contest to watch, even if our own entry of Olivia Newton-John's "Long Live Love" (#11 April '74) is a somewhat turgid harbinger of just how bad UK entries would become by the next century. I'd make my standing joke of us at least not sending Cliff Richard again, but I think countrypolitan number "(You Keep Me) Hangin' On" (#13 June '74) might genuinely be better, no matter how painfully tame it sounds.

#1 in June is Ray Stevens' horrid comedy record "The Streak", a routine about public nudity with banjo accompaniment, chants of "boogity boogity" and lots of innuendo. When I say that the intersection of saucy comedy and novelty records is two of the worst things about the '70s combined to make an even worse thing, it's things like this I'm thinking about. This is genuinely terrible, to the point I'm wondering if I should rethink that earlier judgement and cover 1974 from the albums chart instead.

Another infamous '70s name, Showaddywaddy see their chart debut at #2 with "Hey Rock And Roll". Winners of the first New Faces competition, that combination of "hey" and "rock and roll" suggests some kind of Glitter-level nonsense and there are no surprises here. I don't know if there was some kind of widespread memory loss going on in the early '70s, but I'm sure we don't need quite so many records where at least 50% of the lyrics are the words "rock and roll" repeated over and over.

I fear Eurovision 1974 may have been too much excitement for a public who've only really been listening to one style of thing to bear, because the charts seem to sag over the summer, with ex-Animal Alan Price having marching band "Jarrow Song" at #6, the Scaffold doing their drunken singalong antics at #7 with "Liverpool Lou" and Gary Glitter about to have another teeth-gritting chart-topper with "Always Yours".

Some respite arrives in July with Lobo's #5 "I'd Love You To Want Me", a slow and building number with a nice little bit of country piano. Still, there's a certain sense of directionlessness creeping in with a reissue of Gary Puckett and the Union Gap's "Young Girl" at #6 and the Drifters having a revival with newly-recorded "Kissin' In The Back Row" sounding no different to a '60s record and having the unpleasant thing of listening to a 40 year old man sing about waiting for his girlfriend to finish doing her homework.

If you wonder how the questionable cod-reggae lyrics of the Wombles' "Banana Rock" could make it to #9, evidently there was space for it. There's certainly a lot of rubbish here to Womble up and put in the bin.

This malaise starts to end as August approaches, with George McCrae's "Rock Your Baby" going to #1 at the end of July. The moment I listened to my first bedroom soul record I realised that while the tempo wasn't there, many of the foundations of disco were being laid. This record may be the missing link; while I wouldn't place it firmly in either category, it's on that road between them.

Slade #3 "Bangin' Man" is simple and fun, although you can hear in the lyrics that we're a long way from the band who've only had a few weeks' experience of being famous. Occupying that #3 spot later in August is Paul McCartney and Wings with "Band On The Run", a multi-part odyssey that journeys through multiple textures before finally breaking into the best bit, an acoustic-forward number so reminiscent of CCR it even has "rain" in the lyrics.

Terry Jacks went in for another sad record with "If You Go Away" - less mawkishly sentimental than "Seasons In The Sun" it made #8 in July. At #9 a week later are the Sweet with "The Six Teens", a title that sets my teeth on edge, but I should have learnt to trust Sweet. Far from being yet another icky ode to underage relationships, this is a story of growing up in the tempestuous world of the late '60s. And it is masterful; hard-charging where it needs to be, but ready to cut the intensity on a moment's notice to drive home the contrast.

The Rubettes return for more falsetto-vocal bubblegum with "Tonight", #12 in August. Perhaps Paul Da Vinci should not have been so in a hurry to leave in favour of an existing contract, because "Your Baby Ain't Your Baby Anymore" languished down at #20. The falsetto hits a higher pitch but it's less well-integrated, feeling tacked on to the song and a bit of a gimmick. It all feels a bit undercooked, with some rather heavy-handed fades in places.

More bedroom soul from The Stylistics with "You Make Me Feel Brand New" at #2 in August, a few weeks after Stephanie De Sykes and Rain took that position with "Born With A Smile On My Face". A record which feels like an attempt to copy what ABBA were doing, but comes off more like the New Seekers run at too high a voltage. Composer Simon May would go on to create the theme to "Eastenders", a rather more enduring endeavour.

Rollermania continues with "Summerlove Sensation", #3 in August. The shock for me listening to these for the first time is how generally okay they are. Don't get me wrong, I'm aware these are simple teeny-bop songs and there's a fair amount of bubblegum poured in, but given later criticism I was expecting them to be horrible. Instead they're simple, catchy, and do exactly what they set out to do.

Mud's August #6 "Rocket" is the first chart outing for Les Gray's pastiche of Elvis, combined with a Sweet-like chorus. A gimmick bringing to mind that most gimmicky of musical eras, but it's listenable enough.

Still, it sounds very dated compared to the point at which proto-disco finally becomes disco proper, Hues Corporation's "Rock The Boat" (#6 August '74). The strings and itchy guitar are still there from bedroom soul, but now we've got the energy and that last element of the disco record proper: a memorable, rhythmic chorus that cannot be described any other way than "danceable".

Sparks unleash another flurry of ideas for August #7 "Amateur Hour", I guess on some technical level it's a saucy comedy record, but without the constant nudge-wink and obnoxious musical arrangements which typically befall these things you can almost ignore it, and the speed at which the lyrics come makes it hard to tell in the first place.

Once more it may as well be 1965 again for Donny & Marie Osmond's "I'm Leaving It All Up To You" (#2 September '74), a journey through old recording clichés with vocals that are consistently at too high a register for me. For all we've seen a lot of new things this year, I fear Osmond-mania still has quite the momentum to it. Never mind, let's walk past and pick up reissue of Jimmy Ruffin's "What Becomes Of The Brokenhearted", peaking at #4 in late August with the continuing 1970s fascination for old records.

Eric Clapton covers Bob Marley number "I Shot The Sheriff" for an August #9, keeping much of the reggae style in place. While I don't like the man I'll admit this one works well; Clapton's tendency to make everything more laid back works well in the style, and there's a lot of nice guitar detail scattered around in lieu of a traditional solo.

Also laid back are the Stones at #10 with "It's Only Rock and Roll", but we're definitely post-slide here. It's a hollow, empty sort of record, a band going through the motions of "Exile On Main Street" without any of the conviction. It spends five minutes going nowhere, not helped by the consideration that I'm utterly fed up of records which are some variation on, "look, rock and roll, it exists" by now.

Cockney Rebel's "Mr Soft" (#8 August '74) is exactly the problem I have with Cockney Rebel as a whole. I don't know if they're trying to be weird or mysterious, but it just comes across as obnoxious. Hey, look, we made our record much less enjoyable than it otherwise could have been, aren't we wonderful?

If I'm fed up with songs that keep going on about rock'n'roll, then the Glitter Band's refusal to innovate what they do in the slightest pleases me even less. At least August #10 "Just For You" doesn't mention any ages relating to the protagonists.

But then I see John Denver's "Annie's Song" entering the charts in mid-August (eventually going to #1 in October) and feel a lot better. It's beautiful and expressive, using rich textures to help the simple lyrics soar. I'm sure there's a religious-themed variant of this our youth pastors used to sing when they'd run out of New Seekers material, but even that can't cast a cloud over this welcome break.

Sylvia's "Y Viva Espana" going to #4 in September can, on the other hand. While I've not heard a straight-up Template song since Peters and Lee, it seems the exotic travelogue song can still pester the charts.

But then we have the Osmonds parked at #1 with "Love Me For A Reason", a record which haunted me even in my teenage years with a typically saccharine Boyzone cover. I do wonder that I may be accusing the original of guilt by association, because it's largely inoffensive.

Still, disco is here and one-hit wonder Carl Douglas displaced it from #1 later in September with "Kung Fu Fighting", a record designed to capitalise on the chopsocky craze of the early '70s. It sits weirdly on the cusp between straight-up disco record and novelty, the obligatory waka-chicka guitar butting up against enthusiastic "huh"s and "hah"s. It may be a bit of a joke, but it's also arguable the first disco chart-topper, perhaps warning that we could be in for yet another flimsy and gimmicky genre if it's resorting to novelty before we've even got going.

Johnny Bristol's "Hang On In There Baby" (#3 September '74) is a record which leans heavily into disco but leaves one nervous toe in the waters of bedroom soul. Of course, if it's bedroom soul you're after, Barry White has the genuine article with "Can't Get Enough Of Your Love Babe" at #8, although even this is noticeably more uptempo than earlier efforts with some very disco-like swells.

There's a welcome return for the Fender Rhodes on Andy Kim's "Rock Me Gently", a self-financed and self-published record which went to #2 in October. It's unexpectedly well produced given those origins, with some great little synth accents and squelchy clavinet reminiscent of Stevie Wonder's "Superstition".

One of the iconic elements of disco would be the string swell, and while the record itself is more Jacksons-esque pop, it's very present on Sweet Sensation's October #1 "Sad Sweet Dreamer".

Leo Sayer tilts at Bob Dylan for "Long Tall Glasses", an October #4 full of inscrutable lyrics. Also hitting #4 in October is Peter Shelley with "Gee Baby", and I do wonder - you gave away Alvin Stardust for this? I know it was a popular record in its day, but I can see why this ended up being consigned to the same fate as most chart filler which seems to exist solely to make leaner weeks a Top 40 and not, say, a Top 2.

It appears reggae is finally back. I'm not talking about things like Clapton's cover or "in the style of"s like Andy Fairweather-Low's unfortunate #10 "Reggae Tune", but Ken Boothe's "Everything I Own" hitting #1 at the end of October. Of all things it's a cover of a Bread song, but Boothe makes this rocksteady version his own.

Rod Stewart goes to #7 with double A-side "Farewell" / "Bring It On Home To Me / You Send Me". Listening to these in retrospect I find myself wondering: "when is he going to stop being good and start being the thing we joked about in the '90s". Well, technically I do sort of know and it has the word "sexy" in it, but these are some good records.

Slade are sounding most un-Slade (and in fact, not a million miles from Rod Stewart) on October #2 "Far Far Away", another record which is starting to make me feel that Slade's post-"Xmas" output is really rather underrated, tarred with the brush of their earlier, simpler and dumber records.

I find it strange how fast meat and potatoes rock disappeared from the charts after having it in such a stranglehold, even if the summer of '74 felt a lot like there wasn't anything ready to replace it. I wonder if it was the victim of its own success. When teeny-bop acts such as the Bay City Rollers choose it as their form of expression, such as October #4 "All Of Me Loves All Of You", it has an effect on the teenagers and young adults who make up so much of the singles market. You don't want to buy something that sounds the same as what your kid sibling is listening to. The success of glam and pub rock spawn Rollermania, and in turn Rollermania ends their success, at least with anyone over the age of 12.

Similarly, the Wombles' "Minuetto Allegretto" (#16 November '74) must be why none of us listened to classical music as teenagers. Hang on - wait a second, just how old did they claim Uncle Bulgaria is? If Wombles were genuinely that long-lived they should have had invented fusion power by 1974, not been dancing around on Top of the Pops.

Moving on, David Essex's "Gonna Make You A Star" comes in with a big synth blare, and is probably the most satisfying Essex record I've listened to yet. It's even a little self-aware, talking about being "out of style and not "hip". That synth work truly is great, though, and I feel its eventual #1 in November '73 is deserved.

Brushing past the Drifters revival and yet more old records charting ("Da Doo Ron Ron", #15 in November) I arrive at Queen's second chart hit, "Killer Queen". This was far more of a commercial success, peaking at #2 in November. It's also so much more obviously self-assured, starting with finger snaps and introducing the mid-'70s Queen we would come to know so well; pomp, bombast, tilts at opera or musical theatre and the ever-present feeling that Freddy Mercury is only one step away from waving around a foot-long cigarette holder and going, "dahling".

What's notable is how much of a difference this single and album "Sheer Heart Attack" represent in the few months since "Queen II". Yes, "Seven Seas Of Rhye" might have been a hit and they found time to throw in a straightforward hard rocker or two, but listen to the album in its entirety with knowledge of just how academically accomplished the band members were and you can't help but come away with the feeling that in singing about fairies or ogres and devoting an entire song to describing a Richard Dadd painting, Queen was music both by and for nerds.

This was certainly how they had come to be seen by the early '90s, and my love of the band caused some amount of friction with classmates who felt my time would better be invested in Ace of Base or 2 Unlimited. Then of course Britpop happened and I discovered Pulp, which was music by and for nerds that you could get away with.

I digress. What Queen's third album and indeed "Killer Queen" in particular show is the band figuring out what it means to be Queen. They've toned down the rocking, ramped up the bombast and most importantly made things accessible. You no longer need to be sticking your nose deep in brick-thick fantasy novels to appreciate the themes.

One final footnote is that this was typically billed as a double A-side along with "Flick Of The Wrist", although the number of different variations of haphazardly cutting that intermixed album track in and out and its later excision from "Greatest Hits" suggests EMI always knew which way up they wanted things.

Hitting the top spot in December was another iconic Barry White number, "You're The First, The Last, My Everything". White has finally made his own journey from the bedroom soul genre he so thoroughly inhabited to disco, adopting the latter's tempo and urgency if not its hook-laden choruses.

Hitting #6 and entering with a blast of what sounds like an ARP synth is The Peppers, with "Pepper Box", a funky French instrumental that feels firmly in the disco groove.

At #11 are Pilot with what you'd easily mistake for a Paul McCartney song, "Magic". This tail end of 1974 seems the time for a few enduringly famous songs to hit the charts, with Bachman-Turner Overdrive's "You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet" hitting #2 in December, and eking out a long career over the temporary PA systems of small arenas set up in fields, usually just before some monster trucks are about to crush a bunch of old Morris Marinas or something of the sort.

It's been a while since we've seen Elvis Presley in these parts, and "My Boy" (going to #5 right at the end of the year) sounds very out of place. Which isn't a bad thing. I've missed this. We're firmly into the later stages of Vegas-era Elvis, and "My Boy" is beautifully confident as he works his way through a slow pained number that in theory is being sung to a sleeping infant. I kind of feel they'd wake up around the point Elvis wheels the horn section into the bedroom.

Rupie Edwards scores a December #9 with "Ire Feelings (Skanga)", the first time a dub record has made it this high up the charts. Dubs were typically B-sides of reggae singles, usually signified by the simple addition of "(version)" to the title, with almost all lyrics removed and the record reduced to its most basic components of drums and bassline. They were intended to be toasted over by the DJ of a sound system, but the deep, heavy and slow records drenched in tape echo turn out to be an enjoyable listen even if there's no-one around to talk over the top of them.

Elton John's "Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds" (#10 December '74) is perhaps taking advantage of the era's backward-looking nature, but it's a fascinating piece in how hard it switches between straight-up Beatles tribute and sounding like a pure Elton John number. There's even a bizarre reggae section.

This last month of 1974 starts to once again become confusing as to which year things should belong in, as there's a lot entering the Top 40 which doesn't really get far up the charts until January. The reason is the same as 1973's similar confusion: we get a big Christmas record battle.

Only this time we're doing it not as Slade vs. Wizzard at the peak of their powers, but with the rather confused and often regrettable charts of 1974.

First on to the Top 40 are Showaddywaddy with "Hey Mister Christmas", a choir-led affair which invites us to throw away our troubles this Christmas. What if one of my troubles is the amount of Showaddywaddy in the charts? What then, eh? I can't decide or not if it's recycling bits of "Merry Xmas (War Is Over)", but I guess there's only so many places you can go with saying you hope people are having fun. Final score: #13.

Speaking of recycling, of course newly minted chart tyrants the Wombles would be there, with "Wombling Merry Christmas". And if I feel Mike Batt liked to channel Wizzard for this project, it's not been more present than it is here, on Wizzard's home turf. I know it's the Wombles, but this does about everything you'd want from a mid-'70s Christmas record. If only everyone had listened to what they had to say about recycling, we might still have some snow to Womble around in now. Final score: #2.

The Goodies are better known for their TV comedy programme of the same name, its zany humour getting it a slightly inappropriate reputation as a children's comedy despite a few sketches being definitely adults-only. In terms of Christmas singles they're cheating with a double A-side "The Inbetweenies", but let's look at the Christmas side "Father Christmas Do Not Touch Me". It's about as horrible as you might expect from the title. "Ho ho, saucy comedy, isn't it hilarious," nudges and winks the 1970s from the distant past. "How chortlesome it is as brassieres ping off in contrived circumstancies and filthy old men chase young ladies around fields," it says. "Oh, and we're so pleased with ourselves about this we're going to put precisely zero effort into this aspect of our Christmas song". I have tried to refrain from lazily decrying the entire '70s as awful, but I'm looking across at the highest chart position for this and finding myself severely tested. Final score: #7.

I've not mentioned Gilbert O'Sullivan in a while as he's mostly kept on doing the same sort of thing, and "Christmas Song (I'm Not Dreaming Of A White Christmas)" is pretty much that thing with a Christmas theme applied to it. It's surprisingly deep, being as much an anti-war song as it is a Christmas one. I feel like some balance has been restored, reminding me that the '70s did maintain much of the social consciousness of the late '60s, even if it became more cynical toward the end of the decade. Final score: #12.

But Christmas 1974 belonged to one band, or perhaps one man's Elvis impersonation. It's Mud, with "Lonely This Christmas", a record which is trying so hard to sound like it could have been made in 1958. I think the bits where it fails only make it more endearing, home-made like a tired Elvis impersonator in the back room of a run-down pub who's doing this so there's enough money to buy the kids the presents they want. Plus I've always been a sucker for a spoken-word interlude. Final score: #1, and I think I agree.

1975

Much like the Wombles I find myself entering 1975 by picking up things which have been left behind, in this case late 1974 chart entries which only climbed to their highest positions after the great Christmas song battle was over.

The highest of those positions is a #1 for Status Quo's "Down Down", a band who have somehow managed to ignore everything that has happened the previous year and come out with yet more simple rock, even if it is far more hard-driving than any teeny-bopper would accept.

At #2 is Ralph McTell's "Streets of London", another one of those school assembly stalwarts, where we'd get our allotted 10 minutes of social consciousness before doing some times tables and learning how to program Logo on a BBC Micro. Even in the educational setting I liked it, and McTell's choice to be hard-hitting in a soft and wistful way.

While the Quo might be in rude health, Kenny's "The Bump" (#3 January '75) shows glam rock sliding gracelessly into gimmickry and novelty on its way to what is certainly irrelevance, given I don't recall the charts being full of glam rock decades later.

Record buyers were embracing disco, with Gloria Gaynor's "Never Can Say Goodbye" reaching #2 at the end of January, starting with the trademark disco string swell and introducing an overly busy arrangement which takes the nascent genre further away from its bedroom soul origins.

The Tymes "Ms. Grace" almost feels like a throwback in this context, the band still going after a long career making soul records. If anything this is a reminder that the Northern Soul movement was in full swing and soul music still had its fierce adherents, enough of them to take this to #1 - not a bad result for a band who usually hung around the lower reaches of the Top 40.

At #6 that same week is John Holt with a soft reggae cover of Kris Kristofferson's "Help Me Make It Through The Night". It's a lovely record, at least if you don't hear it from my personal copy of "1000 Volts of Holt" which I bought from a £2 bin and is scratched to a point of near-unplayability. This is one of those songs where the UK got a significantly slicked-up version with extra strings and overdubs compared to the more stripped back Jamaican market one.

We've finally caught up to things which enter the Top 40 for the first time in 1975, although that chart still included the last couple of days of 1974. Wizzard ask us "Are You Ready To Rock" (#8 January '75), to which we answer, "haven't you noticed? We're ready to disco, reggae, soul, and possibly even something else by the time the year is out".

If glam acts are getting increasingly gimmicky, then Wizzard have responded by immersing themselves fully in the original land of the gimmick, making this sound more like 1950s rock'n'roll than anything I've heard before.

If Wizzard are in the '50s, then Donny & Marie Osmond are still flying that flag for the mid '60s on "Morning Side Of The Mountain" (#5 entering February '75), sounding more and more like something from the kind of film soundtrack that'd have sold an improbable number of copies in that decade. I've listened to so many of these things I'm starting to become numb to them, but a dulled and over-used receptor is still telling me "too much" somewhere in there.

Given how they're barely even remembered as the creators of "Magic" I was half-expecting Pilot to be a one-hit wonder, but they're back at the start of February with monster #1 "January", which is pleasant enough but certainly less memorable than "Magic" which may explain why it hasn't lasted anywhere near as long. My instincts aren't that bad, by the way. A quick check reveals they were a two-hit wonder.

At #2 in February are the Carpenters with an insipid cover of "Please Mr Postman", which I would mainly be entreating my postman not to deliver and return to sender. A man who knows about things being returned to sender is Elvis Presley, whose "Promised Land" is at #9 the same month. It's an old Chuck Berry number, and a two-year-old recording at this point from an album composed largely of leftovers from the "Good Times" sessions. If you ever wondered what Elvis channelling the Stones circa 1964 would sound like, well, it's here.

The Glitter Band have found a new way to irk me, by getting to chart positions I can't ignore, with new mediocrity "Goodbye My Love" making it to #2 in February. I'm not even sure what it is I dislike about this, because a lot of the ingredients are fundamentally correct. I think it's the insincerity.

Below it at #3 are Mac and Katie Kissoon with "Sugar Candy Kisses", a fine piece of pop soul. The duo had lost out to Middle of the Road on recording "Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep" and while that may have denied them massive international success I think this is a much better record to be remembered for.

After years of trying Johnny Wakelin and the Kinshasa Band (an entirely English outfit) had a hit with "Black Superman (Muhammad Ali)", having even changed the boxer it was about. The result is an uneasy fusion of polka and "Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da" style cod reggae, and I do not like it. That didn't stop it making #7 in February '75.

Northern Soul's dedicated following made another mark on the charts with "Footsee", #9 in February '75 and credited to Wigan's Chosen Few but in fact an old Chosen Few instrumental B-side sped up to the frantic rhythm demanded in Wigan Casino and overdubbed with crowd noises, supposedly from a football match although some suggest it was merely a few people allowed to have a party in a studio. However, purists feared that "Footsee" was little more than a cash-in, and interfering with the original records went against the spirit of the thing.

Queen made #11 with "Now I'm Here", almost a straightforward hard rocker were it not for those hard-panned stereo vocals, an illusion which would be maintained on stage by alternating lighting and having a crew member dressed as Mercury appear on the opposite end as required.

Career revivals for old soul acts continued to come, with Frankie Valli taking "My Eyes Adored You" to #5 in March, although this is a soft ballad a long distance from his work with the Four Seasons.

That other Steve Harley and Cockney Rebel song I like, "Make Me Smile (Come Up And See Me)" is #1 at the end of February. The Dylanesque lead vocal is appealing, and it's got a lovely laid-back vibe.

Shirley and Company's "Shame, Shame, Shame" (#6 March '75) is a disco record in the most ramshackle and home-made way, with muddy sound and none of the slickness you'd normally expect in a disco record. There's something a bit charming to all this, and the record-buying public evidently took it to heart.

Mud seem to have come over all soft for March #3 "The Secrets That You Keep", that impression wobbling between Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly as the band slip further back into playing straight-up rock'n'roll. I find it odd how so many of these bands (well, at least two) escaped the pall of teenybop hanging over glam by taking their sound all the way back to the late 1950s.

There must have been something in covering Bread songs, because Telly Savalas made a spoken word cover of "If" long before the style became synonymous with William Shatner, going all the way to #1. It's more of a curio than anything, and I suspect its absence from streaming platforms is not making much difference to their popularity, but there's a sort of earnestness to it that I find hard to criticise.

1975 surfaces a few bands who are going to be with us for quite a bit. First of these is Fox with "Only You Can" (#3 March '75). Fox are one of those bands who seemed to have a lot of fun in the studio, coming up with unusual sounds to put on a record, although the stereo phasing on this one suggests a slightly immature approach to that early on.

The Average White Band's "Pick Up The Pieces" is #6, and even if you don't recognise the title you've definitely heard it before. The funk and horn instrumental with its mid-record shouts of "pick up the pieces, uh-huh" has been all over the place, especially on soundtracks which wish to remind you that you've entered the disco era and there's a high risk of some detectives in an unmarked car beginning a stakeout.

Peaking at #13 in March are Supertramp with "Dreamer", introducing a falsetto-vocal style and keyboard-centric style that would remain uniquely theirs for the rest of the decade, to the point I'm slightly surprised how early this record came along. It wasn't even that early in the band's chronology, with "Crime of the Century" being their third album after two progressive rock efforts so distant they appear to have been excised from the band's streaming discography.

Then at #11 we have Barry Manilow, long since reduced to a joke, but let's try to give "Mandy" a fair chance. Alright, I've tried that and it's over-sweetened, convictionless and trying so hard to do those kind of Big Pop moments without understanding you need at least some emotion and a much bigger voice to achieve them. I hit the gear change at 2:46 and find my teeth clenching.

Well, I may as well leave them clenched since the Bay City Rollers are #1 in March with "Bye Bye Baby". If the likes of Wizzard and Mud feel they can escape by heading into the past then I have bad news, because Rollermania is heading in your direction, stopping only briefly to riffle through the pockets of the Shangri-Las.

At #2 is overgrown McVitie's biscuit jingle "There's A Whole Lot Of Loving", fronted by a band formed so late that what you hear on record is still the session musicians all the way through to the vocals. It brings to mind nothing so much as what might happen if you kept pouring sugar into "Beg Steal Or Borrow" and nobody told you to stop.

I fear we're going through another of these fallow periods in the charts, and my concern increases upon seeing another Goodies record lurking at #4 in April. Oh yes, "The Funky Gibbon", double-A'd with "Sick Man Blues" and trying to poke fun at disco. There are some very bad connotations here, which I don't want to even start digging into, but even ignoring that this is getting wearing very quickly. I try the flip side, but apparently I've discovered that point of the '70s in which mocking black artists and black musical styles is fine, even before we get to the gratuitous "Indians and Jews" line. I'm sure this is the kind of thing where people will leap to the defence of the Goodies, as much of their comedy was well-loved and I don't recall it all being this mean-spirited, but listening to some of those mocking catcalls they bloody well knew what they were doing and exactly who they were targeting it at.

(Further investigation reveals that the show was blighted by racist caricatures and tilts at minstrelsry, many of them far less subtle than this. Despite the trio been keen to use their comedy to champion causes that were still often seen as a bit "right-on" in the '70s, including a scathing mockery of apartheid, it's the frequency of these moments which has prevented all but the occasional clip being shown in current times. One member regretfully laments that it was a spirit of the age they entered into a little too easily, while another claims refuge in audacity: that these things were so over-the-top offensive nobody can possibly have taken them seriously.)

At least all the Wombles ever did was ask us to recycle things.

A name I really didn't expect to see at this point is Duane Eddy, at #9 with "Play Me Like You Play Your Guitar". On top of that, a name I really didn't expect to see associated with that record is Keith Potger, of both the New and Old Seekers. I worry that I'm never going to escape the shadow of "Beg Steal Or Borrow", and while this isn't really much like that it does feel like one of the more tolerable New Seekers records with Duane Eddy added to it. And it really is just Duane Eddy doing exactly what he did in the 1950s, turned on and off at intervals like someone's wired a lightswitch to the output of his Gretsch. If anything it suggests that what the New Seekers needed all along was Duane Eddy, just doing this. It'd have made the 1972 Eurovision Song Contest interesting, at the very least.

Sweet's "Fox On The Run" is #2 in April, and the band are writing their own material for the first time, graduating from Nicky Chinn and Mike Chapman although those two still produced the album version. The single is all the band's own work, and my word it sounds like something has been unleashed here. Well, y'know, a fox. It's explicitly stated to be on the run. This is magesterial though, like the Sweet had previously been set to 50% by accident and someone's just noticed the control.

Peter Shelley's "Love Me, Love My Dog" (wait, is that where the expression comes from?) is a bit of a come down after that, because pretty much anything would be. I don't mean that in a bad way, though, as it's a pleasant soft rock record with some lush production. Between his own efforts and Alvin Stardust, Magnet was becoming quite the successful independent record label.

I almost think for a moment that Jim Gilstrap's "Swing Your Daddy" (#4 April '75) is going to break out into some wild piece of progressive rock weirdness, but after a few seconds of tension we find ourself in something sounding more like what you'd expect from one of Stevie Wonder's session musicians.

It looks like I'm not the only person to have noticed soul's stalwart fans propelling records to the charts, as a group called Sparkle rename themselves to Wigan's Ovation after a meeting with Northern Soul DJ Russ Winstanley and cover Invitations classic "Skiing In The Snow". This was seen by Casino regulars as a shameless cash-in, the band appearing on Top of the Pops in a ridiculous pastiche of the style and bringing a horde of fairweather punters who didn't really "get it" to flood their beloved venue. It made #12 regardless, but for a particular sect dedicated to all-nighters of upbeat and obscure soul this was the day the music died.

If anything, the problem these charts have is not so much death as necromancy; a re-release of Bobby Goldsboro's 1968 #2 "Honey" yet again reached the same chart position, this time in the back half of April '75. It's not a bad record, if a little sentimental and perfunctory of ending, but why? I can't see any impetus, any film it features in or piece of news relating to the artist, just that "Honey" got rereleased and everyone went and bought it again.

KC and the Sunshine Band's funk-tinged disco record "Get Down Tonight" was a big hitter in the US, but peaked at #21 over here. Maybe it was a little too funky, as it only feels fully like a disco record coming into the chorus, and if anything we're still seeing mostly conservative tastes in these charts, even down to buying the exact same record we bought seven years earlier.

There are some signs of life. Magnet Records were also behind bringing underperforming Jamaican-market record "Hurt so Good" by Susan Cadogan to the UK, where it hit #4 in May. Boris Gardiner is on bass, and we have a great three minutes of slow reggae in a style known as lover's rock for what should be obvious reasons.

Slow to the point of soporific is Gladys Knight and the Pips' "The Way We Were", #4 later in May and just as backward-looking as buying records from 1968. It does raise an interesting point in one of those lyrics, though; as you are looking back on what you consider to be "good old days", a new generation are making their own days to one day look back upon as "good old". I look forward to a younger version of me writing some 2050s version of this and starting it by reminiscing on the good old days of the 2020s pop-punk revival.

While the Pips may be cautioning us about the dangers of selective memory in constructing our own rose-tinted view of the good old times, 10cc are coining a platitude that is just bizarre, "Life Is A Minestrone" (#7 May '75). This is apparently the result of some misheard words, and a perhaps slightly desperate attempt to concoct some sort of message around, "wow man, yeah, life really is a mix of things, isn't it?"

A mix which I'd prefer doesn't involve the Glitter Band, lurking down at #8 with "The Tears I Cried". Actually, I'm being a bit unfair for mere comic effect, as this is bearable, given the caveat I've listened to so much glam rock by now I'm losing my ability to distinguish anything in the gigantic mirror-coated vat of soup. No, seriously, this is quite a decent attempt that's been cribbing from the Sweet and perhaps even a little Roxy Music.

The Three Degrees go a bit disco for "Take Good Care Of Yourself", #9 in May. But if we're talking soul acts, it has to be another Northern Soul champion, Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons' 1972 record "The Night" being propelled to #7 the same month. Stomping rhythm, the occasional pause when you can come up for air, and another point in favour of the Northern Soul movement's ability to sift through thousands of soul records and curate only the very best.

Mud's mining of the '50s reaches a point where it is more gimmick than music with sing-it, speak-it cover of Crickets classic "Oh Boy". It was a solid #1 for the first two weeks of May because the '70s did love itself a novelty, but I can't even get all the way through it before pining for the original and this is perhaps the point where Mud have finally skidded into that latter assessment of both them and their decade: naff.

Displacing it from #1 is yet another 1968 record, Tammy Wynette's "Stand By Your Man". This one can be excused by 1975 being its first release in the UK, and also being a way better record than you remember. That Everly Brothers style tremelo-laden guitar chord has me hooked immediately, and that sudden ascending scale which breaks out the big chorus gives me chills every time. This is Nashville at its biggest and best, showing that no matter how much you might tilt at countrypolitan, outlaw country or whatever the hell it is Buffy Sainte-Marie is about to do over there with that vocal synthesiser, they can still belt 'em out served straight up.

"Israelites" is also back in the charts, although less of a smash this time peaking at #10 in June '75.

While this might be an awful lot of '60s records entering the charts in one way or another, one position below Desmond Dekker on that same June week is something quite special. Kraftwerk's "Autobahn" is like nothing else, or at least nothing else you haven't had to order specially on an LP after having your beard checked for interestingness.

This is a four and a half minute cut of a track whose full runtime comes in at 22:47, all rich synth textures, artificial sound effects, and those dislocated German voices intoning "fahr'n, fahr'n, fahr'n auf der Autobahn". Even the truncated version on the single is outright weird, the mechanical precision of the synths disguising a directionless and free-form freakout, in its last minute transitioning fully away from music to a collection of bleak, discordant sound effects.

I love this. I love that despite how meat and potatoes these '70s tastes have been, how we've even preferred our disco straight and unfunky, and out of nowhere arrives this avant-garde and impenetrable record, so meticulously alienating even critics suggested it should have been more traditionally upbeat and listenable in the style of Wendy Carlos or Mike Oldfield, and it's #11.

Lest we forget, this is sharing chart space with "Wombling White Tie and Tails" (#22 May '75) and believe me that is quite the contrast switching from one record to the other.

I fear I'm going to drive this point so far in the ground I'll pop out in the Pacific Ocean, but #1 the same week Kraftwerk hit #11 are sitcom actors Windsor Davies and Don Estelle with a cover version of "Whispering Grass" that is supposed to be comic, or at least in character from "It Ain't Half Hot Mum", but I genuinely fail to detect any comedy from this unless that basso spoken-word bit was somehow side-rippingly hilarious in 1975.

Then at #6 we have Judy Collins with schmaltzy heart-tugger "Send In The Clowns", and I think by this point my advice on getting through all of this is to close your eyes and think of "Autobahn".

I fear for a moment that Slade have succumbed to the gimmick on "Thanks For The Memory" (#7 ending May '75) and the first rendition of the chorus doesn't help dispel that, but overall it's a decent slice of late period glam. A little lower down the charts (#9 June '75) are Status Quo with "Roll Over Lay Down" and while I know the Quo are a special case I do wonder whether, despite all the damage teenybop bands have done to it, meat'n'taters rock is going to be the new Template.

Still, there's a new Fox record to look forward to, with "Imagine Me, Imagine You" reaching #15 in June. It's not the most memorable of their output, but at least I feel I can steel myself for yet another Showaddywaddy record, "Three Steps To Heaven". It's at #2 that same month and I almost get the sense that Showaddywaddy covering Eddie Cochran might not be half bad, until the vocal kicks in and I realise that no, it's going to be all bad. I totally stole that joke from the Muppets, but hey, didn't that start airing around this time? It's almost topical!

The early missteps of the '70s continue to cast a long shadow over the middle of the decade, with The Osmonds back at #5 with "The Proud One". I grudgingly admit they seem to have become pretty damn talented at some point between then and now, because that lead vocal is pretty much pitch-perfect and even the whole-group vocal harmony manages to park itself within the lines, if not entirely straight. About the biggest criticism I could offer is that it's inoffensive, but then that was kind of the point.

Hot Chocolate have jumped on the disco bandwagon for their rumbling "Disco Queen" (#11 June '75), although I fear they might have misread the timetable and found something going to a different town with a similar-sounding name. In that this might reference disco by name, and it might feature some of the elements, but is really something else entirely. Moodier, and much more complex.

This is one of those moments where the charts provide the perfect contrast to drive home whatever skewed point I'm trying to make, because Van McCoy's "The Hustle" is #3 in early July, one of the most iconically "disco" of disco records. Light, inconsequential, full of swelling strings and with lyrics no more complex or thought-provoking than an invitation to do the titular Hustle. Do it, indeed.

Hamilton Bohannon's "Disco Stomp" (#6 July '75) feels rather more primitive in comparison, and it certainly hasn't achieved the same status as an instant byword for an era, but I do like its squelchy and ramshackle nature. That said, there's not much to it, and I find myself echoing a frequent criticism of disco: it's not got anything nutritious in it, the musical equivalent of empty calories. (Although I think that sentiment is usually rendered with a less bizarre analogy).

A brief but confusing interlude as I try to figure out exactly which version of "I'm Not In Love" was on 45 rpm copies of 10cc's #1 smash, only to discover a mess of pressing and country-dependent options, so let's go with the 3:40 one because that seems to be the most commonly encountered, and also because I'm already tired of it. I know it's supposed to be this amazing thing where look, they used voices instead of instruments, but this feels less like a radical new concept in music than just some of the instruments are missing and people keep making weird noises in the background.

I now have the unexpected situation of looking at my spreadsheet for this point in mid-1975 and seeing that genuinely nothing seems to happen of note on the charts for a good month.

Ray Stevens has a forgettable banjo-tinged cover of old standard "Misty" at #2 which I can find little to say about. The Chi-Lites' #5 "Have You Seen Her"/"Oh Girl" causes me the same problem I have with almost all Chi-Lites records which is that I play them, think they're fine, and genuinely have nothing useful I can say about them. Gary Glitter is... he's released a record called "Doing Alright With The Boys", it's at #6, and I'm going to skip right over this because I am fed up and the 1970s needs to stop buying Gary Glitter records.

Tammy Wynette's "D-I-V-O-R-C-E" is at #12. This was expected to be the bigger hit over "Stand By Your Man" back in '68, but I think that might be the recording industry overestimating the power of a gimmick, even one as well-integrated as those spell-the-word lyrics are here. "Man" has so eclipsed this that I can't even find anything but live versions on streaming, although a G-E-N-U-I-N-E copy is near-guaranteed to be an "any single in this box - £1" affair.

Two Trojan Records sound engineers from London decided to record their own imitation of a reggae record, billing themselves as Typically Tropical for "Barbados", one of two '70s records I'd describe as "proto-Vengaboys" (the other Greyhound's non-charting "Sand In Your Shoes" from 1971, particularly the album version). This one certainly has the better claim to that, not just in its amount of jokey chatter and feel-good sounds, but the fact it's the basis for that band's "We're Going To Ibiza!", airline announcements and all. Also that it was a massive hit, #1 in August '75 with 11 weeks on the chart.

Judge Dread records a lewd version of "Je t'aime (Moi Non Plus)" (#9 July '75) but if you needed a reggae cover I'd direct you to the instrumental version on Harry J's "Liquidator" album, because this is horrible. It starts as a nudge-wink saucy comedy and then degrades from there into trans jokes. The comment midway along of, "come on, this is 1975" says it all.

I wonder that I've said everything I can say about Rollermania, and slow romantic number "Give A Little Love" doesn't do anything to change that. It's well-crafted, and almost goes out of its way to avoid giving anything to complain about, sounding surprisingly like a lost Wings track. Maybe there's the slightest hint of insincerity and commerciality around the edges, but I really can't bring myself to be upset that this is at #1 as it's genuinely one of their best tracks.

Davids Essex and Cassidy are around. First Cassidy with the first version of Bruce Johnston's "I Write The Songs" to be released as a single, going to #11 in August. Some irony that not writing the songs is what Cassidy spent his career railing against, along with this soppy blue-eyed pinup treatment of the songs he didn't write. Then Essex, entering the Top 40 a week later but hitting peak position of #5 faster (at the end of July) with "Rollin' Stone". It's at the weirder end of Essex's output, which is to say very weird indeed with all sorts of awkward stops and out-of-nowhere synths.

Also weird indeed is "Jive Talkin'" (#5 August '75). It feels odd to get this far into the disco era without mentioning the Bee Gees, but based on this there's still a way to go yet. It's got a strong funk influence and some wild synthesiser excursions including a squashing and stretching bass line pinning things together, but this is way weirder than their later, more polished offerings.

Chinnichap (yes, that is a legitimate term for the Chapman/Chinn writing partnership!) launch another career, this time Smokey with "If You Think You Know How To Love Me" (#3 August '75). While the songwriters may have suggested the band's new name, this quickly drew the ire of Smokey Robinson and they changed it for their second album to the now more recognisable epithet of Smokie.

What's noticeable with this is just how much Chinn/Chapman had moved on from the kind of dumb and approachable fun they'd stormed the charts with for Sweet and Mud. This is considered and thoughtful, with a little touch of Rod Stewart or the Faces in there somewhere.

Sweet themselves were still recording their self-penned material, rocking their hardest yet and sounding unexpectedly Queen-like on "Action" (#15 August '75). Indeed, singer Brian Connolly considered Bohemian Rhapsody to have unfairly ripped off bits of this, but then if you get into that you might start questioning who was the first person to shout "liar!" over a hard rock song.

Linda Lewis' "It's In His Kiss" (#6 August '75) is a disco cover of 1963's "The Shoop Shoop Song", which bizarrely contorts itself between classic disco strings with fat horns, and a 1960s rhythm which is about as far from suitable for disco as you can get. It tries to glue things together with the same attitude toward fanfares that Mungo Jerry had toward piano rakes, but there's no escaping it: this is a mess, fascinating though it may be to prod at.

Stylistics #1 "I Can't Give You Anything (But My Love)" is laid-back disco, and I'm starting to worry that barely half a dozen disco records in and I'm already starting to find them a bit boring. There's really nothing here, just some kind of continuous auditory wallpaper that even fades out as if it's being cut to length from a big spool, like when you used to be able to buy chains in Woolworths.

Maybe I'm just uneasy with this sort of bet-hedging soul/disco hybrid, one foot in one camp, one foot in another, and coming away with the good aspects of neither. I miss the pounding intensity of an all-in fast soul record, and there's not enough of the carefree, fun-prioritising ethos of more straightforward disco to replace it.

I think this is my surprise at disco. I really knew very little about its origins or anything more than the stories of its death: disco destruction nights and riots in stadiums, and crowds of punks seething at its plasticky sheen and lack of anything socially worthwhile to say. I was aware that in English-speaking countries it arrived and left, while elsewhere in Europe it never went away, evolving into new and artful forms which eventually fed back into the formation of modern electronic music.

So it's strange to see it arrive not as a sudden craze, but to trickle slowly into public consciousness at a rate of barely more than a record per month. As well as its near-immediate recourse to gimmickry and novelty, disco mirrors rock'n'roll's slow rise. It's been a year since "Rock The Boat" and we're only just starting to see the point where multiple records are nearing the top of the charts at the same time.

Even if so many of them, like the Moments' "Dolly My Love" (#10 August '75) are basically paste. I think it's something about these not-quite-soul, not-quite-disco ones which particularly fail to grab me, but the movement has barely arrived and I'm bored of it already. Keep your quaaludes and your man-made fibres and tell me when the next Northern Soul night is.

KC and the Sunshine Band's "That's The Way (I Like It)" (#4 September '75) has stayed recognisable to this day. Normally when I listen to a record I know well but in this context of when it was released and what was around it, I get something new. Here? Nothing. It's all boogie and no substance, designed to be danced to without really listening to it.

I think the 1970s has detected my malaise from down the years, because the Template is back. Roger Whittaker's "The Last Farewell" is at #2, and I'm ticking off at least 60% of the identifying points we established some time in the mid-1950s. This might be cheating a little as it's a 1971 record which picked up later popularity, and I'm not sure that final resemblance is much more than 60%, but it's still there.

Besides, it's still an anomaly, and I'm not entirely unconvinced this isn't simply the public running out of 1968 country records to buy. The story at the end of August is that after a year of gestation disco has finally arrived. Bimbo Jet's "El Bimbo" at #12, Biddu Orchestra's "Summer of '42" at #14. Both instrumentals, and having just gone on an extended rant about disco I really don't mind the latter so much, possibly because this is a pure and unashamed disco record with scratchy guitars and that "ba-ba-ba bum bum" rhythm.

I have to listen to #20 "Superwomble" just to see if even the Wimbledon-based chart interferers have also gone disco, but we just have a silly, glammy single trying to be a bit of fun.

I admit to listening to a lot of Rod Stewart's work earlier in the decade and wondering what exactly it was he did so wrong, but in the second half of 1975 we suddenly get that phrase of doom, "new artistic direction". Along with tax exile status, a new record deal, and departing the Faces to leave them in what was doubtless an even more uncertain state of face size. New album "Atlantic Crossing" is that point, and "Sailing" is the #1 record where I remember that, oh yes, it was this.

The word "authenticity" is something I've tried to avoid in my assessment of the charts, because it has no meaning in a stew of ideas whose success is measured purely by their commerciality and, in this album-dominated era, a certain amount disposability. But we've gone from gritty, unpretentious rock songs straight to this: a lighter-swaying anthem proclaiming some great cosmic truth but really being something you can learn to sing along to in about 15 seconds. It's a volte-face that could only be worse if he'd suddenly gone disco.

Sadly this slick, corporate rock acted as a mirror to disco's new statement that seedy and authentic was out, and empty lustre was in. There's a new band in the Top 40 for the first time, and it's the Eagles with "One Of These Nights" (#23 September '75). I have a difficult time with the Eagles. When I was younger, and collecting classic rock was less fraught with matters of taste because it was inherently uncool at a macro level, the Eagles were one of those bands you were supposed to like according to the people who knew about it. And I couldn't, not entirely - there was something a little too calculated, a little too slick, a little too empty about so many of these records that I couldn't shake off.

Then the crate-digging movie soundtracks of the 2000s started making parts of classic rock acceptable again, and now there was a new generation of people to know about it who said you were very much not supposed to like the Eagles, indeed you shouldn't be able to stand them. Somehow, I couldn't do this either. No matter how much I skip past some of their tracks I have a soft spot for "Hotel California" I can never leave, and I'll even take "Lyin' Eyes" if I'm in the mood for it.

"One Of These Nights" sits somewhere on the cusp of that. I find myself neither liking nor disliking it. It's just... there? Mind you, these paragraphs have taken me long enough to write that I've been through a few repeats by now, and I find myself warming to it again. The Eagles, man.

Mike Batt is finally around sans Wombles and under his own name with September #4 "Summertime City", although this was yet another TV theme turned single, this time for BBC variety show "Seaside Special". That said, it's a straight-up pop single, and you can see why Batt started in later years to regret the Wombles typecasting him as a novelty artist.

Hot Chocolate finally reach their most iconic sound on their self-titled 1975 album, from which #7 cut "A Child's Prayer" comes. There is more to say about this sound later with the single it is most indelibly associated with, but I need to get that foreshadowing in.

Leo Sayer takes "Moonlighting" to #2 in September, a song about a couple eloping from the South Coast to Scotland, only to be stopped by police a few miles short of their destination. Sayer wanted the song to end on a happier note than the real story behind it, any police left three hundred miles behind in this version.

Jasper Carrott's "Funky Moped" is so infamous for being bought for the B-side (a lewd, swear-laden comedy rendition of The Magic Roundabout) that it's a bit of a shock to see the official charts labelling it as a double A-side. This appears not to be the case on vinyl copies, with "A" and "B" markings very much present and picture sleeves giving much more weight to the story of rockin' and sockin' on a small motorbike with pedals, but who knows what was going on. "Boing", said Zebedee on his way to #5.

Procol Harum seem almost an anachronistic footnote with "Pandora's Box" at #16, and while the sound is a bit updated they are still very much doing their thing. Earlier output was arguably better, but this is still plenty listenable.

Frantic disco "I'm On Fire" from 5000 Volts hits #4 at the end of the month. It's itchy and restless, like you might imagine being on fire while simultaneously recieving a large electric should would be. And yet we can still see Showaddywaddy at #7 with "Heartbeat", a cover of a 1959 record. I do find it fascinating how so many acts independently retreated into '50s pastiche with the death of glam.

A bagpiping record hitting the charts once is an oddity, but twice is just bizarre. And yet that's exactly what Band Of The Black Watch's "Scotch On The Rocks" (#8 October '75) is. As far as I can tell nobody got summoned anywhere for demeaning the pipes on this one, although that's mainly because I don't seem to be able to find much about it at all.

David Essex racks up his second #1 with "Hold Me Close" in October. As usual Jeff Wayne is on production duties, and while it's a straightforward structure with some amusing Small Faces-esque accented singing in place, there's some interesting electronic texture underneath.

It was displaced from #1 by Art Garfunkel, with "I Only Have Eyes For You". One of those slow and deliberately dreamy '70s records which lots of chorused guitar and vibraphone. It's all a bit forgettably inoffensive and, dare I say it, Osmonds-like in places.

There's a point where this so-inoffensive-it's-offensive soft rock started to coalesce around a sound labelled soft adult contemporary (after its nature and the radio stations which played it most regularly), and I feel it's probably a few months ago when Barry Manilow first turned up, but Morris Albert's "Feelings" (#6 October '75) is about as typical as you could get.

Moving on, it feels like a long while since Eurovision 1974. Indeed, there's been a whole extra Eurovision since then - we sent the Shadows with "Let Me Be the One", and it finished second. While ABBA have had some minor Top 40 encounters since then (including pre-"Waterloo" recording "Ring Ring") it took until October 1975 for them to have another big hit - "SOS", peaking at #6.

I mention "Ring Ring" because it's obvious why that peaked at #32 and "SOS" did a lot better. That one is a fun little pop song. This one is meticulous, polished to an improbable degree. What I find so fascinating tracing "Waterloo" from Swedish-language original via Eurovision performance to UK chart-topping record is it's one of the rare times we got to see this process in public, how long the band would spend chipping away at rough edges and sanding corners until every last part fits together perfectly. 'tis a great song.

Bob Marley & The Wailers get "No Woman No Cry" to #22. This is one of those moments where I'm deliberately going to break my rule on trying to always find the correct single versions (or not link to anything at all) as the four minute single mix of this live performance at the Lyceum which used to be just about everywhere when I first heard it has completely disappeared, and besides I spent ages trying to find the full seven minutes with all the solos until they reissued greatest hits album "Legend", so you can listen to the full thing. I sort of went off Marley for quite a while, as much of what ended up on "Legend" felt overproduced and sanitised compared to the intimate recordings of lesser-known reggae and tape-cutting looseness of dubs, but every once in a while I'll listen to a track and remind myself what was great about it.

A maxi-single release along with "Changes" and glam era castoff "Velvet Goldmine" took Bowie's "Space Oddity" back to #1 in November, with Roxy Music's "Love Is The Drug" below it at #2. This is finally a glam act (even if they were only on the arty fringes of it) doing something other than retreating to the 1950s, fusing the rock sound with disco's rhythms, repeated lyrical signatures, and instrumental stabs.

One of disco's big names were the Trammps, but other than a few portentious scales up and down they are still very much a soul band on "Hold Back The Night", a #5 in November.

The Moody Blues spent much of the '70s in a hiatus, but members Justin Hayward and John Lodge got together to produce album "Blue Jays", from which November #8 "Blue Guitar" hails. It was performed with 10cc, although sounds very much like a great lost Moodies record.

Comedy records were still very much a thing (I'm not ready to talk to Judge Dread again just yet), and this is still in the era where Billy Connolly was very much a musical comedy act. The man and his guitar have a joke version of "D.I.V.O.R.C.E" at #1 in November, complete with deliberate misspellings and Connolly having a hard time not laughing at his own jokes. It's not one of the greats, but hey, at least we got through a whole two minutes without being staggeringly offensive to a minority group of people and that's high flying by 1975 comedy record standards.

Jim Capaldi's "Love Hurts" (#4 November '75) is one of those rare things, a disco record I find myself enjoying. Possibly because I know so many other versions of this and seeing how it got disco-ified is fun in itself, but also because it doesn't fall into the trap of so many disco records of repeating the same basic thing over and over.

John Lennon takes "Imagine" to #6 at the end of the month, and now here is a record I have a complicated relationship with. There was definitely a point at which this was my favourite record, better than any ensemble Beatles effort, and probably still around the age where simple repeating structures are really appealing. Followed not long afterward by that period of teenage moral absolutism, where everything you don't like is bad and should be abolished because that will immediately solve everything.

Then of course I got older, and anger about fundamental societal structures like religion and national borders turned into anger that this guy in his massive house with his expensive piano and his entire room he can afford to clear of all but that single object is telling me to imagine no possessions. That someone from whom the phrase "domestic abuse" is never far away feels even slightly qualified to give a lecture about living in peace and sharing. Plus, y'know, musically it is a bit repetitive, right?

Thing is, adults are complex screw-ups and as you get old enough to see that in yourself, you start to think that maybe someone can have screaming rows one day and truly dream about peace the next, indeed it may be the internal conflict from one that drives them to the latter. You realise that bad people can make good art, and good people bad art, and providing they're not actively using the proceeds of that art to fund hateful causes you're probably going to find some personal compromise there which isn't entirely pious.

This was at one point my favourite record, and it contains a sentiment I definitely scrawled on the back of a notebook at one point in my early twenties. I'm not seeking to excuse John Lennon as a person, because I think the things he did and the hypocrisy of how those conflict with the things he talked about need to be known, but I've listened to this record four times over in the service of writing just this bit and I still, perhaps with some element of nostalgia, like it.

Astonishingly we're this late in the year and we're still not even at the final record I have a complicated relationship with.

A record I have a simple relationship with is Hot Chocolate's "You Sexy Thing" (#2 November '75), because it's bloody excellent. Repeat comment about iconic Hot Chocolate sound here. Somehow this got turned into some sort of mocking byword for the '70s during the late '90s obsession with the decade, probably because it's got a little bit of disco influence and, well, haha, the people from the past said "sex". Yeah, so Errol Brown's lyrics might be a bit direct, but we're coming in off the tail end of the glam era and this has such a rich musical complexity I feel I have to fight the perceived injustice that this could be anything but Exhibit A in the case for the 1970s being able to turn out records just as great as any other decade.

While it might have one of the Isley Brothers on board, Rod Stewart's #4-peaking cover of "This Old Heart Of Mine" is yet another strike against his character, the kind of soulless, slick corporate schlock that would eventually be categorised in 2005 as yacht rock. (And then ironically enjoyed, because it was 2005 and hipsters existed).

Here's where I get to the other notable record which entered the Top 40 that week. You might have heard of it. It's a little ditty called "Bohemian Rhapsody".

The stories of this are legend. The video shot at the last minute for £4,500 that turned promo videos from oddball one-offs to an essential part of music marketing. The story of it being too long to be considered a single, one in which its 5:55 runtime has been so oft exaggerated upon retellings you'd be forgiven for thinking it's 15 minutes long. Of Kenny Everett being given a reel-to-reel tape and being made to promise he wouldn't play it with a sly wink. And if we look at the spreadsheet, the #1 position it hit two weeks after entering the Top 40 and maintained for nine weeks, longer than any single since the slow-moving charts of the '50s.

But this really is my story, and it's the story of loving Queen in an era where almost everyone my age was somewhere between indifferent to violently opposed to this.

"Bohemian Rhapsody" is, of course, the one that everyone knows. Leading to the exchange many a Queen fan must surely have had:

"I don't like Bohemian Rhapsody."
"Well, it's not actually their best."
"What is?"
"Er... well... er..."

(This is the point at which you seriously consider saying "Spread Your Wings" knowing, deep in your heart, that it is true)

You can't really escape from Bohemian Rhapsody because it is at once both typical and atypical of the band. It was done with some amount of joking intent, to produce something so ridiculously over the top it almost served as self-parody, and certainly at least succeeded in trolling the Top Of The Poppers who'd have to put together a soundalike for their regular album of ersatz covers of chart-toppers. But the theatrical antics, shifting of styles and deliberate technical artifice are all core elements of what makes Queen.

So to like Queen at the time and age I liked Queen is to have everyone think you spend your time listening to these over-the-top three part mini epics. You can try to explain that there are soft songs, there are loud songs, there are ballads and would-be musical numbers, there are straightforward rockers and progressive masterpieces, there are even regrettable experiments from the early '80s we try not to speak of. It doesn't matter. In their mind, what you are listening to with each album are a dozen Bohemian Rhapsodies.

I should resent it for this. Well, I do a little, but not to the point I don't still love it. The first point at which the piano comes in feels like a big warm welcome, back to the first time I discovered music didn't have to be a world of sparkling glissando slides and empty beats, it could be complex and textured. (Yeah, so the people around me were really into boy bands at that point. It didn't help.)

I know bits of it are corny, and the three act structure wasn't as new and daring as I once thought it was, and Sweet really do have a point about that hard rock section, but I've still got a lot of fondness for it. Just don't tell me it's the only Queen record you've ever heard.

(Even then, it's probably better than if you've only heard the really duff filler tracks off "A Kind Of Magic")

With "Bohemian Rhapsody" on the top spot until the end of January we've already resolved the question of Christmas #1, and I think that's the last record of the year I have a lot to say about, but it is only November and there are a few odds and ends to round out 1975.

David Bowie's "Golden Years" hit #8 in December. This and August's "Fame" (#17) are the result of another Bowie transformation, this time into the persona of the Thin White Duke and the world of funk and disco. Well, it's 1975, what else? I say that, these are influences in only the broadest terms, with the end result being something far more otherworldly than disco's straightforward, dance-focused aesthetic.

Yet another old reissue doing big sales, with Chubby Checker on a double "A" side with "Let's Twist Again" / "Do The Twist". Maybe it makes sense when Showaddywaddy, Mud and Wizzard are all planting themselves firmly in this era, but I still find it odd - seeing this at #5 a decade and a half later is like looking at the charts in 1991 and seeing "Bohemian Rhapsody" on there again. No, wait...

Speaking of that record, what's sitting below it? At #2 for most of December are Laurel and Hardy with the Avalon Boys featuring Chill Wills - "The Trail Of The Lonesome Pine". I think we might have broken the record for old records in the chart, because this is a 1937 version of a song first published in 1913. There's something fascinating in this, because even in all of my record collecting I've never listened to a 110-year-old pop song. (Barring the differences afforded by newer electric recording, the 1937 version is very much in the style of the original.)

What I take from this is how much closer compared to modern pop this record is to what people might have sung amongst themselves, assuming they had a friend with a guitar. Indeed, I've happened upon a few recordings made by groups of ordinary people in the Calibre Auto Recording booths which could once be found at stations and other places where punters might have time and money to waste, and other than a more modern choice of material they invariably sound much like this. Well, maybe quite a bit drunker.

Replacing it at #2 for Christmas is Greg Lake's "I Believe In Father Christmas", with a seemingly improbable genre combination of being a prog rock Christmas song. Hey, it works. It sits among a brace of Christmas hopefuls, including seasonal contributions from both Judge Dread and the Goodies. I refuse to spend time on either of them. Both of you know exactly what you did.

Instead, I'm going to debatably declare this the year of the prog Christmas single, with Mike Oldfield's "In Dulce Jubilo"/"On Horseback" entering the Top 40 right at the end of the year, eventually going to #4 in January, suggesting this might have been a bit subtle for anyone who didn't know it's an instrumental version of a Christmas carol.

This, then, is 1975. A year about which I did not expect to write so much or happen across so many records which were landmarks in my own personal exploration of music. Perhaps, like Andy Fairweather-Low, I find myself "Wide Eyed And Legless" (#6 January '76), a lament of taking on a little too much and coming to regret it. And with that, it's time to flip the calendar over and see what the new year has to offer.