UK Charts: 1976-1977

1976

What could displace "Bohemian Rhapsody" from #1? Oddly, another record which later became the title of a film featuring the band, "Mamma Mia". Now, ABBA's is a feelgood jukebox musical and Queen's a biopic, so it's only a loose coincidence, but I still feel bound to mention it. The standing joke is this sold as a result of people hearing the operetta bit of "Bohemian Rhapsody" and asking record shops for "that mamma mia song", but this is unfair on just how good ABBA's single is.

Not to spoil the rest of the 1970s, but this is such a run of perfect singles you start to wonder why it took so long for someone to consider assembling them into a jukebox musical (1999), which has since gone on to become one of the most enormous long-running hits of musical theatre. Well - I do have a good idea why. Not only were ABBA caught up so much in the gloss and glam of the decade that they got tarred with it in the fallout, the whole idea of a determinedly commercial group who produced deliberate pop rankled with the rockist, authenticity-obsessed lens through which the music of the past ended up being viewed by the time I was picking up '70s records.

If we're tallying guilts by association it doesn't help that so much of their classic run is bang in the middle of the disco era, with Donna Summer's "Love To Love You Baby" sharing the same charts, and Smokey Robinson and the Miracles going disco on "Love Machine" (#3 February '76).

Yet in this most disco of eras it was deposed from #1 by  near-anachronistic glam rocker "Forever and Ever" by Slik. This has both elements of what I'm going to call post-glam, with both the arty weirdness of later Slade and a spoken-word interlude ticking the box of retreat to the '50s. And yet it still feels enough like a straight-up classic glam single complete with "sha-dooby-doo"s that I can't place it fully in that entirely self-invented camp.

Now, if there's a phrase that's going to grab me, it's "Walker Brothers comeback single" and "No Regrets" is just that, peaking at #7 and being title track for an album of country and pop covers - this being a Tom Rush original from 1968. Starting strong although coming on a little syrupy, this also really reminds me of Peter Gabriel's "Solsbury Hill" from 1977 in places. It also goes on a bit too long, relying on some very Queen-esque guitar pieces in the last couple of minutes to keep things moving.

Sadly I find myself agreeing with modern reviewers that while this one might be okay, the album as a whole can be summed up with, "it stunk". The double denim and regrettable perms on the cover don't exactly invite you in, and for all this was billed as a comeback it reveals quite how much the Walkers were circling the status of pier end entertainers by the mid '70s.

This was a world of funk and disco sheen. War's "Low Rider" (#12 February '76) is another one of those ones where you might not remember the band or the title, but you'll instantly recognise the song within a few bars.

If I want to sum up this odd transitional bit of the '70s, I could do a lot worse than mention February #1 "December 1963 (Oh What A Night)" from the Four Seasons. Upbeat and danceable, funky around the edges, but also ever looking back at the previous decade. The band chose this deliberately, shelving a more conceptual idea about celebrating the end of prohibition in 1933 with a simple tale of first love from early in the '60s. Possibly soundtracked by a Four Seasons record; they have after all been going that long.

There's a strange mood around this period. The '70s was a difficult time for the UK; a decade which showed in the most painful way that a country could not subsist on past glories, with the cracks two world wars had put in our class system opening so wide they caused structural failure. We're listening to the Who ("Squeeze Box" a fine #10 from February) but we're also buying megamixes of old Glenn Miller tunes.

And yet none of this internal strife is reflected in the charts. About the closest we get to a spark of protest is Pluto Shervington's "Dat" (#6 February '76), whose bouncy rhythms disguise a tale of life when you're poor, have religious obligations, but also would still like to buy enough weed to roll a spliff or two.

Society is falling apart to the superficial feel-goodness of "I Love To Love", #1 for Tina Charles at the end of February. Even the record feels fragile, a rictus grin held uncomfortably long because if you stop you're going to have to think about things and that's going to go badly. If meat and potatoes rock represented a desire for the world to be simple and honest again (and that's still about - just - with Slade hitting #11 with "Let's Call It Quits") at odds with the gathering economic storm clouds of the early '70s, then this is wilful denial.

Maybe I'm reading too much into this from my 2020s perspective, a decade of obsessing with some past which never was as a way of hiding in the sand from a complex world. But it feels like it'd explain cuts like Billy Ocean's March #3 "Love Really Hurts Without You", a perfect '60s soul record apart from the small detail of being released ten years too late.

Ocean's is the classic '70s story: working fingers to the bone on an automotive assembly line, alternating shifts with trying to break into music doing odd jobs around studios and singing demos that never went anywhere. But a fortuitous evening playing a second-hand piano and an offer of another recording session resulted in this rip-roaring record and the end of a career screwing together Escorts.

Escapism may also explain the decade's predilection for novelty, such as fictional truck-driving country singer C.W. McCall (C.W for "Country & Western") with "Convoy", #3 at the end of February. It even spawned a UK-specific parody a couple of months later, put together by Radio 1 DJs Dave Lee Travis and Paul Burnett.

1976 gave us one of Eurovision's more enduring winners, Brotherhood of Man's "Save Your Kisses For Me" (#1 March '76 - we didn't half like buying 'em). "Enduring" is also how I'd describe the listening experience; the band had tapped into a certain vibe of oompah-ish Euro pop, which was certainly in the spirit of the competition but not in the spirit of things I might willingly choose to listen to for pleasure.

Barry White's "You See The Trouble With Me" is below it a week later at #2, and now there's a man who found something that worked and stuck to it. Somewhat more uptempo than his earlier work, it has all the polished sheen of a disco record albeit covering rather more laid-back underpinnings. That might not be the best choice of phrase to describe a record from an artist indelibly associated with the bedroom and activities therein.

This is a difficult era to work my way through. John Miles' "Music" (#3 April '76) is a good example of the problem I have. It's not something I really know about, indeed I'd never heard it before, but also sits in this awkward middle ground where it's not so great I want to rave about it, but also not bad either. Maybe it tries to nail itself a bit too obviously to the major mid-'70s movements with aspects of everything from prog to disco, but not in a bad way. I'm liking the healthy slice of Elton John influence and the way it finishes off with a crescendo that is more Walker Brothers than anything from their denim-festooned comeback album.

But I'll say this now, move on from the record and probably never listen to it again my entire life. It's at times like this I look for some external inspiration, some fascinating anecdote of what was going on in the world of music, but what little I can find tends to be a scant few sentences, usually involving the word "nadir". Which I think is both unfair and suggests an excitement the year so far isn't offering up. Sure, the presence of 1957 rockabilly record "Jungle Rock" at #3 in late April doesn't paint a picture of a healthy music scene at its creative peak, but I don't think what's around is bad in the same way it was for significant stretches of the 1950s. It's just a pile of nothing, a lack of sense of direction or anything going anywhere.

Into this featureless void EMI reissue a pile of Beatles singles, with "Yesterday" and "Hey Jude" taking respectable chart peaks of #8 and #12 respectively. Bay City Rollers #4 "Love Me Like I Love You" may as well be a tribute act to earlier Lennon-McCartney days (give or take a sprinkling of Beach Boys). As ever with the Rollers, it's inoffensive to the point of blandness.

It's a blessing to find Brotherhood of Man being knocked off the top spot at the start of May by fellow Eurovision alumni, ABBA. And oh my, does "Fernando" show how unfair writing off the four Swedes as mere song contest graduates is. If you'd asked me before starting this ridiculous exercise what my favourite era of ABBA was I'd have told you tales of wistful late-career albums like "The Visitors", with their ever-present melancholy and the constant sense of things coming to an end.

I'm now wondering if I need to measure that up against these early records. Fresh, bright, and enthusiastic, but with the band's instinct for pop craft perfectly honed. "Fernando" is so perfectly assembled. It fits in a lot over four minutes, and every one of those elements falls into place at just the right time, late enough to give you a moment of anticipation at the pause but without interrupting the momentum.

By the mid-1970s Motown had become a multimedia enterprise, with Motown Productions initially set up to produce Partridge-esque band vehicles for TV. These specials grew into feature films which would showcase Motown artists, first "Lady Sings The Blues" in 1972 and then "Mahogany" in 1975, with Diana Ross playing the part of a department store employee who wishes to become a fashion designer. The "Theme From Mahogany (Do You Know Where You're Going To)" hit #5 in April '76, unimaginably lush if a little deliberately sentimental.

Sailor's "Girls, Girls, Girls" (#7 April '76) is not a cover of the 1961 Coasters record which featured in the Elvis film of the same name, but a self-penned song. No exclamation marks in the title, see! It feels like something which belongs in a musical, and not necessarily a great one either. The attempt to be theatrical starts grating on me quite quickly. Queen did this much better, and even then I wouldn't say those records are the highlight of their discography.

Somehow we still have pastoral, folkish pop in the charts as if it's 1971, although Sutherland Brothers with Quiver's #5 "Arms of Mary" has some synths adding a bit of texture and modernity. It's the magic of listening through the charts in this way; I can be complaining about a nothing year and musical theatre pastiches one minute, then have a single I've never heard and immediately fall in love with the next. Although some points should be docked for Quiver having come up with "Sailing", the record which Rod Stewart covered and in doing so tolled the bell for the end of his time as a thoroughly listenable medium-sized Face.

A single which I do know well is perhaps the definitive Fox record, "S-S-S-Single Bed" (#4 May '76). I first saw this mentioned in a TV Cream article about great singles back when TV Cream was something everyone on the Internet read (citation needed), and it gave my serious rockist head a new notion to chew on: that a record could be good not for musical complexity or artistic intent, but for being fun. Because this is goofy in the extreme and a parade of the oddest sound effects the band could get out of their studio equipment, but it's also a lot of fun.

The Stylistics are back in the charts at #4 with Elvis cover "Can't Help Falling In Love", and oh my is this overwrought in the bad way. Putting so much in the treble region shouldn't be legal. I'm not saying I'd be taking a copy of this to a football field to burn it and start a riot afterward, but mostly only because it's raining out and I can't be bothered. Also because oh wow, does that Disco Destruction Night ever have some problematic things associated with it. Maybe we'll get to that in 1979.

Paul Nicholas' "Reggae Like It Used To Be" (#17 March '76) is definitely not reggae like it used to be, unless you count horrible cod-reggae in the mould of "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da". Inappropriate saxophone breaks, a brief blast of Beethoven's 5th and whoops and yells in the background underline how tediously un-reggae this record is. Give me a failed bet on Long Shot any day.

J.J. Barrie's spoken-word country number "No Charge" went all the way to #1 at the end of May, two years after Melba Montgomery's original recording stormed charts across the Atlantic. It's nicely done, but horrifically sappy to a level it can't ever hope to escape.

Evidently this had tapped into some kind of national mood though, as everyone was at it. The Rolling Stones mash up bits of this mawkish nonsense with wholly inappropriate bedroom soul influences for "Fool To Cry", (#6 May '76), a record whose only vestiges of the out-of-control Stones of times past is the feeling that it should have stopped 3 minutes in but the brakes have stopped working. It never moves fast enough for this to be a problem, and I feel the band could have just crashed it into some bins or something rather than spending all that time waiting for it to roll to a stop.

Wings are also at it, with "Silly Love Songs" peaking at #2 in June with what you might think of as the tiniest hint of self-awareness used only to pave the way for something even more simplistic and soggy than the last two records I mentioned. Also it's a McCartney number so it goes on for about eight years.

Despite baiting a sentimental crowd it was kept off #1 by the 1970s' other great love, the novelty record. The Wurzels "The Combine Harvester" also manages the unexpected feat of being the better version of "Brand New Key". It's a bit of silly fun but c'mon, 1976, two weeks at #1? Really? Can't we skip straight to punk at this point?

At #7 is the original kinda intense voicemail, Dolly Parton's "Jolene". Already a three year old record by this point, we have oddly disparate release schedules between UK and US to thank for this one. Also, possibly, the presence of a cover on recent Olivia Newton-John album "Come On Over".

Gallagher and Lyle's "Heart On My Sleeve" (#6 June '76) is another big slice of nothing expressing some simplistic homily. I fear for the level of repression at large in society which caused people to need to buy an entire record to express the idea that they, y'know, get a bit emotional sometimes. Surely the point of having your heart on your sleeve is you don't need to do that?

Wading through this bog is enough to make disco sound welcoming and fresh, with Real Thing's "You To Me Are Everything" stealing #1 away from the Wurzels in the back half of June. Real Thing had spent a bit of time touring with David Essex and even backed him on a few singles, although none of the big hits. It's a classic disco record, which is to say you almost certainly already know it and there's very little dietary fibre here.

At #2 is more from New Faces, with Osmonds knockoffs Our Kid looking particularly joyless on Top Of The Pops for "You Just Might See Me Cry". You know the drill by now. Wayward child vocals, rosy-cheeked youngsters fronting the band, damning evidence in the indictment of the '70s as a musically terrible decade. It's little wonder people ended up buying enough copies of reissued 12 year old death disc "Leader Of The Pack" to send it to #7.

With all this going on it's easy to forget 1976 is the year of some absolute classic albums - the Flamin Groovies' "Shake Some Action", Dylan's "Desire" and Thin Lizzy's "Jailbreak" to name but three, the latter with its die-cut flip-sleeve cover revealing some great comic book style artwork. Lead single from it was "The Boys Are Back In Town", peaking surprisingly low at #8 for a record more memorable than almost anything I've mentioned so far this year.

Bryan Ferry's version of "Let's Stick Together", previously seen in these pages as "Let's Work Together" goes to #4 as June '76 draws to a close. There's a whole lot of urgent sax on this one. Possibly even too much.

A disco classic of the "songs played at weddings by people who really ought to listen to the lyrics" genre is Candi Staton's "Young Hearts Run Free", a #2 from July '76 with a big soul groove underpinning those stirring strings. Rod Stewart is the purveyor of another, but it's not "Young Turks" we have here (and indeed won't until 1981) - it's loungy "Tonight's The Night" going to #5. It's okay, I guess? Well, until the saxophone kicks in and we realise this is just as much glossy schlock as any other contemporary Stewart track.

Demis Roussos offers a very confusing #1, with EP "The Roussos Phenomenon" not containing any track of that title. Somebody needs to tighten up the rules on these charts, possibly mandating the identification of only one 'A'-side per record at the same time. Lead track "Forever and Ever", originally from a 1973 album, seems as good as any to reveal that what we have here is effectively a Greek Engelbert Humperdinck; indeed, Humperdinck recorded his own version of this in 1975.

I keep mentioning it, but the directionlessness of these charts is getting to me. You've got the swarthy, glowering Roussos sharing chart space with The Manhattans soft soul "Kiss and Say Goodbye" at #4. But neither of these things are going anywhere. They're not milestones on some musical evolution, it's like 1976 picks genres at random without moving any of them on.

Dr Hook's "A Little Bit More" (#2 July '76) is one of the year's biggest-selling records, but it's just another spongy soft-rocker, a sort of musical holding pattern. This could conceivably be an Osmonds record from any point in the previous five years, with the possible exception of that weird six months during which they did "Crazy Horses".

Queen's "You're My Best Friend" is a welcome sight at #7, but even that is one of the band's more simplistic and unadventurous records. The heavy serving of Fender Rhodes adds to that feeling there's a lack of progress; wasn't that 1973's thing?

Somehow we still find time to at least have one genuinely great pop moment achieve a high position - #1 in fact, the natural place for Elton John and Kiki Dee duet "Don't Go Breaking My Heart". Overplayed to the point of cliché since, you need to come at this one with fresh ears because there's a lot to like; the call-and-response vocals, the anticipation of that string section, and the sense that just like Fox, this is a fun record.

Surprisingly for something so emblematic of the disco era, Walter Murphy's "A Fifth Of Beethoven" did not overly trouble the charts on its initial release, with a peak at #28 in August '76. While Saturday Night Fever may have ensured its fame, I can't say that's an unfair result; this really is one gimmick extended over three minutes of otherwise generic disco instrumental.

Instead people are buying advertising jingles in the shape of David Dundas' "Jeans On" (#3 August '76), originally on a Brutus Jeans advert and extended out to a full length single. I can't say my generation were exactly immune to it, given the number of people very disappointed by Babylon Zoo's "Spaceman", but these are not charts in rude health.

Disco records are starting to blend from one into the other without me being certain where one ends and another begins. Jimmy James and the Vagabonds are at #5 with "Now Is The Time" and I'm sure they put lots of effort into it but I'm starting to feel like there's a big slab marked "disco" somewhere that these things are being carved off three minutes at a time.

I still find myself surprised by what a showing country puts up in 1976, with Billie Jo Spears' "What I've Got In Mind" going to #4 at the end of August. It's an alright record, a functional expression of the style, but my unease gathers at this period being a weird grab-bag that doesn't have any overriding theme or, indeed, make any sense at all.

The Bee Gees hit their disco era square on with "You Should Be Dancing", a #5 hit in early September that may as well be the anthem for disco. Stop thinking about it. You should be dancing. Sadly I'm not, and between this and the doorbell chimes of Wings' "Let 'Em In" (#2 August '76) I find myself despairing at a country that is half utterly mired in mawkish sentimentality, and half too busy boshing Quaaludes and inventing unfortunate cocktails with Galliano in them to care about much of anything any more.

Steve Harley and Cockney Rebel put out a version of "Here Comes The Sun" which excises all sense of delicacy from George Harrison's original and turns it into a graceless assault on the senses. Those synths might be fun on another record, but in the sense that while spray paint can make great art, you probably don't want to go mad with it over the top of a Goya.

Into the midst of this we get what, perhaps even more so than "Waterloo", has a claim to be the iconic ABBA single - "Dancing Queen". If "Waterloo" was the band's tilt at glam, then this is them tackling disco, and in much the same way it ends up being something else entirely. The basic elements are there: the swelling strings, the soulful harmonies, even the lyrics about forgetting it all in favour of dancing. But this is something different. It's melancholy. It's cold. ABBA take the emptiness disco tries so hard to disguise and lay it bare, let it wash over the listener. The dancing queen won't be 17 forever, and operating a laissez-faire policy on who can be that guy is a fast ticket to a lifetime of regret, hanging on to those fading memories of feeling the beat from the tambourine. I'm probably reading too much into this. ABBA does that to me.

It went all the way to #1 and spent 15 weeks in the Top 40, showing that no matter how much else might be wrong in the charts of 1976, at least there was someone out there with taste.

Rod Stewart's "The Killing Of Georgie Parts 1 and 2" (#2 September '76) is initially more decent than I was expecting, "Walk On The Wild Side"-esque "doo do doo" backing vocals included. Man's got a good voice for this sort of thing. But as the title implies it's a two-parter, and so we descend into that woozy, lighter-swaying glurge that I can't stand. As if to undermine that we are definitely post a thing I do not like, next month sees a reissue of "Sailing" getting all the way up to #3.

Reissues see Elvis make a visit to the charts, with 1960 cut "Girl of My Best Friend" making it to #9 in October. This is far from one of the essential greats, though, and shows yet more of that 1976 problem: it was just there, so people bought it because there wasn't anything else. Maybe this is the excuse for the Bay City Rollers getting to #4 with a perfunctory cover of "I Only Wanna Be With You". As ever with the tartan-clad lads I can't really fault it beyond general mediocrity, but that's not going to stop me being angry they took a perfectly good Dusty Springfield record and made it less good. C'mon, it's not like people aren't buying reissues, you could have just reissued the good one.

I'm starting to get the feeling 1976 is mocking me by taking me through a journey of everything I dislike, because it has also invented the Pan Pipe Moods album about two decades early with Georghe Zamfir's "Doina De Jale" (#4 September '76). It's a record which goes nowhere while someone plays some pan pipes over the top of it, intended for the kind of people who think you can't take in the majesty of a mountain vista or beach sunset without some kind of new age nonsense in your headphones. Let me tell you, I've marvelled at the majesty of the Alps from 3000 metres to Elton John and Kiki Dee's "Don't Go Breaking My Heart". You don't need pan pipes.

With Mr Acker Bilk's "Aria" below it at #5 you can almost feel these charts reaching out for something, anything to get away from the stagnation of disco, cloyingly sentimental soft ballads and the vast miscellany of things which are okay, but don't seem to be able to sustain any sort of noticeable movement by themselves. Clarinet is not the way, folks.

The problem is the lack of new sounds. Dutch country-pop band Pussycat had a huge #1 hit with "Mississippi" in October, but how many years ago did I first mention Countrypolitan as a genre because other than not being made in Nashville and a few token ABBA influences this has moved on not a single inch.

"I Am A Cider Drinker" (#3 September '76) suggests the Wurzels are a joke which was good for precisely one record and rapidly wears thin after that. The early part of the year may have been directionless, but between this and the pan pipes I think we've finally found a direction, and it's badness. Listen, 1976. I've got my eye on you, and you're one Christmas record about sausage rolls away from me figuring out how I can burn down "the past" as a concept.

Rick Dees and His Cast Of Idiots take tedious disco parody record "Disco Duck" to #6 at the start of October. It surprises me just how much disco parallels early rock'n'roll in its development. The style was set over a few short months in 1975 and then it never moved on. From the start records were reliant on gimmicks, and the genre had barely got off the ground before novelties and parodies started appearing. For all it would spawn interesting genres in the following decade, disco needed to die before it could be born.

Maybe we should all give up and buy Demis Roussos records instead. "When Forever Has Gone" hit #2 in October, sounding for all the world like it could have come out in 1967. Although in that year, Roussos was busy in progressive rock band Aphrodite's Child, and getting from there to this kind of Big Pop is quite the journey.

Rock continues to get softer, with Chicago's "If You Leave Me Now" hitting #1 at the start of November. It's all a bit too soporific for me. Part of the problem is that disco was taking over venues to the point it was getting hard to find work starting out as a straight-up rock band. A frustration Wild Cherry put on record with "Play That Funky Music", a #7 slice of hard funk expressing the challenge of playing in front of audiences who just wanted something to dance to.

One unwelcome gift disco seems to have given the world of 1976 is the falsetto vocal. While it might have worked for the Bee Gees, it marred the Chicago record for me, and is particularly irritating on Leo Sayer's "You Make Me Feel Like Dancing", a November #2 which takes a lot of influence from the Jackson 5 and irritates me greatly with its incessant boogie.

Showaddywaddy's revivalist "Under The Moon Of Love" hits #1 at the end of November, and comes across like some kind of mission statement for mid-'70s chart malaise. Backward-looking, but not in the respectful way Wizzard or Mud might have been. This one obnoxiously cocks its hat at rock'n'roll, mocking the thing it's supposed to be reviving. Yet again, we're brushing up against that problem 1976 has: it needs something new.

The reality is that something has been bubbling along beneath the surface, and in the last couple of weeks of 1976 it's going to start gathering pace into an era-defining musical movement. At the fringes of pub rock were a pair of designers who took the revivalist '50s greaser look as an anti-fashion statement. These were Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood proprietors of Too Fast To Live, Too Young To Die in Chelsea. McLaren spent some time abroad managing proto-punk rockers the New York Dolls, returning to London in 1975 as the shop gained a new focus on bondage gear as inspiration for a new, more provocative style of anti-fashion, pioneered by employee Pamela Rooke. It also gained a new name to make this inspiration clear: Sex.

Bands of disaffected kids started hanging around at Sex, and they had a lot to be disaffected about. Hanging around on filthy, litter-strewn streets because they had no money and, in the UK's moribund 1970s economy, little chance of a job, they formed bands but struggled to get gigs and contracts in a country enthralled by disco and whatever the hell it was making people buy Demis Roussos records en masse.

One of these bands was The Strand, occasionally the Swankers, formed by Steve Jones, Paul Cook and Wally Nightingale. Becoming a part of the scene around Sex, by 1974 they'd gained Glen Matlock on bass and booted Nightingale shortly afterward, but the band were struggling to find a singer and frontman. In August 1975 a guy walked into the shop wearing a Pink Floyd T-shirt with "I hate" scrawled on it. This was John Lydon, who became the band's frontman under a nickname inspired by his bad teeth and worse personal habits: Johnny Rotten.

This new iteration of the Strand became the Sex Pistols. They played their first gig in November 1975, consisting mainly of rough-edged covers of old Who, Small Faces and even Monkees records. But it wasn't until 1976 that they gained their ransom-note aesthetic, a small tribe of followers starting their own bands, and in the middle of the year a pivotal gig: a set at the Manchester Lesser Free Trade Hall on 4th June.

Punk was now booming in two cities. The Pistols started being supported by two new bands: The Clash and The Damned. All played a tight, fast and raucous variant of pub rock. The 100 Club ran a two-day event to showcase the new punk bands. Wild Cherry might have found themselves being asked to play disco, but there was a momentum here that was hard to ignore. Sooner or later one of these snotty groups of kids in their ripped clothing had to be given a recording contract.

The Damned were the first to get a recognisably "punk" record out, with "New Rose" on brand new label Stiff Records, formed by Dave Robinson and Jake Riviera to get the boiling punk scene into record shops and, no doubt, some money into their pockets for doing so. Dr. Feelgood's Lee Brillaux provided the loan to get them started, building yet another link between rocks punk and pub.

On 8th October 1976, EMI signed the Sex Pistols for a two year contract. From which point chaos ensued.

Studio time turned the band's lumbering, lunk-headed signature anthem into a tight and hard-charging record intended to capture the energy of a live performance. "Anarchy in the UK", quite possibly the greatest thing to have happened in 1976. There have been good singles this year, almost certainly better ones if you count technical craft or universal appeal, but "Anarchy" is what 1976 needed more than anything else: a hard boot up the arse.

From the opening flurry of chords to that sudden "right... now" followed by a chuckle, this is a deliberate and calculated shock to the system. Nearly every record this year has shied away from the deteriorating situation of the UK and here comes one that tackles it head on. A place so bad it may as well have anarchy. The Pistols may have been as carefully stage-managed as any high-gloss pop band, Malcolm McLaren's hand guiding it all behind the scenes, but McLaren must have realised how much this was needed, that all he had to do was unleash it and the rest would follow naturally.

Which on 1st December 1976, it did.

Queen were unexpectedly unable to make an appearance on the Today programme thanks to Freddie Mercury getting toothache, so instead the Pistols turned up with friends, got themselves well lubricated with complimentary drinks, then told a nation who were used to prim and rather stuffy television that they'd "fucking spent" their advance and that if anyone got turned on by Beethoven that was "their tough shit".

Problem was that host Bill Grundy had also been at the bar, and goaded the group while trying to chat up Siouxsie Sioux. This went about as well as can be expected, with Steve Jones breaking the taboo of 1970s TV by calling a presenter out as a "dirty sod", following it up after some provocation with "dirty bastard" and commenting "what a fucking rotter". This went out live, Malcolm McLaren bricking it behind the scenes, and overnight ended Grundy's career while kick-starting that of the Pistols. Apparently the state of disorganisation in the immediate wake of those few minutes of television was such the band ended up answering the phone to some of the people ringing up to complain, doing so about as politely and sympathetically as you'd expect.

And yet amidst all of this, "Anarchy" made #38 for just a single week at the very end of 1976, before EMI dropped the band entirely due to internal and external pressures ranging from packers at their plants refusing to handle the singles to an incident involving spitting and vomiting on a flight to the Netherlands.

Strangely, to modern eyes, the most jarring thing about the Grundy interview is a member of the entourage prominently displaying a Nazi swastika armband, with no comment from anyone.

It feels strange to go from this back to the rest of 1976. That in the same week as the Grundy show, ABBA are hitting #3 with "Money, Money, Money". I think this might be the first misstep for me. Not in the uneven and experimental style, but in how simplistic the chorus is and how many places there are where things don't quite fit together. It's an ABBA record. There shouldn't be gaps in it.

Some rare signs of life from outside of the punk world with Electric Light Orchestra's "Livin' Thing" (#4 December '76). The freakout sections and competing vocals of the verses offset a beautifully simple pop chorus. Not only does this work, but it also makes me realise how little energy the records of this year have had in comparison. I'm not talking about the superficial boogie of disco either, but the way this flows, always full of bounce and ready to surprise you with some new turn.

Compare, if you will, Johnny Mathis #1 "When A Child Is Born". It just never gets going. By the time we get our first actual lyric, ELO have already treated us to a mysterious intro, mariachi horns, those two near-perfect chords of the acoustic guitar coming in, and are already at the bridge into the chorus.

Queen had been having a bad month on the dental health front, but "Somebody To Love" going to #2 at the start of December might have been some consolation. Again, there's a bit of perk to this, with the rumbling piano, slightly over-urgent vocal harmonies and one of those Brian May solos that makes me think there's a big cord in his back that you just pull and watch him go at it for the next 20 seconds.

Mike Oldfield had another go at Christmas single oddity with "Portsmouth", a two-minute hornpipe jig that made it to #3 for the new year, although there's good reason it's "In Dulce Jubilo" that everyone remembers.

Mud's last chart entry is "Lean On Me", peaking at #7 in December '76 and moving away from their '50s rock'n'roll stylings for something more contemporary, with both Moog and Fender Rhodes. The squelchy chorus doesn't quite work for me, though, no matter how much this Bill Withers song may otherwise be a classic.

Smokie's "Living Next Door To Alice" hit its #5 peak right at the end of the year. Before you wonder if there's another Grundy moment about to happen, this is the early version of the Chapman/Chinn classic (originally recorded by New World in 1972), long before the "who the fuck is Alice?" catcalls got added to it. It's quite sweet in a way, but seriously, don't spend 24 years on unrequited love, that's not good for you and more than a little bit sinister.

Of all people, Hutch of "Starsky and" fame has a record in the charts - at the top of them, no less, David Soul's "Don't Give Up On Us" peaking at #1 in January '77. It's serviceable, if a little saccharine. Some nice guitar work there, mind. Music, as Soul said, was his first love and if TV detective fame allowed him to indulge it then who can blame him?

Sadly the timing of that #1 peak reveals that we're finishing this year with Johnny Mathis at #1, and I can't say that's not representative. Although I'll slip in one last pick for the year with Barry Biggs' "Sideshow" entering the Top 40 mid-December before peaking at #3 in January. A pleasant combination of reggae like it used to be with some pleasing electronic sound effects.

At which point I have to admit that most of these December chart entries are really 1977 records in terms of when they hit big and finally leave behind the disappointing world of 1976.

Was this really the nadir of the British pop chart? I'm not sure. See, I don't think the music of 1976 has necessarily been bad. There have been some real stinkers, but then find me a year which doesn't have a few horrible novelty records, especially in the 1970s. What it has been, though, is directionless. Up until now I've always had a story to tell, whether it be the clash between psychedelia and easy listening of the mid '60s, the rise of meat and potatoes rock in the early '70s, or even the stubborn recalcitrance of the Template throughout the '50s.

'76 doesn't have a story. It's just this mismash of everything; disco giving way to soft rock ballads giving way to country giving way to Demis Roussos and then that pan pipe record. Maybe it's because the big musical stories of the year took place so far away from the pop charts, that this is a year of things bubbling under to explode forth in '77, '78 and beyond, but I found it hard to go through this year without ever finding a thread I could pull at to untangle the whole thing or even, for much of the time, that would do anything interesting.

I think perhaps that's the problem. A lot of good stuff happened in 1976, but it's so far removed from the pop charts it may as well have happened in a different country. This is the year of my favourite Bob Dylan album. My favourite record of all time (a B-side, natch). It's got that Warren Zevon album with "Desperados Under The Eaves" on it. I could write you 10,000 words on an amazing 1976, shot through with demos, obscurities, album-only tracks and things which only really happened in the US or elsewhere at this point... but it wouldn't be the history of the UK charts.

Even if that history was a particularly aimless and frustrating one this year.

1977

The first surprise of 1977 is that despite the Grundy incident making front-page news and causing a national panic, it takes until April for another punk record to hit the Top 40, and the Clash's "White Riot" disappears after a single week at #38. Punk took so long to get to the point of records being issued and charting in the UK that by the time Stiff were formed in 1976, they were already signing artists who'd be considered New Wave and post-punk.

(Although the title New Wave only came to mean a specific type of calmer, more pop-oriented punk band later on; at the time it was a broad spectrum term covering everything from first wave punk to ska and two-tone)

What this means is that while there may be safety pins and spiked haircuts in the streets, there's still a full quarter of the year in which the charts drift by blithely ignoring this. I'm sort of intrigued by this. Perhaps given how 1976 went, I should be horrified.

First on the list is Boney M. with "Daddy Cool" (#6 January '77). German vocalist Frank Farian started off recording one-man disco records using the Boney M. pseudonym, but in this most superficial of eras realised what was really needed was to turn the act into a dance troupe. So, with only half of the band singing on record (the rest of the balance made up by Farian's own voice electronically processed) we got the Boney M. that became a near-constant feature of late '70s Top of the Pops.

As for the record? Well, 's disco, innit.

David Parton's workmanlike cover of "Isn't She Lovely" went to #4 toward the end of the month. Like Farian he seemed to have trouble finding singers who could do what he wanted, so ended up singing the lead vocal himself. I guess it's technically fine, but really it's just the kind of soundalike cover you'd expect to find on a K-Tel compilation.

RCA put out yet another Elvis back catalogue number on single with "Suspicion", going to #9 at the end of January. It's a decent enough slice of early Elvis, although not one of the memorable greats and missing all of the gaudy top-heaviness and farty trumpet I love of his showman era. I fear we may indeed be settling into a continuation of that weird, directionless pattern of buying old records, go-nowhere disco and slop, even if Thin Lizzy's "Don't Believe A Word" at #12 provides a little laid-back hard rock respite.

Going into February we start getting signs that disco might finally be breaking out of its rut. We've seen bands such as Wild Cherry approach disco from the funk side, and Rose Royce's "Car Wash" (#9 February '77) melds the two genres fully, with handclapping choruses offset by twangy guitar runs and an intro which is pure groove. There's less gloss here, more to dig into.

But the big hit of the month comes from Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice's double-LP rock opera "Evita". Yes, the soundtrack came nearly two years before the full stage musical opened in the West End - although the restrained cover and glossy booklet included within suggested this was still supposed to be a sophisticated event.

That sophistication didn't mean they were above releasing a couple of singles from it, the first featuring Julie Covington on one of the greatest musical songs of our time, "Don't Cry For Me Argentina". Displaced in latter years by the 1996 film version, it's quite something to go back to this original which had to stand on the music alone. Covington brings a wonderful frailty to those first few vocal lines, with an arrangement that holds back until the last couple of minutes, emphasising the feel of loneliness. It took #1 away from David Soul because of course it would.

Soft soul from Harold Melvin and the Bluenotes with "Don't Leave Me This Way" (#5 February '77), breaking out into an all-action disco-influenced chorus.

"Argentina" managed only a single week at #1 before being displaced by Leo Sayer with "When I Need You", a drippy ballad which plays on the '70s susceptibility for mawkish sentimentality. I'll grant that it's well crafted, and nicely recorded, but it's in a whole genre of things which annoy me and I'm not letting it get away with that.

Below it at #2 is Heatwave's "Boogie Nights", a crushingly generic disco single that I feel erasing itself from my memory even as it plays such is the level of forgettability at play here.

Times are desperate enough that I'm looking further and further down the chart to find something worth talking about, and peaking at #22 in February '77 is Boston's "More Than A Feeling". History may have reduced it to meme status, but I will point you at pretty much everything else which is happening and posit that this is the one great chart record of early '77. Well, that isn't from "Evita", and that one's really a personal preference.

Also I've probably annoyed some Eagles fans with that.

Moving into March, The Manhattan Transfer's "Chanson D'Amour" takes #1, a cover of a 1958 record and I hate to say it (hell, I hate to listen to it) but smooth sax aside there's an awful lot of Template lurking in here. Particularly the fake exotic variant of it, although by 1977 France was not exactly inaccessible, unless you had a particularly bad example of a Friday afternoon Morris Marina.

I can't disguise it any more. I am hopelessly bored by these charts. Racing Cars, "They Shoot Horses Don't They", #14 at the end of February '77. Why am I listening to this? What does this tell me about modern pop music, or the indie vs. assembly line battles of the '90s, or indeed anything? Not since the 1950s have I felt so much like I'm sitting at the output terminal of an endless sausage factory of dirges that exist because if people spend long enough in a record shop they're going to buy something.

Sure, there's Thin Lizzy and the first Boston album and the odd recognisable disco track for which I have little more pertinent commentary than, "yes, I remember this", but I find myself joylessly plugging through my big spreadsheet of major chart hits without ever finding anything to be enthused by.

Well, maybe "Don't Cry For Me Argentina". This should not be the best big-selling record of an entire quarter.

Toward the end of March we get a single from the first of Bowie's famed Berlin trilogy, "Sound And Vision". It peaked at #3 but I'm going to risk eternal damnation by suggesting this is reflective of the charts which surround it by being a big pile of nothing. I know this is a critical darling, and possibly some sort of daring exploration into the recovery from addiction, but I can't find anything to engage with. Bowie was at his best when making records which somehow were both incredibly weird and incredible pop, and this is neither.

We do finally get a new(ish) Elvis record, with February '76 session holdover "Moody Blue" making it to #6. I think this may be the point at which the somewhat overwrought arrangements of Vegas-era Elvis slip into self-parody, but at least it's fun and has a sense of swing.

If these charts are echoing the malaise of the late '50s, I feel like ABBA may be my '70s equivalent of the Everly Brothers. "Knowing Me, Knowing You" hits #1 at the end of March '77, and oh is this a one. I think this might be the first point at which the full melancholic force of late-stage ABBA comes to the fore, which is unexpected as this was recorded well before the infamous double divorces of the band's two couples. I guess they just had a good ear for a breakup song.

It got a decent space of time on the top spot, eventually being displaced in May by utterly forgettable single "Free" from Deniece Williams. Itself displaced by Rod Stewart schlock "I Don't Want To Talk About It", which indeed I don't.

Somehow, inexplicable, Dead End Kids stick a glam rock cover of Honeycombs classic "Have I The Right?" at #6 in April '77 as if it's still 1972, and I find myself marvelling that the only thing we seem to be accumulating here is even more lack of direction or coherency.

But May 1977 is where this ends. It's not just the recognisable records - Peter Gabriel's "Solsbury Hill" at #13, "Hotel California" at #8, and The Trammps with "Disco Inferno" at #16, a record Stephen King liked enough to use the lyrics multiple times in "Misery". It's a record peaking at a mere #22.

Entering the Top 40 for the first time on the week ending 15th May 1977 are the Ramones, with "Sheena Is A Punk Rocker". This is the unlocking moment for punk rock. It had been brewing in the UK for two years, it had made front page news, but this American band who the Sex Pistols themselves denounced as long-haired nonsense made something in the UK charts snap. From this point punk rock singles would come thick, fast, and violent.

It's a great single, although I think the Pistols were on to something with their moans about differing aesthetic. Compared to the disaffected, angry themes of UK punk this is a lot more celebratory, a lot more pop. It's got an accessibility that our homegrown brutish noise lacked.

Which, to some extent, was the attraction. Rod Stewart may have been #1 as June 1977 began, but the man on the streets with the green mohawk would have told you what was really the biggest-selling record of the week: "God Save The Queen" by the Sex Pistols, officially #2 although the NME's own chart put it at #1.

The establishment had it in for this one. Considering it gross bad taste to release the record for the official observation week of Queen Elizabeth II's Silver Jubilee year, it was instantly banned from both the BBC and any radio station regulated by the Independent Broadcasting Authority. The Sex Pistols were by now on their third record company (although second suitors A&M had pressed a small number of copies of this single, creating a collector's grail in the process) and had finally found a punkish kindred spirit at Virgin Records.

This was a tale of stunts and high feelings, with the band cruising down the Thames playing the song at full volume on a boat called the Queen Elizabeth, being arrested shortly thereafter for their efforts, and separately being attacked with razor blades outside a pub. But for all the media-baiting and the cynical assessment that the Pistols were little more than Malcolm McLaren's pet boy band, there's a lot to like about this.

With lyrics that are little more than a series of disjointed protests and ramblings set against that sarcastic "we mean it, man" and a squall of guitars, this is an impenetrable riposte to the accessibility of "Sheena". I can feel that whole year with no direction being swept away on a wave of purposeful anger.

Perhaps this is because, unlike all that disco wallpaper and tedious ballads, I know this one well. Approaching it from the inconsistent swamp of 1976 makes sense, but what about from the other side? I really got into '70s punk around 2002, and I kind of had my reasons for it.

For me, the late '90s were great. I'd always had this sense when I was younger and chafing against the rigid strictures of what was acceptable in music, humour and conversation that I was just waiting for everyone around me to mature. Suddenly we started hitting 16 and it happened. Pranks and catchphrases in the classroom gave way to the sort of absurdist humour I enjoyed. Having interests outside an endless wall of football was OK. Listening to music that hadn't been produced in the last six months was fine, as schoolmates began toting copies of Nevermind in their Discmans and accepting these bands were influenced by other, earlier acts and listening to some of those wasn't inherently a bad thing. (Although, y'know, keep quiet about those Queen records. There are limits.)

It was glorious, and yet also temporary. What felt like a world in which Britpop and pop-punk were hitting creative peaks never before scaled was in fact a world in which they were already becoming overwrought and over-commercialised, paving the way for landfill indie and false emo, genres which wallowed in simplistic structures covered up by excessive production and overt gimmickry. Worse, in my world the laissez-faire social structures of sixth formers from the same town who'd grown to know and accept each other was about to be replaced by the cagey young adults of first year university, nervous of each other and regressing to strict social structures and enforced conformance as a way of coping with this new and unfamiliar land.

I bristled at this. I wanted it to work the way sixth form worked, where everyone was kind of themselves and the social structure relied on those clear and distinct identities. I felt like this world rejected who I was, and I dealt with this rejection by meeting it head-on with more rejection; becoming spiky and abrasive. In doing so I became curious about punk, and upon buying a couple of Clash and Pistols albums in a record fair I found myself being welcomed in by music which was just as spiky and abrasive as I felt.

"God Save The Queen" is a statement. One that rings as true to a dejected, bitter young adult in 2002 as it did to dejected, bitter young adults in 1977. There's a universality to feeling downtrodden and hard-done-by, no matter what the factors, and British punk rock spoke to this in a way which nothing before had. Even Vietnam-era protest rock tended to use euphemisms, whereas punks stood up on stage, grabbed a microphone, and bellowed "no future" into it. With some trace amount of irony since, musically speaking, they had just created one.

Virgin Records said their sales total comfortably exceeded that claimed for Rod Stewart's effort, and suggestions abounded that the BMRB had exerted pressure on the chart return shops used to extrapolate official figures not to stock the record, or outright fixed the charts by refusing to count figures from Virgin's own Megastores which were responsible for a significant number of "God Save The Queen" sales.

If they had, it was an own goal. This was the kind of story punk traded on; a sort of us-against-them mythos in which the real, authentic music battled for recognition against corporate and establishment interests. Regardless of the result, the overt fiddling and things like branches of WHSmith listing the theoretically second-placed record in the pop charts as "-" undermined confidence in the charts in a way that lasts to this day, even more so with the arbitrary formulas used to calculate streaming figures against sales. "It's all fixed" was certainly a common refrain of my younger years, and even now I wonder if one of those recent Christmas #1s really belonged to the Kunts.

The next #2, this time not a controversial one, was Emerson, Lake & Palmer with "Fanfare for the Common Man" in July. A proggy, electronics-heavy version of a 1942 piece of classical music, what you got on 45 was a tight three-minute edit of a near ten minute album track. There's a juxtaposition here: this sort of musicianship-heavy music which spoke a lot to technical proficiency and very little to lived experience was exactly what the punks were against with their ethos of, "here's three chords, now start a band".

On the top spot as we go into July is Hot Chocolate's "So You Win Again". There's a weird deflationary, tired sense to this. There's a sense of lightness and joy to earlier Hot Chocolate singles which is absent here. Errol Brown must have had the same experience listening to the charts of 1976 as I did. Poor guy had to do it in real time, too.

What I find weird about the summer of 1977 is that after a long period of nothing, everything suddenly explodes at once. Disco is at its most plastic and euphoric on Donna Summer's "I Feel Love", taking #1 from Hot Chocolate in mid-July. It entered the Top 40 the same week as the record which took that slot away from it, Brotherhood of Man's "Angelo". Not to suggest they overly mined a particular style but I had to check it wasn't this year's Eurovision entry. (It wasn't; that honour belonged to Lynsey de Paul and Mike Moran's "Rock Bottom", which bucked the UK's trend for buying high-placing Eurovision singles by peaking at a mere #19 despite its #2 placing in the contest, worrying a cash-strapped BBC who really didn't want the bill for hosting 1978).

Late riser "Peaches" by The Stranglers had been hanging around on the top 40 since May, but only peaked at #8 at the beginning of July. Which illustrates that point I made earlier; we've barely had a couple of punk singles and already we have the first to be recognisably New Wave, experimenting with rhythmic structure and instrumentation far more than the standard two-chord squall of old wave punk rock.

I still find myself gravitating more to the simplistic fury of those first few Pistols singles though, with "Pretty Vacant" at #6 in the same month. It was the first song the band penned, and served as kind of mission statement; a group who felt vacant and didn't care about anything. Except maybe opening a single with a killer one-chord riff.

It feels like the pop charts have finally found the energy they've been lacking for so long. Even the oddities like RAH Band instrumental "The Crunch" have a drive and purpose to them. I know to some extent I'm picking and choosing the records I use, but earlier on I was having to dig to find things I could talk about where here I can pick nearly anything and there's something going on. By the way, the reason for RAH being in capitals is this was a bit of goofing off from an arranger called Richard Anthony Hewson, who'd worked with basically a Who's Who of '60s and '70s musicians. Including Cliff Richard, but we won't hold that against him.

Another example: if I'd picked a random #11 from this time last year it would have been a soporific ballad or some forgettable also-ran disco record. Here at the turn of August '77 it's Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers with "Roadrunner". This is a mean and punkish interpretation of, bizarrely, not the 1960 Bo Diddley record of the same name, but instead the Velvet Underground's "Sister Ray". Incredible. Six months ago we were reissuing old Elvis records because there was genuinely nothing else to listen to, and now we're namechecking Lou Reed, the original bloke who popped out to buy heroin off some other bloke.

That said, August starts to sag a bit with starsign-listing R&B record "Float On" by The Floaters making #1 (and even then it gets a bit desperate, I'm fairly sure "Barry" isn't a star sign) despite having little to it other than those sparkly effects '90s pop songs loved. Below it at #2 Showaddywaddy are somehow still peddling their sub-Wizzard nonsense with "You Got What It Takes".

This is starting to feel more like the late '70s I experienced retrospectively, though. At #13 in August are the Jam with "All Around The World". In some sense they're the local team for me, given I grew up in West Byfleet and the band were so local they played the Camphill Club in that very town when they were starting out. Indeed, I once worked in an office that overlooked Stanley Road, the street where Paul Weller grew up.

The Stranglers are at #9 with "Something Better Change", presaging the synth lines of "No More Heroes". While researching this I saw a comment about the Stranglers playing something more akin to garage rock, and I definitely get that here; if the early punk bands grew out of the straightforward and no-nonsense stylings of pub rock, this tilts more at those whirling organs and cautious experimentation of the garage rock genre.

Bond theme "Nobody Does It Better" from Carly Simon takes a #7 in September. It's a bit of a slow starter, but once it's going this is a fine mix of influences, strongly reminiscent of Elton John and those rare few moments when Paul McCartney makes something great.

A couple of positions below it at #9 were Eddie and the Hot Rods with "Do Anything You Wanna Do", credited to merely "Rods" on the 45. It showed how little gap there was between the more energetic end of pub rock and the less abrasive side of punk, going down well with the latter audience even though the Hot Rods had been plying the Medway with rock of the pub variety since the early '70s.

Besides, the New York punks were already experimenting with the idea that a band with the punk ethos that played the punk bands didn't necessarily have to play "punk rock"; Television being the most well-known example of that today, although flag bearer track "Marquee Moon" had done no more than trouble the very bottom of the Top 40 back in April '77.

Mink DeVille were another CBGB band whose sound was not what you'd expect, based more in soul tradition and the likes of Frankie Valli, give or take a little Velvet Underground. #20-reaching "Spanish Stroll" gives an idea what punk audiences were willing to listen to, perhaps in part because even if the musical style was a world apart they shared the same disdain for flowery hippy sentiment and were scraping by on fifty bucks a night.

And then seemingly out of nowhere we all seem to discover French synth pop.

"Magic Fly" by Space reaches its peak of #2 in that same busy early September week, a gloriously mad thing to be so popular with its unabashedly electronic tone, otherworldly synth effects and those little bubbly accents which make everything feel all so very gallic. Jean-Michel Jarre's "Oxygene, Part 4" is at a numerically appropriate #4, and if you could claim "Magic Fly" at least shared the upbeat nature of most charting records, that does not.

Wistful and with musical signatures that evolve more than they noticeably change, I am left with the same mystified reaction I had to the chart success of "Autobahn"; I have no idea what's going on here, but I think I like it.

But topping these charts for a solid month is Elvis number "Way Down". This was initially a routine release, coming out in June in the US in anticipation of Presley starting a new tour in mid-August, the kind of thing expected to sort of bump around in the middle of the charts being neither one of the greats nor one of the stinkers. Indeed, in markets which got a picture sleeve, this was a perfunctory image of an overweight and somewhat breathless-looking King, complete with teaser text for a new LP.

Then on 16th August 1977, Elvis suffered what is widely agreed to be a heart attack while at home in Graceland. Famously while on the toilet, although some accounts merely state he was found on the floor in the bathroom. Drugs were not listed as a direct cause, but in the hours leading up to his death he had taken a fearsome amount of prescription painkillers, as he had done for much of the '70s.

This left "Way Down" as an odd epitaph, a gimmicky filler single with J.D. Sumner's backing vocals hitting low Cs down in the region Cs should probably not be hit. Yet in some ways I think this captures Elvis, or perhaps what Elvis became, better than any deliberately chosen and no doubt mawkish and sentimental effort to find a final statement might. (Wait a month or so. We'll get one.) It's fun, it's silly, it's a little bit gaudy and also it's a hell of a show.

It was dropped from #1 by David Soul's "Silver Lady" at the beginning of October, which is fine, although I say that as someone who's taken a lot of punishment from this decade. Look, if the same nation which has been purchasing Showaddywaddy singles by the bucketload can suddenly develop a taste for avant-garde Euro pop, I can accept that Detective Hutch can make a thoroughly listenable pop ballad.

Bond theme composer John Barry made a wonderfully itchy piece of disco for "Down Deep Inside", peaking at #5. Vocals were by Donna Summer but a few of them are rather phoned-in, and I'm minded to reprise my assessment from "Je T'Aime (Moi Non Plus)" that too much suggestive moaning rather takes the shine off a record.

We also see the Boomtown Rats have an early hit, energetic "Looking After Number One" going to #11 in mid-September. Again, this is one of the bands cited as having taken over from punk rock, and yet most of punk rock hasn't even happened yet. The end of the '70s is just this mad explosion of ideas all happening at once, as if the decade looked at 1976 and decided, "never again".

La Belle Epoque's "Black Is Black" is an odd cover of the Los Bravos psych classic from '66, and matched that record's #2 peak position in October. It's all getting a bit disco-by-numbers by this point though, and the French talent for bizarre sounds zipping all over the place can't save it. It cribs the "Sugar Pie Honey Bunch" strings but I find myself thinking I'd rather be listening to the Four Tops.

Another French-ish connection is Canadian artist Patsy Gallant's "From New York to LA" (#6 October '77), an English-language reworking of a disco reworking of a 1964 film soundtrack number called "Mon Pays". None of the things in this chain are remotely essential.

Still, one position below it Yes had managed to land "Wonderous Stories" on the charts, giving us the post-punk that killed punk rock, punk rock, and the prog rock punk killed all on the same charts at the same time.

It didn't take long for the mawkish response to Elvis' death to start, with "I Remember Elvis Presley" hitting #4 in October, under the pseudonymous Danny Mirror. It's exactly as terrible as you'd expect, namechecking multiple Elvis records in a pastiche of his early '60s output in an impersonation more competent but also far less pleasingly homemade than that employed by Les Gray of Mud.

Disco with unnecessary ecstatic moaning appears to be the order of the day, with Baccara's "Yes Sir I Can Boogie" taking #1 at the end of October. That intro is the worst part, and there's something endearing about the accented English which does give me happy memories of the days before every last rough edge got polished away before a record even leaves the DAW.

Speaking of rough edges, The Stranglers are at #8 with "No More Heroes". This is quite the whiplash moment going from the plastic sheen of disco to something so aggressively charged and political, but I think I made some point earlier about 1977 and everything happening at once.

In the same week of early October we get chart entries for Meco's disco version of the "Star Wars Theme" (oh yes, that was a thing in 1977, wasn't it?) and the unmistakeable boogie-woogie piano of Status Quo at their most Quo, "Rockin' All Over The World".

There's Carpenters and Rod Stewart in there but both of those records are boring so let's see how Bowie is getting on with his Berlin trilogy. Perhaps people have been heeding the words of The Stranglers, because "Heroes" from the album of the same name peaks at a mere #24 in October. Appreciation of these records came so late its eventual peak position of #12 is from 2016.

Far more appreciated on its original release was ABBA's "Name Of The Game", reaching #1 at the end of October. I seem to only know the chorus of this because the rest of the record is a lot weirder than I remember or expect. It's meticulous and exact, because of course it would be, but the halting rhythm and synth trills before going into that singalong chorus are a complexity I was not expecting from these people at this chart position.

Far less complex is Queen's "We Are The Champions" (#2 November '77), a piece of stadium-baiting euphoria that sounds so inevitable now it's hard to imagine a pre-1977 world in which it did not exist. Whatever did people sing at sports events? Naturally it comes with "We Will Rock You" on the B-side, the two of them so inseparable they've appeared together as a 1-2 (or occasional 2-1) in running order nearly everywhere they've turned up, from 1977's "News Of The World" to Greatest Hits albums to compilations of videos. Apparently the band were quite cold when they recorded the "We Will Rock You" video, from the same "let's stand around outside in the garden in winter" session that also gave us the "Spread Your Wings" one.

Another veteran of tapes found in the centre console of cars old enough to have a tape deck (assuming they haven't all turned to Queen's Greatest Hits yet) is Tom Robinson's "2-4-6-8 Motorway" (#5 November '77), a record I first encountered on a two-cassette compilation of "driving music" I was given as a present, an odd one given I did not own a car at the time and at 13 was in theory too young to drive one, although I've heard stories about things which happen on the New Haw Broadway in the early hours of the morning.

Things here start to get recognisable after a lot of disco one-hit wonders and never-heard-of-'ems. We've got the Sex Pistols at #8 with "Holidays In The Sun", a song which eviscerated 2010s style "authentic tourism", or perhaps demonstrated such a thing existed at least as long ago as the late 1970s. We've got Bee Gees "How Deep Is Your Love" (#3 December '77), which took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out why it became so overfamiliar in the early '90s before remembering that oh yes, Take That covered it didn't they.

Elvis Costello bubbles up to #15 with "Watchin' The Detectives", and I know I'm labouring this point but y'know, contemporary with "Holidays In The Sun".

Smokie take a rather faithful cover of "Needles and Pins" to #10 in November, which is odd in a chart crowded with new ideas, but I'll take it. There's some worrying signs we've burnt too fast and too bright though, and the novelty mash-ups like a rock'n'roll version of "Daddy Cool" or the Barron Knights releasing a roll-up live medley of parodies of current-ish records, "Live In Trouble" (#7 November '77)

Even Showaddywaddy are hanging around with "Dancin' Party" at #4 in November, which is firmly in the "I probably heard this blaring from an Amstrad tower system at some point in my life" camp, although not from anyone particularly musically discerning.

We get the official marking of Elvis' passing with a live recording of "My Way" from a June CBS special. The TV special has since been locked in the vaults as it lays painfully bare the poor state of Presley's health by mid-'77, and given both that and the choice of song this could be horrible. It's not. This is a surprise, but that mawkish and awkward tribute I warned you about happened and it was the Danny Mirror record.

This is the Elvis of the '70s, the Elvis of the International Hotel, the man who would never innovate or shock again but could stand up there with the farty trumpet somewhere off to the edge of the stage and give you a hell of a show. It is an absolutely tacky choice to use a performance of "My Way" as the coda to a musician's life but if there's one person who could sell "tacky" in a way that felt full of conviction it was Elvis. Perhaps the record-buying public thought otherwise, as unlike "Way Down" this peaked at #9.

Presley's death overshadowed the loss of another beloved performer. On October 13th 1977, Bing Crosby suffered a heart attack after a successful game of golf with a brief pause for an a capella version of "Strangers in the Night" after being recognised by some workers on a building site. "White Christmas" was duly reissued and made #5.

So if "White Christmas" can't make Christmas #1, what can?

A strong contender for "naff things which happened in the '70s" is the Brighouse and Rastrick Brass Band's recording of "The Floral Dance" and... I don't often do this, but I can't join in here. It's odd that this is up here in the top reaches of the charts, but it's not naff. If you were looking for a brass band recording of this particular piece of music, I dare say this is a decent one. This is not to say I am not utterly mystified as to why we've suddenly switched from Brotherhood of Man to, "actually, brass bands, that's what we want" but shorn of the judgements about what you're supposed to like or not like this is no different to that brief fascination with French synth-pop.

But while there is more to the Floral Dance story, that would come later. As far as 1977 is concerned it was only #2 when Christmas rolled around, and I have some opinions about what was at #1.

If you were looking for prime examples of how Paul McCartney gets one hell of a free pass for being in that band which was good and having the occasional nice solo record (emphasis on the occasional), "Mull of Kintyre" would be a good start. At its highest points it's a less good Lindisfarne, at its lowest it's someone repeating a place name endlessly over the most painfully slow and turgid folk guitar to grace anything this side of a Greenwich Village "Dylan's a traitor" meet-up. About the best bit is the bagpipes, and I don't want to demean the pipes here (not least because it's going to be a pain to get to Edinburgh for my regulation telling-off) but when the bagpipes are the best bit of a pop record you need to take a long hard look about the decisions which went into that thing. Also like all the worst of McCartney the label claims it's a bit shy of five minutes but I swear that feels more like nineteen.

Still, it's what the people of 1977 chose to close out the year with on the top of the charts, in a year where there were almost too many ideas and not enough charts to fit them in. A brief glance at the next few lines of the spreadsheet suggests 1978 is going to continue in similarly interesting fashion the moment "Mull..." is deposed.