A couple of things first:

1. Yes I am shoving out a lot of these posts lately. It is because I realised that I am bloody old so a playlist of one song per year is going to take ages if I only do one a week or something like that.
2. We are getting closer to the end of the 70’s so I will stop gushing so much about all the brilliant songs to choose from. The 70’s were just so brilliant I can’t help reflecting on how brilliant they were, and how lucky I was to be a teenager at that time.

Having got that out of the way I can start with the predictable comment of “What a year! So many good tunes to choose from, I don’t know where to start.” I could start where I left off, thinking about the summer. Capital Radio used to have some sort of feature where they would have a vote (I think) and play the most popular song every afternoon. This happened at a time when we would be sitting around in the main common room listening to the radio, and we were all interested to hear what the top song would be. For what seemed like months there were only two songs that ‘won’ and they were Hotel California and Peaches. If I picked either of those songs to represent 1977 it would not be wrong because we must have heard them hundred of times.

To put the year in context, disco was ruling the radio playlists, our school was still gripped by prog rock fever, and then punk finally arrived on the scene. After one half-term holiday I came back with White Riot by the Clash and Neat, Neat, Neat by the Damned. Somebody else had Anarchy in the UK and somebody else had In The City. I know. The Jam were not punk, but it felt like they were. They were new, young, energetic and got lumped in with the scene. It wasn’t long before the school was awash with the punk singles of that year – Complete Control, Holidays in the Sun, God Save the Queen, Gary Gilmore’s Eyes, Peaches, Lookin’ After No. 1, Pretty Vacant and all the rest.

Best of all, we were not dropping one thing and jumping onto a new trend. I keep getting into new genres of music, but always keep the old passions as well. I could never understand why someone would, for example, get into Goth and then listen to nothing else and pretend they never liked anything else. I think the whole school was a bit like that, so we embraced the new puk scene but still persisted with Genesis, Elton John, and the top twenty pop songs.

And at the risk of sounding like a stuck record myself, what a year for great pop singles: Stevie Wonder with I Wish , Sir Duke and As, various ABBA songs, Lonely Boy by Andrew Gold, the mighty Uptown Top Ranking, and Yes Sir I can Boogie. A quick word about that last one. It is easy to forget how huge that was. My dormitory wall had a poster of Baccara alongside the posters of Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd, though admittedly it was not so much for reasons of music and more to do with the leotards the girls were wearing in that pull-out from Record Mirror. Anyway, it was a hit everywhere, so much so that when it comes to physical sales it is still in the top ten of all time. Baccara sold more copies of Yes Sir I Can Boogie globally than the Beatles, Madonna or ABBA did of any of their singles! (A fact that will surely be useful in a future jackpot round of Pointless)

And it wasn’t just pop in the charts. There were a lot of more serious/grown-up/credible artists in the charts now: the Eagles, Fleetwood Mac, Bob Marley, Eric Clapton, Peter Gabriel, ELO and even Yes. Amongst all that, particular obsessions at our school were Ariel by Dean Friedman, I Think We’re Alone Now by the Rubinoos, and John Otway and Wild Willy Barret’s Really Free, which still makes me smile.

It is time to mention a further influence on our musical tastes at school: the teachers. Some of them were only really a few years older than us and a few of them did expose us to some different music. Apart from anything some of them also had decent hi-fi separate systems in a different class to the crappy Dixons own-brand turntables that any of us had access to. It was quite something to go round to our science teacher’s flat and listen to Supertramp albums played through his Rotel amp. One of our English teachers was a Genesis obsessive but also had lots of classic rock like Ten Years After and Cream, and another English teacher  was a huge Bob Dylan fan. As part of his film studies/mass media courses he took us off to see the Woodstock film and The Last Waltz. In this respect they really were acting in loco parentis properly.

Of course we were also into albums, which were played a lot more than singles on our turntables, and when it came to albums it was more rock than pop that we gravitated to. Highlights of the year were Pink Floyd’s Animals, Works Volume 1 by ELP, Even in the Quietest Moments by Supertramp, Going For The One by Yes, Out of the Blue by ELO, Bat Out of Hell, Seconds Out, Spiral by Vangelis, New Boots & Panties, Santana’s Moonflower and, for some reason, Procol Harum’s album Something Magic.

I should give a special mention to Sneakin’ Suspicion by Dr. Feelgood. Not their best album, but the one where I found out about them, via the title track. To think that all this was going on a few miles from my home and I never realised.

All of that was brilliant. I would be happy listening to any of those albums or singles again now, but none of them changed the world like I Feel Love by Donna Summer, although obviously the credit for it must go to Giorgio Moroder. Electronic dance music started here. At nearly 6 minutes it was long for a single, but the 8-minute 12″ version is even better. Hypnotic, danceable and ahead of its time, this was the 1980’s arriving three years early, and for us fans of electronic music it was great to see it being a massive hit instead of limited to niche albums by Kraftwerk and Vangelis.