1978 really was peak disco year wasn’t it? Obviously there were the Bee Gees singles Night Fever and Stayin’ Alive, but also the other singles from the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack, and the soundtrack album itself which was released towards the end of 1977 but still selling well and spawning singles in 1978. And then there was Chic, Marshall Hain with Dancing in the City, and Instant Replay by Dan Hartman.

I stil enjoy listening to those disco songs, although at the time we were listening to very different stuff by choice. The disco we got from the radio, TOTP and the school dances, but what we were putting on our record players in the dorm was very rock-oriented. There was what is now called classic rock but was just rock at the time, prog and punk, even if that had already blown over to be replaced by the more general classification of ‘new wave’. Only a year after the Jubilee year summer of punk, the Sex Pistols were history by the end of the year and Johnny rotten had returned as John Lydon with Public Image.

They may seem to be polar opposites, but we took equal pleasure from concept albums like the Jeff Wayne War of the Worlds album and Pyramid by the Alan Parsons Project and singles from the Rezillos, Blondie, Squeeze, Jilted John, the Police, Gang of Four and Buzzcocks.

It goes without saying that Yes, Genesis and Elton John still featured heavily for us. Genesis released …And Then There Were Three and Elton had a few singles that get less remembered now but I still remember fondly – Ego, Part-Time Love, and Song for Guy. Meanwhile, Yes released the Tormato album which was hugely significant for me because in October I went to see them play at the Empire Pool, Wembley (as it was known then).

That was the first time I saw any band play live and my ears didn’t stop ringing for days afterwards. The concert was in the round and I was in row seven, close enough to see the stitching on Rick Wakeman’s cloak. It was not supposed to be my first gig though. I had tickets for the Tubes earlier in the year, but Fee Waybill broke his leg at a show in Leicester and the rest of the tour was cancelled. I ended up seeing them when they toured the Remote Control album and again on the Completion Backward Principle tour and more recently on their Wild West Tour so I made up for it in the end.

It took a lot of effort to get concert tickets in those days. You couldn’t just go online, pay by card and get a ticket e-mailed to you by return. You had to write a cheque or get a postal order if you were too young to have a bank account and put it in an envelope and post it to the box office. Some time later you would receive tickets or your returned cheque if they had sold out. if you lived near a venue you could go there, or visit a ticket bureau maybe, but if you lived in a small town it was the Royal Mail or nothing. Having said that, you were usually successful in getting tickets unlike today when shows at the O2 sell out in seconds or the Kraftwerk Tate Modern shows crashed the systems under the weight of the demand. I like the convenience of how it works now, but get annoyed by how you need to book (and pay for) tickets when the show is announced 18 months in advance to stand any chance of getting in. Back then you could get tickets for big tours just weeks before the show.

And talking of live music, 1978 was a good year for live albums. Some of my favourite live albums were released in this year: Thin Lizzy’s Live and Dangerous, the Tubes with What Do You Want from Live, Busting Out by Jethro Tull, and The Last Waltz soundtrack.

Again, there are too many great, significant and iconic singles and albums from 1978 to even attempt to list them all. Wuthering Heights, Babylon’s Burning, Roxanne, Baker Street, Mr Blue Sky, Sultans of Swing, Who Are You?, Hong Kong Garden, Parallel Lines, Tubeway Army, The Man-Machine only scratches the surface.

Above all of them I have chosen Down At The Doctors by Dr Feelgood just because. Because as a card-carrying South Essex boy I have to have them somewhere. Because although it is called “Down At the Doctors”, Lee actually sings “down to the doctors” all the way through it. Because of the mythical eight bars of piano. Because it showed that they could survive without Wilko, even if they were never quite as good. Because it is a real belter of a tune.