The 1970s

The electric guitar and rock'n'roll have been inextricably intertwined since the very beginning, a perfectly natural combination. But the lead guitar...

With their distinctive tartan, hordes of screaming female fans and singalong choruses, they were one of the biggest-selling groups of the 1970s,...

America might try and lay claim to inventing folk rock when the Byrds began playing Dylan’s songs but true folk-rock – the mix of traditional folk...

Progressive music had really begun in 1967 - at least that's when the term was first used. But progressive rock was a different animal altogether,...

The first wave of West Indian immigrants arrived in Britain in 1948 with the docking of the Windrush and from that point they continued to arrive....

Pop, progressive, blues-rock, folk-rock…by the beginning of the 70s, music was veering in several different directions. But one of them proved to...

As music explored more and more possibilities at the end of the 1960s and into the 1970s it was inevitable that rock and jazz would eventually cross...

Punk had barely exploded on the scene when its cleaner more acceptable little brother, New Wave, arrived. Like much punk, it took its music cues from...

It became the most influential music television show of the 1970s. Where radio had John Peel and Top Gear, there was no viewing equivalent for anyone...

Every decade has its pop stars, some of whom endure, some of whom vanish very quickly. In many ways the 1970s was a golden age of pop music, and many...

By its very limited musical nature punk had a fairly short shelf life. The bands had to grow or die, and most of them died. However, that created a...

The late 1960s and 1970s brought a number of singer-songwriters to the fore. The Beatles and Bob Dylan had made the idea of writing your own material...

Space, was it really the final frontier? In the late 1960s and early 1970s it certainly seemed that way, both physically and in music. Man landed...

T Rex was the brainchild of Marc Bolan. Born in 1947, he'd hung around the fringes of the music business since his early teens working as a model, a...

For the most part, until the middle of the 1970s, the music business was dominated by large established record labels like EMI and Decca. There were...

Punk was meant to sweep away the bloated dinosaur of progressive rock and the blandness of pop music. In that it succeeded, changing the course of...

In pop music, the 70s arrived with a bang, albeit a fairly androgynous one. The first movement to stir the charts was glam rock, where musicians...

For a brief moment at the beginning of the 1970s, the festival seemed the perfect way to see groups. But a combination of factors gave it just a...

It’s been a long way from plain old Reg Dwight to the superstardom of Sir Elton John, but it’s a journey loaded with hit singles and albums, a...

It’s not often that a label also manages to be a musical movement, but Two Tone confounded the stereotypes to be exactly that. Rising out of punk and...

From mail order import records to global mega brand, Virgin has gone from humble beginnings to make Richard Branson wealthy. During the 1970s, Virgin...