Hardly any decade is more diverse than the 1970s. Punk & Funk. World music & avant-garde. Disco & crystal clear pop. And: Hardly a decade is better illuminated – right? Error! We have uncovered 50 treasures beyond the established canon.
Paul Williams
SOMEBODY MAN
(1970)
Songwriter Paul Williams is behind songs like David Bowie’s “Fill Your Heart” or “Rainy Days and Mondays” by the Carpenters. The man worked as a chord writer, but maintained his belief that he could become a pop star himself. Wishful thinking, because even Williams’ first and best record was lost. A shame! Williams elegantly oscillates between soft rock and opulent pop. He can never decide, that was a problem back then. Today we know: more touching songs than “Time” are hardly imaginable. Daft Punk recognized this – and hired Williams as a lyricist and singer for their last album.
Andre Boße
Editorial recommendations
Rodriguez
COLD FACT
(1970)
Rodriguez was building houses in Detroit and had no idea that South Africans revered him as a late superstar. Big eyes on both sides as we got to know each other, a great film tells the story. COLD FACT is the album that triggered the boom – and that no one in the USA was interested in. Rodriguez plays a psychedelic version of Dylan, or a folk version of Hendrix. The Dealer Ode “Sugar Man” is his most famous song. But Rodriguez also sings about political grievances; South Africans learned these songs by heart in the apartheid state. Rodriguez, hidden champion of globalization.
Andre Boße
Tim Buckley
STARSAILOR
(1970)
How can Tim Buckley help it that many years later one of the worst Britpop bands named themselves after this album? The man had already released a series of five brilliant records in the early 70s, his pace was breathtaking. He started out as a sensitive songwriter who sang about the sea and the mountains in opulently arranged songs. STARSAILOR doesn’t want to know anything about it anymore. Buckley grins sweetly from the cover, but the piece “Come Here Woman” is comparable to the kind of anti-pop that Scott Walker plays today. Jazz, Dadaism, avant-garde – and in the middle of it all, the breathtaking “Song To The Siren”. Out of this world.
Andre Boße
Comus
FIRST UTTERANCE
(1971)
Even in the early 1970s, which was full of absurd music, Comus are an aberration, a British folk band far removed from the ethereal lightness of leading bands like Fairport Convention, which on their first album sounds like no group before them. Or after. Or at all. If the occult shocker “The Wicker Man” had nightmares, he could probably sound like this group of scattered Velvet Underground fans from Bromley: music on the verge of a nervous breakdown: scratching, grinding, sniffling, threatening, pagan and always captivatingly beautiful. Accompanied by a foldout cover drawn in ballpoint pen by bandleader Roger Wootton featuring a creature writhing in pain, FIRST UTTERANCE plumbs depths that will leave you mind-boggling. Bowie was a fan. Good Bowie.
Chris White
Gil Scott Heron
PIECES OF MAN
(1971)
Listening to this record, you’d think Scott-Heron single-handedly invented a good portion of what we think of as black music today. Among many good records, PIECES OF A MAN is his great masterpiece, glowing with energy: a furious mixture of jazz and funk, poetry and anti-establishment protest. Not just because of the famous opening track, the raging proto-rap “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”. Only afterwards (“Home is Where The Hatred Is,” “Or Down You Fall”) he goes from spoken word to soul man who can compete with the greats – Sly, Marvin, Curtis.
Annette Scheffel
Judee Sill
JUDEE SILL
(1971)
She had put drugs, prostitution and prison behind her and had emancipated herself from temporary jobs in showbiz: This is how Californian convert Judee Sill made her debut in her mid-20s. Music that, although promised to be folk, refers to Johann Sebastian Bach, finds its way to soul via gospel and even manages the panoramic beauty of the Carpenters. A jewel of the art of arranging that never turns away from Judee’s guitar and her voice that strives for pure beauty. Her message is the good news without her lyrics being naive. However, there was no salvation for Judee Sill: at the age of 35, she died of an overdose.
Oliver Götz
Bill Fay
TIME OF THE LAST PERSECUTION
(1971)
Four years ago, the spiritual ’70s singer reappeared out of nowhere, and suddenly we realized where Spiritualized had stolen their religiously charged mantras. Bill Fay’s second album deals with the big themes: Christian and Antichrist, faith and heresy. But don’t be fooled, Fay is not a crackpot or an evangelical. His strength is breaking down biblical language to the issues of the day, for example the Kent State massacre in the title song, in which four students were shot at an anti-Vietnam War demonstration. Fay vs. Nixon. Good versus evil.
Andre Boße
The New Rotary Connection
HEY LOVE
(1971)
Between 1967 and 1971, Chicago’s Rotary Connection released five albums of angelic chamber rock music, whose increasingly theatrical widescreen sound was dismissed at the time as gimmicky nonsense. It was only later that the group around Minnie Riperton was duly celebrated by the acid jazz scene as a visionary act that filled the gaps between David Axelrod and Eugene McDaniels. The best album is the last, not least because it “I Am The Black Gold Of The Sun” contains, immortalized in the version of Masters At Work.
Chris White
Kevin Ayers
WHATEVERSHEBRINGSWESSING
(1971)
For his third solo album, the Soft Machine founder descends from the prog rock summit, makes himself comfortable in a valley hut and reflects. He chooses the orchestral, psychedelic ballad as his narrative form. Only for the riff rocker “Stranger In Blue Suede Shoes” – Blueprint for the Dandy Warhols – he ends up in the nearest bar. Supported by members of his backing band The Whole World, the space rockers Gong, his Soft Machine colleague Robert Wyatt and Mike Oldfield’s Ratatat guitar, nothing disturbs Ayers: not even the marching music “Champagne Cowboy Blues” taken by surprise.
Stephan Rehm
Pan & Regaliz
PAN & SHELF
(1971)
If you want to see how seasoned record collectors start dripping from their mouths, you have to shove an original pressing of Pan & Regaliz’s only album under their noses. Not only because the record, released during the Franco regime, was only pressed in a tiny number, but also because the music is almost idiosyncratic. The short-lived group from Barcelona replaces the usual bombast of popular progressive acts of the era with a sparsely instrumented sound that thrives on its driving groove that flirts with jazz rock. And a dehumanized flute surfing over the songs, which makes Pan & Regaliz seem more distant than the simple songs would suggest: “Waiting In The Monster’s Garden” is the big track – psychedelic funk out of this world.
Chris White
The O’Jays
BACK STABBERS
(1972)
Does anyone actually still know the term Phillysound? The hyped soul offshoot from Philadelphia flooded a young invention called the discotheque. And was quickly forgotten again. Maybe because it was mainly the club kids in sequined bell-bottoms and platform shoes who fell for his grooves – and who, over the years, swapped discos for semi-detached houses. BACK STABBERS reflects the feeling of a generation that some millennials might consider to be the softening of humanity, that’s how sweet and funky it sounded when the foundation for disco and modern pop music was laid.
Jördis Hagemeier
Curt Boettcher
THERE’S AN INNOCENT FACE
(1972)
At the beginning of the 1970s, the paradigms had shifted for Curt Boettcher. The days in which he was considered a producer who was mentioned in the same breath as Terry Melcher and Brian Wilson were over, and his subtle psychedelic finger exercises with The Millennium and Sagittarius remained unsuccessful. THERE’S AN INNOCENT FACE also swept past all possibilities with its radio-friendly melodies between soft rock, country and sunshine pop. It’s a shame, because the album definitely supports its core competence – the hyper-careful, multi-layered, polished arrangement.
Jochen Overbeck