ABBA, I mean, they were terrible, weren't they? What did they ever do, eh?

Shirley?

Sturgeon's Law and all that.

Can't see much to fault about the few songs by Sailor that I remember. Stylish, tuneful and witty. How terribly crap and 70s, eh?

Haven't we already has this conversation? The year straddled the end of glam and the start of punk, and this was just what was going on betwixt the two.

But there's nothing wrong with it at all. I'm so glad TOTP is back.

Top of the Pops was a half an hour show featuring the the top-selling singles in the country sorted principally by the availability of artist to come in to the studio that week. Who were they supposed to be featuring?

I saw the show the OP is talking about, and I share his view. It was pretty horrendous and bland. Seemed to be a bit of a dodgy year.

with a bonus of the top 20 rundown beforehand - Four Seasons, Carps, Be-Bop Deluxe, Miss Ross, Harold Melvin, Abba, Eagles, 10cc, Glitterband, Reg and no less than THREE HJH singles. That's a pretty bloody good batch of music.

My arse..

Is anyone still falling for/peddling this keck?

Sorry, but 30 odd years of the supposedly epoch changing "punk revolution" (or metropolitan show offs picked up by the tit dailies as a way to frighten the mums and dads...)orthodoxy just annoys. The idea of some sort of musical year zero in 1977 is pish.

Truth is, they didn't sell many records cos nobody much in the great British record buying public liked them. Just some music journos on the way up who smelt death amongst their elders and some angry boys in bedrooms. ELO and Genesis still probably outsold "punk" by 5 to 1 at least.

I could go on...

were on it, presumably back in the charts with a reissue programme. Jim'll introduced 'Hey Jude' as their 1966 hit. Tut tut Fixit!

... the spring or summer of 1977, isn't it a bit unfair to use a TOTP from 1976 as an example?

Music is one of my favourite tunes,that is all

...and I've got a soft spot for that Sailor song too, but have to agree that the edition of TOTP from 1976 was absolutely dreadful.

When you hope Guys and Dolls come on next to shake things up a bit, you know it's crap.

Punk definitely shook things up and the DIY idea that came out of that meant loads of new indie labels like 2 Tone and Stiff who put a new emphasis on singles thereby revitalising the charts where of late there had been a focus on albums as the superior art form. I saw that TOTP and it was dire. Even the ABBA song was one of their lesser efforts. There was also a show about TOTP and the radio 1 DJ presenters and my honest reaction to it was what a bunch of silly billys for the most part. Totally in love with themselves as stars in their own right. Not really interested much in the music. Corrupted by their fame and sense of importance. Good riddance to the majority of them.

EDIT: offending c-word removed to avoid offending the delicate sensibilities of the Massive. They were though, and I thought so at the time too, from the age of about 12 onwards.

that is exactly what was so great about TOTP. No pretensions about being anything other than an indicator of what was popular at the time. Happy to have Pans People dance along to the Sex Pistols thereby rendering Punk just another musical trend no more no less. Hands up who owns ELO and Sex Pistols records?

It was the year I started listening to Radio 1 and I spent most of the summer with a transistor radio welded to my ear. For some time, I suspected that my views were skewed by my rose-tinted retrospectoscope but I now think that I became truly aware of music at a highly fortuitous time. As Dr Volume wisely says, so many musical styles suddenly came to the fore. New Wave, Punk, Disco, the early stirrings of NWOBHM and Two-Tone, classic US Power-Pop, Reggae, the last stirrings of old-fashioned Rock 'n' Roll and some truly fabulous plain ol' Pop. 1978 still holds the record for the highest number of singles sold (OK Rivers Of Babylon, Brown Girl In The Ring, Summer Nights and You're The One That I Want do contribute to a lot of the total)

And there was Showaddywaddy.

There were two acts on Friday's show that do not appear in the Guiness Book. 'Tarney & Spencer' and 'Lawrence Andrew'. Both were shite.

But it shows that the production team did have a say in the make up of the show. It doesn't JUST reflect the charts.

In a way it's unfortunate that 1976 is the earliest date from which they can broadcast the lot as 1976 was a bad year for pop music. I was 16 and it was dire. I hated the album bands on the Whistle Test (and now the latest act from Capricorn Records....aaaaahh kill me now) but the chart stuff wasn't doing if for me either. Sailor and John Miles I liked well enough but you can't live your life on that stuff. No-one my age liked ABBA - maybe girls did but they're opinion on music was not sought! ABBA were for newly married old bastards.

By the end of 76' I had found me three bands. The Kursaals, The Feelgoods and The Hotrods. I stayed with the Rods until The Jam took off.

TOTP didn't reflect anything of the rise of punk though. I seem to recall a great celebration in summer 77 when there were three acts on that were not BOFs. And even at that one of them was Sir Dave Edmunds.

All in all - I am so so pleased that the BBC are broadcasting these shows. Can't wait for Get Out Of Denver.

Cancelling a much loved (but floundering) TV show and then running endless repeats documentaries for several years about how great it was reminds of when Dr Who was off air. Could TOTP come back, re-invented, a la Dr Who?

It couldn't come back as a chart show, since I don't think the Charts are the barometer of public taste they once were. Young people in particular consume music very differently, and although they listen to chart music I think they are far less concerned by genres and eras since they can listen to almost anything on Youtube or Spotify but if it remained purely a chart show it would be wall-to-wall Autotune R&B.

I'd have some sort of chart rundown, bands and acts in the studio rather than videos (that being the USP of TOTP) and incorporate classic clips from the archives, and also have some not chart acts, perhaps bands who are on tour or a couple of newish acts. So you'd have Black Eyed Peas, Adele, then maybe Arctic Monkeys, Elbow or whoever, followed by a clip of Lieutenant Pigeon

Reggie Yates and Fearne Cotton would be barred from the premises. Instead I would have maybe Lauren Laverne and how about Tom Ravenscroft for the grumpy Peel factor?

Would it work or have I basically just described 'Later...' without Jools, with more acts doing 1 song each and a pop/rock bias..er...

but they rarely trouble the charts as far as I'm aware. Not that I've been that aware of the singles chart for years

Ive bought more singles these past couple of years than I have done for 20 years, and all of them chart hits, specifically because Ive heard them once theyve charted and liked them. Just like I used to when I was 12. Im 42.

I'm firmly of the view that punk was mainly an interesting socio-cultural phenomenon, one that paved the way for some interesting stuff to follow.
As a 'movement' however, it didn't produce much in the way of great music. There is plenty of music from that era that still sounds fresh and vibrant today, but I don't think that is the case with the vast majority of punk's output.

TOTP represented the 'settled will' of the audience; that is, it played the most popular songs of the day. When we complained about the content (as I certainly used to do on a weekly basis) we were really complaining about other people's musical taste.

No change there, then ;)

My intention was not to slag off the individual bands that appeared on the 1976 show but that collectively they appeared very MOR.

To a 17 year old living in the wilds outside Blackpool this ( apart from OGWT) was the only window onto the world of modern music. I naively thought that some of the bands that I read about in NME might ( if they ever reached the charts ) might appear on the show.

Minor point - was the programme re-edited? It showed the chart rundown at the start of the programme and I always remember it being shown at the end just before the number 1 was shown.

From 1960 to 1990 downloaded or on vinyl (long story), so TOTP is the show for me. Shit or not, it's simply a joy.

I've always been a singles man - until they stopped making them. Now I'm artist and album, but still have a soft spot for all those great hits.

...is like walking across a field full of cow pats, climbing a stile (not too much of that in the 1970s), and treading in a dog turd.
The clever money was on buying up all the dirt cheap 50s and 60s vinyl and ignoring 'the now'.

you may(or not) like to know that this sort of thread really put me off joining in initially. I grew out of saying 'my band is better than your band' when I was 14.You,re all good people but you can be very boring.It is all music. It doesn't matter about what you bring to it to other people.Say it's shit if you think so or good if it's not-to you,But spare me the 'importance' of Joe Strummer or Bjorn Ulvaeus.Thank you.When you talk be funny or witty or I will resign and you wouldn't to risk that,would you?

you should lose that habit of calling people boring, its something a 14 year old would say - and not stray into that trap when asking people to be witty and funny. Spare me the drone of your advice as we are nice people

Last time I looked this was a thread about a particularly poor episode of TOTP with a side discussion of how much influence punk had on the record buying public. I come back and it's turned personal with sweeping generalisations about the attitudes of people who went to public school.

There are some real prats who went to public school (eg Nick Clegg, David Cameron, George Osborne, my ex brother-in-law) and other diamond geezers who also went to public school (eg Peter Gabriel, Hugh Laurie, Stephen Fry, Humphrey Littleton).

You can't help your parents or what they choose for your education. But what you do with your life and your attitudes after that is down to you.

Now can we please get back to discussing the piano stylings of Mr Keith Emerson on the Endless Enigma (Trilogy)?

that's all really...

http://legsandco.blogspot.com/2011/03/this-is-your-life-babs-powell.html

Here's all the hits from 1952 to 1988

http://loadsamusicsarchives.blogspot.com/

Apologies Fraser if this should not have been linked

But Katy's lovely 'The History of This' and the 1976 nostalgia fest has made me put my writing trousers on - tell me what you think and I'll continue the story if anyone is interested:

The seventies are a funny decade. Historians mostly see it as a failed decade, which says more about the social background of historians than it does about the experiences of ordinary people. Journalists see it as ‘the decade that taste forgot’ but frankly with the music, films, television and literature of the 1970s held up against those of the years since the Millennium, it is so blindingly obvious that this was golden age of popular culture that you end up wondering what kind of taste they mean? Kipper ties? Kaftans and the gypsy look? What about Bowie’s Berlin period, what about the Godfather films, what about Fawlty Towers and what about the books of Alan Garner?

For me though, the seventies were an age of innocence. Not just because it was my pre-adolescent decade, but because everyone I met appeared to be innocent – from my parents with their appreciation of simple pleasures such as home, family and bonfire night, to their friends at the residents’ association hall who joined photography clubs, Scottish dancing teams and silly pantomimes with a passion that always left me rather awe-struck. Even the bullies were innocent. A hurtful comment, a Chinese burn and the odd stolen penny chew seemed to satisfy them. If you took these on the chin (or rather the raw forearm) and treated them the same as anyone else, didn’t try to suck up to them or run away, they never singled you out, and even let you in on their appealingly innocent brand of mischief.

Most of all, our leisure interests were innocent, from the chart hits of the day, through the latest crazes (plastic toys and nausea inducing confectionary mainly) to the best thing of all, for a rather dreamy primary school boy:
The comics!
Oh, the comics.

Admittedly you had to be interested in The War to be into comics. The Eagle was long dead and 2000AD wasn’t even a reflection in Dredd’s visor, so it was a solid diet of war, war and more war. But this was only reflecting the cultural obsession among boys. Apart from Matchbox’s beautifully made model cars, everything we played with was focused on Britain’s finest hour. Britain's models, Timpo, Airfix of course, but even Action Man came as a soldier and remained one, whether he kept his commando outfit, or swapped it for a French resistance costume (which had a Croix de Guerre on his black jersey – wasn’t that a bit of a give away?) or more alarmingly slipped into one of the three most beautifully designed costumes – German infantryman (with ‘potato masher’ grenades that fitted in his jackboots), German Officer with cavalry trousers, or German camp commandant, with a fantastic greatcoat that made him look sinister yet imposing. Yes. You could dress up your doll as Amon Goeth.

I agree with whitehorsehill's comment - it feels to me like an innocent time, albeit for the banal reason that I was, er, only 9 at the time (ahem).

Anyway, in 1976, punk didn't have the slightest impact, except as a silly news story at the end of "Nationwide" or whatever. I remember (as a rather irritating boy) asking my primary school teacher what she thought of the Sex Pistols: "I try not to", she huffed.

As a 9-year old, I was a slightly obsessive Beatles nerd, and I never really grew out of that, even when I became a teenager and started trying to like The Nightingales or Sex Gang Children. I think the 9-year-old me knew where he was at, far more than any of the older versions.

By the way - ABBA or the Clash? ABBA every time. And I love Fox as well. So there.

Last night's episode had a much stronger line up.

What I'd forgotten, given 35 years of rose tinting, was how tacky the whole thing looked. All those wire and cardboard sets.

Pan's People dance interpretations were as weirdly literal as I remembered though.

But if the toys were all focused on the war, like the best documentary every made (The World at War as if you need to ask) and the best sitcom of the 70s ('Dad’s Army' not the bloody 'Good Life'!), the comics were completely obsessed. And if the comics were obsessed, then I – oh, you get the idea.

There were 'Victor' and 'Hotspur' – all right for holiday reading, but badly drawn with silly (i.e. middle class) heroes and a complete lack of respect for either our allies or our enemies. 'Warlord' was better – the silly middle class officer types were actually commando types in disguise – and there were one or two rather intriguingly ‘tough’ characters. Then in 1975 came 'Battle'. This was more like it. Officers were despised, the heroes were mavericks, tough NCOs, or even a bunch of convicts. I bought the first one, as I just knew it was what I was waiting for. The stories were so much darker and ‘real’:

"This is the story of a madman. A hard, cruel son of satan who led us into the very pit of hell – and laughed about it. Then he began to turn us into savage animals – the most savage fighting force the Japs had ever known…"

Sometimes British characters were openly cowardly – like in ‘Darkie’s Mob’(above) - something I’d never seen before. Although I didn’t know it, this was mainly the work of Pat Mills, a man regarded nowadays as ‘the godfather of British comics.’ There were heroic Russians (and even Russian women!) in his ‘Johnny Red’, and of course there was the legendary ‘Charley’s War’ – the first anti-war war comic - but that was set in World War One and there wasn’t much fighting in it. I didn’t understand most of the authentic Edwardian idioms that the characters came out with, either.

Battle had ‘death’ and lots of it liberally spread around. Quick death with knife, grenade or bullet, but sometimes slow death, like ‘D Day Dawson’ who’d been shot on 6 June and the bullet was moving towards his heart. He got his men to Germany, and then waded out to sea as the bullet killed him. No cissy cop-out ending – we’d be told he was dying for 50 odd weeks, so he had to die at the end. Of course!

Naturally, with the same focus in every story, every week for a year, even a 9 year old with a seriously intense war-habit started to get a bit bored, after a while. So when there was an advert for issue 1 of "Action", I thought I’d give it a try. I popped down to the shops (end of the road opposite – butchers, newsagent, greengrocers and grocers/off licence) and spent my sweet money on it. It also came with a really cool glider, but that went over our fence into the garden of a house I certainly wasn’t going to venture into.

I bought it mainly because the advert said there was a war story with (deep breath now) a German hero – 'Major Hellman of Hammer Force'. He was a Panzer commander, and, so he had a cool uniform and even cooler tanks. Yes we had Spitfires and Lancaster bombers, but frankly, our tanks were crap. The Churchill looked like a shed, the Matilda had a girl’s name and the rest of them were American. The Germans had the Panzer Mk IV which looked evil, the Panther which was made by Porsche and apparently drove like one, and Hellman’s favourite tank, the Tiger, which was indestructible and had a gun that would have made Dirty Harry feel seriously out-barrelled.

I thought the point of the 1976 documentary was that the "we're just playing what people are buying" argument was somewhat undermined by the fact that Radio 1 was determining practically the only pop playlist to reach most people; in other words, one part of the BBC was significantly shaping what people were deciding they liked, and another part of the same organisation was playing it back to them.

So in effect you had a feedback loop, which, as with all feedback loops, eventually reached such unbearable levels (in say 1976) that someone had to turn it down (and, say, go for punk in a big way).

Of course, there were plenty of ways people could find out about all sorts of other music, rather than going by the Radio 1 playlist, but for many people they just take the choice most easily accessible. I know that, as a pre-teen in 1976, I thought the charts were generally dire but it genuinely didn't occur to me to look elsewhere: it simply didn't enter my childish imagination that there might be other bands out there.

And my entry point to "proper" music was seeing the Buzzcocks on TOTP (Everybody's Happy Nowadays - not one of their best, but that didn't matter and it's not the point). That was the trigger which made me realise there was a whole other world out there where bands played music I would enjoy. So TOTP got short shrift from me after that.

I remember Radio 1 promoting plenty of tepid, lyrically bereft AOR drivel in the seventies, either through its record of the week or, if the particular song didn't get in the charts, trying to push it again a few months later. Hence the bearded fella with the guitar in the first Pops last week who probably wouldn't make the cut at an acoustic night in a pub now.

I'm a huge fan of the Punk thing, both the British and the American sides of things. But arguably the Northern Soul scene was just as big an influence as Punk if not more so. Through the 80s the amount of bands talking about Northern was as high if not higher than those talking about Punk. Weller and Costello and Dexys for instance, loads of the early 80s bands like Soft Cell and the Human League, the Stone Roses and the Happy Mondays - all of them raved about and claimed influence from the Northern Soul thing. There were quite a few chart hits as a result of the Northern scene.

mention JoBoxers...

with one episode a week? That's insane! I think Janice Long pointed out on the podcast that we'll be in the 2040s before they reach the end of the show.
It would be more fun if they randomised them so you never know which episode is going to come up....although I suppose the danger is you end up with an episode from the 00s presented by Fearne Cotton featuring loads of half forgotten Rave anthems, Busted and Travis.

These repeats remind me of the 'Guilty Pleasures' MOR revival in the early noughties, when hip club DJs suddenly admitted to loving Sad Cafe records. Maybe there will be a second comeback?

I'm too young (ok, early middle aged) to remember the 70s in a serious way, but I agree with others that the ex-punks who took over the media and academia in the 1980s have created 1976 as year zero. As Danny Baker suggested on a great podcast here a while back, it wasn't really the case.

As Mr Hepworth, or Ellen pointed out in a distant podcast-fed up of hearing from people who weren't there how punk changed everything. It quite clearly didn't, but it did pave the way for some bands who might otherwise not have been signed-The Jam, Banshees etc
It did have an influence on bands to come but no doubt the massive would deny the right of Duran Duran et al to claim that. "The Sex Pistols take on Chic and the Brummie boys win" as Mr Taylor, J once said.
There were good and bad records in 1976 and indeed in any year before or since and to single out acts on that particular episode of TOTP is to deny the place, time and context in which they exsisted. It was a family friendly entertainment world and we had OGWT for 'proper' music.
Like most posters I have both Pistols and ELO in the collection and at the moment the Pistols get more airplay as it is just appealing to me more but it's not better or worse. I also have Cliff, Abba, Manilow and Yes, ELP and Genesis-I just like a good tune.
Anyway off now to prepare for tonight's episode-Smokie are on!! And don't even start cos as a Bradford lad I'd have to ask you to step outside.

I'm not going to make any claims that Punk changed everything, but one thing it did do was make buying records, or more specifically singles, exciting again.

I had pretty much given up buying singles. Since the demise of the HJHs and the product from the HYSYMBSITSHs being bathed in a heroin induced torpor, there was little allure in buying singles. I certainly hadn't been getting excited at the prospect of new ABBA releases.

Come the advent of punk and new releases were eagerly anticipated. The Banshees, mentioned above, as an example had done Peel sessions but held off signing a record deal for ages. There was a genuine buzz of anticipation awaiting Hong Kong Garden (which in retrospect was a slight disappointment - good but not great).

I still remember buying (White Man) In Hammersmith Palais unheard on the day of release and rushing home to play it. Jam singles crashed into the charts at No 1, probably selling 100,000 in the first week.

Stiff had also done a lot to revive the singles market. They were almost a trademark of quality in themselves, in that people would be prepared to buy a single unheard simply because it was on Stiff. This trend continued for quite a few years. When TwoTone started a friend used to buy new releases unheard simply because of the label. The Indie market did start suffering under the weight of labels, but there was still gold to be dug out.

That I think was one of the legacies of punk.

and thinks it's a good idea. 20 years later, a career is born.

I knew i rcognised her !

.....to fit them into a 30 minute timeslot. I did wonder where the Beatles rooftop performance of Get Back was last night. They cut 3 tunes out.

Why? Its BBC4. There's no time constraints or news bulletins to be finished before.

A shame, they finally start to repeat what they have in their archive then they decide to cut them up. Bizarre!!

.

I have no memory of Mud reinventing themselves as a disco band.

.....very bad...........very, very bad. And if you think tonights performance was bad just wait, they're back on performing it in a few weeks time and DLT joins in "larking" about on the stage.

I only caught a few songs from tonight. They're showing the full repeat, unedited tonight. Sky plusing them, how long do you bet until I reach for the fast forward button??

But let us rejoice that Brotherhood of Man are no longer number one, Abba have reclaimed their crown.

Don't remember them at all, they seem like a cross between Pan's People and the Village People. And Mud going disco was another eyebrow-raising moment.

One thing I have noticed: they show the 30-1 countdown at the start, but some of the acts are clearly not in the top 30. Given TOTP's mantra of only playing the hits, presumably these were bubbling under?