I’m seven years old now, some of this becomes familiar on reading.
The editorial direction of the paper now is kind of boring, Travolta, Abba & Status Quo are flavours of the month I guess, but not really my bag man. And the tone of the paper is a bit aggressive, but maybe that’s the Punk attitude. But I doubt it, it’s the newest counter culture and I can’t see it well represented in the press, only looked back on.
UK Top 75 can be found here and the US Top 100 is here. Soul & Disco charts are compiled into the playlist below, but I wanted to call out the Star Choice this week as it’s courtesy of Paul Weller with some decent choices. Not easily findable on Spotify, but I think everything is on youtube at the very least.
Scan is a bit murky, but Paul Weller’s Star Choice of tracks for September 30th, 1978 appear to be:
- Longshot Kick The Bucket – The Pioneers
- The Four Gees – Rough Rider
- Don’t Be A Drop Out – James Brown (& The Famous Flames)
- Breakdown – Tom Petty
- Making Time – The Creation
- My Girl – Otis Redding
- In The Midnight Hour – Wilson Pickett
- Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere – The Who
- Waterloo Sunset – The Kinks
- A It Mek – Desmond Dekker (& The Aces)
The Top 20 UK & US Soul, Top 20 US Disco and Top 90 (!) UK Disco provides over 10 hours of music just in case you’re reminiscing of Wigan.
There seems to be an increasing amount of stuff that isn’t available on Spotify, that’s 16 tracks from the different charts that are missing. The rest are in the 100 strong song playlist above. Would also mention that increasingly it’s the smaller UK labels that seem to be missing, which is a shame but an inevitability as the bigger labels consolidate and eat the smaller ones, sometimes just dropping niche content and a reason for the continued presence of Soulseek. I should have a look on bandcamp for some of these items going forward, but that’s for a future edition.
Have moved the playlist to youtube, which has more content over spotify so the above is kind of redundant but I’m leaving it in anyway.
Elsewhere in this paper…
Noticed this, which sent me back to older papers to find the potential offensive cartoon. And well, actual yikes.
This did put me in search of the St Michael label, as I was curious about what was issued on it. According to discogs, the label was brought into existence in 1968 with a Sacha Distel album, which doesn’t really tie up with this cartoon. Said album didn’t have any images and shared a catalogue number with a Max Bygraves album, so seemed a bit of an oddity. Anyway, I found the album with images on ebay, and learned it was issued in 1978 which seems to make sense. M&S had issued a cassette of Christmas Carols in 1975, and an Elgar variations edition before the label launch in 1978. There’s probably more digging I could do on the lable as I would like to understand what the catalogue number actually mean as they seem to clash quite frequently, but that’s for the pile of stuff that I’ll never get round to dealing with.
A reader writes.
And this seems to have been the review that drew ire from two weeks earlier.
Sunday Supplement School of Rock is pretty spot on for Yes, IMO.
Another item of interest spread across the recent pages follow, the A-Z of Heavy Metal by Steve Gett is reproduced below.
A veritable of Who’s Who and Who’s That. Some of these bands would go on to fame and fortune, others to obscurity. A few would find their home in the following year when the NWOBHM became a press term in the post punk era.