The 1970s is the decade that can't make its mind up. It starts with the Beatles breaking up and ends with Margaret Thatcher entering Downing Street. In between, Britain careers through glam rock, progressive rock, heavy metal, pub rock, disco, punk, and the first stirrings of post-punk — often in the same year. It is the most musically diverse decade in British history, and the most contradictory. It gave us both Queen and the Sex Pistols, both "Bohemian Rhapsody" and "God Save the Queen." It is the decade of glorious excess and furious rejection. And it never settled on a single story.
The Hangover
The 1970s began under a cloud. The Beatles were finished. The idealism of the 60s had curdled into recrimination. The economy was tanking — inflation, strikes, the three-day week. Edward Heath was Prime Minister, and nobody was happy about it. But from the ashes of the 60s came something strange and wonderful: glam rock.
Glam was the first great British pop movement of the 70s, and it was everything the 60s weren't: artificial, theatrical, self-consciously glamorous. It was a reaction against the earnestness of hippie culture. If the late 60s were about being authentic, the early 70s were about dressing up and pretending.
Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders
David Bowie was glam rock's genius and its shape-shifting god. He'd spent the late 60s trying and failing to find his voice — a mime artist here, a folk singer there, a novelty hit with "Space Oddity" (1969) that felt like a one-off. Then, in 1972, he invented Ziggy Stardust. The album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars was a concept album about a bisexual alien rock star who arrives on earth and saves humanity through music. It was ridiculous. It was glorious. And it made Bowie the most important British solo artist since the Beatles.
Bowie didn't just make great records — he made everything around the records interesting. The costumes, the makeup, the interviews where he claimed to be gay (he wasn't, entirely), the theatrical performances with Mick Ronson's guitar heroics. He understood that pop stardom was performance, that the image was as important as the music. This seems obvious now. In 1972, it was revolutionary.
Glam wasn't just Bowie. T. Rex, led by Marc Bolan, had been a folk duo before Bolan discovered glitter, platform boots, and a three-chord boogie that produced a string of perfect singles: "Hot Love," "Get It On," "Telegram Sam." Bolan was an unlikely sex symbol — small, curly-haired, with a voice that wavered between a purr and a squeak — but he captured the moment perfectly. Glam was also Roxy Music, a band so weird and sophisticated that they seemed to have arrived from the future. Their debut album (1972) featured Bryan Ferry's croon, Brian Eno's synth noise, and a cover girl dressed as a space-age stewardess. Nothing like it had existed before.
Queen: The Unstoppable Force
In 1973, a band called Queen released their debut album. Led Zeppelin had already redefined what a British rock band could be — massive, blues-drenched, world-beating. Led Zeppelin IV (1971) contained "Stairway to Heaven," the most played FM radio track in American history. But Queen were different. They were glam crossed with prog crossed with hard rock, fronted by Freddie Mercury, a former Heathrow baggage handler who turned out to be one of the greatest vocalists and showmen in pop history.
Queen's ascent through the 70s was methodical. Sheer Heart Attack (1974) was the breakthrough. A Night at the Opera (1975) was the masterpiece — an album of absurd ambition that included "Bohemian Rhapsody," a six-minute single with an operatic middle section that the record company said would never be played on the radio. It became the Christmas number one in 1975 and stayed at the top for nine weeks. Queen played Wembley Arena, then Earl's Court, then Madison Square Garden. By the end of the decade, they were the biggest band in the world.
The Prog Rock Colossus
While glam ruled the charts, another movement was filling the arenas. Progressive rock — prog for short — was the most ambitious, self-indulgent, and technically brilliant music of the decade. Bands like Yes, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Genesis, and Jethro Tull played 20-minute suites, concept albums about mystical landscapes, and music that borrowed from classical, jazz, and folk. Their fans were devoted. Their detractors thought they were ridiculous.
The greatest of them all was Pink Floyd. The Dark Side of the Moon (1973) was the album that made everything else seem frivolous — a concept piece about madness, time, money, and death, executed with immaculate perfection. It spent 741 weeks on the Billboard charts. It has sold 45 million copies. It is one of the few albums of the 1970s that sounds as fresh and strange today as it did then. Pink Floyd's subsequent albums — Wish You Were Here (1975), Animals (1977) — were less commercial but no less ambitious. By the end of the decade, they were the biggest band in the world, replacing Queen.
The Other Side
Not everything in the 70s was glam excess and prog ambition. There was a parallel Britain, grittier and more grounded, that found its voice in pub rock — a back-to-basics movement that rejected the pomp of the mainstream in favour of small venues, cheap beer, and R&B grit. Dr. Feelgood, from Canvey Island, were the pub rock archetype: tight jeans, sharp suits, no nonsense. Brinsley Schwarz, whose members included Nick Lowe and a young Elvis Costello, were pub rock's house band.
Pub rock didn't sell millions. But it created the infrastructure — the venues, the audience, the attitude — that made punk possible.
1976: The Year Zero
Punk didn't start in 1976, but 1976 is when it became visible. The Sex Pistols played the Lesser Free Trade Hall in Manchester on 4 June 1976. Only about 40 people were in the audience, but one of them was Howard Devoto (who formed Magazine), another was Peter Hook (who formed Joy Division), another was Morrissey. It was the most important gig in British rock history, because it convinced a generation that they could do it themselves.
The Sex Pistols were not the most talented punk band. The Damned were better musicians. The Clash were more principled, more political, and ultimately more important. Buzzcocks were more melodic. But the Pistols were the detonator. Their single "Anarchy in the UK" (1976) was a declaration of war. Their appearance on the Today programme with Bill Grundy — the "fucking rotter" incident — created a tabloid frenzy that made punk the most talked-about musical movement in the country. Their album Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols (1977) is the sound of a decade hitting a wall.
1977 was punk's annus mirabilis. The Clash released their debut, a furious, politically-charged classic. The Damned, Buzzcocks, and Siouxsie and the Banshees all released essential records. Punk was a movement, a fashion, a political statement, and a threat to the existing order. It was also, crucially, a British invention — the US had punk precursors (the Ramones, the Stooges), but the full explosion was a UK phenomenon.
Kate Bush and the Strange
In 1978, a 19-year-old from Kent released her debut single, "Wuthering Heights." Kate Bush was unlike anyone else — a classically-trained pianist who wrote songs based on Emily Brontë novels, who danced like an interpretive modern dancer, whose voice swooped and soared in ways that pop music had never attempted. Her debut album The Kick Inside was a masterpiece of strange, literary, emotionally complex pop. She was the best thing to come out of the late 70s, a reminder that British pop could be weird and wonderful even as punk was painting everything in black and white.
The End of the Decade
The late 70s was a period of fragmentation. Disco invaded British pop with the Bee Gees (Australian by birth, but saturated in British pop culture) and the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack. The Jam, led by Paul Weller, merged punk energy with Mod style and became the biggest band in the country. Elvis Costello emerged from the pub rock scene, armed with venomous wordplay and a catalogue of classic songs. Joy Division formed in Salford in 1976, playing their first gig supporting the Buzzcocks in 1977. Their debut album Unknown Pleasures (1979) was the sound of a new decade waiting to be born — cold, minimal, post-punk, utterly original.
Squeeze released their first albums. The Specials and Madness kicked off the 2 Tone ska revival. The Police — a trio of British musicians who'd all played in different jazz and prog bands — released their debut, fusing punk energy with reggae rhythms. The 1970s ended not with a bang but with a thousand different bangs, each in a different direction.
What the 70s Left Behind
The 1970s changed British pop by splitting it open. It proved that pop music could be many things at once — theatrical and stripped-down, intellectual and visceral, absurdly ambitious and militantly simple. It gave us Bowie, Queen, Pink Floyd, the Sex Pistols, and Kate Bush — artists so radically different from each other that they seem to belong to different centuries. It gave us arena rock and sweaty basement gigs. It gave us "Bohemian Rhapsody" and "Anarchy in the UK." It gave us the template for everything that came after: the solo artist as chameleon, the band as political force, the underground as breeding ground for the mainstream. The 1970s didn't have a single identity. That's what made it great.