It's My Kind of Scene: Top 100 Songs of the 1970s

Wednesday 2 March 2011

Top 100 Songs of the 1970s - Honourable Mentions

The picture lies... there will be no Rod Stewart!

The 1970s. The decade that saw disco music swiftly rise to prominence and then fall out of fashion faster than you can say, "exactly how am I supposed to feed the fish in my platform shoes?" It was a time when you could say the first Star Wars was awesome, the ladies were asking their hairdresser for 'the Farrah' and Margaret Thatcher (the babe) became the first female to be elected as Britain's Prime Minister. Hippies lost a lot of their popularity as the Vietnam War came to an end, American and the Soviet Union were the world's superpowers and their was an economic recession to rival the most recent Global Financial Crisis (or GFC, for those of us in the loop and stuff).

What of the music? The psychedelic 60s really ended in the 70s with the break-up of The Beatles and the death of Jim Morrison. Elvis Presley would also pass in 1977, bringing a close to another chapter in the history of rock and roll music. We mentioned disco (disco) already; bright lights, snazzy outfits, big hair... they were good times. Or so I've been told. ABBA and the Bee Gees were two of the biggest stars but their time at the top wouldn't last. Glam rock came in the form of KISS and David Bowie, heavy metal and progressive rock would dominate after Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd touched down and there was even some decent country artists like Dolly Parton.

Grease was huge and as Olivia Newton-John reminds us (all the time), it became the highest grossing movie-musical ever. Pink Floyd, The Eagles, Fleetwood Mac, Meat Loaf and The Bee Gees all had an album with sales of over 40 million, but Elton John can lay claim to being the most popular artist to emerge from the decade. And that's everything that happened. Everything. What? Oh, yeah... there's also punk music. Good ol' punk music. You can expect to see some classic punk acts appear throughout our countdown, as we look at the 100 greatest songs from one of the most important decades in the history of popular music. Before we can get to that, we're going to look at ten songs that narrowly missed out on the countdown. Think of it as a taste of the goodness that's to come. Let's get to it!

Honourable Mentions

Piano Man (1973)

by Billy Joel