1975

‘Across 21 albums, Jones smartly covers the songs and music as well as the geo-cultural milieu that nurtured and enveloped them. An excellent book’ Irish Times

‘Makes one crave a follow-up undertaking for 1976!’ Record Collector

‘Enormously entertaining . . . Never has pop history been so elegantly told’ London Standard

1975 was the apotheosis of music. Rich with masterpieces, it’s the most important year in the narrative arc of the music of the twentieth-century: Blood on the Tracks by Bob Dylan, The Who by Numbers by the Who, Young Americans by David Bowie, A Night at the Opera by Queen and the eponymous Fleetwood Mac, to name just a few.

The records of 1975 were magisterial; records that couldn’t be bettered. Who could realistically make a more sophisticated album than The Hissing of Summer Lawns? Or a more complex hard-rock album than Physical Graffiti? Or a record as unimpeachable and as prescient as Horses?

It was a year filled with an unparalleled sense of ambition, where the album was venerated as much as the modern novel, where everyone was trying to make a masterpiece.

Setting the music against the social, political and artistic context of the time, Dylan Jones brilliantly unravels the cultural fragments that made 1975 the greatest year of them all.