Yet Never a Dull Moment lives up to its title. Hepworth’s rocktastic perspective means he misses a trick or two 1971 was also the year reggae insinuated itself in the British psyche via hits such as Dave and Ansell Collins’s Double Barrel, and if you are looking for 1971 music with “afterlife”, Al Green and Curtis Mayfield deserve attention. Truly this was another country, though one whose music remains all too familiar, thanks to “heritage rock”, a concept Hepworth also traces to 1971 the year saw a burst of nostalgia exemplified by Don McLean’s American Pie and George Lucas’s American Graffiti. To counterbalance rock’s youthful glamour, Hepworth begins his book with a sobering sketch of everyday UK life: no mobile phones, 70,000 telephone boxes, two-thirds of the population have no bank account, smokers everywhere (even in hospitals) and “the only people with tattoos got them in the services”. These were bruisers, “not a hippy among them”, who realised pop’s new money‑making power. Promoter Bill Graham’s mother had died in Auschwitz, Zeppelin manager Peter Grant was an East End evacuee, producer Tom Dowd had worked on the Manhattan Project. To what is often a familiar story Hepworth brings rare perspicacity into the business machinations of the era, whose movers and shakers were, as he points out, often from a previous, less starry-eyed generation. The vestiges of 60s idealism fell away after 1971, there was no “underground”, everything was mainstream.Įven the staid Tapestry marked the emergence of a new kind of record buyer – young women, who identified with “themes of shelter, stability and trust… Carole King became the sister they might have had”. Palatial 24-track studios became the norm, their productions marketed with a new slickness, not least on FM radio with its freshly arrived concept of AOR. Arena rock reached new heights of grandiosity – Led Zeppelin at the Sam Houston Coliseum rather than the Bath Pavilion – with live albums such as the Allman Brothers’ At Fillmore East acquiring fresh importance. George Harrison’s Concert for Bangladesh provided the template for subsequent charity bashes. The year’s innovations came in many forms. “TV was nowhere, movies were in retreat, music was king,” he justly claims. Yet he is surely right that ’71 marked a step change in pop history, one driven as much by the industry’s commercial clout as by its music, fecund and memorable though that often was. Previous years had hardly been short of groundbreaking bestsellers, while Hepworth, who wears his nostalgia on his sleeve, concedes that the music of one’s youth inevitably rings most potently. Rod Stewart is 'dressed like a disreputable clerk out of Dickens… a gifted cynic who knew the arts of survival'Īs much is contestable.

Rod stewart never a dull moment book