Not the year that I was expecting
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The ownership ratio was actually higher than I expected this year because we own a whole one of them - Evita! There were also three that we own that we've previously met or that were rejected as unworthy of consideration - Fleetwood Mac's Rumours, the Bread best-of and Glen Campbell's 20 Golden Greats but it was really a bit early for us for album ownership.
Looking at the best selling albums of the year, I'm not exactly surprised to see ABBA'a Arrival at the top given they had ten weeks at #1 in this year. It's followed by two "twenty golden greats" from The Shadows and Diana Ross & The Supremes - yeah, this totally is the year of punk, isn't it? #4 was Fleetwood Mac's Rumours which was released in February and spent most of the year in the top twenty but didn't hit #1 until January '78 (but it's done OK since with it currently at #28 with 1034 weeks on the chart in total) and the top five was rounded out by A Star Is Born.
Given it's 1977 we only have a top ten for the year-end chart, so let's run through the rest quickly - Eagles' Hotel California (which never made it to #1 - it spent five weeks at #2 behind Arrival), best-ofs from Bread, Johnny Mathis and ABBA with Pink Floyd's Animals closing things out. Five compilation albums in the top ten isn't exactly rock and roll, but it's not like things have really got any better since - there were five in 2023's year end chart top ten as well!
Looking at the albums I reviewed, let's consider the women first - 1977 was slightly better than 1973 for women in the charts, but not by much. The only women that managed to get their name on the front of the album were Joan Armatrading, Donna Summer, Emmylou Harris and Eva Peron and I think we can agree they don't have an awful lot else in common, apart from the fact that I liked all the albums in places but was very confused by other aspects of them.
Other women that contributed to a varying degree on albums were Agnetha Fälkskog and Anni-Frid Lyngstad (who I think we can safely say had a pretty spectacular year), Barbra Streisand (none too shabby either, although I can't say I loved A Star Is Born), Julie Covington and Barbara Dickson (providing the high points of Evita for me), Liz Mitchell and Marcia Barrett (making some very strange sounds on Boney M's monstrosity - but I don't blame them!) and Dee Palmer (the keyboardist on Jethro Tull's peculiar album). I also feel I should mention Diana Ross and The Supremes who were #1 for seven weeks and Connie Francis who also managed three weeks, despite not having released anything in the UK in ten years.
Having gotten those pesky women out the way, let's talk about the guys - they pretty much owned the chart this year. Solo-wise, Rod Stewart was the king with three albums popping up and they were all surprisingly enjoyable - I think Atlantic Crossing was my favourite, but they all had some very decent tracks on them. Other guys with multiple offerings were Leo Sayer and David Soul, both of whom were somewhat less successful for me with Leo seeming uncertain as to what he wanted to do and David seeming absolutely certain that what he wanted to do was produce bloody awful albums (particularly his debut offering).
There was much variety of certainty of touch from all the other guys with David Bowie, Jean Michel Jarre, Kenny Rogers, Don Williams and Elton John all sounding like they knew what they wanted and producing decent albums as a result, if not always my cup of tea. I think Jean Michel was probably my favourite of that lot and Elton would have been viewed a lot more favourably if it had just been a single album. Peter Gabriel, Elvis Presley and Cat Stevens seemed less certain as to what they wanted to do but still produced some very interesting sounds whereas Bryan Ferry and Steve Winwood produced incredibly forgettable albums. Which is unfortunately not true for Cliff Richard and Demis Roussos, no matter how hard I've tried to forget them.
Looking at male groups, we've got another set of multiple visits - Queen either underwhelmed or confused me, Thin Lizzy definitely impressed more on one than the other and ELO and The Stranglers both surprised me with a couple of decent albums, Looking at those who were only lucky enough to get the one visit, there's an awful lot of forgettable albums in there but I remember liking Pink Floyd and Supertramp a lot more than I was expecting to. Other albums that stuck in my mind for various reasons were Little Feat, Bad Company and Boston which aren't my sort of thing but they're well done and Jethro Tull, The Manhattan Transfer and Emerson, Lake & Palmer which were all very peculiar albums indeed.
Although I ignored them all, we saw a load of compilation and best-of albums but, for a change this year, we've got a new category of album to consider! And we've only got the one entry so I can confidently state that the best album of songs, comedy and general nonsense by puppets this year was - ta-da, The Muppets! And what a peculiar album it was - and incredibly successful too, knocking The Beatles off the top spot. On a slightly related note, January was a peculiar month because I didn't, for various reasons, listen to comedy albums from Billy Connolly, Max Boyce and Pam Ayres - you just don't see stuff like that in the charts these days!
Looking at the other statistics of interest, the number of #1 debuts this year was, wait for it - just the one. Yup, those musical behemoths The Sex Pistols were the only group that debuted at the top this year, which is weird since we had eight such examples in 1973 - it will be interesting to see which year is the outlier when we've got a bit more data in the sample. Throughout the year we saw 17 #1 albums, which is also lower than 1973 - I didn't listen to any of them in the week they were at #1 and ten of them didn't qualify to be listened to at all, because it appears the charts had an obsession with older music in this year. Of the 52 weeks available at the top, only 18 of these were occupied by an album that wasn't some form of compilation or best-of - and nine of those were from ABBA! I suspect a similar exercise undertaken across the top twenty would be even more depressing - there were a LOT of compilation albums floating around in there all year.
The generally accepted (by the internet) best albums from the year that we never got close to seeing were Talking Heads:77 by you-can-probably-guess (peaked at #60), Lust For Life (#28) and The Idiot (#30) by Iggy Pop (both produced by David Bowie), New Boots And Panties!! by Ian Dury (#5, but not until '79 - having spent most of '78 in the charts), Bat Out Of Hell by Meat Loaf (#3, but not until his death - before then it peaked at #9 but has had 530 weeks in the chart), In The City by The Jam (#20 - it was unlucky not to get picked), Damned Damned Damned by The Damned (#34), Trans Europe Express by Kraftwerk (#49), Marquee Moon by Television (#28 - surprisingly high), Rocket To Russia by Ramones (#60), Pink Flag by Wire (#82 - for one week), The Stranger by Billy Joel (#24 - but not until '78) and Funkentelechy vs. The Placebo Syndrome by Parliament (never charted).
There were some very fine albums produced in this year but, as with 1973 (but even more so) there was a huge amount of old music about - mostly by very, very old men. This actually made me enjoy the proggy albums we met a lot more than I was expecting because, although they do sound somewhat dated now, they were at least trying to do something different - and it's weird how punk kicked out against them as opposed to the very backward looking stuff that most people seemed to be buying. Looking at the #1 albums, Slim Whitman had four weeks, The Shadows had five, Frank Sinatra two, Johnny Mathis four, Connie Francis three and Diana Ross seven - which just seems incredible when you think how people view '77 as some kind of classic year for music.
Having said all that, most of the albums I met were pretty new and I mostly enjoyed the experience of listening to music from the time, even if it wasn't always my particular cup of tea. Picking a top three for the year, I'd go for ABBA's Arrival, Jean-Michel Jarre's Oxygène and Rod Stewart's Atlantic Crossing (and I wasn't expecting that) although I do have to have honourable mentions for Peter Gabriel's Car and Pink Floyd's Animals, both of which I think I could get into if I give them a chance and also Fleetwood Mac's Rumours, which came out this year and has to be my favourite album of the 70s.
So, where to next? The decades which we've only visited once so far are the 60s, 00s and 10s and I feel I need some more recent music, so let's somewhat randomly see what 2005 brings us. I expect a lot of it will be very bad indeed...
02/01/77 - A very forgettable end to the year
25/12/05 - Oh joy
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