Original subtitles

Record shops were great to spend time in.

I could spend three or four hours just strolling round.

That was one of the most exciting places to hang out.

You break the veneer of the hip joint employee.

All it is, is a kind of like, "All right?" - just one of them,

and you're like, "I own this town and everything in it."

That's how it felt.

When people walked around town,

if you had some albums under your arm, it told people who you were.

Something to read on the bus on the way home from the record shop.

Really a magical moment, when you rush home and you put the music on.

You'd have to extract the record from its sleeve

and place it on the turntable.

The first time you drop a needle on a record,

it's ten points if there's a little bit of skid and then...

Bump, biting into it, as the needle hit the vinyl.

And then the music comes in.

There's nothing as wonderful as that.

The unsung hero in popular music's epic history is not a performer,

or a band, or even a song.

It's this - the long-playing album.

A creative canvas on which musicians could express themselves

like never before.

It turned record labels into business empires,

turned humble musicians into exalted immortals...

..and helped transform popular music from disposable teenage distraction

to an art form.

This is the story of how, from the mid-'60s to the late '70s,

the long-playing album changed popular music for ever...

..the era when albums ruled the world.

Around 130 grams of vinyl and acetate mix, 1,600 feet of groove,

33 and a third revolutions per minute -

the long-playing vinyl record was unveiled to the world

by Columbia Records in 1948.

With up to 22 and a half minutes of sound per side,

it was the perfect vehicle for classical music

and soundtracks to popular musicals.

It was a product aimed at, and bought by, adults.

I remember a lot of soundtrack albums.

Your parents went to see a show or a film, then they'd get

West Side Story soundtrack, or Oklahoma! soundtrack or My Fair Lady.

And it was very much... I saw LPs as being part of the grown-up world.

Along with soundtracks and classical music, the LP soon became home

to easy listening collections and jazz recordings.

But while parents listened to their LPs,

teenagers were dancing to a different beat.

# Wop-bop-a-loo-bop a-lop-bam-boom Tutti frutti... #

This was rock'n'roll, preserve of a smaller, cheaper disc.

A 45 is a little guy with a big fat hole in the middle,

slips on to this penis.

How very phallic, how very sexual.

But as the '50s became the '60s,

teenagers' disposable income grew and rock'n'roll,

increasingly called pop music, began to creep onto the grooves of the LP.

Many albums of that era

by pop artists contained the singles and then some duff tracks,

a few covers, and some filler.

The artistic pinnacle is a hit single as a pop artist,

and an album, in a way, is often always perceived

as a kind of cash-in on the single rather than the other way round.

The artistic opportunity the LP could provide

was still waiting to be discovered.

Intellectually, it was fallow.

The minds of the young people hadn't really expanded yet.

# I'm all shook up. #

But change was in the air.

In New York's Greenwich Village, folk music was about to show

that the LP could be the canvas for a new kind of musical expression.

In the early 1960s, American folk music was enjoying a renaissance.

Folk captured the spirit of protest

in a society still scarred by racial segregation.

Society itself is changing during the early '60s,

both technologically and socially,

and there's a growing sense

that music itself should address some of that.

# I've seen trouble all my days... #

Into this scene stepped a 20-year-old Bob Dylan.

His 1962 debut was a collection of folk standards.

But for his second record, he did something different.

# Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son? #

He recorded an album almost entirely made up of original songs.

# Oh, where have you been, my darling young one? #

That marks a change

and one that's quite noticeable among his peers

and general public, that the songs are credited to Bob Dylan.

He is the artist behind this album.

Here were 13 songs that tackled love, war, peace and race.

I ran into him at a party,

and he was in a back bedroom, playing to some girls,

trying to impress them, and he played Masters Of War

and A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall, and I was like, what?!

It was the most powerful thing I had ever heard.

# Come, you masters of war

# You that build the big guns... #

Freewheelin' was Dylan's statement on the world around him.

Bob Dylan was clearly developing the idea

of looking at the album as a collection.

There was serious thought put into the make-up

of what this album was going to be.

This was a landmark.

This was a new chapter in American music.

# The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind

# The answer is blowin' in the wind... #

Everything about Freewheelin' seemed to herald a new era,

right down to the cover.

Nobody did covers like that.

It was so confident, so oblique, so casual, like,

"Yeah, I got a girlfriend, so what?

"Here she is. It's not glamorous, it's nothing. It's just reality."

The whole thing, just...powerful.

# I'll know my song well before I start singing

# And it's a hard And it's a hard... #

The expansive canvas of the long player

had allowed Bob Dylan to find his voice.

In return, Dylan had given the album a new purpose.

While the early albums from British bands like The Rolling Stones,

The Beatles and The Kinks were still just collections of pop songs,

Dylan's next records would continue

to push the boundaries of what an album could be.

He pushes that further and further,

by introducing 11-minute songs

on Highway 61 Revisited or Desolation Row,

and then having what is one of the very first double albums

with Blonde On Blonde, where you have side-sprawling tracks.

And with these albums now charting in the US top 10,

Dylan's vision for the album was entering the mainstream.

Dylan's career, in a way, provides a blueprint

for how artists that follow him want to pursue their careers.

They want to be able to pursue their own artistic vision

and they want to pursue it on album.

In California, this artistic vision was heightened

by the addition of a new ingredient.

PSYCHEDELIC ELECTRIC GUITAR PLAYS

Diethylamide, popularly known as LSD.

If you haven't heard of LSD, you will.

LSD was the catalyst behind a psychedelic subculture

that had the album at its core.

A whole kind of chunk of your mind gets opened up

and a lot of the musicians had fairly good experiences with acid.

By 1966, the folk music revival had reached California,

where bands like Jefferson Airplane

had absorbed it into a new musical melting pot.

# Lord, look at me here... #

Jack and Jorma were blues men.

Paul liked outer space, and Marty wrote love songs.

And I like folk music,

so you got a real smorgasbord of stuff, and I liked it that way.

But it was the acid that took the music of the West Coast underground

in entirely new directions.

Expansive psychedelic rock LPs like this were tailor-made

for their tune-in, drop-out audience.

I mean, one reason why album culture suited psychedelic culture

is that if you were sprawled out or sitting cross-legged

and being semi-meditative to the music, the last thing you wanted

was to have to get up and, you know, turn the record over

or change the record any more often than you had to.

Call your friends and come on over

and everybody sitting listening to the whole album all at once,

you made comments about it afterwards, smoked a bunch of dope

or have wine or whatever you do, and it was great.

But while this new audience

devoured the records of the psychedelic scene,

one place this new album-based music couldn't be heard was radio.

# I need love, love

# To ease my mind... #

The big American radio stations,

I mean, the giants, you know, in LA,

93 KHJ, for example, the Boss Jocks, they were playing singles,

so, you know, there wasn't a lot of platform on air

for album music until the arrival of KSAN in San Francisco.

KSAN was a local station that revolutionised American radio.

In 1967, a KSAN DJ connected to the psychedelic scene,

called Tom Donahue, stopped broadcasting chart hits

and started playing album tracks instead.

This is Tom Donahue at KSAN,

K-S-A-N, Metromedia Stereo 95, San Francisco, Oakland.

This new format was an instant success.

By the late '60s,

every town in America had an FM station

with at least a late-night free-form show, if not all day long.

It was a massive game changer.

The origination of the engine,

the first part of the engine

that powered album sales in America through the '70s.

Donahue's radio revolution soon crossed the Atlantic

and found its way aboard the pirate radio stations

based off the coast of Britain.

The turning point for me

was hearing John Peel do Perfume Garden late at night out there,

and as John described it one night,

in his stone solitude in the middle of the North Sea,

playing this amazing music that he'd brought back from America with him.

The concept of the album as a revolutionary musical force

was spreading.

And in London, it would now emerge as the object

and the idea that would dominate the next decade of music history.

MUSIC: I Can't Explain by The Who

By the mid-'60s, swinging London had

become the hippest city in the world.

Acts like The Who, Dusty Springfield

and Manfred Mann had scored hit single

after international hit single.

But the biggest singles band of them all, The Beatles, had been

absorbing American album music, from Dylan to the psychedelic scene.

At the start of '60s, your parents loved them.

Your mum would take you to see Help!, A Hard Day's Night,

and maybe she'd buy the LP for herself.

And by the end of the '60s, your parents despised The Beatles

and they were symbolic of everything that

they were afraid was going to happen to you -

that you were going to grow your hair, you were going to take drugs.

When I saw that Rubber Soul album cover and they're looking down,

you looked at them and went,

"Uh-oh, these guys have been psychedelicised."

After The Beatles ended their 1966 world tour, they returned to

London's Abbey Road Studios to begin another recording session,

but this time, things would be different.

Out of the blue, John says to George Martin, "On this record,

"we're going to create sounds that no-one's ever heard before.

"We don't have to worry about reproducing them live

"because we're never going to tour again."

At the end of 1966,

The Beatles started work on Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band

and so began the most ambitious album recording session to date.

When you see shots of George Harrison bundling out of a Rolls-Royce

and in through the door of Abbey Road with reams and reams of A4,

waving at everyone, head down,

getting into the studio, getting to work, it's like...

They must have felt like they were splitting the atom in there.

For those inside Abbey Road, it was clear the band wanted this

to be a different kind of recording session.

John, especially, was looking for something new.

Things weren't in the studio to create things new,

so that was the gauntlet that was thrown down.

Analogue four-track studio technology

was to be pushed to its limits.

Every time we were going to use an instrument,

they were fed up with listening to a guitar sounding like a guitar,

or a piano sounding like a piano, a cowbell sounding like a cowbell,

so we did all we could to try and mask those sounds.

You knew it was a guitar, but it had some sort of quirkiness to it.

This intensive approach to recording was another influence picked up

from the American psychedelic scene.

The idea that it's possible to really spend time in the studio

and experiment and explore.

Brian Wilson was doing that with Pet Sounds

and Paul sort of picked that baton up as well.

Here we go, then. We'll send the tape. Are you ready, Richard?

Marshalling the band was veteran producer George Martin.

OK, Jeff? Right, here we go.

He turned the studio into the LP's final instrument.

George was brilliant at that.

He was like a schoolmaster and we were the schoolchildren, you know?

The last tracks on the record were laid down in April 1967.

That night, set up a monitor mix,

and there was just the most unbelievable atmosphere.

# Woke up, fell out of bed Dragged a comb across my head... #

No-one had ever heard anything that sounded like that in their lives,

it was like going from a square black and white picture

into CinemaScope Technicolor.

And Ron Richards was sitting on the floor by the mixing console,

and Ron was the producer of The Hollies.

And Ron had his head in his hands

and he said, "I'm going to give the business up."

That was his intention, it was that amazing.

# Ah... #

What The Beatles had created was arguably

the world's first concept album.

Since they weren't touring any more,

The Beatles would go on the road in their imaginations

as Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

# It was 20 years ago today... #

This is the start of his concept. It was some fictitious band

and they were tuning up at the Albert Hall.

They're creating a kind of quasi-live set

and bring in a lot of ideas

that are quintessentially English, you have to say, you know?

The sort of musical idea of... they had a brass band.

And then you hear a laughter.

The reason why the laughter's there is that we're supposed to be

the audience, the listener of that album is supposed to be

sitting in the audience of a theatre.

# We're Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band

# We hope you will enjoy the show... #

And the way they flow into each other.

CHEERING

The way that the stories and the themes reappear.

# We're Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band

# We hope you have enjoyed the show... #

There's a cohesive thread that binds all these songs together.

The album has a beginning and a middle and an end.

This was a revelation.

# Sgt Pepper's Lonely Sgt Pepper's Lonely... #

The concept of an imaginary band on tour was played out

on the album sleeve as well.

Bela Lugosi and God knows who, Lenny Bruce, WC Fields,

Laurel and Hardy.

Oh, look, there's Marlon Brando. Oh, there's Bob Dylan.

This is one of...might be the most recognisable album cover of all time.

As a last, innovative touch, the final groove on the record

was cut back on itself so, in theory, it would play into infinity,

just like the influence of the music itself.

Sgt Pepper is the template for everything we've come to know

now as the great long-playing record.

Sgt Pepper shot to number one in the UK and became the longest

and highest charting of all The Beatles' albums in America.

By the end of the year,

sales of albums in the US passed the 1 billion mark for the first time.

Albums were now outselling singles in both the US and UK.

Sgt Pepper, it was a catalyst.

When you think, '66, '67, was an incredibly creative time.

So you've got other bands that were coming through,

particularly in London, The Underground,

bands like Pink Floyd, Soft Machine,

who weren't conforming their songs to two-and-a-half,

three-minute single formats.

Some bands tried to copy the Sgt Pepper's formula.

Some lampooned it. Others, like guitarist Jimi Hendrix,

wanted to take the idea of artistic control a step further.

All right!

Hendrix had been plucked from obscurity by producer,

Chas Chandler, in 1966.

Together, they made two albums that established Hendrix

as the most influential guitarist in rock.

But his 1968 LP, Electric Ladyland, would be a new departure.

After a fallout with Chandler,

this would be Hendrix's first album without a producer.

MUSIC: All Along The Watchtower

Artistic control over album recording was entering a new phase.

So Hendrix, at this point, in order to warm up, almost,

is every single evening going to jam at a club

two blocks down the street called The Scene.

He would literally turn up and jam with whoever happened to be on stage.

You know, we have the session booked for eight o'clock. No Jimi.

And then around midnight or so, when Jimi felt he'd got enough

players that he felt were in the moment with him and would be useful

in the studio, he would literally walk from The Scene down to the

record plant, like a circus of people walking these two blocks in New York.

I can think of this one fabulous night where he dragged in

Steve Winwood, Jack Cassidy, they come in,

Mitch gets on the drums, Jimi plugs in the guitar.

The organ's all ready, the bass, everything.

We open up the faders, they rehearse, one take.

Next take, that's the master. Done. We get Voodoo Chile.

MUSIC: Voodoo Chile

This is where we are now with long-playing records.

We're beyond even where The Beatles were, who were, more or less,

nine-to-five creatures in the studio.

We're, "When will the lightning strike? We need to be ready."

Complete control of the recording process

allowed Hendrix to indulge his every musical whim.

Electric Ladyland was his most adventurous record.

And there was so much...

so many great things he was doing in the studio that hadn't

necessarily been heard before.

The result was tracks of increasing length and complexity,

such as the near 14-minute 1983...

# Hooray, I wake from yesterday... #

One take all the way through.

..which Hendrix even helped mix.

I would take one half of the console

and I'd give Jimi, like, a vocal track

and some other things over here

and we would rehearse it as a performance, and then in the middle

of the mix, we would look at each other and we would start laughing

and say, "OK, are you ready to split? OK, go."

And I'd get up and I'd shift positions with Jimi, and Jimi would

take my position, and we'd go like this, "You ready to go back? Yeah."

And then we'd bump into each other,

he'd fall on the floor laughing, I'd fall on the floor laughing

and then the tape would still be running.

Electric Ladyland was the first Hendrix LP to hit

the top of the US charts when released in 1968...

..proving that artistic freedom could equal commercial success.

# You jump in front of my car When you, you know all the time... #

Classic double albums like Electric Ladyland were met with

a certain amount of incomprehension by early reviewers.

They weren't designed to whack you over the head the first time

you heard them and give up all they had to offer on that first hearing.

They were designed to gradually sink in to reveal more detail

and subtext as you listened to them over and over again.

Increasingly adventurous album tracks from both British

and American bands were now dominating the ever more popular

FM radio network in America.

This album music was becoming a category all of its own. AOR.

Album-oriented rock.

You know, you've got bands who were now maturing

and now delivering what was becoming increasingly sophisticated music.

Fantastic sort of time for albums to burst through,

supported by American radio in the way that they were.

You've got The Velvet Underground,

you had Frank Zappa And The Mothers Of Invention,

you had Captain Beefheart,

you had a whole bunch of stuff that would have been...

that wouldn't even have been classified as pop music

or rock music just a little while earlier.

# Ever since I was a young boy I played the silver ball... #

In London, The Who, once known as a singles band,

released a double album called Tommy.

Its writer, Pete Townshend, proclaimed it a rock opera.

It's such a cliched term now, but at the time, it was exciting and fresh.

A rock opera. Grandeur, meaning, credibility.

And The Who weren't the only chart-friendly band to recognise

the creative power of the album.

Some people may see The Stones as perhaps more of a singles band.

They think of Satisfaction, Paint It Black.

And, of course, that's what they were to begin with, in the same way

that that's what The Beatles were to begin with.

But they wouldn't have the legacy they have now

if they hadn't made the same journey The Beatles did from being

this supernova singles act into long-playing-oriented band

that made its reputation completely on its albums.

Starting in 1968, The Stones made a series of four albums,

which would be seen by many as their creative peak.

If you think of some of their greatest tracks,

Sympathy For The Devil, You Can't Always Get What You Want,

Wild Horses, none of these are singles.

The more rock bands embraced the LP

and pushed its artistic boundaries, the more sales soared.

By 1969, some 200 million albums were being bought annually

in the US, and rock LPs accounted for four-fifths of these sales.

The economics of the industry were changing, commercial success

no longer depended on hit singles, as one band was about to prove.

# Hey... #

With a harder-edged raucous rock sound, Led Zeppelin hit

the top of the US and UK charts with their 1969 debut album.

The band was led by a veteran session guitarist.

We're talking about a guy, Jimmy Page, who played on something

like 60% of every hit single made in London over the previous five years.

Led Zeppelin were Page's way out from a career of playing

on other people's hit singles.

The whole idea is for Jimmy Page to do everything

he'd never done before - not make music to the clock, not make hits.

When work finished on the band's second album later in 1969,

Page sends Zeppelin's manager, Peter Grant,

with an ultimatum to Atlantic Records.

No singles were to be released, not even the sure-fire hit,

Whole Lotta Love.

# Yeah, what a whole lotta love... #

Pete doing his air of threat about him, he said, "No singles."

And everybody looked in astonishment.

The record company, understandably, utterly baffled.

Here's this hit in the making, we can't release it.

But Carson wasn't about to be told what to do,

even by Peter Grant and Led Zeppelin.

I decided that there should be a single, right? I did that.

And I put a single out.

I put an edited version of Whole Lotta Love out

and incurred the total wrath of Jimmy Page and Peter Grant

and was immediately forced to withdraw the whole damn lot.

I think the number was something like 3,000 went to Manchester

before I could stop them going there.

Even with no singles to promote it,

Led Zeppelin II topped the charts in both America and Britain in 1970.

Jimmy and Peter Grant and Led Zeppelin were right.

By not having a single,

that Led Zeppelin II album was selling like it was a single.

Within three years,

Led Zeppelin were the biggest grossing act in the world.

That is probably the pinnacle of how to sell an album.

Make great music and make it available only in its album format.

Don't sell anybody a single.

The single was rapidly falling out of fashion.

By the turn of the decade,

albums accounted for over 80% of record sales.

TRUMPET PLAYS

But while the rock album was on the crest of a wave,

other musical forms were suffering.

The popularity of jazz had been declining for years.

Not even one of the most celebrated jazz musicians of all time

was immune,

Miles Davis, a long-time Columbia Records artist.

You know, he came to me, and his words, he said,

"These fucking young, long-haired white kids,

"they're stealing my rip."

He said, "How come I'm selling 70,000

"and they're selling a million,

"two million albums?"

With Columbia riding high on sales of rock LPs, Clive Davis knew

better than anyone where the album-buying market was - rock fans.

My saying, "Miles, you know, you're playing in small jazz clubs."

I said, "You've got to get out where the young people are,

"you're going to be impressed...

"..with what you hear. Somehow it's going to influence your music...

"..and moreover, you're going to have an audience that just doesn't go

"to your jazz clubs."

So, for his next project,

Miles Davis took a whole new approach to the jazz LP.

At this particular moment,

you suddenly get Miles Davis dropping the suit and tie,

dropping the super jazz cool and suddenly dressing like Jimi Hendrix.

Big shades, robes.

And suddenly he makes this extraordinary album

called Bitches Brew.

The double album Bitches Brew was released in 1970,

with a cover from artist Marty Klarwein,

whose work had adorned Jimi Hendrix LPs.

The music was a radical departure for jazz,

adding rock guitar and drums.

It was the style that became known as fusion.

So, what you will find in fusion that you can listen to,

that you'll pull out of it, is the groove.

A jazz personality on top of a rock groove,

fundamentally, and that's what fusion, fundamentally, is.

It was interesting because during those days,

jazz and rock started to work together

and all of a sudden you heard jazz being played on a technical level

that was next level.

HE IMITATES TRUMPET

It's like, "Whoa!"

To record the album, Davis had assembled an astonishing array

of young jazz talent, including drummer Billy Cobham.

The tracks were heavily improvised, with Davis as the conductor.

He said to me the night before, "You know that groove we played?

"I like that, play it tomorrow."

OK. Got there, of course I couldn't remember what to play.

I started to play something,

he says, "That's not what you played last night.

"But I like that, I want it!"

Bitches Brew changed everything for Davis.

Hardcore jazz fans were outraged by this new direction,

but Davis was now playing to rock fans at the Isle of Wight Festival

in 1970.

Is this a jazz festival? No.

Is this a pop festival? Absolutely not.

This is a rock, long-playing, freak-out, far-out,

join in, trip out, go-on-your-journey festival.

Davis tapped into this vast rock audience,

scoring his first gold record on one of the bestselling jazz albums ever.

The musicians from Bitches Brew would go on to form bands

like Mahavishnu Orchestra, Weather Report

and Return To Forever, whose LPs would cement fusion

as jazz's dominant direction for the 1970s.

CHEERING

But even with sales soaring,

not everyone had yet woken up to the power of the album.

In Detroit, Tamla Motown was the most successful record label

of the 1960s, an empire built on the 45.

The core of the Detroit sound

was the idea of the two-and-a-half-minute single

that was instantly recognisable, that had a chorus, three verses.

# Baby, everything is all right... #

And a song that was effervescent, upbeat, very positive about life.

They were not essentially, at least in the '60s, an album company.

MUSIC: I Can't Help Myself by The Four Tops

As the '70s dawned, Motown owner Berry Gordy remained

committed to the label's hit factory formula.

He imagined that he had a better sense of what made a hit record

than any members of his staff.

This often lead to a kind of rancorous relationship

with the producers and sometimes with the singers and musicians.

One of these singers was about to launch Motown into the album era.

# Darling, please stay Don't go away... #

Marvin Gaye was known as the Prince of Motown,

the epitome of the label's chart-friendly sound.

But his relationship with his label was becoming fraught.

He felt that the company was essentially constraining him,

constraining him in all sorts of different ways.

He always felt that Berry Gordy was denying him

being the full Marvin Gaye.

You know, this is a guy who really didn't want the restrictions

of Motown on him.

It was a hit factory, and all of a sudden these artists wanted to grow.

# Ooh, I bet you're wondering how I knew... #

Following the death of singing partner Tammi Terrell,

Gaye had become disillusioned with his pop career

and increasingly concerned with Detroit's social problems.

Gradually, from about 1967 onwards,

that was the era of the urban riots in Detroit,

he began to compile almost a kind of dossier of different things

that were going on in the city, and that dossier became the basis

of probably the greatest soul concept album of all time,

Marvin Gaye's What's Going On.

This is it.

This is What's Going On, Marvin Gaye.

Best sleeve, don't you think?

MUSIC: What's Going On by Marvin Gaye

In 1970, under Berry Gordy's radar,

Gaye had begun work on some new material, not hit singles

but an album, and a radical new direction for Motown.

# Mother, mother... #

CHEERING Thank you!

# There's too many of you crying... #

You knew when you heard it that it was important,

and this was a move on, not just in terms of what he was saying,

ie, "What's going on?"

It was more the construction of the whole piece.

The tracks on What's Going On seemed to melt into one another.

A theme of social commentary

and snippets of conversation gave the album a documentary feel.

This was a concept album in the new rock mould.

It was probably like the early days of rock'n'roll

where bands like The Stones and The Beatles were basically emulating

their blues gospel idols from America.

But here, the roles were reversed.

For the first time, the black acts

were starting to imitate the rock acts.

Musically, Gaye brought

nearly a decade of songwriting experience to bear.

Everything there, jazz, funk, soul, it was all there.

Berry Gordy was worried Gaye's new direction would alienate

his core audience.

But released in May 1971, What's Going On became

Marvin Gaye's first LP to break the Billboard Top 10.

This album came out like a smooth assassin, it was like...

It crept up on you. You know, it's screaming.

It should be a rock album, its statements are so strong.

But yet it's delivered so coolly and so smoothly.

The fact that it gets to the end and he goes up on that high note,

"Ooooh", and then it comes back in like the record begins,

and the fact that it doesn't resolve, it just trots off into the distance,

almost suggesting that that music is playing still

somewhere in the universe.

Within a year, it had sold two million copies

and become Motown's biggest-selling LP.

Even Motown had now entered the album game.

It was with What's Going On that they began to realise

that there was a market in the album,

and then that subsequently set the tone for big albums

by Diana Ross, Stevie Wonder's three albums in the '70s.

It's this moment where rock

and the whole idea of the long-playing record

actually now infiltrates every sphere of music.

The early '70s saw musicians from all backgrounds embracing

the approach, and commercial potential, of the rock album.

Bands like Jethro Tull fused rock with English folk.

MUSIC: Aqualung by Jethro Tull

The Doobie Brothers mixed rock with country.

And in the glam rock scene,

the power of the album divided two of the biggest artists...

MUSIC: Starman by David Bowie

..Marc Bolan and David Bowie.

The crucial difference, really, between what T-Rex

and Marc Bolan were doing and what David Bowie

and the Spiders from Mars were doing

can be summed up in two words - long player.

MUSIC: Cosmic Dancer by T-Rex

Bolan was a glam rock pioneer, but it was the single,

not the album, that was his focus.

I think Marc Bolan and David Bowie,

they always had different goals.

Marc Bolan wanted to have singles,

he wanted to emulate

the singles that he grew up with by Little Richard, Elvis Presley.

David made great albums and let the single be damned.

He did get great singles out of the albums,

but it wasn't his purpose, it wasn't his primary purpose.

Bowie used LPs to stretch himself as an artist.

I hadn't seen him for a whole year and a half

and he came to my apartment in full Ziggy regalia.

No eyebrows, spiky orange hair and all that.

But when this voice came out of that person, it was my friend David.

# Now, Ziggy played guitar

# Jamming good with Weird and Gilly

# And the Spiders from Mars... #

He was the first rock star to invent a rock star.

To invent a person with another name. That's unbelievable.

And then he could still be...

The album could be Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars.

# Ziggy really sang... #

So, you know, Bolan was the pathfinder, in a way,

when it comes to glam rock.

But it was David Bowie, it was Roxy Music, those were the artists

that really benefited long-term because they were LP artists.

As well as allowing artists the space to grow creatively,

the album also allowed them to look inward

and explore a more personal agenda.

In the early '70s,

a new kind of musician started to adopt the album -

the singer-songwriter.

Suddenly it was like people kind of sat down

and were contemplating people more and were wanting to know more what

they had to say and what they had to say about the world, as it were.

Therefore, it became more introspective.

# Tonight you're mine completely... #

Carole King had spent the 1960s writing hits for other people.

A lot of what we did in the early days,

creating a really good track

and getting a couple of good-looking kids

and putting them on it, that was a different business.

But stardom in the era of the album depended on a different

set of qualities.

# You got to get up every morning

# With a smile on your face and show the world... #

In 1970, King and producer Lou Adler, of Ode Records, began work

on a collection of songs with the working title Tapestry.

I certainly knew and Carole knew that we were making an album.

It was obvious that we were trying to complete something.

And not just go for a hit single or something. It was way past that.

# So far away

# Doesn't anybody stay in one place any more? #

Tapestry would be the most personal and intimate work of King's career.

In the older sessions, you went in, whatever the lights were,

that's what you recorded under.

And these kind of sessions,

if you are doing a ballad, you turned the lights down a little bit.

# Long ago I reached for you... #

When I describe what Tapestry means to me,

I always describe it as the musical equivalent of your big sister

or your big brother putting the kettle on

when you're having a really bad time, and they are like,

"Come over here, come on, we will sort it out.

"We'll have a cup of tea, we'll fix the world."

# Stayed in bed all morning Just to pass the time... #

# There's something wrong here There can be no denying

# One of us is changing or maybe we've just stopped trying... #

The final running order of Tapestry was

a masterclass in one of the secrets of a great album - sequencing.

I must have spent two weeks or more on the sequence of Tapestry.

Coming out of the right chord into the right chord of the next song

so that you don't, you know, abruptly shake somebody,

not only shake them but musically shake them.

The transition from So Far Away to It's Too Late was a classic example

of Adler's sequence.

What I really like is that you're going from this chord,

it's a fade-out, actually, so we don't get a proper ending on

So Far Away, but it sets you up nicely

for that move to the A minor 7th.

Because that chord is there again.

So there's this really nice harmonic relationship.

They're in different keys

but they are echoing the song that's come before.

Tapestry was released in the US in March 1971.

All that pop kind of thing that she had come from,

she poured into this album, but it's very personalised too.

And that's quite a potent combination.

The album spent 15 consecutive weeks at the top of the US album charts -

the only time a female solo artist would achieve this

in the entire 20th century.

No solo album would outsell it until Thriller over a decade later.

Tapestry was confirmation that the era of the album encouraged

a new kind of star.

Carole and I won five Grammys that year,

the most by a female artist at that time.

We won Best Album Of The Year and Song Of The Year

and Single Of The Year.

So that validated Carole King as an artist.

# ..Like a natural woman. #

Artists like James Taylor, Joni Mitchell

and Don McLean contributed to the singer-songwriter boom.

# And I think it's gonna be a long, long time... #

Britain's answer was Elton John, who scored seven consecutive

number one LPs in the US in the early '70s.

# I'm a rocket man... #

Only The Beatles ever surpassed this feat.

But in contrast to the intimate stripped-back

style of the singer-songwriters, other musicians were using

the LP to create ever more elaborate musical landscapes.

This was progressive rock.

In a strange way we were musical scientists.

We had lots of ingredients of different instruments around us

and we had lots of different kinds of musical knowledge.

And I didn't want to play three chords

and just sort of do blues solos and things.

I wanted to go to different levels and fuse music

and put things together.

The most popular album band on the Billboard charts for 1972 was

a prog band, Yes.

Yes music was as convoluted as it was excellent.

Songs often spanned entire sides of vinyl.

Double albums became triple albums.

Such grandiose music required similarly creative sleeve design.

Yes found their visual identity through artist Roger Dean.

I never tried to paint music.

What I was looking for in the imagery was something that

would stop people, make them think,

and have something that was from the same source as the music,

rather than an image of the music.

That was desperately important to us, desperately important,

because the cover was as important as to what was inside.

I mean, they say you can tell a book by its cover.

You can also tell a vinyl by its cover.

Increasingly extravagant packaging allowed Dean to explore

entire narratives through a single album design.

When we did the Yessongs album, it was a great opportunity to

tell the story because it was a triple album with a booklet.

Landing on a new planet, life restarting

and humans and cities coming about.

Yes's huge album sales gave Dean's artwork huge exposure.

We did sell an enormous number of posters and calendars and books.

I've looked at figures ranging from 60 to 100 million,

so it's a lot of pieces.

But iconic sleeves

and progressive sounds didn't only meet in the world of rock.

The albums of the Parliament Funkadelic collective created

a funk universe every bit as creative as prog.

It was the most insane, ridiculous, creative,

ludicrous band collective of all time, Parliament Funkadelic.

Just the most genius insanity that music has ever produced.

Bands like Parliament Funkadelic, they were much more

like the R&B, soul, funk versions of the Grateful Dead.

Band leader George Clinton's clash of psychedelic rock,

soul and funk met its match with the album artwork of Pedro Bell.

It's Afrocentric, it's mad, it's kind of got Satanic qualities to it,

it's challenging all sorts of different things.

Just look at the breasts of this weird-looking woman here.

One is a map of the world,

the other is a musical turntable on the end of her nipples.

I think it is very hard not to like a record which, on the sleeve,

it describes the record company as, "Vinyl Binbanglers"

and where the bass musicians are called "bass thumpasaurians".

Cosmic Slop, No Compute, Trash A Go-Go, March To The Witch's Castle,

The Nappy Dugout, and two skeletons having sex in the corner.

Excellent!

For the '70s music fan,

the album sleeve became a symbol of their identity.

It actually summed up a lifestyle.

When people walked around town,

if you had some albums under your arm, it told people who you were.

If you walked in somebody's house and there were racks

and racks of album covers, it is

a bit like going into somebody's library and you would look to see

what books they read to kind of ascertain

what kind of person they are.

The same thing happened with the album cover.

Of all the iconic images on '70s album sleeves,

one above all appeared to define the era...

# Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day... #

..Pink Floyd's 1973 album, The Dark Side Of The Moon...

..one of the highest-selling albums in history.

# Digging around on a piece of ground in your home town... #

When I was growing up as a child in the late '70s and early '80s,

it was a commonly held belief that there was a factory somewhere

in Germany which only pressed copies of Dark Side Of The Moon.

It just seemed convincingly true

because practically every household,

everyone's parents' household, had a copy of Dark Side Of The Moon.

You could not avoid that record.

The Dark Side Of The Moon would sell some 40 million copies

in its lifetime.

Yet it was released with a stark sleeve design with no mention

or photo of the band.

The cover art was the brainchild of Hipgnosis design agency.

Hipgnosis never worked for record companies,

we only worked for the artists,

we were commissioned directly to work for all the people who we worked for.

The record companies hated us with a vengeance.

Storm and Po from Hipgnosis went into EMI with the cover

and EMI went, "A record cover with no picture and no name?

"Can't have that." They went, "Tell you what, we can,

"because we're with Pink Floyd.

"That's what they want, what they're having and what you're doing."

At no point when you're flicking through the racks in a record shop,

unless you knew what that was, you would not know that's Pink Floyd.

The themes on Dark Side were uncompromisingly adult.

The idea was that the album

would sort of focus on the pressures that we were feeling, I suppose.

Or the sort of things that impinge on your life.

# Money... #

Money, the acquisition of too much, in a way, mortality, time,

rather than teenage love, which we felt perhaps other people did better.

The band's attitude to publicity was similarly uncommercial.

They didn't do one press interview, not one press interview.

There wasn't even a picture.

Cos why would you want a picture of someone you haven't interviewed?

And you weren't going to reproduce a picture of their covers

cos they weren't on the cover. But it didn't do them any harm.

It was just extraordinary that they got away with it, in a way.

I think at the time we were being a bit grand

and felt that we didn't really want to be too involved in the

sort of promotion that the record company were doing.

I think there was a playback at the planetarium.

And I think that we decided that we weren't going to turn up for this.

Quite why, I have no idea.

Despite Pink Floyd's disdain for publicity,

Dark Side Of The Moon spent 14 years in the Billboard Top 200.

No other album has ever come close to this feat.

This piece of work, I think they will still be listening to in

the same way they listen to Mozart, you know, in hundreds of years' time.

It is just perfect, there are no rough edges.

You're going to ask me why I think Dark Side was successful.

And, erm...

My answer is, it's more than one reason,

it isn't just because the drums are so fantastic or anything like that.

It is actually the fact that the lyrics are extraordinary

and they are more relevant to a 50-year-old than

they are to a 23-year-old, in many ways.

# And if the dam breaks open many years too soon

# And if there is no room upon the hill... #

Dark Side turned Pink Floyd into one of the biggest bands in the world.

But an album was now capable of even more than that.

# I'll see you on the dark side of the moon... #

In 1973, the first release from a start-up independent label

called Virgin Records was delivered to be cut to vinyl.

MUSIC: Tubular Bells by Mike Oldfield

Each side was a single experimental instrumental track.

It was written and performed by a complete unknown.

It featured no lyrics and no songs.

It's always every young musician's dream to make their own album.

That's what life is about. I thought one day I will make my own album.

In 1973, young musician Mike Oldfield sent a set of home demos

to every record company in London. No-one was interested.

But then they came to the attention of an independent record shop owner.

Somebody brought a tape that he had made which was the sort of makings

of Tubular Bells that he had recorded in his flat above his mother's house.

It was captivating.

Branson saw something in Oldfield's tapes

that the record companies didn't.

When he launched his own record company a few months later,

Oldfield was the first person he called.

They said, "OK, we'll give you a week in the studio."

And in that week I did a huge part of Tubular Bells, nearly all of it.

Oldfield played almost every instrument on the record

and composed all the music.

I knew it would be a long and difficult job

and take me quite some time.

The studio was a big thing and cost hundreds of dollars per hour.

So, to be allowed free rein of a studio was quite a special thing.

The album was released in May 1973.

Richard Branson arranged a live television recital to promote it.

But Oldfield was less keen.

I'd finished the album and I was pretty exhausted,

and then they came to me and said, "All right,

"now you've got to do all that again, but live.

Oldfield's mesmerising instrumentals

had been meticulously constructed in the studio.

He hadn't considered the complications of performing it live.

I think we counted once,

over 1,800 or 1,900 overdubs on Tubular Bells,

and I had to work out how to translate that studio production

into a live concert.

And...it was exhausting.

On the way there, he said to me, "I'm afraid I just can't do it."

You know, "I just can't face it."

I'd got a very old Bentley which cost about £300,

which my parents had given me for a wedding present,

and I was driving him there in it,

and I pulled in and I said to Mike, "Look, you know,

"if you can overcome your psychological problems,

"the keys are yours."

And Mike sort of sat there for about five seconds and said,

"I think I'm feeling slightly better."

MUSIC: Tubular Bells

That night he performed at the Queen Elizabeth Hall

and brought the house down.

It was absolutely, you know, breathtaking.

I mean, a standing ovation for, I don't know,

20 minutes at the end.

The audience absolutely loved it, which was...

You know, rapturous reception, which was rather nice.

And I got the Bentley.

Tubular Bells has sold 18 million copies worldwide

and spent nearly 300 weeks in the charts.

It was the album upon which Richard Branson built his empire.

Obviously Tubular Bells, you know, made an enormous difference

and it really kicked off our record company.

By the end of 1974, in America,

more money was being spent on records than movies or sports.

And the major record labels

were joining the ranks of the corporate elite.

By the early '70s, most of the record companies

have interests in lots of areas.

RCA, you know, home for David Bowie during the 1970s

and that fantastic stream of albums he produced,

also owns the Hertz rental car company.

MCA has, you know, Universal Studios.

Now, with companies themselves thinking big,

you get, equally, the promotion of artists

who are kind of megastars during this period -

people like Elton John, for instance.

Captain Fantastic And The Brown Dirt Cowboy,

selling something like 1.3 million copies

within its first four days of sales.

So, huge budgets are then bequeathed to those stars

because they're seen as sure-fire bets.

In 1975, Queen began recording their fourth album, A Night At The Opera.

At the time, it would be the most expensive album ever made.

It was painstaking.

We were using four studios at once at one point

and there'd be a different member in each studio doing different things.

# Oh, oh, people of the earth... #

Speeding and stopping the machines and slowing them down

and speeding them up again and recording that.

It seemed to take for ever, actually.

For four months, the band overdubbed track after track.

We really did take it so that the tape...all the oxide

was almost worn away, it was actually transparent in places.

The result was a sprawling, diverse album

which indulged the band's influences from music hall to opera.

# I see a little silhouetto of a man

# Scaramouch, scaramouch Will you do the fandango? #

We were sort of almost showing off what we could achieve in the studio.

- # Gallileo - Gallileo... #

Oh, yeah, making records in the '70s was a lot of fun.

You usually own the studio, like, you'd block book it.

You would live in that studio for two months.

You'd have Ping-Pong tables, pool tables, dartboards.

The record company's role was simply to write the cheque.

So, yeah, you know, the idea

of anyone going to a Queen album session

and discussing the merits of the songs

with Freddie Mercury and Brian May, pretty unlikely.

You know, they knew what they were doing.

But investment in these headline artists

didn't tell the whole mid-'70s story.

In 1973, Arab nations had declared an oil embargo

and the price of oil,

a key substance in the manufacture of vinyl, had quadrupled.

There's a shortage of PVC vinyl,

the oil offshoot that records are made from.

The price has shot up £60 in three months to £210 a tonne.

With vinyl costs soaring,

record companies turned to cheap solutions to balance the books.

Best of albums and greatest hits compilations and, you know,

cheapy chart compilations become a kind of mainstay

of the record companies' revenue stream.

When I was at EMI, we started doing 20 Golden Greats,

which was, you know, an enormous income earner for EMI

at a time when we struggled in the mid-'70s.

You paid no recording costs.

You know, you just basically compiled it and you made an ad.

You know, that kept the books balanced.

Best of albums by The Carpenters, The Stylistics and Abba

were the UK's highest sellers in '74, '75, and '76.

And in the huge rock market,

there was another way to package collections of hits cheaply -

the live album.

It's better than a greatest hits

because the greatest hits were kind of like for the part-timers

or the non-serious fans -

the "here today, gone later today" crowd.

Live albums, though, had their cake and ate it all up.

You know, you had all the hits but done in a new, unfamiliar style.

It was easy as pie to make a live album.

You would just show up with a truck that had a 16-track recorder in it,

set up the mics, you know,

take a feed off the stage mics,

and labels were thrilled that a live album

took relatively nothing to produce

and you could still get millions of sales.

It was an LP recorded in 1975

that showed just what a cash cow the live album could be.

British guitarist Peter Frampton had released four studio albums,

none of which had even scratched the US top 20.

# I wondered how you're feeling... #

For his first live album,

he took to the stage at San Francisco's Winterland Arena.

It was 7,000 people, you know, in Winterland,

and when we walked out, got this huge ovation,

and because of that, I think we forgot that we were recording

and the audience just brought something to the show

and we just did one hell of a show that night.

# I want you to show me the way... #

The recording of a live LP was the reverse

of the often lengthy, complex sessions of a studio album.

I remember standing at the back of the control room,

leaning up against the wall, and Ray just put...he said,

"I'm not going to do a mix, I'm just going to put all the faders up."

He said, "Check this out."

And I don't remember what he played first.

I just remember us all going...

..and just the energy that we'd captured from that,

it was just quite special.

# I want you... #

The mix of Frampton's best material, his rapport with the audience

and the instantly recognisable talkbox was a smash hit.

MUSIC PLAYS ON IPHONE

HE LAUGHS

I'm going to have to disinfect my iPhone now!

The album became the biggest-selling record of 1976 in America

and the biggest-selling live rock album of all time.

# I can't believe this is happening to me... #

You couldn't go in anyone's car, anyone's house,

or walking down the street, you heard Comes Alive coming from somewhere.

And even I would change the channel on the radio...

now, I wish.

# I want you... #

Live albums, best-of collections and bankable megastars

kept the industry growing.

But attitudes to risky new releases were changing.

The record companies, after the oil crisis, in a sense,

become more conservative in their choices,

they become, perhaps, more businesslike.

With most debut LPs failing to hit profit,

labels cut back on new releases.

And in America, album-oriented radio,

which once championed the artistic freedom of the LP,

was becoming increasingly resistant to new music.

MUSIC: In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida by Iron Butterfly

Now, bigger, you know,

corporate companies had got hold of radio in America

and were beginning to want certain tracks played

from certain albums, you know.

Radio had gone from playing every new song

that the music industry put out, to a very tight playlist,

and no-one in a competitive market

wanted to be the first one to try out a new song.

So, increasingly,

the universe of songs being played on the radio was shrinking.

Album-oriented radio was still key to breaking the vast US market,

but in order to break the tightening playlists,

new artists needed a new approach to creating a record.

In the early '70s, Tom Scholz was an engineering graduate

and wannabe rock star in search of a record deal.

I realised somewhere around 1973 or '74

that the only way I was going to get a chance to have my music heard

was if I could find a way to get it on the radio.

Scholz built a studio in his basement,

where he set about creating songs that could break US radio.

From that point on, I was pretty much independent.

I could play every single part

and I not only didn't need anybody else,

I really had learned the hard way

that the only way that I was going to be successful

is if I did everything the way I heard it.

Scholz used his engineering know-how

to produce a sophisticated, radio-friendly sound.

# More than a feeling... #

This was no rough and ready demo.

# More than a feeling... #

Every guitar note, every melody, every vocal,

was thoroughly produced.

More Than A Feeling is a sensational track.

He was a brilliant, brilliant producer.

The vocals are panned a little bit towards the centre

to give more phasing on the line on purpose.

# ..As clear as the sun... #

If you listen very closely, you can tell

that there's two singers singing the same part.

Here there's four guitar... lead guitar parts come in.

There's one on each side playing at the same note,

then there's a harmony part on top of it.

There are two electric guitars, one on each side.

There are two acoustic guitars on each side.

There's a lead guitar running off under the vocals.

There's a total of eight guitars playing, plus the bass, of course.

# ..Till I see Marianne walk away... #

Scholz's sound caught the ear of producer John Boylan.

I remember taking the two-track tape and flying to New York with it

and playing it at the singles meeting in New York

for Ron Alexenberg and the entire Epic staff and they went nuts.

And I knew that something was going to happen with this record

right then and there.

Boylan persuaded Epic Records to sign Scholz

and vocalist Brad Delp under the name Boston

and the debut album was released in the summer of 1976.

A band was assembled to perform the music,

and just weeks after More Than A Feeling

was played on FM radio, Boston played their first gig.

I guess they could have accommodated

something like 1,000 people in the stands.

There was a riot.

3,000 people showed up.

They broke down the fence, the promoter was arrested.

It was the most exciting show of all time!

More Than A Feeling helped turn Boston's album

into one of the biggest-selling debut albums in history.

And not only that, it heralded a whole new style of rock music.

I would say Boston was the first album of a certain genre,

and that genre was continued on

by acts like Journey and Styx and Kansas

and other artists that had a sonic signature,

you know, that sounded great on the radio, that were definitely rock,

but also melodic and also had a lot of other things going for it

than just a plain ahead rhythm and blues

kind of rooted rock'n'roll.

# And I guess it's just the woman in you... #

The kind of music that was dominating American FM radio

began to change.

AOR was no longer album-oriented rock.

In the '70s, it did become adult-oriented rock,

and there's, I think, a simple reason,

is that the audience became adults.

Let's face it, they weren't going to be teenagers

and college kids for ever.

Album-oriented rock became adult-oriented rock

only because the audience became adults.

Of course, the downside of groups like Foreigner, Journey,

REO Speedwagon, was that we now had the formula.

We now had the rules, the map,

we could build it in the laboratory.

A little bit of Zep, a little bit of Beatles,

a little bit of this and that

and we could come up with this really beautiful anthem

that would sound perfect on FM radio in America.

So, a lot of these records are fantastically well-crafted,

but they're kind of sealed hermetically.

There's no air in them. There's no life, they don't breathe.

# Welcome to the Hotel California... #

Polished melodic rock was becoming

a feature of the American charts.

# Such a lovely face... #

In 1977, the Eagles' Hotel California

was knocked off the number one spot

by the biggest-selling album of the year,

Fleetwood Mac's Rumours.

# Don't stop thinking about tomorrow... #

An album like Rumours, for instance,

manages to combine the kind of rhythmic,

catchy element of rock'n'roll

with something that's slick and smooth.

# Loving you isn't the right thing to do... #

Perhaps its audience were seeking something akin to easy listening.

They wanted something that was comforting

and could be stuck on in the background.

But they are a generation that's grown up with rock'n'roll,

so they're used to the idea of a beat.

Everyone of a certain age probably has a copy of Rumours.

It became part of the furniture

of being an adult in the 1970s.

# Go your own way... #

But it wasn't just the album buyer that was growing up.

It was musicians too.

The British prog artists,

famous for pushing the envelope of the album

in the early '70s, were now increasingly accused of indulgence.

I think progressive music started with every good intention.

It started in the way we've been describing of, you know,

pushing out, "Let's experiment, let's see how far we can go.

"Let's introduce lots of other different elements into it."

And I remember my turning point with all of this came watching

Yes at Madison Square Garden...

..where there were pods

lowered down through dry ice, you know, onto the stage.

The pod opened

and the drummer steps out through the dry ice...

..all to very dramatic music going on, and I began to think,

"Whoa, hang on a minute.

"We have now come about as far away

"from Elvis being at the RCA Studio

"in '56 as you could possibly get."

All those guys that were in their early 30s by the mid-'70s,

they were all pretty ropey.

It wasn't just the LP, it was The Rolling Stones too.

It wasn't just Pink Floyd, it was David Bowie too.

The promise of the long-playing album was no longer

delivering for a new generation of music fans.

But once again, the album was about to be reinvented.

No, it's extremely provocative, you know.

MUSIC: Holidays In The Sun by The Sex Pistols

Starts with, you know,

what we can only assume are jackboots marching.

At the time...

At that point, it's all over.

Everything that's gone before that

has now been deemed fucking irrelevant,

as soon as he starts anti-singing.

# I don't wanna holiday in the sun

# I wanna go to the new Belsen

# I wanna see some history... #

In 1977, the Sex Pistols

released their debut album, Never Mind The Bollocks.

Punk, in a sense, defined itself against hippy.

Whatever hippies did, punks did the opposite.

Hippies play long instrumental solos,

punks play short solos or no solos at all.

Hippies make conceptual, thematic double albums,

punks make short singles.

It was designed specifically to be

whatever the hippies didn't do.

# Sensurround sound in a two-inch wall... #

We were quite Stalinist, you know, like breaking from the past,

till it meant nothing to us,

apart from a few revered icons,

like The Velvet Underground or Iggy Pop.

Never Mind The Bollocks brought

a new way of thinking to the LP.

Short songs, no sleeve notes and stripped-down production.

MUSIC: Pretty Vacant by The Sex Pistols

Now, this guitar riff, this is probably alone...

You don't need much more of a reason

to produce The Sex Pistols.

It's one of the first things you learn

when you pick up the electric guitar is that riff.

I wanted it to sound like real steel.

No flab at all.

# There's no point in asking You'll get no reply

# Oh, just remember... #

Just two musicians played almost all the music on the record -

drummer Paul Cook and guitarist Steve Jones,

who also played the bass parts.

He just played exactly the same thing on the bass guitar

as he played on the guitar.

He just followed the root note, one octave down.

You've got a perfect harmonic sequence of - boomf - an octave

and then a fifth of an octave and then...

And that's where the power came from.

# ..And we don't care. #

The more you look at it, it's got the words sex and bollocks on it,

and it might be the most provocative piece of popular art ever.

But, despite its rebellious stance,

Never Mind The Bollocks was

no less sophisticated an album in its creative intent.

# I am an antichrist... #

It was the politics and the fashion and the thinking.

Youth culture had died before that point, it wasn't really...

Kids weren't empowered, they were just still seen as kids.

The Sex Pistols came along saying that the established order

was about to change.

It did, for ever. It's never gone back.

While punk purports to have kind of introduced a ground zero

approach to everything that had come before -

goodbye, horrible, self-indulgent concept album, progressive,

long-haired fools -

Never Mind The Bollocks actually turns out to be perhaps

one of the greatest rock concept albums of all time.

# ..An anarchist... #

Never Mind The Bollocks went to number one in the UK in 1977.

That's it, for them. It's all they ever did.

That's their one statement to the world.

And imagine getting it so right once.

I made ten albums and in my own mind

they don't match up to that.

And I'm an arrogant bastard.

Seriously.

And I'd give them all up to have written that. I truly would.

1977 also saw debut albums from The Stranglers,

The Clash and The Damned.

# Be a man, can a mystery man

# Be a doll... #

Even for this revolutionary, raw, anti-Establishment music,

the album was crucial.

Punk rock and New Wave,

which I think was the last great flowering of the LP,

cos everybody wanted their LPs, and if they were The Ramones,

you know, even if all their songs lasted the two minutes,

you still had to get your album out

because you weren't a grown-up rock band unless you did that.

# Once I had a love And it was a gas... #

Punk and New Wave had given the album a creative shot in the arm.

In 1978, record sales propelled the industry to unprecedented revenues.

And in a nod to the LP's early days,

the biggest sellers in 1978 were both soundtracks.

But the long-playing album was spinning on borrowed time.

The record industry is enjoying an unparalleled level of dominance

and success in 1978.

Sales of vinyl albums are at their peak, and then

that's unfortunately followed in 1979 by a massive global downturn.

In 1979, for the first time since album sales overtook singles

11 years earlier,

record industry profits crashed by nearly a quarter.

A golden age of album-led growth came to a close.

The industry blamed the wider recession

and new competition for young consumers' attentions.

They're concerned about the arrival of computer games,

both in arcades and TV consoles.

They're concerned about video recorders, and most of all,

they're concerned about cassette recorders.

# You must be my lucky star... #

Changing technology was undermining the record industry's

LP-orientated business model.

# I just think of you... #

The cassette transforms the way in which people can listen to music.

They're no longer trapped by the physical object of the LP,

they can also tape the album, mix up the tracks

and make their own compilations.

So, it brings a completely different experience of listening

into the equation of the album,

one that reduces the album's kind of

monolithic presence in youth culture

during that period and beyond.

As sales of LPs continued to struggle into the early '80s,

a new way of selling music

and a new canvas for artists' creativity was about to emerge.

MTV was launched in 1981.

Its brash, iconic branding signalled a new approach

to selling music.

What made MTV so different is that everybody else

who had done music on TV

had tried to make music for the TV form, create a story arc through it.

And we said, "No, no.

"We're going to make TV for the music form -

"mood, emotion, attitude."

That was new, that was different,

that was revolutionary at the time.

# Video killed the radio star... #

The music video changed the whole way music was marketed for a while.

I mean, in the old days, you'd have to hear a song

five, six, seven, eight, nine times and then you'd say,

"I've got to have this thing."

But with the music video,

because you had that extra level of entertainment and visual thing,

sometimes the conversion from experience to purchase

happened a lot faster.

Within a year of its launch,

MTV had made an indelible mark on the industry.

Clearly the most influential album was Thriller, Michael Jackson.

# Cos this is thriller

# Thriller night... #

He and Madonna were the first video artists

that really conceived of everything,

the record around the video.

They sort of thought of it as one piece.

# Killer, thriller... #

All of a sudden, the emphasis was

now making singles that would make a good video.

People were writing for video and were abandoning the album concept.

The whole idea, then, of the video being the art form

and you're going to divert huge amounts of resource

from your core album into the marketing of that album.

You're going to suck half the budget away from what previously

had been the recording costs into now marketing that album.

The era of the video had arrived.

EVIL LAUGHTER

The long-playing album would never again be

the driving force of the music industry.

But, even long after the needle lifted from its golden age,

its influence lives on.

I consider myself extremely fortunate to have been

in the music business in what I think will be looked back on

as a golden era, and that is the vinyl era,

I think was the most productive, the most musical

and the most forward-thinking era in the entire

140 years of the music industry.

Things like Pink Floyd, Dark Side Of The Moon,

would never have been able to exist

without the LP, and so there were

beautiful albums produced that only would work in LP form.

It's like sitting by an old fire, a crackly piece of vinyl.

There's something really comforting about it.

You could sit there over a lovely cup of tea

and you could have people round to listen to it.

It wasn't just this experience that happened in your ears only.

Every single time you listen to the record,

you've got to do the same thing - handle it with care,

put your finger in the middle, keep it balanced,

put it on the platter, do that.

You can't just casually throw it and hope that it...

You've got to do the same ritual,

that preparatory ritual,

- before you sit back and go... - HE SIGHS

That was like a gift, a gift to yourself or a gift to somebody else,

and it was a magical experience.

My favourite quote from any rock star is

Ray Davies of The Kinks said that

when he looks at someone's LP collection,

he always feels like weeping,

because it's like looking into their soul.

And anybody that collected LPs

in that golden age can understand that.

The record collection was really the art collection

of the ordinary man, of the working man or woman, you know?

And it's only now, as they slip into history,

that we see their real beauty and their real power.