When pop gave way to rock

According to David Hepworth, the year he turned 21 was also the year when ‘a huge proportion of the most memorable albums ever made were released’. Having been a rock journalist for four decades, he does of course know the theory that everybody thinks music was at its best when they were young. But, as he puts it with untypical — if presumably ironic — machismo, the ‘important difference in the case of me and 1971’ is that ‘I’m right’.

The strange thing is that he might well be. If the Mercury Prize had existed in 1971, Hunky Dory, Led Zeppelin IV, Imagine, Every Picture tells a Story, Who’s Next and Sticky Fingers would have been up against at least half a dozen others that, 45 years on, rock fans of any age are likely to know better than most of the recent winners.

And that’s just the albums from Britain. The same year also produced Joni Mitchell’s Blue, Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On, Neil Young’s Harvest and the record that, by Hepworth’s reckoning, ‘invented the album business’.