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Sometimes a song just hits you right there, regardless of genre or anything else. In 1978 this one-hit wonder got me right from that opening acoustic guitar.
It’s hard to overestimate the sense of anticipation and mystery surrounding the return of Johnny Rotten after the dismal demise of The Sex Pistols onstage in San Francisco in January 1978.
This was always my favourite song from Low. And this is the story of the day David Bowie played it for me in private – at my own request.
Like mother like daughter… this is Madonna’s daughter Lolahol slavishly coping the methods that brought her mother to public attention more than 40 years earlier.
Say what you like about Boney M, they were an entertaining fixture in the singles chart all through the second half of the Seventies.
In March 1977 I went to the Rainbow Theatre, scene of many of my favourite gigs, to see Iggy Pop for the first time – with a band including David Bowie.
As punk was mutating and evolving in 1978, a new band called Japan surfed in on the New Wave. I went to see them at the Music Machine, attracted mainly by their image.
I came late to the party with Low; I missed their whispery slowcore beginnings and my engagement was limited largely to their magnificent Christmas album, which should be a staple of every home in December. It certainly is in mine.
Like most music fans, I first set eyes on Amanda Lear in 1973 as the coquettish vamp on the cover of Roxy Music’s second album, For Your Pleasure, sheathed in black leather with a black panther on a leash.
This was a kind of guilty pleasure during my disco-hating days as a punk. It came out in 1978 and I probably noticed it because of Alicia Keys’s provocatively punky hairstyle – somewhere between Bowie and Billy Idol.