1975

1975 was the apotheosis of music. Rich with masterpieces, it's the most important year in the narrative arc of the music of the twentieth century: Blood on the Tracks by Bob Dylan, The Who by Numbers by the Who, Young Americans by David Bowie, A Night at the Opera by Queen, and the eponymous Fleetwood Mac, to name just a few.

The records of 1975 were magisterial; records that couldn't be bettered. Who could realistically make a more sophisticated album than The Hissing of Summer Lawns? Or a more complex hard-rock album than Physical Graffiti? Or a record as unimpeachable and as prescient as Horses?

It was a year filled with an unparalleled sense of ambition, where the album was venerated as much as the modern novel, where everyone was trying to make a masterpiece.

Setting the music against the social, political and artistic context of the time, Dylan Jones brilliantly unravels the cultural fragments that made 1975 the greatest year of them all.