When the album charts had real meaning, however corrupt, it was a fairly good guide to what was popular. For what it’s worth, I think the album charts were far less corrupt than the singles chart but probably measured sales inaccurately all the same.
Regardless, we didn’t know about any of that as kids and pretty much took it at face value. If it was in the music papers, it was true as far as we were concerned.
The 70s were the glory days of the chart when people like Perry Como’s latest release was alongside a Yes album or the folk of Fairport Convention would be competing with Jeff Beck’s jazz rock.
I sometimes feature charts of yesteryear here because we forget just how great they were, regularly virtually all records that became classic releases and they were packed with genius music.
They told their own story. You could tell when a band or artist was on the way up or going down. I loved Ren Tears After but after a string of top 10 albums, they were on the wane by 1973 my beloved Recorded Live only got to #36 is bad enough but I was excited for Alvin Lee’s solo albums. However Pump Iron didn’t fare well making #131. And it was to be typical over the next few releases. You literally saw a primo rock star of the early 70s drift from view in the charts
It was so exciting to see unusual records enter the charts. We would get the NME or Sounds and religiously and pore over the charts every week, It really felt important. For some reason, I’d write them out every week and that’s why I still recall positions of certain records.
I remember being excited that Tangerine Dream’s Rubycon got to #12 in 1975. If you know the record from 2026’s standpoint it feels really amazing that such an ambient record got so high. And Phaedra got to #15
It’s a shame that kids today can’t have the excitement of seeing where records are every week. They must have other obsessions and the way things have developed, with so many different options for listening to music, it just can’t be how it was.
