These individual songs and entire albums make up the music that meant the most to me during the years I’ve focused on in this book.

‘Dark Star’ - the ‘Live Dead’ version released in the UK in January 1970 - was psychedelic rock’s crowning glory and last hurrah. Exquisite, other-worldly and drenched in LSD’s sense-shifting dream-like otherness, this is nothing less than Coltrane’s A Love Supreme reimagined as the stoner rock of the gods.

This quirky jazz-fusion exercise from Third was playing over the sound system of the 1970 Bath Festival at the very moment I inhaled my first marijuana fumes, so it understandably still looms large in my memory. In fact, the whole double album remains one of my most frequently replayed early-seventies recordings.

I can’t be 100 per cent sure but I’m still fairly certain that being exposed to this beguiling Barrett recasting of a piece of verse from Ulysses in early ’70 was what actually prompted me to start reading the James Joyce novel.

The Byrds were my all-time favourite sixties group but I never forgave McGuinn for sacking David Crosby in 1967 and generally took a dimmer view of their later output. But ‘Chestnut Mare’ was just too irresistible - their last shot at transcendental greatness.

Like the Grateful Dead, Buckley released no fewer than three great albums in 1970 - Blue Afternoon, Lorca and Starsailor. But the last named was the most startlingly creative of them all and I defy anyone to find a recorded vocal performance as octavespanningly gymnastic and demonically possessed as the one Buckley delivers on this extraordinary track. Just listen to the way he screeches out the line ‘I run with the damned, my darling’. It will make your blood run cold.

If I Could Only Remember My Name - David Crosby

This album instantly sets up a dreamy pothead ambience that re-evokes the mood of its time so completely that hearing it again is like experiencing instant déjà vu.

1970 was Neil Young’s breakthrough year and it really took off for him that autumn with the release of the After the Gold Rush album. I was a bit ambivalent about some of the record’s contents, finding parts of it too fey and whimsical. But ‘When You Dance’ found Young strapping on an electric guitar and conspiring with Crazy Horse and Jack Nitzsche to create a truly glorious racket that was seldom off my record player that season.

Fun House - the Stooges

The sound of the seventies barbarians baying at the door. Back then, you either felt the power of the Stooges’ disruptive music reverberate through the very core of your being - or you didn’t.

‘Directly from My Heart to You’ - the Mothers of Invention Frank Zappa’s musical output post-Mothers mostly gave me the creeps but on his final MOI compilation Weasels Ripped My Flesh - released a year after the group’s 1969 demise - he released this unforgettably greasy rearrangement of the old Little Richard classic just to convincingly prove that this old outfit - greatly abetted here by violinist Don ‘Sugarcane’ Harris - could rock out with the best of ’em.

Plastic Ono Band - John Lennon

This, Lennon’s last truly inspired set of songs and performances, came down like a jackhammer on the youth culture of the hour when it was released in the winter of 1970. When he wasn’t frantically exorcising the demons of his childhood, Lennon used the record to ritually slaughter the whole late-sixties peace-and-love pipe dream still hypnotising the rock landscape. In the final selection ‘God’ he spelt it out in no uncertain terms: ‘The dream is over’; ‘I just believe in me / Yoko and me / and that’s reality.’ From that point on, the whole ‘me’ decade mindset was officially in session.

Sticky Fingers - my all-time favourite Stones album and the record I played most frequently throughout the year under discussion - is amply eulogised in the 1971 chapter but this lesser-known rampage through Chuck Berry’s back catalogue - released as a bonus B-side to the ‘Brown Sugar’ 45 rpm - was what I’d put on first thing every morning in order to wake up and face the day.

Performance - various artists

The deeply spooky and wickedly eclectic Jack Nitzsche-helmed project gets my vote as the greatest film soundtrack recording ever made.

Alice Cooper’s early-seventies mega-success was short-lived but significant if only for this track - the quintet’s first global hit - which not only gave glam rock some much-needed hard-rock sneer and rebel clout but also - stylistically and attitude-wise - boldly helped pave the way for the punk explosion that finally came five years after its release.

This wasn’t a hit in 1971 but I’d still hear it everywhere I went that year. Lou Reed sang the words with uncharacteristic gusto but it’s his irresistibly circular guitar riff holding the whole thing together that really seals the deal.

You can’t spotlight the most memorable musical moments of 1971 without including something by its ‘man of the year’ Rod Stewart, and this hauntingly plaintive folk ballad from Every Picture Tells a Story still glistens with everything that was once great about the man.

Brian Wilson wrote and recorded this back in 1966 but it took the Beach Boys five more years before they saw the wisdom in actually releasing it. Miraculously this spine-tingling ode to the rise and fall of the sixties’ golden wave of spiritual uplift sounded just as divine and unearthly in the seventies as it would have done in the time frame it was written for.

This melancholy, drifting meditation on big-city isolation became the all-purpose soundtrack to my period as a student at London University which began in the October of 1971.

Like another of ’71’s key singles, John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’, ‘What’s Going On’ is an unapologetic musical sermon from the mount to the pop masses, but unlike Lennon’s sanctimonious diatribe, it actually works for me. The message is heartfelt, righteous and to the point, the groove, chords and arrangement are all sublime but its most outstanding feature is the prayer-like way Gaye sings to himself in the call-and-response sections, inventing a whole new form of vocal self-expression in the process.

Simply their all-time best masterclass recording.

Ziggy Stardust was still a few months away from being introduced into the public domain when Bowie released his Hunky Dory album late in ’71, but anyone who heard the record that winter instantly sensed that he would become one of the decade’s leading creative luminaries. This track in particular stopped everyone in their tracks, an unforgettable foray into the realm of fractured surreal songcraft that beguiled and mystified like a darker shade of ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’.

The album this comes from - Gonna Take a Miracle - was the first record I ever reviewed for the UK press but that’s not the reason why I’ve chosen it. ‘The Bells’ is a beautiful Marvin Gaye-penned torch song that was first recorded by the Originals for Tamla Motown in ’71 and which even reached no. 1 in the US singles chart that year. It’s one of Motown’s most incandescent late-period productions but Nyro and LaBelle trump the original with a more intimate reading that blends sublime gospel harmonies with a lead vocal that is the very essence of barely contained romantic hysteria. By the time La Nyro gets to the pay-off line ‘If you ever leave me, I believe I’ll go insane’, you’re already convinced she means exactly what she’s singing.

‘Thunder Express’ - the MC5 (The Big Bang!)

When the Motor City 5 exiled themselves to England in early ’72, this was the song they had up their collective sleeves as a possible hit single. Basically a rewrite and update of the classic four-to-the-bar Chuck Berry automobile fetish, ‘Thunder Express’ never made it into a recording studio but still managed to become the highlight of all their concerts that year. This live version - recorded for a TV show in Paris - totally captures what it was like to be one of those privileged few who actually made up their audience.

Tago Mago - Can

The stoner-rock masterpiece of 1972.

Don’t laugh. This vibrant ambitious blending of hard-rock light-and-shade with classical music’s sweep and sensibility is UK prog’s greatest-ever achievement bar none. So good in fact that it almost single-handedly vindicates one of the dodgiest musical hybrids of the past fifty years.

You couldn’t escape this track in 1972 for love or money. Every London club DJ played it in seeming rotation until the wee small hours, by which time its sensual groove had every patron swaying and buzzing with hypnotised grins. In many respects, Steely Dan defined the seventies just as potently as David Bowie. But they did it purely on their musical talent.

Exile on Main St. was received cautiously by the pop pundits when it first appeared in the late spring of ’72. But that didn’t hinder its two vinyl albums from taking up dominion on my turntable for most of the summer. Hearing ‘Ventilator Blues” deep, druggy groove always takes me back to that hot and hectic season.

I first heard this single over at the Stooges’ rented house in Barons Court. Iggy used to play it a lot, nodding sagely at the sentiments being expressed in King James’s dramatic soliloquy against ‘one of the most deadly menaces in the world today’. Thirty-eight years later it still stands up as the most effective anti-hard-drug statement ever made through the medium of music.

Whilst writing this book I was sidetracked and saddened by news of the death of John Martyn. John was a friend of mine during the late seventies, as well as being someone I’ve always considered a supremely gifted musician. This enchanted instrumental from Bless the Weather is just one of many Martyn classics from a decade that never gave him the success and acclaim he deserved. Maybe now that he’s passed on, he’ll finally get that global iconic stature that so eluded him in life.

This loping, elegant instrumental from the Tamla Motown saxophone titan was what often used to be playing in my head when I’d promenade around London’s sleepy streets after dark.

Ah yes, glam rock. Well, ‘Dudes’ was the form’s very own national anthem that year, its best-written song and most inspired production. Runners-up included Bowie’s own ‘Suffragette City’, Roxy Music’s ‘Virginia Plain’ and a T.Rex B-side called ‘Raw Ramp’.

Big Star’s glorious first album and Raw Power were the two records I listened to incessantly whenever I had access to a record player during my travels through America that year.

Raw Power - Iggy and the Stooges

Still the greatest, meanest-eyed, coldest-blooded hard-rock tour de force ever summoned up in a recording studio.

Diehard fans may argue the point but I’ve always preferred Roxy Music’s recordings after Brian Eno was banished from their midst, specifically this epic meditation on the soul-deadening side effects of living in the ‘looking-glass world’ of seventies celebrity narcissism. Bryan Ferry is quite right when he refers to it as the best song he ever wrote.

This actually came out as a single in 1973 but I could have just as easily picked earlier Green releases like ‘Let’s Stay Together’. His music became so omnipresent in the early seventies - particularly in all the clubs - that you could have been forgiven at the time for not fully appreciating just how remarkable the run of singles and albums he made with genius producer, arranger and co-writer Willie Mitchell really were.

Bowie totally nailed the soul-suckingly decadent vibe of Hollywood circa 1973 in this underrated selection from Aladdin Sane.

Clear Spot - Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band

This is - hands down - Beefheart’s musical magnum opus. More musically accessible and way better produced than Trout Mask Replica but still as weird as all hell, Clear Spot is the splendid sound of the Captain at full creative throttle backed by a Magic Band at their most inspired and - yes - magical.

Like ‘Surf’s Up’, this is the sound of utter perfection and full-on spiritual rapture merging together in the pop-song medium. Beyond exquisite, this is holy, healing music that remains to this day criminally underappreciated.

This careening track from their eponymous debut album contains all the approaching-train-wreck bliss of their best live shows.

The Harder They Come - various artists

1973 was the year when reggae reached out beyond its previous UK ‘specialist’ fan base of Jamaican expats and home-grown skinheads and started appealing to the larger white rock and pop demographic. The Wailers’ ‘Catch a Fire’ and ‘Burning’ were crucial in spreading the weed-head gospel throughout the British Isles but this Jimmy Cliff-dominated soundtrack album was the key artefact to detonate a full-blown reggae revolution in the pre-punk UK.

Fresh - Sly & the Family Stone

Sly’s last recording of consequence before drugs and ego turned him into one of the biggest losers of the late twentieth century.

Alongside the Temptations’ Norman Whitfield-produced ‘Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone’, Marvin Gaye’s ’73 hit single ‘Trouble Man’ introduced the world to a new, edgier, gloomier Motown sound for the seventies. A year after the studio version had sat proudly in the UK top ten, Gaye returned to the song for a special in-concert rendition that shredded the original courtesy of some jaw-dropping vocal gymnastics and a backing band - Gaye’s old Snakepit support crew reunited once more - that swings like the proverbial motherfucker.

Peebles never got to duplicate the worldwide success this sultry, lovesick single briefly brought her in 1974 but I will never forget the indelible impact this record had on taste-makers and music-lovers alike during that year.

Future Days - Can

This is the record that contained the dreamiest and most mind-scrambling musical explorations Can ever managed to conceive together.

Grievous Angel - Gram Parsons

Chrissie Hynde was a big fan of this, Parsons’s posthumous final recording, and played it over and over again throughout the last months we lived together.

Bryan Ferry’s second all-time masterpiece composition was too dark to be considered a plausible single choice for Roxy Music but nonetheless lit up their Country Life album with its cautionary ode to some drug-dependent early-seventies dandy libertine. I wonder who he was referring to.

On the Beach - Neil Young

If you want to know even more about what it felt like to be cast adrift and left to float uncertainly through the spiritual quagmire of the (early) seventies, this album will fill you in.

Womack - one of American soul music’s most talented singer/ songwriters - became a bona fide hipster cult item in 1974, with the Stones and Rod Stewart frequently praising his records to the skies and clued-in club DJs playing tracks like this until the grooves had been worn down to a static hiss.

Veedon Fleece - Van Morrison

Let us not be forgetting the prickly Belfast cowboy’s mighty contribution to music in the early seventies. Moondance and Tupelo Honey were also particular favourites of mine during this time frame.

This maudlin drug addict’s confession from Newman’s seventies high point, Good Old Boys, really spoke to my personal condition as the decade headed towards its midway stretch.

I first heard Physical Graffiti in its entirety four months or more before its March ’75 release date. Jimmy Page arranged an exclusive listening session at a London recording studio. Afterwards he asked me what I thought. I told him then that the stand-out track was ‘Kashmir’ and that it would probably go down in history as their greatest-ever recording. He seemed disappointed by this information and claimed to prefer ‘Ten Years Gone’. Thirty-five years later though I’ll bet he’s revised his opinion.

King David’s celebrity-bashing disco extravaganza was unavoidable in ’75. ‘Fame”s co-author John Lennon is lurking somewhere in the mix but the key contributor here - apart from Bowie himself of course - is Carlos Alomar, the Duke’s most accomplished guitar foil and riff provider.

Blood on the Tracks - Bob Dylan

The Great One’s return to sustained songwriting excellence after eight erratic years was a humongous hit worldwide in early ’75. Obliquely centred on Dylan’s recent marital conflicts, Blood became the perfect record for lovesick fools like me to use as a musical I Ching for the broken-hearted.

The Hissing of Summer Lawns - Joni Mitchell

On this sumptuously disturbing record La Mitchell daringly ditched her old LA neighbourhood of winsome Canyon ladies and free-spirited male troubadours to move into the loveless side of town where the pimps and junkies mingled with the rich and the damned. Her singing voice went down an octave in the process but her songwriting gifts flourished like never before in the new noir setting.

Disco’s most euphoric-sounding single was also the high-water mark for Gamble and Huff’s prolific production factory out in Philadelphia.

Long before these two tracks were available on vinyl, John Cale gave me a cassette tape of studio sessions he’d produced with this oddball Boston outfit, and both ‘Roadrunner’ and ‘Picasso’ instantly stood out as dual portents of ‘things to come’.

The gaunt Canadian dropped the bomb twice in ’75, first by finally releasing Tonight’s the Night, his prophetic meditation on the role of drugs and death in evolving pop culture, and then by unleashing Zuma at year’s end. ‘Cortez’ was the highlight of the latter, with Young and a freshly reunited Crazy Horse down-pacing their usual prairie lope until it moved more like the sound of war canoes and their paddles slicing through calm waters in order to destroy ancient civilisations.

This once sorely underrated LA band were suddenly a hot ticket in ’75 - particularly in Britain, which received their first live presentations with rapturous acclaim. Doubtless influenced by this stroke of fate, their leader Lowell George went on to deliver his most soulful composition and vocal performance ever during that same year before succumbing to drug-accelerated flame-out and death at decade’s end.

Something about the nakedness of emotion expressed in this beautiful song-a lonely, oversensitive introvert’s simple prayer for acceptance in a more sympathetic universe - really put the spook in me when I first heard it.

This double-fierce, borderline-obscene, amphetamine-sharp rearrangement of an old Coasters novelty track from the fifties was always the pivotal performance in their live shows in the mid-seventies.

Station to Station - David Bowie

The sessions for this album were so drug-sated that Bowie now claims he can’t remember any of the details about recording the six tracks. That’s too bad because in my estimation it’s his most fascinating work. If you really want to unravel the mysteries lurking in this deeply strange record, read Ian MacDonald’s brilliant analysis in the chapter ‘Dark Doings’ from his 2005 book The People’s Music (Serpent’s Tail).

The late seventies found Gaye struggling to match the lofty creative standards he’d set for himself earlier in the decade. But this sublime single was another immaculate conception from Motown’s greatest-ever God-given vocal talent.

The Stooges had already pushed the door marked ‘punk rock’ ajar at the outset of the seventies, but this track and the group who performed it were the proverbial dynamite stick which blew that door clear off its hinges in ’76, opening wide a space in rock culture for the Sex Pistols and the Clash to rampage through.

Metallic KO - Iggy and the Stooges

This hellish live recording is in the list mainly because I was a prime mover in getting it released in the first place. It certainly had a ferocious influence on the emerging punk scene - not all of it good unfortunately. A lot of the violence that took place at London punk shows was directly caused by clueless young people trying to copy the audience mayhem of Metallic KO. More macabre audio vérité than a conventional rock album, this record now sends an uncomfortably cold chill down my spine whenever I even think about it. Bad karma on black vinyl.

In recent years this has become a global biker anthem like ‘Free Bird’, as well as the victim of a side-splittingly funny Christopher Walken ‘More Cowbell’ routine on America’s Saturday Night Live. Back in ’76 though this majestically creepy rumination on looming death hit all the right buttons amongst record buyers and rock critics alike, both of whom couldn’t get enough of its ingenious ‘Byrds meet Darth Vader’ ambience.

Full-tilt seventies testosterone rock was what Phil Lynott’s boys served up to the masses, and this breakthrough single proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that they were the toughest and tastiest in their field.

Rundgren was an oddity throughout the seventies. Early in the decade he looked set to become America’s answer to Bowie but - after experimenting with psychedelic drugs - veered away from his more commercial instincts to clumsily embrace prog rock. Result: his fan base never grew beyond a cult. Still, in ’76 he released some of his best-ever work on the album Faithful, specifically this killer salute to everyman that packed into approximately three minutes everything you needed to hear from his wide-ranging talents.

Hejira - Joni Mitchell

For my money, this remains the most intimate and breathtakingly beautiful album released during the seventies bar none.

The Pretender - Jackson Browne

The haunting title track - inspired by the suicide of Browne’s girlfriend - was an unforgettable ‘how to survive the seventies’ burst of lyrical self-exegesis.

One of the first ‘indie’-distributed 45s I ever heard or saw. Mad as a sack of wild cats. Pure cerebral psychosis with a flaming back-beat and demons for guitar picks.

I remember spending an evening with Nick Lowe and Jake Riviera at their Kensington flat listening to a rough mix of this track - which Lowe had just produced - over and over again. I’d already heard Costello’s My Aim Is True record and thought it was good. But this was monumental. Still one of the only examples of white blokes playing reggae that hits all the right spots for me.

The Idiot/Lust for Life - Iggy Pop

I’ve already praised these two Iggy/Bowie sonic groundbreakers sufficiently in the 1977 chapter.

Marquee Moon - Television

Several London punk notables took me to task for raving about this record so extensively in the NME that year. They said it was just ‘music for old hippies’ and that it would never last the test of time. Thirty-two years later though I see Marquee Moon routinely perched in the highest branches of all those ‘greatest-ever albums’ polls instigated by the media whilst the recorded output of those who castigated them barely gets a mention.

The album Heroes could well have been the creative blueprint for the late-seventies ‘new wave’ musical hybrid. Everyone from the Human League to Simple Minds drew their core musical cues from its sulphurous contents. But no one ever merged US funk with European avant-pop drama more artfully than the Bromley Alien, and the album’s second selection-a skewed homage to performance artist Chris Burden - was uncommonly inspired even by Bowie’s exacting standards.

‘Anarchy in the U.K.’, ‘God Save the Queen’ and ‘Pretty Vacant’ were all brilliant blockbuster singles but the uproariously venomous ‘Bodies’ best captured the full foul-mouthed, flint-hearted essence of who and what the Sex Pistols really were from my vantage point.

Aja - Steely Dan

It’s amazing to think the Sex Pistols’ debut album and this sublime collection were released during the same year. The Dan’s creative high point was the sonic antithesis of punk and took Donald Fagen and Walter Becker’s noble quest to merge penetrating pop songcraft with sophisticated jazz-drenched chords and arrangements and five-star musicianship to a level of accomplishment no one has since come close to matching.

Little Criminals - Randy Newman

Greil Marcus really laid into this record via a long Rolling Stone review but I actually preferred its sleeker sound to most of Newman’s early-seventies output.

The Belle Album - Al Green

In the mid-seventies, Green’s mighty run of hits was interrupted by the singer’s sudden urge to become an ordained preacher. The Belle Album was his first self-produced effort and first post-religious-conversion musical statement. Rarely has music promoting the ‘I’ve found God and you should too’ message sounded as compelling and persuasive to non-believing ears.

I stopped listening to David Byrne and his pals in the eighties when they opted to concentrate on manufacturing yuppified funk pastiches for white people with no sense of natural rhythm but this overlooked song from their debut album was still one of my favourites from 1977.

New Boots and Panties!! - Ian Dury and the Blockheads Dury truly found his form once he’d disbanded the Kilburns at mid-decade and thrown in his lot with the more musically accomplished Blockheads. This seminal celebration of English eccentricity was one of the decade’s stand-out musical statements.

Darkness on the Edge of Town - Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band

For most Europeans, Darkness was the place where Springsteen finally rose above all the formative musical influences that had previously defined his recorded output and became an unstoppable rock superpower strictly on his own terms. These eloquent anthems for blue-collar Americans struggling to keep their faith in uncertain times sounded even better on the various live bootlegs that started appearing hot on the heels of this studio album’s ’78 release date.

Blue Valentine - Tom Waits

Predecessors Small Change and Foreign Affairs both had their share of stellar moments but Valentine was Waits’s real ‘coming of age’ artistic triumph during a decade that never quite knew what to make of his music.

Considering we almost came to blows back in 1973, you could be forgiven for thinking that I’ve always felt only contempt for the Bee Gees but - like virtually everyone else in the late seventies - I fell under the spell of their Saturday Night Fever contributions such as ‘Stayin’ Alive’ and ‘How Deep Is Your Love’. Even more irresistible was this lilting soul ballad from their Spirits Having Flown album.

This infectiously demented samba was all the proof I needed to show me that Beefheart had bounced back from his mid-seventies wilderness years to re-establish his rightful place on the throne as rock’s very own King of Weird.

Excitable Boy - Warren Zevon

Zevon started out hell-bent on portraying himself as West Coast rock’s very own Hunter S. Thompson and this - his second solo album - still ranks as his most successful and imaginative attempt at spicing up LA-centric, radio-friendly tunesmithery with an authentic ‘gonzo’ edge.

The highlight from ’78’s otherwise lacklustre Street-Legal, ‘Señor’ is the gloomily compelling sound of Dylan staring down the black hole of despair and betrayal just prior to being touched by the hand of God.

LA’s rockabilly renegades outstripped even Roy Orbison’s original version of this song by investing it with just the right hint of authentically psychotic swagger.

Rust Never Sleeps - Neil Young

To my ears this remains Young’s all-time career peak. Every song is a masterpiece.

The Pretenders’ second single was the one that really brought it home to me that my old flame Chrissie Hynde had developed into a songwriter of consequence.

I was never the world’s biggest fan of the Clash’s various studio recordings but always kept a special place in my heart for their ferocious rendition of the old fifties rocker first recorded by Vince Taylor.