VOX POP ALBUM GUIDE 1960-1979

Welcome to the Vox Pop Album Guide 1960-1979. With over 3400 album reviews this is the most comprehensive guide to 1960s and 1970s popular music ever, highlighting the musical achievements of this amazing period. The ambition of this music guide is to convey the genuine opinions of real people on the merits of notable UK and US music albums. Thus it contrasts with the outlook of many music industry pundits, who have too often pursued an agenda focussed more on promoting dubious cultural fashions or advancing short term commercial interests, rather than encouraging and nurturing musical excellence.

The guide aims to sort the wheat from the chaff. Each album is given a star rating influenced by the assessments and reviews. Qualities looked for to achieve the highest ratings are musicianship, musical structure and development, strong melody and harmony, distinctiveness, originality, creative arrangements and vocal ability. The more of these buttons that are pressed the higher the star rating achieved. Thus five star albums are regarded as outstanding, four star can be confidently recommended, three star are likely to appeal mostly to fans of the genre or artist, two star are considered to demonstrate limited musical quality, and the very few with just one star are deemed to have little or no musical value.

All US and UK top twenty albums from the period 1960-1973 are included, plus very many others selected for their individual contribution to the music scene of the era. Unfortunately, the level of creativity began to diminish from the mid 1970s onwards, and so the choice of albums to review from later years is necessarily more selective. It is clearly pointless and meaningless to review albums which are intrinsically worthless.

Each review contains an image of the LP cover, as it originally appeared when released. Also included is a list of individual tracks. A brief overview outlines the main features of interest of the album and details its chart placing and any hit singles included. The bulk of each entry is devoted to the comments of ordinary people on the qualities of the album. These views are given with style, sincerity, insight and conviction, and provide a uniquely valuable assessment and analysis of each album.

The albums are listed in rough chronological order of release, so the earliest posts are for 1960 and the latest for 1979.