Part One of Randophonic’s three part celebration of the 40th anniversary of 1974 aired November 29th, on CiTR.FM.101.9.

Here it is in two Mixcloud streams. All Secrecy No Privacy:

The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway (an extended Movie of the Week):

The podcast of the full program is available for download here …

Think of it as a halfway cool radio program from forty years ago — a few guys running through some of the essential records of the year, not ranking them so much as just shouting them out. This is the important stuff. This is what has kept the flesheating robots at bay for the past three hundred or so days.  And they might have been stoned while they were doing it, so stuff is out of order and maybe a little confused, but in a good way, 1974 proving rather difficult to really pin down.

But there was certainly no shortage of darned fine music.

Kraftwerk – autobahn

Wherein some very smart German guys decide that what the world truly wants and needs is a sort of stretched out and techno-fied version of the Beach Boys’ Fun Fun Fun.  And they nail it, a hit single and album world wide.  The future is suddenly very cool.

MFSB – TSOP [the Sound of Philadelphia]

Disco wasn’t really a SOUND yet in 1974, so it wasn’t really annoying at all. Not yet anyway.

O’Jays – for the love of money

The root of all that evil. Same as it ever was.

Camel – freefall

Introducing progressive rock, the elephant in the room, which it’s safe to say peaked rather gloriously in 1974, with Camel as solid an example as any. Tight playing, complex arrangements, no fear of cosmic overload.

Alice Cooper – teenage lament ’74

Does it always suck to be a teenager? Probably. But as far as we know, 1974 is the only year that had an actual teenage lament.

Sensational Alex Harvey Band – the man in the jar

Straight outa Glasgow, and not just a little glam, but you would not want to mess with any of them.

Rolling Stones – fingerprint file

74 was not a great year for the Stones with Keith Richard heroin comatose pretty much the whole time and Mick Taylor (the best player they ever had) calling it quits. Yet they still nailed it big time with Fingerprint File.  All secrecy. No privacy.

BTO – not fragile

Big meat eating, truck driving riffs and melodies that rocked pretty much the whole world. Nothing pretty about any of it …

ELO – boy blue + Laredo tornado

ELO finally just went all the way technicolour with their fourth album, the concept known as El Dorado. These two flowed nicely together through the middle of side A.

10CC – Wall Street Shuffle

Blood sucking brokers ripping the whole world off, laughing all the way to hell and back. Some things never change.

Genesis – The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway [an extended Movie of the Week]

It’s hard to grasp now, but forty years ago Genesis were pretty much the epitome of strange and complex cool, with the four-sided Lamb Lies Down on Broadway (Peter Gabriel’s last album with the band) believed by many to be one of the genuine monsters of the so-called prog-rock genre, by many others to be simply monstrous.

What’s it about? To be honest, we’re pretty sure not even Peter Gabriel knows, and he wrote the lyrics.  That said, it seems to begin with an apocalypse of sorts. On Broadway. But nobody notices except Rael. Who’s Rael? He’s the (sort of) punk hero of the thing, whose weird adventures will take us deep into subterranean regions of mystery, pleasure, torment and lifeless packaging.

What’s the significance of the lamb? Not much, it seems.

Meanwhile from out of the steam a lamb lies down. This lamb has nothing whatsoever to do with Rael, or any other lamb. It just lies down on Broadway.