(Credits: Far Out / Atlantic Records / Tamla)
Sun 26 October 2025 18:30, UK
It takes years for a movement to be born; it takes a few moments for one to die. There were just two days between the end of Woodstock and The Beatles’ last recording session together. Then boom went the 1960s.
So sudden was this curtailment of the peace and love age, as the Manson Murders substituted these default nouns with paranoia and loathing, that the one who followed felt flush with idiosyncrasies. In all of its magnificent glory, the 1970s wasn’t a movement inasmuch as it was a series of subversive statements.
This felt particularly apparent within classic rock. Was it really classic rock now? What had it become? And what, exactly, was leading the charge? Well, that would all become apparent in the spring and summer of 1973, in a few months’ span, when three British titans tried to take the mantle for the soul of new rock ‘n’ roll.
It began as a two-way battle in the album charts. On March 1st, Pink Floyd presented an enigmatic prism to the world. Dark Side of the Moon emerged as an oddity at first. Up until this point, the band had been floundering since Syd Barrett’s departure. They simply knew that they had to follow on his colourful legacy in some way, and when they crafted this classic, it felt as though they had finally found a new era, fit for the masses.
“When the record was finished I took a reel-to-reel copy home with me and I remember playing it for my wife then, and I remember her bursting into tears when it was finished. And I thought, ‘This has obviously struck a chord somewhere’, and I was kinda pleased by that,” Roger Waters recalled to Billboard.
“You know when you’ve done something,” he continued, “certainly if you create a piece of music, you then hear it with fresh ears when you play it for somebody else. And at that point I thought to myself, ‘Wow, this is a pretty complete piece of work’, and I had every confidence that people would respond to it.”
But what had they created? Well, “complete” would be the operative word. The album married structured songwriting with a cohesive concept, revolutionary production from Alan Parsons, intellectual philosophy, and bold instrumentation to create an audiophile’s dream. Coinciding with a time when FM radio was suddenly around to give more expansive ideas some airtime, the soaring record seemed to define a new age in music.
But they weren’t alone. While Dark Side of the Moon might have eventually held the wild record of staying in the charts for a whopping 741 consecutive weeks, peculiarly, it debuted in the US at 95. The band had envisaged the album as a complete suite, and didn’t release any singles beforehand as a result. It was a come-hither statement towards a new sound revolution.
David Gilmour cutting guitar tracks for Dark Side of the Moon. (Credits: Far Out / Alamy / Pink Floyd Music LTD)
But they weren’t the only band trying these tricks. Led Zeppelin, similarly, only released 15 singles in their entire run as a band. And in March ‘73, they were also readying their bid to seal the soul of new rock ‘n’ roll. Houses of the Holy followed on from a giant run of four classic records. Led Zeppelin IV was always going to be hard to beat – it remains one of the best-selling albums of all time – so they decided not the even bother.
Instead, they expanded their sound. With flourishes of reggae and funk on tracks like ‘D’yer Mak’er’ and ‘The Crunge’ respectively, and billowing orchestration on the anthemic ‘The Rain Song’, inspired by George Harrison’s advice to write a ballad, the band looked to be “complete” in a different way. The album is an assembly of disparate influences, tied together succinctly by the band’s own bluderbuss power.
In short, it said if you can play anything, you can be anything, so they did, and they were, while never losing sight of their raw power and the roots of rock ‘n’ roll that undercut the storm. Once again, that took some getting used to. This was not a typical ‘burst on the scene’ chart battle, but rather rogue riders racing forth from the back of the field.
Despite also being released in March in the US, the album wouldn’t rise to the top spot until May, in a sequence that saw Dark Side of the Moon hold the mantle for a solitary week before Elvis Presley swept in with Aloha from Hawaii before the King was promptly dethroned too, and Led Zeppelin planted themselves on top of the podium or two weeks, before the former Beatles locked horns with Paul McCartney and Wings holding the fort for three weeks with Red Rose Speedway, and the George Harrison for five with Living in the Material World.
Alas, it was clear from these two respective efforts that the Fab Four had firmly left rock ‘n’ roll in the most proverbial sense behind. The Rolling Stones, however, had not. And in August, they also tried to supplant themselves as the true owners of its soul. Goats Head Soup saw the band relocate to Jamaica, but if anything, the flourish of reggae brought them back to their roots.
The band had faced fierce backlash over the Altamont tragedy, and in a make-or-break moment, they decided to soften their raucous sentiment to some degree. For a while, it was unclear whether it had worked. Once again, their rise to number one was a laboured one, finally dismantling Chicago a month after their release.
With ballads like ‘Angie’, it was, to some extent, a more mature album. But it seemed that is how rock ‘n’ roll albums would have to be moving forward, as the younger generations attempted to subvert rather than follow suit. And in the process, the band commercially dominated, making it clear that the old guard would always have a future, as is patently still the case today.
But what did it all mean?
Arriving hot on the heels of each other, these albums might not have jostled or backstabbed in the manner of Blur and Oasis, each securing a number one in the long run, but they did represent rock ‘n’ roll somewhat, splitting into three pillars that still remain to some degree: experimentation and conceptualising, heaviness and polish, and old school riffs.
Perhaps the most glaring footnote of it all: the album that held the top spot for the longest in ‘73 was Goodbye Yellow Brick Road by Elton John, adding the final caveat that, despite the classics, maybe rock ‘n’ roll’s being the paramount art form had been replaced by pop?
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