Ten From Then: Ep 6 1976

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After a week off, the Melochronometer was once again pressed into service and we watched it steam and struggle and spin, finally settling on 1976. What a place to land. Three weeks into the year, Concorde carried its first paying passengers — Air France out of Paris and British Airways out of London, taking off at the same moment so neither could claim to be first. On the first of April Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak formed a company in California and called it Apple; their first computer sold for six hundred and sixty-six dollars and sixty-six cents US, because Steve Wozniak liked repeating digits. In July a fourteen-year-old Romanian gymnast scored a perfect ten at the Montreal Olympics, and the scoreboard, never built for such a thing, showed “1.00”. Closer to home, on the seventh of June, more than a hundred people queued outside a former squash court in Porirua for the opening of New Zealand’s first McDonald’s — a Big Mac was seventy-five cents. In September the Rangatira made the last Lyttelton-to-Wellington sailing of the steamer express, ending eighty-odd years of the overnight ferry. And on the charts, it was ABBA’s year: four New Zealand number ones in twelve months, with “Fernando” the biggest single of them all.

The records, as ever, are the reason to come back. This ten-song trip has a marimba solo that four hundred radio stations promised to play and mostly didn’t, a song David Bowie always insisted he’d written for somebody far more famous than himself, and a band who advertised for a new singer, auditioned four hundred people and found him closer to home than they expected. There’s a producer who turns up twice in the hour without you noticing; a man who’d been pronounced dead on the way to hospital eighteen years earlier, finally getting the pop hit that had eluded him for nearly twenty years; and a number one that was written in a single afternoon, straight after a company picnic. There’s a song first cut as a B-side back in 1971 that got re-recorded because somebody kept crediting it to the wrong man, and a group of session players who’d shortly stop playing on other people’s hits and start having their own. And if you hear a Soviet baritone singing with no words at all somewhere between the songs, that’s our little joke — but it turns out he’s more on-theme than he knows. Ten songs, one year, and a reminder that in 1976 the best records were made by people who kept turning up to each other’s sessions.