I don’t believe that there has ever been a year for popular music to match 1970. The sheer range of stuff released that year was astonishing. There were gentle ballads like James Taylor singing ‘Fire and Rain’, as well as heavier music by Black Sabbath and Deep Purple. A lot of this music went on to become the soundtrack to the seventies, defining that time in a very distinctive way. I know that there were popular albums and singers in the 1980s and 1990s, but the seventies seem to have been something special like that and 1970 was the best year of all.