1966

The year of [B]'Pet Sounds'...

The year of ‘Pet Sounds’, the year of ‘Otis Blue’, the year of ‘Revolver’, the year of ‘Blonde On Blonde’ and ‘Fifth Dimension’ and ‘Aftermath’…the album (still referred to as “the long player”) had come into its own with the Lennon/McCartney and the Brian Wilson axis pushing things forward in a game of one upmanship.

John Lennon upset the God botherers in America by saying that The Beatles were bigger than Jesus. But the best music was coming from America; Motown was producing an unbroken stream of hit records while on the West Coast bands like Big Brother & The Holding Company, Buffalo Springfield, The Byrds and The Doors joined the boom spearheaded by the Airplane and the Dead.

Album of the year: Between ‘Revolver’ and ‘Pet Sounds’ and I’m buggered if I can decide that one after 33 years…

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Single of the year: ‘These Boots Are Made For Walkin’Nancy Sinatra

Band of the year: The Beatles

1966 belonged to: Swingin’ London

Key event of the year: The Beatles invent The Chemical Brothers with ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’

Gone: The Beatles stop playing live ‘cos no-one can hear them Across America, a generation of teenage punks with bowl haircuts, paisley shirts and bad cases of acne were churning out a wealth of garage-band rock, influenced by the British beat boom given their own distinctive sound by the application of bad attitudes, cheap drugs and production involving all the needles in the red and the reverb up full.

? And The Mysterians enjoyed a national hit with ’96 Tears’ as did The Shadows Of Knight with their seminal cover of Them‘s ‘Gloria’.

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In the real world…apparently England won the World Cup. You’d think they’d have made more of it, going on about it all the time…

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