The Jimi Hendrix Concerts

Led Zeppelin III – Audio Cassette

If you regress, reverse-chronologically through the 1970s, it’s all very trend-led until you rewind prior to the beginning of glam rock. Then you drop into a sort of crisis of direction in which a lot of the decade’s potential stars aren’t really sure where they’re going. You’ve reached the year 1970, and you’ll be hearing a lot of folk influence, as the overdriven blast of the late 1960s reaches its first “have we gone too far?” moment.

Route to Fame: The Band Demo Tape

In the UK, we might today be tempted to think of the delusional pop star dream as something that was manufactured in some truly evil phonecall between Nigel Lythgoe and Simon Fuller – cunningly wiretapped by Simon Cowell.

But it’s a dream that goes back a lot further than the early 2000s. Right through the heyday of audio tape cassettes, it was possible to find hopeless hopefuls throwing good money at the dartboard of fame, and missing not just the bullseye, or indeed the board, but the entire wall. And actually, if anyone, or anything, sparked that delusion, it was probably punk…