Anthony (Stranger by Starlight)
SPB: What is your favorite 1970s artist?
Anthony: It's incredibly difficult to pick a favourite artist, album or even track from the entirety of the 1970s, so many things spring immediately to mind, all of which deserve to be mentioned: Leonard Cohen, The Stooges, Amon Duul II and Ash Ra Temple, Gang of Four, Joy Division...my head spins even trying to decide amongst them.
There are two pieces which I most strongly want to choose, but neither were actually released in the ‘70s, despite both being written and premiered in that decade.
Arvo Part - Cantus in Memoriam of Benjamin Britten
Henryk Gorecki - Symphony No.3
Both of these pieces of music make time stand still, but considering the fact that neither had wide exposure until a decade or so later...perhaps they don't count.
So instead I've decided upon a track which was released at the very tail end of the ‘70s, and set a benchmark for the decade to follow. It's also the first vinyl I ever asked my father to play, at the age of around 5. To me it symbolises both my own musical awakening and my family's influence in my life.
Bauhaus - Bela Lugosi's Dead.
Eugene: I can do one better...though this was the next to last decade when the album really ruled supreme and behind that the auteurs that created it, anticipating where music would go I am going to bypass my faves -- Eddie & the Hotrods, Lydia Lunch, Prince, the Plasmatics -- and instead not only focus on one act but one SONG and that song is a cover of Spencer Davis Group's "I'm a Man" by the Italian-French-American group MACHO. About 18 minutes of pure disco lunacy. Pre-AIDS, deep, deep disco. And total, total genius from many different perspectives.
