The whole world sang together in 1967 and we’re still singing now

When you’re looking for music’s greatest year, the obvious candidate has nothing to do with data

What was the best year for music? It is, of course, an almost impossible question. The British Phonographic Institute’s attempts to answer it by analysing all the music streamed in the past year (and coming up with the best for each decade) ignores the fact that the way we consume and care about it is far too subjective to be reduced to such empirical measurements.

But if we were really going to try to pick one year above all others, there is an obvious candidate.

The Sixties was the decade when pop music and youth culture coalesced in an explosive surge of creativity, introducing sounds, styles and fashions that influenced everything that followed.

Pop gripped the psyche of the world as never before, turning distinctions between high and low culture on their head.

And 1967 was the year when pop became a serious art form, in ways that we take for granted today. One group and one album stood out: The Beatles’ masterpiece Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, a psychedelic cornucopia of delights including Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds and A Day in the Life that exploded the parameters of what a song could be.

Its impact was phenomenal and probably unrepeatable: the most famous entertainment figures in the world making music of a kind no one had ever heard before.

But The Beatles were not working in isolation. They were responding to shifts in the counterculture.

Because 1967 was the year when what we now think of as alternative rock took shape.

There were debuts from such era-defining talents as Jimi Hendrix, the Velvet Underground, Pink Floyd, Cream and The Doors, whose frontman Jim Morrison provided a new shamanic model of what a rock star could be.

The pop singles charts were on fire, too.

The psychedelic influence of the hippie scene on America’s West Coast resulted in beautiful confections such as Scott Mckenzie’s San Francisco, and, in the UK, Procol Harum’s haunting A Whiter Shade of Pale with its gorgeous baroque accompaniment, a sort of hymn to the Flower Power era.

It was a thrilling time for black American artists, with Motown churning out unbeatably joyous hits from Marvin Gaye, The Supremes, The Four Tops, Stevie Wonder and Smokey Robinson.

Meanwhile, James Brown was pioneering a new form of devastatingly thrilling dance music with the supertight groove of Cold Sweat, the original funk record. Aretha Franklin reached No1 with feminist anthem Respect.

Janis Joplin arrived to demonstrate that women could rock just as hard (and, sadly, just as self-destructively) as men with Big Brother & The Holding Company.

On a more interior side, Bob Dylan enjoyed a reflective interlude with his album John Wesley Harding while a wave of sensitive singer-songwriters emerged including Simon & Garfunkel, Leonard Cohen, Van Morrison and Joni Mitchell, whose influence has pervaded every acoustic troubadour ever since. And yes, kids, that includes Lewis Capaldi.

1967 may not be your own particular pop year, but it is a year that touched and shaped everything that followed.

Not content with releasing just one groundbreaking masterpiece a year, The Beatles appeared on television’s first-ever global satellite broadcast performing their anthem All You Need Is Love.

You could say that the whole world sang together for the first time in 1967. We’re still singing, 53 years on.

‘It may not be your particular pop year but it touched and shaped everything that followed’