1970 TIMELINE

JANUARY 4 KEITH MOON ACCIDENTALLY KILLS HIS CHAUFFEUR

The looning takes on a darker tone when the wildman Who drummer runs down his chauffeur while escaping a drunken mob surrounding his Bentley outside a Hertfordshire pub. Neil Boland’s death is ruled an accident, but the episode haunts the drummer for the final eight years of his life. “Nobody actually pointed a finger at him and said: ‘You killed your best friend’,” said Pete Townshend. “But that was the thing that went through his head.”

JANUARY 16 JOHN LENNON’S “SICK” ART EXHIBITION IS SHUT DOWN

Police raid John Lennon’s Bag One

“Nobody actually pointed a finger at him and said: ‘You killed your best friend.’”

exhibition at the London Arts Gallery, after being told by a local magistrate that the exhibition includes nude sketches depicting the Beatle and new wife Yoko Ono on honeymoon.

“Many toilet walls depict works of similar merit,” notes Detective Inspector Frederick Luff. “It is perhaps charitable to suggest that they are the work of a sick mind.”

JANUARY 23 PINK FLOYD RISE, SYD BARRETT FALLS

In the same month that estranged Floyd frontman Syd Barrett crawls to UK No.40 with his debut solo album The Madcap Laughs, his former bandmates perform their forthcoming and future-sounddefining album Atom Heart Mother at the Theatre Des Champs Élysées in Paris (billed as The Amazing Pudding).

FEBRUARY 14

THE WHO RECORD LIVE AT LEEDS

Winding down the Tommy world tour, The Who record a career-best show in the university’s student refectory (Roger Daltrey: “It was packed to the rafters and then some. I heard there were a thousand fans on the roof”). On a good day for seminal live albums, the Grateful Dead also record Dick’s Picks Volume Four at the

Fillmore East.

FEBRUARY 22 DAVID BOWIE RAIDS THE DRESSING-UP BOX

Looking to shake off Space Oddity, and flood the scene’s “denim hell” with colour, David Bowie’s new band The Hype debut at London’s Roundhouse. The line-up – Bowie, guitarist Mick Ronson, drummer John Cambridge and producer Tony Visconti on bass – adopt superhero personas

“It was packed to the rafters and then some. I heard there were a thousand fans on the roof.”

and costumes, but Bowie is crushed by the early reaction. “We thought we were kind of smart,” he said, “but nobody even looked at the stage.”

FEBRUARY 28 LED ZEPPELIN’S BALLOON IS BURST

For one night only, Led Zeppelin are billed as The Nobs in Copenhagen, after Danish heiress Eva Von Zeppelin – already enraged by the flaming airship depicted on the debut album’s sleeve – threatens legal action if the band use her family name on home turf. Jimmy Page shrugs off the incident as “absurd”, but John Bonham is keen to continue with the name: “Just think what our album covers could have looked like!”

MARCH 19 DAVID BOWIE MARRIES ANGIE

The low-key ceremony at Bromley Registry Office is chiefly to secure Cyprusborn Mary Angela Barnett a work permit, and has not a sniff of romance. “David had told me before we married: ‘I don’t love you,’” the actress and model said, “and we had enjoyed an open relationship from the start. We had a threesome on the night before our wedding.” For his own part, Bowie will later describe their coupling as “like living with a blowtorch”.

APRIL 10 PAUL McCARTNEY BREAKS UP THE BEATLES

John Lennon and George Harrison have previously quit – and rejoined – before Macca’s self-penned Q&A to promote his first solo album cites the band’s “personal differences, business differences, musical differences… I have a better time with my family.” Although he never explicitly called time on the band, the Daily Mirror swiftly whips up a story that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy (“Paul Quits

“We had a threesome

on the night before our wedding.”

The Beatles”). “I think it was the press who misunderstood,” McCartney reflected in Anthology.

APRIL 11

PETER GREEN GOES OFF THE RAILS

Having told NME in February that he plans to give away all his earnings, Fleetwood Mac’s troubled leader is easy prey for a Munich hippie cult when the band are playing in Germany, and the fallout from his acid trip at their local commune effectively ends his time in the band he started (although he plays on until May in order to avoid breach of contract). “We called them the German jet set,” recalled Mac drummer Mick Fleetwood. “They captured Peter completely and pulled him away. He was already set to leave, pretty much. But my god, this was like the final nail in the coffin.”

MAY 8 THE BEATLES ALBUM LET IT BE IS RELEASED

The uneven product of ill-tempered sessions, The Beatles’ swansong release tops the UK chart, but press response is brutal. Leading the catcalls, NME ’s Alan Smith hisses that “if the new Beatles soundtrack is to be their last then it will stand as a cheapskate epitaph, a cardboard tombstone, a sad and tatty end to a musical fusion which wiped clean and drew again the face of pop”.

JUNE 3 THE KINKS’ RAY DAVIES LEAVES HIS CARBON FOOTPRINT

Hearing a tip-off that British radio stations intend to ban the Kinks’ make-or-break single Lola due to the mention of ‘Coca-Cola’ (the BBC on the grounds

“They captured Peter completely and pulled him away. He was already set to leave.”

“By the time Jimi got to Atlanta, there was a new confidence in him.”

of product placement, other stations for its supposed drugs reference), the bandleader makes the round trip from New York to London – and back – just to change the lyric to the less contentious ‘cherry cola’.

JUNE 27-29 BATH FESTIVAL OF BLUES AND PROGRESSIVE MUSIC

Promoter Freddy Bannister pulls off what might be the best pound-forpound festival bill in history, with the Royal Bath And West Showground hosting Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Santana, The Byrds, Jefferson Airplane, Johnny Winter, John Mayall with Peter Green, Canned Heat and many more (with Genesis, Yes and Hawkwind playing unofficially in an adjoining field).

JULY 3-5 ATLANTA INTERNATIONAL POP FESTIVAL

Not to be outdone, the Americans hit back with the ‘southern Woodstock’, featuring the Allman Brothers Band, BB King, Mott The Hoople and, most of all, Jimi Hendrix, his status as a black headliner in the cradle of the civil rights movement not to be sniffed at, and his set signposting a musical future that – spoiler alert – would never happen. “By the time Jimi got to Atlanta, there was a new confidence in him,” says producer Eddie Kramer. “He was ready to break through to the next stage.”

AUGUST 3 MICK CHEATS ON KEITH IN THE FILM PERFORMANCE

Critics of the time skewer the violence and squalor of Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg’s “pretentious and repellent little film”, loosely based on a co-habiting gangster (James Fox) and a faded rock star (Mick Jagger). Although Anita

Pallenberg is Keith Richards’s girlfriend, the explicit sex scenes between her and Jagger are rumoured to be real. “Cammell wanted to fuck me up, because he [Jagger] had been with Anita before,” Keith will write decades later in his autobiography,

Life. “Clearly, he took a delight in the idea that he was screwing things up between us.”

AUGUST PHIL COLLINS JOINS GENESIS

After answering a Melody

Maker small-ad requesting a drummer “sensitive to acoustic music”, Collins arrives at Peter Gabriel’s sprawling family pile in Surrey, and immediately lowers the tone by jumping into the swimming pool “in just my greying Y-fronts”. Despite the class divide, the drummer impresses. “These are ‘Phil Collins jumps into Peter Gabriel’s swimming pool “in just my greying Y-fronts”.’ tightly wound public schoolboys. They will, they say gravely, ‘let me know’. I later learn that Peter knew the moment I sat down that I was the guy.”

AUGUST 14 STEPHEN STILLS IS ARRESTED

Having been found crawling along the corridor of a San Diego motel, the guitarist is incoherent, aggressive with police officers and in possession of cocaine and barbiturates. At the resulting court appearance, his $1,000 fine is reduced to a ‘misdemeanour’, and David Crosby’s status as CSN’s troublemaker-inchief continues unchallenged.

AUGUST 23 LOU REED TRIES THE NINE-TO-FIVE

After his final show with the Velvet Underground, in New York, Reed is collected by his

“Well first of all, Jim did not pull it out… But it was bedlam, just total craziness.”

parents from Max’s Kansas City and returns to the family home in Long Island. He will spend the next two years working as a typist at his father’s accountancy firm, on a weekly wage of $40.

AUGUST 26 DUANE ALLMAN DUETS WITH ERIC CLAPTON

With a newly solo Clapton recording at Miami’s Criteria Studios, the doomed god of southern slide guitar drops in to play on

Layla’s weeping twin-lead outro. “I tried to get Duane to leave the Allmans,” Clapton reflects. “But he said he had to be loyal to what he called ‘the family’.”

SEPTEMBER 18 JIMI HENDRIX KISSES THE SKY

Throughout the year, the guitarist has given hints at his darkening head-space, making doomy statements from the stage (“I’ve been dead a long time”), walking off mid-set and abusing audiences in Seattle. Now, after leaving a tragic message on his former manager Chas Chandler’s answering machine (“I need help bad, man”), Hendrix is pronounced dead on arrival at St. Mary Abbot’s Hospital in London. Whether you believe the pathologist’s official verdict (inhalation of vomit due to barbiturate intoxication) or the murder allegations of roadie James ‘Tappy’ Wright, the greatest guitarist of the era is gone.

SEPTEMBER 20 MIAMI CATCHES UP WITH JIM MORRISON

In a litigious year for live performance – Janis Joplin and Jefferson Airplane have already been fined $200 and $1,000 respectively for on-stage profanity – the Doors frontman is charged with indecent exposure and profanity at the previous

“The truth is that Janis didn’t overdose. I will go to my grave believing that.”

year’s infamous show the band played in Miami (although not the charge of ‘lewd and lascivious behaviour’). “Well first of all, Jim did not pull it out [in Miami],” says Doors guitarist Robby Krieger. “But it was bedlam, just total craziness.”

OCTOBER 4

JANIS JOPLIN CHECKS OUT

The track-marked, troubled singer is found dead at Hollywood’s Landmark Hotel, on the same day that she is due to record the vocal for the track Buried Alive In

The Blues. It was assumed to be a heroin overdose, but close friend Peggy Caserta will offer the theory in her 2018 memoir that Joplin went out to the hotel lobby to buy cigarettes, then on her return tripped and fell, breaking her nose which resulted in her dying of asphyxiation. “The truth is that she didn’t overdose. I will go to my grave believing that.”

OCTOBER 10 BLACK SABBATH’S PARANOID ALBUM HITS UK NO.1

Heavy metal is officially up and running as Sabbath’s second album tops the UK chart (it will be another 43 years before they repeat the feat). But it could all have been very different, Tony Iommi told MusicRadar, had the band’s paymasters not sent them back to the studio. “The label suddenly said: ‘You don’t have enough songs.’ Within a few minutes I came up with the riff to Paranoid.”

OCTOBER 12

IAN GILLAN FINDS GOD

The Deep Purple frontman sings the title role on the original studio album of Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s

Jesus Christ Superstar, but he won’t be tempted into appearing in the stage

production. “I didn’t think about it for more than a half-hour,” Gillan told the

Jerusalem Post. “Here I was, in Deep Purple, the band I always dreamed of playing with. I wasn’t going to jeopardise it for a run on the West End or twelve weeks on location filming the movie.”

NOVEMBER 9 BADFINGER WRITE THE ULTIMATE POWER-BALLAD Pete Ham and Tom Evans’s pain-racked

Without You is a highlight of Badfinger’s

No Dice

album, and will later be covered by Harry Nilsson and Mariah Carey, earning millions. But Ham and Evans will never be rewarded financially for its success, and the wrangling over royalties is thought to be a key factor in their suicides.

DECEMBER 6

GIMME SHELTER

HITS CINEMAS Opening in New York, the Rolling Stones tour documentary is most notable for its candid footage from Altamont. Fallout from the disastrous 1969 concert has followed the band into the new decade; in February they are sued for £375,000 by local residents for causing damage to the land, while on October 26 the mother of murdered teenager Meredith Hunter files a £28,000 law suit. ‘The Rolling Stones are sued for £375,000 by local residents.’

DECEMBER 12 THE LAST DOORS CONCERT WITH JIM MORRISON

Controversial to the last, Morrison’s final act on a stage is to smash his mic stand through the floor, bringing to an early close a New Orleans show already marred by forgotten lyrics and meandering anecdotes. The band weigh up their option, and elect to retire from live work. “We couldn’t play anywhere, we were fucked because of the Miami incident,” Robby Krieger said later.