Exclusive Shindig! Qobuz playlist #7: Ambition – Pop Music In The Progressive Era: 1968-75

We’re very excited to be media partners with the truly unique online streaming platform and download store Qobuz. The seventh of our monthly bespoke playlists, which take in all manner of genres and sub-genres, scenes and beyond, then and now, focuses on the kind of pop and rock made by one time stars, commercial artists and mavericks alike across the late ’60s and mid-70s

“Ambition”. Meaning: Strong desire for achievement, advancement, or honour.

Pop music certainly got more ambitious after Brian Wilson conceived Pet Sounds and Paul McCartney ‘Eleanor Rigby’, but it had always thrown a spanner in the works, dating right back to the earliest days of recorded music. Perhaps it was the boundaryless film music that emerged across the ’40s and ’50s devoid of time or place, notably the songs of Water Schumann and Davis Grubb in the 1955 movie Night Of The Hunter that brought folk, classical and the avant-garde into what on the face of it was just popular song, but let’s not get too deep. This collection focuses predominantly on solo British artists, both male and female singers, plus a couple of ensembles, following the evolution of psychedelia into progressive. In short, the four hours of music that lay ahead are what happened when “pop went progressive” and on occasion, “folk bands got funky” or “pop singers were unknowingly backed by both heavily orchestrated arrangements or the trippy and profound.”

© Jon ‘Mojo’Mills /Shindig! magazine in partnership with Qobuz