British Steel: How UK rock got ever harder, heavier and more metallic in the '70s

ROCK CRITICS HAD IT ALL PLANNED: music during the Seventies would become increasingly sophisticated. By dint of hard reviewing all folly would be removed, leaving a core of beaty but adult fare, stripped of vulgarity, pretension and innocence. In some ways the aims of such critics were laudable in the context of Dylan, Van Morrison and Joni Mitchell. Rock had been taken up by intellectuals who saw it as part of a wider philosophical movement. But this left virtually disenfranchised a large section of the populace for whom rock music was all about excitement, human contact and raw energy.