E933 - Joan Armatrading, Tom Robinson and the great music meltdown of Summer ‘76

The blistering heat of 1976 burnt various things onto the memory – standpipes, strikes, Entebbe, ‘Confessions’ movies, Jeremy Thorpe – but most of all the records that became its soundtrack, some of them revolutionary, others begging for extinction. John L Williams captures the moment in ‘Heatwave: the Summer of 1976, Britain at Boiling Point’ and a paints of picture of a country on the brink of a vast pop-cultural shift. We talk to him here about …

… violence at gigs and football and on Derek & Clive albums

… dumb people pretending to be clever (prog rock) and clever people preten...