1976: Music, milestones and moments that mattered

Those painful details became the basis of one of disco’s great songs of liberation — an irresistibly upbeat record built from a very real desire to escape.

Another track worth rediscovering is The Real Thing’s You To Me Are Everything. The Liverpool group took the song to number one in Britain during the famously hot summer of 1976, becoming the first all-Black British group to top the UK singles chart. At its peak, the band says the single was selling around 30,000 copies a day.

Away from music, 1976 was extraordinary. On January 21, British Airways operated its first commercial Concorde service, from London to Bahrain, taking supersonic passenger travel from futuristic dream to reality. Then, on July 20, NASA’s Viking 1 successfully landed on Mars and began returning images from the planet’s surface — exactly seven years after Apollo 11’s Moon landing.

Closer to home, June 16 changed South African history. Thousands of Soweto schoolchildren marched in protest against the use of Afrikaans as a medium of instruction. Police opened fire on the students, and the uprising quickly became a major turning point in resistance to apartheid.

Cinema was having quite a year too. Audiences encountered Robert De Niro’s Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver, while Carrie brought Stephen King’s horror to the big screen. Before the year was out, Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky would arrive and become a cultural phenomenon.

Did You Know?

ABBA performed Dancing Queen at Stockholm’s Royal Swedish Opera on June 18, 1976 — at a televised gala honouring King Carl XVI Gustaf and Silvia Sommerlath, who were getting married the very next day.

The song had not even been released as a single yet. ABBA appeared in extravagant baroque costumes, making one of pop music’s most famous “queen” songs part of an actual royal celebration.

And while 1976 was producing one generation of pop classics, two future Spice Girls were just arriving. Melanie C was born in January, followed just days later by Emma Bunton. Two decades on, they would become Sporty Spice and Baby Spice as the Spice Girls turned Wannabe into a global phenomenon and helped define pop music in the 1990s.

From disco floors to Mars, Soweto to supersonic flight, 1976 packed an astonishing amount into twelve months — and its music still sounds remarkably alive fifty years later.