Table of Contents

The 20th of February 1974

Official U.K. Albums Chart results from Sunday the 17th to Saturday the 23rd of February 1974

Cut-off for sales figures was up to the end of Saturday the 16th of February

Results counted from Sunday the 17th,

and published on Wednesday the 20th of February 1974.

The Who

Quadrophenia

At No.48, on the “The Top 50 U.K. Album Chart”, the week of my 2nd Birthday, are The Who with Quadrophenia.

An absolute monster…

…of an album resides this week at this position.

The culmination of over a years hard work and passion, from the aching heart and and deep soul of Pete Townshend, from which emerges the story of the tortured mod protagonist Jimmy, created from the traits of the members of the band, tied in with the life stories of six of the group’s most devoted followers, to conceive a four-way super-sonic soundscape playing on the schizophrenia-laden psychological emergence from the quadrilateral discomfort, distortion, desperation and destructiveness during the developing young years of life, with the finding of oneself in all the madness, through to the advancement into their own self-discovery, and maturity.

The power of Four.

A Four-way split personality of a troubled adolescent, told by the collective Four members of the band performing at their absolute peak, running through Four sides of a double album, with a Forty-Two page book included to put pictures to the words and music.

With the word quadraphonic being banded round a lot in the music industry at this time as a way to push the boundaries in the High Fidelity landscape, which had less than ten years previously expanded the norm in popular music from one channel to two, and was now attempting to double that again to immerse the audiophile with four, and with Townshend’s angst-ridden schizoid protagonist coming to the fore (little play with words there), the title of the album (not in quadraphonic, but in stereo at this time I may add) and concept was welded together to make a new term; which, although not quite entering into the Oxford English Dictionary, it had nonetheless embedded itself into mainstream Rock and Pop culture.

The Album…

…had first shot straight into the chart at No.2 last autumn on the 11th of November 1973, where it sat solidly for a fortnight behind an album which is currently now sitting a little further up this same chart at No.31.

It would end up spending just over a month in the Top 10, before gradually reversing back through the numbers, until it drops out altogether after the 2nd of this current month.

This week it re-enters back into the chart.

From here…

…the album will disappear once again after this week and it will be over twenty years before it appears once again, now in the new mid-chart positions in the fully expanded Top 100, this time newly remastered under the Polydor label, on the last day of June 1996, where it will stay for a fortnight and slip away mid-July.

Another 15 years will pass, fully now into the new century and millennium, where it reappears once again, in a multitude of different formats (including a deluxe box set which this time includes a multi-channel mix), this time near the end of November 2011, again mid-chart, for one solitary week.

So far, the final appearance for this album will be another few years along, where it fills three lower chart placements, again in the summer months of 2015 (this time with an added streaming option), from the 28th of June through to the 16th of July, from where, so far, it hasn’t returned in its original glory; yet.