Monthly Highlights Update: March 2024

It's one week into March and so it comes time to update our monthly highlights!

Last month we celebrated the anniversary of The Beatles' record breaking debut appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964. We focused on the 1964 US releases of three classic British Invasion albums, including Meet The Beatles, The Rolling Stones' England's Newest Hitmakers, and The Kinks self titled debut, known in the States as You Really Got Me.

This month we are featuring a slightly less well known music milestone. On 30th March 1974, US Punk band the Ramones played live for an audience for the first time, at New York's Performance Studios. The success of the Ramones would soon become a springboard for the frantic, unruly genre of Punk Rock, starting out in the US before spreading over into Britain. What followed is one of the most chronicled periods of popular music history, in which musicians started to dye their hair, play badly on purpose, and swear on television, and seeing as we don't often feature Punk here at Rocking at the Hops, we decided to dedicate this month's highlights to just that. And yes we are late, meaning that this month's highlights will last for slightly less time than the rest. This was unintentional, but we feel it suits the short-lived explosion of Punk quite well.

So this month we are focusing on three of the most controversial Punk Rock albums, from both the UK and US, released during the late 1970s, a time in which music was more about shocking the establishment than it was about the music itself. Head on over to the home page to check out which nasty bunch of Punk Rockers made the cut!