These were the songs you heard on Radio 1, during Saturday-night TV, at youth clubs, down the pub and even emanating from your parents' record player. I, and many, others would contend that the 1970s is the greatest era of recorded popular music, where everything from reggae to rock reached its apogee - and the records just sound better - but here giants like Bowie and Roxy Music are mere background figures, over shadowed by the hit machines of Slade and Sweet.

Stereo Review magazine opined that “The emotional connection between the Carpenters and their songs is about as strong as my last resolution to stop smoking. Will Hodgkinson said: “I had a simple goal with In Perfect Harmony: to take seriously the singalong pop of 70s Britain, which so far has not been taken seriously at all. Someone needed to find out why Merry Xmas Everybody by Slade became the people's anthem in the age of the Three Day Week.There's a fair and decent case to be made for Slade's strikingly coiffured and perma-grinning guitarist Dave Hill as the greatest rock star ever. Singalong pop in ’70s Britain is a massive subject, especially given the constant juxtaposition of the music and the historical context.

Rampant inflation, perpetual strikes, fuel shortages, pollution, nuclear threats and racial tension – sounds familiar doesn’t it? In Perfect Harmony takes the reader on a journey through the most colour-saturated decade in music, examining the core themes and camp spectacle of '70s singalong pop, as well as its reverberations through British culture since.

However, this is also a decade which is remembered with nostalgia and fondness (even if it may be a little rose-tinted) by those who were there, and this is, to a large degree, down to the music. The story of how Kenny Everett’s constant lampooning of the Bee Gees proved to be “…the death knell for the band who took disco to the masses as a serious proposition for years to come. Will Hodgkinson is author of the music books Guitar Man, Song Man, The Ballad of Britain and the childhood memoir The House is Full of Yogis. It’s all very well for pretentious rock snobs like me to prattle on about Gram Parsons, Big Star, or even The Clash, but that’s not what people were really listening to in the 1970s. If you are fortunate enough to be too youthful to have experienced all this first hand, the book provides an atmospheric and faithful insight into our relatively recent past with all the lessons, learnt or not, held therein.