My 20 Favourite Instrumentals of the 70s

Earlier this year, I wrote a blog post about my 20 favourite classic rock instrumentals of the 60s in honour of Jeff Beck, one of his most famous instrumentals being “Beck’s Bolero”. While working out and listening to some music, I was thinking of making a sequel for that blog post for the 70s and a friend of mine suggested I go for it and so we have a sequel to that blog post.

Here are my rules and criteria. All of these instrumentals have to be released between 1970 and 1979 with each song being by a different musician and they can be any genre. On this blog we don’t just talk about the artists and songs played on classic rock radio, but really anything from the era. So you might find some R&B, funk, jazz, as well as rock of course! I don’t believe there’s any point in limiting yourself to a certain genre. Life is too short to limit yourself and you miss out if you have rigid music taste. These aren’t necessarily the most popular instrumentals either, but rather ones I like. I don’t like posting the same old, same old songs and only talking about those. I want to also share stuff that isn’t as popular, but definitely deserves a listen. Without further ado, let’s talk about my favourite instrumentals from the beginning to the end of the 70s. These will be in more or less chronological order, but not ranked. That’s too difficult and honestly, I love all of these instrumentals!

If you want to listen while you read the blog post, here’s the playlist of songs:

1. “Glad” – Traffic (1970)

The opening track to their comeback album of sorts John Barleycorn Must Die, it is one of my favourite opening tracks of all time. A couple years before the release of the album, Traffic temporarily disbanded and the band members went on to work on other projects with Dave Mason pursuing a solo career, Steve Winwood joining the supergroup Blind Faith, and Jim Capaldi and Chris Wood working as session musicians. Steve Winwood wanted to record a solo album and was set to, but he wanted to work with like-minded musicians, and who better to work with than old bandmates so he called them and everyone but Dave Mason came back and Traffic were back with a new sound! While the album got mixed reviews, it’s one I really like for its jazzy, proggy sound. I really like when bands try new things and psychedelia was out and prog rock was in. The first side of the album is phenomenal with the jazzy instrumental “Glad” as the opening track. “Freedom Rider” and “Empty Pages” are also great songs and as always, Steve Winwood’s vocals and organ playing are great.

2. “Unknown Song” – Pink Floyd (1970)

This instrumental was recorded for the 1970 Michelangelo Antonioni film Zabriskie Point, but ultimately didn’t make it into the soundtrack, hence the lack of a real title. It wasn’t released until 1997 on a bonus disc to the re-release of the soundtrack. It’s a beautiful, relaxing instrumental and I love this side of Pink Floyd so much. I remember hearing it on a playlist of Pink Floyd songs to relax and fall asleep to and when I heard this, I fell in love. Overall the music they recorded for Zabriskie Point is great, even if the movie was a commercial flop. I haven’t seen the movie so I can’t comment on that. This wasn’t the first movie Pink Floyd recorded music for. They also recorded songs for the soundtracks of The Committee and More in 1968 and 1969, respectively and “Interstellar Overdrive” was featured in the 1967 Peter Whitehead film Tonite Lets All Make Love In London. Of course, they would later on release a movie of their own Pink Floyd The Wall, which came out in 1982, starring Bob Geldof as Pink.

3. “Bryter Layter” – Nick Drake (1970)

Nick Drake’s discography is a very short, but good one and sadly he didn’t achieve the fame he deserved in his lifetime, but rather only got recognition and a cult following years after his death at the age of 26. Of the three studio albums he released, my favourite is Bryter Layter, considered his most polished album. Inspired by The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, Nick Drake bookended Bryter Layter with instrumentals and added an instrumental in the middle to link the songs together in a way and they’re all beautiful. My favourite instrumental is the title track.

4. “Outa-Space” – Billy Preston (1971)

This improvised instrumental is one of Billy Preston’s best known works. It nearly topped the Billboard pop charts, but Bill Withers’ “Lean On Me” kept it out of the top spot. However, it did top the R&B charts and it won the Grammy for Best Pop Instrumental Performance in 1972. The funky sound comes from a clavinet played through a wah-wah pedal. Interestingly enough, his record label didn’t think it would be a hit and made it the b-side to the title track “I Wrote a Simple Song”, but DJs preferred the b-side. Shows what record labels know!

5. “Clap” – Yes (1971)

The Yes Album is the first Yes album with Steve Howe on guitar, and overall one of my favourite Yes albums. He replaced their original guitarist Peter Banks in 1970. Howe made a lot of great contributions to the album and is considered one of classic rock’s best guitarists. Not convinced? Just listen to the instrumental “Clap”, which Jon Anderson erroneously referred to as “The Clap”. It was recorded live at the Lyceum Theatre in London on July 17, 1970. The guitar playing was influenced by Chet Atkins and Mason Williams’ “Classical Gas” and is considered a very difficult song to play on guitar. When playing it live in the 70s, he said that he wrote the instrumental for his son Dylan. He makes it look so easy. He’s such a great guitarist that Queen asked him to play a Spanish guitar solo on “Innuendo” and they insisted he play even though he thought they were crazy for asking him. If you want to hear that, go three and a half minutes in and there you go! It was hard to pick which Steve Howe instrumental to go with for this list, but if you loved “Clap”, you’ll also love the equally brilliant and beautiful “Mood For a Day” from Fragile, which has more of a Spanish guitar sound.

6. “Nutrocker” – ELP (1971)

I’m no fan of classical music. I find it boring! But when you mix classical with rock and roll, now that’s what I’m talking about. I love symphonic rock and progressive rock and ELP were one of the best at that sound. So many of their songs are based on classical compositions. I’m going to sound like a basic bitch, but my favourite instrumental of theirs is “Nutrocker”, based on Tchaikovsky’s “The Nutcracker” from 1892. Seventy years later, B. Bumble and The Stingers recorded a rock and roll version of this classical song and oddly enough it was bigger in the UK (topped the charts there) than in their native US, where it peaked at #23. The BBC historically had a ban on classical music parodies, but they let this one slide because of its overty novelty song status. Certainly the members of Emerson, Lake & Palmer were familiar with it and they covered it almost a decade later and in my opinion it’s much better than the B. Bumble and The Stingers version. It was the closing track of their live album Pictures at an Exhibition, which was a rock and roll take on Mossorgsky’s 10 movement suite from 1874.

7. “Sylvia” – Focus (1972)

While Focus are best known for the proto-metal with a bit of yodelling song “Hocus Pocus”, I like this song better and it was hard to pick between this one and “House of the King” to include on this list. There are some falsetto vocals from frontman Thijs van Leer, but for the most part this is instrumental and there are no lyrics so I’m counting it. Great guitar playing from Jan Akkerman. The song was composed in the late 60s when Thijs van Leer was in Ramses Shaffy’s backing band and he showed the composition to a singer named Sylvia Alberts with the long-winded title “I Thought I Could Do Everything On My Own, I Was Always Stripping The Town Alone”. She didn’t want to sing it, and the composition stayed on the shelf until Focus recorded it as an instrumental and they named it after her. The song was a hit in the UK, reaching #4. They performed it on The Old Grey Whistle Test in 1972 as a medley with “Hocus Pocus” – I love how they speed up “Hocus Pocus” live, one of those times the live version is superior to the studio version.

8. “Hallogallo” – NEU! (1972)

NEU! are a krautrock band formed in Düsseldorf in 1971 by ex-Kraftwerk members Klaus Dinger and Michael Rother. Conny Plank produced their albums and was considered the “hidden” member of the band. They chose the name for its powerful impact in advertising. Neu is German for new and that’s a pretty common buzzword used in advertising and marketing and the sound they had was experimental, and you could say new because it’s really not like anything you’ve heard before. They were one of the first bands to pioneer the motorik beat – Devo were huge fans of that sound and borrowed that style for their hit “Whip It”. They also were one of the first bands to do remixes of their songs with their sophomore album containing remixes because they couldn’t afford to record a whole album’s worth of music. You could call that a happy accident. They are not a difficult band to get into, as they only released three albums in their first incarnation in the 70s, simply titled Neu!, Neu! 2, and Neu! 75. Their self-titled debut was a commercial flop, only selling 30,000 copies, but those who had the privilege of listening to it loved it and it later attained cult status and had famous fans like David Bowie, Brian Eno, and Iggy Pop. David Bowie was interested in moving to Germany because of various films and writers, but also because of Kraftwerk and krautrock. Brian Eno and Iggy Pop also joined him in Berlin and Kraftwerk name checked Iggy Pop and David Bowie in “Trans-Europe Express”. “Hallogallo” is the opening track of their debut album and a very long one at about 10 minutes with a repetitive sound, perfect for a road trip or chilling and smoking weed. As someone who has autism, I love it. 

9. “Love is the Message” – MFSB (1973)

What Booker T. & The MG’s were to Stax, MFSB were to Philadelphia International Records. They were the house band for the label and released their own albums as a band. Their lineup consisted of a pool of 30 studio musicians who worked closely with production/songwriting team Gamble and Huff. You might have heard them play on songs by Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes, The O’Jays, Stylistics, Spinners, Wilson Pickett, and Billy Paul. They are also well known for playing the Soul Train Theme, “TSOP”, The Sound of Philadelphia. It was the first disco chart topper. That’s a great instrumental, but my favourite one of theirs is “Love is the Message”. This song was featured in an episode of the FX show Pose, which is about the ballroom scene in New York City. Billy Porter’s character Pray Tell asked the DJ to play it twice and I can’t blame him, it’s great and a replay worthy one!

10. “Tubular Bells” – Mike Oldfield (1973)

I know there’s some words in it with Vivian Stanshall of the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band introducing all the instruments played on the song like he did in a humorous way on the track “The Intro and Outro” on his own band’s album Gorilla, but the single edit of it as heard in The Exorcist is instrumental. This was the song that made Richard Branson a very wealthy man and Virgin the conglomerate that we know it as today, as it was the first release on the then-brand new Virgin Records. Prior to this, Mike Oldfield was a young kid just playing guitar in his flat and working with Kevin Ayers. One day he heard Septober Energy by a prog/jazz rock group called Centipede and he was inspired to compose a really long instrumental and so he came up with what became Tubular Bells, which he played almost all the instruments on. Another big inspiration was Terry Riley’s A Rainbow In Curved Air, which inspired The Who’s “Baba O’Riley”. His composition was rejected by so many record labels before Richard Branson decided to start his own record label and took a chance on “Tubular Bells”. It was a sleeper hit, topping the charts a week later thanks to The Exorcist director William Friedkin replacing Lalo Schifrin’s score with the intro to Part One of “Tubular Bells”, which he found by chance when visiting Ahmet Ertegun’s office. The unusual time signature made it perfect for a horror film. Since then, Mike Oldfield released sequels and re-recordings of the album.

11. “Jessica” – The Allman Brothers Band (1973)

Great country rock guitar playing on this one by Dickey Betts. Like Steve Howe did with “Clap”, Dickey Betts wrote the song for his child while at the band’s farm in Juliette, Georgia and named it after her. The musical inspiration was Django Reinhardt, who famously lost a couple of fingers in an accident, in that the song can be played with just two fingers on the fretboard. While it wasn’t a major chart hit, it’s still a very influential and notable composition with it being the opening theme for Top Gear.

12. “The Rock” – The Who (1973)

One of the instrumentals from Quadrophenia, the word being an amalgamation of quadraphonic and schizophrenia. Musically, this album is The Who at their best. For those who haven’t listened to it, it’s a rock opera that is about a rebellious, angsty, young mod from London named Jimmy who lives a humdrum working class life and is trying to figure out who he is. He works a mundane dead-end job, is depressed and goes to a psychiatrist, lives with his parents, who don’t treat him well and think of him as a loser, and his crush rejects him for his friend. He likes riding his scooter, going to nightclubs, and taking drugs for fun. One weekend, he went to Brighton to see The Who in concert only to be disappointed when he tries to meet them and is rebuffed and he comes out feeling like they’re a bunch of phoney ingrates, a never meet your heroes moment. While in Brighton he and the mods get into a fight with the rockers, their rivals. While he is undoubtedly one of the mods, he doesn’t feel like he’s enough, definitely no Ace Face.To relive that brief moment of happiness, he goes back to Brighton to relive that iconic weekend and he feels even more disillusioned with everything when he sees that his idol Ace Face works as a bellhop at a hotel, realising he’s not that special after all.

13. “Apostrophe’” – Frank Zappa (1974)

There’s a lot of great instrumentals in Frank Zappa’s discography and so it’s difficult to pick one for this list, but I’d have to go with “Apostrophe’” from Apostrophe (‘), his most commercially successful album, which peaked at #10 on the Billboard 200 albums charts. The instrumental was recorded in 1972 and like a lot of Frank Zappa albums, this one was a mix of archival and recent recordings from between 1969 and 1974. Jack Bruce and  disgraced session drummer Jim Gordon played on it and both were credited as co-writers. Love the fuzz guitar on this one and the jazz fusion sound.

14. “Always There” – Ronnie Laws (1975)

This jazz instrumental is one of my dad’s favourites and is something he’d often play on the car or at home and it’s one of those that has an impact within the first couple seconds. It’s no surprise that it’s the opening track of his debut album Pressure Sensitive. It became more famous when Side Effect covered it in 1976 and Incognito & Jocelyn Brown covered it in 1991. Before Ronnie Laws went solo, he was briefly a member of Earth, Wind and Fire and performed with Hugh Masekela. He comes from a musical family; his siblings Hubert, Debra, and Eloise also had musical careers. I love the saxophone on this one and if you love AWB’s “Pick Up The Pieces”, you’ll love this one.

15. “Slick Stuff” – The Brecker Brothers (1976)

I found out about this one recently when a prog rock loving friend of mine sent it to me on Instagram. I was blown away and I loved how it sounded like a TV show theme or an anime intro. Very funky. As the name suggests, they’re a two brother duo: Michael and Randy Brecker. Randy was previously in Blood, Sweat and Tears and was one of the original members of the band, playing on their debut album Child Is Father to the Man. The two brothers were session musicians who played on recordings by Todd Rundgren, Parliament, Frank Zappa, Quincy Jones, and Eric Clapton.

16. “A New Career in a New Town” – David Bowie (1977)

This is one of my favourite tracks on his Berlin Trilogy album Low. One of my friends suggested this one when I was asking him what his favourite Bowie songs were. The previous year, David Bowie and Iggy Pop moved to Mainland Europe to rid themselves of their drug addictions and they collaborated on music with David Bowie producing Iggy Pop’s album The Idiot and co-writing the songs on it. This began a new era of David Bowie. During the previous Thin White Duke era, he was addicted to cocaine and recorded Young Americans and Station to Station while under the influence. His surroundings in LA and New York were not helping and he needed a change of scenery and a new sound. As we all know, David Bowie’s discography is incredibly diverse and he was not the type of musician to stay still and complacent. He always liked to try something new. He was a true artist. The sound on Low is more avant-garde and experimental, inspired by the electronic sounds of Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream and the ambient music of Brian Eno, whom he collaborated with during the Berlin Trilogy. “A New Career in a New Town” is the b-side to the single “Sound and Vision”, a great song. There are multiple instrumentals on the album, but this one’s my favourite. This one and “Speed of Life” were supposed to have lyrics, but since David Bowie couldn’t come up with any suitable ones, he left them as instrumentals. 

17. “Sylvan Song” – Heart (1977)

I love the renaissance/mediaeval “Battle of Evermore” like sound on this instrumental that segues into “Dream of the Archer”. I love Nancy Wilson and Roger Fisher’s mandolin playing. This is beautiful. I don’t know what else I can say about this one. I guess as a bonus instrumental intro, I love the acoustic “Silver Wheels”, which Nancy will often play before “Crazy On You” – you can really see how talented of a guitarist Nancy is. I named this website after “Crazy On You” and the Wilson Sisters are a huge inspiration to me.

18. “La Villa Strangiato (An Exercise in Self Indulgence)” – Rush (1978)

One of the things I love about Rush is how long their songs are and they’re a power trio where everyone is a master of their craft, you’d compose long self-indulgent instrumentals too if you had that kind of talent. They have a very solid discography too. “La Villa Strangiato” is one of a few instrumentals in their discography and it’s one of my favourites. At almost 10 minutes long, it is the closing track of their 1978 album Hemispheres and is their first instrumental. That album has only four tracks on it with “Cygnus X-1: Book II” taking up the first side of the album and “Circumstances” and “Trees” making up the rest of the second half. Geddy Lee, Alex Lifeson, and Neil Peart had big ideas for “La Villa Strangiato” and hoped to record it live in one take, but it took three takes. They spent more time on that one instrumental than they did recording the entire Fly By Night album! The hard work paid off and it became a fan favourite and ranked highly in lists of best Rush songs. Love the classical guitar intro and the 12 unique movements. They incorporate a 1937 jazz instrumental by Raymond Scott called “Powerhouse” in the segments “Monsters!” and “Monsters! (Reprise)”. Whether or not prog rock is your thing, doesn’t matter, you gotta admit Rush are amazing musicians.

19. “Rise” – Herb Alpert (1979)

If you listen to hip-hop, you’ll recognise this one being sampled in Notorious B.I.G’s posthumous hit “Hypnotise”. It was released days before he died in a drive-by shooting and went #1 after his death. Puff Daddy picked this song to sample because of its nostalgia, Herb Alpert’s “Rise” and Chic’s “Good Times” were popular songs in New York during the summer of 1979. Those are songs that were played in roller discos and nightclubs. Many rappers wanted to sample “Rise” but songwriter Randy “Badazz” Alpert declined most requests, until he heard Biggie’s “Hypnotise” and he immediately and enthusiastically approved because he’s a fan of his work and loved his 1994 album Ready to Die. Decades later, he let Bel Biv DeVoe sample it in their song “Run” because he liked their music. “Rise” topped the charts in October 1979 and won a Grammy. It was written by Randy Alpert (Herb Alpert’s nephew) and Andy Armer. Randy previously worked at A&M records and was orinally brought on to redo songs from Tijuana Brass as disco and R&B songs, but it didn’t feel right and so the original funky instrumental “Rise” was composed. You might be wondering how that famous breakdown as heard in those hip hop samples was made, that was a Minimoog run through an Echoplex tape echo machine. This article tells the story of “Rise”. I really love this quote from Randy Alpert – for me it sums up what The Diversity of Classic Rock is all about, so I’ll share it with you:

“There’s something that’s pretty cool about passing music on to generations. And I’ll tell you when I was a kid, I was listening to — like everybody — The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Animals. And when I would read New Musical Express or Billboard, when I would read that Mick Jagger and Keith Richards and Eric Burdon’s favourites were Muddy Waters and Blind Lemon Jefferson and all of these black American blues people, that made me go to listen to those records. Those people passed that gift on to me. So it’s so cool that “Rise” got passed on to a hip-hop generation, which then gets passed on to some other generation.”

– Randy “Badazz” Alpert

20. “Rydeen” – Yellow Magic Orchestra (1979)

We’re going to finish this blog post with an electronic, almost disco instrumental. YMO were one of the pioneers of electronic music – we wouldn’t have EDM as we know it as today without them – and one of my favourite songs of theirs is “Rydeen” from the album Solid State Survivor. It sounds like a song that comes straight out of a video game, and that describes a lot of their music. The Japanese electronic band were a huge influence on British synthpop acts like Ultravox, Gary Numan, Duran Duran, Depeche Mode, The Human League, Visage, and Art of Noise. YMO’s video game sounding song “Firecracker” (side note: it was a cover of a 1950s exotica song by Martin Denny of the same name that turned the orientalist song on its head) was sampled by hip hop and pop acts like Afrika Bambaataa, De La Soul, 2 Live Crew, Jennifer Lopez, and Mariah Carey. That single sold over 400,000 copies in the US and went top 20 in the UK. “Firecracker” was performed on Soul Train. Along with “Technopolis” and “Firecracker”, “Rydeen” is one of YMO’s best known songs. The title is a reference to the Edo period sumo wrestler named Raiden Tameemon and an anime called Brave Raideen, the latter which the spelling of the instrumental was based on due to the popularity of the show at the time of release. I love the galloping sounds. While it wasn’t released as a single until 1980, it was on an album released in 1979, so I’m counting it on this list. It’s great!

So that’s my list of 20 instrumentals from the 70s that I love. What are your favourites? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section.

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