New doccie reflects on '1971, the year music changed everything'

Record collectors and music anoraks love nothing better than a good, robust, passionate debate about which year in popular music history was "the year".

For some, like author Andrew Grant Jackson, it's 1965 when Dylan went electric, the Beatles started their journey down increasingly experimental paths in Rubber Soul, the Stones blasted on to the charts with Satisfaction and the soul and R&B geniuses of Motown made the jump from the R&B charts to the top of the Billboard 100.

Jackson has also made a case for 1973, when David Bowie killed off Ziggy Stardust and brought Aladdin Sane to the US, Pink Floyd travelled to the dark side of the moon, a young singer-songwriter from New Jersey named Bruce Springsteen shared the stage at New York's Max's Kansas City with a fiery revolutionary reggae prophet named Bob Marley, and the New York Dolls and Alice Cooper laid down the foundations for punk and hair rock.

Author David Hepworth made his argument for 1971 in his book Never a Dull Moment: 1971 — The Year That Rock Exploded, and it's his book, tied to a year that's now a half-century past, that forms the basis for Apple TV's sprawling, archive-rich, heady eight-episode docuseries about that year; the music that it produced and the tumultuous political and social changes that influenced the musicians who made it.

Series director, Asif Kapadia (Senna, Amy, Diego Maradona), recently told the New York Times that he and his co-creators, felt that, "Sometimes you've got to make a bold statement … [and] from our research, there was something amazing about that particular moment, where it comes after the '60s, where it comes in terms of the '70s, as a turning point."

1971 is certainly packed with a slew of seminal albums, including Marvin Gaye's What's Going On?, Gil Scott Heron's Pieces of a Man, the Rolling Stones' Exile on Main Street, Carole King's Tapestry, Joni Mitchell's Blue and Sly and the Family Stone's There's A Riot Going On to name only a handful. However, it's in the careful focusing on the social and political events that the series succeeds in rising above yet another geeky listicle.

Not all the music that's explored here was necessarily released in 1971, but it was all definitely made and influenced by it. After releasing Sticky Fingers early in the year, the Stones set off for a mansion on the French Riviera to avoid paying their long overdue and very expensive tax bill in the UK; set about turning the basement of that mansion into a makeshift studio for the recording of a hodgepodge of disconnected but brilliantly evocative and inspired songs.

They fell under the heavy spell of readily available heroin and left in a hurry at the end of the year, hotly pursued by angry local drug dealers before finishing and releasing Exile the following year. It is still the most critically acclaimed album of their career and one of the acknowledged best of the era.

Likewise, Bowie announces in the opening credits: "We were creating the 21st century in 1971." He released Hunky Dory that year, a harbinger of the enormous influence his far-reaching, eternally curious musical tastes would have on the next four decades. But he would only truly change the face of music and kill off the '60s with the release of the songs recorded in 1971 for his Ziggy Stardust album released in 1972.

In the US, the tragic deaths at the Rolling Stones' free concert at Altamont and the Manson murders in California had, in 1969, whacked a final nail in the coffin of the Utopian ideals of the '60s. The year 1971 saw the rise of the anti-war movement and the black power movement was growing in size and influence and there was increased resistance by women to the patriarchy.

Gaye captured the dismay of many at the continuing war in Vietnam in his quietly devastating pop classic What's Going On?, inspired by the feelings he had about his own brother's drafting; Scott Heron warned that "the revolution will not be televised" and wrote the equally potent No Knock decrying racist police brutality; and King and Mitchell produced two of the greatest break-up albums in history, which also offered a blueprint to independence and self-actualisation for a new generation of women who refused to be trapped by lives lived in the unhappy bondage that had characterised the experience of their mothers' generation.

The series takes particular care to examine, in some depth, significant moments that have echoed through to our current era but seem often to have been left on the dustbin of history — the prison riots at Attica, the concert for Bangladesh organised by George Harrison at Madison Square Gardens, the Soul to Soul concert for the 14th celebration of Ghanaian independence featuring Ike and Tina Turner, The Staple Singers and The Voices of East Harlem, among others, and the rise of the new forms of communal organised existence and technological music that helped a new generation of young Germans to find answers about what really happened during World War 2 and what they could do about it.

Thanks to an approach that relies solely on archive - rich, often rare and expertly selected - with input from artists and observers offered only in voice-over, the series manages to submerge the audience as completely as possible within the sights, sounds and pressingly urgent crises of 1971 as seen through the images that were captured of it at the time.

It may seem to a younger generation to be another desperate and obvious example of boomer boasting and nostalgia-tinged longing for the good old days when music still meant something other than chart success and dollars, but there's enough here to make a case that whatever else it may have been, 1971 was certainly a year of unforgettable music and dramatic real-world upheaval that created sounds and characters whose images and influence still remain embedded in our collective consciousness.

• '1971 The Year That Music Changed Everything' is available on Apple TV +