″[In the 1970s], music criticism was a blood sport,” says veteran critic Jim Farber. “The record companies would pay to send you across the globe to write stories and the writer could come back and type up the most vicious thing imaginable. Even the 1990s had its fair share of put downs. It was just accepted.”

In America, legendary critic Lester Bangs once described the “inane” lyrics on Black Sabbath’s 1970 debut album as “like Vanilla Fudge paying doggerel tribute to [occultist] Aleister Crowley”, while Rolling Stone magazine compared the music on Lou Reed’s divisive 1975 LP Metal Machine Music to “the tubular groaning of a galactic refrigerator”.

The Telegraph London