20 January – The premiere ofPink Floyd'sThe Dark Side of the Moon atthe Dome, Brighton, is halted by technical difficulties.The Dark Side of the Moon would be played in its entirety the following night, but it would be a full year before the album was released.
21 January –Keith Richards jumps on stage to jam withChuck Berry at theHollywood Palladium but is ordered off for playing too loud. Berry later claims that he did not recognise Richards and would not have booted him off the stage if he had known who he was.
2 May –Stone the Crows lead guitaristLes Harvey is electrocuted on stage during a show inSwansea, Wales, by touching a poorly connected microphone. Harvey died in a hospital a few hours later. The band's lead singer,Maggie Bell, Harvey's longtime girlfriend, was also hospitalised, having collapsed on stage after the incident.
8 October –David Hughes is taken ill while singing the role of Pinkerton inMadam Butterfly in London. He completes the performance but dies shortly afterwards of heart failure.[2]
A list of the top twenty best-selling albums of 1972 was published in the issue ofRecord Mirror dated 13 January 1973, and a top fifty was later reproduced in the first edition of theBPI Year Book in 1976. However, in 2007, theOfficial Charts Company published album chart histories for each year from 1956 to 1977, researched by historian Sharon Mawer, and included an updated list of the top ten best-selling albums for each year based on the new research. The updated top ten for 1972 is shown in the table below.[6]
