Episode 49 - Precious Metal (ft. Led Zeppelin, Foreigner & Meat Loaf)

And so the Sadmen turn their attention to three albums that sit among the most commercially successful of all time. Passing on the chance - again - to put AC/DC's Back In Black into the Hall of Fame, they instead went with three records that ticked the brief in their own way, notable for not only the sheer volume of sales achieved, but also taking into account the relative stages each artist was at on the albums' release.

Two of the discs are debuts. Both were released in 1977 and 45 years later one of them is still the fouth best-selling record of all time. 

Foreigner's self-titled debut marked the start of a 4-album hot streak of million sellers. A few months later, and after being rejected by eight record companies before a small independent took a chance on it, Meat Loaf's Bat Out Of Hell set off on a march to 35 million sales and a reimagining of how we define the word 'ambitious'.

But the episode starts seven years earlier, in 1970, as a young British band stopped to draw breath following an epic and gruelling US tour that had seen them conquer America on a scale that no other band aside from The Beatles had managed to achieve.

Led Zeppelin's third release may have been predictably titled - simply III, to follow II - but predictability ended there, with a soundscape so rich and so eclectic that it polarised critical opinion at the time, yet has come to be regarded as a pioneering classic.