For a bit of trivia and to demonstrate at least a tenuous connection to this album I'm familiar with Starstruck as it featured on the Sounds- Good for Nothing LP issued in 1977. What's that you say?
Sounds, the old music newspaper issued a number of albums, of which the cleverly named Good for Nothing was the first from 1977 onwards. All you had to do was collect the vouchers over a number of weeks and send them off with a postal order (probably) to cover postage and wait several weeks for it to arrive. I was an avid collector but they really varied in quality as you might imagine. The best was the third one which featured artists on the Stiff label. Anyway this was the first;
View credits, reviews, tracks and shop for the 1977 Vinyl release of "Good For Nothing - The Sounds Album, Vol 1" on Discogs.
www.discogs.com
A few of the tracks on that album have stayed on my playlist (or rather made their way back on to my playlist since playlists became a thing) but Starstruck isn't one of them. Although to be fair I remember at the time thinking it was OK compared to some of the duller tracks on the album.
Rainbow though and their ilk are not really my thing and I didn't enjoy listening to this album. Even Starstruck grated with me a bit and although it's not particularly long I did wonder if it was a shorter version that had featured on the Sounds album. As for the rest of it, I can appreciate why it is so well rated as of it's kind it's not bad. It's pointless me trying to analyse it any deeper than that though as it really isn't for me and while listening to it I really wanted to go back to the previous pick of the Cocteau Twins. Too big a contrast.
As another not particularly insightful comment, am I the only one that thought the riff of A Light in the Black sounded very close to 10cc's Good Morning Judge? And did they adapt Kashmir for one of the others? Doesn't matter anyway. I'm not going to slate it just because it doesn't appeal and it would be insulting to give it less than a 6 as those scores are reserved for perfunctory or cynical releases. I can tell even though I'll never listen to it again that this is well crafted. A 6 it is then.
Record Mirror was very much the poor relation to Sounds and they also got in on the act with a couple of LP releases which were pretty gash. Music paper giveaways went up a notch or two with NME's C81 cassette. This was followed five years later by C86. Now we're talking...