Gigs that didn't go as expected

I don't particularly like going to gigs.  For many people, music is a shared experience, something to sing along with, dance to, lose yourself in.  They talk about how great the atmosphere is and they revel in being part of a crowd, everyone loving the music.  Bollocks to all that.  Give me a record player and an empty room in my own house over a gig any day.

However, my admiration for certain musical artists has led me to attend a great many gigs since my first one in 1987, most of which I have thoroughly loved.  But that's because the opportunity to see in person a performer that I love listening to in my lounge usually outweighs the trauma of having to do so alongside other human beings.  So much so, that as time goes on and bands split up and people die, I am able to reflect on who I've been able to see in concert and I feel hugely privileged.  Years after they've all gone, I'll revel in the memories of seeing Paul McCartney, Bob Dylan, David Bowie, Neil Young, Pink Floyd, Madness, Jethro Tull, Bruce Springsteen, Robert Plant, Jimmy Page, Blondie, REM, The Stone Roses, Oasis, Morrissey, Ian Dury and Prince, to name the most iconic.

But obviously, from time to time, things don't turn out as expected.  Here are five times:

1. Bob's curls

My long-time adoration of Bob Dylan has led me to see him at his worst and at his relatively better than worst.  The first time I saw him was at Wembley Arena in 1987.  I had a seat next to the first exit on stage right.  During the support act, his backing band of Tom Petty and Heartbreakers, I looked over the ledge to that exit to see, within arm's reach, Dylan himself.  Clearly he wanted to catch a view from the stands.  And with hood up, iconic sunglasses on and everyone focussed on the stage, he was managing to retain enough anonymity to get away with this for a while.  Given the fact that the curls of his hair, which fell out over his forehead from below the hood, were close enough for me to ruffle, for a while, only I knew he was there.  I pointlessly wasted that precious time by asking the couple next to me if they had a pen, so I could get him to sign my programme (which in retrospect, I surmised, he was never going to do).  By the time the dozy sods found a pen, someone on the way to the loo had passed Bob and recognised him, prompting a swift retreat backstage.  The chase proved futile and undignified.  I've seen him 5 times since, but never again able to pose a molestation risk.

Four years later, I saw him for the second time, persuading my future wife (in only our second month of going out together) to come along.  That month, he played, according to what I have since read in a book, his worse series of gigs ever. I made my wife pay for her own ticket.  She hates Bob Dylan.

2. Mick'sd Emotions

The only times I've ever given a crap about the fortunes of the England football team were at Italia '90 and Euro '96. In 1990, I was at university, out drinking too much whilst watching every England and Ireland game, supporting both, caring too much.  But when it transpired that England's semi-final showdown with West Germany would be played on the same night that I had a ticket for The Rolling Stones in concert, a dilemma emerged.  Do I forego the drunken atmosphere of watching England in a pub as they potentially secure a place in their first World Cup Final since their sole appearance in '66?  Or do I go to the Stones gig?  I decided that I had to be at Wembley Stadium that night.  Of course, England were playing West Germany in Italy - it was The Rolling Stones who were playing Wembley.  With the Stones far too old in 1990 to seem likely to ever play live again (!), I couldn't waste this opportunity.

In the days before mobile phones, I relied on a transistor radio to keep me updated on the score-line.  The game went to penalties during 'Paint it Black', somewhat prophetically.  At this point, I tuned out of the Stones' performance, as did a small crowd around me, eager for updates.  Soon after I broke the bad news about Pearce's and Waddle's penalty misses, someone must have told Mick Jagger.  "We've all got mixed emotions tonight" he said by way of an introduction to their song 'Mixed Emotions'.

England weren't the only ones to crap (only ever so slightly though) on my experience of the gig.  I bought some Rolling Stones Bermuda shorts that night as a momento.  £25 they cost,  a small fortune in 1990.  Some time later, my brother nicked them to wear below his jeans on a night out, to make himself look less skinny.  He shit himself on the dancefloor of a club that evening and disposed of the heavily soiled shorts in the toilet.

£25.  Twenty.  Five. My fucking shorts.  Still, despite that and the England result, it was a great gig.

3. Prince - a few years too late

I saw Prince at Wembley Arena in 1990.  There were two things wrong with this concert experience.  Firstly, I went with a mate from university called Ziggy.  A close mate, until his erratic, attention-seeking and aggressive behaviour evolved from being infrequent, moderate and annoying to frequent, extreme and unacceptable.  At this point in his journey towards becoming a complete arsehole, he brought along his 16 year old girlfriend.  He was 21 and I was 20.  The baby-sitting didn't enhance the experience.

Secondly, my wish to see Prince live was based on liking his output from several years prior to this gig - 'Purple Rain', 'Around the World in a Day' and to a extent 'Parade'.  By 1990, he had undergone his own journey, one from rock/psychedelic/arty pop to dance music.  Let me make this clear.  I like music you can dance to, but I really fucking hate 'dance music'.  Prince kept punctuating his songs with calls to the crowd to dance and wave our hands in the air and "say yeah".  I drew the line after the compromise of standing up from my seat, I wasn't going to do what Prince told me, Prince wasn't the boss of me.  I spent the night mostly irritated with the dance music, the fun fascism and my mate's girlfriend looking like she needed to go home early on a school night.

4. Too old for a new scene

Another occasion on which 16 year olds made me feel generationally removed, despite being only a few years older, was at the 1989 Stone Roses Alexandra Palace gig.  We turned up with ageist complacency and a presumption that the crowd would be our own peers, university students excited by this new music that was cleverly marrying melodic 60s pop with 80s Indie sensibilities.  It turned out that The Stone Roses were also appealing to school kids, as much for the fashion as the music.  We were witnessing a 'scene' for the first time.  Youths in flares and baggy t-shirts.  We'd spent the last ten years taking the piss out of the whole concept of flared trousers, laughing at kids at school whose trousers were a centimetre or more wider than drainpipes, shouting 'ding dong' at them as the wind caused the superfluous material around their ankles to flap with unfashionable absurdity.  And now, here we were, the potential objects of ridicule for being adults with bootcut jeans, gate-crashing into this alien world.

We were undeterred though.  The Stone Roses' debut album was the coolest thing to happen to music since The Smiths.  Once they came on stage, it wouldn't matter what we were wearing or how old we were.  As it turned it, Ian Brown's voice outside of the studio was weaker than a mouse's fart and Ally Pally's sound system was so rubbish, it sounded like someone was just playing the CD over a Tannoy.  A depressingly bad gig.

5. Leave you to fall asleep

I'd been a fan of Natalie Merchant during her 10,000 Maniacs and solo careers, and convinced my brother-in-law and sister-in-law to come and see her in concert in 2010.  I'd seen her live before and the venue (Hammersmith) was a good one, so what could go wrong?

What can go wrong, musical history teaches us, is when a performer completely disassociates themselves from their audience and disappears up their own backside in a self-indulgent artistic 'project'.  Unfortunately for her audience, Natalie Merchant's 'project' had been to put to music a double album's worth of 19th and 20th century poetry about childhood.  Slightly boring.  And she'd spent 5 years on this album, entitled "Leave Your Sleep", so was determined to fully focus on it, prefacing every song with a commentary about the poet and a power point slide to illustrate.  It was like watching the world's most boring English teacher.

Having zealously ignored all calls from the crowd to "play some of your old stuff" until she had reached the end of the double album and 20 slide power point, she apologetically claimed that they had not rehearsed anything other than this new tediously soul-sapping new material, but would "give a few old numbers a go".  At last!  And of course it would be rehearsed and of course it would be amazing!  But it WAS unrehearsed.  So much so, that she forgot the lyrics or gave up trying mid-song.   Sometimes something very beautiful can be both boring and bollocks. 

Half-amusing musings on my music collection - Part 14: The 2010s

In 2017, Willie Nelson released "God's Problem Child" (7/10) on which he sang, "I woke up still not dead again today."  He was one of several artists who still hadn't died by the end of this decade, artists who had been making great music since the 60s or 70s, defying expectations.  Willie was still paying off the taxman by giving us an album a year, and quality was in no way compromised by quantity, as validated by "Last Man Standing" (7/10 2018) and "Ride me Back Home" (7/10 2019).  Dylan was still not dead and started his 70s with "Tempest"  (8/10 2012), then did a lot of painting and Frank Sinatra covers and just when you thought he'd given up writing his own songs, he snuck up and put out "Rough and Rowdy Ways" (8/10) in 2020.  Similarly, Springsteen, Neil Young and Richard Thompson farted in the face of death with a good few decent albums between them.

This wasn't enough to make this a good decade for music though.

There were some highlights.  I discovered 'Hurray for the Riff Raff' on Jools Holland's "Later..." TV show, on which he consistently manages to showcase a great band every so often in between all the tedious world music, musically competent but unappealing dross and inane interviews with 'legends' whom he blackmails into letting him play boogie woogie piano alongside.  Hurray for the Riff Raff are my band of the decade, although in effect they is a she, not in a pronoun fluid sort of way, but in terms of the fact that Alynda Lee Segarra is the singer-songwriter and the rest of the band are a rotation of session musicians. Hurray for the Riff Raff help to provide the bulk of the 8/10 and 9/10 albums of the era - the eponymous debut in 2011 (8/10), "Look out Mama" in 2012 (9/10), a covers album "My Dearest, Darkest Neighbour" in 2013 (8/10) with amazingly beautiful versions of My Sweet Lord and Jealous Guy, "Small Town Heroes" in 2014 (9/10) and "The Navigator" in 2017 (9/10).

The few other top albums of the decade come from the previous decade's favourites, I am Kloot ("Let it all In" 10/10 2013) and  The Decemberists ("The King is Dead" 9/10 2011, "What a terrible world, what a beautiful world" 8/10 2015 and "I'll be your Girl" 9/10 2018).  My other discovery of the decade, albeit with a back catalogue to the early 80s, was Robyn Hitchcock.  My first gig after this discovery was the intimate Betsy Trotwood pub near Farringdon, where I bought "Tromso, Kaptein" (8/10 2011) from the merch stand and asked the man himself to sign it "about bloody time" when I admitted it had taken me nearly 40 years to get into his music.  His current LP at this time was as good as any he'd done in a prolific, but slightly obscure career, a self-titled record (8/10 2017).  Who waits nearly 40 years to release a self-titled album?  Did he just run out of ideas for titles? And in between he gave us "The Man Upstairs" (8/10 2014).

Finally, a special mention to the last few remaining albums to score 8+.  David Bowie's hugely tragic death in 2017 coincided with a pretty intriguing and enjoyable album "Black Star" (7/10) and followed his unexpectedly brilliant comeback album in 2013, "The Next Day" (8/10).  Noel Gallagher proved that he could reach the same heights as Oasis without Oasis on "Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds" (8/10 2011).  Neil Young, relentlessly creative, was closest to his best on "Peace Trail" (8/10 2016) and "Hitch Hiker" (8/10 2017).  And Belly's 20 year hiatus ended with a superb comeback album "Dove" (8/10 2018).

Below these are albums by country stars Jason and Margo Price - two consistently good artists on my list of who to see in concert.

But overall, I've struggled to fill the top ten lists in this decade.  Sometimes, I have to drop down to the 5/10 level LPs and occasionally I can't even fill ten spaces.  Music has very definitely been on a downward trajectory over the decades.  But gradually.  And I still discover old stuff that I'd previously overlooked.  And I have enough in my collection to keep me happy anyway (not that I ever go a month without buying a few more records.)

If you've been reading these blog posts, then thank you for indulging my nerdy need to write about something that I care passionately about.  Hopefully, it's made you consider checking out something I have praised and sometimes prompted some interest in my rating of an album  that you may love.

Half-amusing musings on my music collection - Part 13: The Noughties

You know how, when you ask someone who their favourite bands are, and they reel off names that you've never heard of, and you think to yourself, "Music wanker"...?

That's probably me now.  It wasn't me until the mid-noughties.  Up until that point, as you've maybe noticed from previous posts, nearly all of my favourite albums are from well-known artists, names familiar to people who aren't even that much into music.  But the new millennium brought with it a fundamental change in popular music: the most popular mainstream bands were not longer the best bands around, the obscure ones were. I mean just look at the barrel-load of dog shit that has been picking up Brit awards in the last 20 years and compare your Coldplays, Ed Sheerans, Killers and Arctic Monkeys to The Police, Madness, Blondie, The Jam, etc... etc...

Heading this list of obscurities are my favourite band, more so even than The Beatles and Madness, and they go by the name of 'I am Kloot'.  Easily the most incomprehensible name you couldn't imagine.  There's no explanation for its origins, but one theory is linked to the fact that 'kloot' is Dutch for 'bollock'.  Their first album, "Natural History", is one of 3 I have rated 10/10 in 2001 - the first year since 1978 that can boast that many with a perfect score.  Their second, self-titled, from 2003, breezes to a 10/10 and rivals Bob's "Highway 61 Revisited" for my favourite album of all time.  I'm equally and obsessively generous in awarding top scores to their third album, "Gods and Monsters" (2005), their 4th, "Play Moolah Rouge" (2007), their 5th, "Sky at Night" (2010) and, guess what, their 6th and final studio album, "Let it All In" (2013).  I am Kloot's incomprehensible avoidance of commercial success was a blessing for the cult of Kloot followers like myself, who consequently got to see them in small intimate venues, as I did on 8 out of 10 occasions, and more often than not, also got a chance to meet their lead singer and songwriter at the merch stand afterwards.  John Bramwell is self-deprecating, a hilarious raconteur and instantly likeable.  So you can imagine how awestruck, gobsmacked and privileged I felt, when, at a recent solo gig of his, I was chatting with him afterwards, and this happened:  He spotted and admired the screen saver on my phone, which was of a painting I had recently done of Coronation Street's Elsie Tanner, played by actress Pat Phoenix.  (He's a Mancunian, that must have been the reason for his interest.)  He said, "What's that?  That's great!" and when I told him he asked me to send it to him and gave me his mobile number.  We've even had a couple of text exchanges since. Non-stalkery too.  A surreal experience.

The problem with lesser known bands is that you don't always know about them.  I didn't know about The Decemberists until after that decade had finished.  Here was a folk-rock band with the ability to tread a path between Nick Drake and Led Zeppelin with Beatles style melodies, spinning wry tales of rogues, murderers, queens, cranes and infanticidal fathers from unspecific historical times.  Their discography from the Noughties consists of "Castaways and Cut-outs" (8/10 2002), "Her Majesty, the Decemberists"  (8/10 2003), "Picaresque" (10/10 2005), "The Crane Wife" (9/10 2006) and "The Hazards of Love" (8/10 2009).

The Decemberists, like I am Kloot, have the added benefit of a very likeable and witty songwriter and lead singer, Colin Meloy.  I don't feel a need to really like the people I listen to, or to get a sense that they harbour personality traits and values that I look for in friends.  It's just nice when they do.  In stark contrast to Bramwell and Meloy, is Ryan Adams.  Again, he's not well known.  When I mention him to anyone, I feel the need to say, "Ryan Adams, not Bryan Adams, Ryan not Bryan, very different."  But Ryan has turned out to be a bit of a ****.  In 2019, it came out that he had been using manipulative behaviour against younger female artists, promising them help in their careers and then sexually harassing them in texts and via social media.  This included an under-age girl.  Adams made a public apology, but undermined it with a disclaimer, suggesting it was unintentional, denied the allegations and confessed that he had made mistakes in life.  Wanker.  Now this put me in a difficult position in regard to enjoying his music.  He had a hugely prolific decade, releasing ten studio LPs in that time, including one of my absolute favourites, "Gold" (10/10 2001) and also "Heartbreaker" (8/10 2000) and "Cold Roses" (9/10 2005).  I certainly didn't feel like listening to him after that news broke.  And the first album he (eventually) released afterwards, I just couldn't stomach listening to, especially as he sounded mawkishly and self-indulgently apologetic, with the pathetic whine of the sort of self-obsessed, malignant little bastard that he obviously is.  But, I came to realise that if we allowed our moral evaluation of the personal lives of artists whose work we admire to lead us into a refusal to experience it, then we'd end up listening to very little music, reading very few books and watching very few films.  That moral evaluation may well colour my enjoyment, but I find myself able to disassociate the person from their art.  If I can do that for Chuck Berry, then I can for Ryan not Bryan Adams.  (But definitely NOT Gary Glitter!  You have to draw a line somewhere)

Listening to songs which are so explicitly about the singer's depression is nearly always pretty depressive.  The song-writing tends to be either too earnestly confessional or resignedly woeful.  But Malcolm Middleton is a Scottish folk singer who sugars his tales of depression with a gentle upbeat, an almost jaunty wistfulness.  Lacing his self-deprecation with just enough wit to make it palatable, songs like "Fuck it, I love You" and "Blue Plastic Bags" (in reference to bringing bottles home from the off licence for a Friday night in), make him another favourite obscure artist of the decade.  His debut is graced by the impossible to accurately recall, stream of consciousness title of "5:14 Fluoxytine Seagull Alcohol John Nicotine" (7/10 2002).  Later in the decade he had a string of 3 great albums in 3 years: "A Brighter Beat" (9/10 2007), "Sleight of Heart" (8/10 2008) which includes a heartstring-pulling cover of Madonna's 'Stay', and "Waxing Gibbous" (7/10 2009).

And my final music wanker mention of a lesser known act, is eels.  Not Eels.  Not The Eels. And in fact not even a band, but instead a band name for an individual called Mark Oliver Everett.  Following a strong start in the 90s, eels score highly in the Noughties with the LPs "Daisies of the Galaxy" (8/10 2000), "Souljacker" (7/10 2001), "Shootenanny" (8/10 2003) and "Hombre Lobo" (6/10 2009)

Returning now to those more well-known artists who have appeared on my lists in previous decades - with generally less unsavoury reputations than Ryan Adams, albeit perhaps not as warm and cuddly as Bramwell and Meloy - the Noughties proved an unexpectedly fertile period for many of these old favourites.  

Bob Dylan had his most consistent series of albums since the 70s, starting with "Love and Theft" (10/10 2001) which grew on me slowly over about 15 years before I decided it was one of his best, followed 5 years later by "Modern Times" (9/10) and "Together Through Life" (9/10) in 2009.  He never fails to surprise.  

Neil Young had a similarly consistent spell, though with far fewer gaps between albums.  Young released "Are you Passionate?" (8/10 2002), "Greendale" (7/10 2003), "Prairie Wind" (7/10 2005), "Living with War" (8/10 2006) and "Chrome Dreams II" (7/10 2007).  Five great albums in five years?  Bloody hell, you'd think it was the 70s again.  

Madness, who took 14 years after their first split to release one new studio album, then waited another ten to make a stunning return to form with "The Liberty of Norton Folgate" (10/10 2009).  

Robert Plant's solo career reached a higher level in the Noughties, but his best effort was actually in collaboration with Alison Klauss - "Raising Sand" (8/10 2007).  

Bruce Springsteen had a much better decade than the previous one.  He makes the lists with "The Rising" (8/10 2002), "Magic" (7/10 2007) and "Working on a Dream" (6/10 2009).  

Johnny Cash, in his final days, continued his "American Recordings" series, which covered a plethora of wonderful songs from the likes of Springsteen, U2, Tom Petty, Neil Diamond, Depeche Mode, Nick Cave and most famously Nine Inch Nails ('Hurt'), in such a way as to make many of them his own, but with so much emotional poignancy that the originals occasionally became instantly diminished.  "American III: Solitary Man" (9/10 2000) is his best, with "American IV: The Man Comes Around" (9/10 2002) not far behind and "American V: A Hundred Highways" (8/10 2006) a worthy posthumous addition to the series.  

And finally, David Bowie rose to his greatest heights since 1980 with "Heathen" (7/10 2002) and "Reality" (8/10 2003) before having ten years off as well.  These old boys were clearly on some kind of musical equivalent of Viagra.

Not a decade that has anything strong to characterise it in the wider music loving public's consciousness, but for me it was a time of new people making old man music, while old men made new music.

Half-amusing musings on my music collection - Part 12: Side B of the 90s

Side B of the 90s (the second half of the decade, that is) is not very different to side A .  Much like an album.  More of the same, only not quite as good. 

I blame Britpop.  As much as it was probably the last great movement in British pop music culture, it spawned a glut of bands who struggled to extend their cheeky lad and ladette guitar-based indie sing-alongs across a whole album.  Blur are the epitome of this flattering to deceive summation.  Had downloads and then streaming usurped CDs before "Parklife" was released, then far fewer people would have bought the whole album.  As it was, everyone who "loved a bit" of it, had to put up with all of it, fairground jingles and irritating moments of musical dicking about included.  

Blur, then, were not one of the Britpop lot to trouble my geeky top ten lists of albums from each year of the mid to late 90s.  Nor were Sleeper, despite my efforts to love them more - efforts prompted partly by their propensity for a catchy single and mostly by my infatuation with lead singer, Louise Wener.

The best albums by bands who could be said to at least loosely fall under this same umbrella would include the following:

"The Sound of McAlmont and Butler" (8/10 1995), which was purchased not just out of loyalty, but because it turned out to be a great album assembled from a series of original EPs; and because it might just kick off with the most explosively celebratory expression of joy ever unleashed in a pop song - "Yes".

Pulp's "Different Class" (8/10 1995) pre-dated the TV series 'Shameless' by a few years, but it managed to put the essence of that show to (extraordinarily catchy) music in its endearing portrayal of council estate romance, dry wit and perversion.

Demonstrating a far more middle-class, culturally intellectual obsession for sex - a classical music and literary tinged Beatlesesque pop version of the 'Carry On...' films - was Neil Hammond, aka The Divine Comedy. "Casanova" (7/10 1996) introduced us to 'Something for the Weekend' with its references to Stella Gibbons' 'Cold Comfort Farm' (something in the woodshed); "A Short Album about Love" (8/10 1997) contained the ultimate declaration of love with 'If you were a horse, I'd clean the crap out of your stable'; and "Fin de Siecle" (7/10 1998) painted images of journeys on National Express coaches with huge bottomed women.

Not quite fitting the sunny side of the Britpop template was Radiohead.  Before sinking into an abyss of experimental, morose dirge, they weren't quite too pretentious enough to forego a memorable guitar hook or ten within the bars of "The Bends" (8/10 1995) and "OK Computer" (8/10 1997).  And Oasis and Supergrass squeeze themselves onto the lists as well, to complete what on reflection is actually a fairly healthy representation for Britpop.

Not Britpop, but sitting comfortably alongside them are these CDs from indie/alternative artists: "Bring it On" (9/10 1998) by Gomez, "Beautiful Freak" (9/10 1996) by eels, "White Ladder" (8/10 1998) by David Gray,  "I'm with Stupid" (6/10 1995) by Aimee Mann and "Big Calm" (6/10 1998) by Morcheeba.  James also continued to plough a furrow through the 90s of half decent albums sprinkled with some great songs, the best being "Millionaires" (7/10) in 1999.

Less likely to find themselves featured in between topless photo-shoots on the pages of 90s lads' magazine, "Loaded" or invited to be interviewed on "The Word" by one of the decade's most iconic arseholes, Terry Christian, would be the inevitable folk and country rock performers sitting on my CD and record racks.  This includes Natalie Merchant, who moved on from 10,000 Maniacs, to produce several beautiful solo albums.  Beautiful AND interesting that is.  I stress that, because people often use that ubiquitous adjective to describe soft, gentle and VERY dull and bland ballads, which is not what Natalie Merchant did, not at first anyway. She did, later on, spend a few years on a self-indulgent project to put a double album's worth of Edwardian poetry for children to music, which I also witnessed in performance in probably the most tediously fucking boring concert I have ever attended.  At her best she can be heard on "Tigerlily" (8/10 1995), "Ophelia" (7/10 1998) and "Motherland" (8/10 2001).

Willie Nelson, Sheryl Crow, Robyn Hitchcock, Lucinda Williams and Gillian Welch get on the scoreboards, but standing out is another folky favourite of mine, bearded this time, as you'd expect,  Richard Thompson.  "You? Me? Us?" (7/10 1996) pulls off the experiment of one disc of acoustic tracks and one disc of electric versions without it seeming like a gimmick.  In 1999, he unleashed a classic in my mind, one of only two perfect scores in this half of the decade, "Mock Tudor" (10/10).  The other ten is "Time Out of Mind" (1997), Dylan's resurrection #3, that proved to be a turning point rather than a blip, a return to form that he continued to build on for the next 14 years.

An even more unexpected comeback at this time (1999), given that their last studio album was 14 years previously, was Madness.  The LP title "Wonderful" (6/10) described some of the tracks on that album, not all, but its the odd song that stacks up against their classics that showed they could still write great pop tunes; and they went on to do this again, irregularly, over the time since.

Finally, also proving that they weren't washed up either, were David Bowie ("Earthling" 6/10 1997 and "Hours" 5/10 1999) and Paul McCartney ("Flaming Pie" 7/10 1997).

So, lots of great albums, but a downward trajectory.  You'd expect this would continue in the 2000s, as clearly I was getting older, more set in my ways, more narrow minded and rose tinted in my view of the good old days.  But you'd be wrong.  Strangely.

Half-amusing musings on my music collection - Part 11: Side A of the 90s

"Side A" of the 90s will focus on the years in the first half of a decade in which CDs fully replaced vinyl records, thus making the concept of a side A or B completely redundant, and adding just enough irony to my blog post title to compensate for the lacklustre humour hereafter.

Unfulfilled Promise

The best album of the decade came from The Sundays - 1990's "Reading, Writing and Arithmetic" (10/10).  Imagine The Smiths, but with a lead singer that you want to snog and marry rather than kill, because she sings about her finest hour "finding a pound on the underground" and elsewhere confesses to getting sick on her cardigan.  Although it happens quite regularly in music, it always seems implausible that an artist capable of creating one amazing album should be incapable of doing it again.  I love Harriet Wheeler's voice and the distinctiveness of the band's sound, so I enjoy their two follow-ups, but neither 1992's "Blind" (6/10) nor 1997's "Static and Silence" (7/10) contains a song you'd swap for anything on their faultless debut LP.

Much more notable in their fall from precocious perfection was The Stone Roses, who spent the early 90s not following up their iconic debut due to a record contract dispute and thus building up an unassuaged level of expectation and suspense over their 1994 sophomore LP, named with suitable irony, "The Second Coming" (7/10).

The House of Love were a third band from this era, who teasingly released an LP (9/10) that (to steal one of their own lyrics) "sucked the marrow out of bones" and then failed to follow it up.  Like The Stone Roses and The Sundays, they are emblematic of halcyon university days, when I constantly listened to them, saw each in concert and anticipated subsequent albums with all the relish of a fox who'd snuck into a battery farm full of hens.  Unlike The Stone Roses and The Sundays, the House of Love's follow up was more than just relatively disappointing, it was as shockingly stark a contrast as being served a dog poo for dessert in a Michelin star restaurant.  It remained the worst CD in my collection until I finally recovered from the shock, gained closure on the death of any vain hopes of being eventually persuaded of its worth and threw the bloody thing in the bin.

Bob Dylan's inclusion in this 'unfulfilled promise' section might seem crazy, 30 years into his career, but he's here on the back of ending an artistic and commercial slump in the 80s with a promising return to top form, only to follow it with slump number 2.  This starts with 1990's "Under the Red Sky" (6/10), an over-produced LP packed with average tracks and star names like George Harrison, Elton John, Slash and Stevie Ray Vaughan sitting in as musicians, all responding to Bob's genius as you might the Emperor's new clothes, while he sings "Wiggle wiggle wiggle like a swarm of bees, wiggle on your hands and knees."  Bob learned from this experience never again to allow a producer (Don Was in this case) to roll his songs in glitter, but he then forgot how to write songs at all.  His next albums are stripped back, solo acoustic, containing only covers of traditional folk blues songs.  "Good as I been to You" (1992 6/10) is the harder listen.  "World Gone Wrong" (1993 7/10) is better, but neither did anything to suggest that Dylan's song-writing days weren't well behind him.  Or so I thought in the mid-90s.

One band managed to do a similar trick halfway through their album.  Crash Test Dummies frontloaded "God shuffled his feet" (1993 7/10) with enough great songs to earn a 10/10; but what would have been side 2 if it wasn't the CD age pulled the average down and yet again the follow up album was a million miles off that early promise.

The early 90s were awash with bands destined not to sustain their early promise.  The Cranberries' first two albums (both 7/10) are a case in point.  Suede, whose self-titled debut (9/10) in 1993 proved difficult to match on LP #2 and even harder after co-song-writer and guitarist Bernard Butler left the band. Portishead's "Dummy" (1994 8/10) led to nothing of interest thereafter.  And "Mama Said" (8/10) saw Lenny Kravitz reach a creative peak that proved an anomaly.

Meanwhile, U2 turned a corner in their career.  They followed their last good album, 1993's "Achtung, Baby!" with the average "Zooropa" and then transformed themselves into a blueprint for tediously self-satisfying, terminally dull purveyors of smug, over-earnest elevator music, like fucking Coldplay.  Paul Weller pulled off a similar trick, but without stirring up such passionate hatred as Bono and co.  He seemed to have found his groove as a solo artist on "Wild Wood" (7/10 1993) and "Stanley Road" (7/10 1995), but thereafter he's manged to stir up nothing passionate or emotion-inducing at all, just charmlessly competent Ocean Colour Scene copies.

So, did anyone maintain any momentum in the early 90's like bands used to years before?

Yes.  Fulfilling their promise, one album after another, was The Beautiful South.  No band has pulled off such an ironic juxtaposition  (there's that poncey word again) between upbeat melodies and dark, twisted lyrics, as if they'd based their whole career on Maxwell's Silver Hammer by The Beatles.  Songs with titles like "I Love You but you're boring" that take a wry look at relationships and romance for some reason appeal very much to the cynic in me.  From 1990's "Choke"(9/10) to "0898 Beautiful South" (7/10) in '92 and "Miaow" (7/10) in '94, Paul Heaton and co proved possibly the most consistently great pop band of the decade.  

Fulfilling their promise from the late 80s, at least commercially (as I prefer those earlier albums) are REM.  "Out of Time" (8/10 1991), "Automatic for the People" (8/10 1992) and "Monster" (7/10 1994) are perhaps only flawed or inconsistent, because they contain some classic songs that shine a bit too brightly for anything else to keep with. Reaching their commercial AND artistic zenith were Crowded House, who released "Woodface" (9/10 1991) and "Together Alone" (10/10 1993) and then disbanded for a decade rather than inevitably let us all down trying to follow such inimitable work.

Neil Young has spent decades alternating between between sumptuousness folk or country LPs and heavy grunge outings, and he pairs two of his best since the early 70s here.  1990's "Ragged Glory" (7/10) and 1992's "Harvest Moon" (10/10).  At the time of writing and at the age of 75, he's about to release his 20th studio album in the 29 years since then, most of which score even better than "Ragged Glory" in my mind. Having released 40 studio albums in total (of which I have 30 and rate them on average 7.5), it's fair to say that he HAS fulfilled his promise.

Hellos and Goodbyes

1994 gave us the start of Oasis's career, which was to deliver many, many fine songs, but no LP as consistently great as their debut, "Definitely Maybe" (9/10).  It gave us a new 2nd career for Johnny Cash, whose first in the "American Recordings" (8/10) series was released this year.  It gave us the complete career (until a recent equally accomplished comeback) of Belly, with the superb "Star" (7/10) in '93 and easily loveable "King" (9/10) two years later.

And it was goodbye to Jethro Tull, after 91's "Catfish Rising" (7/10) and '95's "Roots to Branches" (6/10) - a strong finish to a consistently great 30 year career, which they then spoilt with one album too many, their worst of all time, "J-Tull dot com" (which doesn't make the top ten, even in a year as bad as 1999, given its rating of 2/10).  It has a shit title and album cover too, so Tull's ship had well and truly sailed by this point.

And the saddest of goodbyes, of course, was to Freddie Mercury in 1991, marked fittingly with a final Queen album, "Innuendo" (7/10), which along with "The Works" in '83 was their best since the 70's.

Half-amusing musings on my music collection - Part 10: The mid to late 80s

Up until this point in musical history, the best rock/pop songs and albums being produced were also in the mainstream and consequently the artists responsible would appear ubiquitously on shows like 'Top of the Pops'. But the mid-80s proved a turning point, and 'Top of the Pops' went the same way that 'Doctor Who' did at that time (in the era of Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy), and that's straight down the shitter.  Nonetheless, there were plenty of great albums in the second half of the decade.

10/10 albums from 1984-9

The best LP of the decade comes from Kate Bush.  I'm sure I wasn't the only 15 year old in love with her when she released "Hounds of Love" in 1985.  My obsession was such that my mum, in an effort to help me find a girlfriend, once claimed that her friend's daughter looked like Kate Bush.  She didn't.  She was much more like Alison Moyet.  No disrespect to Alison Moyet, but she wasn't really competing with Kate Bush for a turn on my turntable or a space on my wall.

'Dawn escapes from moon-washed college halls' was still 3 years off for me when Marillion's Fish sang this favourite lyric of mine on "Misplaced Childhood's" 'Kayleigh' (1985).  There is no better album for songs that segue into each other and it's easy to be forgiving of his heart-on-sleeve self-pity, because his use of language is unique:  He somehow manages to sound like an English Literature post-grad with a thesaurus fixation without coming across as a right bleeding ponce.

On the subject of lyrical masterpieces with complementary melodic dressing, I'll add to this list of near-perfect albums, The Smiths' 1986 classic, "The Queen is Dead".  Another light that never goes out.  And I'll throw in REM's "Green" and The Waterboys' "Fisherman's Blues", my soundtracks to the summer of '88 and a first year at university, where I strived to become as equally poetic, tragic and Cinderella-obsessed as Marillion's Fish.

Bob Dylan's mid-to-late 80s period is his most maligned and appeared to have finally signalled the death throes of his career, but he pulled off yet another resurrection, probably the most incredible for ...oh, about, the best part of 2,000 years.... when he allowed Daniel Lanois to soundscape a collection of great songs that became the beautifully atmospheric "Oh Mercy".  And as Bob ended the decade having a resurrection, The Stone Roses were born, claiming to actually be the resurrection and sounding like the lovechildren of the 60s and the 90s on their self-titled, lemon and paint-splat adorned debut LP.

9/10 albums from 1984-89

Lanois (alongside Brian Eno) can also take credit for a similar sound on U2's "The Unforgettable Fire" (1984), adding timeless sophistication to the more raw sound of their early LPs.  So much so, that you can even forgive Bono's gurning smugness and ridiculous attire of a ten-gallon Teletubby hat, sex worker boots and Kentucky trailer park mullet as he gave himself a hernia singing about Martin Luther King.  He refined this look when U2 pulled off pretending to be an American country-blues rock band on "The Joshua Tree" in 1987.  I found myself easily able to overlook their affectations while the music was so great - but once they started to wade through a mire of tedious mundanity from the late '90s onwards, those affectations made me want to punch Bono every time he flicked his fingers and caused a child to die of poverty.

Two 9/10 albums of the time really challenged me.  Springsteen's "Born in the USA" and Dire Straits's "Brothers in Arms" proved to be my gateway LPs into their older, less 80s sounding-music; and consequently these albums then became, for a long time, disregarded in my mind as weaker, overly commercialised, too-radio-friendly, digital, hyped CD flagships.  Recently, they've grown on me again, enormously so, as the songs are all strong on each and the 80's production has dated better than much from that that era.

REM were riding an artistic wave in the late 80s as a run up towards becoming A-listers in the early 90s.  The prequels to "Green" were "Life's Rich Pageant" (1986) and "Document" (1987) and together this forms a trilogy of their best and most consistent LPs throughout a long career.  Anything else might come close and might include classic songs, but always had a couple of weaker tracks to detract.

Other 9/10 LPs from this era are:  Marillion "Fugazi" (1984) and "Clutching at Straws" (1987), Madness "Keep Moving" (1984), Sting "The Dream of the Blue Turtles" (1985), The Smiths "Meat is Murder" (1985) and "Strangeways, Here we Come" (1987), 10,000 Maniacs "In My Tribe" (1987) and "Element of Light" (1986) by Robyn Hitchcock and The Egyptians.  A real mix of fashionable and unfashionable and all of which, except the latter, I had procured and started to love by the end of that decade.

The rest, year by year

1984 was marginally weaker and the remaining ranks of my top ten are taken up with 7/10 scoring LPs from Prince, Madonna and even Frankie Goes to Hollywood.  Much more typical 80s pop than the choices above.

1985 was - coincidentally, much like 1975 - a mid-decade peak year, helped by many 8/10 albums, from Suzanne Vega, Madness, Richard Thompson and The Pogues.

1986 has a range with some great albums by The Bangles, The Fall, Crowded House and Peter Gabriel, towering above some very average efforts from Queen and Dylan.

1987 was similar in that respect, with the top ten ranks scrapping the barrel a bit, courtesy of a 5/10 from Springsteen and some good but unexciting records by John Mellencamp and Aztec Camera.

1988 proved to be better and full of 7/10 LPs from The Fall, The Pogues, Crowded House, The Travelling Wilburys.

1989 scores even better with Kate Bush, 10,000 Maniacs, Tom Petty and Neil Young.

Half-amusing musings on my music collection - Part 9: The early 80s

 The early 80s except 1981

What do nuclear energy, synthesisers and social media have in common?  Like many inventions they have been usefully used and atrociously abused; but more than most inventions the results have been at polar extremes.  Synthesisers epitomise the 80s as much as men with hairstyles like their mums', the only difference being that synths weren't always quite as shit. Successful bands who embraced the synth as a primary instrument were capable of knocking out a few great singles, but never enough to rescue an LP from the concrete shoes of its more average album tracks.  Thus, you won't find any Tears for Fears or Depeche Mode or Eurythmics albums on my 80s lists of top tens.  What you will find are albums by my usual favourites who either (a) mastered the benefits of the synth as a primary instrument, (b) used it as secondary instrument to complement their music or (c) avoided it as you might well cross the road to ensure you don't step in a dog turd.

Category (a) includes Bowie's "Scary Monsters... and Super Creeps" (7/10) in 1980.  Top track 'Ashes to Ashes' pretty much invents the 80s, as a song and video.  It's not just that Bowie changed his entire image as often as I change my pants (once a year), it's the fact that whatever new style he immersed himself in, he pulled it off better than anyone else.  Almost.  Roxy Music can also take some credit for blueprinting the 80s sound in the first year of the decade with "Flesh and Blood" (8/10), an even better LP than Bowie's.  Bowie lacked the consistency on "Scary Monsters...", as he did on 1983's "Let's Dance" (5/10), despite the title track being damn near perfect.  Roxy Music again score better with 1982's "Avalon" (7/10).  In each case, the tone of these albums was very much in keeping with the sunny side of the 80s: Upbeat, glossy and optimistic.  In contrast, Joy Division's second and final album "Closer" (8/10) reflected the darker, industrial northern gloom that also characterised the decade, like 'Boys from the Blackstuff' did.  Sadly and poignantly it proved an appropriate epitaph to Ian Curtis who took his own life 2 months before the LP's release.

Category (b) is a strange mix.  Kate Bush was too much of a restless artistic genius to ignore the benefits of a synth (and a fairlight) and embraced both on 1980's commercially accessible "Never for Ever" (9/10) and '82's more interesting, but less poppy "The Dreaming" (9/10).  The latter featured Rolf Harris on didgeridoo.  Yes, I know.  But it could've been worse.  Gary Glitter on backing vocals for instance.  Saville on synth.  OK, I'll stop there.

Jethro Tull, whose response to punk had been to release albums you could Morris Dance to, shocked many by adding synths to their usual folk-rock-band-with-flute approach and did so to tremendous effect on "The Broadsword and the Beast" (8/10) in 1982.

The Police were initially well known for play-fighting on camera and using French phrases for album titles in the late 70s, whilst musically they relied on their 3 instruments of bass, drums and guitar, played with extraordinary skill.  In 1980, they were still playfighting, but they started to use synths; and what sounded like another French LP title - "Zenyatta Mondatta" (9/10) - was actually just made-up words meaning absolutely nothing at all.  In 1983, they signed off with an even better LP, with even more synths and a synthy 80s sounding not-French-at-all title, "Synchronicity" (10/10).

I'll sub-divide Category (c).  (If that's not the nerdiest sentence that I've used so far across 9 super geeky blog posts, then I don't what is.)  Firstly, there are those bands who used a lot of electronic keyboards, but not synths.  The Cure's 1982 "Pornography" (7/10) features, as does Marillion's debut "Script for a Jester's Tear" (8/10) the following year.  I might even lump Dire Straits in there for company, simply for increasing keyboard use on 1980's "Making Movies"(7/10) and '82's "Love over Gold" (8/10). 

Then there is a whole host of artists who stuck with traditional instruments, ducking modern means of performing music, even if the production methods or their choice of personal attire was unmistakably '80s.  In some order of preference:

There was always more to Madness than jaunty dance-along singles with obvious comic panache, but their development from "Absolutely" (10/10) in 1980 to "The Rise and Fall" (10/10) in 1982 did represent a long journey to a more serious place, even if the album covers travelled a mere half mile from Chalk Farm tube station to the top of Primrose Hill.

Fun Boy Three might not have had the cultural impact of the band they spawned from, but I've always enjoyed them FAR more than The Specials ('Ghost Town' notwithstanding) and they proved to be another band with a two-(classic)-album career: their eponymous debut LP (8/10) in '82 and the remarkable "Waiting" (10/10) in '83, on which every single song could have charted in the top ten had they all been released as singles.

U2 in the '80s hadn't yet evolved into unbearable wankers.  They were merely bearable wankers, and I've retained enough residual teenage adulation for them to still really enjoy "Boy" (8/10) and "War" (9/10) from 1980 and '83.  Dylan slowly toned down the Christian fundamentalism from "Saved" (8/10) to "Infidels" (9/10) in the same years, even though he was still singing about Jesus without necessarily sounding like he'd collaborated on the lyrics with St John the Evangelist.  And retaining a devotion to good old fashioned ways of doing things with minimal decoration from the age were Richard and Linda Thompson ("Shoot out the Lights" 7/10 1982), Bruce Springsteen ("The River" 9/10 1980), The Waterboys' self-titled debut (6/10 1983), Dexy's Midnight Runners ("Too Rye Ay" 7/10 1982) and the first of many LPs from R.E.M, ("Murmur" 6/10 1983).

That leaves a few LPs that don't fit into categories with any others, so I'll stick ZZ Top's "Eliminator" (5/10 1983) into its own group of bands with long-bearded guitarists not called Beard and unbearded drummers called Beard; I'll put "The Gift" (7/10 1982) by The Jam into the category of albums with 'A Town Called Malice' on them; and Pink Floyd's "The Final Cut" (7/10 1983) in with all the other albums of off-cuts from a previous album by bands who were collapsing in a mire of hatred towards each other.

1981

This year proved to be a bogey in the trifle.  On average, I own 14 albums from each year of the 80's, but only 8 from 1981 and absolutely no classics in there.  The best of a relatively not-too-bad bunch is Madness's "7" (9/10), the very first album I bought for myself, but distinctly the weakest of their first five.  Dylan's "Shot of Love" (8/10) is a close second alongside the first solo outing for someone I discovered much later in life, who took his inspiration from Dylan, The Beatles and early Pink Floyd - so I'm not sure why I overlooked him for so long - and that is Robyn Hitchcock.  Incidentally, I am writing this just days after he played a very small intimate venue local to me, where my daughter worked for several years.  To be stood at the front just a metre from a musical hero in such familiar surroundings is quite surreal. (His lyrics are equally surreal.) His debut, incidentally is called "Black Snake Diamond Role" (8/10), and no, I don't understand why either.  

Half-amusing musings on my music collection - Part 8: The late-70s

 1977

1977 was a fork in the road.  The rock music world became partitioned between those who bought and loved the crude, spit-in-your-face brashness of "Never Mind the Bollocks" by The Sex Pistols and those who fell in love with the polished beauty of Fleetwood Mac's "Rumours".  It was a simple choice between nasty and nice.  Nice Fleetwood Mac spent 1976 in California, wasting 6 months of expensive recording studio time blowing a bottomless budget on excessive feasting, singing about the self-destruction of their relationships/marriages to each other as they simultaneously self-destructed, being served drugs like canapes at a wedding reception and snorting cocaine out of each other's bum holes.  Nasty Sex Pistols were touring clubs and colleges of the UK and swearing on TV.  On that basis, you'd take nasty over nice, but it's "Rumours" (10/10) that has always taken pride of place in my record rack.  I don't own and have never even listed to "Never Mind the Bollocks".  I imagine it's bollocks and so I'm not minding it.

The Sex Pistols and punk in its purest form have always been too raw and unimaginative for me.  It's like road rage on record. But undeniably, the whole punk movement - and by that I don't mean just the Pistols, I mean its influences as well, The Stooges in the US and elements of the UK pub-rock culture, like Dr Feelgood - influenced so many great bands in the late '70s and beyond, that we should take our hats off to it.  Not that they ever wore hats.  Except perhaps my favourite punk, whose individual style out-punked the punks.  Poly Styrene's band, X-Ray Spex, had something more than other punk bands of the era, partly down to her image (for example, the middle-aged woman's tweed jacket and skirt), partly down to her quirky lyrics and song subject matter ('Warrior in Woolworth'), partly down to her distinctive voice and partly down to their unusual inclusion of a sax player.  Their sole album, "Germ-Free Adolescents" just misses out on my 1977 top ten, but is well worthy of an honourable mention.  There are two albums on that list for 1977, which can claim a close affinity with the movement.  Ian Dury and the Blockheads released "New Boots and Panties" (8/10).  I haven't been able to test this claim, because my turntable doesn't work in this way, but if you set it to 45rpm and your needle arm automatically rises and lowers itself onto the record, then it will land on side 2 track 4 at the start of 'Plaistow Patricia'.  This song commences with Dury sing-shouting the opening words, "Arseholes, bastards, fucking cunts and pricks".  Not something you'd hear on a Fleetwood Mac record.  The second punk-related album is Talking Heads' debut "Talking Heads:77" (7/10), which is pure CBGB, pure 'psycho killer', pure not-Fleetwood Mac.

Even the dinosaurs found themselves taking notice of - and even demonstrating a thin slither of influence from - punk in 1977.  Queen attempted to get a bit punky on "News of the World" (7/10), about as punky as parents who are trying to use young people's slang.  Pink Floyd's "Animals" (9/10) certainly contained their first attempt to move from the melodic hippy (Gilmour voiced) lyrics to the unmelodic angst-ridden (Waters voiced) lyrics.  The songs 'Sheep', 'Dogs' and 'Pigs' on the LP are all angrily aimed at society's squares, including city bankers and Mary Whitehouse.  This was dinosaur rock doing a Sex Pistols on the Bill Grundy show.

Jethro Tull, however, easily managed to swat away any flies from the punk dung pile as they picnicked in the tranquil and antiquated idylls of pre-industrial English folk.  "Songs from the Wood" (7/10) sits resolutely in my list alongside Waylon Jenning's "Ol Waylon" (7/10) in eschewing urban modernity; unlike David Bowie, who existed on a plane above everybody else.  Much as he was a self-proclaimed magpie of artistic ideas from others, Bowie did this in order to create new styles, not to reflect current ones, like punk.  On "Low" (8/10) and "Heroes" (7/10), he helped create an early blueprint for 80's electronic pop music, albeit with significant help from Roxy Music's dodgy-haircut-afflicted former keyboardist, Brian Eno.  And completing 1977's top ten is Peter Gabriel, whose debut solo effort, affectionately named after himself (6/10), manages to hang off of Bowie's shirt-tails in his wise efforts to discard the prog rock self-indulgence that characterised his final record with Genesis (the overlong "Lamb lies down on Broadway") for something more akin to art rock.

1978

Talking of art rock, 1978 was the break-through year for the most unique female music artist of her time, Kate Bush.  She had grown up taking inspiration from Bowie and Roxy Music and probably even Genesis, but her remarkable originality, engrossing execution and popular appeal all warrant the use of that oft-misapplied term, 'genius'.  Her first two albums top my 1978 list - "The Kick Inside" (10/10) and "Lionheart" (10/10) - alongside Blondie's "Parallel Lines" (10/10) and "Plastic Letters (9/10).  Debbie Harry was the first woman to front (and write songs for) a chart-topping band and Kate Bush was the first female singer-songwriter in the UK to reach number one.  Another legendary debut in 1978 came from Dire Straits with their eponymous debut album (9/10) which spawned Knopfler-esque singing and guitar work on a plethora of rock songs for the next decade, from the likes of Dylan and Tull to that Geordie bloke who sang the theme tune to 'Auf Wiedersehen, Pet'.

Tull, meanwhile, made no efforts to get down with the kids and remained ensconced in their namesake's historical era, the agricultural revolution, with "Heavy Horses" (8/10); while Dylan roped in some backing singers for a hastily recorded "Street Legal" (8/10) which sounds great despite them missing their cues and the band generally not knowing what  Bob wanted them to do, which is fairly typical.  The Rolling Stones managed to knock out the best album ever to contain both a bona fide disco song ('Miss You') and an authentic country song ('Faraway Eyes'), without it sounding like a jumble, on "Some Girls" (8/10).  And finally, The Jam, moved beyond being a post-punk band to embracing enough melody and variety to win popular appeal on their best LP, "All Mod Cons" (8/10).

1979

The decade ends with more debuts, more new wave and more tenacious plying of their trade from the dinosaurs of rock.  

Pink Floyd's "The Wall" (9/10) is, as my brother once described after I played it in its entirety on a car journey while he tried to sleep, "an hour and a half of a psychotic having a moan."  I fully understand people hating this album, it's the most egocentric, navel-gazing, gloomy example of adolescent wallowing in one's own self-styled victimhood, that it stands to reason that it appealed to university students for the next decade or more.  Made worse that Roger Waters was nearer his mid-30s than his adolescence as he indulged in a mire of unsubtle self-pity; but I still like a lot, thanks in part to Gilmour adding some unforgettable musicality and partly due to the nostalgia of being a self-pitying adolescent when I first listened to it.

While one rock dinosaur introspectively disappeared up his own arsehole, another disappeared off his own scale of reinvention and surprise.  Bob Dylan found Jesus!  A proper, full-on, genuine conversion to Christianity was so intense for Bob, that it turned him into an evangelical zealot.  "Slow Train Coming" (9/10) contains lyrics of such fundamentalist, intolerant preaching, such apocalyptic fire-and-brimstone damnation of mankind, that you'd assume the whole thing was some kind satirical parody.  It wasn't.  But musically, with Bob on top form and enhanced by Mark Knopfler's session guitar work and Jerry Wexler's production, it's one of his best.

Knopfler was much in demand in the late 70's and Dire Straits' second album, "Communique" (9/10) matched the crisp quality and unforgettable hooks of their debut. Meanwhile, Neil Young toured "Rust Never Sleeps" (7/10) with roadies dressed as jawas from Star Wars and the album's opening track providing Kurt Cobain's suicide note over a decade later, claiming that 'it's better to burn out than to fade away'.  Bands still burning in 1979 included more new wave/ post-punk groups, The Police ("Regatta de Blanc" 8/10), Blondie ("Eat to the Beat" 8/10) and Talking Heads ("Fear of Music 7/10).  And cheesy not-quite-prog-rock pop rockers, Supertramp, reached their artistic zenith on "Breakfast in America" (9/10).

But 1979's two best debuts burst from different directions from two of the most unique English bands of all time.  One tragically lasted only until the suicide of its lead singer after two albums, but created a cult legacy that has endured; the other has (with lengthy breaks in between) continued to record new material and tour in the 40+ years since, becoming generation-spanning musical icons, epitomising British popular culture and performing on the roof of Buckingham Palace and at the London Olympics.  This could never have happened the other way around.  The former is Joy Division, whose beautifully gloomy debut was "Unknown Pleasures" (9/10); the latter is Madness, who managed to squeeze onto their first album (10/10) the title track 'One Step Beyond', 'My Girl', 'Bed and Breakfast Man', 'The Prince' and 'Night Boat Cairo'.  That's like releasing a greatest hits volume 1 as your first LP.

Thus, after a mid-70s lull when the decade's early kings were sometimes struggling to maintain momentum, the late 70s saw their resurgence and the birth of a new generation of kings and queens who would cement their places in pop's most unforgettable history for decades to come.  I would never have guessed at that time or for many years afterwards that almost 20 years into the 21st century I would take my daughter to see Blondie and Madness at London's Roundhouse for what was to become two of our favourite concert experiences ever.

Half-amusing musings on my music collection - Part 7: The mid-70s

The mid-70s was a mid-life crisis for the rock album, wedged as it was between its golden era and the explosion of punk, which seemed to consciously take a dump on the dinosaurs mentioned in my previous posts and heralded a new golden age of New Wave.  Some of those dinosaurs survived this brash meteor, but not always without injury.  1975 saw a final burst of sunshine before the rain, which appears to have fallen in 1976 (metaphorically, because in actuality 1976 witnessed an unprecedented heatwave).

Enjoying a second summer was Bob Dylan, who released "Blood on the Tracks" (10/10) in '75, which just about all Bob fans would rank as one of his 3 best albums; but Bob himself was quoted as saying that he didn't understand "people enjoying that type of pain" in reference to his divorce from Sara, which threaded its way throughout the album.  Much as I love Bob, I'm sorry to say that I do enjoy his pain on "Blood on the Tracks".  Bob's follow up in '76's "Desire" (9/10) and Rolling Thunder tour further demonstrated for the first time in rock history that you should never write anyone off.  My favourite story related to "Desire" is the fact that he recruited violinist Scarlet Rivera, whose input on each track gives the album its distinctive character, by driving past her in the street and deciding that she just looked like she should join his band.  He stopped and said hop in.  So, you just would, wouldn't you?

Another artist, resisting extinction and continuing to evolve and fascinate was David Bowie.  This was his 'Thin White Duke' era.  The term 'Thin White Duke' pretty much refers to the fact that he looked SHIT at this time, like a famine victim, consuming more heroin than protein and risking professional suicide by releasing an album of white soul music.  The words WHITE and SOUL go together like chocolate and fish or Jimmy Saville and children.  But Bowie being Bowie, even when he doesn't quite pull it off, manages to pull it off enough to admire his artistry.  "Young Americans" was too steeped in white soul for me, but "Station to Station" (9/10) developed from this to be more uniquely Bowie-esque

1975's top ten has mostly 10/10 and 9/10 albums for me.  Neil Young continued his beige (not purple, because beige is best) patch with the postponed release of "Tonight's the Night" (9/10) in which he laments the deaths of friends to heroin - the drug which best symbolised the 1970s' dystopianism in contrast to the idealistic '60s drugs of acid and pot - and "Zuma" (10/10) in which Crazy Horse are utilised once more as a very early precursor of '90s grunge.  Queen hit a peak with "Night at the Opera" (9/10), which features a great song that you might not know, but is worth checking out, called 'Bohemian Rhapsody' and "A Day at the Races" (8/10).  Both albums were named after Marx Brothers films.  This works much better than the titles "Abbot and Costello meet Frankenstein" and "Abbot and Costello meet the Mummy", but at the time it was the latter films that I was personally enjoying more on a summer holiday morning on BBC2.

The artistic curves were also moving in the right direction for Bruce Springsteen, whose album "Born to Run" (10/10) begins with perhaps the most poetic series of lyrics of all time (look up 'Thunder Road' and prepare to weep) and Roxy Music who put out "Siren" (8/10) in this year.  And Pink Floyd performed the impossible by following up and arguably equalling "Dark Side of the Moon" with "Wish you were Here" (10/10), the recording sessions for which were poignantly interrupted by an unrecognisable Syd Barrett, founder member and subject of the album's lyrics, who just wandered into Abbey Road like a ghost, clearly physically transformed by his drugs and mental health traumas.

But the cracks were beginning to show in the mid-70s.  Led Zeppelin conjured up a very decent double album "Physical Graffiti" (9/10) in '75, but following a near-tragic car crash that nearly killed him and his wife, Robert Plant was singing from a wheelchair on 1976's "Presence" (7/10), their first disappointing album.  Roy Harper and Willie Nelson both released their best albums in 1975 -  respectively "HQ" (8/10) and "Red Headed Stranger" (8/10) - but 1976 produced so few great albums that I don't own enough to comprise a top 10.  And those I do own, average a score of about 7/10 only.  It's a real dip.

Tull's "Too Old to Rock and Roll:  To Young to Die" (7/10) perhaps summarises the problem.  The giants of rock were pushing 30 or in some cases not far off 40 and the next generation were still popping their zits and spending too much time appreciating the shower page in the Argos catalogue.  Willie Nelson's "The Troublemaker" (7/10) failed to match its predecessor and I even have to put a 5/10 album on my list, which is "Jailbreak" (5/10) by Thin Lizzy, a band who always flattered to deceive.

Although meriting only 6/10, Blondie's self-titled debut at least provides a seed for a renaissance of rock music in the late 70s, as you'll see in my next post. Well. To an extent, anyway.  I've just looked ahead.  I won't pretend that I've packed it with cool new wave, post punk albums.  I am, after all, a bit of a sad bastard, with more in common with Alan Partridge than John Peel, so please expect more Kate Bush and Supertramp than The Jam and Ian Dury next time round.

Half-amusing musings on my music collection - Part 6: The early 70s

 1972

The definite article has a special place in popular music.  It was the usual starting point for most bands in the 1960s when naming themselves.  "The Somethings".  And some bands were often reverently ascribed the addition of an unofficial one, such as "The Pink Floyd" or "The Led Zeppelin".  But the Eagles, despite being referred to as 'The Eagles', are in fact just 'Eagles' and in 1972 they released their first album, "Eagles" (7/10) as if to emphasis the absence of "The" from their name.  That fusion of folk and country soft rock, which by now you're probably mocking me for always including in these top ten lists (a genre like something comfortable that a middle aged man might take simple joy from, like a pair of slippers), remained popular in 1972.  It influenced both "The Late Great Townes van Zandt" (8/10) by the late great Townes van Zandt, who WAS great but still 25 years off dying, despite what the title suggested; and also Neil Young's "Harvest" (10/10).  "Harvest" is indefinably wonderful to me, much like "Hunky Dory" and the colour beige, which I associate with both records.  Beige is such a comforting colour - that must be my reason for loving those two albums so much, their beige-ness.  The Rolling Stones, having helped pioneer country rock, released "Exile on Main Street" (9/10) which continued to embrace this genre and threw in some blues and gospel for good measure.  Country music always makes think of beige too.  Probably due to cornfields and cow dung.  The early 70s were very country and beige.  Lovely.

But 1972, witnessed a juxtaposition (had to get that word in somewhere) between this warm beige-ness and the multi-coloured brilliance of Art Rock.  I won't say Glam Rock, though there is an overlap, as Art Rock is a bit more sophisticated and grown up than the likes of  T Rex.  Heading the field in '72 were Roxy Music and a new incarnation of Bowie.  The former released their self-titled debut (9/10) in which they managed to do a bit of all that mucking about being clever stuff that Prog Rockers and the likes of King Crimson did, but they did it on good songs with melodies that you could sing along to, not just nod analytically along with as you acknowledge the musicianship, which is a wanky way to listen to music.  And Bowie released "Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars" (10/10) which song for song is difficult to match any other album against.  It's always interested me that 'Starman' was a hastily written last-minute song, when they were one track short of an album.  It was his appearance singing this on 'Top of the Pops' that turned him into a star.. coincidentally.  That look to camera as he sang, "so I picked on you, hoo, hoo" won over the country.

Not wanting to be too down on the Prog Rockers, I have included Genesis' "Foxtrot" (7/10) on my list.  And Pink Floyd continued their journey towards the Dark Side with "Obscured by Clouds" (7/10).  But as some stars were ascending, others neared their end.  Nick Drake released his 3rd and final album, "Pink Moon" (8/10) and The Doors did an admirable job with their second LP without Jim Morrison, "Full Circle" (7/10). 

1973-4

Despite its hype and a thousand or more listens, I never tire of  1973's "Dark Side of the Moon" (10/10).  I'm not quite sure how Pink Floyd created it, but this was certainly a time for re-inventing the whole concept of the rock album.  Roxy Music continued doing it with "For Your Pleasure" (8/10) and Frank Zappa was strutting his stuff left of left-field with "Overnite Sensation" (8/10) and "Apostrophe" (8/10).  Across those two LPs, Zappa sings about dental floss farming in Montana, smelly feet traumatising a dog as it chews a slipper, Nanook the Eskimo clubbing baby seals with a lead-filled snow shoe, warnings to "watch out where the huskies go, don't you eat the yellow snow" and lots of pretty rude stuff about sex that I won't provide details for in case my mum reads this. (She won't, she got bored after part one).

Clearly, in the 70s, rock music felt confident to move beyond the sexual innuendo in 60s music and just come out and say it.  Listening to Bowie's "Aladdin Sane" (9/10) I found myself, as a teenager, having to turn down the volume during 'Time' when he sings, "Time is flexing like a whore, falls wanking to the floor."  I mean, that is REALLY rude, David!  To think that the same album includes his cover of The Rolling Stones 'Let's Spend the Night Together' which was seen as so rude in the 60s that The Stones had to perform it on TV with the main lyric tweaked to 'Let's spend some time together'.  But I think Bowie's reference to self-abuse - and groupie-nailing Frank Zappa's obsession with all things sexual - was unusually explicit for a rock album at this time.  Bowie was not lyrically explicit the following year on "Diamond Dogs" (9/10), but the initial artwork depicting him as a human-canine hybrid, did feature a great big pair of dog's bollocks.   These were the years of the 'Carry On...' and 'Confessions' films, which admittedly were getting naughtier, but were still more cheeky than explicit, especially by modern standards.  That very English (almost camp) cheekiness is evident in Queen's "Sheer Heart Attack" (8/10) in '74 and concealed in innuendo in the (rarely camp) lyrics of The Stones and Led Zep.  Both of these rock giants put out albums worthy of their big stadia tours in these years: The Rolling Stones' "Goats Head Soup" (8/10) and "It's Only Rock and Roll" (8/10); and Led Zeppelin's "Houses of the Holy" (9/10).

Dylan was on the comeback trail at this time, touring with The Band (his first tour since 1966) and bringing them into the studio at last to add their unpolished genius to "Planet Waves" (9/10) in 1974.  Bob had been spawning imitators since day one and some who were clearly influenced by him, but were original enough to make the "new Dylan" epithet an inappropriate burden.  Bruce Springsteen was a case in point and his first two albums were distinctively poetic and soulful in an east-coast 1970s American way that always conjures up for me the scene in 'Rocky' where a group of singers are performing a cappella around an oil-drum fire on a cold night in a grim Philadelphia street.  Each Springsteen long-player had a long title - "Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ" (9/10) and "The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle" (9/10) - very much in keeping with the Boss's tendency for long concerts, then and now. 

One of my favourite Alan Partridge quotes was when he referred to 'Wings' as 'the band The Beatles could have been'.  At this time, Paul McCartney went from solo artist, to solo artist with wife to solo artist with band.  The first album by 'Paul McCartney and Wings' is fully deserving of Partridge's ridicule, but in 1973 they released "Band on the Run" (8/10) which might just win the accolade for the best post-Beatles LP by an ex-Beatle, by a nose anyway.

Rounding off the top tens for these two years are 1973's "Desperado" (8/10) by Eagles, or The Eagles, or whatever you want to call them, and 1974's "Heart like a Wheel" (7/10) by Linda Ronstadt, "Walls and Bridges" (8/10) by John Lennon, "I want to see the bright lights tonight" (8/10) by Richard and Linda Thompson, "On the Beach" (10/10) by Neil Young and "War Child" (7/10) by Jethro Tull.  As with the deleted Bowie album cover, all of these 1973-4 albums were indeed the dog's bollocks.

Half-amusing musings on my music collection - Part 5: 1970 and 1971

In 1970, The Beatles split.  Not because Yoko had been lying in a bed in Abbey Road studios, mad as a box of frogs.  And it wasn't to do with Phil Spector doing a production job on "Let it Be" (9/10) that McCartney would consider to be Spector's greatest crime (although, I'm not as sure that adding strings to "The Long and Winding Road" is in the same ballpark as murder, sexual molestation and psychological torture.)  The real reason for The Beatles split was because in 1970 they had so many brilliant songs that it would have been showing off to stay together and release them on one (probably triple) album.  THAT would have made The Beatles bigger than Jesus (don't burn my blog!), unless Jesus had been resurrected AND released a triple album of similar material.  Something not easily done in first century Galilee.

The material I refer to is scattered across the huge output of Beatles solo albums in 1970-1 and their final release as a band, "Let it Be".  The solo LPs securing positions on my top ten lists are 1970's "McCartney" (8/10) and George's triple album "All Things Must Pass" (8/10) and 1971's "Imagine" (8/10) and Paul and Linda's "Ram" (8/10).  Lennon's 1970 solo effort "Plastic Ono Band" doesn't quite make the list, but is a great album.  And Ringo's 1970 "Sentimental Journey" isn't in my collection, because, well, it's Ringo.  Solo.  Bless him.  I suspect he'd be allowed one song on the 1970-1 Beatles triple album that never was.

So, that's a combined score of 41 across '70-71 for The Beatles.  Untouchable.  But who are the others heralding the new decade with copious amounts of nice noises pressed onto vinyl?

The Doors score a perfect 20 by maturing into a more bluesy style, keeping willies in trousers on stage and growing a beard and getting fat in Jim Morrison's case.  "Morrison Hotel" (10/10) and "LA Woman" (10/10) frustratingly show them at their absolute best, sadly just before Jim quit the band, moved to Paris and died in the bath.

Jethro Tull's "Benefit" (10/10) and "Aqualung" (9/10) continued to prove that one of the best additions to the standard guitar-bass-drum-keyboards foundation for rock bands was a flute.  (We are a year or two away from Roxy Music making the case for a sax.) Standing on one leg, wearing tights and a codpiece whilst playing the flute might not have stood the test of time as well as the actual sound, but such is the joy off listening on vinyl over watching on You Tube.

After years of trying different styles, laughing with gnomes and floating in a tin can, David Bowie's creative peak began in 70-71, even though he was a year away from a commercial breakthrough.  He grew his hair long, donned a dress and draped himself over a chaise longue for the cover of "The Man Who Sold the World" (9/10).  Because (or maybe despite the fact that) the content  was not quite as camp or feminine as the sleeve suggested - the riff on 'Width of a Circle' rivals Led Zep's more overt masculinity - his record company couldn't see those conservative Americans wanting to buy a rock album with a transvestite on the cover and so changed it on the US version for a 3rd rate cartoon of a man in a cowboy hat with a rifle wrapped in a blanket under his arm, standing outside what is probably a mental asylum.  That's what America got for its inability to cope with a bloke in a frock.  A year later, Bowie unveiled a work of genius that few people appreciated straight away.  "Hunky Dory" (10/10).  Way beyond my powers of description, so I'll move on...

Led Zeppelin continued to name their albums after themselves, much like heavyweight fighter George Foreman, whose five sons are all called George.  "Led Zeppelin III" (9/10) surprised the critics with the emphasis shifting from rock towards folk; but in '71 the balance between the two was perfected on "Led Zeppelin IV" (10/10).  Or whatever you want to call it, because by that time, Zeppelin were so huge, that they confidently released an album with no title and no writing on the front, back or spine to indicate that it was their album.  Not something Showaddywaddy could get away with it.

On "Hunky Dory's" 'Song for Bob Dylan, Bowie sings that "we lost your train of thought", referring to what many at the time saw as Dylan's demise.  At this time, people may have believed that Bob had lost HIS train of thought, or perhaps his mind.  One particular 'Rolling Stone' music critic would have agreed, having famously headed his review of 1970's "Self Portrait" with the words "What is this shit?".  It doesn't nudge into my 1970 top ten, but it's far from shit.  The follow-up shut a few people up, though.  "New Morning" (8/10) was Bob's most varied album ever in terms of style, even embracing jazz-styled scat singing from a female backing vocalist.  'Rolling Stone' did not respond with "What is this scat?".  They missed an opportunity there.

Nearly all jazz makes me want to pour petrol into my ears and set fire to my head.  Especially scat.  And improvisational jazz.  All that smug nodding along to a careering rhythm that sounds like a never-ending trickle of piss into a toilet.  However, used sparingly, like garlic (which I also hate in larger quantities), jazz can enhance music in another primary genre, and Nick Drake's 1970 sophomore folk album "Bryter Layter" (9/10) is the jazziest thing in my collection.

If jazz is garlic to me, then Prog Rock is pepper.  I can take more of it, if the whole dish is a good one, but pile too much on and I want to spit it out.  Tull were dabbling with prog and did so more after 1971, but early Genesis were steeped in this genre.  Prog rock is always very clever, but very clever stuff can be either dull or down right irritating.  1971's "Nursery Cryme" (8/10) makes the peppery prog palatable by presenting it in a context of Victorian gothic folk supernaturalism, dark mystery, wit and even a sprinkling of music hall.  But more importantly, the songs are enjoyable and not annoying as most prog rock tends to be when it conforms to type and disappears up its own arsehole.

A final few mentions. 1970 saw Simon and Garfunkel bow out on a high point, with their unsurpassable "Bridge over Troubled Water" (10/10) and Neil Young cemented his place as a writer of classic songs on "After the Goldrush" (9/10).  1971 heralded Pink Floyd's transformation from psychedelia into something altogether more recognisably Floyd-ish with "Meddle" (9/10), while The Rolling Stones released "Sticky Fingers" (10/10) with another iconic Andy Warhol penis-obsessed album cover.

Thus ends the golden 3 year period, 1969-71, in which I've rated 13 albums with perfect scores of 10/10.  The rest of the 70s produces only 12 albums of that same quality and there are diminishing returns thereafter.  It's not the case that I've donned rose-tinted glasses to view this era with, nor have I worn brown-tinted ones for the rest of the time; it's purely because between 1969 and 1971, the world was blessed with the creative fruits of The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, David Bowie, Neil Young, The Doors, Simon and Garfunkel, The Rolling Stones, Nick Drake and Jethro Tull.... ALL AT THE SAME TIME!! Talk about buses!

Half-amusing musings on my music collection - Part 4: 1969

Based on a series of calculations carried out on a Bletchley Park enigma machine, 1969, 1970 and 1971 each score higher than any other year for the quality of the albums in my top ten lists.  This post will focus on 1969.  We've never had it so good.

1969

The Beatles' final recorded album, "Abbey Road" (10/10), lives up to the iconic status of its sleeve better than "Sgt. Pepper's" does, though I know many would disagree with me.  Not least, because of the inclusion of "Maxwell's Silver Hammer", a jaunty, kids' TV jingle about a vicious murder, and "Octopus' Garden", which would have made far fewer ripples on the pond of popular culture if it had been written and released by Aussie children's performers, The Wiggles, as you might be forgiven for thinking it had been.  But I like those songs.  And they in no way compromise the perfect 10 rating for an album that witnesses George Harrison's song-writing hitting its creative peak and the most seamless, musically coherent sequence of disassociated songs pieced together on side B.  Given that the album cover was shot outside Abbey Road studios in London's St John's Wood, where my parents grew up and were living at the time, and that the record came out two months before they married, then its strong visual image of George, Paul, John and Ringo on the zebra crossing was an inevitable choice of arm tattoo for me when I whimsically opted for some Beatles-related, permanent skin marking.  (A tattoo of the Sgt. Pepper's cover, would have cost a small fortune and caused me to pass out several dozen times.)

Like The Beatles, Led Zeppelin are one of those few bands who would have been unrecognisably poorer for one of their members being someone different - something they understood when they chose to split up following John Bonham's death in 1980.  And the magic of the Bonham-Jones-Plant-Page interplay surprisingly had no gestation period - Zeppelin arrived fully evolved, like a chicken plopping out another fully grown chicken and skipping the whole egg bit.  They first played together as a band in August 1968, toured that Autumn as 'The New Yardbirds' and released their debut album "Led Zeppelin" (10/10) in January 1969, faultlessly and characteristically Zeppelin from the outset.  In the same year, they released "Led Zeppelin II", inspiring every rock band from that year forward and prompting a similar debate over which is better, I or II, that was soon to eternally rage in respect to 'The Godfather'.

Our current generation of young music makers might well be inspired by Zeppelin, but their delicate/principled (*delete) sensibilities would probably be shocked by what they'd call 'toxic masculinity' in the lyrics; but Robert Plant is by all accounts - including those of two friends who have worked with him - a thoroughly nice bloke.  Not toxic at all.  So, when he sings that he wants you to squeeze his lemon until the juice runs down his leg, you just have to judge it in its 1969 context.  As you would 'On the Buses'. Similarly, on Jethro Tull's finest outing "Stand Up" (10/10), these lyrics might also cause a Twitterstorm these days if a well-known pop star employed them in a song: 

"Don't want to be a fat man, people would think that I was just good fun... too much to carry around with you, no chance of finding a woman who will love you in the morning and all the night time too... I've seen the other side of being thin, roll us both down a mountain and I'm sure the fat man would win." 

But you know, if you're convinced that in the 1960s everyone was sexist, racist and laughed at fat people, it's best you bugger off and stream some Ed Sheeran from your phone instead.  Not that you'd be wrong, of course.  You might want 1969 rock albums to carry the same warnings as so many old films and TV shows online - something along the lines of "reflects attitudes of the time", which I recently saw applied to Grange Hill on Britbox... ignoring the fact that like most things, even stuff today reflects attitudes of the time, on account of being made by people living at that time.

1969 was also the year in which The Doors pulled in an orchestra, had Jim Morrison in full crooner mode and added a dash of easy listening to their distinctive sound on "The Soft Parade" (10/10).  That's another band with 4 irreplaceable musicians.  And The Rolling Stones ploughed the country-folk-rock furrow some more on "Let it Bleed" (10/10), demonstrating that on the contrary they could replace a band member, by sacking the unreliable Brian Jones midway through recording and becoming an even better band by substituting him with Mick Taylor.  Jones died a month after leaving the Stones, the first of many rock casualties during these 3 years.  The death count for '69-71 might imply that the reason why music was so good at this time was because musicians were dying for their art.  They weren't, of course.  They were just filling their bodies with all sorts of nasty crap.

The remaining 4 albums from my 1969 top ten are also either folk or country influenced, or both (as you'd expect from someone with a non-eclectic taste in music).  Neil Young's second album and first with Crazy Horse, "Everybody Knows this is Nowhere" (9/10) has an awful cover shot of Neil leaning on a tree like a catalogue model for lumberjack shirts, fooling potential buyers into believing that this is a K-TEL compilation of cheesy middle of the road ballads.  Instead, it contains two of his most loved and oft-played, heavy and grungy, epic guitar work-outs, "Cowgirl in the Sand" and "Down by the River".

Nick Drake's debut "Five Leaves Left" (9/10) is pure English folk without any grunge. Drake was too shy to perform live, an affliction you'd wish on Chris Martin.  Consequently, his records remained little known for many years after his tragic death in 1974, until other musicians and song-writers started crediting him as an influence.  Coming from similar comfortable, middle-class, suburban or village backgrounds, and even more deeply immersed in Britain's folk traditions were Fairport Convention.  But they were taking these traditions and modernising them, as best exemplified on "Unhalfbricking" (8/10) and "Liege and Lief" (8/10).  Tragedy plagued Fairport as well.  In between these two albums, drummer Martin Lamble and Jeannie Franklyn, girlfriend of guitarist Richard Thompson, were both killed when the band's transit van crashed on the motorway following a gig.  If it wasn't for Jimmy Saville's subsequent 'Clunk Click Every Trip' campaign, more rock stars might have perished in the Health-and-safety-adverse 1970s.

It is often said that 1969, with its many tragedies - those mentioned here and some key cultural turning points, such as Hell's Angels stabbing a young man to death at the Rolling Stones' Altamont concert and news of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam - marked the end of 1960s optimism and idealism as much as it marked the actual end of the decade.  But in doing so, it began three glorious years of music.

Half-amusing musings on my music collection - Part 3: The late-60s

 1967

If you were a hippy - and by 'hippy' I'm narrowing it down to the parentally-funded, middle-class, work-shirking, naively idealistic, 18-25 year olds from San Francisco's Haight-Asbury district - then 1967 was the 'Summer of Love' and the 'Age of Aquarius' and all sorts of lovely, let's-bang-each-other-bandy, psychedelic nonsense until the grim reality of life came along and bit them all on the asses.

If, like everyone else, you were working in a factory or office, somewhere grey and rainy, reading about hippies in the newspapers and growing your hair long and buying a Paisley shirt in sympathy, then 1967 was the year the ERA OF THE ROCK ALBUM began.

Consequently, my 1967 record collection has enough albums to constitute a top ten for the first time, but only just.  This means that Pink Floyd's "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn" (4/10) creeps in, for all its somewhat irritating nursery rhyme nonsense and over-indulgent psychedelic fatuousness.  It does this at the expense of The Rolling Stones' "Their Satanic Majesties Request" (1/10) which slips to number 11 of 11 on account of it being two songs short of a 12 inch disc of compressed cow dung.

In the lower regions of this top ten are albums which encapsulate the spirit of the time.  The Jimi Hendrix Experience announced their arrival, but had to come to Britain to do so, because Britain was cool then and the USA was all racial tension and Vietnam and not very nice stuff.  "Are you Experienced?" (7/10) and Cream's "Disraeli Gears" (8/10) laid down the blueprint for the future of blues-influenced rock and were totally cool without even trying.  So cool in fact, that Cream's Eric Clapton managed to hoodwink the world into thinking he was both cool and creative for the next few decades, despite being conversely dull and derivative.  Trying a bit too hard to be cool, but pulling it off at times just enough to inspire alternative music for the future, were The Velvet Underground on their self-titled 'banana' album (7/10).  But posterity will record that the most influential album of the year and perhaps of all time, was The Beatles' "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" (8/10).  Yes, you read that correctly.... only 8 out of 10.  It's a better album cover than an album.  Undeniably, it has some great songs, but if I'm being picky, a few are a bit too plonky-plodders, similar tempo, relatively average tracks by The Beatles' own high standards.  If they hadn't taken so long pissing about in the studio being 'experimental' with tapes and farmyard noises, then EMI might have held off releasing "Strawberry Fields Forever" and "Penny Lane" as a double A-side single and stuck these on the album instead of the rather-TOO-Indian "Within You Without You" and "Good Morning Good Morning".  Then it would have been a great album! (well.... 9/10 maybe)

The year's top 5 don't quite match the perfection seen in '65-'67, but they all earn themselves 9/10 on my geeky spreadsheet.  The Beatles' "Magical Mystery Tour" controversially nips in ahead of "Sgt Pepper's", because on this occasion it does contain "Strawberry Fields Forever" and "Penny Lane" and a lot of other great stuff besides.  I'm cheating slightly here, as it was only an EP in the UK.  The LP version (which is the original EP plus 5 tracks) that I'm including on my list came out in the USA in 1967, but was not given a UK release until 1976.  My rules, don't argue!

The Doors might be the sort of band you'd be misled into choosing to jump into a TARDIS and go back in time to see in concert, as the chances are that Jim Morrison would be drunk, get his willy out and cause the police to wade into the audience and stop the gig.  Personally, I'm happy enough just to listen to the records in my living room, with their first two, "The Doors" and "Strange Days" coming out in 1967.

Finally, just as everyone else was getting all psychedelic, experimental, revolutionary, radical, convention-breaking and LOUD, Bobbie Gentry and Bob Dylan released the beautifully acoustic, rural, folk country records "Ode to Billy Joe" and "John Wesley Harding".  In Bob's case, on the back of "Blonde on Blonde", this was another example of him doing whatever the fuck he wanted, whatever pleased him and whatever no one expected, all at the same time.

1968

The Stones bounced back big time from their lame Sgt. Pepper's/Piper at the Gates of Dawn pastiche to produce "Beggar's Banquet" (10/10) and thus take my accolade as the best LP of 1968.  I'm not sure the album sleeve artwork of a graffiti-strewn public toilet wall quite encapsulates the contents, which not only jump on the country-rock bandwagon, but sets up camp there for their next 4 albums. (That's a camp with a fire, a guitar and a lot of beans.)

The Beatles released "The Beatles" (9/10) to be forever known as 'The White Album', much of which was forged whilst finding themselves in India in the company of the Maharishi (before finding the Maharishi to be a fraud, funnily enough).  I'm not a fan of the term 'eclectic' as everyone (usually inappropriately) likes to lazily apply it to their record collection or music taste - everyone except me that is - but 'The White Album' is very eclectic, a melting pot of styles.  It would be a 10, but for the compilation feel to it; it's a lot of great unconnectable songs without quite being an album.  And "Revolution 9" is one of the few occasions I ever lift the needle before the end of a side.

Fleetwood Mac, in their original blues incarnation, released their first two albums this year.  The debut' LP's title is the band's name, but it would have been to the annoyance of the self-effacing founder member, (sublime) lead guitarist and main songwriter, Peter Green, that it has often been referred to as "Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac" (9/10).  So devoid of selfish vanity was Green, that he named his band after the bass player and drummer instead of himself.  If that example had been copied, then we might have had some interesting band names in subsequent decades, not least 'Vicious Cook' in the late 70s.  Their second album was "Mr Wonderful" (9/10), which was not named after Peter Green, even though we all think he was exactly that.

The rest of the list follows on nicely from 1967.  Simon and Garfunkel improve even further with "Bookends" (9/10), its highlight track being "America" and its quirky moment being "Voices of Old People" - which is just that, old Jewish New Yorkers talking.  The Doors do their own eclectic mish-mash with the weakest of the 6 they put out in a 5 year career, "Waiting for the Sun" (8/10), one of those albums which is named after a song that strangely appears on a different album.  Hendrix peaks on his double-LP "Electric Ladyland" (7/10), which contains "Crosstown Traffic" and "Voodoo Chile (slight return)" and has one of those album covers that you tend not to leave lying around as a teenager.  Townes Van Zandt, one of the least well known from my lists so far, picks up the country-folk balladeer mantel to wonderful effect with "For the sake of the song" (7/10); and Jethro Tull introduce themselves as a blues band on "This Was" (7/10), whereas what they 'would become' was more folk-prog rock.

But the story I like most belongs to The Band, who released "Music from the Big Pink" (8/10) in this year.  Under their previous nomenclature, The Hawks, they had been Bob Dylan's backing band in 1965-6 as he toured his new electric sound, attracting jeers (perhaps more for playing it "fucking loud" on equipment that couldn't cope, rather than for for having gone electric at all) and the famous cry of 'Judas' for betraying his folk roots.  Rather worn out by accompanying the enigmatic Dylan with his unpredictable approach to playing songs live, and by all the hostility in the audience, the Hawks spent 1967 recuperating alongside a post-motorcycle-accident Dylan in a large house near Woodstock, NY, called The Big Pink.  Together, Bob and what became The Band, played and recorded dozens of traditional and original country-folk songs, Americana if you like, and plenty there to release a wonderful album together.  As it turned out, that was too predictable for Bob, who pissed off without warning one day and cut "John Wesley Harding" with a different set of musicians playing songs he hadn't introduced The Band to at all.  The Band instead released their own album of music from the Big Pink and waited another 8 years before their 1967 recordings with Bob were officially released as The Basement Tapes.

Half-amusing musings on my music collection - Part 2: The mid-60s

We haven't reached the age of THE ALBUM yet.  Most bands prioritised the release of singles in the mid-60s.  People bought 45s and got up off their arse to change the record after 3 minutes.  LPs were merely collections of more songs, without the coherence and character that later came to define the pop/rock ALBUM. They were far less popular than singles, possibly due to their prohibitive cost - lots of guineas and shillings, whatever imperial measurement of money they still had in those days. Consequently, there just weren't enough good LPs around until 1967, so I don't own enough to list a top ten for each year.   As before, this post will be heavily dominated by the same two artists that are so highly favoured by me - Bob Dylan and The Beatles.

During this time, the two of these heavily influenced each other.  Dylan got The Beatles into marijuana and writing lyrics that went beyond "I love you, you love me" and The Beatles were a prompt to Bob to convince himself to get a band and plug into amps.  Consequently, each artist scaled a creative peak from 1965 into 1966 and produced between them four albums that have cemented a place in my all-time top ten.

1964

There's a lull before the storm, though.

Dylan peddled a couple of slightly dour folk offerings in 1964: "The Times they are a-changin'" (8/10) and "Another Side of..." (7/10).  More to be admired than liked, I feel.  In each case, Bob wrote and performed every song, no cover versions, a convention-shattering approach that paved the way for Dennis Waterman to write the theme tune and sing the theme tune to "Minder" in the late 70s and thus provide me with the perfect ringtone for my phone.

The Beatles matched this musical multi-tasking when they released "A Hard Day's Night" (9/10) and packed it with nothing but Lennon-McCartney accredited songs.  Not even poor George Harrison was allowed a look in this time, despite breaking his duck previously on "With the Beatles".  Between them, Bob, Paul and John raised the bar for other musical performers to write their own material.  Unfortunately, by the end of the year, much like 1963, the Beatles ended up cobbling together a relatively weak rag-bag of originals and covers on "Beatles for Sale" (7/10).  (Like I say, "relatively".  It's still a great album.)

Elsewhere, Simon and Garfunkel were on the bus behind, releasing their debut "Wednesday Morning 3am" (6/10) and putting the self-penned work of genius "The Sounds of Silence" alongside the traditional folk hymn "Go Tell it on the Mountain", which I remember singing (*miming to) at primary school and consequently couldn't get my head round seeing it in this context anymore than if Simon and Garfunkel had sung "Make me a Channel of Your Peace" or "Lord of the Dance"

1965

And then God said to Abraham...

These days, bands take three years to write and record an album of songs and they still can't match what The Beatles and Bob were doing every 6 months at this stage.  Imagine if that was the case with builders or decorators - "We can do the job, mate, but it'll take six times as long and won't be anywhere near as good as other firms."  You'd laugh them out of the door and back to their van, emblazoned with 'Coldplay and Sons' or something like that.

In 1965, these two leviathans of popular rock music each released their best album to date followed by an even better one.  Bob went electric, at least on side one of "Bringing it all Back Home" (10/10) and then demonstrated that this was merely a prophet making the path ready for the messianic "Highway 61 Revisited" (10/10 and my favourite album of all time).  The Beatles released "Help!" (9/10) and then "Rubber Soul" (10/10), the latter being worthy of a perfect score in my book, despite how much better it would have been if they had included on it the two singles from the time: "We can work it out" and "Day Tripper".  The mark of how untouchable Dylan and Lennon-McCartney were as songwriters, is the quality of the songs they left off their albums, remarkably still better than the best of what anyone else has ever done.  I sometimes think some bands would have been even better if they'd left more songs off their albums.  I'm thinking particularly of Manic Street Preachers, The Verve, The Killers, Coldplay and Mumford and Sons, all of whom should have left ALL of their songs off their albums and put someone else's on instead.

To finish my list for 1965, I'd like to share the sad story of Jackson C Frank, whose self-titled one and only studio album (7/10) provides the pathos for his tale.  When he was 11 years old, a fire at his school killed 15 other students and left him with burns to half of his body, that caused him long term joint problems on top of the inevitable trauma he experienced from the whole incident.  He met Paul Simon in England, whilst both were plying their trade on the British folk circuit.  Recognising his talent and the strength of his songs (the best of which, "Blues run the game", he recorded a cover of), Simon produced Frank's album.  In the studio, Frank was so nervous singing, that he had to be hidden from view.  Within a year of the album's release, he had plunged into a deep depression and was admitted to hospital.  He was left completely devoid of any self-confidence or song-writing ability.  He married and had two children, but one died at an early age of cystic fibrosis, leading to Frank being admitted to a mental institution.  By the 1980s, he'd moved back to live with his mother, but went missing in a search for Paul Simon, according to a note he left behind.  He continued to be periodically institutionalised and was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.  In the 1990s, he was shot in the eye by some kids messing about with a pellet gun and consequently blinded.  In 1990, he died of pneumonia, aged 56.  Not the luckiest man in the music business.  But a wonderful album that I recommend you listen to.

1966

On the subject of Paul Simon, two of his albums with Garfunkel feature in my list of best and only albums for 1966:  "Sounds of Silence" (8/10) and "Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme" (8/10).  By this point, Simon had found his song-writing spurs, proving a worthy rival to Dylan lyrically and Lennon-McCartney melodically.  Just imagine how shit these albums would have sounded if he'd discovered South African music this early on, like George Harrison did with Indian music.

George's Indian influences and his other song-writing contributions to "Revolver" (10/10) were a significant factor in making this Beatles album the best in my opinion.  So much so, that "Sgt, Pepper's", its 1967 follow-up, has always felt like a let down to me.  Not because it's not a brilliant album, but "Revolver" is just so amazing that it isn't even spoilt by having "Yellow Submarine" on it.  In film terms, that's like "The Godfather" having an animated musical sequence half-way through, in which Don Corleone, surrounded by cartoon woodland animals, breaks into a chorus of "The Bare Necessities" as he chases his grandson through the tomato plants with a water-spray-can before dropping down dead.  I'm not sure even "The Godfather" would retain its credibility in the same way as "Revolver" does.

And whatever The Beatles do (at this stage at least, as he has a year off while they're knocking out "Sgt. Pepper's"), Bob can do just as well.  And he does this with "Blonde with Blonde" (10/10), which I think is rock music's first double album and easily its best.  The nearest equivalent to a "Yellow Submarine" on here is "Rainy Day Women #12 and #35" in which Bob invents the hashtag two generations before Twitter, whilst singing that "everybody must get stoned" to the accompaniment of a comedy trombone.  "Blonde on Blonde" is all the better for this, for harmonica playing that is more seamlessly integrated into the electric blues sound, for more stunningly original expressionism in its lyrics and for the sheer audacity of putting an out-of-focus photo on the cover and giving the album a title that sounds like a lesbian porn film.

My final 1966 album, is not The Beatles or Bob Dylan for a change.  It's Richie Havens' "Mixed Bag" (6/10).  Richie covers both The Beatles and Bob Dylan on this album.  There's no escaping them.