1001Albums

This is one of those albums where I can clearly remember seeing the cover for the first time - that multicoloured flying saucer with a space ship about to dock promised great things and the album really delivered - mixing electric guitars with orchestral arrangements, some effective sound effects and twiddles, and impossibly catchy songs. The highlight is side 3 which is a sequence ending with the iconic Mr Blue Sky and the instruction ‘Please turn me over’

Weirdly the original release of this album omitted both the title track and their biggest hit, but this version has those plus a couple of other b sides. Anyhoo, with this we are very much in the post punk era with a side line in obtuse lyrics. I struggled to hear what he was singing in places - for years I’d assumed that he was asking his mum to accept his reward. This is probably the best band to be named after a random quote from a Silver Surfer comic.

After their previous album which was mainly Bob Dylan style American folk, and a devastating tour bus crash, Fairport Convention regrouped and produced this album which mixes traditional English folk tunes with (gasp!) electric guitars to great effect. The highlights are Matty Groves which is an epic tale of adultery, murder and revenge that builds for eight minutes, and Tam Lin which has all of the faeries, magic and big rock riffs that you could wish for

This is a change of mood from the previous album, swapping some cheeky love songs for the introspection of In the Wee Small Hours. There’s a good selection classic tunes, with I’ve Got You Under My Skin by Cole Porter being a highlight. I also found out today that there were two versions of the cover art - the original with Frank looking off into the distance was changed for one where he’s watching the ‘Swingin’ Lovers’ like a slightly creepy uncle!

Live albums are tricky to get right - there needs to be the right balance between the music and the between songs banter with the crowd. Fortunately this album hits all the right notes with a great atmosphere and phenomenal musicianship from the king of the blues himself. This still feels fresh, despite being recorded 60 years ago (and harking back to even earlier songs called out as “Real, real oldies!”). Not sure about his relationship advice though!

I was a bit too young for punk back in the day but new wave hit me right in my adolescent wheelhouse. This album combines the exuberance of 50's rock 'n' rollers like the Crickets with the punk energy of The Stooges, as well as a touch of French nouvelle vague cool. Just about every song on this is a banger, but apart from the hits (and there are a lot of them!) the standout is the cheeky cover of Buddy Holly's I'm Gonna Love You Too. Peroxide-tastic!

I wasn’t expecting today’s selection to be an Afrofuturist concept album inspired by Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, but it turns out that it was exactly what I needed this morning. It’s gloriously textured and complex and I’m already listening for the second time. I’m also a sucker for any album that has an orchestral overture! My highlight is the psychedelic Mushrooms & Roses which explores the unexpected subject of robot sex. Droidtastic!

Even though I know this is a crowd funded concept album about the experience of living in the Deep South, it still confuses the heck out of me when they start singing about living in Birmingham. Anyhoo, this takes as its starting point the tragic story of Lynyrd Skynyrd and the plane crash in 1977 that killed half the band, as well as the pilots. It’s a wildly ambitious project, but they just about pull it off, tackling some touchy subjects. Bostintastic!

This album opens with a huge bombastic blast with arpeggiated synths, huge guitar riffs and crashing drums, like Queen crossed with Phillip Glass. It calms down a little after that with Starlight sounding a bit like Coldplay, although Supermassive Black Hole returns to the big 70s glam rock feel. The standout for me is Knights of Cydonia which adds galloping horses and Dick Dale style surf guitar to the mix. Excellent fun all round. Sagittarius A*-tastic!

Sometimes you just want an album of good old fashioned swampy blues and southern fried rock ‘n’ roll to stomp along to. Creedence Clearwater Revival might not be the world’s greatest band, but they really sound like they’re enjoying themselves on this and it’s infectious. Does this earn them a place in this list? Yes, if only for their audacious eleven minute cover version of ‘Heard it through the Grapevine’ which is a whole lot of fun. Bayoutastic!

This is an album that I’ve skipped over previously going from Talking Book to Songs in the Key of Life, but it really is a quiet masterpiece with many standout moments. Living for the City hits hard with a story of a naive young black man moving to New York and ending up on the wrong side of the law, complete with dialogue and sound effects. There are brighter songs too, with Don’t You Worry Bout a Thing being an absolute joy from start to finish.

This is another one of those albums that struck a chord with the listening public as being something to put on if you were planning a cozy night in with your significant other. I’m not entirely sure quite how romantic the line about wanting to be turned on like a light bulb in a darkened room is though! It’s a nice easy listen though - a bit of piano, some folky guitar and smooth vocals from Norah herself. Not my usual cup of tea, but a solid 3 stars though.

For a rap album, this is actually quite sweet and thoughtful. Lupe Fiasco had a tough upbringing, but the thing that he missed out on most was making model trains with his absent father. The cover shows him surrounded by his favourite things, including a Nintendo DS. He tackles the thorny subject of misogyny in rap on one track and spends the outro thanking everyone by name who helped him. The highlight is a two part song about skateboarding. Nerdtastic!

I only knew Van Halen from their 80s hair metal era, so this album was a pleasant surprise. There are interesting parallels between this and Iron Maiden’s first album, with both having a punk edge, but this album also includes blues and even some vocal scatting on one track. The highlight is probably the showboating guitar solo from Eddie Van Halen on Eruption that segues into a cheeky cover of The Kinks’ ‘You Really Got Me’. Good fun all round.

On October the first, 1966 Eric Clapton watched Jimi Hendrix playing at the London Polytechnic. Shortly after, he switched from ripping off black American blues guitarists to, well, you do the math. Disraeli Gears tries to be a psychedelic acid rock album, but it plods and meanders, and manages to seem tediously long for a running time of just over half an hour. Ginger Baker is still a good drummer but Clapton can get in the bin.

This album not only broke new ground in exploring the sounds that it was possible to get out of an electric guitar, it pushed the boundaries of rock music genre mashups with the highlight being the sci-fi epic Third Stone From the Sun which veers wildly from acid rock to free jazz noodling to total freak out. Legend has it that Jimi liked to play so loudly in the studio that the neighbours complained about the noise. Another artist who died far too young.

This sounded intriguing from the description - a debut album based on the artist’s synesthesia where he experienced first love as the colour orange. In actually, this is fairly anodyne R&B (albeit with some NSFW lyrics about running out of condoms) interspersed with random and surreal sound collages. The highlight (or very middling light) is where he pays a confused Muslim taxi driver to act as his personal therapist by keeping the meter running. Weird.

In one of those ironic twists that this list throws up, after yesterday’s album about how lovely drugs are, today’s is from someone who died after a heroin overdose. Janis Joplin had an amazing voice, but on this posthumously released album you can already hear it cracking in places and she sounds much older than her 27 years. The highlight is Mercedes Benz where her prayers gradually get scaled back from a new car to the next round of drinks. RIP Janis.

This an album of its time, and the time is firmly in the Summer of Love in San Francisco. Whilst the Beatles made a token effort to hide their drug references, Country Joe & the Fish are openly passing round the reefers and whispering LSD over the outro. They’re not shy about sex either and the politics are far to the left. The highlight is the cheeky Superbird where he calls on the Fantastic Four and Doctor Strange to take out LBJ. Hippytastic!

n 1959 Miles Davis decided to do something different, moving away from hard bop jazz. He assembled a crew of some of the best musicians around, gave them each a set of scales to improvise around, then lit the metaphorical blue touch paper. The result is like listening to a conversation as music is built up in real time with each player contributing to the piece. Music like this really should be heard live, but this recording is probably as good as it gets.

This is an album that I’ve previously skipped on Bowie’s journey from Aladdin Sane to the Thin White Duke. It’s R&B/funk aimed with laser sharp cynical precision at the American market, and on reflection it’s pretty darned good and sounds better than the R&B that Bowie released in the 80s. The highlight is probably a spectacular cover of Across the Universe but the bitter and angry Fame written with John Lennon is good too, and also foreshadows 80s Bowie too

There are some men of a certain age, probably wearing an old Ramones t shirt that’s a bit too small for them nowadays, who would look at this album and complain that it’s not ‘proper punk’. I would counter by saying that here we have 15 banging tunes in 38 minutes, dealing with boredom, alienation, growing up in an uncertain world that just doesn’t care, as well as the usual teenage concerns of sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll. What could be more punk than that?

I think that every rock contract in the 70s must have had a clause that the band were obliged to record at least one live album in Japan. Thus we get Cheap Trick, in front of thousands of screaming Japanese fans, plodding through a competent but pedestrian set list. I always assumed that they were hard rock, but apart from the opening track this is closer to glam/pop. The highlight is a Chuck Berry cover where they somehow shoehorn in a drum solo.

When I was a kid, I used to borrow sound effects LPs from the library and record them on to cassettes to make mini audio dramas. This album is a little bit like that, except it also adds in a musical soundtrack for an imaginary film noir with the track names hinting at the unfolding drama. There are some nice nods to the genre with the Hitchcock tune and a stab at a Bond theme. I could imagine using this as a soundtrack for a seedy spy rpg. Cinetastic!

Has there ever been a more thrilling start to an album than Highway Star on this one? It perfectly captures the feeling of driving like a maniac on an open road with some of the best guitar solo work on record. The album calms down a little after that with some nice bluesy rock before we hear that riff, familiar to anyone who’s ever been in a guitar shop, and probably the best song about someone burning down a casino. Funky Claudetastic!

Like Bringing it all Back Home, this album is also full of complex, multi layered songs, backed with an electric band playing with gusto and sung by Bob in his trademark honking nasal drawl. Every time I listen to Desolation Row, I swear that someone has put extra verses in that I’ve never heard before, and they still feel relevant - the bit about the passengers on Titanic arguing about which side they’re on feels very on the nose today. Bobtastic!

My uncle used to be a bit of an audiophile back in the day. He had a fancy turntable and big speakers, and when we went round, he’d put records on to show off how good it sounded. This was one of those records. Technically fine, but lacking anything that grabbed me in any way. This is typically overblown 70s pop prog and I couldn’t tell you what any of the songs were about. I did like the ‘bloody well right’ bit and I think ‘Dreamer’ must have been a single.

The 1970s in Jamaica were a turbulent time. Just before he was due to play at a peace concert Bob Marley, his wife Rita, and his manager were shot at and wounded. This led to him moving to London and recording this album. Side one is the stronger, mixing the spiritual and political, with powerful songs. Side 2 is more chilled and has the better known tracks. This needs to be listened to on the biggest sound system you have with bass turned up. Splifftastic!

Mick Ronson and David Bowie were hugely influenced by The Velvet Underground and they repaid the favour by working on this album with Lou Reed. There’s definitely a glam feel to parts of this, but the lyrical content and Lou Reed’s distinctive style loses none of its edge. We still get boundary pushing tracks about trans people, sex of all flavours and a whole song about how nice it is to spend the day in the park off your head on heroin. Smacktastic!

This isn’t an easy listen, but it’s a worthy inclusion on the list. It opens with the mellow ‘Sunday Morning’ but rapidly moves onto stranger ground with songs about sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, layered on top of growling feedback and odd instrumentation. Vocals are split between Lou Reed’s proto punk drawl and Nico’s harmonies. Brian Eno once famously said that not many people bought this album when it was released but everyone that did started a band.

Joan Armatrading has never quite reached the heights of superstardom, perhaps because she has always refused to play the tabloid fame game and kept her private life to herself. This album is a quiet gem, from one of Britain’s greatest singer songwriters, mixing songs of longing and regret with some gorgeously smooth jazzy R&B. There are some very pointed lyrics here too, especially Water with the Wine dealing with date rape.

Louis Prima is probably best known as the voice of King Louis in The Jungle Book, but this album from 1956 is equally joyous. The album was recorded as live in the studio with an excellent group of jazz musicians, who are clearly having a ball, as well as Prima’s wife Keely Smith who provides a cool counterbalance to his wild flights of fancy. It’s a brisk 30 minutes of fun and one of the rare albums where I listened twice. Highlight is opener Just a Gigolo!

Well, this was a lot of fun. Female fronted pop punk, with fuzzed out guitars and even more fuzzed out vocals, tracing a direct line from bands like the Pretenders and Siouxie and the Banshees. It’s not revolutionary or going to change the world in any way, but sometimes you just want something that hits all of the right notes without trying too hard. The highlight for me was the song No, No, No which is very appropriate for the Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs.

The conceit of MTV Unplugged is simple - get a big rock band to come in and play an acoustic set of their greatest hits. Nirvana approached the challenge differently, picking deep cuts and covers over hits, and featuring The Meat Puppets as special guests. Cobain sounds a little nervous at the start and also uses some amplification and effects in places. He passed away 5 months after this recording, lending it a poignant air, especially on Come As You Are.

Many of the best musicians in the world are to be found strumming away in dusty bars and concert halls, playing to a handful of local fans. In 1996 Ry Cooder went to Havana to record an album with some musicians from Mali, and for various reasons ending up recording an album of traditional Cuban music with a diverse group of local musicians instead. Everyone involved had a great time and the end result is an absolute joy to listen to. Soncubanotastic!

This album was exactly what I needed this morning. Queer French hyper-pop, performed with Gallic elan by lead singer Chris. Unusually, this is a double album with the same songs presented in English and French, and on balance I think I preferred the French ones which gave my schoolboy French a workout. This would go down a storm on Eurovision and I mean that in the nicest way possible. It’s accessible, engaging and fun, and I will seek out more! Eurotastic!

I’m always intrigued when I get a band that I haven’t heard of on this project. This album starts out as fairly low key shoegazey indie before picking up with some nice 60s style psychedelia. Nothing world changing or revolutionary, but well done and good to listen to. The highlight for me is the Byrds-esque Memory Boy, dealing with the fallibility of nostalgia. A solid 3 stars for this.

From the name, I was expecting a bit of country music, but instead got something that sounded like a cross between Coldplay and Ed Sheeran, from a man whose idea of a big romantic gesture is putting his phone on vibrate. This is so inoffensive you could play it at a dinner party for maiden aunts, nervous vicars and people with heart problems with no risk of upsetting anyone. The only edgy thing here is the cover where he is holding a longsword by the blade. Do not want.

After leaving Genesis, Peter Gabriel put out four quirky, experimental albums titled Peter Gabriel 1-4. His record company asked for a more marketable name for his fifth album, so he called it ‘So’. I wasn’t keen on this album at the time - a combination of the mawkish ‘Don’t Give Up’ and the MTV earworm of ‘Sledgehammer’ put me off. Revisiting it reveals some gems though, especially ‘This is the Picture’ with Laurie Anderson and opener ‘Red Rain’. Sotastic!

Alternative bands from the 90s with one word names tend to blend into one for me and I initially struggled to remember anything from this one apart from Stupid Girl. However, I was pleasantly surprised by some of the more down tempo tracks on this that edged into shoegaze/trip hop territory, with the highlight for me being A Stroke of Luck with Shirley Manson’s voice flowing like warm honey. Lovely stuff.

This live album opens with what sounds like a band tuning up at a sound check, then bit by bit they all start noodling around a theme, someone randomly starts singing and before you know it twenty minutes have passed. I always thought that the Grateful Dead were a rock band, but this is closer to free jazz with extended improvisations. I can see the attraction of following them around to listen to this while getting stoned in a field somewhere. Hippytastic!

The extraordinary musicianship on this can’t be denied but it has to be tempered by knowing that Mingus was a angry man, prone to violent outbursts. He once punched a fellow musician in the face so hard it permanently damaged their ability to play the trombone. His anger is reflected in the music here - aggressive hard bop with diversions into blues and classical guitar. Apparently this was originally written as a ballet which is something that I want to see

Apparently Peter Buck from REM once asked producer John Wood how he captured the intimate sound on this album. Wood replied that Nick Drake had simply sat in front of a single microphone and played his guitar. It really is a captivating performance that was sadly to be Drake’s last as he passed away at the age of 26. I can start to understand why Robert Smith and Michael Stipe were so worried about passing thirty now.

This is another album inspired by turning thirty, although with REM their songs tend to the wistful and abstruse rather than gloominess. The opening track Drive sets the tone for the album with sparse acoustic guitars blossoming into a stunning string arrangement from John Paul Jones from Led Zeppelin. The remastered atmos mix also shines here, sounding intimate and epic at the same time. The highlight is still Stipe’s Elvis impression on Man in the Moon.

I only really knew the guitar/drums garage rock stuff from the White Stripes so this album was a bit of revelation with a wider range of instruments on offer, adding piano, marimba and mandolin to the mix. There are also some variations in style too, and I particularly enjoyed the country feel on Little Ghost and the blues rock of Instinct Blue. Nice to hear Meg singing too. True confession - I always thought they were siblings but turns out they’re married!

Apparently Robert Smith had a bit of a crisis of confidence approaching his 30th birthday, thinking that he would soon be past his creative peak. He wrote most of the material for this album on his own, working through his feelings of despair and the band added musical gloomscapes to them. The end result is oddly uplifting, when you remember that Bob is now happily in his sixties and still collaborating with bands who are less than half his age. Gothtastic!

The second album from 1983 this week and it’s a complete contrast. I remember enjoying this at the time but it hasn’t aged particularly well. It’s po-faced and preachy, and you get the feeling that no one involved had any fun at all while they were making it. I can’t imagine U2 busking outside a Pretenders gig and getting invited to be the support act for a night. Knocking off a star from the 1001 albums rating until they start paying their taxes.

There comes a time in every band’s career when someone mentions the C word - the concept album. For a punk band known for three minute pop bangers this is a risky move. However the opening salvo of American Idiot still hits home, relevant today just by changing one word. The album looks American society at the turn of the millennium but not much has changed. Jesus of Suburbia sends shivers down my spine with the final ‘Are you leaving home?’. A punk classic.

If you’d asked me to guess the year and genre of this album from the title, then acoustic folk punk from 1983 is probably the last thing I’d have gone for. This turns out to actually be a lot of fun, written by an 18 year old high school student called Gordon Gano, mixing punky Lou Reed style vocals with bouncy acoustic guitars and lively drums. The highlight is the first track Blister in the Sun which I recognised from the Xbox Rock Band soundtrack.

How 80s could this album be? None. The answer is none more 80s. This is where Duran Duran changed from fay Sci Fi nerd New Romantics into archetypal shoulder padded yuppie icons, with an era defining series of music videos backed up with some great music. Admittedly, Simon LeBon wasn’t the world’s greatest vocalist, but the rest of the band held it together with the standout being John Taylor’s phenomenal bass lines punching through the mix. Yacht-tastic!

I know this album off by heart and not through choice. When I was at university, the guy next door in the halls blew all his grant money on a cd player and only had enough left over to buy this, so he played it on repeat for weeks. I quite like Knopfler’s steel guitar on The Man’s Too Strong, but the rest of the album suffers from that overly bright 80s digital production, it’s way too long and the homophobic slurs in Money for Nothing can get in the bin.

This was the album that came out after Brian Wilson had to give up touring for health reasons, but a year before Pet Sounds. It’s an ok collection of pop tunes with two bangers (Do You Wanna Dance and Help Me Ronda) but a lot of filler for an album that’s less than 30 minutes. The worst bit is the last track which is just two minutes of studio chatter. I initially thought this was a special feature, but it’s on the original release. Lazy, lazy Beach Boys.

A self-aware, sample heavy NYC rock/rap trio, popular with white kids - it’s the Beastie Boys, right? NOT!!! It’s the Fun Lovin’ Criminals (with the all important apostrophe). I actually enjoyed this quite a bit more than I was expecting, particularly when they slowed things down a little and cut back on the samples. The highlight for me was a delicious cover of John Barry’s We Have All the Time in the World.

This is the transitional album where Brian Eno came on board as a producer, turning Talking Heads from an arty NYC proto punk band into something that you could dance to. I haven’t listened to this album as much as some of the others - not because it’s not good, but because the live versions of some of these songs on Stop Making Sense (notably their cover of Al Green’s Take Me to the River) are even better than the ones here.

This is album that requires listening to on headphones - the extraordinary number of MFPH and the toe curlingly explicit references to sex, violence and drugs make this extremely NSFW. Headphones also show off the dense soundscapes of dialogue, jokes, samples, music and rap. You could almost see this as an elaborate satire of a gangsta whose idea of luxury is being able to afford both Sega and Nintendo at the same time, but Biggie was dead by 24. Sheesh.

When I was a kid growing up in the 80s a new song (and video) from the ‘Nutty Boys’ was always a treat, but I’ve never listened to a whole album. On this, their fourth album, they find a different tone, delving into nostalgia for childhood and family life, and tackling darker topics like depression and the aftermath of the Falklands War. This was originally a concept album but it drifted slightly (and let’s not mention the misstep of New Delhi and the cover)

This is a heartbreaking classic of an album. While Nothing Compares 2 U is the best known song, other tracks have an equal or greater impact with howls of despair and anger, as well as more upbeat and joyful numbers. The only misstep is ‘Black Boys on Mopeds’ which is a clunking protest song about Margaret Thatcher, but it was 1990 so we can probably let this one slide.

This was supposedly the album that marked the transition from fay electro pop dweebs to stadium friendly behemoths, but it’s not quite there for me. There’s nothing that grabs me in quite the same way as Enjoy the Silence or Personal Jesus on their later album Violater. The best track is probably the opener “Never Let Me Down” but the rest of the album doesn’t quite live up to this.

This album does exactly what it says on the tin. It starts with an ominous voiceover (“I have tasted maggots in the mind of the universe”) before setting off on a musical journey spanning acid rock, funk, soul, prog and even a bit of gospel in case y’all need churchin’ up. The highlights are the title track and the closing ‘Wars of Armageddon’ both clocking in around 10 minutes. Truly funkadelic!

Some cities have a distinctive sound, and Athens, Georgia is one of them. REM were one of the bands that defined that sound - solid bass, punchy drums, jangly guitars and laconic vocals with lyrics ranging from the esoteric to the surreal. Michael Stipe has said that he still doesn’t know what Pilgrimage is about and he wrote it. Highlight is Radio Free Europe which one of my Athens friends sent me on a mix tape of local music back in the day.

When the Beatles started going weird, someone at NBC television had the bright idea of creating a family friendly boy band from scratch for a tv show, and maybe put out some records as well. The Monkees were duly assembled and released two albums, before rising up and seizing the means of production to record their own songs. This album is mostly harmless, but not particularly memorable. Highlight is a snarky song about the Beatles called “Randy Scouse Git”.

Romantic meal, candles lit, now for some music. Whatever you do, don’t put this album on. It starts with a song about a child custody battle and goes on to anger, jealousy, self pity and the unfairness of paying attorney fees. After a bitter divorce, Gaye was contractually obliged to produce an album and give his ex 50% - he delivered this, which takes petty revenge to a whole new level. Save this for if you get dumped and want to know how not to respond.

It never ceases to amaze me that an album released 50 years ago, recorded using instruments made from spare electronics and tin foil, held together with string and duct tape, still sounds fresh and startlingly modern. The highlight is the title track, recreating a trip on an Autobahn through the medium of motorik beats and painstakingly crafted sound effects. This is a genre defining album, influencing artists from Gary Numan to Afrika Bambaataa. Stunning

For a couple of hours this morning, I felt like I was in a 1960s Mad Men style Manhattan appartment, drinking a martini and listening to this box set on my Radiogram. Some of the best classic songs of the early to mid 20th century, sung by one of the very best vocalists, ranging from ragtime to jazz with a touch of soul thrown in. Apparently the original deluxe edition of this came in a wooden box for $100 (well over $1000 now). Totally worth it.