Monthly Archives: August 2021

1. Revolver, The Beatles – 1966

Posted on by

I have already written exhaustively on this blog about Revolver, so for a long time it wasn’t on the list, but not writing about it would have been absurd – if this is an appreciation of the 12 inch vinyl album, then it pretty much has to start here.

It’s not, of course, the first rock album, not the first Beatles album, and it’s definitely not the first album I bought or knew – in my defence, I was three when it came out – but it is, I think, the template for pretty much all the other 59 albums in the list.

At this remove, I can’t tell you exactly when I heard it all the way through for the first time – did someone at school have a copy? Did I take it out of the library? Was it as late as some university student party?  I can tell you that I remember Yellow Submarine from around the time the film came out in 1968, and that I knew easily half of the songs before I ever listened to the whole thing – at some point around the time that I was learning piano (I got to grade 2 or 3, but found the whole thing a little too much like hard work – sometimes I want to go back and give 11-year old me a good shake), I had a book about the Beatles with many songs illustrated with musical notation.  I painstakingly taught myself to pick out the melodies on the keyboard, but only the ones I already knew.  When I did finally hear Revolver, I was astounded to realize how many of the songs were already familiar.

So when I talk about a template, it’s not that every album for ever more had 14 tracks on it (11 if you were in North America); it’s more the way it is all put together – it has art direction; sleeve notes; songs exclusively written by the band members; it went off in interesting new directions every few minutes, and still managed to sound like a cohesive whole.  For an album by four white boys with guitars, it has a hell of a lot of other stuff going on, from the strings on Eleanor Rigby to the French horn on For No One.  There’s a brass band on Yellow Submarine, and Indian instruments all over the place.  Some of the songs refuse to stick to one time signature; others fade away while they still appear to have something to say.

By the time I first sat down to properly listen to Revolver, I was able to understand it and  – perhaps unlike many who heard it on its release – able to nod along with all the strange goings-on under all those famous melodies.  Only later did I come to understand that I was hearing it filtered through dozens of weird and wonderful albums I had heard which had, in turn, been inspired by Revolver.

What does it sound like to me now, however many years after first hearing it all the way through?  I’m listening to the 2009 remaster, and there’s a whole discussion to be had about whether the only way to hear albums of this vintage is to hear an original pressing on vinyl, but let’s leave the audiophilia aside for a moment and just hear the songs.

The most striking thing remains how it all just flows together – the track order didn’t happen by accident; like everything on this album, it was carefully considered and laid out for maximum effect, which makes the shorter North American version all the more puzzling.  It’s not an album which sets a mood and sticks with it, it’s an album which gleefully hops from idea to idea without pausing for breath. 

From the opening snarl of Taxman to the unprecedented infusion of Indian structure and instrumentation of Love You To is only four tracks, and the two in between are the radical Eleanor Rigby and the beautiful pure pop of I’m Only Sleeping.

And it gets better from there. 

Because of all the music which has followed it and been inspired by it, it’s impossible to hear this with fresh ears; to hear the subtle way the lyric of Here, There and Everywhere pulls the structure of the song together, or be sideswiped by the French Horn in For No One for the first time. All I can do is imagine how it must have been, to reach the clearly drug-induced madness of Tomorrow Never Knows and know that nothing will ever be the same again – from here, pop stars became rock bands, and you could do anything you wanted.  Anything at all.

Any other albums by this artist to consider?

Well, yes – all of them, to be honest, although if you missed out ‘Let It Be’ you’d be forgiven.  You should listen to them in order, too – the growth of this band from the joyful count-in at the start of I Saw Her Standing There to The End on Abbey Road is unparalleled.  In fact, if you didn’t read any of the rest of these entries, and just spent the rest of your life listening to those Beatles albums, I wouldn’t blame you one bit.

Compilations to consider?

Many, but I reckon you still can’t go wrong with the two classic ones, still known as the Red Album and the Blue Album.  They contain all the singles which didn’t appear on the albums, and are as good a way in to the Beatles as anything.

Live albums?

No contemporary ones, but the remastered Live at the Hollywood Bowl from the soundtrack to Ron Howard’s documentary Eight Days A Week is spectacular, if not entirely representative of the entire Beatles catalogue (you’ll have to wait for a later entry for some of that).

Anything else?

Watch the movies – they’re all great in their own way; the aforementioned Eight Days A Week is terrific, and there are so many books, not all of which are worth the effort, but Hunter Davies’ official biography benefits from having been written at the time, while Philip Norman’s Shout! erases some of the sanitizing which Davies felt obliged to do while being somewhat unfair to anyone who was in the Beatles but not called John Lennon.  Beyond those, if Mark Lewisohn ever finishes his colossal trilogy, I have no doubt those will become the definitive work on the Beatles phenomenon.

There’s so much Beatles stuff out there, that the Anything Else? could easily end up longer than the original post, so I’ll leave it there.  You should take a walk down Abbey Road some day, though, if you ever get the opportunity.  It’s impossible to explain why, but there’s something special about it.

60 at 60

Posted on by

60 at 60 – what to expect

There will be sixty albums at the end of this process, and – all things being equal – I’ll post them once a week in the sixty weeks leading up to my 60th birthday in October 2022.  They may well appear in more than one place, but the definitive version will be here on these blog pages.

The albums will appear in chronological order; I’ve wrestled with this for a while now, but finally settled on the simplest order.  This means that some albums will be wildly out of sync with when I first heard them, or first owned a copy, and others will appear exactly as they did in my life.  This won’t, therefore, be a linear story, but I think that themes will appear naturally as we go along.

There won’t, however, be one album for each year of my life.  I did start from that point, but picking only one album from, say, 1978, would not only be impossible, but would not tell the full story of what it was like to be 15 going on 16 at that extraordinary time for popular music.

I have, however, applied a couple of restrictions, to keep some variety in things (but see the disclaimer below):

  • One album per artist.  I’m slightly flexible on this, as we’ll see – some artists appear on more than one album – but there’s one Beatles album, for example.  This, as you might imagine, has caused some sleepless nights, but as I write this, the list hasn’t changed for about a month, so I’m probably happy with it now.  Also, you’ll only have to hear me ramble on about one Rush album, not all 19 of them.
  • No classical albums.  If you read the previous memories, you’ll notice that this is a Mahler-free zone.  Perhaps it’s too restrictive – I don’t know, but getting this down to sixty was extraordinarily difficult; I had to ditch anything which wasn’t what we might call ‘rock and pop’ after the first couple of days of wrestling.
  • No ‘greatest hits’ or equivalent (although yes to live albums, for reasons we’ll get into later).  No ‘Various Artists’; no career retrospectives, entertaining though those could be.  There is – I think – only one album in here which bends this rule; we’ll get to it in due course (some time next April, at the current rate).

I’ve left out so much, including several bands and artists I’d consider among my favourites (fourteen year old me would have been horrified to find no Deep Purple on this list, for example).  Sometimes, I’ve left things out because I’ve already written about them exhaustively; others just wouldn’t fit (there are six albums released in 1978, for example, so no room for about a dozen others which I’ll talk about when we get there.)

On the other hand, there are some things in here I have written about before (including the very first one), and I’ve left them in because they are important to my musical journey, or because perhaps I felt that I’d like to see if I can get a wider audience for some of that writing.  The majority of what’s to come is new writing, but apologies in advance if you feel I’ve said something before – I probably have.

The other point to make here – and I’m sure I’ll say it a few more times before we’re done: these aren’t my sixty favourite records, or even the ones I consider the sixty best; they are, for the most part, sixty albums I have something to say about, or which correspond to a significant part of my life, or which just couldn’t be left off this list for one reason or another.

A word or two about the composition of the list is in order, however.

When I completed my first pass at a list of sixty albums to represent my life, I was struck by just how much of it was by, for want of a better expression, ‘white boys with guitars’.  Not all of it, to be sure, but seeing the list of names written down was a little sobering.  Are my musical tastes really that narrow?

Well, in a way, yes they are, and I think there are a number of reasons for that.

Firstly, and there’s no getting away from this, I’m a middle-class white boy.  I grew up in comfortable suburbia and wanted for nothing.  The music I heard, and the music my peer group listened to, reflected that.  We listened to music made by people like us.  It challenged and tested us in the ways we wanted to be challenged and tested, but it ultimately reflected our lives back to us in one way or another.

When I wasn’t listening to my treasured collection of early seventies Prog albums (might as well get that one out of the way now; there’s going to be more than a few Prog albums, especially early on) I was, like everyone else I knew, glued to my transistor radio tuned to Radio 1.  I’m old enough that I was tuned to 247 on the Medium Wave at first, and what I heard through the static and fuzz was a broad selection of what everyone else in the country was listening to.  It didn’t really reflect what I was buying, but it was just as much part of my life.

1974 on my list is represented by the albums I bought around that time, but it’s just as much represented in my life by Sweet Sensation’s Sad Sweet Dreamer or the Three Degrees When Will I See You Again.  I didn’t buy albums by any of the acts I heard on Radio 1, though.

So if you’re holding out to see which classic soul, R&B, reggae or hip hop albums I’m going to review, you’re going to be disappointed, I’m afraid.  It’s not that I didn’t or don’t appreciate all those forms of music, and many others; it’s just that I never bought or loved any of those albums – not even Maggot Brain, which would have blown my pre-pubescent mind..

Still, it’s never too late to start.

60 at 60

Posted on by

Sixty albums to mark sixty years

Twenty years ago (well, nineteen as I write this), I had the idea to mark my 40th birthday with forty pieces of writing about music which had meant something to me over those years.  I more or less managed it through the chaos of dealing with huge changes at work while adjusting to having two young children in the house, and ten years later, I thought I should revisit it, add ten more memories, and reflect on what had changed in the intervening decade – including the fact that I was by then a citizen of an entirely different country.

Naturally, I can’t let another ten years go by unmarked, but I’m equally sure I can’t go back to that particular well again.  It’s not that I couldn’t find another ten pieces of music and another ten memories, more that the intention of the thing was to talk about particular memories, and for the most part, those haven’t changed.  What I remembered about Buzzcocks twenty years ago is what I remember about them now; I’m confident I don’t have anything particularly new to add to that story and, well, if you’re reading this, you probably read that, too.

So sixty different things, then.  Sixty pieces of writing about what, exactly?  I toyed with sixty novels or sixty films, but I do still want this to be about music.  Thanks to things like Spotify, I can point you to the music and let you discover it for yourself, if you don’t already know it, and that’s much harder with books or films (or TV shows, or whatever else I briefly thought might work).

No, it was always going to be music, and the format I’ve settled on, and given away in the subtitle, is the humble Long Playing record.  Probably the most significant change in my musical life since I last sat down to do this is that there is a neatly filed shelf of vinyl albums just to my right, replicating in many ways the one I shed more than thirty years ago when it seemed likely that the CD would be the ultimate musical format, and all that vinyl was a) extremely heavy and awkward to move and b) mostly composed of things I bought in a fit of misplaced enthusiasm in 1981 and had never listened to since.

That long-lost collection did have some gems, most of which I’ve replaced – often with second-hand copies of similar vintage – and some things which are now rarities owing to living in entirely another continent.  Some of what I sold back then I don’t miss and wouldn’t replace, but what I didn’t appreciate back then when we needed the space (and probably the money) was that I wasn’t just selling stuff; I was letting go of a significant part of my life.

CDs, it turned out, were just commodities; LPs were possessions, carefully created experiences which could whisk you back in time just by the act of sliding the inner sleeve out and inhaling that particular vinyl and cardboard smell.  Even the humblest hardly played albums could have me in a reverie; if you saw me now in a record store, flicking through the stacks in the way I did when I was 15, you would be struck by the faraway look in my eyes as I uncovered something as unpromising as Metal Rendez-Vous by Krokus; you might wonder what on earth could be causing me to give this slice of early eighties landfill euro-metal more than a glance, but if you had owned the original and not thought about it for more than half your life, you might understand.

I tried it with a CD of Peter Gabriel’s So, the first CD I owned, but there was nothing there.  Twelve inches of vinyl does something to me that nothing – not even a well-loved book – does, and I think it’s a factor of my age.

I was born in 1962, so missed the initial surge of 12 inch LPs triggered by the Beatles, Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, the Beach Boys and all that followed them.  By the time I was aware of albums, and could afford to buy my own, they had a fixed place in life and a culture all of their own.  I fondly imagined that by flicking through the Frank Zappa back catalogue in Boots’ record department, I was participating in an age-old ceremony; taking the baton passed down to me by generations of music lovers who had gone before me.  I didn’t really understand that I was only fifteen years or so into what we might call the ‘album era’, and that it would only last another ten years as the predominant musical format.

I grew up musically in the peak of the album era, and it unquestionably shaped the way I think about, and listen to, music to this day.  If, like me, you are pushing sixty, I imagine that you, too, feel that there’s something right and inevitable about the LP record.  Other generations will see it differently; I think my children do appreciate the aesthetics of vinyl, but to them music is something you stream on whatever device you have to hand – the analogue way of doing things is awkward and slow.

Which, I think, is kind of the point.

60 at 60 – a new writing project!

Posted on by

It’s about time I started writing again, don’t you think?

Soberingly, it’s almost twenty years since I started the ’40 Musical Memories’ project, and as the following posts will explain, it’s time to get back on the horse. Combining my two favourite things – music, and writing about music, #60at60 will be with the unsuspecting (and largely uncaring) world in just over a week. To kick off, and test my methodology, a couple of introductory posts