Monthly Archives: August 2022

53. Prophesy, Nitin Sawhney, 2001

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It’s a playlist – full story below, including the missing track

I ruled classical music out at the beginning of this process – and, to be clear, this isn’t classical music – but I also need to talk about the BBC Proms, and this album, which I haven’t listened to many times in the intervening years – allows me to do that.

I feel I had always been aware of the Proms; we certainly watched the Last Night every year when I was growing up, and it always seemed to me to mark the end of summer and the proper return to the drudgery of the school year.  I knew other concerts were available – my dad would listen to them from time to time, especially if there was nothing on TV, but it wasn’t until I lived within commuting distance of London that I properly started to appreciate the scale and accessibility of the whole thing.

The idea that you could (and Covid seems to have changed this) simply walk up to the Albert Hall of an evening, queue for an hour or two depending on the popularity of that day’s offering, and for a pretty much negligible price, see some of the best orchestras and musicians from around the world was startling, and I started to avail myself of the opportunity some time in the mid-1990s.

I suspect it was after we moved to Watford – Tring was a fair trek in to London from a station some miles from the town (they thought it would be better to build the station near the railway line), but once we lived in a place where you could (with a change of train here and there, or a drive up to Watford Junction) be in central London in 30 minutes or so, it became a thing we – usually just me, in truth – were able to do several times a summer.

I saw some spectacular things in those years, and the experience forever changed the kind of music I listened to, and also the way I thought about concert-going.  The barely-organised chaos I remembered from my younger days watching overloud bands in converted cinemas had gradually evolved into a kind of slick, vastly overpriced, corporate ‘event’ where you might or might not be able to see the band from the only seats you could afford and the front rows seemed to be populated by people who had no particular involvement with the music, but whose suppliers or clients wanted to entertain.

And then I was exposed to concerts by household names (well, in my household, anyway) featuring some of the greatest music ever written in an iconic venue for less than I used to pay to stand in a freezing cowshed out by Edinburgh airport to see the biggest bands of 20 years before.  It was civilised (although not completely comfortable – it was usually too hot, and you do have to stand up all evening, sometimes packed into a huge crowd), and it was all audible, you could see the sweat dripping off the brow of the percussionists, and appreciate every nuance of the wildly famous conductor.

I loved my Prom-going, and it remains one of the things I miss most about the British summer.

However, not every Prom was an orchestra playing a symphony.  Scattered around the fringes of the festival were other things – 20th century musicals, for example, or film scores; a children’s Prom each season, and the occasional and eclectic Late Night Prom, which – like the one I’m about to describe – were often jazz-related.

These weren’t terribly Late Night in truth, they would start around 9:30 as I recall, and be scheduled for about an hour.  Having said that, I just dug out the programme for the one from Friday, August 3 2001, and it started at 10pm.

I don’t recall the whole story of that Friday night, but I know, because I have both programmes here, that I attended both Proms.  The way that worked was that you queued up dutifully for the first Prom, eating your M&S sandwich on the pavement in Prince Consort Street, and were accosted by the queue wranglers who dished out raffle tickets to anyone who said they wanted to attend both concerts.  On exiting the Hall after the first one, you took your place allotted by the raffle ticket in the second queue, and went through the process again, each time paying the astonishing price of £3 for the privilege.

The first concert was a mix of Joshua Bell playing Bernstein and Ravel’s Bolero; the second was jazz-flavoured, and was billed as the ‘Later…’ Prom, featuring Jools Holland, who has been presenting the ‘Later…’ programme since the early 1990s (I just checked; it’s still going strong.)

Jools Holland and his Orchestra was the main attraction for me that night; the other artists were Julian Joseph playing some jazz standards with an acoustic trio, and Nitin Sawhney doing I knew not what.

Julian Joseph I knew – I was at the time a Radio 3 listener, and he had a jazz programme on there I would occasionally catch snippets of; Nitin Sawhney I didn’t know at all.

If you can remember back that far, I already confessed to buying a great many albums by artists I was going to see live, regardless of quality – I just wanted to be at least passingly familiar with the music before hearing it live, and the same thing applied here.  Two of the three acts would be performing songs I knew, or was at least passingly familiar with; the third was an unknown quantity, and rather than discover it all as it was played to me, I decided to revisit my youth and hear some of it beforehand.

I went out and bought the CD of Prophesy a couple of weeks before, and played it until I was familiar with the songs.  It was – and is – quite unlike anything else I was listening to, and came from a place I was unfamiliar with, but I put it straight on this list as I was drawing it up, and I have no doubts it deserves to be here, even if I haven’t heard it in many years now – I no longer have the CD, which puts me at a slight disadvantage, as I don’t know who any of the musicians and singers are, beyond Sawhney himself, and I will be guessing at some of this, I’m afraid.  It’s a good exercise in pushing my boundaries, though, and I’m looking forward to rediscovering it.

That Late Night Prom over-ran that evening; I remember slipping out at around the time of the encores to race back to South Kensington station, so I wouldn’t miss my last train back to Watford, but I do remember it fondly; Late Night Proms were special, and had a relaxed atmosphere all their own.  I wonder if they still do?

The album isn’t on Spotify, so I’m recreating it thanks to a YouTube playlist, giving me visuals as well as audio.  I’ll try not to be distracted by them, and just listen.

The album starts in a space I recognised from the likes of Massive Attack or Soul II Soul, radio staples of the previous ten years.  It’s a chilled dance beat with a delightful female voice, who I can’t identify, and all purrs along in a fairly predictable way until the appearance of a rapped section in a language which some digging suggests is Bengali – it’s entrancing and engaging, and I’m immediately reminded why I liked this album so much.

Nothing  has a lo-fi feel over it’s tricky beat, with a soothing vocal probably by the song’s writer, Tina Grace.  It does sound of its time, reminding  me of the spaced-out songs I’d sometimes hear on the radio in the evenings, but it doesn’t grab me the way the previous track did; it’s soothing deapite its somewhat nihilistic lyric, but no more than that.

I do remember Acquired Dreams, however.  It’s much harder to pin down, featuring electronic beats and traditional Indian instruments in a mainly instrumental soundscape which dances from speaker to speaker, bringing in lush string sections here, and a repeated vocal line which may or may not mean something; it certainly sounds at once modern and rooted in an ancient tradition.  It’s really hard to pick apart the influences and traditions these sounds are coming from, which I suspect is part of the point; it’s  intentionally a mashup of whatever sounds good together, without particular emphasis being given to any one part of it – there are clear jazz elements, but just as many rooted in traditions I have no experience with at all.  Comfortably my favourite of the first three tracks, it’s uplifting and inspiring.

It fades out with flute sounds drifting into a reprise / early draft of Nothing, called Nothing More, which revisits the earlier track with just voice and sparse acoustic guitar over a background of waves crashing on a beach.  It acts as a coda and – perhaps – a bit of a recontextualization of the earlier version, sounding more hopeful and relaxed.

Moonrise is sung in a mixture of Portuguese (I assume Brazilian Portuguese) and Rai, the Algerian folk music sung in Arabic.  The mix is startlingly effective, and the musical underpinnings – save for the spectacular classical guitar – are simple, designed to direct attention to the words.  It makes absolutely no difference that I don’t understand any of them; it’s a powerful statement of fusion and unity; actual World Music in a time when that was a label used to shift more units.

The next track, Street Guru (Part 1), starts with a field recording (echoes of the last post here) of what I’m led to believe is a Chicago taxi driver, of which the key line is ‘technology has made us slaves of the time’.  The same technology which makes music like this possible is also enslaving us.  This is more than 20 years ago; I’m still waiting for the promised ‘backlash against technology’.

The Preacher appears to be the heart of the album; it talks about ‘the Seal of Prophecy’, and features a vocal from Terry Callier, full of blues and the heartfelt soulful folk music he made his own.  Again, the arrangement is sparse, eventually fading out altogether to let Callier’s words sink in.  It’s a simple song of joy and hope.

The introduction to Breathing Light is a war report from the frontline of the Bosnian conflict in Sarajevo, followed by a glorious piano line, a stuttering drumbeat, more flute, and the words of Nelson Mandela, proclaiming us ‘free to be free’.  The juxtaposition of the two spoken word parts is – as so often on this beguiling album – startling and provocative.  It is, of course, very much of its time; the reference points are from the tumultuous and – I think – hopeful post nineties point of view; this album was released before the September of 2001 changed so much about the world, it retains an optimism and general sense of hope which I don’t think we see too often in the following few years.

It fades directly into Developed, which runs the risk of me getting into a lengthy political rant.  It’s a spoken word piece from an Australian aboriginal, and let me just say this – from the perspective of a white person who has come to live on traditional lands of people who were here for tens of thousands of years before I showed up – he’s dead right.

It moves directly into an acapella children’s choir singing in one of the South African languages – my research suggests it is Zulu, but I’m prepared to be corrected on that.  It’s a magnificent transition, away from the beats and synthesised sounds of the rest of the album, to the simple power and beauty of the human voice.  It’s called Footsteps, and it ties us in to the next track, Walkaway, which develops the theme of the footsteps in what begins in the Western idiom, but which reaches out to all the sounds of the world as it takes us on its journey – none of them are more than hints and illustrations, but they underline the point of this album, folding Martin Luther King and Malcolm X into the mix under some Indian strings.  It’s quite the journey, this album, and while I don’t feel remotely qualified to deconstruct it, I certainly know how to react to it.

Street Guru (Part 2) picks up the conversation from the first part, initially with a snippet of song which could be coming from the taxi’s radio, which finds its previous beat again, until the question ‘What’s going on; we can’t use our brains?’ shuts it down instantly.

I’ve looked up and discovered that the playlist doesn’t include a track called Cold and Intimate – all I have are the lyrics.  Once I’m through the rest of this, I’ll go digging for it; it’ll appear out of sequence, if it appears at all.

That short interruption is probably what I needed to prepare me for Ripping Out Tears, which is an angry, guitar-driven rap.  It references Columbine, but is otherwise ripped from today’s headlines.  Has nothing changed in the 21 years since this was recorded?  It’s a long way from Mandela’s hopeful words, and the clear, joyous sound of the Zulu choir.  I don’t know who the rapper is, but she’s rightfully angry.  I’m not a hip-hop kind of person (you probably noticed), but that doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate and understand exactly what’s going on here.

Seriously, 21 years?

We move from the rapped Prophecy to the final statement of – well, what exactly?  We’ve heard from all kinds of people all around the world and their views on what the future holds; this is the closing statement of Nitin Sawhney, and it is stepped in all the traditions we’ve been visiting along this spectacular journey – there are traditional Indian instruments, Western-sounding vocal harmonies, and Arabic-sounding melodies, all set over a beat which accelerates constantly until we’re all hanging on for dear life as it swoops and soars to a spectacular end where everything drops out, leaving us with only the voices, seemingly still seeking answers, only fitting for this most eclectic and thought-provoking album.

I don’t know why it fell out of favour in my collection to the point where I don’t own a physical copy any more.  I’m also more than a little disappointed that it’s not available anywhere to stream, but I shall go and seek out a new copy, because I need to spend a lot more time with this music.

Like I said, I’m not exactly equipped to comment on it on more than a basic level of noting its impact on me, but I can report that it’s quite the impact – it’s a tremendous album, and I wish I’d spent more time with it, and exploring Sawhney’s work all these years.  There’s still time, though.

Postscript – I did track down a video for Cold and Intimate,it’s back in that ‘Massive Attack’ soundscape from the beginning of the album.  Again, I don’t know who the singer is, but it fits right in here, providing a bridge which makes the transition toRipping Out Tears seem a little less jarring.

Any other albums by this artist to consider?

A great many, I should think.  I’ll let you know when I dig some out.

Compilations to consider?

I don’t see any, but perhaps this might be the appropriate place to try out one of those Spotify ‘This Is..’ playlists.  That’s what I’ll be doing.

Live albums?

There’s an album called Live at Ronnie Scott’s, which I’ll be checking out, too.

Anything else?

Film soundtracks.  I’ve seen the ‘live action’ Mowgli, and therefore I have heard his soundtrack for that.  Again, I’ll be revisiting that – after all, I’ll have some space in my schedule in a few weeks.

52. Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, 2000

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By the time the year started with a 2 (let’s not revisit the debate about new centuries/ millennia, shall we?), pretty much everything had changed in my life.  Not as radically is it would a few more years down the road, but I was by now formally working in IT, there was a second small person in the house (born in the height of summer this time), and in the few minutes I had spare to think about it, I was not listening to new music at all.

My commute to work was full of talk radio in the morning, and Radio 3’s ‘drivetime’ snippets of classical music on the way home.  I don’t know if I’d given up on rock music, or it had moved somewhere I wasn’t interested in following, but if I was listening to anything, it was revisiting back catalogues – by 2000, it was possible, if slow, to download music (streaming was some way off), and mp3 players were available – I had a primitive early one which I seem to remember was in some way a perk of now working in IT.

Even buying physical music was changing.  You could go to your favourite High Street retailer’s website and order CDs to be delivered.  The internet of 2000 would be more recognisable, I think, to today’s digital generation, although I think it took us a long time to wake up to digital security – I must have cheerfully typed my credit card number into the online store without much thought about where else it might end up.

The CDs in the car were now a mix of classical (not exactly perfect for in-car listening, no matter how much I wrestled with the ‘compression’ setting on the CD player), brightly coloured discs designed to appeal to the 2-year old in the back seat, or burned copies of downloaded albums, which was how I tried to recreate my old vinyl album collection the first time round.

I wasn’t hearing new music on the radio, and I wasn’t even buying new music by bands I liked – unimaginably to me now, three whole Rush albums had gone by without me hearing any of them – and, whatever else was going on in my life, I seemed to have resigned myself to the idea that, approaching 40, I had ‘grown up’ in my musical tastes, and wasn’t really interested in keeping up with whatever was going on.

One day, however, on one of those messageboards I was talking about last time out, someone mentioned a new release by a band called ‘Godspeed You Black Emperor!’  I’m fairly certain that the exclamation point was at the end of the name in those days.

I think what drew me to it was the label ‘post-rock’.  If I was done with rock music (spoiler alert: I wasn’t), then perhaps what I needed was whatever came next.  I’m not sure I had any idea at this point what ‘post-rock’ actually sounded like, or if GYBE music was the kind of thing I would like, but for some reason – perhaps the genuine enthusiasm of whoever recommended it – I ordered myself a copy online.  From a reputable retailer.  For actual money, which looked like it might become the less popular way of acquiring music for a while there.

I trawled the internet – I was an early adopter of Google, back in the days when ‘don’t be evil’ actually meant something – but could find almost nothing on this mysterious band I’d just sent some money to.  I did, I think, discover that they were Canadian, that while they may or may not have been anarchists, they didn’t seem to do things the conventional way.  I was reminded of the commune-like aspects of bands as diverse as Gong and Crass, and surmised that they might fit somewhere in between those, which turned out to be a reasonable guess.

Some of the music I had been listening to in those ‘no new music’ years was what you might call ‘avant-garde’ or even experimental.  There will be a whole piece about the BBC Proms next time out, but some of the Proms I’d been to in those years I had chosen because the music had a reputation for being challenging and different.  I had seen Pierre Boulez conduct some of his own work, and had become mildly obsessed with the music of Messaien, and this was the mindset I brought to Lift Your Skinny Fists…’.

The CD arrived (for some reason I remember it being delivered to the office, rather than to my home address; I don’t know why, or even if that was true).  It was – different.

Packaged in cardboard rather than the ubiquitous plastic jewel case (there’s a rant here about CD packaging, which, on reflection, I’ve taken back out), it retained its mystery and air of ‘otherness’ even once opened – the card gatefold featured a mysterious and unsettling illustration, a paper insert had tantalising snippets of information, some crossed out, a picture of some of the band looking nothing like I had imagined, a couple of inscrutable photographs, and on the flip side, a pictogram representation of the music.

It’s hard to explain exactly what that pictogram represents; it’s a significant amount of information about an album which is otherwise devoid of meaningful detail, but it is also vague (the timings are not exact by any means), and misses out perhaps the most important piece of detail.  There are four tracks on this long double album; I now know them to be called Storm, Static, Sleep, and Antennas to Heaven, but it was years later that I discovered that – those words don’t appear on the packaging anywhere, although the names of the sub-sections (movements, I like to think of them) do.

So, I remember thinking, this is right up my street – mysterious, experimental, evasive – the kind of music which requires you to make your own mind up, and not be distracted by shiny things while you do it.

And then I listened to it and failed to get it at all.

I listened at home, and I listened in the car (as noted, never the best environment to hear new things), and while I could tell it was interesting and challenging, and all the things I was expecting, something didn’t quite work for me.

Until the day it did.

Some time early in 2001, I was driving up the M1 to our distributor in Yorkshire – we regularly had meetings up there, whether to discuss the technology which connected the two companies, or – on occasion – internal meetings with our more northern-based staff, where the distributor’s meeting room was a useful substitute for a generic hotel room.

This time, I was driving up in the early evening, presumably for an early start the next day.  As I recall it, I had a room booked at Tankersley Manor (that name just popped into my head, so is likely the right one), conveniently situated for whatever it was I was doing the next morning.  After a while, I decided to give this mysterious CD another go, and cranked it up as loud as I could so that as few of the details as possible were missed in the general road noise.

This time, I got it.  This time, the first disc flew by as I thrashed my way  north in the cold and wet.  I flipped the discs over, and allowed Sleep to unfurl.  There’s a point, which I’ll tell you about when I get there on my re-listen further down, where it’s not possible to do anything else but surrender to the extraordinary power of this music, and when it passed, I looked out of the windscreen to discover I was approaching the outskirts of Leeds.

It took another 20 minutes or so to retrace my journey to the junction I should have come off at, but in the most unpromising of situations, tired, probably hungry, with delightful Yorkshire spring weather battering off my car, it all suddenly clicked.

I don’t think there’s a trick to this band’s music – there just has to be a willingness to surrender to it; to recognise that it isn’t like all the other music out there.  There are no catchy choruses or refrains designed to have an audience bouncing up and down or swaying in time, just a fierce determination to express itself in sound.  Once I finally figured it out, it became obvious to me that this isn’t rock music (or anything like it) at all; this is modern classical music, played on (mostly) rock instruments.  It’s a different idiom, and needs to be listened to that way.

Ready? Let’s take a listen…

Storm starts quietly, with guitar and quiet horns picking out what is essentially the theme of the album, listed on the plan as Lift Yr. Skinny Fists, Like Antennas to Heaven.  It sets the tone as it gradually increases in volume, adding cello and what sound like multiple other strings before a military drumbeat – reminding me strongly of Shostakovich – introduces the full sonic palette and presumably (as I say, the timings are hard to interpret) breaks out into Gathering Storm, which does exactly what it promises, lifting the intensity and purpose of the thing without seemingly losing touch with the initial theme or the underpinning drone.  The climax collapses into a more tentative contemplation, which may or may not be the sub-section entitled Il Pleut a Mourir [+Clatters Like Worry].  The continuation of the underpinning drone, barely heard during the actual storm section, now pulls the whole soundscape along into a kind of re-statement of the idea, but this time without drums, which only fade back in once the drone has established itself as the dominant tone.

When the drums do kick back in, it’s like a cloudburst on a sultry summer day, with all kinds of rumbling going on behind the drone, which eventually gives way to a full-throated melody pushing us to the cacophony of the actual storm, expressed not as something explosive, but as chaos and confusion – the drums rumble menacingly, there are flutes and curious noises off, but the momentum is remorseless before driving us into a more rhythmic and structured section.  Which may be called Cancer Towers on Holy Road Hi-Way, but which appears to skip over a piece which is in the pictogram as “Welcome to Barco AM/PM”. I’ve never been able to hear that in the place the album art suggests, but as Storm winds down with the sound of a decelerating freight train, it appears – a field recording of an announcement in Spanish and then English, apparently recorded at Los Angeles Airport.

It’s a political statement of sorts, but an oblique one – allowing us to reflect on what prompts the announcement without commenting on it at all.

The track ends with some doom-laden piano chords playing out over an increasingly distorted recording – it follows directly from the Welcome to Barco insert, and may be the same recording heavily distorted, or may be something else entirely – part of the joy of this album is not knowing exactly what’s going on at any one time.  This last piece may well be the one called Cancer Towers; which prompts me to wonder why the most obvious change of mood in the previous movement doesn’t have its own title.

And that’s just side 1 – I wondered if I’d have enough to say about it!

I’m listening to my vinyl copy of this (I still have the CD, as well as a digital download; that’s how far under my skin this eventually got), and the label on side Static is – or appears to be – a blueprint of a prison cell block.  Make of that what you will.

Terrible Canyons of Static begins with looping train horns (A theme I hadn’t picked up on before now; how the gradual deceleration of Gathering Storm relates to these sounds).  This is more like the avant-garde classical music I’d been listening to.  It feels like an experiment in soundscapes, related to the sixties tape loops which found their way onto the Beatles’ White Album as Revolution 9, and to the work of the likes of Stockhausen and even the BBC Radiophonic Workshop.  One of the things I’ve always known about this music is that it would make a terrific film score; this movement, edgy and unsettling, would fit some of David Lynch’s more out-there work.  The static eventually fades into a recording of what the band calls the Atomic Clock, interleaved with someone’s religious experience / testimony of an acid trip.  This appears to be called Chart #3 and throughout, the found recording does battle with a calm string and guitar-driven melody which repeats patiently, waiting for one of them to assert authority.

Ultimately, neither does, and the fading sounds are replaced by a pizzicato cello line, signalling the start of World Police and Friendly Fire.  Right from the beginning, you can tell how this is going to go.  Even in its first minute, as it establishes a hypnotic rhythm, you can tell it’s going to build upon itself and grow.  As in several places on this album, I just stop trying to figure out what exactly is going on and just surrender to the sounds.  This takes a lot of inspiration from minimalism, but there’s still a lot going on – glockenspiel and what sounds an awful lot like the musical saw from the previous post.

The build is one of intensity as much as it is volume; in fact, the volume increase is subtle and hard to detect until there’s a clear shift of gears and you realise that you’d have to shout to be heard over music which seemed to be a murmur only moments before.

I’m going to take this opportunity to marvel at the intense control over tempo this whole ensemble has.  The gradual change in pace is natural and organic, but is achieved without a conductor up front giving direction.  It’s easy to point to the drum track as the source of the changes, but it is so organic and ingrained that no-one seems to be leading it, it just – somehow – happens.  What began as a contemplative stroll is, by the end of the movement, a full-out adrenaline-fuelled sprint, with distorted guitar and frantic drumming, eventually crashing into a feedback howl and the chance to start the process again with a movement called […The Bulidings They Are Sleeping Now].   This does begin as an opportunity to catch your breath, although the soundscape here is not exactly calming, echoing as it does industrial metalworking.  This is all drone and open cymbals with the extraneous sounds filling the void rather than happening in the background.  Like the best avant-garde work, it hard to call this music at all, save for the emotional effect it has – it’s gripping and powerful, filling the listener with dread and calm at the same time.

And then we come to side 3.

It’s really hard for me to be objective about this side, Sleep, but I’ll try.  It begins with another field recording.  According to the tracklisting, it’s a man called Murray Ostril talking about Coney Island, bewailing the fact that …they don’t sleep any more on the beach”.

And then Monheim starts, and there’s nothing to say.  Ever since the day it caused me to accidentally drive to Leeds, it has been one of my favourite pieces of music in any genre or style.  It lives inside me like few other things do, and the effect it has on me is unchanging – whatever I’m doing when it starts, I have to stop, and do nothing but listen.

To give you a little context, it’s a simple start, the saw we heard before is joined by some gentle electric guitar strumming, which establishes a mood.  The guitar gradually picks out a motif which allows further accompaniment to come in, then everything – and I mean everything – just builds from there.  Again, it starts out quietly, almost contemplative, but as more instruments join, as more volume is added, as the music begins to throw off its chains, something remarkable happens to my brain, and I have to stop and listen.

 There’s a part where – just as you think it can’t get any more intense or engaging – the bass breaks into double time, and the whole thing becomes transcendental

Told you I wouldn’t be able to be objective.

Approximately ten minutes later, you rejoin me enjoying the comedown of Broken Windows, Locks of Love Part III.  I don’t know exactly where I’ve been in the interim, but I’m glad I went.  The end of Monheim is insane, but entirely fitting; it kind of disintegrates in its attempt to reach escape velocity, leaving us sifting through the wreckage, picking up the pieces and trying to remember what normal is.

Broken Windows doesn’t hurry, just wandering quietly through the assorted pieces.  The band gradually return to us, summoned by a tiny bell.  If this is a film score it’s one of those scenes where nothing is resolved, and you’re left to make your own mind up about what you’ve just seen.  Eventually, it, too cannot resist one more gathering of breath and one more sprint for the finishing line, perhaps having decided on a direction. It recapitulates the movement which brought Monheim to such a spectacular close, but is more controlled in its execution, pulling up short of the line and breaking into something remarkably close to a straightforward rock instrumental, albeit mainly played on strings.

I’ll need a bit of a lie down after that, as usual.

I know it’s unlikely you’ll have read this far if you don’t already know this music, but if that’s you, please go and listen to Sleep; it’s quite the experience.

Side four, in some ways the title track, is… different.

I mean, it’s all been different, but this one starts with former member Carlos Moya singing “Baby-O”, which crossfades into an indistinct wall of noise called Edgyswingsetacid, itself usurped by a field recording of an unidentified pair of musicians playing a glockenspiel duet on a campsite in Rhinebeck, NY.

Then there’s another random field recording, this time of some young children speaking and singing in French (I suspect Quebec French, but I’m not particularly good at picking out accents in French)

Once we get past the slightly shambolic (and deliberately so, of course) opening, She Dreamt She Was a Bulldozer, She Dreamt She Was Alone in an Empty Field returns us to the established patterns of this album, but this time rather than patiently building up to an intense climax, the climax gets in first, exploding into the calm and positively rocking along for about a minute before falling back to a windswept landscape.

Bulldozer (I’m calling it that; I’m not writing all that out again) plays by its own rules – it’s still fixed in the idiom of a song on this album, but it plays more with structure, and is more open and expressive in its melody than we’ve been used to so far.  There’s time to reflect on the journey, and time – if you’re someone like me – to try and identify where the influences in this are.  Hearing it so soon after OK Computer, I do hear little bits of what Radiohead were and what they became, but there’s so much more in there; little echoes of sounds I recognise from those early Cure and Banshees albums; I’ve already referred back to the White Album, but I hear Can in here; I hear the outer edges of King Crimson, but mostly I hear a soundscape unlike any I had heard before.

Bulldozer gives way to Deathkamp Drone and prompts me to tie together the drawings on the labels (side 4 looks like a top-down drawing of a Panopticon), the faintest hints in the music, and a line in the sleevenotes which reads “we dedicate it to every prisoner in the world”.  If there’s a theme here, it’s escaping from captivity, whatever that may look like, and this remarkable, awkward and spiky music does exactly that over and over again, even if the captivity is a drone of the band’s own making.

Eventually, like all good things, we are returned to whence we came with the final movement, Antennas to Heaven. Echoing if not exactly restating the opening theme, it brings us safely home, wiser and more enlightened.

As the sleevenotes suggest, these tracks are “…more awkward pirouettes in the general direction of hope and joy”, and who am I to disagree?

This album changed something about what I listen to and listen for in music; in a strange way, it led me back to the Prog music of my youth, although I was by now a little more demanding about the music I sought out.  It also pushed me to listen harder to the 20th century classical music I had been toying with, and to look further into the Godspeed universe, for which, see below.

I have but one regret – 22 years after this music came into and changed my life, I had the opportunity to take my boys to see Godspeed You! Black Emperor play live.  Then I booked a flight back to Scotland, and standing around in a crowded room listening to music mere hours before my flight didn’t seem that sensible, in the time of COVID, so they went.

They said it was fantastic, which reassures me on two fronts: that I did a reasonable job opening their ears to all this strange music over the years, and that when I do eventually get the chance, seeing this band live won’t disappoint.

Any other albums by this artist to consider?

I have favourites, particularly Yanqui U.X.O. with the recently released G_d’s Pee at State’s End! probably the closest in style and impact to this, but try any of it – the style changes in the 2010s, but remains captivating and intriguing.

Compilations to consider?

They’re really not that kind of band.  Really, really not.

Live albums?

Likewise, although ‘field recordings’ of GY!BE shows are not discouraged, so there are some out there, if you know where to look.

Anything else? Well, there’s the whole “the members of this band are also members of any number of other, loosely affiliated bands” thing.  Special mention should go to the various Silver Mt. Zion bands, my favourite incarnation of which – mainly for the name, to be honest – is (deep breath) “The Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra and Tra-La-La Band with Choir”.  Their music is different, but related, and might even be a way in to Godspeed if this all seems a little daunting.

51. Deserter’s Songs, Mercury Rev, 1998

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Spotify includes the hidden track at the end which is sadly missing from my vinyl copy

After the storm of albums in 1997, and – more pertinently – following the complete overhaul of our lifestyles following the arrival of our first baby, music took a bit of a back seat for me.  I don’t remember much about the albums of 1998, and I knew nothing of this album at the time, or for many years afterwards.

I like to think that, had I been aware of it in 1998, or heard any of the singles from it at the time, I would have become a big fan, but the truth is that the only music listening time I had that year was in the fifteen minutes or so I spent commuting in each direction in the car – we had moved to the fringes of London, much closer to my work, and in a house large enough for us to actually have a room where the baby would sleep.  The flip side of the move was that I had almost no meaningful ‘listening to things’ time in the car, and for most of that time, I was listening to news radio.

At least, I assume I was, because I’ve looked at the big sounds of 1998, and I barely recognise any of them.

I think we owned the Manic Street Preachers album, but that’s about it.

So this album came into my life about five years ago, thanks to the internet, and it’s an opportunity for me to contemplate the change in the way I have found music over the years.

Until I left school in 1980, I relied on two sources for information about what I should be listening to.  I’ve covered both back in the over-long 1970s part of this list, but essentially, if I read about it in the music press, or had it recommended to me by friends at school, it stood a good chance of finding its way into my collection.  Outside of that, I rarely discovered music entirely unprompted.  What was played on the radio was the same music everyone else heard, and would be endlessly debated before any purchase was made; and on the rare chance that anything showed up on television, it would have been on a programme we all watched, like The Old Grey Whistle Test, with the same result.

Finding music entirely on my own was difficult; even the things I tentatively borrowed from the library were mainly down to having seen an article, review or advert in Sounds.

Once in Edinburgh, the options were much wider, but my tastes – as described earlier – narrowed considerably, and although I spent a lot of time in record shops, hearing a much more diverse spread of music didn’t prompt me, at least not for the first couple of years, to experiment with the music I bought.  If it wasn’t on Tommy Vance’s Friday Rock Show, it probably wasn’t coming home with me in one of those square plastic bags.

By the mid-nineties, there was a much wider range of music covered in the music press I read, having migrated from weeklies to the glossy monthly Q magazine, and a lot of what I bought at that time was inspired by rave reviews in my grown-up music magazine.  There was definitely more music available on screen as well – we even had a cable TV subscription for the last year in Perth and could watch MTV back in the days when it showed music videos all day long.

But it was the internet which changed everything about how I found music.  Right from the early days of wrestling with dial-up connections, and seeing only text-based webpages, there were places you could hang out with fellow music enthusiasts and get unfiltered recommendations.  At first, those were Usenet messageboards, but they were quickly replaced by online forums, of which there seemed to be one for every possible kind of interest.

I am a member, therefore, of the ‘forum generation’.  The function of online forums has been largely overtaken by sites like Reddit (which nowadays does recommend a lot of good stuff to me), or applications like Discord (which I’ve never quite got along with, dating me, I suspect).

Forums, however, were – and still are, to an extent – where I could hang out with like-minded people and discuss the important issues of the day.  Music forums, I’m afraid (and this is true of many Reddit communities as well) tend towards being echo chambers where there is a received wisdom about a certain type of music, of about bands, musicians or genres.  They aren’t always the best place to go for unbiased recommendations, and it’s in places other than music forums where I have uncovered the albums which have enlightened the last 25 years of my life.

For example, I have been part of an online forum nominally dedicated to the world’s favourite sport – the one I had to learn to call soccer on arrival in Canada – for more than 20 years now.  Many and amusing are the sport-related debates and arguments, but I wouldn’t go there for an unbiased look at how good, say, Arsenal are, any more than I would go to a music forum for unbiased views on the new Radiohead album.

Instead, it’s all the other discussions which make the football forum work, and for me it’s the discussions about music which have taught me so much over so many years, precisely because no-one has gone to that place to discuss music; it’s just a subject which comes up on a daily basis.  Of course, people have their favourites, but when the whole forum settles in to discuss a ‘classic album’, for example, there’s a good chance you’ll read a wide range of opinions on it, and through those come to understand something you had previously dismissed, or – in the case of Deserter’s Songs, find something you had completely missed, but which is revered by a wide range of people who seem to have similar tastes in other music.

So it was that I was encouraged to give this album a try, having known next to nothing about it.  I recognised the cover, so had presumably seen it in record shops for years, but I couldn’t have told you anything about the band, the kind of music it is, or whether it is, in fact, a ‘classic album’.

Spoiler alert – it is.

Thanks to the other great disruptor, which I will be covering in a post or two, the easy availability of streaming services, I was able to dial up a copy of Deserter’s Songs, pop on the headphones, and find out for myself what I’d been missing all these years.

It starts with strings and ethereal keyboards, before the kind of voice which makes you check that it’s at the right speed breaks in and grabs your attention.  It’s a mournful song, potentially about a breakup, although it seems to be about a band breaking up rather than a couple, and while I’m digesting that, the accompaniment breaks out a musical saw, and I’m hooked.

I think (we’ll see when we get there) there’s another album on this list which features the musical saw, and it’s not exactly my favourite instrument or anything, the way it adds an entirely unexpected layer to a song just breaks down my defences, to the point that when a trumpet joins in at the end, I’m swaying along, fully engaged.  The voice is tentative, unsure of itself, but perfect for the plaintive feel of the melody.

I cannot imagine a better way to introduce you to an album you’re not sure about – Holes is one of the great album openers, and now I’m ready for anything.

Tonite it Shows has a delicate nursery rhyme of an introduction, and helps you understand the voice; it builds without ever becoming bombastic or overpowering, and the voice sits on top of all this unusual orchestration, directing us to contemplate another mournful lyric.

By the time Endlessly comes along, with that saw accompanying a soprano voice, I have settled in to what this is about.  I think you could categorise it as ‘Americana’, although that label is suitably vague to allow for this to have a couple of lines of ‘Silent Night’ float in without sounding out of place.  It’s a glorious song, but one which would be easily ruined by being crammed into a modern production; there’s no place here for drum tracks and autotune – it genuinely could have been an archive recoding from the 19th century, with the saw and flute sounding less and less earthly as it draws to a close.

The next track, I Collect Coins is actually designed to sound like it was recorded on a wax cylinder, and perhaps is the key to the whole project – it’s intended to sound out of time, and not tied to a place.

Unlike the astonishing Opus 40, which wheezes in referencing Bruce Springsteen and featuring Levon Helm on drums, which shouldn’t be enough to make it sound like an out-take from The Last Waltz, but somehow is; you can imagine that cast of thousands harmonising along to the chorus while the audience sways along, lighters aloft. 

And if that wasn’t enough, fellow Band alumnus Garth Hudson pops up on Hudson Line, blowing sax like it’s 1975 behind a song which finally manages to make me understand that these are all songs about leaving in one way or another.  The received wisdom is that the band were sure that this was their final hurrah, and just did what they wanted, with the theme of moving on naturally weaving its way through all of the music.  This one shows all its influences at once, but in spite of featuring everything from ailing lead guitar to asthmatic organ, never feels overburdened or rushed – it has its own careful pace, and if we are leaving the city tonight, we’re doing it on our own terms.

I’m listening to my vinyl copy of this, so there’s a natural break here while I flip it over – there aren’t many albums from 1998 where this act feels more natural, I’ll wager – we were deep into the CD era at this point, but this album just feels like an old-fashioned LP.

Another instrumental at the start of side 2 – The Happy End (The Drunk Room) lives up to its title, sounding exactly like a bunch of intoxicated musicians not much caring what their music sounds like, as long as they’re having fun.  Except, of course, it’s all done over a carefully structured ostinato which suggests some care has been put into it.  It eventually devolves into someone playing the strings of the piano before ending abruptly as if someone noticed the tape was still running.

All of which unstructured nonsense makes the switch to the delightful Goddess on a Hiway most satisfying.  Probably the catchiest song in the whole collection, it features a verse as joyfully melodic as the chorus, some terrific wordplay, and the by now familiar orchestration featuring what sometimes sounds like the whole band playing whatever comes to hand.  I’ve searched the sleeve notes for mention of a theremin, but it must be that saw again – the music is warm and organic, and it was roughly at this point on my first listen that I wondered how on earth I’d managed not to hear this for so long.

The Funny Bird threatens to bring the sound right up to date, featuring the kind of beat which wouldn’t feel out of place on a Massive Attack album, but the careful layers of modern (well, modern for 1998) sound are somewhat undermined by the same lo-fi vocal treatment and all the bells and whistles which have enlivened this whole album just refusing to stay quiet.  Probably the most traditionally ‘rock band’ sounding track on the album, it still couldn’t be by anyone else, especially as it breaks down into its constituent parts after the guitar solo, only to pick itself up and go again, filling all the spaces the other songs have left open as it surges out over the horizon.  If this album had been intended as one last blaze of glory, this song in particular nailed what that was supposed to sound like, fading into random sounds and cast-off pieces of string melodies.

Pick Up if You’re There is another instrumental, drifting along on a sea of keyboards, over laid with yearning violin (actually, possibly viola.  If any of it is electronically derived, it’s really hard to tell).  The saw joins in with a plangent melody before it all becomes unmoored and drifts off under a soundtrack from a movie.  Identifying which movie would, I think, break the spell.

I think I’d have found this a genuinely delightful album without the final track, but it’s the gleeful leave taking of Delta Sun Bottleneck Stomp which definitively raises this out of the ordinary.  I think I sensed that this was a band capable of cutting loose and having a blast like this, so for that to be confirmed on the final track while they determinedly wave goodbye is positively life-affirming.  If you’re going to use the word ‘stomp’ in a song title, the song really needs to stomp, and this delivers in spades.

As noted above, there’s a hidden track on digital versions of this, but it’s missing from my vinyl version, so you should go seek it out yourself. It’s weird, but in a really good way.

For such a quiet, contemplative lo-fidelity record, this really leaves me feeling uplifted and joyful.  It reminded me that there is still an awful lot of music out there which I’ve never heard, and I really should get round to checking it out some day.  It also made me wonder if I’d ever have found it, if not for my online community of people I’ve never met, but who challenge me on an almost daily basis to seek out new things.  People online may be responsible for a lot which agitates and irritates those of us heading into our seventh decade, but they are also capable of a lot of good.

Any other albums by this artist to consider?

Sigh.  It’s taken me five years or so to fully appreciate this one.  I really should get round to the others, don’t you think?

Compilations to consider?

There’s one called The Essential Mercury Rev: I should probably start there.

Live albums?

Not that I’m aware of, no.

Anything else?

Having invoked it up there, I should direct you to the concert film of The Last Waltz. It remains one of, if not the best concert documentaries of all time, and is required viewing for anyone with even a passing interest in this kind of music.  Whatever this kind of music actually is.

50. OK Computer, Radiohead, 1997

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You’ve already heard the childbirth story; it’s only right that there’s a pregnancy story to go with it.  At the end of May 1997, with Zoe four months pregnant, we took our last couples vacation “for a while”.  I have no idea how we chose to go to Cornwall, but it was a part of the country we didn’t know, and didn’t involve anything more stressful than driving for the best part of a day to get there, so we headed southwest, listening to whatever music we had brought with us, and occasionally tuning in to the BBC to catch up with sport or news.

Pretty much the same sort of thing we did in my parents’ car on our way south from Aberdeen twenty years before, although FM radio, and the in-car CD player meant that we could actually hear things for most of the journey.

Also, we didn’t have to listen to Waggoners’ Walk and The Archers on the way…

So it is that this album, which marked a turning point for me in the way I thought about music, will forever be linked in my mind to Penzance.

One of the CDs I had brought with me was a cover disk from the latest issue of Q  magazine, which featured – what with it being 1997 – various modern artists hailed as the best new music of 1997, but most of which didn’t detain me much – I just looked it up, and only Stereophonics, Eels and Erykah Badu stand out as music I was interested enough to check out further, although I must have spent some time trying to like the track by Three Colours Red, as the band is named after my favourite film.

OK, one of my favourite films – I couldn’t pin that down any more than I can pin down my favourite album.

 If I remember correctly (and I so often don’t, so take this with a grain of salt), I was becoming somewhat disillusioned with what passed as ‘new’ by 1997.  Don’t get me wrong, it was a terrific year for albums, and I still own several which were never going to make this list on account of OK Computer being better than all of them put together, but there was something different about how I was reacting to new music.  Maybe this was it; the moment I’d been dreading, when my musical tastes finally ‘grew up’, and I no longer had any interest in what was new and young.  I mean, I enjoyed Oasis and Blur and Pulp and so on, but I wasn’t startled and moved by it the way I was every couple of weeks in the late 1970s.  I was also about to become a parent, and deal with all those responsibilities.  Maybe it was time for me to move on from this whole ‘pop’ music lark.

So it was with some significant surprise that I heard Paranoid Android on Radio 1 one weekday lunchtime as we drove around Penzance.

Almost all of the music I hear for the first time while driving passes me by – it can often be a day or two later that I find myself wondering just what that was, and how to find it again.  For years, I bought new albums on cassette, and ‘listened’ to them in the car as I hurtled around the Scottish Highlands.  This is not the optimal listening experience, and I still to this day can find myself humming along to a melody I know well, only to discover, on listening to it through headphones, that the sound is actually much more complex and rewarding than I’d assumed for all these years.

Also, a great many lyrics make much more sense once you’ve heard them properly.

So, when I talk about ‘significant surprise’ up there, I’m actually talking “hang on, I’m going to pull over to the side of the road and turn the engine off so I can listen properly” surprise.

It’s not quite true to say I had never heard anything like it – a look back through this list will reveal a number of multi-part epics, for example – but it’s true to say that I recognised something on that first listen which I had only really encountered once before.

If you’ve noticed that one of the albums which didn’t make the list was Queen’s A Night at the Opera, here it comes:

In the late autumn of 1975, I heard a song on the radio which changed my life.  I can vividly remember the experience of that first encounter with Bohemian Rhapsody; the way time seemed to stand still as I tried to find some sort of context for what I was listening to.  I knew Queen, owned a copy of Sheer Heart Attack, but nothing had prepared me for this – whatever it was.  It dropped into my brain as if beamed there from an unimaginable future.  I thought I knew how pop music worked before I heard it, and afterward, I accepted that I knew nothing about anything, and pop music could be whatever it wanted to be.

In the late spring of 1997, I heard a song on the radio which changed my life.  I can vividly remember the experience of that first encounter with Paranoid Android; the way time seemed to stand still as I tried to find some sort of context for what I was listening to.  I knew Radiohead, owned a copy of The Bends, but nothing had prepared me for this – whatever it was.  It dropped into my brain as if beamed there from an unimaginable future.  I thought I knew how pop music worked before I heard it, and afterward, I accepted that I knew nothing about anything, and pop music could be whatever it wanted to be.

Maybe rock and pop music really was over, and this was the dying howl of a format which was about to be replaced with something new, but – easy to say from 25 years down the road – maybe it wasn’t.  Maybe Radiohead knew something which the rest of us hadn’t yet figured out.  Maybe there was undiscovered life out there.

I bought the album on release, pored over the inscrutable sleeve design, analysed it to death with my work colleagues, looked it up on the internet – a thing you could do now, with the Radiohead site in 1997 being a very early indicator of how this internet thing might work in the future.

In particular, I watched the electrifying performance of much of this album live from the mudbath of the Glastonbury Festival.  OK, it was beamed into my warm, dry living room, but it’s an extraordinary performance which cemented this album as one of my favourites, a position which it has not shifted from even slightly in the intervening 25 years.

Honestly, I’ve tried to avoid bandying around words like ‘masterpiece’ during this process – everyone should make their own minds up, and what sounds perfect to me may not land at all for someone else.  But – and I have said this before about a very small handful of albums – it is, I think, objectively a masterpiece.  Even if you don’t like it, there’s an undeniable sense of greatness and history about it.  It is, of course, just a dozen rock songs, but it’s also a cultural artefact in the way that Sgt. Pepper and Dark Side of the Moon are.

So this isn’t a ‘re-discover’ kind of re-listen.  It’s me listening to an album I know intimately and trying to find some way of explaining why it works the way it does.  My hope for this is that I can have it make some kind of sense.

I’m listening to my vinyl reissue copy.  This is an album intended to be heard on CD; it’s CD length, and was mixed and mastered accordingly.  However, the sumptuous vinyl reissue is a thing of genuine beauty, and reveals so much more about what the art direction was aiming at than the tiny CD version does, and displays the lyrics in the way they were surely meant to be seen, crossing out and all.

It begins with Airbag – a song which almost immediately acquired an eerie resonance with the death of Princess Diana.  The latter half of 1997 was a strange place, soundtracked by this dystopian album which seemed not only tuned to the times we were living in, but actually to be anticipating and predicting them.  Unlike the next album – we’re coming to that – it leads in with a sound not so different from the familiar one from The Bends­, but with added menace and a growing sense of everything – even the guitar solo – being slightly off-kilter.  For a catchy song, it’s surprisingly unsettling.

Then the album reveals what it’s all about as Paranoid Android bleeps its way into existence.  The only thing I’d add to what I said earlier is that, having listened to it hundreds, if not thousands, of times in the intervening 25 years, it never fails to grip me, to have me air drumming or air guitaring along; never once have I thought that I’ve heard it enough, and I’ll skip along to the next track.  It’s one of a very small number of songs which never pales, never loses its ability to engage.  If it’s playing anywhere within earshot, I’m listening to the end.

Following that seems like a tall order, but Radiohead simply invoke Bob Dylan and plough right on with Subterranean Homesick Alien.  It’s a lyric which works just as well as prose; in fact, reading it out of context, it’s not at all obvious where the line breaks are; how it would fit to any rhythm, but of course, as soon as you hear it, it all makes sense.  Well, as much sense as a song about wishing for an alien abduction can make.  I often think of The Man Who Fell to Earth when listening to it; I can’t tell if that’s my interpretation, or something I read somewhere, and the joy of this album is that it doesn’t matter – each song says the things it says to each listener independently, then we move on together.

In this case, to flip the record over.  You know, this really works as four sides of vinyl; each triptych (or near-tryptich as we’ll see) has it own internal logic, which I perhaps hadn’t noticed before.  Side two – side ‘meeny’ – is the singalong heart of the thing, closest in spirit to The Bends but entirely new and of its own time.

Exit Music (for a film) is delicate and heartbreaking.  And then you see the film in question – Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet  – and it takes on a whole other layer of meaning.  It’s not even slightly Shakespearean, but it is entirely Shakespearean.  No, I know that doesn’t make sense, except that it does.

You know what it reminds me of?  Stairway to Heaven.  No, it doesn’t sound anything like it.  It’s partly the drumming, and partly that sense of a band just doing what they want and accidentally making a perfect song.

Again, the difficult task of following something so perfect is made to sound easy, as Let Down may be the most perfectly balanced song on the album, full of carefully curated soundscapes aligned with a despairing lyric which seems to sum up the prevailing sense at the time of false dawns and being out of control.

A quarter of a century on, it doesn’t feel any better, but Let Down at least reassures us that we’re not the only ones.

And – as that wasn’t enough – the side is completed by the staggering Karma Police, a hit in anyone’s hands, but given the Radiohead treatment, a menacing and almost dreamy statement of intent.  I also think that the chorus stands as a plain introduction to the experimentalism and eclectic sprawl of the next two albums:

“This is what you get when you mess with us”.

Also, bonus points for the use of the word ‘phew’.  I think it serves to remind you that this is a song; that all of this is artifice, perhaps pulls the listener back a little from the immersion in the way the Brecht always tried to remind the audience that they were watching a play.

Yeah, Brecht.  It’s that kind of album.

Exactly here, I’m going to complain (and it’s my only complaint) about how the seamless transition to Fitter, Happier is somewhat diminished in effect my me having to get up and go change records over.

And now I’m going to defend Fitter, Happier.  If this album has a manifesto, it’s right here.  Here is the modern world; the way we’re all being encouraged to live, in a grey dystopian uniformity which might as well be declaimed by an artificial voice, such is the lack of humanity, underlined by the disturbing imagery id dissolves into at the end.  The only way out of this disturbing vision is to rebel.

Which brings us to Electioneering, where we learn that rebelling through the ballot box is pointless.  The portrait of the venal, soulless politician was probably a little more cutting when it came out; now it just seems a banal truism.

See what I mean about prescience?

What comes next seems an inevitable response – the descent into the horror film which is Climbing up the Walls.  The tempo may drop, but the energy levels don’t – the song pulsates with menace and despair, and for the first time, the printed lyrics – so far, shaky and disjointed, but correct – wander off into a whole other world, where the unspoken threat of the sung version is made explicit.  It’s genuinely creepy and – again – unsettling.  Music should give you pause as much as it should entertain you, I think.

No Surprises belongs on this side thematically, with its rallying cry to bring down the government, and perhaps it’s here also to help us to transition to the final movement.  I feel it would work just as well as the first track on side four, which is where I mentally placed it earlier (I’m not going back to edit the ‘triptych’ comment, though), but here it is, lowering our blood pressure and reassuring us that – well, it’s not really reassuring us of anything more than the fact that there’s not much you can do about any of this, so perhaps just sit back and enjoy the harmonies and the pretty melody, and try not to think about it…

Lucky takes us back to the themes of the first side – this time, instead of a car, we’re in in an aircrash, but the mood is perhaps a little more optimistic.  The song was written before the rest of the album, and released as part of a charity album.  It doesn’t, therefore, quite match the tone of the others lyrically, but it also serves as a way to head out of the album with a sense of quiet optimism, in spite of what we’ve been hearing.

That sense is underlined by the gently loping The Tourist, which appears to offer some kind of sheepish apology for all that has gone before (“Sometimes I get overcharged, that’s when you see sparks”).  It brings things to a close with a surprising calmness, the drumming (uniformly excellent on the whole album) and the vocal harmonies helping us to find our way back to reality, and it ends with a single chime which seems to announce that something has just happened, but now it’s time to move on.

I can honestly say, that in the years since first hearing it, I have never felt the need to move on.  I have had a mixed relationship with some of Radiohead’s later work, but this album has never lost any of its power, any of its energy, or its ability to shock, surprise and provoke.  I do think I have albums I love more, but not many.  Hardly any, in truth.

Any other albums by this artist to consider?

In the unlikely event that you’re new to Radiohead, I’d recommend chronological order.  Of the early albums, The Bends is closest to this in sound and intent (and at least one member of this household might cite it as her favourite Radiohead album if pressed), while if you can handle the extraordinary shift into Everything in its Right Place at the beginning of the next album, Kid A, you’ll be fine.  I think the standard answer here is In Rainbows, but there is much to recommend on all of them; Radiohead are a band who have never rested on their laurels, and always look to do something different.  Not always successfully, to be sure, but so few bands keep pushing the envelope and they should be celebrated for that.

Compilations to consider?

There’s a Best Of album, because record companies are a thing, but no.  Buy the albums; the shift in styles between them is too much for a compilation album to deal with.

Live albums?

The only live album is more than 20 years old, and I’m not sure it does the live show justice.

Anything else?

A couple of the Glastonbury 1997 performances are on YouTube, and give the general idea, although the whole set really needs to be seen in one sitting, but I don’t think that’s available commercially, although it did appear on the BBC a few years back, so someone you know (cough) might have a copy.

Aside from that, and generally encouraging you to seek out the video albums featuring all those disturbing and highly creative videos, I can only urge you all to check out the astonishing Amanda Palmer playing… Look, the album is called Amanda Palmer Performs the Popular Hits of Radiohead on Her Magical Ukulele.  You should listen to it.