Category Archives: Music

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.

49. Milk and Kisses, Cocteau Twins, 1996

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Among the many and varied types of music we listened to in the 1990s, none was more “1990s” than a spectrum of dreamy, often unintelligible albums ranging from Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares  via the likes of Enya, and a fondly-remembered project called simply One World, One Voice to, well, to Cocteau Twins, nominally a Scottish band, but unlike pretty much any other Scottish band in their seeming determination to sound like their music came from outer space.

I had been vaguely aware of a Scottish band with some ethereal vocals for some time, but I’m not sure at this remove what finally prompted me to properly listen to them – maybe it was another library album.

The last time I remember regularly borrowing albums from a library was when we lived in Tring.  Tring library was very similar in size and scope to the one I first started borrowing albums from, and still mostly dealt in vinyl albums – at least, that’s what I think I remember, but maybe I’m conflating the two in my mind.  I got through a fair number of early-nineties fads – remember those MTV Unplugged albums – and some things I probably should already have known, and then suddenly I was listening to Cocteau Twins music in all its otherworldly glory.

One of the principal reasons that this album is on this list as opposed to any of the other mainly instrumental sounds is that when this album came out in 1996 it quickly became a firm favourite in the house, and then the following year, became part of our intended childbirth soundtrack.

Now, I’m not kidding myself; I’m barely qualified to talk about childbirth, having been a spectator for both of my children’s births, but there were some aspects I could take part in, including the ante-natal classes, and the curation of a delivery room playlist.

The classes were generally interesting and useful – save for the one which was basically a sales pitch for one particular brand of formula milk (I assume that’s how the whole thing was funded); we sat in a room once a week with a group of other first-time parents who were all as bewildered and anxious as we were, and we were reassured that the whole thing would be simple and straightforward – the point of the classes, in reality, is to ensure that the new parents-to-be are aware of the wide range of what’s normal, both during and after the birth, and in my case at least, to be given permission to think about what calming music I could provide to at least let me feel like I was contributing in some way.

Milk and Kisses had quickly become a favourite – one of the albums which accompanied our move to a slightly bigger house on the fringes of Watford, and a certainty for the labour ward playlist, combining as it did ethereal, calming sounds and a general air of peace and tranquility.

At least, that’s how I remember it – I haven’t listened to it in years.

Of course (and you may be ahead of me here), the well-intentioned plans for a calm, almost mystical birthing experience didn’t really survive contact with the real word, in which we spent the majority of a chilly November day listening, not to Liz Fraser emoting or Robin Guthrie and Simon Raymonde dazzling us with their layers of sound, but to the surprisingly rapid heartbeat of our imminent arrival.  That day is nudging 25 years ago now, but it’s vivid to me; I can even tell you what I was wearing.  And I can’t do that about yesterday.

We did listen to Milk and Kisses at some point around lunchtime, I think.  But that was still many hours from the actual delivery, and I don’t remember any more music being played; it all seemed a little superfluous to the real life happening in the room.

As I say, I’m not really qualified to talk about anything more than what it looked like, but I think it say something that of the no doubt lengthy playlist I had assembled, this is the only album which stands out and which, on the odd occasion I do hear something from it, reminds me acutely of the sounds and smells of that unforgettable day.

And once we were parents, there seemed to be so much less time for listening to new music that I actually found myself wondering if new music had completely dried up around the end of 1997.  It hadn’t, of course, but it’s telling that we’re at number 49 in the list with 25 years of music still to go.  All of which prompts me to wonder what this album which is the soundtrack to a very specific and highly charged part of my life sounds like now.

The immediate reaction to Violaine is a mix of “oh, I remember this”, and wondering if that’s a live drummer, since I am almost certain that there wasn’t an actual drummer in the band.  And then Liz Fraser’s unmistakable voice cuts in, singing those strange syllables and accompanying herself in a pure soprano, and I’m not listening to the music as such any more, just experiencing it.  There’s a false ending with a chance for the bassline to re-establish itself, and the whole thing drifts along exactly as I remember it – easy to hear why this would have been on the playlist.

Serpentskirt opens with delicious cascading guitar, and a vocal which trips along beside it in a language which is almost, but not quite, English.  If I was to choose an example from this album of what this band sound like, this would be it – there’s a whole soundscape here, played at a loping pace and with enough modulation and shifting of the melodic ground to make it something more than the background music you could easily write it off as.

On the other hand, Tishbite almost sounds like a regular 1990s pop song.  It’s still at that same calm, unhurried pace, but there are actual English lyrics, and the song is structured in a more easily interpreted way, although the lack of printed lyrics leaves the whole thing open to interpretataion, like snatches of an unfamiliar song heard in a dream

And Half-Gifts drifts in with a woozy fairground feel – it reminds me very strongly of Gabriel Yared’s score for Betty Blue (there’s a whole unexplored area of film scores I have known and loved, but there’s no time…).  This sounds like a break-up song, and it’s hard not to relate it to the crumbling relationships which meant that this was the final Cocteau Twins album.  I can make out the words fairly clearly on this one, and while it’s a bitter kind of song, it’s also in that special Cocteau Twins way, deeply weird – “That’s what grown-ups do / That is mature thinking” sounds more like an argument than a song.

Can I just point out my deep admiration for a band who attach seemingly random titles to their songs, prompting as much reflection as the actual music does?  What on earth does Calfskin Smack mean?  How on earth does it relate to the impenetrable lyrics which seem to be adjacent to, rather than entirely in, the English language.  It’s still a gorgeous song, though, and ends absolutely perfectly, as if they all looked around and said “Yes, that’s all we have to say about that.”

Some albums on this list have tried my patience with songs which outstay their welcome, but I have never felt that about this album; each song is precisely as long as it needs to be – some take longer to make their point than others, is all.

Rilkean Heart (which I have discovered today was written for, or inspired by, Jeff Buckley) actually features the song title in the lyrics, which may make it unique (although I’m now wondering about Pearly Dewdrops’ Drops).  It packs a lot into its four minutes, including a breakdown where it all threatens to fall apart, searching for a key to continue in, before righting itself and flowing on.

It is all calm, and similarly paced, this album, but never does it feel samey or plodding (which had been my concern – how was I going to write about 10 songs which all sound the same?  I needn’t have worried).

I’m captivated by the voice – of course I am – at the start of Ups; I have looked up some lyrics for this, and can see that someone has valiantly tried to render it as if it was written in English, but it plainly isn’t, and the linguist in me is just entranced by those trills…  The voice is at its most free and expressive here, given permission to just explore the outer edges of what’s possible in the melodic framework, and not worry too much about where it’s all going, or what it means.

The sound effects at the beginning of Eperdu take me aback; I hadn’t remembered them at all – we’re standing on a rocky shore, listening to the ocean, and there’s hardly any instrumentation at all, leaving us to focus on the voice, which is soaring above the water, gliding along like a seabird in a strong onshore wing, hovering, swooping and gliding seemingly effortlessly.  What does it mean?  I have no idea, although I think I hear words like ‘floating’ and ‘dreaming’ in there; maybe I’m projecting my feelings onto it.

I still haven’t worked out the drum thing yet – there’s very definitely a drum kit involved in some of these songs, rather than a drum machine, but more research is needed to see what was going on there.

Meanwhile, Treasure Hiding is slightly slower, and even more enigmatic.  At times, the layered vocals seem to be commenting on themselves – or possibly translating, who knows?  It’s entirely possible that the title is a commentary on the whole song – there’s something in here, but you’ll have to work at it to find out what exactly the song’s about – the lips, the heart, the soul; who knows?  Then it suddenly breaks open; there’s a definitive beat and suddenly, all this way in, a purpose and energy to the song – unlike everything else we’ve heard before, it’s going somewhere.  It’s just that only the driver knows what that destination is, the rest of us are blindfolded and along for the ride.

The whole thing is rounded off by Seekers Who Are Lovers, which announces itself with a firm drumbeat, then gradually puts on all the Cocteau Twins layers – at first the vocal seems clear and even meaningful, but gradually is enveloped by the guitar sounds, and then the second level of voice – Liz Fraser just emoting in a higher register, and taking your attention away from what you thought the song was about.  In the end, like all the best Cocteau Twins music, it seems to exist to perplex, beguile and leave the listener not entirely sure what they just heard, but eager to go back and see what they might have missed while trying to work out which planet this came from.

I though that I would be dropping back in time, listening to this, but what I found was that Milk and Kisses, and probably most of the band’s output, exists outside time; I can imagine it being discovered by today’s generation and still heralded as radical and otherworldly; maybe I should ask my 25-year-old what he thinks…

Any other albums by this artist to consider?

Certainly.  Both the mainly acoustic Victorialand and the full band experience of Heaven or Las Vegas are worth your exploration, especially if you were enraptured by this album.  I will say that I find the production on the earlier albums better than the slightly muddy sound on Milk and Kisses.

Compilations to consider?

Stars and Topsoil looks to be a comprehensive collection covering the 1980s; I’m not aware of anything equivalent for the 1990s material, though.

Live albums?

Nope.  Not really a live band, your Cocteaus.

Anything else? If you’ve never heard the This Mortal Coil version of Song to the Siren, it’s basically a Cocteau Twins track (it’s all a bit complicated to explain), and is breathtaking in its simplicity and the power of that unmistakable voice.  Speaking of which, one of the reasons I enjoy Massive Attack’s Mezzanine album (not on this list, but might have been) is that the best tracks – including the peerless Teardrop – feature Liz Fraser.  Basically, seek out anything which she’s ever sung on, you won’t go wrong.

48. (What’s The Story) Morning Glory?, Oasis, 1995

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To look at the last few albums, you’d be forgiven for assuming that I’d more or less lost interest in what was new and popular; I was happily exploring the byways of grown-up pop music, and assumed that those heady days of breathlessly scanning the new releases in my local records shops for the latest sensation were behind me.

And you’d be right up to a point.  I think that the mid-nineties marked the point where I was most likely to have moved on like generations before me, and to have devoted my time to exploring back catalogues and different genres rather than keeping my finger on the pulse of what was new and exciting.

I’ll admit there was a part of me which wondered if we hadn’t squeezed the last drops out of pop and rock music; if we weren’t already overdue another revolution and something different for the next generation to feast on while us old-timers tutted and shook our heads before going back to our treasured Deep Purple albums.

I still bought new albums, but not – as a rule – ones which were going to reach the top of the album charts, or get reviews in the mainstream media or make the national news.  Not until I went to watch England play Bulgaria at Wembley on a bitterly cold March evening in 1996, anyway.

For a few years, Tic Tac was the official mint of the England Football Team (apparently, only one gender played football in those days), and while it wasn’t the most successful sponsorship deal ever, what with England failing to qualify for the 1994 World Cup, it did mean that our sales department (of which I was, nominally at least, still a member) regularly took clients to see games.  The glamour games (England played Brazil during this period, for example) were over-subscribed, whereas the ones against the likes of Bulgaria tended to be passed along to the likes of me, to give me a break from compiling month-end statistics, or whatever else it was I was supposed to be doing in those days.

I’d like to tell you it was a tremendous game with end-to-end action, but it wasn’t.  In front of a barely quarter-full Wembley, England plodded to a 1-0 win which none of the players looked like they could be bothered with.

Those of us looking on didn’t even have the chance to run about and keep warm, although those of us in the sponsor seats did at least get some reasonable food and drink beforehand.

I remember very little to nothing of the game, but I remember half time.

I was, of course, aware of Oasis.  And Blur, and the whole ‘Britpop wars’ thing which had surrounded their in-no-way-contrived simultaneous album and single releases.  By March of 1996, I doubt there were many people in that Wembley crowd who weren’t fully aware of the new Oasis album and the five singles which had been released from it already, but the whole thing had almost passed me by; I thought (probably correctly) that it was squarely aimed at younger people than me, and while I could hum along to ‘Wonderwall’ if pushed, I hadn’t really given Oasis much thought beyond a vague awareness that the Blur songs seemed more my kind of thing.

But at half time that evening, whoever was in charge of the music at Wembley played the new(ish) single Don’t Look Back in Anger.  And everyone sang along.

It was an astonishing thing, because half-time music at football matches generally doesn’t do much more than raise an occasional eyebrow.  The DJ will rotate through seven or eight recent chart hits, breaking them up with announcements and birthday wishes to people whose parents have written in, and there’s usually no acknowledgement from anyone of the music which is being played.

But here was this song – not announced, just put on and greeted with the loudest roar of the evening, then a full-throated, word-perfect singalong.  It was a moment etched in my memory, firstly for how unusual it was, but secondly because I suddenly heard an Oasis song in context – these were not songs to be pored over and listened to thoughtfully; these were raucous singalong anthems of a kind which seemed to have gone out of fashion the last time Slade got a single into the charts.

In context, it seemed, Oasis songs were magnificent, irresistible things which could get a crowd of cold, bored football fans on their feet and singing along.  Even ones like me who hadn’t paid much attention to them before, but suddenly understood what was going on.

The song got an encore as we trooped out of Wembley at the end of the evening, and got an equally lusty choral accompaniment from a crowd who had barely mustered polite applause to mark the end of the game.

At lunchtime the next day, I walked along to Strawberry Fields Records in Rickmansworth and bought myself a copy of the album.  I still don’t know if that made me an Oasis fan or not, and I have never quite shaken the feeling that this album wasn’t really intended for the enjoyment of someone as old as me, but I do know that for the first time since I was having my head turned and my brain scrambled by every new album which came out in 1978, I could see and hear the same thing happening to a new generation, and the really interesting thing was that I didn’t feel excluded from it, because –

Well, let’s listen and find out why, shall we?

If you come to the album having heard Wonderwall, then the opening is naggingly familiar, and you reach over and turn it up just in time for the actual start of Hello to leap out at you with a defiant statement of intent – this is going to be the kind of album where you don’t really get to take a breath, and will find yourself singing along long before you’ve worked out what the words are.  It thunders along, reminding you of several 1970s things before explicitly referencing Gary Glitter and causing you to remember where you heard this before.

Not to belabour the point, but Roll With It also drinks deeply from the well of mid-1970s pop music.  I remember remarking at the time of the battle with Blur’s Country House (it really happened, and really was reported on the evening news) that this was basically a Status Quo song, albeit with the kind of attitude which Quo never mustered – Liam Gallagher wasn’t, and still isn’t, the most technically accomplished of singers but he could deliver a song in a way which brooked no argument.

Wonderwall is timeless and glorious; there’s a brief sense that things might be calming down a touch before the voice, all barely controlled plosives and urgency, howls its defiant joy at the sheer fact that this song exists.  It’s not possible to just hear a song like Wonderwall; you experience it, and if you’re not singing along by the end, there’s something seriously wrong.  No amount of ham-fisted cover versions can dilute its power, and when it is covered sensitively – I remember an episode of a TV show where a young cast member plays it at the funeral of a classmate – it has a quiet, devastating power.  They may never have written a better song, but very few people have.

As if that wasn’t enough, it collapses straight into Don’t Look Back in Anger, which makes the late-period Beatles influences explicit, and out-anthems its predecessor. I’ve just explained that no Oasis song tops Wonderwall, but this comes as close as it’s possible to do, and while it doesn’t carry the emotional heft, it makes up for that in the way it just keeps building the chorus to the point where it sounds wrong not to have tens of thousands of people singing along. I don’t know if Noel deliberately set out to write an anthem, but I heard it sung like one, and that moment has stayed with me for 26 years now and counting.

Inevitably, Hey Now! doesn’t reach the heights of what has gone before it.  It’s not the song’s fault; it’s full of singalong moments, and the band sound as if they’re having a fantastic time, but while the previous two songs leave you wanting more, this one outstays its welcome and even drags a little by the end.  They can’t all be indelible classics, you know.

The first of the untitled instrumentals (I think they only acquired the Swamp Song title later) fades in, intrigues you with it’s apparent disconnect from what else is going on (I can’t be the only one to hear Canned Heat in there, can I?) and fades out again in favour of the eye-opening riff at the beginning of Some Might Say, which is a straightforward rock song, but delivered with the whole Oasis arsenal, leaving you with the sense that you’ve heard something much more than the sum of its parts.

It's perhaps the apposite point to observe that this is one of the first albums to obviously employ the ‘everything louder than everything else’ method of mixing and mastering, which came to be known as the ‘loudness wars’.  Many albums suffer from this compression which was designed to cut through background noise, but this one – I think – probably benefits from it.  Strip songs like Some Might Say back, and they would definitely lose something, although listening to it now on noise-cancelling headphones makes the deficiencies obvious.

Cast No Shadow does have some space to breathe, and reminds you that in spite of Noel Gallagher’s reputation for writing lyrics which are all surface, there are plenty of songs like this which actually have more to say than first appears.  The arrangement stands out and lends it an almost laid-back air which allows you to poke around in the various strands – I’m noticing for the first time in a while just how expressive Noel’s bass playing is.  It’s somewhat underrated, is Cast No Shadow.

I’ve mentioned before how I was trying to teach myself any number of songs on guitar around this time, and when I came to try She’s Electric, I remember thinking it wasn’t one I’d particularly noticed.  Then I tried to play along, and became unreasonably obsessed with it.  It’s not particularly tricky or clever, and it’s not one of the great lyrics, but there’s something about the way it takes a simple melody and pulls at it until it reveals something bigger than itself inside – the middle eight is simple, understated but irresistible, full of the joys of being young in the way so few songs manage without sounding deliberate and arch.  It’s the sound of a band who heard all the early Beatles albums, and thought they wanted to sound like that – the same energy and enthusiasm for what they do.

Morning Glory, on the other hand, is full of all the other stuff; everything which came after the first flush of enthusiasm wore off.  Doom-laden and swampy in its mix, and pretty nihilistic in its lyric, it takes the energy of the whole album and shows you it through the filter of all the substances needed to make it sound as fresh and optimistic as it does.  It’s yet another anthem, but a cynical and harsh one.  I’m still singing along, though.

There’s another quick burst of the swamp, although this one with more sound effects, and much less melody, before Champagne Supernova cuts through it and brings us back to earth with the only possible way this album could end.  It’s a ballad, although a fairly fast-paced one; it’s calmer than what’s come before it, but not much calmer, and if we’re going out, we’re going out singing and playing air gutar while pretending that the words mean something.

It's not a particularly complex or clever song, but the way it’s played and arranged, with just the faintest hint of Hey Jude in the background make it timeless and one of those closing tracks which just make you want to go back to the beginning and start again.

(What’s The Story) Morning Glory? is one of those albums which brook no argument; it’s rightly considered a classic, and genuinely has no weak moments.  It turned my head in a way it hadn’t been turned for many years, and it did so by taking all the things I knew and loved about rock music and mixing them up in a way I genuinely hadn’t heard before.  It’s not groundbreaking; it’s not a new kind of music; it’s not even especially challenging or outrageous.  But it is truly spectacular, and listening to it now with nearly 60 years behind me, it still does the same thing to me as it did the first time I heard it; the thing which great albums do – it made me stop, pay attention, and join in – whether by singing along or air-drumming those fills, or wishing I could remember the chord sequence so I could play along.

There’s been a lot of hype and noise around Oasis; there always was.  But it’s the music which matters.

Any other albums by this artist to consider?

Definitely Maybe is a spectacular debut; I still prefer this one, but it’s close.  The full Oasis sound isn’t quite there on the earlier album, but maybe the real Oasis sound is.  The others don’t match up to this, but Be Here Now isn’t as bad as it’s made out to be, and the later albums all have something to recommend them.  They never managed another full album of unskippable tracks, though.

Compilations to consider?

First up, get hold of a copy of The Masterplan. It’s a compilation of B-sides, but it dwarfs some of the later albums; it’s the only place to hear songs like Acquiesce, Half the World Away, Whatever, and The Masterplan.  Then there’s Stop the Clocks, which is as comprehensive a retrospective as you could want.

Live albums?

If you want a live show from around this time, the recently released Knebworth 1996 will be right up your street.  Otherwise, Familiar to Millions should do the trick.

Anything else?

Both Liam and Noel continue to have successful solo careers, although it’s hard to avoid the suspicion that they need each other to really reach the heights their early career scaled – not that a reunion seems on the cards any time soon.  The lengthy documentary film Supersonic looks at this early period in some depth, and is worth a look. And I’m going to say it – Oasis music never sounded as good as Half the World Away as the theme song to the brilliant sitcom The Royle Family – if you really want to understand why this music works the way it does, you should pop in and spend time with Jim, Barbara and their family…

47. To The Moon, Capercaillie, 1995

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The final track was only on the 'Special Edition' re-release

By 1995, we had been living in a foreign country for five years.

I’m aware that’s a contentious statement, and I’m not sure even I fully believe it, but I’ve been thinking about it as I try to contextualise this album (and a couple of others I bought around this time), and it’s what I feel now.

We moved to England in 1990.  At first, there were some differences which we noticed, but the majority of things we encountered in daily life didn’t change.  Sure, the water out of the taps tasted funny, and trying to buy a ‘fish supper’ in the local ‘chippy’ would get you funny looks, but we’d been living in the UK our entire lives, and it wasn’t especially clear to me that someone moving from Yorkshire or Cornwall to the Home Counties wouldn’t feel the same sense of dislocation.

But over time, the differences accumulated.  Not in obvious ways, but definitely subconsciously.  I would regularly meet people who not only had never been to Scotland, but had only a vague idea of where it was and whether life there was in any way comparable to life in the south.  The regular jokes about whether we had electricity up there were – of course – jokes, but there’s a reason these jokes appear in the first place.  I missed certain things – sport was probably the most obvious – and as I became more and more immersed in a world where Scottish accents were rare, and references to Scotland on news and current affairs programmes were pretty much non-existent, I began, I think, to feel increasingly Scottish.

When I was an awkward idealist as a teenager, I would cheerfully declare myself a ‘citizen of the world’.  I don’t know where I first heard that, but I latched on to it as a way of distancing myself from narrow jingoism and nationalist sentiment.  The devolution referendum in 1979 was my first opportunity to inspect my own feelings about Scotland, and I remember being quite firmly in the ‘no’ camp, although I didn’t have a vote, being only 16.

But ask me in 1995, and I’m not sure my answer would have been the same.  Living in England was great – I love England, my children were born there, and I have many English friends and memories of the place.  But I gradually realised that it actually was a different country to the one I was brought up in, and that it was OK to miss things about Scotland which I hadn’t really thought about before.

We would, of course, regularly go back to visit family, and I would have the occasional work trip (I’m coming to another one of those), and each time we went, I’d notice something else I’m not entirely sure was there before.

There seemed to be more Scottish flags flying, more national team shirts around, even more tartan in places.  I don’t think we were going to tourist areas; it just seemed that things had changed.  Things I used to take for granted, like the Scottish country dance music on the radio on Saturday teatime, stood out to me now – I wouldn’t say I’d missed Robbie Shepherd on the radio, but on hearing him again, I found myself reflecting that there was a whole part of my childhood missing from my English life.

I don’t know if being away from Scotland encouraged me to think more about Scottish music and culture, but I started to actively investigate music from my homeland, and to identify some distinct differences – Deacon Blue might just have been another 1990s pop band, but they sang about things I recognised; things which didn’t feature in my new life.  I was, somewhat belatedly, introduced to Runrig and heard things I didn’t know I’d been missing – people singing with a distinct Scottish accent, for example.

And this album came in to my life because of an old friendship and a trip to Scotland at a time when I was thinking more and more about my Scottishness, and what it meant to me now.

Spoiler alert – I am  a citizen of an entirely different country now, and I still haven’t figured any of that out yet, so there’s not going to be an answer.

At some point in late 1995, I was on a work trip to Scotland, which I extended into a weekend, so I could go up to Aberdeen and see my family.  There was  - I think – a sales meeting on the Thursday in Edinburgh, and I needed something to do on the Friday before driving north.  I had one of my colleagues with me (or I met her at Edinburgh airport on the Friday morning, which seems more likely) and we spent the day surveying the distribution of Nutella tubs in the corner shops of Edinburgh and beyond.

I now have to explain the Nutella tub.  At the time, Nutella was sold in glass jars – the smaller one could be reused as a drinking glass once empty – and in multipacks of what we generally referred to as ‘tubs’; little portion-pack sized plastic containers with a peelable lid which you could buy for pennies at the counter of your local corner shop.  I genuinely hadn’t thought about them for years before sitting down to write this, and have no idea if they still exist in their original form.  I do know that the tub was reshaped to mimic the shape of the jar a few years after this.  I also know that if you refrigerated them, you could have a bite-sized Nutella flavoured chocolate snack, which I recommend.

Scotland was, for reasons I’ll explain in a moment, a hotbed of Nutella tub sales, and our Nutella brand manager, Anna, who was English, but of Italian descent, wanted to see for herself.  I jumped at the chance to show off my favourite city, and we spent a fantastic day driving around Edinburgh interrogating owners of small neighbourhood shops about why the little tubs sold so well.

I knew why, of course, and it’s to do with ice cream.

Ice cream in Scotland was, and is, heavily influenced by the Italian diaspora.  There are many variations on the stories of Italians settling in Scotland from the late 19th century on, and no space here to tell all those tales, but the important point is that not only did every Scottish town have its Luigis, Macari’s, Vicca’s, or Nardini’s, but it also had fleets of ice cream vans, selling all manner of confections alongside the gelati.

This is also not the place to get into the so-called ice cream wars; suffice it to say that ice cream is an important subject in Scotland, and if you’re of Italian descent and you sell ice cream, you also sell that staple of the Italian breakfast table, Nutella.

The little tubs were sold in highest volume from the ice cream vans – the wholesalers who supplied the vans bought the tubs by the pallet load – but by a process of the way markets function, there was a demand for tubs which expanded into every newsagent and corner grocer in the land.

So there was no shortage of surveying to be done, and any number of shopkeepers happy to tell us that they just kept a box of them on the counter, and sold them mainly to those who were spending pocket money on them after school, but that a surprising number of people would opt for one of the little tubs instead of a more traditional chocolate bar.

I’m not sure what we learned, but we had fun.

As I was driving to Aberdeen at the end of the day, we had arranged for Anna’s flight south to depart from Aberdeen, and I’m sure we intended to spend more time in my home city than we did, but there’s so much of Edinburgh to show off, and I’m not sure we had time for more than one or two fleeting visits in Aberdeen.

On the drive north, we entertained ourselves by firstly, me making Anna try to pronounce all the Scottish names we saw on roadsigns (the one just outside Forfar which points to Bogindollo, Oathlaw and Jusinhaugh was a particular favourite), and listening to my new Capercaillie CD.

The first thing we did that morning was to go to the Gyle Centre (again; that’s twice it’s shown up in here, and they are quite possibly the only two times I ever went in there) so we could pick up coffee and a CD for the car.

The previous night, rather than staying in the hotel we’d been meeting in, I drove across the Forth Road Bridge and spent the evening with the same friend who had started me off on the Ferrero journey back in the Tears For Fears post.  During dinner, we listened to his new copy of To The Moon and all those strange feelings of Scottishness flowed through me.  Living in England, I doubt I’d even have heard it, but hearing it there, in good company, and thinking about how different my English life was turning out to be, compelled me to take home a slice of Scotland.

And before taking it home, to subject my Italian / English colleague to it.

To The Moon is sung in a mix of Scottish-accented English (not Scots; let’s not go down that road just yet) and Scottish Gaelic.  The English part is, of course, comprehensible to an Aberdonian (I’m not sure there are many, or indeed any, pop songs sung in Doric); the Gaelic much less so.  Had I stayed in Scotland, might I have followed my friend Andrew’s example, and learned Gaelic?  I’d like to think so, but my experience of trying to learn Italian, which was of daily use to me for 16 years, suggests I might not have got very far.

All of which is to say that for a number of the songs on here, I’ve literally no idea what’s being sung, but I can react to the sounds.

The opening title track, for example, sets the mood perfectly – it’s all smooth bass and sparse instrumentation, supporting a breathy voice singing about who knows what before it eventually explodes into live about halfway through, opening the door to the rest of the album.

Capercaillie are not a traditional drum-bass-guitar kind of band.  Instrumentation tends to revolve around violins (strictly, fiddles), flutes and other traditional woodwind instruments, with piano or accordion supplementing the more rock-oriented rhythm section.  It gives the music a highly distinctive, and to these ears, particularly Scottish, sound.  Of course, people have asked me about the ‘Irish music’ I’m listening to, but the distinction is clear to me.

For instance, the fiddle line in the strangely upbeat ‘Claire in Heaven’ is unmistakeably descended from the same ancestry as the ones I used to hear on Robbie Shepherd’s Take The Floor programme on a Saturday night.  The song itself is one of those contradictory ones; ostensibly sung from the perspective of an infant who died at only three days old, it’s curiously joyful and easy to sing along with.  I always like that in a band; the ability to mask the message of a song and make you work for it.

Nil Si nGra, on the other hand, is clearly mournful.  I put the lyrics through Google Translate, which tells me that it is a song of regret and sorrow.  It also tells me that the text was detected as “Irish”, which is annoying.  I am also reminded by looking at the original lyrics that Gaelic is perhaps only rivalled by Danish as languages which seem to have little or no relationship between the written and spoken form.

Meanwhile, Why Won’t You Touch Me? starts off in Spanish to completely throw the translate program.  It features some splendid Spanish-style nylon-stringed guitar alongside the fiddle.  It’s not clear to me why it keeps breaking into Spanish, but there’s no reason why it shouldn’t; just because Capercaillie are rooted in the Scottish islands, there’s no reason why they shouldn’t also reach out to the rest of the world.  There’s also a very 1990s bass break in the middle, which I’d forgotten about, and which caused me to grin widely.

I don’t think I’m bringing those prejudices to this album; I’m not expecting a dozen songs about the Highland Clearances or anything, which is just as well – the lyrics of You, bar the Gaelic backing vocals, cover the same subject matter as a million other love songs.  It’s just that this one sounds Scottish in its execution and delivery.

La Paella Grande has me researching just what, exactly, is the Spanish connection.  It’s largely instrumental, and full of life and joy, but I’m not sure I understand the name.  Not that names have to carry deep meaning; as Robert Plant said about Big Log, “you have to call it something”, and there’s a definite Spanish feel to the beginning of this – the handclaps mixed with the fiddle actually give it a sound all its own.

I think The Crooked Mountain exemplifies the sound of this album.  It contains all the warm production and smooth sounds of its time; the bass and drums are solid and funky; the mood is that of a 1990s pop anthem, but the unusual instrumentation breathes a different kind of life into it.  It’s one of the least played songs on the album according to Spotify, but I can hear all the elements of a proper chart song – I suspect that says something about how things had moved on from the 1980s; the offbeat and quirky found it much harder to reach a wide audience than they had ten years before.

However, Ailein Duinn took the path of being a key song in an Oscar-nominated film, and very nearly propelled Scottish Gaelic into the UK charts, so what do I know.  Some of the music on To The Moon came out of the costume drama Rob Roy, starring that well-known Scotsman Liam Neeson, and this interpretation of a traditional lament was used as the theme tune, although it perhaps reflected the mournful tone of the story too well to reach a wider audience.

God’s Alibi is a political anti-war song which isn’t all that sure about religion, now you come to mention it.  The overall tone of the album might suggest that the subject matter is unexpected, but there was a war going on in Europe at the time, and bands which play traditional instruments and sing in Gaelic aren’t immune from the effects of that.  It’s a terrifically powerful statement which deserved a wider audience.

Fear-Allabain positively rocks along, although it’s only with the help of the translator that I understand that rocking along is the whole point – it being a ‘get up and get going’ kind of song, albeit one with a flute solo where others might have had a wailing guitar.

The Rob Roy Reels are instrumentals from the movie soundtrack, and are comfortably the most Scottish thing on here, hewing not only to the traditional sounds, but to the structure of Scottish music, with the shift from the gentle reel at the beginning to the wild abandon of the second part accompanied by much whooping from the dancers.  Well, I can hear it.

The Price of Fire feels like it could be from another film soundtrack, but I think I’m imagining that.  It’s a cool piano ballad, and allows me to rhapsodise about Karen Matheson’s extraordinary pure, clear voice.  I’m used to it singing these songs in this way, so it’s easy for me to overlook the fact that one of the most important things about the sound of this album is that the voice is peerless and is doing so much of the work so apparently effortlessly.

Amusingly, Spotify thinks that it’s called The Prince of Fire, which would be a completely different song, I think.

Another reel, billed as Eastern Reel, to ease us out of this most enjoyable album, wraps things up calmly and to send me on my way wanting more.  I don’t listen to it often, but when I do, I always find myself immersed in its soundscapes.  If you’ve never heard it, give your ears a treat.

The further I have moved away form Scotland, the more Scottish I have felt, I think.  The music of Capercaillie is a direct link to my roots in two ways; the sound and feel of it echoes music I often heard growing up, but perhaps more importantly, it reminds me of a specific time and place, and of starting to think more seriously about who I am and where I come from.  My children (who we’ll be meeting soon) are a mix of English, Irish, Scottish and Canadian, and I’m sure that while they have a link to Scotland, it’s nothing like as strong as mine.  Albums like this, however, might give them a clue.

Any other albums by this artist to consider?

I’d like to give you a full rundown, but the truth is that the longer I was away from Scotland, the less likely I was to buy another Capercaillie album.  I know lots of bits and pieces of their music, but no other whole album.  I should rectify that.

Compilations to consider?

There’s a Best Of from 2012.  I’d start there; it’s what I’ll be doing.

Live albums?

Yes.  The other Capercaillie CD I owned was the Live In Concert one from 2002, and it’s terrific.  Highly recommended.

Anything else?

Well, this is – I think – now the fourth album in this list to feature Davy Spillane, so we should go and check him out, don’t you think?  Atlantic Bridge seems to be the place to go….

46. Stanley Road, Paul Weller, 1995

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Like everyone else, Spotify thinks that's the cover of Stanley Road. It isn't.

This project is partly – perhaps even mainly – about getting older and tracing that journey through music, but it occurs to me that I haven’t really thought about that process from the perspective of the musicians.

Even by 1995, it was still possible to think of rock music as a new phenomenon, something which young people created, and young people listened to.  I think that most other forms of music had matured to a degree, but the 1990s were the first period where it became clear that the first and second generation of rock musicians weren’t slipping quietly out of the limelight to make way for the next iteration; everyone was competing for the same space.

But were competing for an increasing number of ears.  It seems obvious to say now, but no-one was growing out of this music; if the musicians were growing older, so were the audience.  In 1995, I turned 33.  There are four albums on this list released in 1995, and I bought them all on or near their release date.  My father was 33 in 1964 – he wasn’t buying Beatles and Rolling Stones albums; he probably barely knew who they were.  From his generation to mine, something changed – partly the effect of the ‘album era’ I talked about back at the beginning; that easy availability of all the music of the last 40 years – and partly, I think, that music seemed to have hit on a formula which worked.

I’m not pretending that music stopped developing after the early seventies; of course not, there are an ever-evolving set of genres and styles, with more appearing every day, and I certainly wouldn’t argue with the contention that hip-hop and its fractally expanding offshoots was an entirely new kind of popular music, not beholden to much of what came before it (but gleefully ready to appropriate any parts of it which served the rhyme).  My point is that, instead of one style overtaking a previous one, and leaving the teenagers of the 1970s behind, everyone came along for the ride.

There’s an essay or two to be written on why that is, of course – just offhand, I can think of the change in formats; of the explosion of DIY creativity ignited by punk and carried forward by the New Wave and all that followed; of the expansion of rock journalism from weekly disposable inkies to proper glossy magazines; you can even throw in changes in the political and economic landscape and the sudden availability of easy consumer credit.

While I make notes for a forthcoming writing project which won’t get off the ground, let’s consider the case of Paul Weller.

Having used the sensibilities of the punk movement to give his band, The Jam, a way into the public eye, Weller’s songwriting and musical abilities kept them there for several years.  The Jam were staggeringly popular, but came to an end (at Weller’s insistence) when he was only 24.  In 1982, to have had a rock music career which lasted as long as it did was a significant achievement, and had all three of them faded into semi-obscurity afterward, no-one would have been overly surprised.

Weller, however, started an entirely different band, and made them successful, playing music which sounded  quite unlike The Jam, but exactly like the 1980s.  Even then, at the conclusion of a second career, Weller faced the question which few had encountered until then – what does a middle-aged rock musician do now?  Once past the supposed musical peak of 27, is there a career to be had continuing to make music?  Who’s going to be buying albums by people heading for their forties when there are a hundred new bands a month appearing, and appealing to an audience who want something which represents their lives and their concerns?

It turned out that the audience who loved The Jam in their teens and twenties were – unlike their parents’ generation – still buying music, and while (as we’ll see) they would be perfectly capable of finding much to enjoy in the younger bands, having someone of our own generation still making music which stands up alongside it was even more appealing.

In 1995, I was still waiting for the moment when I’d grow out of all this ‘pop music noise’, but the noise kept evolving along with me, and while I did think for a time that perhaps there wasn’t much more blood to be wrung from this particular stone, I’m still eagerly anticipating new albums by bands I only discovered recently, and looking forward to hearing something new.

I have some strong opinions on what passes for ‘pop music’ these days, but I did back in 1995 too, and that particular gripe clearly doesn’t hold any water with the millions of people who go out and buy it.  I prefer my music not to be shaped by algorithms, or moulded by focus groups, or written to a formula, but there’s plenty of other kinds of music still out there, so I’m not going to run out of things to listen to any time soon.

Back in 1995, I acquired a copy of Stanley Road on CD (and I think it might have been a birthday present), and loving it helped me lean back into those Jam albums I’d never quite fully absorbed back in those fast-paced days of change, and helped me find a way into the ‘Britpop’ (I was never a fan of that label, but you know what I mean by it) which was all around at the time.

I sometimes struggle to clearly identify with the 1990s; it doesn’t have a ‘feel’ for me the way the 1970s and 1980s did, and that may be a function of age, but the music is what anchors it for me, and right at the centre of it is this album, a considered, mature work by an artist still finding new things to say, despite having reached what his generation would once have considered pensionable age.

On the cover, designed by Peter Blake of Sgt. Pepper fame, Weller looks – no doubt intentionally – like John Lennon, and The Changingman starts with that Beatle-like guitar sound, straight out of Dear Prudence, although the vocal couldn’t be anyone else, and while the song never quite shakes off its influences, it manages to sound contemporary, perhaps partly due to the way it influenced (or shared influences with) the likes of Oasis, who mined the same seam musically.

I had forgotten how effective the sparse opening to Porcelain Gods is – perhaps I should say that despite it being one of my favourite albums at the time, I haven’t listened to it for maybe a decade or more – it’s actually a much better song than the opener in its willingness to explore the sound rather than just chug along in the same vein.  I’m not sure if I knew that the bass is played by Dr. Robert of the Blow Monkeys, but it’s fantastically fluid and gives the track a relaxed underpinning for its otherwise menacing air.

Another musical doctor next – Dr. John’s swampy New Orleans blues retitled for some reason to I Walk on Gilded Splinters (the original is Guilded).  I’m not sure I’m convinced that Paul from Woking carries off the voodoo menace, but I’m singing along anyway; it’s an irresistible melody however presented.  Apparently – did I know this at the time? – Noel Gallagher is in the mix somewhere, and I do still love the fake ‘scratched vinyl’ outro.

You do Something to Me is a straightforward love song, perhaps the best known song from this album, and one which perhaps best illustrates the way that the passage of time produces music which wouldn’t have worked as a Jam or Style Council song – it’s a mature song with a slightly world-weary feel to it which would sound strange coming from a younger Paul Weller.

Woodcutter’s Son demonstrates that the passage of time hasn’t dulled the righteous anger of the man who was a big part of Red Wedge.  It‘s perhaps not as clearly focused on a specific target, but behind its cheerful clapping and the unmistakeable keyboard work of Steve Winwood, there’s a real air of menace and anger at the state of the world.

As soon as I hear the piano at the start of Time Passes…, I realise that my thesis for this post was perhaps subliminally inspired by this, my favourite track on it.  There’s nothing complicated about it, a quiet blues-based lament, but I suspect it came into my life at the first time I really thought about the inexorable progress of time.  Turning thirty and being in possession of something approximating a career, together with the fact that I was now listening to music like this and thinking about the people who were making it getting older like I was – well, something struck a chord with me, and something made me approach this album from this perspective.

I still don’t know if the instrumental coda is meant to be attached to it, or is an introduction to the title track, or somewhere in between.

While it’s musically different – much more up-tempo and purposeful, Stanley Road addresses the same question – how to look back and look forward at the same time.  It is, of course, the theme of the whole set of songs, perfectly captured in a simple image of the street where Weller grew up.

Broken Stones shifts moods quite deliberately.  There has, so far, been little sign of the soul influences which reach all the way back to the days of The Jam, but they’re all here – surrounded by understated piano, drifting accordion and that glorious bass, Weller’s voice makes much more sense in this context – he’s a soul singer; perhaps even a gospel singer, trying to explain his philosophy while adrift in the sounds of the seventies.

Talking of which, Out of the Sinking feels like a lost song from the early seventies – it’s got that same swagger that the Small Faces did.  If this album is, as I seem to be suggesting, a recap of everything which has gone before and is trying to put all of that into a 1990s context, it is drawing from impeccable sources.

Back to the Beatles for the piano intro to Pink on White Walls; a simple, straightforward slice of a pop song which swings joyfully by in little more than a couple of minutes, which is not something you can say about  Whirlpool’s End, which takes the premise of an angry Jam song and stretches it over seven minutes of slow boiling anger.  I’ll be honest; I think the song is done at the halfway point, and I’m unconvinced that stretching it out past that adds much at all, despite some smart guitar and drum work – the drumming on this whole album is impressive – I’m known for being an apologist for overly long songs, but I’m prepared to call out the odd one which seems to burble away to no great effect.

Wings of Speed is much more like it, concluding the album with a burst of gospel-tinged (OK, gospel-soaked) piano balladry.  It’s a very effective way to end an album, timeless in its appeal, and perhaps symbolising the way this whole album manages to be at once free from any particular time period, and firmly fixed in the 1990s.

I’m not sure my words convey how much I have enjoyed renewing my acquaintance with Stanley Road. While I wouldn’t claim to be word-perfect on the lyrics the way I was with some of my earlier favourites, I was singing along happily to much of it, and while it’s not a perfect album by any means, it does illustrate neatly the way I was feeling about music, and life in general in the middle of the 1990s.  I’ll not leave it so long next time.

Any other albums by this artist to consider?

The only other one I know well is Wild Wood, which I also heartily recommend.  As with a few others, I played this one to death, but didn’t move on to any later ones – I should probably try to figure out why that is.

Compilations to consider?

There’s a greatest hits album called Modern Classics from around this time, and a much later one called More Modern Classics (naturally); maybe I should investigate those…

Live albums?

Live at the Royal Albert Hall contains some of these songs, but Catch-Flame! from 2005 also includes some songs from earlier in his career, which may appeal.

Anything else?

Well, there’s The Jam and The Style Council.  That should keep you busy for a while…

45. Concert Program, Penguin Café Orchestra, 1996

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To trace my history with this curious and engaging band, we’ll have to indulge in a little time travel, and head all the way back to Inverness.  If you’ve been following the story closely, you’ll remember that I moved to Inverness in early 1986, and – inevitably – one of the first things I did on finding myself a more or less permanent place to live was to join the library.

I have a clear memory of picking up the first Penguin Café Orchestra album in the library there, but I am drawing a complete blank on where the library actually was.  Unimaginably to the 1986 version of myself, I can just go and look it up now.  I’d remembered it being near the railway station, which it is, but what I was actually remembering was that it was, and still is, tucked in behind the bus station in the centre of Inverness.

It's like scratching an itch, figuring that out, I can tell you.

Anyway, in spite of being the main public library in one of Scotland’s cities, at that time the record collection available for loan wasn’t quite as broad as I had been used to in Aberdeen, so after borrowing a couple of things I’d been meaning to get round to, I found myself perusing the cover of a frankly mysterious-looking album which I think had also been in the rack in Aberdeen, but which I’d never felt the need to investigate.

What did I know about Simon Jeffes and his oddly-named Orchestra?  Precisely nothing at this point, I think.  I may have come across the name somewhere in the murkier recesses of the review section of Sounds at some point, but the great thing about having a library card was that I could take a risk on something I knew nothing about and hand it back a week later whether I got on with it or not.

I took home my borrowed copy of the ten-year-old Music from the Penguin Café and probably listened to it straight away.  I was living on my own in Inverness those first few months; I didn’t know anyone in town, and my weekends were fairly quiet and uneventful – I didn’t even, to my considerable surprise looking back, go to see a Highland League game, of which there was pretty much always one going on in town on a Saturday.  I spent my time listening to music, reading books, wandering around on Culloden Moor – right along the road from where I was living – and presumably watching television, although I don’t remember that being a particularly large part of my life.

I do know I had a TV, though, as I watched a large chunk of the 1986 World Cup on it that summer.

So, if I can presume to reconstruct my Saturday afternoon, it likely was spent listening to, trying to figure out, and then deciding to tape, Penguin Café music.  That first album has some obvious highlights – the opening track, Penguin Café Single, and the irresistibly catchy Giles Farnaby’s Dream, for example, and some other things which seemed inscrutable and minimalist, but worthy of further study.  The thing was – and this was an important consideration – what could I put on the other side of the C90 tape?  Flipping from this weird, string-driven, classical inflected folk music to pretty much anything else would have jarred.  What I needed was a second PCO album to pair it with.

Fortunately, Inverness Public Library also had a copy of Broadcasting From Home, and the following weekend, I swapped one for the other, filled up the tape and then let this quietly seductive, slightly subversive music infiltrate my life.

The band remained unknowable, beyond the sparse details on the album sleeves, and as I had had access to those for a week each, any details I might have gleaned from them faded quickly.  What I was left with was a tape of music, mostly unlike anything else I had in my collection, but which I kept coming back to, particularly on long, late-night trips (sales meetings which ended at 10pm in Perth when I lived in Inverness; I don’t know how we put up with it, to be honest).  I can’t say I carefully studied this music which always seemed to uplift and cheer me, but it got under my skin.

Once we were living in Perth and embarking on a CD collection, I added to our minimalist collection one day with the live album When in Rome… which quickly became a firm favourite.  This music, which had seemed to me perhaps a little cold and sterile in its studio renditions, came alive in a concert setting.  For the first time I was aware that PCO music was not only mentally stimulating, but fun.  I resolved to see them live.

One of the benefits of living in Perth and working in Glasgow for that year was that it allowed me to feel reconnected to the cultural world.  During that short time, we (sometimes just me, sometimes both of us) found time and the money to start going to things again – Glenda Jackson in Mother Courage at the Citizen’s Theatre is a particularly fond memory – and while Glasgow’s arts festival, Mayfest, perhaps didn’t rival the more famous summer one next door, it did cram a lot of intriguing things into a few weeks in spring. 

So in May 1990, I saw Simon Jeffes and his Orchestra at the City Halls in Glasgow.  It was a venue I had previously been unaware of, and was perfectly suited to the PCO.  The audience was as eclectic as the music – a whole class of music students here, a bunch of ageing hippies there, me still in my suit I wore to work – and the evening passed in a blur of joyful music-making.  The live album hadn’t revealed the full effect of a performance – it cut out all the dry wit of Jeffes’ between-numbers chat, for instance, and seeing these remarkable musicians effortlessly switch between instruments as needed – often mid-song – gave the whole thing an extra dimension missing from the recorded version.

I was apparently now the kind of person who went to concerts in a suit and tie, who sat down during the whole thing, and nodded thoughtfully along to pieces I hadn’t heard before, and didn’t even register that there was no-one up front, singing.

The music of the Penguin Café Orchestra came with us to Tring; expanded our collection on the release of new albums (I bought Union Café pretty much on the day of release), and I did finally figure out how to know something more about them.

In the early 1990s, the internet (strictly speaking the World Wide Web part of the internet, but let’s not go there) started to permeate first my work life (I vividly remember my colleague Gianluca and I being the first people at Ferrero to get online, thanks to a cheap modem and one of those “free internet” disks which quickly became drinks coasters in IT departments around the world), and then my home life.  The move from it being a curiosity to something we could use for work, to a way of finding things out at home – things like guitar tablature, and so on – to part of daily life seemed to happen at bewildering pace.  One minute there was this slightly scary thing called Usenet with a bewildering array of bulletin boards, the next I was cheerfully saying “hang on; I’ll just look that up” – probably on proto-search engine Dogpile, my personal favourite.

One of the things I suddenly realised I could look up was the Penguin Café Orchestra.  There was a domain – zopf.com, and upon it a suitably inscrutable early website, which began “I am the proprietor of the Penguin Café.  I am asked to say something to explain”.

Naturally, not much of what followed was an explanation, but it was from the zopf.com website that I first heard the story of how the Orchestra had come into being thanks to a bout of food poisoning, and sparse details of the personnel on the albums.  The air of mystery only cemented my love for the music – it did seem to exist slightly outside the usual constraints of publicity machines and press releases.  It seemed to say: here’s our music; see what you think.

Simon Jeffes died in the autumn of 1997, which I discovered from the obituary pages of my newspaper of choice at the time, The Independent.  The deaths of people in the public eye rarely affect me, but the idea that there would be no new PCO music was profoundly shocking to me; I imagined that I’d always have something new and strangely compelling to look forward to – this was a band unlikely to suffer from the usual travails of ageing rock stars, and would surely continue sporadically releasing slightly off-kilter chamber music well into their old age.

Alas, the PCO discography is complete, and short, although it’s not all bad news, as I’ll explain below.

Concert Program is, therefore, the final statement from a group of musicians who played in the space between classical minimalism and joyful folk music; recorded ‘as live’ but without an audience (or with a staggeringly well-behaved one who didn’t so much as cough throughout), it serves as an introduction, primer, and record of the live performance of a unique musical entity.

It is also over two hours long, and were I to attempt a track-by-track review, I think I’d suck all the joy out of it by trying to describe how the piano enters here, underscoring the cello part, while playing an odd metre which seems to give the track a limp.  So, for once, I won’t be doing that.  Instead, I’m going to try to convince you to go out and buy a copy of this album, unheard, by explaining some of the ways it just sooths and uplifts, probably without trying to.

Let’s start with Air a Danser, the opening track.  Is it actually an air?  Can you dance to it?  Well, as far back as Bach it seems to have been agreed that an air doesn’t actually need words, or someone to sing them, and as for dancing; I defy you not to.  It starts on a nylon string guitar, and seems about to break into flamenco, but when it does decide to let its hair down, it’s a piano and some unison strings which propel it along.  Jaunty, I think, is the word I’m looking for.

The second track is a version of Cage Dead, which the sleeve notes of Union Café tell us was both a reaction to the passing of John Cage (who must bear some responsibility for the way this music sounds) and a technical exercise in trying to write music based on the letters of the title.  The result is the very definition of ‘off-kilter’ and takes a while to process before its delights are revealed.  Once you hear it, though; once you get what’s going on, it sounds like the most glorious melody, even though whistling it remains a challenge, and draws funny looks form passers-by.

Let’s skip ahead to Perpetuum Mobile.  I don’t often delve too deeply into musical theory, being strictly an amateur enthusiast when it comes to time signatures, rhythm, metre and so on, but rarely can a piece of music have been so aptly named as this, as it continually seems to overshoot the end of the bar, giving it an irresistible forward momentum as no phrase ever quite seems to finish, kicking into the next one.  13/8, I think I read somewhere, but trying to count the beats seems futile as I’m always distracted by the parping trombone.

I skipped over Numbers 1-4, which pops up in strange places – I seem to keep hearing it as incidental music in podcasts, for example.

I once tried to write a short story based on how Nothing Really Blue made me feel.  I gave up when it reached 100,000 words and hadn’t gone anywhere.  It’s – the music, I mean, not the unfinished story – simultaneously melancholic and uplifting, with the minimalist backing underpinning a simple, elegiac piano melody which has enough tiny flourishes to make you think of someone breaking out of a long-term depression.  I have likely maligned this beautiful piece of music, but that’s what it said to me.

One of the great things about being a fan of the PCO is that every now and then a piece of their music appears when you were busy doing something else and makes you yelp for joy.  Telephone and Rubber Band did this to me the first (and perhaps only) time I saw Oliver Stone’s Talk Radio.  Famously created from the kind of technological glitch which could only happen with analogue systems, it’s based around a recording of a mix of a ring tone and an engaged signal which happened to Simon Jeffes one day when he happened to have a tape recorder close at hand. Oh, and a rubber band, which he used to emphasise the accidental rhythm of the electronic bleeps. That original, second-generation analogue recording from a telephone handset now has a life of its own, featuring in hit records, advertising campaigns, and – yes – podcast soundtracks.  It’s a handy metaphor for crossed wires and technological issues, but it also just sounds like a telephone having a cheery singalong.

Live, the sounds were played on a looped reel-to-reel tape, and it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that it was the original recording.

Beanfields is what happens when the Penguins let themselves off the leash and see what happens – there was always something about beans in the titles of their songs which provokes everyone to get up and start leaping around.  This far in to the concert, it serves as a joyful release of all the pent-up fun we’ve been having, and a palate-cleanser for the second half, which gets underway with the solemn, thoughtful and clam Vega, a piano piece given life by the string arrangement, and which wouldn’t sound out of place as the second movement of a piano concerto.

Music for a Found Harmonium is another of those PCO pieces which has a life of its own, having been co-opted by generations of Irish musicians as a modern reel, and remixed by The Orb in the 90s as Pandaharmonium.  Both those treatments are as joyful as the original, but perhaps miss the point of the original which was written and played on – well, obviously - a found harmonium.  The full story was on the old website.

Lifeboat really is played at a (Lover’s Rock) rhythm and tempo – well, most of it is; the cello seems to be serenely floating above it all, perhaps on the lifeboat…. It’s still one of my favourites of all of these for its gleeful loping beat and its effortless melody, and marks the point at which the concert begins to wind up to what was presumably an encore following the transition into the calm piano and strings of Steady State, which – I like to think ­ ended the main program, leaving us stamping and shouting for more.

Yes, I know.  It does sometimes sound like background music, but it really isn’t.  Immersed in it, carried along by its spirit, and seeing it performed by a host of musicians having a lot of fun, you, too, would be on your feet at the end.

Like all good rock concerts, the encore is mainly reserved for the fan favourites we haven’t heard yet.  Scherzo and Trio bounces in, allowing the brass to take centre stage, and those of the audience who listen to BBC Radio 4 (and let’s face it, that’s most of them) to suddenly exclaim “Oh, that’s the Round Britain Quiz music!

Which they all knew, anyway, but it still makes me smile every time, and I don’t really hear RBQ any more.

Then I’m catapulted back to that draughty single-bedroom cottage on Culloden Moor.  The first time I heard Glies Farnaby’s Dream, I knew that, whatever else was on this album, this was my kind of music.  It’s a kind of wheezy interpretation of an original piece from the early 17th century by a fairly obscure English composer of music for the virginal, that delicate precursor to the modern piano.

It starts almost in period costume, but almost immediately throws that off with a gleeful burst of cuatro and a yelp of joy. There are trombones and whistles going on all over the place – at times, it seems to be somewhere in the jungles of South America; at others its firmly in the English countryside which Farnaby would have recognised, but at no time does it let up in its relentless pursuit of a good time.  By this point, the audience are up and dancing, and with good reason.

This version of Giles Farnaby wanders off into new, possibly improvised areas midway, and then brings us back to earth by putting its costume back on and ending back where we began in the early 1600s, a little dishevelled and out of breath, but grinning from ear to ear.

There’s a short pause for breath at the beginning of Salty Bean Fumble, but we’re very quickly back to full ‘dancing around like crazy people’ status.  This version of the piece is superior to the studio version, and captures the energy and life I remember from the live versions I saw.  It ends too soon, of course, but that’s mainly because I could happily bounce around listening to it for another 30 or 40 minutes..

Then, like all responsible orchestras do, we’re sent out into the chill night air with a short piece of calming music – Red Shorts performs its function admirably, but I’d have happily just have had more leaping around.

I hadn’t listened to Concert Program for some time before doing this post, but if it’s possible to be word-perfect on an album with no words, that’s what I was.  Listening to it has brought the same feelings of joy and comfort I always had listening to any Penguin Café music.  Almost as much as anything on this list, and more than most, this music has been the soundtrack to my life.

It’s nothing like anything else on here, but it’s like all of it – part of me in ways I can’t really explain.

Any other albums by this artist to consider?

The obligatory ‘all of them’ really does apply here; they’re all terrific, but if I have to pick one Broadcasting From Home may be the best way in.  But Union Café is probably the best of them.  Ah, listen to it all; thank me later.

Compilations to consider?

Putting this one aside, I’d recommend Preludes, Airs and Yodels, as comprehensive a summary as you could wish for.  It also features a couple of those Found Harmonium versions I referred to earlier.

Live albums?

Aside from this one, there’s the aforementioned When In Rome…, which is almost as good as this, and lived in my car for years.

Anything else?

A couple of things.  The spirit of the Café lives on in Simon’s son Arthur, whose Penguin Café no longer has an Orchestra, but very much reflects his father’s way of doing things. There’s also the ballet – Still Life at the Penguin Café is a delight, and may still be available somewhere; I had my old VHS copy digitised some years ago, and while the picture quality isn’t great, the music still shines through.

44. Flyer, Nanci Griffith, 1994

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A few weeks back, I discovered that a compilation album which I fondly remembered didn’t actually lead me to Lou Reed as I had thought.  However, it did lead me here, so now I get to talk about New Roots and its curious mixture of styles.

As I may have mentioned before, New Roots was – in my case, anyway – a double cassette, and I think the general idea was for it to showcase ‘roots’ music from all over the world, although I think the definition of ‘roots’ was a little loose, as the tracklist veered wildly between the obscure and the established stars.  It’s roughly split into four differing sides, although the themes can be tricky to pick out – side one, for example, leads off with the Americana of Ry Cooder and Michelle Shocked but it’s not entirely clear what the path to Enya and The Proclaimers was meant to be.

Side two was, roughly speaking, British folk-influenced music, and side four was firmly in the ‘world music’ camp, mainly African, but culminating in the traditional music of Bulgaria, which was a whole other rabbit hole we went down for a while.

But side three was devoted to a journey from folk into country – from Richard Thompson’s Turning of the Tide to Dwight Yoakam and Lyle Lovett.  Right in the middle of that journey was a live rendition of a song I’d heard before, From a Distance, delivered by the extraordinarily pure voice of Nanci Griffith.

I dug deeper into music by several of the artists on that compilation, but none more than Nanci Griffith, who clearly had something I hadn’t heard before, and threatened for a time there to turn me into a country music fan.

I say ‘me’; we both became Nanci Griffith fans.  This is, of course, partly because we lived in a tiny house and drove around in the same car; whatever one of us was listening to, we were both listening to for a lot of the time.  But it was also because great music is great music, and there was something about Nanci Griffith’s music which stood out for me – stood out from the other 27 songs on New Roots, but also stood out among all the new music swirling around in the early 1990s.

I started by grabbing a copy of the album the track had been lifted from.  I’ll talk a little about One Fair Summer Evening later on, but take it from me there could have been no better introduction to her music.

We were, by this stage, able to spend money on albums again, and we gradually worked our way through the Nanci Griffith back catalogue – I suspect we had different favourites, especially as the albums showed a clear progression from country / folk – in those early albums is the ‘roots’ music the compilation was alluding to - to something altogether more polished and produced to appeal to a wider audience.

What never changed along this journey from sparse folk to over-produced pop was her ability to tell a story.  Griffith's songwriting ability never faltered, although she seemed to find writing harder and harder as the years passed.  Looking back at it now, I’m certain that what attracted me to this music was a combination of a remarkable voice and the stories behind the songs.  She was never shy of a cover version or two, and later devoted entire albums to other people’s songs, but it was her own stories which landed best for me, whether heartfelt tales of love and loss, or simple evocations of time and place.

By the time Flyer came along in 1994, I was as familiar with her back catalogue as I was with any other of my favourite artists.  Several of her albums could have made this list, but this one does because I think it’s the one which hits the sweet spot she had been looking for – all but one of the songs are originals, and she picks from the various styles and sounds she’s used through the years.  I might again quibble that a few too many rough edges have been smoothed off by the production, but these songs shine through regardless.

Opening track The Flyer sets the scene for the whole thing – tinges of country guitar and hints of banjo deep in the mix, but all in service to the story – an autobiographical (or autobiographical-sounding) tale of missed connections which I once based a short story of my own around.  It swings along merrily, with the ‘la-la-la’s around the chorus sounding at once joyful and wistful.

Nobody’s Angel is a straightforward ‘lost love’ song on the surface – Nanci is mourning the fact that her lifestyle doesn’t seem to lend itself to stable relationships, and is quietly and sadly beating herself up about it now.  What raises it above the ordinary on this occasion is the setting – the music is doing all kinds of unusual things in the background – I swear there’s a harmonium in there somewhere, and there’s definitely a dog barking towards the end.  The backing singers fade in and out, not always finishing their lines, and the whole thing has a broken-hearted feel which fits the words perfectly.

Say it isn’t So is a straightforward country song – Nanci’s voice, which generally rings pure and true, is as clear as you’d expect, but joyfully slides around those country-style slides and bends to lend this song an authenticity which you rarely hear in modern mass-produced country music.  I know which I prefer.

The only cover on this album, Southbound Train is a Julie Gold song, and fits the mood and themes of the album, but never quite reaches the heights of Griffith’s best-known Julie Gold cover, From a Distance.  Southbound Train pushes some of those same buttons, and reaches for many of the same tricks, but never quite makes it.  There’s also a single superfluous word in there, which still jars (the word ‘chill’ serves no purpose I can see, it just kind of sits there, throwing off the metre and stubbornly not rhyming with anything).

Fortunately, These Days in an Open Book comes along to get us back on track.  There’s a maturity to both the lyric and the vocals here which gives the delicate melody a real punch.  It also opens with a line I still use to this day, usually without remembering where it’s from (“Shut it down, and call this road a day”) – I haven’t listened to this in a few years, and it was a delight to be reacquainted with the source of one of those things I just find myself saying from time to time.

Nanci Griffith was not often openly political (in her lyrics at least; she would famously wear a giant “All The Way With LBJ” button on her guitar strap), so Time of Inconvenience comes as something of a surprise in among these wistful love songs. The message is clear and almost angry, but these days seems almost naively optimistic. 

Don’t Forget About Me invokes another album I covered a few weeks ago – it wouldn’t sound out of place on Gerry Rafferty’s  North and South album; the songwriting is very similar, and the accompaniment is constructed in a strikingly similar way, which has me searching the sleeve notes for Davy Spillane – he’s not there, but his spirit definitely is.  At this time, Griffith was poking around her Irish connections, and that comes over clearly in the way this sounds.

I remember little about Always Will, and it still strikes me as one of the slighter songs on here, so maybe this is the point at which I can confess to my somewhat inept attempts to recreate these songs on guitar – I always had more enthusiasm than ability on the guitar, but these songs, combined with the early internet and the sudden, surprising access to tablature and sheet music meant I could at least try to play along with all of these.

Haven’t done that in a while, but it’s another reason I love this album.

As is the standout track, Going Back to Georgia, which crackles and fizzes with life and showcases the voice of Counting Crows singer, Adam Duritz, whose world-weary voice perfectly complements the ringing bell of Nanci’s.  It’s a simply gorgeous song, one where the words perfectly fit the rhythm, and the loping beat invokes the weariness of the long-distance traveller.  Nanci Griffith wrote several duets over her career, but this one is far and away my favourite, and never fails to break me into a wide smile whenever I hear it.

Talk to me While I’m Listening is back in sad love song territory; there’s an honesty to it which is genuinely heartbreaking; the song is simple and effective, enhanced by the backing vocals, sometimes doubling, sometimes harmonising, sometimes wandering off on their own path – I don’t have the full sleeve notes to hand, but I’m absolutely certain that the female voice behind Nanci here is the peerless Emmylou Harris, who quietly lifts this song into greatness.

Fragile is the kind of song which finds itself being used over the end credits of a particularly emotional episode of a TV show.  That’s not a criticism, by the way – I could probably write several essays on the way that some television is lifted into the category of art by the music choices it makes (see the episode of thirtysomething which used Joni Mitchell’s River to devastating effect, for example)

Now we go full Irish with On Grafton Street, which starts with a drum track which could have come from Achtung Baby (yes, Larry Mullen on drums) before becoming more of a lament – a song about feeling at once at home and out of place in an unfamiliar city.  It’s also a song of lost love, as so many of these songs are.  I think it just about contains its desire to erupt into full Irish corniness, although at times the pennywhistle and autoharp combine with the fiddle to walk that tightrope a little uncertainly.

Incidentally, if you like this, you should look into the music of Eleanor McEvoy, from around this time, who did whole albums which sounded like this to tremendous effect.

The count-in to Anything You Need But Me still makes me laugh (“one, two, three…nine”) and the song itself is a welcome release from the inward-looking tone of the last few songs.  This one is defiant and self-confident, full of a quality which has seemed incidental so far, simple enjoyment at the act of making music.

Goodnight to a Mother’s Dream is a magnificent piece of poetry, at once sad and uplifting.  It’s – like all the songs on here – a song from a woman’s viewpoint (we overlook this aspect too often, I think – how much rock music is male-oriented).  This is as much about a woman’s relationship with her mother as it is about the same themes which have been stitched through the whole album, and while I might complain that it’s a tad over-produced, I can’t shake off the genuine power of the words, which stand alone as poetry in a way few lyrics ever do.

But you can’t end an album that way – there has to be one more song full of joy and hope, and This Heart delivers.  Simple, fun and memorable, it closes the door on the introspection and points the way forward with curious noises and sparse instrumentation.  All the elements of the album are present, but repackaged and repurposed to send us on our way with a smile in our hearts and a skip in our step.

There are other Nanci Griffith albums which match this for quality, I think, and ones which are perhaps more uplifting and positive, but none which surpass it for songwriting and musicality.  I’d still start the way I started if you’re coming to her new, but this is a terrific album any way you look at it, and – like almost everything she did – deserves to be much better known.

Any other albums by this artist to consider?

Nanci Griffith’s career was a progression, so it’s hard to pick just one or two which are representative.  Having said that, Once in a Very Blue Moon does the country thing very well, and both Storms and Late Night Grande Hotel demonstrate how that sound evolved into this one, even if the latter is somewhat too polished and shiny to be a truly great album.

Compilations to consider?

The UK-released Best Of is a tremendous selection, and includes a track I’m in the audience for (although you can’t hear the audience, so it’s rather a moot point).  The much later From a Distance is more of a career retrospective, but perhaps serves also to highlight that her later writer’s block meant that most of her best work was done prior to 1995.

Live albums?

Oh, yes. As mentioned before, One Fair Summer Evening is a truly exceptional live album.  If you need convincing of the genius of Nanci Griffith, look no further.  Stripped of the layers of instrumentation which the studio versions sometimes suffered from, this is mainly voice, guitar and storytelling.  And no-one ever did it better.

Anything else?

There was a book published to coincide with Other Voices, Too, her second album of covers, and it offers some insight into her background, influences, and process, although I remember thinking that I still didn’t know much more about her having read it.

43. A Night in San Francisco, Van Morrison, 1994

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Yes, all of it...

Suddenly, we’re in 1994 (Spoiler alert, the pace is going to pick up now; I may pause to debate why that is at some point).  There was a lot of music in my life during the three years I’ve just cheerfully skipped over, but I no longer felt at the forefront of what was going on.  Madchester and the rave scene pretty much passed me by; I did like some of what I was hearing, but somewhere around turning 30, my musical interests changed.  I branched out into classical, and would listen to Radio 3 on the way home more often than not.  Being in close proximity to London meant I could go to the occasional Prom (and wonder how all those people with season tickets were able to go night after night); I gradually replaced many of the albums I’d sold on CD, and I started that slow merge into middle age by shaking my head sadly at the seemingly repetitive and unimaginative music I was hearing elsewhere.

The other thing which happened, as I slowly developed some kind of disposable income, was that I began to explore the back catalogues of artists I knew I ought to like, but had never quite got round to.

In my first few years at Ferrero, I worked for a seemingly endless stream of managers.  Some left and moved on to other things, some moved around the company as it grew and figured out how to expand into the kind of company the Ferrero family imagined for the UK.  It was a somewhat bewildering time in my professional life, as there was to a degree an empty canvas for me to figure out what I wanted to do.

Officially, Sales Operations was about providing the tools for the sales team to work with; in reality that meant an unending series of opportunities to develop not only brochures and flyers, point of sale materials and business reports, but also the newly emerging technologies, which I suddenly, and perhaps to my slight surprise, gravitated to.

If we were going to give our salespeople laptops and handheld devices (there was a period where we went through Apple Newtons and Palm Pilots, before laptop technology caught up with what we needed it to do), there was going to have to be someone in the office who knew how it all worked, and who could explain that to people whose primary function was to drive around asking people to buy things.

Yes, of course we had an IT department, and technically, that kind of thing was their responsibility, but I wormed myself in alongside them, and  became the person who understood both sides of the coin.  It took a few more years for me to officially move in to IT, but it was a big part of my job from the first few months at Ferrero, and – somewhat belatedly – I discovered the thing I was actually good at.

I’m old enough now that I enjoy making my younger colleagues groan with my tales of how it was in the old days, but those days instilled in me a sense that anything is possible in a growing company if you have a vision and the patience to explain it to those higher up the food chain.  We figured out a lot of innovative stuff in the 1990s, and had a lot of fun doing it, even if maybe half of it worked as intended.

My job seemed to change every six months or so, but I was always able to hang on to the bits of it which properly interested me, and shake off the things which didn’t; I ran a telesales team for a few months at one point, for example, which really wasn’t my thing at all.  Thankfully, that passed into other, more capable, hands, and I was free to send myself on training courses, and burrow ever deeper into the IT team.

Anyway, managers.  The Sales Operations function was passed around for a while – I had a period working for the IT director, while having no official IT responsibilities - but I eventually ended up back in Sales, where my responsibilities came down to dealing with technology, and developing business reporting.  My Sales Director came to rely on my numbers to the extent that I was regularly hauled into the Monday board meetings to explain what was going on.  In return, I began – mainly out of politeness at first – to take note of his Van Morrison obsession.  I started to explore the back catalogue of an artist I’d had plenty of opportunity to hear before, but who had mainly passed me by.

I wasn’t sure that I was convinced by him for a long time, until one week in the early summer of 1994, when I was sent up to Scotland to test some reporting tools.

I say ‘sent’; I now wonder if I volunteered to go up, see my family, and then spend a few days driving slowly back south, visiting every Co-op, Kwik Save and Shoprite store in the Borders before heading home.

The ostensible reason for my driving tour of the borders was that Ferrero was testing a new chilled product, the altogether unconvincing Kinder Milk Slice, and I was working on ways of measuring and reporting not only the extremely short shelf life, but also the distribution in what was a new area for us – the discount supermarket.

I’ve deleted a whole essay here about how Kwik Save and Shoprite were the precursors of Aldi and Lidl; be grateful I did.

The net result was that I had a couple of days trundling around in the borders – the TV campaign we were testing was exclusively broadcast on Border TV, which was still a thing at that time.  I had a blast, working on primitive spreadsheets, and using little more than my wits and the position of the sun in the sky to figure out where the next shop was.  All I lacked was some music to listen to.

I stopped in Edinburgh – I think at the Virgin megastore in the Gyle shopping centre – and quickly scanned the racks.  I had a CD player in the car by now (how far I had come up in the world!), so I was able to choose whatever I wanted, and spotted a Van Morrison live album.  ‘ah, well’, I remember thinking, ‘maybe it’s time to figure out what all the fuss is about’.

There are better-regarded Van Morrison live albums, and several of the studio albums are genuine masterpieces, but none of his albums resonate with me the way this one does, because whenever I hear it, I’m returned to that first time, driving from Peebles to Galashiels to Kelso to Hawick and on to places I hadn’t properly heard of, finally connecting with all this spectacular music, and thinking “oh, now I get it”.

Over the years, A Night in San Francisco became our ‘driving home late at night’ music – something about it is perfectly suited to purring along country roads in the dark, and this found its culmination many years later when we drove back from San Francisco to our hotel in the Mill Valley, zooming over the Golden Gate Bridge in sight of the place where this was recorded, singing along to ‘Tupelo Honey’.

So, it went on my list without hesitation, and I’ve been looking forward to writing about it since the beginning of this process.  The one small thing I overlooked was that it’s well over two hours of music, and even I will be struggling to find new ways of saying that I particularly like the way the music does this or that by the time we get to the end.

So this is definitely not a track-by-track review; more a kind of edited highlights package from the punchy saxophone intro of Did Ye Get Healed  all the way to the loose and indulgent guest-filled encores.

The album was recorded on the tour to support Too Long in Exile, which is an album of exploration of blues and jazz, and some of the collaborators on that album such as Georgie Fame and John Lee Hooker, came along for the tour, and no doubt influenced some of the loose and free playing, which extends to the seemingly spontaneous (but no doubt carefully planned) excursions from  Morrison songs into the songs of his youth and back again which make this so irresistible.

The first part is fairly straightforward – some Morrison ‘deep cuts’ interspersed with a medley where It’s All in the Game eventually bleeds into Make it Real One More Time.  The highlight of the early songs is undoubtedly the explosive start to Did Ye Get Healed, but it’s all joyful and straightforward.

Then there’s a second medley; the band merge Vanlose Stairway into Trans-Euro Train and introduce guest singers – only later do we find out who else is singing, but the contrast with Van’s familiar smoky growl works really well, with Morrison name-checking Sam Cooke and Ray Charles before fading into a quick excerpt of Charles’ A Fool For You.  This sets the template for pretty much the rest of the album, as we either get Brian Kennedy (so that’s who it was) singing a Van Morrison song, or the band stomping their way through a headspinning run of classics – some appear only as snatches of melody; others – like Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Again) - given the full treatment.

Van brings his daughter Shana on for a duet with Kennedy, during which he apparently wanders offstage to let his band get on with it (they seem to do just fine without him), and we head into the more mellow part of the first disc as each guest and member of the band is introduced and given a chance to shine.

 The medleys keep coming – the second half of the first disc is as much a quick potted history of the blues as it is a Van Morrison album, and everyone is clearly having a blast keeping up with whichever blues standard Van feels like playing next.

There’s even a – possibly unplanned – burst of Green Onions in there somewhere, while Jimmy Witherspoon and Junior Wells help out and make the whole thing sound like an end of the tour party, before we are reminded who we’ve come to see by a side-ending double of Tupelo Honey and Moondance – the latter interpolated with My Funny Valentine, because why not?

Over an hour in, this would have been plenty for most live albums, but we’re only halfway through.

By this time, I’m almost certainly in Duns or Coldstream, peering at the shopfronts to see if I can spot the Co-op, but caring little if I’m successful, as I’m enjoying this way too much.

The second disc starts with Georgie Fame Jumpin’ With Symphony Sid while Van takes another break, before returning for another of those deep cuts – It Fills You Up – which were giving me so many albums to uncover.  From here, it’s medleys all the way, as more and more guests arrive to perform blues and soul standards with the occasional Van Morrison song here and there.  The man himself hands over singing duties to his guests from time to time, and evidently goes off to watch from the wings every now and then.  It all thunders along magnificently, and there’s a genuine sense of fun as even the famously hard-to-please Van Morrison seems to be enjoying his band.  The end comes with about 45 minutes of music still to go, as everyone tries to outdo each other through an extended, never-ending encore, but the real high point is still to come.

There’s a version of So Quiet in Here which is so laid-back as to be positively horizontal, which slides imperceptibly into Sam Cooke’s That’s Where it’s At, and everyone takes a deep breath.

Then without warning, the band launch into an irresistibly high-energy, uptempo version of In The Garden, and I remember pulling over so I could listen to it properly; it turns a meditative and spiritual song into a proper barn-burner, careering through snippets of Real Real Gone, You Send Me,  and even Allegheny before hurtling into the conclusive ‘No Guru, No Method, No Teacher’ line delivered as a rousing singalong chant.

Every time I listen to this, possibly my favourite version of my favourite Van Morrison song, I’m transported back to that extraordinary first time – hearing a song I was aware of as something contemplative and calm reinvented as a rabble-rousing call to arms.  There is no way not to sing along with the ending – if I hadn’t quite been sold on Van up to that point, there was no turning back after this.

Oh, now I get it.

To be honest, I could live without the straightforward rendition of Have I Told You Lately? which follows; it seems to drain a lot of the energy which then has to be restored during actual set-closer Gloria which gets exactly the treatment you’d expect at the end of such a free-form and energetic performance; everyone – even saxophonist Candy Dulfer – encouraged to step up and add something to a song which fits right in with all those older blues numbers.

It's a huge beast of a thing, this album, and there are easier ways to get to know Van Morrison, but surely none which are as much straightforward fun.

And, yes, I’m just ignoring the more recent fuss about Van’s political opinions.  Sometimes, you just have to set those things aside and listen to the music.

Any other albums by this artist to consider?

Ah, where to start?  It’s fair to say that not every Morrison works equally well, and the most famous ones like Veedon Fleece  or St. Dominic’s Preview; Astral Weeks or Moondance are famous for a reason.  But I’ll also suggest later albums like Inarticulate Speech of the Heart and No Guru, No Method, No Teacher.  And I retain a soft spot for the pair of Avalon Sunset and Days Like This.  I’ll admit to not having heard much of the more recent albums, but those should get you going.

Compilations to consider?

The first two Best Of albums cover a lot of ground, and will give the casual listener pointers to where they should go next.

Live albums?

Astonishingly, this isn’t widely regarded as the best of them, although I disagree.  Too Late to Stop Now and Live at the Grand Opera House, Belfast are also excellent.  Neither of them has the same effect on me as this, though.

Anything else?

There’s no definitive biography, although there ought to be.  You should watch Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast, though – it’s shot through with Van Morrison music which is perfectly pitched, if not always chronologically accurate.

42. Achtung Baby, U2, 1991

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I look on this album as a turning point, both in the way I listened to music, and in everything else in my life.  We had owned a CD player for a couple of years by the time I bought this, but the various changes and challenges in life meant that the collection was a little thin.  By the time I picked this up everything had changed and – possibly for the first time in my life – I was able to hear music the way it had been intended to be heard.

The part of my life where I drove madly around Scotland pretending to be any good at selling things came to an end in the summer of 1990, when I was recruited into an office job – Sales Operations, we called it – and had to figure out how to afford life in the south of England.

There was a certain amount of culture shock being so close to London and having to figure out the slightly different way many things seemed to work at the time; in the first few days, we encountered a giant grocery store which didn’t accept credit cards (yes, really), and discovered that while you could buy alcohol on a Sunday, pretty much everything else was closed.

We quickly figured out that on one salary, we wouldn’t be living particularly close to where I worked, and after a couple of weeks in a hotel and a few months in a poky flat overlooking Chorleywood underground station, we found a house we felt sure we could just about afford.

Our little house in Tring was about half the size of the flat in Perth, and cost almost exactly twice as much.  It wasn’t exactly spacious, but we made it work, and in the end spent the first half of the 1990s making it work.  I figured out just what it was I did want to do with my career, Zoë slowly recovered and got herself fit enough to work, and I started buying music on CD.

I mean, I did other things, too, and I still belonged to a library with a record collection which I could tape things from, but more often than not, I would find myself buying CDs and marvelling at the clarity and crispness of the sound.

At least, that’s what I told myself.  How much of the difference was down to the digital format, and how much was down to the fact that I wasn’t listening to it either on a cheap plastic record player, or in a noisy vehicle via a second-generation tape isn’t entirely clear.  I certainly thought I was hearing music as it was supposed to be heard, but in my dotage, I have come to doubt whether CDs were always as wonderful as we thought they were, just as I often prefer nowadays to listen to older records on vinyl than in digital format.

The truth is, of course, that nothing can exactly replicate the sound of being there, so how you hear something comes down to personal preference.  I suspect that electronic and digitally-created music works better in a digital format, while acoustic instruments respond much better to the warmth of the analogue sound, but what do I know?

In one other respect, CDs were essential to our situation in the early 1990s, in that they took up way less space.  My carefully curated record collection, which had begun in my tiny bedroom in Aberdeen 20 years before, was now stuffed into boxes in the attic (from where I constantly worried it would emerge through the ceiling one night), as there was literally nowhere to put it in our little ‘starter home’.

I’m not entirely convinced I had any means of playing them either – I know the first CD-capable device we owned in Perth had a record deck, but memory suggests it was replaced by something much smaller in our new house; something which played CDs and tapes, but had no room for the giant slabs of vinyl.

One day, just before we would have had to move it again, the collection was sold.  I like to think I mourned the loss of my precious albums (and I definitely do now), but I suspect at the time, I was all about embracing the future and listening to all my music on a much more portable format.

Talking of embracing the future, here was a U2 album which didn’t really sound like anything they had done before.  U2 had, until this point, always been more Zoë’s thing than mine – I mean, I liked a lot of their music, but the U2 albums in our collection were hers, not mine.  I remember being encouraged by someone while still at university to come and see this new Irish band people were raving about, but still being in my ‘noisy metal’ phase, and not bothering.  Maybe I’d have seen them differently if I had gone along, but they were always just on the periphery of my interests.

I did buy Rattle and Hum, but I know I was buying it for us, not just me.  It weas one of the first CDs we owned, and – I’m sure I’m not imagining this – those early CDs were thicker than the ones which came later.  I remember the disc being quite substantial, and I remember poring over the whole package trying to figure out what was going on with it.  I listened to it again a couple of years ago, and it’s quite a curiosity really; neither one thing nor the other, a sort of live album-cum-compilation-cum-half a new album, and I suspect that in the end all it did for the band was clarify that this wasn’t the direction they wanted to be going in.

I heard The Fly on the radio.  I have a clear memory of being in a hotel room and hearing it for the first time, but I have no idea why my memory thinks I was in a hotel in Dundee, since I definitely can’t figure out why on earth I would have been there – I certainly did occasionally come up to Scotland for sales meetings at this time, but they were always in Edinburgh, and I’d fly up and back in the same day – I’ve been thinking about this all week, and can come to no other conclusion than that I’ve completely misremembered the whole thing.

Which kind of nudges this whole project a little closer to ‘fiction’, I think.

However it actually happened, I heard The Fly, and recognised that this was really interesting.  There’s no doubt that mainstream music was changing and perhaps fragmenting a little around this time; I was certainly exploring lost of unfamiliar areas and reaching back into classical music, listening to albums I’d overlooked – I went through a Frank Sinatra phase for a time there – and as a result, was buying much less new music, a trend which definitely explains how we’re not yet halfway through my life so far, but have already sailed past the two-thirds point in the list.

One other significant change had happened in my life, of course – instead of listening to the radio on my own in the car all day, I now worked in an office with colleagues – many of them a similar age to me – and we talked about music in a way I hadn’t done since leaving university.

We recommended things to each other, and while we didn’t agree on much, I found a lot of things I wouldn’t otherwise have done just by being in an environment like that again.  When the new U2 album came out, though, several of us bought it, and debated it keenly for weeks, unsure if it was iconic or just another passing phase.  I decided I liked this smart, cynical way of looking at the world, and certainly preferred it to the earnestness of the earlier albums.  I haven’t listened to it all the way through for many years, though, so I don’t know how that view will hold up.

It looked different to anything they’d done before, and starts with noises off and distortion, announcing itself as not what you were expecting.  Zoo Station does flirt with the familiar U2 guitar tone briefly, but the heavily treated vocal throws us off the scent; it’s a driving, danceable beat, but a cryptic and strange lyric which seems to be looking at the unfamiliar European landscape which had suddenly emerged and scratching its head.

Even Better Than the Real Thing is on much more familiar ground; the open landscape of older U2 songs is present, as is Bono’s unique vocal tone. But there’s a hustle to it which is less U2, and the doubled vocal is strange,  lending it a kind of eeriness which I’m not sure was the original intention, but which is striking to me listening to it closely now.

I would have sworn One was the final track on the album for some reason – not sure why, as it fits perfectly here, and I was anticipating it as the previous track faded out.  Memory, eh?

Anyway, it’s the song I remember most strongly from the album (although it turns out I remember it all clearly so far); it’s the song I’d identify as carrying the spirit of what this whole project was about – reinventing the U2 sound without obscuring the fact that there are some impressive songwriters in the band.  The lyric resonates and is of its time, the energy of the recording is clear, and it highlights something for me I hadn’t really thought about so far – this album sounds like it’s from the 1990s; there has been a shift away from the sometimes sterile eighties sound.  In spite of its digital construction, the recording sounds warm, which I’m not sure I remembered.

Until the End of the World (you should watch the film, incidentally) is back in the mix of old and new – the familiar U2 tropes, including the religious imagery in the lyric, battle with the new feel and sound which envelop them without ever completely obscuring them.  It skips along; a hummable song about betrayal.

From the first time I heard this album, Who’s Gonne Ride Your Wild Horses stood out for me, I think because of the soundscape which takes us all the way to the chorus before resolving into something recognisable – until that point, it’s a swirling echo of a thing, but gains focus as the bass asserts itself and the vocals take centre stage.  I think I hear this in its layers now – some things which are buried in the mix occasionally pop out into focus, and make me think I’m hearing them for the first time.  I don’t exactly know what appealed to me so much about it back then, but I thoroughly enjoyed listening to it closely this time – part of the appeal of music to me is the ability to hear it differently each time, and this delivers on that score.

So Cruel is stripped back as befits its pained lyric; it shuffles along without really ever finding its stride and leaves you slightly unsettled as you listen to it wrestle with its subject matter without resolving anything; the spirit of betrayal and loss weighs the song down but never brings it to its knees – it’s strangely defiant and uplifting in spite of itself.

The Fly, as already noted, sounds like nothing which had gone before it; I’m not sure I ever completely bought in to the whole alter ego thing Bono had going on, but it definitely fits this song, whatever it turns out to have been about.  All the pieces which go into making up a U2 song are here, but are jumbled and distorted or hidden in the mix, and while it served its purpose at the time of alerting us to how different this was all going to sound, I think it is somewhat overshadowed in the full context of the album.  It’s a bit lightweight and throwaway now, but maybe that was the point all along.

I love the fluid and relaxed feel to Mysterious Ways, the bass tone in particular leaps out and grabs the attention while the drumming propels what might otherwise be an ordinary melody into interesting and attention-grabbing places.  It’s a lot of fun, this track, even after all this time.

Tryin’ to Throw Your Arms Around the World starts with a beat which is very early nineties; this kind of thing was just beginning to come to prominence, and it’s intriguing to hear it here, under a song which is pretty much all vocal, with only the faintest hint of the old U2 sound pushed back in the mix.  The bass again carries a lot of the structure as Bono revisits some of the aphorisms which presumably didn’t fit into the already packed lyric of The Fly.  I think they work better here, to be honest – it’s a better and more open song, and it’s curious to me that one of the highlights of the album from a songwriting point of view is somehow less regarded than the ones around it.

For example, Ultra Violet has three times as many listens on Spotify, but I’m struggling to find anything to say about it beyond it being a memorable melody.  It’s otherwise much more like an old U2 song, with the insistent guitar line pulsing away without ever resolving to anything, until it crashes out into a slightly more raucous final third.

On the other hand, I still love Acrobat, partly for the way it co-opts that familiar U2 rumble and turns it into something altogether newer-sounding, and partly for the lyric which expresses much of the same anger and frustration as Lou Reed was grumbling a few weeks back.  Unlike Uncle Lou, though, Acrobat manages to be hopeful and looks to the future with something like optimism.  Alongside the optimism is a soundscape which feels less like a traditional U2 open sweep, and more like an angry anthem.

Again, memory fails me, as I was sure that was the final track, but of course it isn’t, because we leave with the church organ and genuine despair of Love is Blindness.  It may still be up for debate just exactly what the ‘love’ of the title is referring to, but I think the tortured guitar solo is pretty clear that whatever it is, it’s toxic and unwelcome.  It’s not exactly an uplifting or anthemic way to round out a classic album, but I think it suits the strange, uncertain mood of this album perfectly.

I’m not sure if it’s my favourite U2 album, or even if I have one – for a while there, they were an important part of what I was listening to, but I never did quite latch on to them the way I did other bands.  I’ve been looking forward to reviewing this all week, but I’m not sure I’ll be going back to it the way I have with several others in the list.

I can’t quite put my finger on it, but while it’s as familiar to me as any of these, I feel like maybe it’s an example of an album you had to be there for – it’s undoubtedly a classic album, but perhaps of its time.  Maybe it’s that unsettled mood of the whole thing, or maybe it’s me.  Either way, I’m glad I left it on the list, but I’m already looking forward to the next one…

Any other albums by this artist to consider?

Well, naturally, I’m expected to say The Unforgettable Fire and The Joshua Tree, and they are both splendid.  Myself, I think I always enjoyed Zooropa more than I was supposed to - it’s kind of an album of songs rushed into being without the usual agonising and careful sculpting, and I remember loving it at the time.  Maybe that’s the one I’ll go back to…

Compilations to consider?

There are plenty, of course – the two Best Ofs cover the 1980s and then everything else; perhaps its time for a more comprehensive career summary.

Live albums?

Under a Blood Red Sky was the first time I properly heard U2, and I’m still fond of its short, sharp and to the point nature.  The aforementioned Rattle and Hum contains some live tracks, but they’ve never done another one, in spite of the globe-straddling nature of their live shows.

Anything else?

If you get the chance to see the Glastonbury performance in the pouring rain from 2011, that’s worth a look.  And, you know what?  I’m certain there are all manner of books about them, but I’ve never felt inclined to pick one up.  Maybe I should. Oh, and if you do check out Until the End of the World (the Wim Wenders movie, that is), try to find the 280-minute version; it’s more like a miniseries than a movie, but it’s mesmerising and has one of my favourite soundtracks.

41. Flood, They Might Be Giants, 1990

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All told, I spent around nine months working for Ferrero in Scotland.  In the summer of 1990, I applied for, and got a job working in the head office in Rickmansworth, which changed everything and finally put me, at nearly 28, on the path to something resembling a career, but for those nine months, I slogged around Scotland doing a strange and nebulous job which required a lot of sitting in the car listening to the radio.

As the eighties shaded into the nineties, FM radio was gradually asserting itself in parts of the world – mainly rural Scotland – where it hadn’t been available before.  My daily radio diet was still mainly BBC Radio 1, especially in the first part of the day, and I was still hearing some strange and wonderful things that way, but I was also just starting to wonder if I was growing out of the relentless diet of pop music it served up.

Chart music in the 1980s was – in the UK at least – eclectic and strange.  Among the steady stream of radio chatter, you could hear a surprising number of experiments and off-the-wall oddities, almost all presented as serious music, many of which, from Laurie Anderson’s sublime artwork O Superman to the Dadaist ravings of Trio’s Da Da Da, were also purchased in their millions and took up residence in the higher reaches of the charts.  If there was a formula for making a successful pop record (and it turned out there probably was), no-one had yet discovered or perfected it.

Noisy rock sat alongside twee novelty, electronic experimentalism, heartfelt folk, the odd country song, disco (which was becoming Dance with a capital D) and straight up comedy records for almost the entire decade, and it was often hard to tell them apart.  Entire new genres arose and were instantly parodied; out-there experimentalists became chart staples and passing fads inspired by old movies or TV shows would suddenly and bafflingly appear for a few weeks, only to disappear, never to be heard from again.

All the while, those of us who spent our days driving around would listen to it being served up by an array of DJs who were household names entirely because of their position in the Radio 1 lineup, and hum or sing along to a bewildering array of music.  I don’t remember often (if ever) turning the radio off or changing the station because of a song I didn’t like being played – there would be another one along in a minute to take its place, and it would likely sound completely different.

There were gaps in the radio coverage, though, and it was filling those gaps which first led me down the TMBG rabbit hole, and while it was Radio 1 which led me there, the Radio 1 of 1990 was different from the one I’d been listening to for the past twenty years or so, and while I didn’t articulate it – or likely even think about it much – at the time, I think the variety was dropping out; the music was becoming more formulaic, and I know I was listening to Radio 4 on the way back to Perth at the end of the day more often than not – unthinkably, I seemed to be growing out of Radio 1.

My job for those nine months was a strange one.  Not only was I not expected to sell things, I was actually expressly expected not to sell things – Ferrero still employed a broker to do the selling, and while our presence in the wholesalers and cash and carry outlets was very obviously the company putting its own salesforce in place before taking the business away from the broker, we all played along as I solemnly explained how excitring the new TV campaign was going to be, and asked politely for the buyer to talk to his rep when they next came in.  Meanwhile, I was going to tidy the shelves, rotate the stock, and get back in my Ford Escort to drive to the next cash and carry.

At least I was exploring a new part of Scotland.  Until late 1989, I had been very firmly an East Scotland boy – Aberdeen, Inverness, Edinburgh and Perth were my home territory, and I only ventured to the west to go to football matches.  All that changed when I was handed my new territory – all of western Scotland.

In reality, of course, that mostly entailed driving to Glasgow, with the odd foray into Ayrshire or South Lanarkshire, and I came to know and appreciate Glasgow (not the way I loved Edinburgh, of course) much more, although the traffic often left something to be desired.

Each week, however, I had one of those wild excursions only someone sitting in an office in the south of England could dream up.  Once every two weeks, I was tasked with a drive up to Fort William and Oban, and on the opposite fortnight, down to Stranraer and Dumfries.  If you’re not familiar with the geography of that, have a look at the map.  Both trips involved early starts, later than normal finishes, virtually no business transacted (Dumfries being the only town of any real population in the whole itinerary), and an awful lot of driving through some of Scotland’s most spectacular scenery.

It was the driving through the scenery bit which led to this album; there was no FM radio coverage for most of those two drives, and I loaded my car up with tapes of favourites old and new for the Tuesday excursions.

Occasionally the music ran out.  I don’t mean that I forgot the tapes, more that I had heard them all many times and craved something new.  You may well imagine that stopping en route to buy a new tape might have been tricky, and you’d be right.  There wasn’t time to stop on the way out; early starts and time pressures generally meant I didn’t even stop for coffee at the start of the day.  By the time I was in Oban or Fort William or Stranraer (Dumfries always came last for reasons lost to the mists of time), there wasn’t a wide variety of music shops to scour while I picked up some lunch.

So it was that one Tuesday lunchtime in early 1990 I found myself poking at the thin selection of cassette tapes available in Woolworths in Stranraer.  I had already completed my duly appointed visit to the town’s only wholesaler, and before heading off down the A75 to Dumfries, I usually picked up a sandwich in one of the bakeries.

I had never before considered the Woolworths’ tape section, but I must have been desperate that day.  There, among the cut price compilations and Daniel O’Donnell tapes, I spotted an album I had already earmarked to borrow when it appeared in the Perth library collection.  I knew and loved Birdhouse in your Soul from its repeated Radio 1 plays in the previous autumn, and my attitude to the album was probably “well, why not?”

Listening to new music for the first time in the car while hammering along a major trunk road in between convoys of heavy goods vehicles off the ferry is, perhaps, not the perfect listening environment, but enough of it must have stuck with me, because I remain an ardent TMBG fan to this day.  They were, and are, quite different to anything else I listened to, but their mastery of dozens of musical styles and the evident fun they have with the language are right up my street.

Flood is a startlingly different album to pretty much anything I’ve talked about so far.  It’s hard to solemnly opine about something which is scampering around like a puppy chasing its tail, and in any case, there are nineteen tracks to write about here; even I might struggle to come up with something weighty and considered to say about all of them.  So I’m going to dive back in to Flood and note down my reactions as I go, but I’m not going to constrain myself to a track-by-track analysis.

Unless I do, of course – who knows?

It starts, naturally, with an overture – its own theme, which causes a grin before breaking into Birdhouse, which – I’m only noticing this now – fades up from the volume level of the theme before fully asserting itself as the strangely compelling pop song it is, albeit one sung from the perspective of a nightlight with assorted brass instruments parping their way through the middle eight.

If you wanted to know how this was all going to sound, this is as good an intro as you’re going to get, from the unconventional instrumentation to the way the words only just fit the melody, to the interplay of the two similar but distinct slightly nasal voices.

The interplay continues into the upbeat bluegrass of Lucky Ball and Chain – all banjos and – I don’t know, pool balls?  It’s a mournful lyric delivered as a jolly romp, but you can’t imagine it played straight – how would you fit in the accordion and tuba?

Istanbul (Not Constantinople) was a pre-existing nonsense song which the two Johns made their own, and is probably the best known song on here, thanks to its life as a single, and occasional use in advertising and television.  As with so much of their work, the song is played with an absolutely straight face, if you can do such a thing with tongue firmly planted in cheek.

Dead is about reincarnation as a bag of expired groceries.  I’m not sure there’s anything more you can say about that.

Whereas Your Racist Friend is worthy of an entire essay.  How such a politically sharp point came to be made on an album like this is anyone’s guess, but it truly stands out in the sea of silliness – even the instrumental break feels serious and pointed.  It’s a simple way to make an important point – “Can’t shake the Devil’s hand / and say you’re only kidding”.

I’m not sure I ever expected to be singing along to an oompah song about an assortment of cartoonishly implausible superheroes, but here we are, bouncing along happily to Particle Man.

What I’m noticing now is how these short, sharp songs elbow each other out of the way as they vie for your attention.  No sooner have your ears attuned themselves to the weird soundscape of Particle Man than you’re rocking out to Twisting, and as you settle in to the melody, you’re immediately tipped out of the cart into the surrealist landscape of We Want A Rock which makes perfect sense until you actually go back and read the words.

It doesn’t matter why a carpenter is hammering on his piglet, or why he wants a prosthetic forehead; it’s so much fun that you don’t care.

Until you go back and think about that word surrealist, and look at it through that lens.

The tape flips over before I’ve had a moment to process that, however.  Now Someone Keeps Moving My Chair, and while I’m thinking about the clean production  and how there now appear to be three syllables in the word ‘my’ or the extraordinary sentence structure of the bit where we appear to be writing something on the back of someone’s head with green magic marker, the album’s already moved on to the next agenda item.

Hearing Aid starts all muted trumpet and weirdly distorted tape recordings.  It’s the longest track on the album, but I don’t know if that lends it added significance; it’s probably more that it’s a slower tempo, and therefore takes longer to get through the lyric.  Having said that, I’d forgotten how intriguing the seemingly random sampled noises at the end are.

Minimum Wage is the exact opposite.  The title is the entire lyric, and seems to exist simply to show off the sampled whip sound.

I had entirely forgotten how Letterbox works as a perfect jewel of a song; intricately constructed and executed – there is no way that many words should fit into the melody, but it never feels forced or hurried.  One of the less well-known songs, it is worth exploring further, if only to figure out what all those words are actually saying.

Whistling in the Dark is one of many songs on this album which still pop into my head whenever the title appears in my life – I can’t hear someone say it, or read it without immediately intoning “I’m having a wonderful time, but I’d rather be…”  It’s a curiously joyful tune given the pitch of the vocals and the subject matter, but it collapses into the sound of an uncoordinated brass band marching drunkenly into the sunset, and how can you not love that?

I feel I could say this about almost all of these songs, but I have absolutely no idea what Hot Cha! Is about, and I don’t care.  I love the unexpected solo piano break in the middle, and the way it keeps threatening to break into jazz.

Women and Men is basically a sea shanty about  - I don’t know, overpopulation, maybe?

One of my favourite facts about They Might Be Giants is that for a time, they would act as their own support band under the name ‘Sapphire Bullets’.  Sapphire Bullets of Pure Love is one of many songs on here I’d like to hear expanded out beyond the minute and a half it gets, but that would spoil the rhythm of the whole thing, wouldn’t it?

The second theme song of the album is dedicated to the band rather than the album.  I’ve never known why anyone would ‘fry up a stalk of wheat’, but it really doesn’t matter; I’m just hanging on tighter to avoid being thrown to the wolves.

How do you finish an album like this?  With a Road Movie to Berlin of course.  No sign of Joni Mitchell’s ‘Dorothy Lamour sarong’ here; this Road Movie is back in the folk / country idiom, until it isn’t as the scary synthesised sounds puncture the melancholy.  Berlin was much on everyone’s mind at the time, of course, but it seems incidental to the song – with the obvious exception of Your Racist Friend, this isn’t a political album.

Nor is it a silly one, despite what its popular reputation might suggest.  Sure, it doesn’t sing about the things everyone else sings about, and it’s full of the off-kilter and eclectic; full of wordplay and strange allusions, but it’s not playing at being a serious album, it really is one.  It’s stood the test of time, as has the band, and while more than 30 years on, I still have no idea what it’s on about half the time, I still find it endlessly engaging and entertaining.

And how many albums can you still say that about?

Any other albums by this artist to consider?

My second favourite is still Apollo 18, but there are many others, including some you should introduce your children to, if you have any.

Compilations to consider?

I am horrified to realise that my favourite TMBG compilation Dial-A-Song is 20 years old.  Having got over that, I still recommend it thoroughly, and will now go and seek out some newer ones.

Live albums?

There are a few, but for some reason, I don’t know them beyond the tracks which appear on Dial-A-Song.  Another gap I need to fill.

Anything else?

Something very specific.  Flood is the subject of one of the books in the 33 1/3 series – I’m not entirely convinced that this music is enhanced by close analysis, as may be seen above, but it presents a thought-provoking thesis, and is well worth a read.