Tag Archives: 60at60

4. Close to the Edge, Yes, 1972

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Note: Spotify only has the 'Deluxe Edition' - for the correct 1972 experience, stop after track 3

The way I remember it, there were three main Progressive Rock (capitals intended; indeed, obligatory) bands in the first year or so of secondary school, and you were supposed to pick one.  My band were, naturally, ELP, which meant that Genesis and Yes got less attention from me than they should have done.  I had a friend who was as much a Genesis obsessive as I was ELP, so I heard more of them, but Yes remained something of a mystery in those impressionable days – to my mind, a band for the slightly older boys I met in the Scouts, or older brothers (I didn’t have one of those, but some of us did).

The Scout hut was definitely where I first heard Yes – Tales From Topographic Oceans was reverently passed round one evening when it must have been new.  I’m not certain that there was a record player in the Scout hut, but I know that Tales coloured my impression of Yes, and I probably thought they were a bit too advanced for one of my tender years, so I must have heard some of it at some point.

I came to Close to the Edge, then, a little later than I might have done.  I know I heard it – possibly borrowed it from the library (and I’m coming back to that) during that cacophonous late seventies period when I was listening to everything.  Almost certainly the music of Yes was dreadfully out of fashion by the time I heard it, and I probably buried the cassette of this along with all the other uncool albums under my bed if ever there was a chance that someone would be inspecting my record collection, but it got in my head anyway, so that when I came back to it in the age of CDs and digital clarity, I was comfortably familiar with it and able to conjure up the feel of 1972, with wild experimentation the order of the day, mixed with the dying embers of psychedelia and hippy philosophising.

I think what I loved in those pre-punk years (and still clung to even as my tastes changed with the tides of fashion) was cleverness; music to make you stop and go back to see if you can figure out what was going on.  Don’t get me wrong; I like a good tune as much as the next person, but I liked even more being made to work for the good tune; those music lessons had at least tried to teach me about themes and variations; development and recapitulation, and I liked to hear that in the albums I was listening to as well.

So when I did eventually settle down to listen properly to Close to the Edge, I was ready to hear all the things I never quite got round to hearing when Yes were number three on the pecking order.

Probably the most obvious thing to say about Close to the Edge is that there are only three tracks on the album, and that is just about the most 1972 thing you can think of.  In fact, before I can even start to talk about the music, I find myself pausing to think about how these are ‘tracks’, not ‘songs’.  When did that start?  Every word I write about anything even vaguely Prog struggles against the charge of pretentiousness, but standing back to look at it, calling pieces of music ‘tracks’ definitely has the air of some private members club to which the rest of the world could only be admitted if they knew the shibboleths.

Again; 1972.

So, once you get past the strangely uninformative sleeve, and plop the record with its comfortingly familiar ‘Atlantic’ tricolour label on the turntable, what does it actually sound like?

Like nothing you’ve ever heard before, naturally.  It opens with gently trickling water, but you’ve barely had time to adjust to the pastoral nature of the thing before all five band members enter, playing seemingly unrelated things in different metres and at different tempos.  On first hearing, it’s a mess, and even on what may be my hundredth or thousandth listen as I write this, I find it hard to imagine a more off-putting way to welcome the world to your latest masterpiece.  As soon as it settles down and some order and melody assert themselves, Jon Anderson is singing something about rearranging your liver…

At which point, the more sensible among you probably bail out.  It’s a shame, because you’re missing some remarkable music, but I do get it.  There’s nothing wrong with the three-minute pop song, and there are plenty of times I’m happy to bounce around in my chair to albums with only verse-chorus-verse to offer, but more often than not, I need music to overpower me and take me places I’d never think to go otherwise.

The tile track is eighteen minutes long, and if you’re still on board, returns you triumphantly to nature, having given you much to think about in the meantime.  Of course the lyrics are impenetrable, it was – and I’ll never tire of saying this – 1972.

Oh, and delightfully, my second-hand vinyl copy has a scratch in the very last groove, so it never quite ends….

Side two is a little more approachable.  Once again, it begins with studio chatter (there was some on Trilogy too, leading me to wonder if every album recorded in the wake of Revolver had to have some somewhere), but this time eases you in with gentle acoustic guitar and an actual hummable tune.  Indeed, bits of And You And I were extracted and sold as a single in some parts of the world.  Like pretty much every Yes song of the time, it works its way through several themes and builds to a redemptive climax.  The difference between this and any number of other Yes songs is that the whole band were working together on the same journey.  It’s worth remarking on, because the endless revolving door of Yes membership rarely reached such a point of literal and figurative harmony in the fifty or more years that it’s been a going concern.  Or two going concerns, as has been the case more than once.

The album is rounded off with Siberian Khatru, more hippy philosophy, but this time with a fluid, almost funky bass line.  The whole album is shot through with a kind of spiritual ‘back to nature’ worldview which was becoming a bit old hat by the time it came out, but which feels more or less timeless now – part of a tradition of English musicians exploring the outer edges of Eastern philosophy – something else which ties it back to Revolver.

I doubt I’m going to convince anyone not already sold on the idea to try this, but I hope I can convince you that this music speaks to me on a level that the Slade singles I was listening to when this came out didn’t.

But I loved the Slade singles, too.

Any other albums by this artist to consider?

Well, at last count there were 21 official Yes studio albums (and that ‘official’ is important, believe me), and one scheduled for release shortly after this is posted which will feature exactly no original members of the band.  It’s fair to say that not all of the twenty others is worth your time.  If you like this, you should probably try Fragile and The Yes Album, if you want to follow my journey with Yes, the next stop (nodding to Topographic Oceans on the way past) is Going for the One, with its hit singles, and then you should probably listen to 90125 with that so familiar eighties sound.

Everything else is a matter of personal taste.  There are Yes albums I’ve never heard, and one or two (Union comes to mind) I wish I hadn’t.

Compilations to consider?

Inevitably, there are almost as many compilations as there are albums.  Contemplating them just now, I settled on Yesstory as perhaps the most representative, but as with most Prog bands, cutting their music into small chunks doesn’t really work; you have to listen to albums as a whole.

Live albums?

Yessongs is all you’ll ever need – of course it’s a triple album; of course it only covers a short period of their career (it came out in 1973) but it has never faded in its majesty and grandeur.  These guys, it need hardly be said, could play…

Anything else? One day, some brave soul will take on the job of writing the definitive history of Yes.  It’ll likely run to several large volumes, and will only be read by obsessives like me.  In the meantime, Chris Welch’s biography, called – inevitably – Close to the Edge; the Story of Yes has its critics, but covers the main points and has been revised at least once to keep up with the band which apparently will go on forever.

3. Trilogy, Emerson, Lake and Palmer – 1972

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The first album on this list which I owned when it was still relatively recent, and the first on this list which I loved unreservedly from the moment I first heard it.  I have had something of an on-off relationship with it over the years, but it has never lost its power over me, even in the years when I though it drastically uncool, because I put more store in what others thought than I did in my own ears.  I think I’m over that now; let’s find out.

I know that I first heard ELP in a first-year music lesson in late 1974 or early 1975.  Way back in the age of enlightenment, spotty first-years had weekly lessons which alternated between trying to get us to figure out if we could get a tune out of anything at all and trying to get us to appreciate music in all of its forms.  Well, not all of them; music lessons were supposed to cover everything up until the likes of Stravinsky started frightening the horses.  We’d be exposed to some basic theory, told that our teachers liked modern music as well, honest (and have to sit through some traditional folk or modern classical featuring car horns and anvils, or something, to prove it).  Sadly, unlike in other parts of the school, the teaching was more well-meaning than enthusiastic, and even the likes of me, who were keen to learn anything about music, were left a little baffled by it all.

Until the day when Mr. McPherson (I’m pretty sure that was his name, but I’m happy to be corrected) put on three records in a row for us to compare.  First, Mussorgsky’s original piano version of Pictures at an Exhibition, then Ravel’s orchestrated version, then – “some of you might like this one” – ELP’s version.

I can effortlessly conjure up the feeling which jolted through me on hearing this third one – I can picture the room; even smell it.  I was riveted by what I was hearing, utterly spellbound.  I’m sure other things happened to me that day, but I don’t remember any of them.  All I remember is the clear sensation that I had found my music; whatever the hell Messrs. Emerson, Lake and Palmer had been doing to Mussorgsky, that was the stuff for me.  Enough of this pop music nonsense - I could take or leave that, I needed to know more; I needed to own this music.

It took a while – I was eleven and pocket money didn’t stretch to buying albums, even cut-price ones, which it turned out Pictures was.  It wasn’t even the first album I bought (we’re coming to that), but it was second or third, and if I look to my right, I can pick out the spine of it in the stack over there – when I returned to the particular pleasure of buying vinyl some years back, it was the first thing I bought for myself.

And Trilogy was the second.  While my love for Pictures has never dimmed, it was only my favourite ELP album until I heard this one.  All (almost all) the ELP albums have their charms; a couple of them are more widely regarded as classics of their kind than Trilogy, yet I genuinely feel that this is the only unequivocally successful one; the only one where every track works on its own terms, and the only one where all three of them seem to be pulling in the same direction all the way from beginning to end.

Emerson, Lake and Palmer were a supergroup – one of the first – and unlike, say, Cream, where there seemed to be a common purpose, they spent their entire career trying to go in at least two directions at once, and not always managing to reconcile those directions.  Trilogy is, I think, the only album where you can’t see the joins between Greg Lake’s earnest love songs and Keith Emerson’s classical adaptations; the only one where the inevitable ‘novelty’ song doesn’t stick out like a sore thumb.  Throughout Trilogy, from the open spaces of the beginning of The Endless Enigma to the demented drum patterns of Abbadon’s Bolero, all elements are performing a function in service to the whole.

Side 1 opens with the three parts of The Endless Enigma, setting what might seem a weary, despairing rant at the world as a mini-concerto.  Emerson’s spare keyboards in the opening always struck me as ideal mood music for a gritty late night TV show; they seem to conjure up late night neon-splashed cityscapes just after the rain has stopped.  From the Beginning, probably the best-known song from this album, is a straightforward ‘love and regret’ song raised to something with proper emotional punch by the development of the music from Lake’s acoustic opening to Emerson’s full keyboard onslaught at the climax.  Then there’s The Sherriff, which verges on parody, but works in conjunction with fan favourite Hoedown, an adaptation of Copland’s much-loved original.

The second side features two longer pieces – the title track featuring one of Lake’s most successful lyrics, and Abbadon’s Bolero, with Emerson writing his own riposte to Ravel, sandwiching the startling Living Sin, in which Greg Lake’s remarkable voice drops into his boots and conjures a real air of menace befitting the subject matter.

Look, I know they’re not fashionable, and probably never were, although they were staggeringly popular for a while.  Maybe I was at an impressionable age; maybe you can think of a thousand other excuses for why this album lives so vividly in my head fifty years on.  Me, I’m just going to go on enjoying it in all its complexity and virtuosity.  It’s of its time, to be sure, but what a time it was.

Any other albums by this artist to consider?

None as complete as this in execution, although Brain Salad Surgery and Tarkus both nearly hit the same level.  The self-titled debut is pretty good, too, although a lot of the ideas are not yet fully-formed.  Later albums, even Works, Vol. 1 which I loved in the teeth of gales of derision at the time, have not survived nearly as well, and a couple of the later ones just didn’t really work at all.  When ELP’s moment passed, it really passed.

Compilations to consider?

There’s an imaginatively entitled Best of Emerson, Lake and Palmer of which the second edition is rather more complete than the first.  There are others which I’ve never heard – mainly because I’ve heard all the albums, so why would I need to?  Not for the last time, I’m going to point out that this is an albums band, and compilations don’t do them justice.

Live albums?

All together, take a deep breath: Welcome Back, my Friends, to the Show That Never Ends.  Ladies and Gentlemen… is the essential ELP live album – all the others cower before it.  Don’t forget to pick up a copy of Pictures at an Exhibition, though – you’re allowed to skip Nutrocker at the end if you like; it doesn’t quite fit with the rest of it.

Anything else?

There’s a tremendously psychedelic live video of the Pictures show which is worth your time if you liked the album – it’s striking how different it is from the recorded version; ELP shows were somewhat improvisational affairs, and the music evolved as it was played.  I’ve seen (I have a copy somewhere) the 2010 High Voltage reunion show, and while it has its moments, Keith Emerson’s playing is not what it was – the issues with his hands which contributed to his suicide are evident, and the show never really takes off, fun though it is to see the three of them together on a stage one last time.  There are some books, although I’ve never read Emerson’s autobiography, and I’m still saving up for the forthcoming ELP Book, although the higher-end editions will likely remain outside my budget.  What would a book about ELP be, however, without some deluxe-level excess? And there’s something else about Trilogy, too.  In recent years, I have heard several of its songs reimagined and reinterpreted – faithfully reproduced by an International Collaboration featuring the remarkable Rachel Flowers, for example (Flowers has covered some of these songs solo as well, and she understands them as well as it’s possible to, I think).  However, my favourite cover of these (and one of my favourite cover versions of all) really shouldn’t work at all – the Jad & Den Quintet’s reworking of Trilogy as a late-night jazz standard is truly extraordinary, and ultimately demonstrates what I knew all along – strip away the perceived excess and these are timeless songs.

2. Hunky Dory, David Bowie – 1971

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Hunky Dory came out when I was nine years old.  I was certainly aware of Bowie – I’d been captivated by Space Oddity as a moon landing obsessive – but this is just before he fully broke into the wider public consciousness.  My exposure to music was restricted to the pop charts, the songs I heard on the radio before heading to school in the morning.  I imagine we thought of ourselves as pop sophisticates, but what did we really know?

1971 is perhaps the most tumultuous year in the history of popular music, but I wasn’t quite ready for albums; I, and everyone I knew, was singing along to the hit singles of the day without discrimination; we were as likely to be singing Chirpy, Chirpy, Cheep Cheep as we were Get It On or Brown Sugar.  The seismic shifts in music mostly passed me by; all I knew was that there would be some new song along in a couple of days and it would quickly surpass the last one as my favourite.

I imagine that I had heard Peter Noone’s version of Oh! You Pretty Things during that summer, although it has been completely replaced in my memory by Bowie’s version by now.  I certainly hadn’t heard the other two singles – Changes and Life on Mars? as they only came out in the wake of the sudden superstardom which the Ziggy Stardust character brought.

So why pick this album of all the Bowie releases?  Two reasons, I think – I loved both the singles, especially Changes, when they did reach my consciousness, and I think it neatly fits the pattern of how I came to absorb all this early seventies music; the singles led me in, but the overall scope and sweep of the album kept me coming back for more.  At the risk of becoming repetitive, I’m not entirely sure when I first heard it all the way through, although I remember trying to learn the acoustic guitar riff from Andy Warhol quite early on in my ‘wonder if I can learn to play’ phase – again, as with so much, copies of albums on cassette tape circulated around school and somewhere along the road, I decided this was my favourite Bowie album.

Which, I think, it probably still is.  I never quite became a Bowie obsessive the way so many of my contemporaries did; he was always just on the fringes of my interests – the purveyor of reliably brilliant singles, and albums which people whose taste I respected raved about, but not quite – or, to be strictly accurate – not yet albums I wanted to spend time with.  Once I did relent and start listening to Low and Lodger and ‘Heroes’ and so on, none of them quite resonated with me the way this did.

Coming back to it now, I’m struck by the way it is front loaded with the hits – by the time I’m singing along with Mickey Mouse’s bovine transformation, I’m wondering if I haven’t accidentally put on a greatest hits compilation.  Even Kooks, which some people inexplicably find cloying rather than charming, could find itself on an ‘Early Bowie’ mix tape, so it is with some relief that I remember how powerful Quicksand is, and how getting up to turn it over is like turning a page in a book and being plunged into a whole new chapter.

The second side is mainly Bowie playing tribute to everything around him which he hoped to emulate (it’s sometimes hard to remember that all of this familiar and beloved music was released into a world which had barely heard of David Bowie, and was by no means certain to become the iconic object it now is), from the  cover of Fill Your Heart through the trio of songs dedicated to, and wondering about, Andy Warhol, Bob Dylan and the Velvet Underground, before we get our first view of what is actually driving David, the unsettling and ever-shifting Bewlay Brothers.  It may be Queen Bitch which has the most Spotify plays from the second side, but it’s the final track which lives in the memory longer, nagging at you and daring you to understand it.

Incidentally (or perhaps not), listening to this straight after Revolver drives home the way both of them leave in some of the studio chat and background noise, letting us feel like we’re part of the creative process.

Any other albums by this artist to consider?

Again, you could make a case for all of them (even the Tin Machine ones) but the inevitable answer to this is – everything from here up to and including Scary Monsters is essential; you’ll have favourites among them, but all of them land and sound as fresh and new as they did when they first came out, slightly ahead of the curve as was the Bowie way for ten years.

Well, I’d skip Pin-Ups, but that’s me.

Compilations to consider?

Changesonebowie covers this period, but is out of print, and misses so much out.  The later revised version Changesbowie covers more ground and will help you find your way in if you’re coming to Bowie for the first time, and the later The Singles Collection covers even more, but like all of them restricts itself to singles.  The best way to go about this is to pick an era and dive into the albums.

Live albums?

David Live was the one everyone owned when I was younger, and I have a treasured copy of the Ziggy Stardust soundtrack.  As we grew up with Bowie, Stage was the one to be seen with, but the soundtrack to the Glastonbury 2000 performance tops all of those; it’s a relaxed Bowie and a band he trusts ripping through everything in magnificent style, and the way – I think – he’d hope to be remembered as a live artist.

Anything else?

Both the Ziggy Stardust show and the Glastonbury 2000 film are out there – opposite ends of the career, but you can clearly see what all the fuss was about.  I don’t think (but I’d be happy to be proved wrong) that there’s a definitive Bowie biography, and I know I’ve never read one.  There are hundreds of Bowie books out there, though, many, if not most, lavishly illustrated – the image was as important as the sound, and there are plenty of examples out there.

There are many Bowie documentaries as well, I vividly remember seeing the BBC Cracked Actor film on one of its many repeats, but I don’t think that’s ever been officially released, and the much later Sound and Vision film is worth seeking out, although it’s not exactly comprehensive in what it covers – but then, what could be?

1. Revolver, The Beatles – 1966

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And it gets better from there. 

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

Any other albums by this artist to consider?

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

Compilations to consider?

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

Live albums?

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

Anything else?

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

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

60 at 60

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60 at 60 – what to expect

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Still, it’s never too late to start.

60 at 60

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Sixty albums to mark sixty years

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which, I think, is kind of the point.

60 at 60 – a new writing project!

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

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