The 60at60 index

In the late autumn of 1975, I heard a song on the radio which changed my life. 

I’m not kidding myself; I’m barely qualified to talk about childbirth

And everyone sang along.

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

I sometimes struggle to clearly identify with the 1990s; it doesn’t have a ‘feel’ for me the way the 1970s and 1980s did

I was apparently now the kind of person who went to concerts in a suit and tie

What never changed along this journey from sparse folk to over-produced pop was her ability to tell a story.

I’m old enough now that I enjoy making my younger colleagues groan with my tales of how it was in the old days

In one other respect, CDs were essential to our situation in the early 1990s, in that they took up way less space.

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

So, less than half an hour after setting off, I pulled in to Toddington services in search of music.

I don’t remember how Kite came in to my life, but I can’t imagine having ever lived without it. 

It’s an album for which the adjective ‘coruscating’ might have been coined.

I spent hours painstakingly working with Letraset to make up a set of slides I would show to prospective employers

They probably had day jobs in banks and accountancy firms, and they wrote and sang songs like the ones we would have written, if we had a tenth of their talent.

So, you might be asking yourself, what is this album doing on this list? 

I mean, how can you not love an album which starts with a passionate cry of “Antiques!”?

I’d have a few more of those over the years, haven’t been right yet, and hope I never will be.

It might, after all, have been forty minutes of industrial noise terror or worse

The Beast was not a quiet, contemplative place to listen to the subtleties of an album

Rush also always challenged the listener by moving on to the next thing before they got bored of the last one

It's a time capsule inside a time capsule, this album, and it predisposes me to love it

There were posters everywhere advertising the ‘Sound of Young Scotland’, and although it took me a while to come round, I did eventually get there

It’s not that he can’t sing at all – he hits all the notes, and he’s full of enthusiasm

it was actually a kind of muddy yellow, not far off the colour of Caramac chocolate, but a little less appealing. 

I do remember being hypnotised by it; humming and singing along in a semi-trance to songs I barely understood.

If you guessed rapid-fire riffing and thunderous drumming, well done. 

I couldn’t have been that exercised about a Pink Floyd album, could I?

I just looked up the words.  My goodness, they were angry.

An essential, empowering album, and I wish there were more like it.

It might have been written intentionally for a sixteen-year-old science fiction reader suffering from all the usual teenage insecurities and uncertainties. 

From all this time away, I’d like to tip my hat to the marketing team who promoted this album, because you must have done a staggeringly good job.

It really is that good, and I’m going to try to explain why.

I owned several albums which skipped in predictable places, and hearing songs from them on CD later in life just felt wrong.

This is the first album on the list which is still, several months after I drew it up, highlighted as […]

1978 was a strange place.  I’ve already alluded to the fact that I was listening to absolutely everything available, but […]

Therefore, the name of Aberdeen’s first (or not; I’m really not clear on that) fanzine was: In Reverse Order. 

If you’re paying particularly close attention, you’re probably wondering where all the albums released in 1977 are.  It’s a fair […]

We met the school library a little while back; there was another library which played a much more significant part […]

Firstly, it was cheap.  Yes, go ahead and insert Aberdonian jokes here.

No, I have no idea why anyone had a record with them at camp.

Biodegradable plastic bags.  Not where you thought I’d be going with this, was it? The plastic record bag was ubiquitous […]

I’m going to try to stay away from talking about genre too much in these – I have plenty of […]

When I write, I write about memory.  I don’t know why that is, particularly – I only identified it myself […]

One more album from 1972, and while it has a lot in common with the others, it’s not something I […]

...singing the ending with all the emotional investment of a man reading out his shopping list.

The way I remember it, there were three main Progressive Rock (capitals intended; indeed, obligatory) bands in the first year […]

The first album on this list which I owned when it was still relatively recent, and the first on this […]

Hunky Dory came out when I was nine years old.  I was certainly aware of Bowie – I’d been captivated […]

I have already written exhaustively on this blog about Revolver, so for a long time it wasn’t on the list, […]

60 at 60 – what to expect There will be sixty albums at the end of this process, and – […]

Sixty albums to mark sixty years Twenty years ago (well, nineteen as I write this), I had the idea to […]

It's about time I started writing again, don't you think? Soberingly, it's almost twenty years since I started the '40 […]