Noel Gallagher has listed The Best of the Who as one of his favourite 13 (?) albums. The Best of the Beatles is of course Alan Partridges favourite HJHM album.
Is it right to include a best of? I think there are rules such as the one or two track rule (but never both) for mix tapes.
My favourite Neil Young album is Unplugged which is a kind of best of but I do steer clear of Greatest Hits or Best Ofs.
I can understand it with The Who, I might even concur. Live At Leeds would be my preference but it’s nice to have some later things. I think best ofs are often unsatisfactory though, jarring gear changes of differing styles from different eras. There used to be a Lou Reed collection called Retro, very good it was. It did the job for me.
I have been lengthily re digitising my library. I have lot of best ofs/greatest hits, and I mean a lot. Sometimes they were bought as samplers, with further bought as a result, and sometimes because they are quite as much as I need of less essential bands. Random recents have included Widespread Panic, Stone Foundation, Stereo MCs and Bobby Blue Bland.
1. It’s just a fact that some great acts are/were singles artists (The Supremes, The Undertones etc)
2. Some fixtures in best lists are effectively greatest hits sets anyway (Sex Pistols, Redskins etc)
3. From what I gather, Alan would prefer Wings’ Greatest Hits to The Best Of The Beatles..
4. It’s nice to be able to comment again!
There is actually a Best of the Beatles – a cheeky solo album by their ousted drummer
While I don’t mind Best Off/Greatest Hits (a useful entry point for artists you’re not 100% Invested in), I’m much more into 2-CD career overviews or those Essential collections.
Very often will often buy the twofers by artists I’ve got loads of albums by purely for the pleasure of playing them in the car
Steely Dan may well be my favourite band ever – if you can find it, this really, really is all you need
The Very Best of Steely Dan: Reelin’ In the Years – Wikipedia https://share.google/ebBDRs5vDj4ir5zlI
I agree with this (apart from the best band ever assertion)
(do I need to turn my membership card in?)
Sorry have to disagree with you Lodester.
The finest Dan compilation by a country mile, is the Dutch 3 CD set Collected.
The sound quality is superb and far superior to what went before it, and with a great cover to boot. Disappointingly they’ve deleted it but it’s still out there to buy on Discogs etc.
End of message..
Wot no FM??
Could be updated with the singles from the last two albums, too.
Elvis Presley
For many years I believed the best Bowie album, and maybe half of ChangesTwo.
And then I actually listened to all the albums and realised my error
For Elvis , I think a more accurate answer is ’50s’, not ‘Best of…’
This applies often, that a best of is considered all that is needed because the effort to explore all the albums properly hasn’t been made.
Buzzcocks – I do believe (and will defend) their albums, but surely their best long playing outing is Singles Going Steady
Squeeze – 45s And Under. all killer, no filler
(unlike their albums unfortunately)
All Killer No Filler would have been a great tile
for a Jerry Lee Lewis Best Of
…Or All Killers, No Fillers for the HH.
A good, concise ‘Best of’ is always sometimes a go to. I mentioned on another thread that I love Pink Floyd’s ‘Echoes’, and several other favourites come to mind – a Kinks set, Buddy Holly, Dylan’s Biography, and many more.
However… some career spanning compilations are just too long – the aforementioned Buddy Holly was box setted a while ago into something like 6 CDs and is virtually unlistenable because of the sheer number of repeated tracks, outtakes and the like.
Buddy Holly box has virtually everything he ever recorded, not really a “Best Of”
Since Neil Young was mentioned I would actually suggest that Decade is one of the very best compilations.
Yes it is
Duran Duran also used the title Decade.
Not as essential in my opinion
Apropos of absolutely nothing, while bearing in mind that ‘Time Flies’ unless you’re listening to Oasis, exactly which Who compilation is the ‘eye-brow heavy dodger’ referring to?
No offence to the geezer, but I suspect that what he knows about the Who you could write on the back of two postage stamps… but admittedly one more than his brother.
Well FWIW, Pete is a booster of both brothers solo work, as well as being outspoken about his love of Oasis, and very few people make that claim.
Is it true? For you to decide and they have done him favours both playing the Teenage Cancer Trust charity concerts multiple times but, that excepted, PT would have no reason to exaggerate.
I love Roxy Music and have all their albums up to Manifesto, however their first Greatest Hits album is an absolute belter and all that the casual fan would ever need. Having said that they would miss out on Re-Make, Re- Model and The Bogus Man which would be a shame.
A wonderful album- it just works with a well thought out order of songs (it says here).
I love the way Mother of Pearl segues into A Song For Europe.
I take your point about the greatest hits album: but there’s so much to miss out on. The eight albums and Viva! should be available on prescription.
As much as I love Behaviour (and Actually, and Introspective, and Please…) I recently took delivery of Pet Shop Boys’ Discography 1985-1991 and it’s as cohesive and satisfying album experience as you’re likely to find.
The best Who best of is of course MBBAB
Seconded. It was my first Who purchase just as I left school.
Britannia Music Club? That’s where I got my copy.
Not in this instance.
I did join Britannia later on, but it was sometime in the mid to late eighties, for the CD deal they were doing.
I do remember grimacing at the cost of them, when you had to buy so many discs at full price in the following year.
We had that new ABBA album playing in the family car for a few weeks but, really, ABBA Gold is all you need.
Agree about Squeeze and Undertones having been a “proper” album purchaser in the past.
The direct opposite would be Half Man Half Biscuit. I don’t think they’ve ever seriously played the singles game. They once cancelled a career-breaking live appearance on The Tube because Tranmere were playing at home that evening.
Re: “…really, ABBA Gold is all you need”
Erm … but that means you wouldn’t get “The Day Before You Came”, which is if course a top-notch number.
Of course you need all the albums (or about 5, including Voyage)
There was time when “Snap” seemed lot of casual listeners’ favourite Jam album; it also has the better version of “That’s Entertainment.”
Speaking as a casual listener, it still is that time…
Ditto
“Watching the dark” is an excellent best of for Sir Richard Thompson.
Agreed. It’s also far and away the best RT box of them all
It is though there have been quite a few classics since then so a volume 2 would be good.
Of course, a Best Of has now always to include a couple of, often, new songs, unavailable anywhere else. And that you “can’t” download separately.
See Beatles Oldies (but Goldies), in 1966. 15 “hits” plus (unreleased in the UK) Bad Boy
Not long ago I was adding a load of FLAC versions of my CDs to a digital audio player. I was surprised how many of them are “best of…”, “greatest hits”…etc. Maybe only 30 or so, out of over 1000, but more than I’d have guessed if you asked me.
I’ve generally bought them for the reasons given here, such as liking one or two singles from an artist and wanting them in the library. And I agree that many artists probably never considered their output in terms of albums, rather as collections of singles and B sides.
I have to admit that buying greatest hits CDs has rarely led me to an in-depth exploration of an artist’s wider body of work. But I’ve often found tracks on the compilations that I didn’t remember, which have now become favourites.
The Best Of… that is your favourite album by an artist is of course a playlist you made yourself, except when I’ve done this I tend not to bother playing it.
I turned my David Ackles playlist into a “Best of” CD. It’s an absolute belter!
New Order’s ‘Substance’ is brilliant. You get the then-new bangers ‘True Faith’ and ‘1963’ and most of the 12″ releases to date, depending on which format. They reissued it a couple years back as a 4CD set with a live gig and some more (variable) mixes.
The apocryphal story goes that it came about because Tony Wilson’s wanted to play NO singles in his new Jag’s CD player. But the 1987 re-recordings of Confusion and Temptation seem a bit pointless.
First CD I ever bought! (together with V.U. by Velvet Underground
I had that VU comp as well, very good it was too!
Yes, indeed: the “transparency“ compilation was also very good.
Come to think of it, my first experience of Zappa/Mothers was via the transparency compilation…
Rolled Gold is more complete than the two 60s comps., but just by being from the actual era itself and the quality of design (wow! that IS SO significant) those comps. win out by a mile.
It’s interesting that the Zappa ‘people’ put out on CD a Mothers’ comp. from 69 as part of their CD reissue programme – superfluous really – but actually, this was released at the time… and makes it more viable than anything subsequently.
Obviously ‘A Collection of Oldies’ is more viable than the red and blue albums.
Not sure if the transparency series ever made to CD – but I suspect not. I don’t know how many acts were included in the series, I know Rory Gallagher had one.
Is that what was also called the Polydor “Flashback” series? I had the Velvet Underground one that included, without any credit, the alternate version of “Some Kind of Love.”
If you move the Zappa picture to the left, you’ll see the VU cover – was it that one?
The original Leonard Cohen Greatest Hits compilation genuinely feels like an album, as it only has 12 songs on it. As it predates his finest actual album, I’m Your Man, I’d say it’s the best album of his earlier period and a massive favourite of mine.
The obvious answer is that if it’s one of his 13 favourite records then he’s right to include it. It’s all fairly moot anyway; give it another 15 years and the idea of “favourite albums” will probably have been playlisted into distant memory.
Personal experience is that some greatest hits collections work much better than others. If you were to take, to pick a random example, Bjork’s greatest hits, it sounds like a bunch of Bjork tunes thrown together. It has no real animus or soul, no real reason to exist other than to deliver good Bjork songs effectively and cost-efficiently.
Whereas on the other hand, if you listen to Legend, or to a lesser extent The Immaculate Collection, or The Best Of The Doors, they feel (to me at least), like they’re a legitimate article – like these songs, in this order, make a kind of sense which means that these collections had a definite need to exist.
Dunno which camp The Who one falls into as I’ve never listened to it.
Singles are by definition the most commercial track on the album, so sometimes an album full of them can be a bit too much of that type of song. I think in general The Who were more of a singles band initially so a mostly 60s comp works quite well. I would prefer Meaty, Beaty … to be in chronological order but it’s great. I think same applies for The Stones up to 68 so any singles collection up to Jumping Jack Flash is really what you need before getting into their superb run of albums. Especially as many of their singles did not appear on UK albums in that period..
Yes – the best pre-68 Stones album is Rolled Gold or The London Years or similar. Then you’ve got your wall to wall classic albums. Anything off Beggars Banquet, Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers or Exile sounds a bit strange when isolated on a comp. And then again, after Goats Head Soup it’s back to cherry picking.
I wish there was a best of Field Music.
Is that a band or a genre?
Ah, the band not the genre. They’re quite prolific and each album contains some bangers… and some slightly less so.
I see
There’s this…The Motors Greatest Hit.
Singular.
Which is a bit mean . It’s got Dancing the Night away (which is a banger), Love and Loneliness (which I still remember buying on 10” Green vinyl from Chadds in Hereford) and Metropolis and many more!
And you don’t even mention that #4 smash, Airport!
I guess that’s the Greatest Hit of the title.
The band’s members were famously so ugly the label wouldn’t put their picture on the cover of their debut album
The 12” version of DTNA is brilliant – the intro sounds even better when played at 33 rpm
It’s a jingly jangly power pop masterpiece. I love the middle 8 especially
Oo-ee-ooh!
It’s an involuntary reaction, like whenever anyone at work mentions Flash (ah-aah!) memory.
A classmate at school always thought they were singing “eff off” which is a bit Tourette’s as a reaction.
The 2-CD Terry Reid collection “Super Lungs: The Complete Studio Recordings 1966-1969” seems appropriate at this time.
6 tracks from his early stint with Peter Jay’s Jaywalkers, both sides of his first solo single, his first 2 albums “Bang Bang You’re Terry Reid” and “Terry Reid” plus 8 other assorted tracks.
12 of the tracks were previously unreleased and there were 2 remixes.
https://www.discogs.com/release/1504340-Terry-Reid-Super-Lungs-The-Complete-Studio-Recordings-1966-1969