This was something I’ve been doing elsewhere, and I thought it might get some interest here, especially in light of the recent discussions about what is Afterword music and what isn’t. Plus, the very nature of the format means I’m guaranteed a hanger even if I’m the only one posting in the thread, and they are in short supply around here, so not to be sneezed at. One or two posts a day, should see out the summer nicely…oh, and because I’m hardcore I’ve deliberately limited myself to one album by each artist. Which is going to be a bugger when it’s Neil Young’s turn, but that’s not for ages yet.
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100. Eon – Void Dweller
I first came across Eon when John Peel played “Fear: The Mindkiller” one night. The title was enough to make my nerdy little ears prick up, and sure enough there was Kyle McLachlan reciting the Litany Against Fear over beats somewhere between industrial and techno. I bought the 12” the next day, and then a year or so later, the album dropped. It sits right on the border between techno and rave, but with a dark twisted sensibility that couldn’t be further from the smiley faces of acid house. The fact that it’s stuffed with samples from loads of excellent genre movies (Dune, The Outer Limits, Dune again, Basket Case…) is just the icing on the cake. Nightmare rave.
Cool! I loved the “Inner Mind” / “Spice” EP but didn’t get as far as this album.
99. Lycia – Estrella
The first goth-adjacent album on this list. It won’t be the last.
I discovered these via an eMusic subscription*…alien synth textures, drum machines, spiderwork guitar and wordless ethereal vocals take you for a ride through the infinite depths of space, nothing but cold and darkness forever. Numbing and ghostlike, the Cocteau Twins or Mazzy Star reflected in a dark mirror.
*haha, what’s that grandad?
98. The Wildhearts – Earth Vs The Wildhearts
You’ll see as this list goes on that I am a sucker for something heavy or rocky that also has a melodic hook, and this album basically wrote the manual. Swaggering glam, punk attitude and choruses you can sing for days, with riffs dripping out of every pore. This record also features Mick Ronson’s final recorded appearance, fact fans. They never really went anywhere, partly because of record company politics, partly because they were an incredibly volatile bunch who seemed intent on repeated self-sabotage, partly because they were all deeply troubled individuals (to paraphrase the old tabloid headline, you wouldn’t want your daughter marrying one of them), but for these forty five minutes they were kings.
Forgot about The Wildhearts (is that possible?) – that one’s coming out for a blast
(although I think I actually prefer PHUQ)
I vaguely remembering them having a short bit of fame but with a self destructive front man.. Listened to some stuff at the time on the odd free CD from the monthly mags at the time but was never lead further.
“guaranteed a hanger”?
Do you have some shirts the need placing in a wardrobe, or would you rather have a hamper
Lists, albums, new (to me) music, baited breath guessing – post away Mr D
“Posting with Mister D” – Stones first draft.
Hmm, it seems things can only get better.
I hope.
I have given you a thumbs up Kid so I’m not being entirely negative.
oh you just wait….
Ah, this should be fun, Kid. I literally haven’t even heard of, never mind heard, any of these first entries, so it’s going well for me so far….
I like the cut of your jib, Kid D.
I shall be following this thread with keen interest.
Yes ditto. .great to have the clips as well given I don’t know any of the works to date. I have been considering doing a “my top African artists / albums” for a while.
Do do that, JW – I reckon there would be a lot of interest .
I’m looking forward to the developing Kid Dynamite century – diversity in music is way more interesting than retreading familiar ground, comforting though it may be for some to see ever more classic 70s album reissue posts.
“comforting though it may be for some to see ever more classic 70s album reissue posts.”
Gratuitous and quite insulting – speaking as a 70s music fan who’s looking forward to following this thread.
‘Gratuitous’, I will take. ‘Insulting’ puzzles me a little. I* find these sort of posts more interesting. No sleight intended on those who like their 70s music.
Anyway, I think we are promised some Neil later in the thread, so something for everyone there.
* me, myself, the man in the mirror, el sal
Never mind good ol’ Neil, I’m hoping to see “Hot! Menu” from 1975 somewhere in this century.
I’d buy that for a dollar. But I think you might concede that’s not a Tubular Bells or a Dark Side of the Moon.
Quite likely to be a 90s NY album, I’m afraid, or possibly even a 60s one!
There may well be a different 70s artist coming up very soon, though….
yes, I’d love that. It’s a big gap in my listening, last entry in my top 100 notwithstanding
How far down the list are Explosions In The Sky, I wonder?
Looking forward to reading/hearing the next ninety-odd (and there will be odd) mentions, Kid!
97. Violent Femmes – Violent Femmes
When you’re a shy and unconfident eighteen year old, but are desperate to show everyone that you’re really an edgy unconventional cool outsider where do you go? You go to the Violent Femmes’s debut. Punk played by people who only had access to a limited range of acoustic instruments, it’s a cocktail of desire, fear, uncertainty and embarrassment. Writing that in 2023 makes it sound like an incel’s charter, but it really isn’t. The only object of loathing here is the songwriter / listener, and it’s confused and lost instead of angry. That didn’t stop these songs ripping up the dance floor in the alternative clubs of Plymouth. I have an incredibly vivid memory, just a snapshot, of a crowd caught in a strobe as we danced to Add It Up sometime in the early 90s. Liberation and exhilaration through repression!
Yeah – good call on the first Violent Femmes album.
(Sings, jauntily): “Let me go on / Like a blister in the sun…”
Great choice.
I can remember a similar response to Vengeance by New Model Army in Bradford in 1984!
New Model Army, you say? Hang around!
Just one album though – that must have been torture.
Has anyone seen my clogs?
Where’s me washboard?
Fine album of its time (or for me a couple of years later when Blister In The Sun was used in Grosse Pointe Blank).
96. Loketo – Soukous Trouble
One for Junior, maybe? I’m sure he’ll know far more about this than I do! This is a showcase for master guitarist Diblo Dibala, who had played with Kanda Bongo Man previously. Incredibly effervescent upbeat music, relentlessly joyful and danceable (Loketo means ‘hips’!), with some absolutely killer guitar playing. I am naturally a gloomy sod, but this makes even me smile. I believe they were from Zaire, ended up based in Paris and broke up in the 1980s, so I was never going to get to see them, but I dearly wish I had, think I would still be dancing (badly) now.
Aah yes Diblo Dibala , crank the chorus pedal up to eleven.
A nice selection, guaranteed to uplift.
Hats off to you, Kid! What wonderful variety! I’m looking forward to your other choices.
This is my favourite Diblo Dibala track. Irresistible!
Latin music was a big influence on African music in the 60s and 70s. Fania All Stars played in Zaire in the run up to the ‘Rumble In The Jungle’ in 1974. Here’s Diblo returning the favour playing on Dominican Juan Luis Guerra’s excellent album Fogarate.
That is interesting @Alias!
Two very big names playing together.
This Spanish speaking commentator has some interesting comments.
Loketo, Diblo Dibala, Los Mangos Bajitos all marvelous.
ooooh, going to have to investigate this
There are some extremely cheap copies on eBay.
https://www.ebay.co.uk/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p2334524.m570.l1313&_nkw=juan+luis+guerra+fogarate&_sacat=176984&LH_TitleDesc=0&_odkw=fogarate&_osacat=176984
Latin music esp Cuban music rumbas etc v popular prob because central Africa is where those rhythms started off in the first place. Exported via slavery. .
Absolutely.
see Summer Music thread: Orchestra Baobab.
Returned to Africa via those “Political Advisers” that the Cubans sent all over Africa in the ’60s and ’70s.
To be fair to Fidel, they also sent thousands of trained medical people.
spoilers!
Tapper Zukie was one of the first reggae acts I saw live. His profile no doubt helped by being championed by Patti Smith.
This is very true, Junior
@kaisfatdad fantastic and mesmerising. Thanks for posting.
Some great stuff popping up on here – keep it coming Kid (and all you others).
95. Reload – A Collection Of Short Stories
This is Mark Pritchard and Tom Middleton of Global Communication under another alias. This is more Warp-y than those ambient classics, an early forerunner of IDM. Lots of sci-fi soundscapes, quasi-industrial beats, and some exquisite floaty melodies. The original pressings came with a booklet of short stories that you were supposed to read along with the music, but as I only ever obtained it, ahem, unconventionally, I’ve never read them. Hopefully it’ll get a(nother) reissue one day, it’s a great album that seems to have been largely forgotten. This is one of the mellower moments, and it is quite quite lovely
^^^Supermarket music^^^
blimey, I wish I shopped in your supermarket
Promising start but then the drums kicked in and it quickly became a bit dull. I didn’t stay till the end.
The Baron only shops at Waitrose in Knightsbridge,
94. Black Sabbath – Paranoid
The root of so much of my later listening. I know some might argue that the debut is the true classic, and it’s certainly hard to look past that tolling bell, but it’s still a little too in thrall to the blooze for my liking. This one is pure Sabbath – slow, menacing and stuffed full of riffs. Oh my god, the riffs. From the stuttering groove of War Pigs to the amphetamine rush of Paranoid to the spooked eeriness of Planet Caravan and the titanic Iron Man…and that’s just the first side.
Cover could have been better, though.
This where the Sabbath template is defined. A template they exploited and honed for the next 5 yearsl
Never had much time for Black Sabbath and so it goes.
Love this but of its time to me now and not something I would seek out anymore.
Heaven and Hell with Dio is Sabbath’s peak for me.
Seriously? I mean, seriously??
If we were on the same land mass, I’d seek you out and ask you to step outside!
Yes. I find the old Sabbath a bit ‘dirgy’ these days.
It is a hard listen for me whereas Heaven and Hell is an imperious upbeat album with no filler.
See these NWOBHM types – they can’t take the undiluted sound of proper old school 1970s HM…😉
Excuse me?
I’m with @uncle-wheaty
Okay – no offence intended.
Me too. Was really just solidarity with my fellow east coast NWOBHM mate. I am slightly ashamed I prefer Dio era Sabs to Ozzy era but so be it!
Vol. 4 for Ozzy Sabbath, but Live Evil with Dio is the only one I’ve played since streaming made the catalogue accessible to me.
It’s a very tough competition, but I reckon Supernaut off Vol 4 is Tony Iommi’s greatest riff
I reckon you’re right – Frank Zappa agreed, too…
Heresy.
93. Dr John – Such A Night: Live In London!
This is probably the only record on this list that my dad will appreciate. In fact, the LP of it I have was nicked from him. This early 80s live show sees the good Doctor in full Nawlins RnB mode, cooking up a stew of barrelhouse piano, funk, soul, and rock’n’roll. As I will probably end up writing about every live album on this list, I wish I could have been there. But I was there twenty odd years later, when Dr John came to Bristol and I took my dad to see him, part penance for stealing this record and part acknowledgement of one of our few shared enthusiasms. It was a special night, one might even say such a night.
Dr John live at Bb Kings in Times Square is a gig I will always cherish. He was good, a decade and a half later, at Warwick Arts but not as good as on that night.
This is a long time rekkid on my wish list. Out of print for far too long, and stoopid prices now being asked. I have a few early vinyl Mac boots that include some tracks that rival these, but the recording quality, and the stellar sidesmen, here make this possibly the live Dr. John recording to have. Good call!
Note: for the curious, Discogs is your pal here, as they host a couple of great tracks from this album. Wince at the prices being asked for the disc though!
92. Art Blakey – A Night At Birdland
This one has a complicated release history. It was originally released as 3 10” records in 1954, then as 2 12” LPs a few years later, on 2 CDs in 1987 with the same tracks as the 12”s but in a different order, and then again in 2001 with the correct running order restored. Don’t even get me started on the changing artwork. But what’s important here is the music, of course. It kicks off with an introduction from notorious Birdland MC Pee Wee Maquette namechecking the band – and what a band it is. Art Blakey on drums of course, with Horace Silver on piano, Lou Donaldson on saxophone, Clifford Brown on trumpet and Curley Russell on bass. Four musicians there who would go on to become bona fide jazz legends (sorry, Curley). There’s a track on volume one called Quicksilver, and that sums up this wonderful, thrilling, fluid sound. It flows and darts and changes direction frequently, but the musicians are always together, locked in on chasing the music.
I came late to jazz – it’s one of those things that’s waiting for you in your forties, like hair loss and having to get up in the night to have a wee – but I quickly realised that hard bop was my favourite corner of that world, and this is a great (early) example of that driving energetic music. I could listen to the rhythm section alone for hours.
V funny
I’ve always loved Brown’s tone, preferring it to Davies’s. He also had more nimble fingers. Shame he died so young.
This album is great. My favourite so far.
I, too, thought jazz was for my forties. However, I started losing my hair in my early twenties so I properly committed to it earlier than expected. Also, my dad’s influence started taking hold in my teens.
I decided to reserve classical music for my sixties but that grabbed me much sooner when I attended an ‘industrial concert’ aged 13. This was an LSO tour for the oiks up North when they played the popular tunes and that. Condescending bastards. The gig was great, though. Couldn’t fault the playing.
I’ve come to the conclusion that Miles Davis’ true greatness is in his ideas more than his playing. There were better players around throughout his time, but Miles was a truly great innovator.
Son who is a jazz obsessive (fave musician Buddy Rich) absolutely rates Clifford above Miles in terms of tone.
Correctamundo re: Clifford.
Not so sure about him rating Buddy Rich, though. A bit of a showboater IMO.
Prefer Art Blakey, Elvin Jones and Jimmy Cobb from the old school. Bill Stewart & Peter Erskine from the current crop.
Max Roach is my favourite. He made the drums sing. Great friends wit Brown too.
Max definitely up there.
This is my favourite Art Blakey choon.
We’ve had albums by Dr. John and by Art Blakey, how about this one with the pair of them plus David “Fathead” Newman?
91. Pop Will Eat Itself – This Is The Day, This Is The Hour…This Is This!
I will go to my grave maintaining that the Poppies were years ahead of their time. There weren’t many other white indie acts messing about with sampling and hip hop in 1987, but the music press of the time dismissed them as comedy Brummies. More fool them, because this record is glorious, a deranged collision of glam rock guitars, hiphop beats, movies and comics, with samples flying everywhere. It’s one of those records that constructs its own little universe that you live in for the duration, a dayglo triumph of low culture where Alan Moore and The Terminator rub shoulders with James Brown and DJ Spinderella. Imagine Public Enemy raised on 2000AD, or Paul’s Boutique’s nerdy British cousin and you’re halfway there.
I remember standing in a record shop when it was released, weighing up whether to spend my limited funds on this or Disintegration by The Cure (which tbf does have a 50/50 chance of appearing later in this list). I chose the Poppies, I still have that same vinyl copy, and I’m still sure I made the right decision.
PWEI were up there with BAD for me in being fiercely imaginative, disrespectful of genre limitations and happy to take from high, mid and low culture to make their music.
However, this is a record I have never heard, as I thought they reached perfection with Box Frenzy and the singles I heard from the second album suggested it wouldn’t have the same melody and comedy or breadth of musical form, jumping resolutely from indie to hip hop and losing something in the process. I will investigate.
You’re in for a treat, Sal. Third album Cure for Sanity is pretty good, too, despite a false start. They were fantastic live around this time, too.
Probably best to avoid fourth album, The Looks or the Lifestyle?, which introduced a live drummer.
Saw them for Independent Venues Week earlier this year at the Hare and Hounds. Fantastic gig and they appear to be turning into the grebo AC/DC visually – no bad thing! an absolutely great hour. Being witty and irreverent doesn’t make you a comedy act – lots of love for Carter too on this site. Don’t quite have the love for Carter, lots of love for the Poppies.
Circa 1991, I took a young lady on a date to see PWEI. I know, what was I thinking? Clint Poppy came on for the encores unclothed, with the pendulous Little Clint swinging around for all to see.
Great as the gig was, one way or another, the evening ended in disappointment for me… and her.
Mainstay of the Indie Disco in 1991 – this, Orange Crush by REM, and for some unfathomable reason My Brother Jake by Free
Alan Ball knows the score (apparently)
I know … it’s actually Alan Moore, but the above was the lyric I always heard
I strongly suspect that this thread is going to end up being one of the best things ever on the Afterword. Cannot wait for the rest of this list.
I have to confess to having gone through an enormous PWEI phase when I was about 14. Wore the t-shirt, bought Dos Dedos Mi Amigos day of release, later bought the remix double album (!), etc.
As a consequence, I am familiar with This Is The Day on a near sub-atomic level; every gloriously unfashionable note permanently branded onto my frontal cortex. It’s not a record I often go back to, but it is certainly singular (for all the reasons you say), and that whole “dayglo triumph of low culture” thing that you’ve identified made me love it at the time. Defcon One, Preaching to the Perverted, Wake Up, Time To Die, Can You Dig It, Not Now James We’re Busy – all classics of a sort.
Funnily enough, I have just got quite into Disintegration in the last month or so, having never quite clicked with it before. What a brilliant album.
I cannot wait for the New Model Army album!
spoiler: it’ll be up the other end of the list, probably mid-August at least before we get there
PWEI are another band that passed my by.
Listening to this I can see why.
90. Jeff Mills – Live At The Liquid Room
One of the all time classic techno mix CDs, all the better for being left as it was on the night with the bumps and glitches intact instead of being digitally smoothed out after the fact. Detroit legend Mills is on frantic form here, mixing thirty odd tracks into just over an hour, sixty plus minutes of machine funk very obviously guided by human hands, and it’s tremendous.
About a decade after this came out, I was living in Tokyo. Not long after I’d moved over there, a gig came up at the Liquid Room (a solo J Mascis show). Of course I went, and good as the show was, I kept looking around and thinking to myself “this is it! This is the Liquid Room!” and imagining how it must have looked and felt the night this was recorded. Then I got home and looked it up, to discover that the club had moved some years previously and was now in a completely different location.
Another great choice. Saw Jeff Mills in, umm, Brighton, which has some kudos but not as cool as Tokyo
89. The Avalanches – When I Met You
I very nearly chose their last album, which is a genuine masterpiece, but as we get further into my list, simple fun is going to be become an increasingly rare commodity, so I’ve plumped for this in a probably vain attempt to prove it’s not all icy goth and crusty nonsense round at Dynamite Towers. Afaik this started out as a promotional thing for the Since I Left You album, and it features a good chunk of that record mixed with Dylan, the Beatles, De La Soul, Roy Ayers, Michael Jackson, Madonna, The Smiths and plenty more (tracklist). Not a strictly legal release, I found my CD in a little backstreet shop in the hipster district and I seriously doubt that anyone involved has seen any royalties from it. Think it’s also floating around as “Gimix”, but whatever it’s called, it is an hour of good times, smiles and dancing. Curse the cold dead hands of the copyright lawyers who prevented it being properly released.
I was convinced it’d be on YT but apparently not – you can listen here
https://mixes.cloud/districtsoul/avalanches-when-i-met-you/
Good choice! I thought you had mispelled the name of the album there and you meant Since I Left You.
Pedantic point of order: this isn’t actually the original GiMiX, which was a cassette-only release at their gigs. Someone cashed in on the band by putting together this approximation of the mix on a CD and for a while you could buy it in HMV and suchlike.
The original GiMiX is here and is slightly different and a good bit shorter (not that you’d really notice to be honest): https://soundcloud.com/ryan-l-751516274/the-avalanches-gimix-mixtape
Anyway, I agree it’s better than their album proper, and it’s probably more like the album would have sounded if they had managed to clear all the samples.
It’s well worth tracking down their Essential Mix from 2016 too. Another masterpiece.
88. Pallbearer – Sorrow And Extinction
And as if to prove my just-made point about the fun drying up from here on in, here’s a band called Pallbearer playing a genre called doom. This is what I was talking about when I said upthread that Sabbath were responsible for so much of my later listening. Riffs slow and heavy as molasses, lumbering and rumbling through five tracks, none shorter than eight minutes and a couple over ten. Why should I love this? I mean, look at the adjectives that get thrown round discussing it – slow, gloomy, miserable, the name of the genre for pity’s sake. But it’s not a hard or challenging listen. As any teenage Smiths fan can attest, there can be something uplifting in misery, and Pallbearer found it on this album. Maybe it’s the clean vocals, or the ambient(ish) synths. Perhaps it’s the epic interlocking solos or the balance of melody with crushing heaviness. Either way, it’s a monumental record.
87. The Velvet Underground – Loaded
Yes, I know this isn’t the canonical choice but I’m old and tired, and when I get home from work I don’t want dark psychosexual dramas, I want to lie on the sofa and listen to Oh! Sweet Nuthin’ over and over.
Sod the “canonical choice” – this is a great album!
Rock’n roll , sweet jane , new age : out and out classic songs = classic album – just different to what went before.
Cowboy Junkies did a brilliant cover of Sweet Jane
They did indeed. Listening to it now puts me straight back 30+ years to Guilfest where I bought the 12″ single, the Edward II & Red Hot Polkas/Mad Professor 12″, saw June Tabor and the Bhundhu Boys live and watched This Is Spinal Tap – all for the first time.
What a confluence of wonder!
First heard Sweet Jane via Mott The Hoople’s version.
The Sweet Jane riff became the bedrock of a lot of early Pub Rock (certainly Ducks Deluxe re-visited it a fair bit).
Oh, and David Bowie nicked it for Queen Bitch (that bit towards the end of Hunky Dory where you can almost hear them mutating into Ziggy & The Spiders)
Already owned the debut, but never dug further until High Fidelity stuck 2 songs from Loaded on the soundtrack – Who Loves The Sun and Oh Sweet Nuthin.
All of the Velvet Underground albums are brilliant and I love them all, equally. Loaded is the one that doesn’t frighten civilians. By that time, The Velvet Underground were boiled down to the essence of a Rock band, into its four elemental parts of guitar, bass, drums, organ. Andy Warhol’s artistic patronage, Nico’s glacial cool and John Cale’s maverick experimentation were long gone. Even Mo sat things out (be wise of pregnancy). Reed, himself, left before it was released. It is, however, a perfect Rock album, effectively a greatest hits.
Give me reLoaded for the extended versions and the magnificent Ocean.
Damning with faint praise, Tiggs?
It’s a brilliant album.
Rock and roll is full of people making dark, experimental music, but how many of them turned round right at the tail end of things and revealed that they could have been making fantastic, pared down, melody-lead tunes all along, only they simply chose not to? Not only is it a genius album in its own right, it also enriches everything that came before it.
I also love the super literal cover.
“how many of them turned round right at the tail end of things and revealed that they could have been making fantastic, pared down, melody-lead tunes all along, only they simply chose not to?”
A point driven home in the excellent “A History of Rock Music in 500 songs – Episode 164: “White Light/White Heat” by the Velvet Underground.
Listening to what Lou Reed was doing before the VU makes you appreciate all the more what they wanted to achieve.
For me their weakest, but still pretty good. Too many Doug Yule vocals (and no Moe Tucker) !
* I still bought the 6 disc 45th anniversary edition
It’s a brilliant album.
Rock and roll is full of people making dark, experimental music, but how many of them turned round right at the tail end of things and revealed that they could have been making fantastic, pared down, melody-lead tunes all along, only they simply chose not to? Not only is it a genius album in its own right, it also enriches everything that came before it.
I also love the super literal cover.
Even the first album had Femme Fatale…
My favourite album is probably WLWH (although I have a high regard for the double compilation with the lips on the cover – my first exposure to them) and I still carry a torch for Nico’s songs and her subsequent albums with Cale producing – but I’ve never really understood why Loaded gets quite such a kicking – it smacks (arf!) a bit of “I’m dead edgy and dark, me”
86. The Waterboys – Fisherman’s Blues
Light in my head, you in my arms. I’ve always had a soft spot for records where the artist goes somewhere unexpected, like Nebraska (and you can decide for yourself whether to italicize that or not). The late 80s Waterboys were on the brink of something big. The Whole Of The Moon had been a hit and with the parent album This Is The Sea they delivered on their promise of the Big Music. Everything was in place for them to take the next step up to Simple Minds / U2 levels, to become a massive arena rock band. Then Mike Scott went to stay with a mate in Dublin for a week.
Three years later he came back with this. Largely recorded in a sprawling old house near Galway, it swerved the stadium cliches and zeroed in on a vibe somewhere between a trad session and old school country. The dominant sounds throughout are Steve Wickham’s fiddle and mandolin, and there’s barely an electric instrument in earshot. It’s not a traditional album, there’s no jigs and reels here (although there is a brief snippet of waltz). Rather these are still rock songs, just played in a different idiom. And what songs they are. They’re intense (the insistent sawing fiddle of We Will Not Be Lovers), dreamy and drifting (the cover of Van Morrison’s Sweet Thing) and sometimes just warmly cosy – album centerpiece And A Bang On The Ear is maybe the most good-natured song about exes there has ever been. The album climaxes with a reading of WB Yeat’s poem The Stolen Child set to music, misty and ghostly, a summation of the Irish influence that had overwhelmed Scott.
Except that’s not quite the end- as the poem dies away, a raucous barroom take on This Land Is Your Land comes in. Now, this album came into my life when my older cousin taped it for me (sorry, music industry) and it doesn’t quite fit on one side of a C90, so I had maybe ten or fifteen seconds of the Guthrie cover before the tape ran out. I was tantalised for years by the thought of what I’d missed, and when I could afford to buy the CD several years later I skipped straight to this last track to finally hear it in all it’s glory….only to discover that it was just a snippet wrapping up the album, and I’d missed maybe five seconds worth of fade out. No matter, this is a magical record. It came out in 1988, but it’s so much its own thing, with such a self contained atmosphere, it could have been released anytime in the last fifty years. Incredible, timeless, genius.
It’s also worth noting that Scott and Co recorded an absolute tonne of music for this album. There’s a box set of the complete sessions that runs to 121 songs, like Galway’s own Basement Tapes. Inevitably, some wonderful stuff didn’t make it to the album, Imagine having a song as good as this, and deciding not to include it
This is another enjoyable choice I had rather forgotten about: my student housemate played this album constantly. And spot on that it is (like Forever Changes?) such a self-contained sound you cannot pin it down to an exact year.
The Fisherman’s box is a thing of beauty and it didn’t stop there. Those times in Ireland were a rich seam for Mike Scott and his mates. Oh to have been there when they were jamming.
Great review @kid-dynamite
Loved a Pagan Place, This is the Sea but loved Fisherman’s Blues even more. “We will not be lovers” is very often my favourite song of theirs.
They went too far with Room to Roam I think. Mind you…I only listened to it once and saw them on the tour (Highbury Fields?) and it was a massive disappointment. My second worst rock n roll disappointment, the worst being the second Propaganda album.
So, should I give Room to Roam another go?
Yes, you should, Freddy. It really isn’t as bad as you remember, there are some lovely songs, but it is very much more acoustic.
I know what you mean, though, I had the same sense of deflation with New Order’s Republic, which is also not as bad as I remember.
Also, @kid-dynamite, Too Close To Heaven, the first set of outtakes from FB, long before the Fisherman’s Box. Good, too.
Doesn’t the Fisherman’s Box include everything, eg the Too Close To Heaven album, and the stuff on the second disc of the deluxe FB? Plus hours of other stuff
Funnily enough I do own Too Close To Heaven, but not the Fisherman’s Box itself.
I haven’t got the Box, just cherry picked downloads, so you could’ve right.
85. Marillion – The Thieving Magpie
I would not be being true to my fifteen year old self if I didn’t include something by Marillion. They were probably the first band I was really obsessed by, and therefore this is a little bit of a cheat in that it’s a de facto best of, a live album released to mark original singer Fish leaving the band. That’s also the point where I lost interest in them (more or less – I stuck it out for Seasons End, but bailed at Holidays In Eden), so it makes a nice capstone to that time of my life. This is probably the biggest gap between what I enjoyed them and what I enjoy now – if a new album came out with this kind of flowery overwrought lyrics or the frankly insane levels of keyboard widdliness on display here I’m pretty certain I would hate it, but in the late 80s I played it to death, and the memories earn it a place in the top 100. It includes a run through the entire Misplaced Childhood album, and includes the highlights of the rest of the catalogue (bar a few quibbles here and there). I don’t really listen to them very much at all anymore (although I pulled this album out before writing this and I was word perfect on every song), but I still have a lot of residual fondness for those records and what they meant to me back then. Yeah, it is a bit pretentious and silly but you know what? So was I.
Early Marilliuon – very good
Misplaced Childhood – their best album
Clutching At Straws – nearly as good as thee above
This album – as you say a de facto best of.
But … the vinyl only had part one of Misplaced Childhood. It was another 15 or so years before I got the CD version to hear it all the way through.
And like you, I too bailed at Season’s End (nothing I heard after that really captured my ears)
You are a sentimental mercenary, aren’t you.
I see what you did there. Very good!
Respect to you Kid D for not neglecting the band you loved as a 15 year old.
It’s these small personal references, (like taking your dad to see Dr John in Bristol), which is making this list into such a winner.
And three cheers to @Salwarpe who knows his Marillion. I had to Google.
What can we expect as the list continues?
The Icelandic Satanic sludgecore band who your Granny took you to see in Brixton?
Keep them coming!
84. The Ramones – Rocket To Russia
Let’s face it, this could have been any of those first three albums, but this one has ‘Rockaway Beach’ on so just edges it. A taped C90 of this and It’s Alive was in heavy rotation on my Walkman on the school bus and beyond for years. An amazing mix of melody, brevity and energy, the perfect bubblegum pop band. This is what people should mean when they talk about the Great American Songbook.
You can make a case for any of the first 4 + It’s Alive, but Rocket To Russia indeed just edges it (plus it also has Sheena Is A Punk Rocker on it too)
83. The Supersuckers – The Sacrilicious Sounds Of The Supersuckers
Somewhere deep in the American Southwest, Motorhead and The Ramones had a baby, and it grew up to be The Supersuckers. They are a supercharged punk’n’roll band who offer three crunchy chords per song, a cowboy hat and lyrics pretty much exclusively concerned with one or all of the following: guns, drugs, booze, women, Satan. Do you really need any more?
This is their best record, but they’re really here because of the time I saw them in the tiny Freebutt in Brighton somewhere around 2000. The venue was packed, the mosh pit was frantic enough to knock over a speaker stack, people were literally dancing on the bar, there were devil horns everywhere and my ears rang for days afterwards. Pure rock n roll chaos, one of my all time most memorable shows.
Loved Steve Earle with the Supersuckers on this Stones number.
82. Silver Sun – You Are Here
Another slight cheat, in that this is a compilation of early singles rather than an album proper, and a Japan-only one at that, but tough. Call me Mr Indie Wanker, but I found the debut album a little disappointing after falling head over heels for these singles. I painstakingly collected them all on CD single and 7’ back in those halcyon multiformat days. They’re fast fizzy songs, a little too sweet for punk and a touch too gnarly for powerpop. Like I said earlier, I’m a sucker for melody on top of noisy guitars, and then when you add the kind of harmonies we have here, all sung by boys who in their own way sound a lot like girls…oh man. The Beach Boys with fuzz pedals.
81. Alabama 3 – Exile On Coldharbour Lane
81? Seems low, perhaps. No matter, I don’t think the fate of empires hinges on where Alabama 3’s debut places in an arbitrary list. Unless it was a list of the best country gospel acid house blues albums of all time, in which case it would be a travesty not to have it at number one. The album is big bubbling stew of all those genres, held together by the vocal double act at the centre. The Very Reverend D Wayne Love preaches and pontificates on the evil of sin like a southern fried tent preacher, while Larry Love’s vocals lead you right back into temptation. The whole thing is a paean to the joys of indulgence dressed as a warning and set to some beautifully mashed sounds. Yeah, they probably are taking the piss, but they’re doing it extremely seriously. Put this lovely John Prine cover on the next time you feel yourself sinking into the carpet, and it’ll all get better:
Love the Alabama 3. Except for the interminable ramblings of the Rev D Wayne, which, live made me squirm. RIP, mind….
I’m another big fan of Alabama 3, this album being for me in a similar category to Sandinista-era Clash, and the outputs from Manu Chao – an openness to mixing musics of many forms together with politics and social issues in a joyful celebration of sound. They played the South Bank on Millennium Eve and were spectacular. I recently relistened to La Peste, the second album, which I’d previously thought was a letdown, and it want half bad – nowhere near a good as this one, which is one of my all time favourites, but still worth hearing.
Absolute monster of an album.
They played at one of my friend’s club nights. Fee was a gram of something and pass a hat around.
80. Death In Vegas – The Contino Sessions
Before this album, DIV were known as part of the big beat scene, but one look at the cover here should be enough to lay any ideas of wild hedonism to rest – those leather boots, that heavy gothic script. Sure enough, this one is dark, a superdense record built out of chokingly oppressive layers of sounds. It’s slow and throbbing, dance music that isn’t meant for dancing to. You feel the whole record takes place at night, with only maybe the spiralling sitars and trumpets of closer Neptune City heralding a dawn. The first track, Dirge, sets the scene, an increasingly tense slow burn as Dot Allison’s wordless vocals warn you off travelling any further. Dirge is a clue to the record in another way, in that it’s constructed like a dance track but using ‘real’ instruments. Every few bars a new element is added and looped, building and building.That’s the technique and sound palette for most of the record- call it electro rock, call it techno goth, call it one of my favorite records of the late 90s.
Celeb spotters will also doubtless be pleased to know that when I saw them on the Brighton date of the tour for this Bobby Gillespie was hanging around, and he was being an arse.
This is a corker. I remember the hype. Adverts ran in the NME for ages. When it came out, the critics were split. NME rated it, of course. The guest list made it seem to be in the wake of Chemical Brothers Surrender (Bernard being a common denominator). But it’s so dark it sounded as if it was recorded in a dungeon. released when CD was king. I think it only got a vinyl version twenty years later. Set the tone for BRMC, which is another great album.
My favourite Death in Vegas album – they were playing it in FOPP when I first heard it and I was immediately hooked.
I’m enjoying this eclectic list. I fear for your neighbours if this is representative of your party playlist 😉
Perhaps splitting the list into new posts every now and again to save scrolling and “reply sprawl” would be a good idea?
What he said⬆️
(Apart from the bit about your neighbours. I don’t have any thoughts about them..)
but won’t someone think of the hampers?
(probably a good idea, might do it in four blocks of 25 each)
79. Galaxie 500 – This Is Our Music
I was late to the party for these, and only discovered them when Rykodisc reissued the catalogue in the late 90s (used to love those green tinted Ryko cases). Not sure why, think it’s just that my attention was elsewhere when they were active. Now though, I reckon they were one of the greatest guitar bands of all time, so let that be a lesson in what happens when you take your eye of the ball and go to see Tofu Love Frogs too many times. To be honest, in those days the kind of subtle and understated beauty on display here took a back seat to “music that goes well with a big bottle of cider”, so maybe it was for the best. This record (and the other two albums in their catalogue) is hushed and icy, somehow intimate and spectral at the same time, nowhere more so than in the exquisite cover of Yoko Ono’s ‘Listen, The Snow Is Falling’.
I missed this post last week. I love Galaxie 500, especially the second album “On Fire”, and saw them play to a tiny crowd at the Norwich Arts Club in 1990, which was magical. I think they represent the best of the 80s indie aesthetic that sincerely did not crave mega-fame, and they split up before they became tired. And have you heard their cover versions of “Ceremony” and “Submission” ?
I missed this one as well. One of my all time favourites. Their 1989 Peel session was one I was so glad I recorded, and their performance at Glastonbury 1990 was a highlight – a real slow burn, what I imagine spontaneous combustion feels like. I followed Dean Wareham into Luna, who I used to see whenever I got the chance, and he carried some of that laconic, laidback cool into that music. The album covers were as enigmatic and as beautiful as New Order’s, at their best.
78. Burger/Ink – Las Vegas
You might be aware of Wolfgang Voigt’s ambient work as Gas. This is another (short-lived – three 12″s compiled as this album) project of his, under his Mike Ink alias and in collaboration with Jörg Burger. As you might expect from two leading lights of the 90s Köln scene, it’s minimal techno, but warm and inviting rather than forbidding and austere, with more than a hint of dub in its DNA. A good chunk of the track titles reference Roxy Music, and there is something of that act’s later slick sophistication here, without ever becoming so smooth that you just fall off it. It’s full of perfect little gaseous melodies that bubble up through the relaxed trance beats. A quite lovely and far too underheard record (I didn’t even know it was a thing for the first twenty years of it’s existence).
77. Tappa Zukie – In Dub
Ah, dub. One of my all time favourite genres, but one that, like a lot of JA music, hasn’t been served especially well by the album format. The original 1976 pressing of this apparently ran to all of 300 copies, but Blood And Fire came to the rescue in 1995 and reissued it (with some lovely artwork, as per usual for their output). I don’t care if Mick Hucknall did once put out an album called ‘Love And The Russian Winter’, he’s still going to heaven for his involvement with B&F. Tappa Zukie was better known as a deejay, but he produced this set of dubs when he was still in his early twenties. It’s spacy, adventurous and warm, a great advert for the seventies form of the genre
Another great choice. What you say about Mick Hucknall is quite right. Escape From Hell is just as good. Tappa’s an enthralling toaster. He became a producer later. He was rather good at that too.
76. AOS3 – God’s Secret Agent
In my late teens and early twenties I spent a lot of time on the fringes of the free festival / squat / traveller scene. There was so much great music around there (and some not so great – you can all count yourselves lucky that the Tofu Love Frogs never released a proper album), and there’ll definitely be some more albums from that world later in this list. It was such a good vibe that the Tories decided they had to shut it down via the Criminal Justice Bill. Thanks, lads.
AOS3 were one of those bands, a dub punk act from Sunderland whose name referred to, amongst other things, acid pioneer and Grateful Dead sound engineer Augustus Owsley Stanley III, and that psychedelic thread runs through this album, along with plenty of reggae and space rock. Like you’d expect from an anarchopunk band in the early 90s, the lyrics are politically engaged, but go a step beyond the usual ‘smash the state’ platitudes, with some playful wit and a side order of occultism and conspiracy theory (it’s not impossible to view the album as a giant knowing wink to the Illuminatus trilogy, and members have since gone on to get involved with Cosmic Trigger and the like).
They came into my life when I ordered a copy of their Owsley demo tape from Bluurg distribution. I’d taken bit of a punt on it, might even have been just to reach a free postage threshold with a Culture Shock (of whom more anon) teeshirt. It was pretty good, and when they came through town a few months later supporting RDF we went along and were knocked out. I saw them loads over the next few years, in fields and the back rooms of pubs. It was always a triumphant joyous occasion, where we’d dance ourselves daft and throw our fists into the air. A great band, closely tied up with some of the happiest times of my life. This should really be higher in the list.
going to move to a new thread for 75-51
The other free festival stalwarts back then were Here & Now, who later briefly morphed into Planet Gong after hooking up with Daevid Allen and Gilli Smyth.
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I loved the live version of “Addicted” on the split album they did with ATV (which is not on YouTube).
Used to have that album, back in the mists..
On the Deptford Fun City label, IIRC.
Sadly long gone from my collection.
That early nineties period felt like the only too brief blossoming of Generation X culture. It was a great time with some wonderful music associated with it. I was more into Chumbawamba, Back To The Planet, Eat, Moonflowers and some of the Loop Guru/Megadog trancey stuff, but it felt there was a wonderful explosion of musical creativity and diversity then. Must admit, though I recognize Radical Dance Faction, I’ve never heard of AOS3 – great logo, though.
Not sure there was a better night out than a Chumbawamba gig circa 1994.