My Favourite Top 25 Albums

The Albums – an extract from my book- 537 Essential Rock Albums – Pt. 1 The first 270

1. Roy Harper – Stormcock

Roy Harper is the greatest British song-writer and poet. There is no one who even gets close. His acerbic lyrics and social commentary are unsurpassed. He rivals Bob Dylan as the greatest songwriter of all time and is greatly undervalued. This is not surprising as he has constantly shot himself in the foot and sabotaged his own career. He remains the foremost British dissident and commentator on the human condition. His epic songs are legendary and the music sublime.

Stormcock is arguably his best album but is strongly pushed by both HQ and Lifemask. I would place at least ten of Roy’s albums in my top 400 albums. He’s that important to me.

The Stormcock album features only four tracks but the album is one of his masterpieces. It consists of brilliant songs with poetic imagery and wide canvasses that challenge your imagination. The music and musicianship was innovative and of an excellence that puts this album top of my top ten thousand. It is one of four Harper albums that would make it into my top ten albums of all time. I have a penchant for great meaningful lyrics put to brilliant music and this hits the spot. I never tire of hearing these songs and simply cannot understand why Roy has not been lauded from on high. I love the depth and insight he brings to bear and the risks he takes in developing his ideas through epic songs. Few people can match it.
Roy’s shorter songs are also great but these four songs show how Roy has matured and taken his art to another level. ‘Me and my woman’ is one of the very best tracks ever recorded. The scope is immense and Roy was at the top of his game.
I am fully aware that not everybody shares my opinion. I can see that it is never going to be commercial. Roy’s work is thought-provoking, intelligent and musically intricate. You have to concentrate. It’s not your catchy pop song – fortunately! But it is well worth the effort. For me Roy is the James Joyce of music as opposed to Simon Cowell’s Barbara Cartland.

• The Beatles – the double white album

Because the Beatles were so good and popular they often get overlooked in lists like this but their importance cannot be underestimated. They altered history and remain the best Rock group ever.

What is incredible is that they started as a Rock/R&B/Pop group and developed into the forefront of innovation becoming part of the sixties Underground scene while still retaining their popularity and wide appeal. They were a phenomenon. They pushed the boundaries, made music that was different, experimental, with social importance and yet was commercial and well crafted.

They changed from lovable ‘mop-heads’ to long-haired, outspoken critics of the establishment and fully qualified members of the alternative society – yet retained their commercial appeal because the quality was immense.

Most of the pundits plump for Sgt Pepper’s as the definitive album but I always thought the double white album had more scope and adventure. From the raucous ‘Revolution’, through ‘Yer Blues’ to ‘Piggies’ and ‘While my guitar gently weeps’; from acoustic to hard Rock, Folk, Electronic, Country and Brass Band the album soars. The range is immense. It feels more spontaneous and less contrived than Sgt Pepper. I love it.

• Captain Beefheart – Lick my decals off baby

Now I had immense trouble sorting out which Captain Beefheart album was the best. There were at least four contenders and ‘Trout Mask Replica’ is awesome but for me ‘Lick my Decals off Baby’ is just that bit better.

Captain Beefheart (Don Van Vliet) is the most original and accomplished of Rock performers. His voice is amazing, the vocal range is stupendous, the lyrics are poetry to music and totally unique and the music is from another planet. ‘Smithsonian Institute Blues’ sums up where humanity is going to be – we’re heading to be fossils. The sad thing is that we’re devising our own demise and taking a huge number of species with us! ‘Woe-is-uh-me-bop’ says it all! The album is packed with extraordinary numbers – ‘Space-Age Couple’ and ‘I love you, you big dummy’ are incredible.

This is one of those albums that come along when you can sense a band is in the groove. They had just got ‘Trout Mask Replica’ out of their system and seemed to be motoring down that same channel with effortless ease. Don’s voice and songs were astounding. This album was certainly on a par with ‘Replica’ and I actually thought it shaded it.

Not only that but this band was the ultimate live band. Their performances are legendary. I have seen them many times, through many incarnations, and I never cease to be amazed by the intensity of the intricate music. I have heard nothing like it and I never tire of hearing it.

If you want to hear something completely different then this is it. The music is extraordinary. Those interlacing guitars still sends shivers through me and Don’s voice is unbelievable. This should have been enormous. They were the best band in the world!

• Bob Dylan – Bringing it all back home

Of the three electric Bob Dylan masterpieces of the sixties this was the first and the best. Any album that features a track of the brilliance of ‘It’s Alright Ma – I’m only bleeding’ has to be in the top ten albums. What is up with songwriters today? Nobody is dealing with social issues even though the world is full of immense problems. The young snarling Dylan went for them head on and wrestled them to submission. This song ‘It’s Alright Ma – I’m only Bleeding’ is a no holds barred poke at the establishment. I love it. Dylan was the hippest thing on the planet with his shades, tight pants, mass of curls, polka-dot shirt and James Dean sneer. This album was a departure from the acoustic ‘protest’ songs of before and shows Dylan at his caustic best. Everyone was against him and he responded by hitting out big time in all directions at once. This was the underground Beat Poet rebel who spat words like machine gun bullets. Just listen to subterranean homesick blues and Maggie’s Farm. He was one angry outsider.

This album was another unique departure and revelation. We live in an age where we have become used to a diverse range of music. Back then it was limited fare. There had been nothing like this music before. Bob invented it.

It sparked near riots when he took it out on the road live and induced crazy reactions at Newport Folk Festival with Seeger threatening to put an axe through the power cable as Dylan blasted the audience accompanied by Mike Bloomfield and the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. (I loved that raw sound they produced and wished they had done a lot more like it!). During the British tour he was called a Judas and the crowd reactions were often hostile.

As we have often seen it only serves to make Bob more entrenched. He does his own thing regardless.

5. Byrds – Notorious Byrd Brothers

The Byrds started out trying to meld the Beatles to Bob Dylan and produced their own uniquely brilliant sound in the process. It was a sound with jingly guitars and flowing harmonies that came to be known as Folk-Rock. They did their covers of Bob Dylan and Pete Seeger songs and then started moving into Psychedelia in the mid-sixties. By the time the late sixties Underground came along they were producing more complex songs with relevant lyrics that aligned them with the alternative society.

The Notorious Byrd Brothers is them at their absolute best – great songs with beautiful harmonies and good lyrics. They captured the sound of the sixties.

What is quite ironic that they did this at a time when they were falling apart. After this album it was all downhill. They teamed up with the great rich kid plonker Gram Parsons and headed off into the dire bland country of ‘Sweetheart of the rodeo’ which is probably their worst effort. Then it was incorporating all the Christian crap and they were a shadow of themselves. As far as I’m concerned Jesus is just not alright. They’d lost their way.

6. Love – Forever Changes

The first couple of albums Love produced were quite Punky. But then Los Angeles had a different vibe to San Francisco. It was much harsher. By the time they got to Forever Changes they had refined their sound to create the perfect fusion of voices and instruments. Bryan Maclean and Arthur Lee wrote some brilliant songs. It was a shame that hard drugs got in the way and decimated the group. They could have gone on to produce more stuff of this calibre.

Listening to this album again one is instantly caught in the atmosphere of it. ‘Alone Again Or’ sets the trend at the beginning with its changes of pace and texture, the delicate acoustic guitar, insistent drums, stunning harmonies. It’s a beautiful song. This is no one off. The album continues on in the same vein right though the whole album. Each song is greatly crafted into a tiny symphony. They move through a range of volumes, textures and feeling all within the space of minutes. Each track has been honed to perfection. The lyrics are great, the voices blend and soar. There are loud forceful sections interspersed with lyrical delicate sections.

As with all brilliant albums this one gels into one consistent experience. The songs flow into each other to create one consistent flow. The Production is so good it enhances the performance.

Unfortunately Love could not maintain this level of perfection. It was not so much a question of running out of ideas as indulging in heroin and falling apart.

What followed were break-ups, false-starts, and mayhem with Arthur getting himself imprisoned for fire-arm offences.

In the 2000s Arthur Lee finally got his act together and reformed Love by using ‘Baby Lemonade’ as his backing band. It really worked. The band was hot and sounded as good, if not better, as the original. I saw them live a number of times and Arthur was in fine form and often stayed around to chat at gigs. The band was motoring, audiences getting big and it looked like they were going somewhere.

Then he got tragically leukaemia and died.

7. Doors – Strange Days

If only Jim had not destroyed himself with alcohol we might have had a lot more like this great album. The album ‘Strange Days’ was the second Doors album and the best. I was very taken by the first album but this one seemed to have a greater consistency of songs, production and performance that gave it a greater coherence.

 Jim wrote some great songs, Ray arranged them, John’s drumming was innovative and Robbie did some of the most amazing, unique sounding slide guitar. As far as Acid Rock albums go this is one of the best. There’s not a dud track on it and the sound on ‘Love me two times’, ‘Strange days’, Moonlight Drive’ and ‘People are strange’ is so different to anything before. The epic track ‘When the Music’s over’ tops it off for me.

I was introduced to the Doors by my friend Mike. We worked at the bakery together and spent Friday nights talking music. He was nuts about the new West Coast Acid Rock sound. We’d go back to his place and he’d play me Doors, Beefheart, Love, Airplane and Country Joe. I lapped it up. We wore his albums out.

8. Mothers of Invention – We’re only in it for the money

What can you say about Frank Zappa? The guy was a genius and his intelligence shines through everything he does. There is satire, disdain and a unique style in this unclassifiable album. Frank never aligned himself with any of the sixties movements. He was disdainful of the ‘Flower Power’ Love and Peace movement and saw the hand of the establishment in everything. Frank was openly disparaging about the wonders of marijuana and the whole San Francisco scene. He kept himself aloof. What you got from Frank was pure Frank. He turned his attention on every bit of prudery, hypocrisy and pretentiousness he could find without regard to its origins. He was as much opposed to the politics of the counter-culture as he was with the establishment. I suppose that being in the music business and seeing all the double standards first-hand was bound to make you cynical.

‘We’re only in it for the Money’ came out at the height of the counter-culture and even had all the hallmarks of the scene, with the long hair and outrageousness yet it was not of it. Frank always saw himself as a serious artist and did what he wanted. He was scathing of the music business. The cover was a piss-take of the Beatles Sgt. Peppers but the music is certainly in a league of its own. I used to play this non-stop. There’s nothing sounds quite like it. The vocals are different, instrumentation unique, song structure varied and construction inspired. This is no concept album yet it is constructed to be played through from beginning to end. It flows through the interruptions, asides, stops and starts and changes of direction. This is not a collection of Rock songs. It is a serious piece of music that has songs embedded in it.

I remember being round at Roy Harper’s one afternoon and he played this through from a big reel tape on his sound system. You could hear everything in such clarity. Roy turned to me and said ‘That’s probably the best band in the world.’

9. Cream – Disraeli Gears

Cream emerged at the same time as Jimi Hendrix. They came out of the British Blues Scene but almost immediately took off into a progressive style that stretched it into jazz based free-style jams.

Clapton has never done anything worth mentioning since.

This album came out in that magic year of 1967. They had emerged out of their Blues phase into a psychedelic/Progressive unit. Pete Brown’s poetic lyrics were magical and added a dimension to the songs. The band were full of ambition, self-confidence and riding the peak of their creativity before the long-standing bitterness between Jack and Ginger cast a long shadow over everything and the exhaustion of touring drove them into the ground.

The album had the incredibly innovation ‘Strange Brew’, ‘Sunshine of your Love’, ‘We’re going wrong’, ‘World of pain’ and ‘Tales of Brave Ulysses’. They had created a unique sound and it placed them at the very pinnacle.

I caught Cream at the Windsor Blues Festival in 1968 and was blown away by their power and expertise. They were simply the Cream of British musicians and this album is arguable the best of the four they released. For a band with such talent and impact it was a shame that they lasted so short a time. Probably Clapton was demoralised by the genius of Hendrix and gave up trying to compete with him.

I saw Ginger play this year with his new Jazz band and they were really good but it was Jazz and not Rock. It is amazing that he’s still going with his Chronic Pulmonary Disease and crippling back problems. It was a privilege to see him. I only wish I could have got to see the Cream get together at the Royal Albert Hall a few years back. It looked good but not as good as when it was all new.

10. Jimi Hendrix Experience – Electric Ladyland

I thought Clapton could play until I saw Jimi Hendrix. He blew everyone out of the water and nobody has matched him to this day. He was simply the greatest guitarist that ever lived, a brilliant showman and a great songwriter. I knew he was something special the moment I heard ‘Hey Joe’ on the radio. He had captured a different sound. Nobody had ever got that sound out of a guitar before. It made your ears prick up and sent chills through you. Today we are bombarded with the full spectrum of music and it is difficult to imagine the aural world that existed before these sounds were invented. It was like wandering around in fields of green grass and stumbling into a meadow full of flowers. Jimi brought colour into the music.

I saw Jimi play three times and he was simply the most exciting thing I have ever seen.

Electric Ladyland was slated when it came out as a double. People wanted the shorter snappier numbers like on ‘Axis bold as love’. Time has changed all that. It was just ahead of its time and still stands as Jimi’s masterpiece.

It takes a while to get into the album. There is a complexity about many of the tracks. Jimi was experimenting with his psychedelic sound, playing with the potential of the studio and elongating the tracks out into long drawn out soundscapes. It created friction with Chas Chandler who left in frustration. He wanted Jimi to continue producing two and a half minute radio-friendly commercial songs. He thought the extended music was indulgent and not going to receive radio play. He was wrong. It was brilliant. It just took people a bit of time to catch up. There were enough shorter rocking tracks such as the definitive version of ‘All along the Watchtower’, or ‘Crosstown Traffic’, ‘Little Miss Strange’ and ‘Voodoo Chile’ to offset the genius of the longer ‘1983… (A Merman I Should Turn to Be) or ‘Moon, Turn the Tides… Gently Gently Away’. But in the long run it was the long tracks that were the greater of Jimi’s creations. This album was immense.

11. Pink Floyd – Wish you were here

Dark side of the moon was the big one for Pink Floyd but I prefer this one. It has a quality to it that grows and grows. ‘Shine on you crazy Diamond’ is so evocative and sums up the sadness of Syd. I met Syd once in Abbey road Studios and his eyes were blown into those black holes Pink Floyd sing about. He was very like a couple of my friends who were also Acid victims. It’s scary to see.

‘Shine on you Crazy Diamond’ takes centre stage but there are great tracks like ‘Welcome to the Machine’ and ‘Wish you were here’. There is also the joy of hearing Roy Harper singing the main vocal on ‘Have a cigar’. The Pink Floyd were meticulous in their arrangements. Nobody has ever used a studio better. This was not gimmickry it was art. They created their sound out of experimentation and an endless searching for perfection to achieve the vision in their heads.

For some obscure reason the Floyd have been associated in many people’s minds with the over-bloated pretensions of Progressive Rock of bands like Yes and Genesis. I don’t see that. I think they were in danger of heading off down there with albums like ‘Atom Heart Mother’ where there was a dearth of songs and too much improvisation and extended pieces. But they came through that. Every song on this album is a masterpiece and no note is unnecessary. They had created another unique sound and style.

The lyrics were intelligent. The album has a real knock at the Music Biz with all its phoney bloated indifference. I love the way it all blends in with tracks segueing and different sound qualities. Pink Floyd were expert at those kind of things. Most of the 1970s Prog Rock was pretentious arrogance vomited on to vinyl that I have very little time for. It was an indulgence and I was glad Punk came along and blew it all away. But Pink Floyd never fell into that trap. Their stuff, even on those iffy early seventies albums, was always innovative and captivating.  This album epitomises that.

12. Country Joe & the Fish – Electric Music for the body & Mind

I can still remember the first time I heard Country Joe & the Fish – Barry Melton’s unique West Coast Acid guitar sound completely blew my skull off. On top of that was Country Joe McDonald’s smooth crystal clear voice. Mike played it to me in his tiny room and I instantly knew that this was something completely different. It was a toss up between this album and the follow up ‘I feel like I’m fixing to die’. They are both equally brilliant in my ears. I went for this one as it was the first one I had heard and it made such an impression on me. It epitomised San Franciscan Acid Rock with its political edge and super tripped out music that sent your mind soaring.

I was introduced to this by my friend Mike who worked in the same bread factory as me. He was in to the whole West Coast scene and was attempting to grow his hair as long as he could. I remember that he refused to brush it because he was certain that would create split ends and the hair would break off and not get so long. Country Joe and Captain Beefheart were his favourite bands.

The stand out tracks for me were ‘Not so sweet Martha Lorraine,’ ‘Flyin’ High’ and ‘Porpoise mouth’ but I loved it all. The long trippy sound they created on ‘Grace’ and ‘Bass strings’ was so redolent of the times with Barry Melton’s spacey guitar. For a time they were my favourite band.

13. Neil Young – Harvest

When Buffalo Springfield split up we wondered what was going to happen to Neil Young and Stephen Stills. So many times when bands split up the magic dissipates and the individual members never achieve anything like the heights as the chemistry of when they were together. In this case it was probably for the best. Not only did we get a rampant Neil Young unleashed upon us but we also got a scintillating Stephen Stills and then later Crosby Stills Nash and Young. It’s great when that happens.

I love lots of Neil’s work and put him up there with Dylan and Harper as a songwriter/performer. It’s so hard to choose which his best album is. Neil said Harvest was a lurch to the middle of the road but I just love its mellow sound. It is easy to listen to but it isn’t easy listening. The stand out track is ‘Heart of gold’ but the whole thing has a great vibe. It does not sound at all middle of the road to me. ‘Alabama’ created a bit of a stir, along with ‘Southern man’. Seemingly the Southerners did not appreciate Neil criticising them. Yet, from my perspective, having travelled and hitched through the Deep South, there was much to criticise. It was a hot-bed of intolerance, racism and violence. If you were black or had long hair you were likely to get severely dealt with. The Klu Klux Klan were rampant. Easy Rider was no exaggeration. It’s got a lot better now but there is still an underlying racism that was quite apparent in New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina.

‘Words (Between the lines of age)’ had a great feel to it. ‘Old Man’ was a beautiful paean of a song to someone who is trying to come to terms with the values and philosophy that make life worthwhile. ‘Needle and the damage done’ was an anti-drug song. We’ve all seen so many friends go down through drink and drugs. They all thought they could control it.

‘Out on the Weekend’ is about the melancholy of life after a break-up.

This was a mature Neil at the top of his form.

14. Joni Mitchell – Blue

Joni is one of the best songwriters to have come out of the sixties. She crafts the most beautiful songs. This album pulls at all the emotions and evokes great memories of those halcyon days back in the sixties. It is one of those magic albums that has a ‘feel’ to it. All the tracks are touched by the same enchantment and flow into each other though the emotions are often quite different. It is the Joni album I always seem to go back to first. She really hit a maturity as both a songwriter and performer.

The pervading mood is one of sadness yet it is done with such optimism that it comes over as a happy album. Joni is so full of love and life. ‘Green’ is about her daughter who she had when she was young and had to give up to adoption. Songs like ‘Blue’, ‘My old man’, ‘Last time I saw Richard’, ‘A case of you,’ ‘Carey’ and ‘California’ are full of broken love affairs, desperate attempts to find love and fulfilment, and a soul in anguish who is searching for stability and an inner peace. The words are so poignant.

This was an album sung straight from the heart.

15. Bob Marley – Exodus

Before Bob Marley came along Reggae was nowhere. In Britain it was largely seen as inconsequential Pop music. The Mods liked it and put it up there with American R&B but it wasn’t taken seriously as an art form to listen too seriously. It was more just music to dance to in the clubs. Bob Marley changed all that. He forced you to listen to it and gave it credibility both as a rich musical form and lyrically interesting. Reggae came of age with Bob Marley. It was once again impossible to sort which Bob Marley album was best. I went for Exodus on a bit of a whim.

It is packed full of great songs – ‘Jamming’, ‘Exodus’, ‘Three little birds’, ‘Waiting in vain’ and ‘One love – people get ready’. But then what Marley album isn’t?

The prevailing theme of the album was Rastafarianism. This was the source of most of Bob’s great work. While I find some of the tenets of Rasta quite amusing – it is so manufactured and cobbled together out of whatever was handy – A bit of Selassie here, a dab of Old Testament there, here a Garvey, there a dreadlock all bound together with the cement of Dope as the sacramental Herb – I can certainly identify with what it represented. This was Black pride. Having their own religion, their own black god, their own pride in where they were going, their own politics of equality and emancipation, created a self-assurance and belief that pervaded the music. The black community of Jamaica, and the world, was no longer going to be cowed and treated as inferior. The music was full of defiance and confidence.

It was that message of liberation and equality that Bob took into his music and out to black people everywhere.

Bob changed the world.

16. John Lennon – Imagine

The splitting up of the Beatles was devastating. They were still the greatest band in the world. They might have had all sorts of internal conflicts but the music they were producing was still the best of their career. It looked like we had lost so much. It was therefore immense to get a brilliant triple album set from George and the first two John Lennon efforts.

Both those Lennon albums were outstanding. It was a hard decision for me whether to go for the ‘Imagine’ album or ‘Plastic Ono Band’. They are both raw and brilliant. In the end I went for this.

The song ‘Imagine’ has become a bit of a strange standard and I find all kinds of incongruous people playing it as if it was an ordinary song. I sometimes wonder if they have actually read the lyrics and understood them. It is revolutionary. John is suggesting that we scrap religion and the idea of countries and start up a brotherhood of all mankind without all the exploitation and racism- sounds good to me. Let’s do it! Lennon was criticised for being a wealthy hypocrite but at least he was saying things and set out to try to make a difference. He tried to use his fame to coalesce public opinion and create a media focus on real issues. That’s laudable in my book.

John was pilloried for doing daft stuff like bag-ins and trying to get the impossible to happen. More power to him I say. Without dreamers and idealists like John we’re in the hands of greedy sociopathic scum. We need more like him. All the bed-ins, acorns and bag-ins were publicity stunts to draw attention to the real message – ‘STOP THE FUCKING WAR!!!

This album encapsulates the Lennon persona. I think he felt liberated when he left the Beatles. He could do what he wanted without having to fit in or worry about the effect on the others. His music, thoughts and ideas were released. Those first two solo albums were him giving vent to it all.

John’s assassination was a disaster. It robbed us of a world of possibility. Paul, on his own, has proved trite, boring and lightweight. George meandered off into mediocrity and Ringo did his own jolly thing. The saddest thing was that John petered out too. Together they complemented each other and were greater than the sum of their parts. There was synergy in that chemistry. Who knows what might have been. They would probably have got back together and the magic might still have been there. After all – look at the vast output of the Stones, not all of it brilliant, produced after the Beatles broke up. We could have had as large an amount from the Beatles. What a loss!

But we do have these two brilliant Lennon albums and that’s something to be grateful for. They are brilliant.

17. Sex Pistols – Never mind the Bollocks

Rock was dead and Punk came along and shrieked life back into it. It roared so loud that it briefly blew all the cobwebs away. Unfortunately they came back with a vengeance.

The Sex Pistols burst upon the scene with full snarling fury, expletives and a new philosophy of nihilism and anarchy. It struck a note with British kids. Overnight the long hair and flares was replaced by spiked hair, safety-pins and skin tight trousers. It was anything to shock. Malcolm McClaren was the master as creating generation gaps to exploit the market with his ‘Never trust a Hippie’ slogan he immediately identified the old revolution as passé and ‘boring old farts’. We were suddenly in the same category as the Straights, even worse! We were not only unhip we were embarrassing! It worked. It was a great marketing ploy and sold a lot of records.

In amongst all the hype it is good to remember that it wasn’t all just hype, slogans and merchandising; there was also a lot of brilliant music generating from a whole slue of brilliant new bans like Stiff Little Fingers, the Clash, Buzzcocks, Gang of Four and Stranglers and it opened the door for lots of New Wave talent like Ian Dury, Billy Bragg, John Cooper Clarke and Elvis Costello who otherwise might not have got going. Long live Punk.

The Sex Pistols only really made one album. Everything else was shit. But what an album that was! The quality and power of the songs was amazing. You sit back, turn it up and you are blown away! ‘Never Mind the Bollocks’ started it off – it’s the dog’s bollocks!

This album was full of anthemic incendiary rebellion and the lyrics were clever and married to songs that were really catchy. This was no meaningless tirade of invective. It was targeted and intellectually interesting. Alright – not all of it! Some of it was just revolting for the sake of it – to create shock, outrage and reaction! That was what Lydon and McClaren specialised in. Life was theatre!

But songs like ‘Anarchy in the UK’, ‘God Save the Queen’, ‘Pretty Vacant’, ‘Holidays in the Sun’ and ‘EMI’ are as vital now as they were back then.

It’s a shame they did not continue the standard and do something more.

18. Stiff Little Fingers – Inflammable Material

‘Inflammable Material’ is the best Punk albumwithout any shadow of doubt.  Jake and the boys used Punk as a medium to harness all their anger and frustration at the terrible situation they were living through in Ireland during the ‘Troubles’ and pour it out into their songs. The lyrics were brilliant and captured the reality of life in Belfast perfectly with both humour and astute observation. The message was superb and the music roared. It was amazing to get such maturity, insight and passion from lads of that age. The song writing was in a different league to most and they even managed to find an excuse for wit. Incredible!

‘White Noise’ is the best and most hard hitting track about racism ever. ‘Alternative Ulster’, ‘State of Emergency’, ‘Suspect Device’, ‘Here we are nowhere’, ‘Wasted life’, ‘Barbed wire love’ and ‘No more of that’ all shrieked their disgust, defiance and fury at the brainless morons on both sides who were destroying everyone’s future. They suffered threats on their lives for speaking out but carried on anyway. They were the voice of all those disaffected young people in Belfast whose lives were a misery and they found an outlet through Punk. They even sequestrated a Bob Marley song ‘Johnny Was’ and moulded it to their experience.

Never has there been such a hard-hitting album!

Yet it was not merely the politics of the album. The songs were well constructed and listenable. The melody was catchy. The lyrics were great. It was an album that you could listen to and enjoy immensely on another level. It was no wonder that John Peel latched on to them. They were superb.

19. Little Richard – Here’s Little Richard

Little Richard was the toughest, most raucous Rock ‘n’ Roller ever. His rawness and individuality was phenomenal and the production at Speciality managed to capture it on vinyl. He had the best set of musicians backing him up and the most dynamic act. He was Mr Rock ‘n’ Roll. Along with Elvis, Chuck, Bo and Jerry Lee he was the driving force of a new music that got kids off their arses, out of their parent’s clothes and rioting in the streets. There was no such thing as teenagers before Little Richard exploded on the scene with his outrageous pompadour. He rocked. Nobody had experienced that level of excitement before. It lit the touch-paper and started an explosion that is still resounding round the world.

Think of how boring the world would have been without Rock ‘n’ Roll. There would have been no sixties, Beatles or Punk. We’d all being mowing the lawn in dreary suburbia and looking like our dads and mums. Dante got it wrong – that’s my idea of hell.

Here’s Little Richard was his first album and the best. The second album was good and after that it was all parody and showmanship. But what a first album! It blew the hair off your head it was so powerful. There was a string of absolute belters.

It all started with ‘Tutti Fruity’ where, quite appropriately, Richard put some slightly cleaned up lyrics to an even bawdier song. It went on through a series of raucous Rock numbers – ‘Long Tall Sally’, ‘Rip it up’, ‘Ready Teddy’, ‘Slippin’ and Slidin’’, ‘She’s got it’ and ‘Jenny Jenny’. They are all here and ready to dynamite your brain. They still sound explosive and that is after our ears have been battered with the Sex Pistols, Nirvana, Deep Purple, Metallica and Motorhead. Just imagine how outrageous they sounded when you only had Max Bygraves to compare them to!

20. Son House – Death Letter Blues

Son House started it all. He taught Robert Johnson how to play. He was king back in the early thirties. That Mississippi bottleneck country blues played on that old beat up steel guitar created a sound that was going to beat its way all down the years to infuse Rock ‘n’ Roll and start up a revolution.

Son House was a leading exponent of the style. His playing was raw, sloppy and incredibly powerful. His anguished singing was equal to it. I was fortunate enough to see him perform even though he was an old man. As soon as he started playing it was as if someone had plugged him in to the mains. The energy shot through him and cauterised us. I have never experienced such a transformation and so much ferocity. The opening chords to ‘Death Letter Blues’ were like a thunder-clap!

This album was made after his rediscovery in 1964. He was already old and had to relearn the guitar and his own songs. You’d think it would be an insipid shadow of his old power but it wasn’t. It was awesome. The playing was crystal clear and startling. ‘Death Letter Blues’ is enough to send the hair standing up to the ceiling. He still had it in Spades, Diamonds, Clubs and Hearts.

Hearing him play was a revelation. The album had other great tracks like ‘Pearline’ and ‘John the Revelator’ but who needed more. This was plugged straight back into those steamy Mississippi nights.

This is a glimpse of where it all began. Heaven knows what he would have been like to hear as a young man! It must have been frightening!

21. Elmore James – King of the slide guitar

Elmore James is truly the king of the slide guitar. The guitar sound he created by was unique. He used to work in an electronics store back in Mississippi and devised a system for creating a different sound when he electrified his guitar. I stood on that street at the site of his shop and paid homage. He took Robert Johnson’s sound and brought it into the urban world. His guitar with that slide effect was so rich and clear that it resonated right through you. Nobody has ever quite managed to capture that same quality.

He had a rich, anguished voice that worked so well on numbers like ‘Shake your money maker’, ‘The sky is crying’ and ‘Dust my broom’. When he went to Chicago and recorded those songs he created something special. The first time I heard his music, as a boy of fourteen, I was absolutely knocked out.

It was hard to get hold of Elmore James records back then. I had to make a special trip up to London to go to Dobell’s specialist record shop in order to get two. I played them to death and still have them.

The sad thing is that Elmore never got to perform for a white audience. He died of a heart attack in the early 1960s. I would have given anything to see him live. He would have been bigger than Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters.

This album has collected together most of his best sides. In order to hear all his best tracks though you have to buy every single CD and play everything because everything he produced was sheer genius.

22. Howlin’ Wolf – Moaning in the moonlight

My friend Dick Brunning played me this album when we were both just fourteen years old. I really don’t know how he got into the Blues but I know that I owe him a big debt for introducing it to me.

This album by Howlin’ Wolf is really atmospheric. The backing, featuring Hubert Sumlin on guitar, is a real repetitive driving force that was later further developed by Mississippi North County Blues singers like Junior Kimbrough and RL Burnside.

The voice is so powerful it will blow your socks off.

The lyrics are wonderful – ‘I asked her for water and she gave me gasoline’ – outstanding.

Howlin’ Wolf, whose real name was Chester Burnett, weighed in at 300 lbs and stood 6 feet seven inches. He was a powerful man. I remember him appearing on Juke Box Jury as the ‘guest’ when they voted ‘Love me darling’ a miss. He dwarfed the six foot David Jacobs.

His stage act was exceptionally dynamic. He would claw his way up theatre curtains, roll on the floor and strut his stuff. His songs such as ‘Smokestack Lightnin’’, ‘Little red Rooster’, ‘Wang Dang Doodle’ and ‘Backdoor man’ have become classics and were covered by countless bands, including the Rolling Stones.

This album features ‘I asked her for water – she gave me gasoline’, ‘Smokestack lightning’, ‘How many more years’, ‘Moaning at Midnight’, ‘Evil’, ‘Forty-four’ and ‘Somebody in my home’. It was full of an underlying menace and a sinister moodiness. I wouldn’t have like to have been caught messing with his wife. He sounded powerfully mean. Yet there was sadness, melancholy and resignation there as well.

It is probably nostalgia that makes this my favourite album of his. There were others of similar quality though with a different feel to them. Many of his numbers were positively upbeat and full of humour. There was nothing humorous in ‘Moaning in the Moonlight’!

This was atmospheric and chilling.

Sam Philips said he was the greatest talent he ever discovered – so bigger that Elvis then!

23. Elvis Presley – Sun recordings

Speaking of Elvis you just have to have a Presley album in there and this was the seminal stuff when he was the rockin’ Hillbilly Cat.

Elvis came from the poor part of Tupelo and hung out with the poor white kids and black kids. He loved both the white country music and the black Blues and successfully melded them together. He took Blues songs, like Arthur ‘Big Boy’ Crudup’s ‘That’s alright, Mama’, ‘My baby left me’ and ‘So glad you’re mine’ and rocked them up. He did the same with lots of other current R&B tracks and created a new style of music in the process.

The Sun recording were full of vibrancy and menace. Elvis took R&B classics like ‘Good Rockin’ tonight’, ‘Baby let’s play house’, and ‘Mystery Train’ as well as Country songs like ‘Blue Moon of Kentucky’, ‘You’re right, I’m left, she’s Gone’ and ‘I Don’t Care if the Sun don’t Shine’ and adding a little pizzazz to them. He speeded them up a bit and slightly altered the beat and rhythm. Those small changes were his genius.

John Lennon said that when they took him into the army they not only cut his hair off but his balls too. But that was not quite true. There was more to it than that. The incredible raw Rockabilly only lasted a short while. Elvis himself was so shaken by the reaction of the screaming girls to every move he made that he soon started playing to it and became a parody of himself. When he moved to RCA he moved into more Rock ‘n’ Roll, Pop and ballad.

I often wonder how good it would have been if he had stayed at Sun Records and never met the atrocious Colonel Parker. Parker was a showman and hustler out for a quick buck. He saw Rock as a short term phenomenon and directed Elvis into a more popular sound and all those terrible movies. RCA were a big record label that did not know how to record Rockabilly or value it. The army merely speeded up the decline.

Strangely the raw Rockabilly sound was not the most popular. All the imitators go for the rather sad late sixties Elvis in those silly costumes and shades. They prefer the Pop to the Rock. They never copy the unique style that Elvis started with when he was truly unique – the contrasting shirt and jackets, tight trousers, long quiff and duck-tail and side-burns. Nobody had looked like that.

The sun sessions were what I consider to be the real Elvis from 1956. The simple Rockabilly trio created a different sound and changed the world. Sun was the real deal.

24. Jefferson Airplane – Surrealistic Pillow

The West Coast Acid Rock sound was my soundtrack to the sixties. San Francisco was the centre of the alternative Freak culture and led the way, along with London and Los Angeles, in creating the late 1960s Underground music scene.

The San Franciscan sound came out of Folk-rock and espoused a different set of values. This was the sixties social explosion that melded sex, drugs, creativity, music and politics into an alternative life-style that was opposed to the war and selfish, greedy values of the establishment.

Acid Rock was very much album based with lots of long trippy numbers but there were a number of incredible singles that were released and actually got into the charts. The live shows were accompanied with light shows and created a great atmosphere.

Jefferson Airplane was the leading band from the Haight Asbury area and supposedly lived communally in a big house in the area. They played lots of free concerts in the park and along with the Grateful Dead, Country Joe and the Fish and Big Brother and the Holding Company created a vibrant music scene.

Grace Slick joined the band from The Great Society and brought two of her songs with her – ‘White rabbit’ and ‘Somebody to love’. They were released as what is one of the best singles ever and form the backbone of this album.

I love other Jefferson airplane albums but those two tracks make this one my favourite.

25. Fleetwood Mac – Fleetwood Mac

The Blues was adopted by white guys in Britain in the early sixties. They saw it as an authentic, raw music unlike the overproduced Pop of that era with people like Tommy Roe and Bobby Vee. It became the basic fodder of the British Beat Bands of the mid-sixties starting with Alexis Korner, Graham Bond and Cyril Davies and including the Rolling Stones, Animals, Yardbirds and Them. When the Underground was coming into being in the late 1960s Blues was still seen as being credible. The later British Blues Boom seemed to mainly stem from John Mayall. So many Blues musicians graduated out of that Mayall Band that it became the nursery for Blues talent.

Peter Green had replaced Clapton when he’d left Mayall to join with Bruce and Baker to form Cream. He joined with John McVie and Mick Fleetwood (Both also from Mayall), and got in Jeremy Spencer on slide guitar. It created a brilliant band with three distinct styles. There was Peter Green’s fluid, crystal clear, Blues guitar, Jeremy Spencer’s Elmore James slide guitar impersonations and live they did some Rocky songs.

I used to see them regularly. They were not only exceptional musicians doing great numbers but they were also fun to see and dance to.

They later went on to develop a Progressive Rock style with Green’s songs like the amazing ‘Green Manalishi’ and ‘Man of the world’.

This first album focussed on a balance between Pete Green’s style and Jeremy’s slide work.

It was a brilliant debut album. Tracks like ‘I gotta move’, ‘Hellhound on my trail’, ‘Shake your moneymaker’, ‘My heart beat like a hammer’ and ‘Long grey mare’ took Blues music up a notch. The quality was so good.