Extract – 537 Essential Rock Albums – Pt. 1 The first 270 (Paperback/Kindle)

Posted on by Opher

I have selected 537 essential albums. They are diverse and brilliant. These are what everybody should have in their collection.

In this book I tell you something about each one of them. This is volume one. The second volume will follow at some time! See if you agree!

537 Essential Rock Albums – Pt. 1 The first 270 eBook : Goodwin, Opher: Amazon.co.uk: Books

254. Gang of Four – Entertainment

Gang of Four are a post punk band. Entertainment was their first album and was released in 1979.

They are one of my three favourite Punk bands. Their lyrics are extremely intelligent and an expose of the social and political scenario with all the outrageous greed that runs the world.

They are not just about lyrics though. This was a highly developed style. The guitar sounds great with its strident sound and riffs; there is a lot of experimentation in song structure and dynamics, use of feed-back and talk over; there is a great call and answer interchange between n the vocals and all this is coupled with a great bass which is very prominent in the mix and a great pounding bass.

As a debut album this is very well constructed.

They have it all.

There is not a weak track on this album but the most striking for me are ‘Anthrax’, ‘Ether’, ‘Return the gift’ and ‘At home he’s a tourist’. I love the rawness of the music and the sound they generated but I loved the sentiments even more. If only music could change the world just like we dreamed long ago that it would do.

255. Ry Cooder – Paradise & Lunch

This was Ry’s fourth solo album. He came out from playing his session work to produce his own material. The sound on this album was centred on Ry’s crystal clear guitar.

It was a nice smooth album with Ry producing a nice mix of Gospel, Blues, R&B and Rock. The musicianship and production made it sound so soft that it appeared effortless. All the instruments melded together so perfectly.

Apart from one song the album was made up of traditional, blues, Gospel and R&B covers. These included the Blind Willie McTell ‘Married Man’s a Fool’, Bobby Womack’s ‘It’s all over now’, JB Lenoir’s ‘Fool for a cigarette’ the old work-song ‘Tamp them up solid’ and the gospel track ‘Jesus on the mainline’.

They were subjugated to Ry’s special treatment complete with chorus and call and response. It all worked fine.

The album ended with ‘Ditty Wah Ditty’. This was done as a nice light acoustic number. This is  a bit like coming back full circle because ‘Diddy Wah Diddy’ was the first single that Captain Beefheart released, except this was done as a R&B number, and Ry Cooder was the guitarist on the Captain’s first album.

256. Jimi Hendrix – Concerts

Well one thing is sure and that is that you can’t have too much Hendrix especially the live stuff. Jimi was a supernatural wonder, a man for whom new superlatives need to be invented. He only released 4 albums in his life-time and yet there are now countless CDs of unreleased material, studio outtakes, studio jams and live material. I just did a count up and I have a staggering 725 CDs of Jimi.

I love all the material. To hear Jimi noodling away, jamming to a groove in the studio, is quite incredible. Then there are the raucous early concerts and the finished article. There were many faces to Jimi Hendrix, some soft and lyrical and others loud, harsh and raw. Whatever mood or style the one thing that was consistent was the quality of the musicianship. Jimi did not stop. His whole short life was music. His guitar was part of him and he was so technically proficient that the only limitations in the sounds he could produce were those of his own imagination.

These tracks are the early Jimi between 1968 and 1970 when he was fronting the Experience with his dare-devil guitar histrionics and showmanship. They capture the excitement but I can tell you that no matter how loud you play them, how good your sound system is or powerful your imagination they don’t come near to the excitement of actually being there.

These tracks were all recorded in the States at San Francisco, San Diego, New York and Los Angeles. So, unfortunately I was not at any of these concerts; but I did see him three times and I can picture him there when I play these.

There has never been anything like Jimi Hendrix.

257. Elvis Costello – Spike

The early punky Costello was great and it is normal for an artist to mellow and mature as they get older, wiser and more adept. I am pleased to say that while Elvis certainly did develop his music, broaden it and bring in different styles, the power and ferocity of his lyrics and delivery were only intensified. This album was exceptionally spiky in places.

This was released in 1989 and was his twelfth studio album. It also contains one of my favourite tracks.

At this time Elvis moved labels and was also co-writing with Paul McCartney. Who knows? Perhaps the Beatles could have reformed with Elvis taking the John Lennon role? He certainly had the venom and bite to do justice to it. He could have pulled off the acerbic part quite well.

The two tracks he wrote with Paul are very good. ‘Veronica’ was very commercial but ‘Pads paws and claws’ was more experimental but still very accessible and catchy. It was a collaboration that showed promise.

‘Baby plays around’ was a beautiful song, sung very delightfully with a great deal of melancholy concerning a break-up of a relationship in which one’s partner is openly unfaithful. ‘…This Town’ was the opening track and was much more like the Elvis of his first few albums. This was the Punk Elvis lamenting the fact that in order to get on you had to be a complete bastard. ‘God’s comic’ is a great song and send-up of religion, a priest who had not been too religious has an audience with God who is listening to Andrew Lloyd Webber and wondering if he should have given the world to the monkeys. ‘Deep Dark Truthful Mirror’ is a song about confronting your own failings.

This was an album with a number of different styles, moods, instrumentation and types of songs. If that was all it would be an excellent album but that wasn’t all. There were two songs that had an exceptional impact on me. The first was the snarling diatribe against hanging ‘Let him dangle’. It told the story of a couple of young thieves who were cornered by the police. Young Bentley was already under arrest and Craig had a gun pointing at the police officer. ‘Let him have it,’ Bentley told Craig. Craig shot the officer dead. Craig was underage got life and Bentley was hung. Elvis turned it into a passionate expose of the viciousness of State murder and the hatred and primitive revenge involved. It was a thought-provoking tale delivered with real anger.

But the stand out track for me was ‘Tramp the dirt down’. It still sends chills running through me when I play it. The melodic beauty of the song only serves to accentuate the hatred in the lyrics as Elvis contemplates the cold, calculated duplicity of Margaret Thatcher. I still have a vivid memory of her standing on the steps at number ten delivering her election speech at the start of her term of office saying how she would bring harmony to the country while already plotting to break the unions and create havoc. Elvis pours out his vitriol as he goes through the trail of Tory deceit over the treatment of public services, the health service and the glorification of the Falklands war. It’s probably not too late to get there and tramp that dirt down so she never gets out, perhaps a good sharp stake should be deployed first though!

258. The Fall – Slates

The Fall were one of John Peel’s favourite bands. It is easy to see why. They have consistently gone about doing their own thing throughout the whole of their long career without the slightest nod to fashion, commerciality or anybody’s views.

Mark E Smith is the Fall. Despite all the personnel changes he is the guvnor! He directs the music, bosses the band around and dictates what goes on. He once said that even if it was him with his moth-in-law on bongos it would be the Fall.

They go about producing their raw output of post-punk without regard to taste, political correctness or the media and often with seeming contempt for their own audience.

I have been to live performances with strange film intros that went on and on, Mark seemingly so intoxicated he could not function, and virtual fights on stage. I’ve also been to concerts where they have motored along completely in tune with the audience with everyone bouncing about and singing along with Mark.

This is the usual type of Fall album. The driving riffs with Mark reciting and shouting his lyrics over it. The result is great. I can’t say he has a great voice but the effect is more interesting than all the plastic bands put together. From ‘Hip Priest’ to ‘Slates, slags etc.’ it drives along. There is that repetitive coda and variation that makes it interesting. You can feel the Captain Beefheart influence.

259. Randy Newman – Lonely at the top

This has all Randy’s great songs all gathered together. It gives you a great view of Randy’s genius. There is so much of Randy’s quirky humour and idiosyncratic observation. He is able to hone a lyric to its bare bones, deliver it with perfect phrasing to a simple but perfectly effective backing. This album has many of my favourites.

‘Political Science’ is a sardonic view of the rest of the world in which Randy suggests that America should just nuke everybody, except Australia – don’t want to hurt no kangaroo – boom goes London! Boom Paris!

‘God’s song (That’s why I love mankind)’ is a send up of religion in which God is a character who is a capricious individual who doesn’t care a jot about people yet is amazed by the antics of humans in the face of his vindictiveness.

There’s the full spectrum here with ‘Short people’, ‘Rednecks’, ‘Jolly Coppers on parade’, ‘I love L.A.’ ‘Germany before the war’, ‘Birmingham’ etc etc. The album ends with his own send up of himself with ‘Lonely at the top’.

What a song-writer! What humour!

260. Sam Cooke – Portrait of a legend

Sam was the guy with the smooth silken voice who was capable of big soulful ballads, Pop songs and more rocking numbers. That voice came straight out of Gospel. He started singing at an early age and became the lead vocalist with the leading Gospel group ‘The Soul Stirrers’.

He left Gospel to move into secular R&B focussing on producing singles and immediately hit with ‘You send me’. This crossed over into the Pop charts and was followed by a string of other hits ‘Only sixteen’, ‘Cupid’, ‘Chain gang’, ‘Little Red Rooster’, ‘What a wonderful world’, ‘Bring it on home to me’, ‘Twistin’ the night away’ and ‘Shake’.

There was a great deal of variation in his work. A comparison between the Pop of ‘Cupid’ and the Blues of ‘Little Red Rooster’ (recorded before the Stones did their version). He also tackled issues like the Civil Rights fight for justice which was an incendiary thing to do at the time; his song ‘A change is going to come’ was a brave thing to do.

Sam’s soulful voice was one of the precursors of Soul music. Unfortunately Sam was not there to participate. He was shot dead at a motel in very dubious circumstances. Seemingly he was drunk and took a girl back to his room. She stole his clothes and ran off claiming he was going to rape her and the distraught Sam was shot dead by the white motel owner. We shall never know by there seemed to be a racial element involved in this.

Extract – 537 Essential Rock Albums – Pt. 1 The first 270 

Posted on by Opher

537 Essential Rock Albums – Pt. 1 The first 270 eBook : Goodwin, Opher: Amazon.co.uk: Books

This is not your average run through an opinionated list of somebody’s favourite albums. This is much more than that. By the time you get to the end of the book you will be in no doubt as to the type of person who has written this and what their views are. This is Opher at his most extreme and outspoken.

He’s been there at the front through thousands of shows, purchased tens of thousands of albums and listened to more music than seems possible to fit into a single life. He’s run courses on Rock Music, written books and been there in the studio with many of the greats. But more important than that is that he has lived the life. He was there living it.

You’ll find a lot of albums and artists in here that you will never have heard of and they are all brilliant. You’ll find out a lot of information about them that you did not know; but more than that you will hear someone who was there telling you why they were so important to him and giving his view on the issues around and in that music. There is a depth, a political and social perspective and a personal involvement.

The passion suffuses this like TNT through dynamite.

Whether you agree with the choices or not you’ll love the journey.

261. Jeff Beck – Truth

Jeff Beck was one of the world’s great innovative guitarists. He came from my neck of the woods in the Deep South of the Thames Delta and played in one of my local groups – The Tridents – before going on to replace Clapton in the Yardbirds. His arrival sparked the most experimental and dynamic style of the band as they moved from R&B and Pop into psychedelia. Beck’s guitar-work was highly original and innovative and drove the band into a new level. They became widely accepted on the emerging Underground scene as a serious band.

Then it all started falling apart just when it should have been at its best. The Yardbirds had taken on Jimmy Page and had the most incredible double lead guitar attack ever. However it was not to be. Jeff started becoming inconsistent and the band fell apart. Jimmy took the remnants off with him to form Led Zeppelin. Keith went off to Renaissance and Jeff went off to go solo and then form the Jeff Beck Group. That band consisted of John Stewart on vocals, Ronnie Wood on bass and Micky Waller on drums. It was an incredible line-up.

I saw them play a couple of times and Jeff was always stunning on guitar though I never hugely liked John’s vocals.

This album ‘Truth’ is one of the great albums of British Progressive Rock. It features a number of great progressive bluesy and psychedelic numbers alongside some delicate workings of traditional songs like ‘Greensleeve’ and psyched out ‘Ole’ Man River’ which I always thought were a little incongruous though they seemed to work and gave the album another dimension.

The album starts with a version of the Yardbirds ‘Shapes of things’ in a very different psychedelic arrangement. Then there was a version of Tim Roses’ ‘Morning Dew’ and ‘Beck’s Bolero’ along with some blues favourites ‘Rock my plimsoul’ (which was a psyched out version of Rock me baby), ‘I ain’t superstitious’ and ‘You shook me’. They were all given the Beck treatment.

It was widely recognised as one of the major albums of the Progressive scene.

262. Dale Hawkins – Oh Suzie Q

In 1957 Dale Hawkins recorded ‘Suzie Q’. It was not quite like anything else. It took the Rockabilly of Elvis and married to the swamp-blues of Louisiana. The result was a bluesy guitar solo, muddy beat with cowbells and a swampy style of Rock.

He followed it up with good Rockabilly tracks like ‘Juanita’ and ‘Tornado’ which both had some of the elements but did not catch that magic of the ‘Suzie Q’ brand of Swamp Rock.

‘Oh Suzie Q’ gathers those tracks together with a rocked up version of Little Walters ‘My Baby’ and  some other strong songs ‘Four letter word (Rock)’ and ‘Wild, Wild World’.

If only Dale could have developed that initial Swamp Rock into something more he would have been as big as Elvis. Unfortunately his other material was good but not quite as good.

263. Big Mama Thornton – The original hound dog

Big Mama Thornton was a big lady with a really big voice. She was outrageous for her time often dressing as a man in her stage act. Like a number of R&B artists she came into secular music from a background of Gospel.

A lot of her early fifties output was good hard hitting R&B like ‘I smell a rat’ (covered by White Stripes) ‘They call me Big Mama’ and ‘You don’t move me no more. But there were two tracks that she is best remembered for. The first of these was ‘Hound Dog’. Big Mama was the first to record this Lieber & Stoller classic as early as 1952. She belted the song out to a great guitar backing and great R&B beat complete with yelps and whoops. It prompted a response song (quite common during those days) from Rufus Thomas on Sun Records and then was later rocked up by Elvis. The second was a slower bluesier song called ‘Ball and chain’. Big Mama Thornton did a really soulful version of this but it gained much more prominence when Janis Joplin turned it into an anguished gutsy song that often stole the show with the intensity she put into it.

Big Mama remains a seminal force. The original Hound Dog collection together most of her early tracks.

264. Nuggets – Original Artyfacts from the first Psychedelic Era, 1965-1968

When the British invasion took place in 1964 the Americans were shocked. They had no response. It was as if they had been invaded by aliens and did not understand the new language. However, it did not take them long to start to respond. All over the continent kids started growing their hair and forming bands. The country exploded with a plethora of new bands. Many of them were clones of British bands but many more were original and different. As the 1960s progressed these bands developed with it so that when the style turned to psychedelia they did their own versions.

There were hundreds of these bands. Every town and city had flourishing little flocks of them all playing to their mates in the local clubs and doing their best to pull the girls. Most of them died away without leaving any trace. Some recorded the odd single which might have sold locally and a few managed to secure major label contracts.

Because this music was rehearsed in their parents garages and was performed by young kids it began to be called Garage Punk.

It would probably have languished unheard collecting dust on shelves in those same garages and occasionally being dusted off for a sentimental nostalgic evening between old friends if it wasn’t for two men. Jack Holzman (founder of Elektra records) and Lenny Kaye (later the lead guitarist for the Patti Smith Group) had the bright idea of tracking down a number of these lesser known tracks and putting them out on a double album. At the time they thought it would be an interesting project and had no idea that in the process they would create a number of distinct genres, spark a wave of interest, and have far reaching effects further down the line. They called it Nuggets because they were collecting all those fairly obscure nuggets of music from that rich vein of the 1960s.

In actual fact it was rather a strange eclectic collection of fairly disparate recordings, some of which were quite big hits, some of which were obscure, and involving a wide range of styles. They were not really all Garage Bands or Garage Punk as Lenny described them. What they did do was spark an enormous amount of interest that started that snowball rolling down the mountainside picking up the debris from the sixties as it gained momentum until it exploded on the scene with the force of a nuclear avalanche.

The album Nuggets spawned other albums and album sets – Boulders, Pebbles, Chocolate Soup for Diabetics, High in the Mid 60s, Fading Yellow, and on and on and on. I was running a History f Rock Music course back in the 1980s as an Adult Education Course and one of my students was so smitten with Nuggets that he specialised in Garage Punk and started collecting Vinyl albums. He was a young man with disposable cash and by the end of the two year course he had amassed two thousand five hundred albums of Garage Punk Bands, compilations and related material!

On the Pop side there were the Castaways, Knickerbockers and Barbarians. On the Psychedelic side there were the Electric Prunes, Seeds, Count Five, Chocolate Watch Band and Cryan’ Shames. On the Garage Punk side you had the Leaves, Premiers and Standells. On the psyched out Bluesy side you had the Amboy Dukes, Shadows of knight and Blues Magoos. On the really weird psychedelic Punk you had the Magic Mushrooms  and Mouse & the Traps. Etc.

It was an inspired choice.

265. Pebbles Vol. 3 – The Acid gallery

Following the success of Nuggets there were three more series of Nuggets, followed by Boulders and then Pebbles. All over the planet people were scouring through the dusty tapes of tiny record labels to turn up the most obscure tracks by the most obscure bands.

There was a treasure trove of unheard youthful genius waiting to be exposed to the light of day (or the sound of ear). More importantly, as far as the compilers were concerned, there was money to be made.

The most interesting thing to come out of this as we found ourselves buried under collections of multiple volumes like Collecting Peppermint Clouds, Electric Lemonade, Nederland Nuggets, Gravel, Coloured Lights and Sounds, Back from the Grave, Aliens Psychos and Wild Things, Acid Visions, Acid Queens, A trip to Toytown, A trip through the sugar cube, A Deadly Dose of Wylde Psych, Circus Days, Flower Power, Garage Mechanics, Girls in the Garage, Mindrocker, Oceanic Odyssey, Psychedelic States, Syde Trips, Tripzone, Turds on a Bum Ride, Ugly Things, and We can Fly, was that there was so much of it. Not only that but it was global. Seemingly all over the world in the most unlikely places, such as Peru, Singapore and Saudi Arabia, young kids had been turned on by the Beatles and Stones, donned flares and beads, grown their hair and formed Beat groups, psychedelic outfits and aped what was going on in the States and Britain. It was universal. All the kids in Russia were dying to get Western Rock Music. Turkey was aflame with psychedelia.

Forget your cold war and global politics this was the unifying force of music, fashion and rebellion. Everyone wanted to be in a band from Australia to Iceland, Brazil to New Zealand. It brought the Berlin wall down, smashed the Iron Curtain, bulldozed the Bamboo Curtain, and breached the religious divides.

All we need to solve all the world’s problems is to create another Beatles and spark off a new social rebellion on the lines of the sixties.

Anyway, enough of those flights of whimsy and back to reality, or at least the unreality of Pebbles Vol. 3 – The Acid Gallery.

If you are looking for weird and wonderful then look no further. This is what happens when groups of young kids get their hands on ridiculously strong hallucinogenic substances which they indulge to extreme, learn the rudiments of an instrument, become exposed to a lot of new sounds created by their slightly older and more competent compatriots and find themselves in a recording studio with the means to indulge and experiment. Their efforts are collected here on Pebbles 3.

There are hilarious parodies such as the one of Jefferson Airplane by Jefferson Handkerchief – ‘I’m allergic to flowers’; horror stories based on a psychedelic Kafka story with ‘The Spider and the Fly’ and just psyched out weirdness like ‘Let’s take a trip’, ‘The reality of (air) fried Borsk’ and the parody of Dylan in the wonderful ‘Like a dribbling Fram’.

If you’re looking for something outlandish and different this might well be it.

266. Sam & Dave – Soul man

Both Sam and Dave started off singing Gospel in their churches before joining Gospel Bands. They met up in a Gospel band and then, after discovering that their disparate voices could gel, headed off into secular R&B. Sam had the smooth voice and Dave the more aggressive and raw. Together it worked well when doing both call-and-response or harmonising.

They soon got themselves a reputation for a dynamic act. They had their dance moves and put everything in so that they came off-stage drenched in sweat. It got them numerous nick-names like ‘The sultans of sweat’ and ‘The dynamic duo’.

It was moving to Stax and working with the MGs with people like Steve Cropper that got them their break-through as major players on the Soul scene. They had numerous hits with songs like ‘Soul Man’, ‘Hold on I’m Coming’, ‘When something is wrong with my baby’, ‘Brown sugar, Soul Sister’ and ‘You don’t know what you mean to me’.

Seemingly there was lots of tension between the two of them which led to splits, periods of time when they did not talk and even open fisticuffs.

It seemed to me that the whole Blues Brothers act was based on Sam & Dave.

267. Animals – Animals

The Animals came crashing out of Newcastle on the back of the Beat R&B boom of 1964 led by the Rolling Stones et al. They quickly established themselves as one of the rawest most authentic R&B bands in the country and stormed into the charts. Eric Burdon’s gravelly Geordie voice seemed not only well suited to the Blues but also well beyond his tender years. Amply backed by the likes of Alan Price on organ, Hilton Valentine on guitar, John Steel on drums and Chas Chandler on bass they created a unique Blues sound which can be heard on this first album. They even backed Sonny Boy Williamson on a tour of England. That album was similar to the one he did with the Yardbirds.

They specialised in cover of Bo Diddley, John Lee Hooker and Chuck Berry but varied that with some Ray Charles and even Fats Domino.

This more eclectic approach led them into the rather extraordinary field of Bob Dylan. Impressed by the early Dylan albums they were taken to do a cover of a Folk song and ended up doing a traditional one by the name of ‘House of the Rising Sun’. It was so successful with the amplified guitar and Eric’s great vocal delivery that it became enormous.

Sadly, for me, that signalled the end. Instead of continuing with great R&B stuff such as the brilliant ‘Story of Bo Diddley’ which told the story of how Bo Diddley had come into their club in Newcastle with the gorgeous Duchess to listen to them play his material only to declare that they were rubbish, in favour of a more commercial sound.

This first album is them with their rawer sound and I like that best.

268. Arthur ‘Big Boy’ Crudup – That’s Alright Mama

Arthur was a street busker and blues singer from the late forties and early fifties and was supposedly quite a large man. He did not make much of a living out of it and at one time was supposedly living in a packing crate under the platform at the Chicago railway station.

He played acoustic guitar and sometimes electrified this to record with a little combo.

His big claim to fame is that he recorded a handful of songs that were destined to become massive.

Elvis Presley came from a poor share-cropping family in Tupelo Mississippi. He was brought up in a poor area with a mixed black and white community. His musical style did not come out of nowhere. He stole it from the local blues singers that he used to love listening to.

When he recorded for Sam Philips he was doing covers of old Blues and Country songs that he’d absorbed. His genius was to give them that extra zip that changed them from Blues and Country into Rockabilly.

One of the guys that he covered was Arthur ‘Big Boy’ Crudup. Elvis’s first release was ‘That’s alright Mama’ and he also recorded ‘My baby left me’ and ‘So glad you’re mine’.

Arthur was much more than just those three numbers and other interesting tracks include ‘Mean old Frisco’, ‘Rock me mama’ and ‘Katie Mae’.

269. Big Three – Cavern Stomp

At the time when the Beatles were emerging from Liverpool on to the world stage arguably the best band in the city was the powerhouse trio called The Big Three. They consisted of Johnny Hutchinson, Johnny Gustafson and Brian Griffiths. They were reputedly the loudest and most aggressive and something of their dynamic stage act can be heard on the fabulous four track EP ‘At the Cavern’. Supposedly the whole show at the Cavern was recorded but the tape was subsequently wiped! What an act of criminality!

Unfortunately they got a big brushed to one side and short-changed as the attention swept to the Beatles and they were never fed with good enough material or received a sympathetic recording production and so never really captured their live form on record.

There were a couple of good singles including a great version of Sam Cooke’s ‘Bring it on home to me’ and their signature tune ‘Cavern Stomp’ but never made that break-through.

That wonderful EP makes it all worthwhile though and that plus all the rest is on this album.

My Favourite Top 25 Albums

Posted on by Opher

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.