100 Albums to Listen to Before the End, 1

From Aavikko to Jacques Brel

The absurdity of trying to capture, in words, why a song is good or meaningful, speaks for itself. That doesn’t rule out a good list of recommendations though, or stories about musicians, or perhaps new perspectives on their work, particularly from other gifted musicians and artists. It just means that there’s a lot of signposting in what follows; ‘sublime’, ‘superb’, ‘great’, etc. with little else beyond incidental anecdote.

Another thing, these are albums, so artists who scattered their greats across several long players, such as Funkadelic or Faust, are mostly absent, but I have included a few compilation albums where an artist only put out ‘sides’ or where, despite not ever making a great album, they’re just too good to ignore.

An obvious point, these are works of art, and although they certainly can be compared, to put Beethoven alongside, say, Ween is like saying a blackbird is as good as a sandal. All we can say is that all of the following songs express a facet of the ever turning, ever shining, gemstone.

Finally, everyone is an expert in music, just as they are in comedy, so there’ll be no attempt to justify this selection. Suffice it to say that if you’re hoping to find here modern Jazz, Country and Western, Hip Hop, Mahler, Metal, The Rolling Stones, Mahler, a ‘fair’ selection from women songwriters, experimental or ‘contemporary classical’, any music of the last thirty years or any music that you might hear played loudly from an open window, you’ll probably be disappointed.

Off we go then…

1: Aavikko, History of History of Muysic. There. Coming straight in with a band formed in the last thirty years. Oh well, rules are meant to be broken. Aavikko, so named I believe to feature first in lists like these, are a Finnish synth band who specialise in Balkan-style dance tracks. Great melodies and at their best diabolically groovy. As their motto has it, ‘we play - you dance!’ I defy anyone to listen to their Holiday Inn and not do some kind of stupid rhythmic stomping.

2: Africa, Music from ‘Lil Brown’. Obscure but sumptuous forerunner to funk from a band that, as far as I can tell, casually drifted together to record this corker (in 1968), then casually drifted apart. Includes storming covers of Paint it Black and Louis Louis. No idea what ‘Lil Brown’ was.

3: Al Green, Call Me. Or Gets Next to You. The grooviest Al Green number is his thumping cover of I Wanna Hold Your Hand, but he’s rightly famous for his ballads. After a string of hits in the early seventies Green became a minister, got done for assault and allegedly beat his wife with a boot.

There is, by the way, an electric cover of Let’s Stay Together on Jimmy Smith’s legendary live album, Root Down (sampled by the Beastie Boys). Highly recommended.

4: Angelo Badalamenti, Twin Peaks. Badalementi has had a long career, but his best stuff came out of his ‘second best marriage’ to David Lynch, particularly his two collaborations with Julee Cruise, The Voice of Love and Floating Into The Night, which are a delicate ecstacy. Take a look at this wonderful account of how he came up with Laura Palmer’s famous theme.

5: Bach, J.S. St. Matthew’s Passion (Richter, 1979). Carl Sagan asked eminent biologist Lewis Thomas to recommend some music to send on the Voyager spacecraft for aliens, ‘I would send the complete works of Johann Sebastian Bach,’ he said, then added, ‘But that would be boasting.’ Indeed it would; and it was all made by one man, working away, without honour, in a small provincial town.

The aim and final reason of all music should be nothing else but the Glory of God and the refreshment of the spirit.

You said it Johan. I would listen to Richter’s recording of the Passion during my darkest hours, living in Poole in the late nineties, full of rage and despair at the world I found I had to live in.¹ Bach’s alchemy transmuted the pain into lonely gold. How consoling his work is, how profound (take a listen to the great Jonathan Miller talking about the Erbarme dich), how inexpressibly beautiful. We all worship different gods, but in Bach we unite in wonder.

I wouldn’t bother with any other interpreter of his choral work; Karl Richter was to Bach what Furtwängler was to Beethoven. The power, sincerity and divine joy of Richter’s Passion, or his Requiem, or his Cantatas, is peerless. Other recordings of Bach I recommend include Britten’s Brandenburg Concertos, Pinnock’s concerti (indeed pretty much all of Trevor Pinnock’s ‘HIP’ chamber music), Szeryng’s violin sonatas and partitas and Tortelier’s (or Fournier’s) cello suites. András Schiff is my favourite interpreter of Bach’s keyboard pieces.

6: The Beatles, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. I could of course have put Rubber Soul, Revolver, Magical Mystery Tour, The Beatles (i.e. The White Album), Abbey Road, Let it Be or the singles collection, all of which are masterpieces. My view is that anyone who doesn’t love the Beatles has a crummy love life, can’t do anything creative for toffee and tortures kittens. I’ve chosen ‘Pepper’ for personal reasons as my mum bought this for me when I was eleven after my first day at school and I listened to it constantly for three years. I listen to The White Album more now.

I must confess I’m a bit of a Beatles nerd. I’ve got a ‘Dad fact’ for pretty much all of their songs. A selection; the original lyrics to Yesterday were ‘Ham and Eggs, Oh my baby how I love your legs’ (which I think they should have recorded); at 2:58 in Hey Jude you can hear Paul McCartney, after making a mistake on the piano, say ‘Fuckin’ Hell’; the first hammered chords at the start of Ob-Bla-Di-Oh-Bla-Da were delivered in a rage by Lennon who was fed up with recording it (and they do sound hateful); Because uses the chords from The Moonlight Sonata backwards; and the egg man, is me.

7: Beethoven, Ludwig van. Symphony No. 9 (Furtwängler, 1942; the Pristine Classical remaster). Many consider Wilhelm Furtwängler to be the greatest conductor of all time. This ‘42 version of the 9th is terrifying in its cataclysmic intensity, as if the orchestra are playing in the centre of a volcano — which in a sense they were. I also recommend Furtwängler’s divine ‘47 6th (the Furtwänglersound remaster), Kleiber’s 1975 7th and 5th, The Busch Quartet’s phenomenal recordings of the late quartets (the 15th quartet being the most beautiful piece of music ever written and, here, recorded; be sure to get the pristine remaster) and Alfred Brendel’s 1970 cycle of the sonatas (particularly the 14th, 15th, 21st and 23rd) although I have a soft spot for Brautigam.

Some favourite Beethoven quotations; ‘Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy’, ‘Beethoven can write music, thank God, but he can do nothing else on earth,’ and ‘Only the pure in heart can make good soup.’

8: Beirut, Gulag Orkestar. The first two albums by Beirut are excellent (although the lyrics are embarrassing; ‘No I was not there, on the church stair, the wind in my hair, fled through night’s air, I saw a brown bear, I wonder where, over there…!’). I saw them live in Osaka after the release of their second album, with Shugo Tokumaru supporting; the best concert I’ve ever been to. Their rendition of Kocani Orkestar’s Siki Siki Baba had the concert hall weeping with joy, strangers embracing, swords beaten into ploughshares.

9: Billie Holiday, Solitude. The tender-hearted Queen of Jazz produced most of her best work in the earlier Columbia period, but this later cut (originally released as ‘Billie Holiday sings’) is as wistful and tragic as the poor woman’s life. Her extremely thin voice couldn’t survive all the drink and drugs and soon after this it collapsed, as did she, without a penny — the whole lot stolen by her bastard husband.

You can trace the modern history of black people in the songs of their women. Before the seventies they appear to have been in love and reasonably groovy about it, even despite cruel, abusive partners. Then Doris Troy came along with a warning — Watcha goin’ a do ‘bout it? — after which it was all Go Now, and Mr. Big Stuff, and I Will Survive. Now I don’t know what black women sing about. Nicky Minaj is awfully taken with her pussy.

10: Bob Dylan, Highway 61 Revisited. No, my impression of Bob Dylan is the best. Robert Zimmerman was the greatest writer of other people’s songs² although he wrote a good few for himself alone. This album, with nine perfect tracks, just about edges it for me, over Blonde on Blonde, The Basement Tapes, Bringing it All Back Home and Blood on the Tracks.

Dylan, incidentally, is the only performer (along with Ray Davis) I know of to have expressed baffled sadness at the fact that he can no longer write the songs he once could. You’d think more slebs would be on the record expressing dismay at the death of their spiritual selves, but of course the part that feels dismay has died too.

11: Brian Eno, Another Green World. Brian Eno loves water. All of his best songs are about it, or feel like drifting on it, or pleasantly drowning in it. Discreet Music is another good one, composed, apparently, during a nasty flu (an illness which I’ve always felt, as you can hear in Eno’s long lotus-eating dirge, have something of the pleasantness of a soft death in them). He faded in the 80s, and started to find U2 worth getting excited about, although he continues to be an exceptional interviewee. Somehow everything he says is compelling even when it’s complete balderdash. I took the idea of ‘scenius’ — the collective genius of a milieu — from Eno, as well as a phrase of his ‘I feel like I’ve slipped out of the normal run of things’, which I wrote somewhere or other, can’t remember where.

12: Can, Future Days. Generally I prefer Can’s later albums, Flow Motion and Saw Delight, but this is apostasy, so I’ve chosen this mid-point piece, a Mediterranean-German hypnogogic machine-Jazz experimental funk reverie, which was the favourite of their enigmatic front man, Daimyo Suzuki, although his highpoint probably came while singing, on their most highly regarded album, Ege Bamyasi, ‘You’re losing, you’re losing, you’re losing your vitamin C.’ Quite.

Other highlights in their amazing repertoire include She Brings the Rain, Tango Whiskeyman, Turtles Have Short Legs, Halleluwah (which spawned the whole late 80s baby-hat ‘Madchester’ thing), Mighty Girl and a personal fave, the late Aspectacle.

13: Cat Stevens, Harold and Maude. Cat Stevens adored himself, had a low opinion of women and a shallow idea of love, which might explain his conversion to Islam and his belief that Salman Rushdie should be executed because, as he explained in an interview, ‘if someone defames the prophet, then he must die.’ Uh-huh. Just goes to show what can happen to a happy heart. To hear that heart when it was still beating listen to If You Want to Sing Out, or Trouble, or Don’t Be Shy. Tea for the Tillerman is very good too, but stained with cheese, with each succeeding album becoming more and more sentimental, the curse of the cynical heart.

14: Chopin, Frédéric, Nocturnes (Rubinstein, 1965). Chopin would only play in the dark; and has the dark ever sung so beautifully? For me he is the son, to Beethoven’s father and Bach’s holy ghost. As he himself said…

Bach is like an astronomer who, with the help of ciphers, finds the most wonderful stars… Beethoven embraced the universe with the power of his spirit… I do not climb so high. A long time ago, I decided that my universe will be the soul and heart of man.

Rubinstein was the master. His barcarolles, impromptus, waltzes and scherzos are all the best there is. I also listen to Barenboim’s nocturnes, which are sensitive without being gooey, Pollini’s Etudes, which are phenomenal, and Moravec’s marvellous Preludes. Barenboim’s Liszt is also wonderful, as is the tender wistflness of his Songs Without Words, by Mendelssohn.

15: Chris Knox, Beat. Lo-fi Kiwi punk master, Chris Knox, has an atheistic chip on his shoulder, but it is spiritual in its integrity (Stephin Merritt and Brian Eno are, in my book, two other ‘godly atheists’). His best work, which often has superb lyrics (have a read of Inside Story), is scattered across his oevre. This album contains the striding godless masterpiece, When I Have Left This Mortal Coil and the chilling despair of Becoming Something Other.

16: The Cure, Seventeen Seconds. There’s old-school, mid-school and new-school Cure. Growing up, as I did, in the oh-so-gay mid-school Hot Hot Hot years I have a place in my heart for all that foppish gamboling. And I like Robert Smith, a lot; one of our great eccentrics. But it’s his very earliest songs of suburban misery — Jumping Somone Else’s Train, Play For Today, The Funeral Party — which really strike home. Good to listen to in Reading in November, I find, or Crawley, or Rotherham.

17: David Bowie, Hunky Dory. Every song outstanding, which is rare, even on this exalted list. Ziggy Startdust also, of course, but I err towards the sweetness and depth of Hunky Dory. The acoustic version of Quicksand — one of the outtakes — is profundity in pop. My favourite Bowie recording, however, is his BBC cover of the Velvet Underground’s Waiting for the Man, which is just mind-blowing.

Bowie’s advice to creative folk: ‘never play to the gallery.’ He didn’t always follow it himself, but he’s right. Pandering to the audience is death.

18: Desmond Dekker, Intensified. Or Action! Like so many reggae artists of the era, Desmond Dekker produced, over a very short period, an almost bewildering number of timeless cuts, but, as with Bob Marley, Toots and the rest of them, it all dried up as soon as he left Jamaica.

Well, I say that, but he managed to extract a good few years of majestic groove out of his back-catalogue. Check out this stupendous version of Isrealites (with one of my dance heroes in; the guy in the blue trousers behind Dekker).

19: Devo, Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! New wave miracle which (can’t put it better than the Wikipedia entry) mingles kitsch science fiction themes, deadpan surrealist humor and mordantly satirical social commentary (the band name indicates the fact that humanity has stopped evolving and is now going in the opposite direction). New Traditionalists, Devo’s fourth album is also great, and a tad more danceable than their earlier, harder stuff. I highly recommend their early promo videos and live performances, for oddness.

20: Dionne Warwick, Here Where there is Love (Burt Bacharach). Dionne Warwick was Burt Bacharach’s finest interpreter. His best songs are distributed across a few albums, but this one, along with Make Way For Dionne Warwick, is densest with hits. I remember listening to this thirty years ago sitting in an impounded car, rain trickling down the windscreen, while my friend argued furiously with with representatives from Lewisham council in a portacabin fitted with iron grills over the counters.

21: Django Reinhardt, Djangology (compilation). Three-fingered gypsy-jazz guitar-master and chicken thief Django Reinhardt, probably the most influential guitarist of all time, produced an enormous number of sides, assembled in all kinds of collections. Djangologie is pretty much everything, so there’s plenty of wallpaper music, but many, many moments of unmatched genius.

22: Elliott Smith, Either/Or. Elliott Smith was one of America’s greatest songwriters, the equal of Lou Reed, Irving Berlin or the Doziers, and a noble heir of the British masters he so loved; John Lennon, Ray Davis and Rod Argent. An extraordinary musician — some of his playing is inimitable and the structure of some of his songs is bewildering; how on earth did you come up with that sequence (Oh Well Okay, Memory Lane; even slight songs show a mastery of composition)? All of Smith’s albums, starting with his eponymous second album, are beautiful; XO, Figure 8 and From a Basement on a Hill. Fishy death though.

23: The Ethiopians, Train to Skaville (compilation). Leonard Dillon of the Ethiopians wrote a few classics, including one which we should all be dancing to today, Everything Crash, one of many reggae songs about the collapse of society. Other popular reggae themes include; getting angry (don’t do it), boasting (don’t do that either), God (love Him with all your heart, although, strangely, in the form of a little businessman who ruled Ethiopia in the 1970s), the devil (avoid, particularly you Susan), the spirit (feel it), paradise (which you can’t get into with either a ‘long gun’ or ‘a big cheque book’) and ‘big neck police’ (which, if you send fe come cool I up, it no work, for Jah Jah walk right in and cool up the scene; you get a jerk.).

24: The Fall, The Frenz Experiment. The secret to Mark E. Smith is not listening to his work as ‘songs’ but as hex. Also recommended, This Nation’s Saving Grace, Bend Sinister and I Am Kurious Oranj. Mark E. Smith’s autobiography is also worth a read; very funny. Here’s a good quote from his last interview in 2017.

The standard of music these days is fucking terrible. Being poorly you have to watch shit like Jools Holland. A lot of it sounds like when I was 15 and I’d go round to a long-haired guy’s flat to score a joint and they’d always put on some fucking lousy Elton John LP. That sounds like Ed Sheeran to me, a duff singer songwriter from the 70’s you find in charity shops. The trouble with the music biz is that it’s become so bougeois. A middle class executive business like the police force.

25: Fanfare Ciocărlia, Iag Bari. aka The Gypsy Horns From The Mountains Beyond. Balkin brass loveliness from the Romanian 12-piece where brass bands are, apparently, rare. Not so in the UK of course, at least until recently, but now they’re sadly in decline. The Williams Fairey band are going strong (recommended: Acid Brass) as are the legendary Black Dyke (recommended: Symphonic Brass) and Brighouse and Rastrick.

26: Francis Bebey, African Electronic Music 1975-1982 (compilation). Bebey was a Cameroonian writer, composer, sculpter, novelist, producer and researcher. His music blended traditional Makossa with pop and Jazz, accompanied by playful lyrics, such as Pygmy Divorce, in which an outraged Pygmy complains that ‘when I met you, you be slim slim, and light, like a dry leaf, but I kill monkey, I kill elephant, just to feed you, but just now I be sorry, sorry plenty, because you make me cry all the time.’

27: Frank Trumbauer and His Orchestra (et al), The Complete OKeh And Brunswick. This vast and most gorgeous collection combines sides from brass-masters Trambauer, Bix Beiderbecke and Jack Teagarden, along with other greats of the early years of Jazz, before it got all slick and moody. A must-have for anyone who can do a decent bandy-legged, very elbowy kind of dance around the living room, which, alas, isn’t too many of us these days.

28: Gavin Bryars, The Sinking of the Titanic. This album addresses, mood-wise, the part of the Titanic story we’re less familiar with; after everyone died and began floating peacefully down to the sea bed. It is a very good album to peacefully die to, and I speak from experience.

29: Geinoh Yamashirogumi, Symphonic Suite Akira. Geinoh Yamashirogumi is a ‘band’ comprising hundreds of ordinary Japanese people, from all walks of life. Their most popular album, this soundtrack to the Akira, is magnificent; a pounding, swelling, high-tech orchestral production, yet rooted in thousand-year-old Buddhist chants and the forest rituals of medieval Japan. Great to listen to on costly cans, walking round urban city-scapes. Also recommended, if traditional chanting is your bag, Selections From Folk Music on the Silkroad.

30: Georges Brassens, Les amoureux des bancs publics (aka Le Vent). Georges Brassans, one of Europe’s greatest anarchists, learnt his art by banging on a chair while hiding in a basement during the second world war. Between 1952 and 1966 he made ten fabulous albums across which are scattered, by my reckoning, about 30 folk classics, many with a lovely subversive undertone. Brassens second favourite country, after France, was Wales, where he played twice, with Jake Thackray opening for him on his second tour.

31: Goran Bregovic, Undergrond (also Emir Kusturica). Balkan classic. My favourite track is Ya Ya (Ringe Ringe Raja) ‘I’m sitting here la la. Waiting for my ya ya.’ Me too, and in a sense, aren’t we all?

32: Holst, The Planets (Boult, 1978). Lots of good recordings of this, but Boult’s edges it for me. I once was in a team that won a regional five-a-side competition and we listened to Mars in the car before the final. Don’t know why more teams don’t do that. You might have noticed by the way, how nearly all the classical recordings I recommend are from before the eighties. It wasn’t just music which died back then, but the ability to play it. Take a listen to any cover version of a classic song used in a modern advert or movie, and retch.

33: The Housemartins, Now That’s What I Call Quite Good (compilation). Paul Heaton is one of England’s great singer-songwriters, although he’s a bitter fruit, and his finest moments are clustered at the very beginning of his career, here and in the first Beautiful South album when his weak-hearted cynicism was of the light and airy variety. The number of artists who start out full of beans and end up consumed by darkness makes you wonder whether this game’s all it’s cracked up to be.

34: Jacques Brel, Ces gens-là. Brel, who had the kind of head you never see in popular music any more, had a phenomenally expressive face, and hands too, which he would hold out in front of him as he sang, shaking, weeping. His songs are emotionally astonishing. Take a listen to Le Chanson de Jacky, or La valse à mille temps, or Amsterdam, which, as with all great songs, great literature also, is hard to listen to without feeling nostalgia for a time you’ve never known. Here is the great man in action.³ If this doesn’t move you, if you find it overblown or sentimental, then please don’t bother reading part 2 of my series, for I declare you unworthy.

Part Two Here. Part Three Here.

1. Skipping the recitative parts, which are boring, unless you’re really doing the thing.

2. Nina Simone did a few good Dylan covers, as did of course Hendrix (Dylan himself even preferred Hendrix’s to his own), Manfred Mann, The 13th Floor Elevators, Them and many others.

3. Sublime lyrics too. Talk a look, if you can read French, at ‘Le Chanson de Jacky’ (translated very well in the Scott Walker version; Jackie).