I was included
in one of those Name Your Top Albums
things on social media this week and, being not only a bloke, but a huge record spod to boot, I was
unable to resist the siren call of compiling a list. Similarly, as a victim of terminal verbosity, I was unable to
keep my comments down to what I’d consider to be reasonable limits in terms of
expecting folk to skip across pictures of anthropomorphic dogs and amusing pub
signs on their Facebook feeds and dig into the equivalent of one of those buyer’s
guides you get at the back of Uncut magazine, so I’ve put it here. All of these
records have moved me (frequently to tears) have expressed emotions I couldn’t otherwise articulate
and have inspired me to aspire to their lofty heights of artistic achievement –
principally, I have to admit, by playing bad versions of their songs in pubs with
my eyes closed. That’s a given. The individual addenda are merely mansplaining
on my part. There are not a great number of what you’d call recent albums on the list – I mean, I work with
people who are younger than most of these records - but to me it calls to mind
the possibly apocryphal story of when Joseph Heller was buttonholed at a party
by someone who pointed out that he hadn’t written anything comparable since the
publication of Catch-22 many years
earlier. “Neither” replied Heller drily “Has anyone else”.
1; Richard
Thompson – Mock Tudor.
Picking only
one album by Thompy was the biggest challenge for me. Henry The Human Fly is inspiring in terms of a man (barely in his
early twenties) finding his post-Fairport feet and melding trad folk and raga
rock, Hokey Pokey has some of the
most joyful music of his career (as well as the most doleful), Hand of Kindness is the break up album’s
break up album but, significantly, when he (or at least Capitol Records)
brought in a couple of left-field outside producers in the shape of Tom Rothrock
(Foo Fighters, Beck, Moby, Motorhead) and Rob Schnapf he was able to really
buff the formula until it gleamed. The notes on Dave Mattacks’ website
regarding recording the drums are so boggling in their attention to detail that
you wonder how they ever dragged him away from the recording booth in the first
place. Key Track: Hard on Me.
2; Neil
Young – Time Fades Away.
Part of the
celebrated so-called Ditch Trilogy, this is the album so ragged, on the edge
and painful to listen to that Young has never been able to satisfactorily
revisit the original tapes in order to get it out on CD - and he
remastered Everybody’s Rockin’ . It
is the soundtrack to a man falling apart on stage, aided and abetted by Crosby,
Nash, a shitload of tequila and bizarrely, a Gibson Flying V. That it was
recorded principally on the tour scheduled to support the release of Harvest only adds to its wayward charm in that the befuddled audiences on these dates must have wondered if they'd come on the wrong night. I would also hazard a guess that the
yawling Yonder Stands the Sinner is
never going to turn up on a Seventies Gold station on heavy rotation. This is careering, in the same way that my snowboarding would probably be. Key Track: Love in Mind.
3; Clive
Gregson – Strange Persuasions.
So clean,
so compressed, so beautifully studio-bound (aside from the piano, which sounds
like it was recorded in the pub next door after closing time), these are the
songs that Gregson still had in his locker after the demise of the sadly
underrated Any Trouble. Decamping to a demo studio in Oldham, he enlisted his old
rhythm section (sparingly) and a young folk singer he’d come across by the name
of Christine Collister to record what looked like it might be his farewell
note to the business of show. Following the mantra of dour lyric/happy tune, I
Still See Her Face is as jaunty a breakup song as you could hope to hear – the overdubbed guitar
interplay presaging that which he’d enjoy with Richard Thompson on a couple of
live promotional OGWT performances preserved in the digital aspic of YouTube. Thankfully
the Gregson/Collister partnership blossomed and although their subsequent live shows didn’t
feature the haunting French horn included in this version of signature song Home is Where the Heart Is they didn’t
run to the Springsteen tribute bombast of American
Car either. Key Track: I Fall Apart.
4; Jackson
Browne – Running on Empty
“Looking
out at the road rushing under my wheels” the album begins, “Looking back at the
years gone by like so many summer fields”. This is a record about yearning, the
songs linked by the unlikely bedfellows of hope and ennui – almost a suite. Largely
co-written, and recorded live this is (literally) the sound of backstage, the bus and the hotel room writ large. Overwhelmingly, everyone sounds tired. Danny Kortchmar’s Shaky Town is a postcard from somewhere
in the mid-west, Lowell George and Valerie Carter’s Love Needs a Heart could have been written in the condensation on
the inside of the tour bus window, in Rosie
the guy on the sound desk comforts himself with, well let’s not dwell on that.
Only in the joyous closing cover Stay
do the band celebrate their incarceration together and even then there’s the sense
that these moments, too, will be lost in time. Key Track: The Load Out.
5; Bruce
Springsteen – Darkness on the Edge of Town.
I know – I couldn’t
believe it either. I first encountered Springsteen in his Eighties, bulked-up,
MTV, Arthur Baker Remix-fuelled pomp, and so it was understandable that I didn’t
really take to him at the time. We all know what gated reverb did to a generation
of drummers, some of whom are still not entirely over it to this day. It wasn’t until he’d got all that (and Outlaw Pete) out of his system that I found
myself in Hyde Park watching the tangled Terence Malick narrative of Racing in the Street play out in front
of me as the sun set over Hyde Park. All that stuff that The Boss bores tell you
about the live experience? It’s all true. Better still is having the entire
back catalogue waiting and ready for you to work through at your leisure. I was
tempted to stop at Darkness, where
the carefree street jokers of Asbury Park have aged and withered to become the enervated
protagonists of songs like Factory
and Prove It All Night. Even more
astonishing, as revealed by the release of outtakes compilation The Promise, is what he left off it. Key
Track: The Promised Land
6; del Amitri
– Waking Hours,
I listened
to this album every single day on my way to work for three months solid. Anyone
who is familiar with the lyrical content of the ten songs contained within will
be aware that this is not necessarily a healthy state of mind to find yourself
in. “I’m watching the fumes foul up the sunrise / I’m watching the light fade
away” is never going to be a couplet likely to get your endorphins racing in
the morning, and so it turned out. Eventually I moved away, before my small,
small town turned around and swallowed me. I’d been entranced from the moment I
first heard the opening track – I’d argue that it starts with
one of the all-time great “Ah-one, two, three, four…” count ins - and from the
off it was pretty clear that this wasn’t going to be a re-tread of their prior jangly
buckskin fringed Sticks and Stones Girl period.
I bought all the singles too – “Don’t I look Like the Kind of Guy You Used to
Hate?” sounds as lemon-juice-on-a-paper cut as it reads on the page. Key Track: Empty
7: The
Waterboys – A Pagan Place
Another
Damacsene conversion for me was when Mike Scott turned the UEA into a swirling pit
of heart, soul, twelve string guitars and tasselled scarves while I watched on unbelieving,
the music like a massive wave simultaneously sucking the shingle from under my
feet and pummelling me in the chest as it swept over and around and through me.
This is the album where The Waterboys – then at least nominally a band – first successfully
combined Van Morrison’s Woodstock Celt vibrations with the Chelsea Hotel attitude
of New York’s CBGBs scene and produced the first great Big Music. Two albums
later, they’d moved on - which is where we first met. Scott’s modus operandi is
principally to set up a revolving door of four or five chords and then declaim
across them, and that technique serves him beautifully here, notably on the
epic Kazakh-referencing Red Army Blues. Don’t get the remastered re-issue, by
the way. This album doesn’t need an extra verse, an extended outro or a bunch
of extra tracks added on the end, no matter what the limitations of vinyl album
running length might have you believe. Fun fact – the “What have I got to lose,
somebody might wave back?” hook in track five is lifted directly from a line of
dialogue in the Elvis movie G.I. Blues.
Key Track: Rags
8; Warren
Zevon – Transverse City
Ah Warren –
none more West Coast; you with your floppy-haired, plaid-shirted, harmony-contributing
Californian pals and your breezy songs about werewolves and Chines menus and headless
Thompson gunners. Who better to produce a late-career claustrophobic concept
album about paranoia, alienation and chemophobia with added Dave Gilmour? Acoustic-led
Neil Young-athon Splendid Isolation and
familiarly-styled ballad Nobody’s In Love
This Year aside, the rest of the
record is synth-driven and intense – there aren’t any jokes on this one. Key
Track: Run Straight Down
9; Spirit
of the West – Go Figure
Another
genre-hopping release was the 1991 effort by former trad-punksters Spirit of
the West, who I’d been in the same room as in what must have been around 1987
and who I hadn’t heard a lot of since, independent releases by Canadian folk
bands not being as easy to casually acquire in the latter part of the twentieth
century as they were to become in the post-Amazon world. I seriously thought I’d
put on the wrong CD in the shop, as what started the first track contained not
the cheeky prod in the ribs of the bodhran I’d been expecting, but some sort of
Pink Floyd power chordage underpinning the sound of a heavily amplified slide
mandolin (and who came up with that
idea!?) combined in turn with the tom-tom heavy percussive assault of somebody building
a particularly impressive shed in the background. I fell instantly
for it, a bit like the way in which Danny does for Sandy at the end of Grease. I’m generally a lyrics man, and
so when further investigation reaped a limpid pool of intricate construction and
shaded detail I fell in love with it all over again. Once you knew that they
are about a children’s hospital, listening carefully to the words of Goodbye Grace had the tendency to prompt
a whole new wave of Kleenex-heavy blubbery. And that was before I had any of my own. Key Track: D for Democracy (Scour the House).
10; Loudon
Wainwright – History
Bleak,
introspective, heavy on the sarcasm, generous helpings of self-loathing and brutal
as a kids’ party at Katie Hopkins’ house. Also does tit jokes. Either you buy
into Loud’s schtick or you don’t, and I do. He edges past Randy Newman in the irony
stakes while puncturing his own ego and that of every family member he can line
up a bead on. Talk about solipsistic. Also, as I say, does tit jokes. The
one-note riff which is the talking blues of Talking
New Bob Dylan aside, the songs on this album are breath taking – usually a quick
intake of breath followed by a long, reflective exhalation as you inwardly
digest what someone who isn’t even a close friend of yours has just told you
about their behaviour – see When I’m At
Your House for example, or Hitting
You. That this album edged out close contenders More Love Songs and Here Come
the Choppers is probably down to his heart breaking performance on the Key
Track: Sometimes I Forget.
“The good news is…” Shev greets us at his front door “…at least there’ll
be a bit more room in the car”. The season of promotion for his album Songs from the Last Chance Saloon which began in the bright spring sunshine of the
acoustic stage at The International Workers' Day Festival in May, has wend and wound its way
through the Felixstowe Carnival Fringe, The Secret Garden Party, the Grandma’s
Porch Sessions, the BBC, Ipswich Music Day, FolkEast, not to mention TJS’s
impromptu appearance at The Grand Old Opry* during his fortnight sojourn around
the open mics and showcase nights of Nashville, and is now gathering its autumn skirts closer and wrapping a cosy
muffler around her neck with a concluding performance at Acorn Fayre, a
boutique festival in the wild Northampton heartlands. Tiny Diva, our vocal co-pilot,
percussionist and latterly stunt bassist has had to call off with an
unspecified condition, but one with which we are advised that close proximity
within a moving vehicle would be inadvisable. Fortunately, along for the ride
on this occasion is album-complementing flautist and singer La Mulley, ready to
add a couple of harmonies when required but principally to add her haunting aerophonics
as per the CD. 
