Song 40: The Trapeze Swinger

Why not, I thought to myself, continue to write about timelessly beautiful songs I really, really love, which have incredible lyrical precision, which are built around a deceptively simple rhyme scheme? Why not do that?

So, here's The Trapeze Swinger, and as a special treat, it's The Trapeze Swinger just as I first heard it, at Green Man Festival in 2008. Up until that point, I'd been an Iron and Wine agnostic, though the rest of the set had converted me somewhat, this was the encore and this was, obviously, a level above. Just as with Hallelujah and Into My Arms, it's a song of such transfixing beauty I just didn't think, for a while, that there had ever been anything comparable.

I'm a little more confident with this one that I am providing a genuine service by highlighting it - it's still quite an obscure song - it's not on an official Iron and Wine album, and it was on the soundtrack to a film called 'In Good Company' (though in a kind-of-reggae recorded version which I really don't think is anywhere near as good as the one-man-and-a-guitar live version above). Do listen to it. Really. Do.

Now I'm here, I'm not really sure what to say. He has become pretty successful, Sam Beam who is Iron and Wine, and in particular another beautiful song of his called 'Flightless Bird, American Mouth' which is the prom/wedding theme in the 'Twilight' films. His last full album 'Kiss Each Other Clean' (around which time I saw him live twice) I was not such an enormous fan of - he was going for a whole different sound, which involved a lot of jamming and squawking saxophone, which I felt was only partially successful.

He's a very clever man, a professor of film and cinematography or something, it's a very clever song, and it invites numerous interpretations - who's dead, is anyone dead, what's the trapeze etc ... for once, I'll quieten my literal mind - it doesn't really matter what it's about, but it's very moving.

So if I'm not going to pick the song itself apart (I probably won't be able to resist a little), then I will perhaps talk about that rare feeling that song gave me, about seeing music live and about the vagaries of festivals.

I've seen a lot of musical acts live - I totted it up recently and in all it's at least 250, a fair few of whom I've paid to see in their own right but more of whom I've seen as part of a festival bill.

Obviously, these are different experiences in various ways - but the main thing for me is not one's own response but the crowd around. At a gig, pretty much everyone has come to see the band, people know their material, they've paid good money, they want to be entertained and a part of that involves pretty high expectations.
The downside for a festival crowd is that they don't know the material often, they can drift wherever they want, the sound won't be as perfectly adjusted for the band, the set is shorter, sometimes they're just lazily kicking back rather than actively listening to music. The pay-off to all the negatives is that expectations can be vastly surpassed, and there is something gloriously exciting and fulfilling about a) enjoying something a lot more than one thought one would and sharing that experience with other people or b) being a fan of a band watching as that band wins over a doubting crowd and enjoys a triumph.

My experience with Iron and Wine was the former. I had bought their latest album and kind of got into it a little, and was fan enough of the band to be there, but equally blase enough about them, I recall, to go and get my Pieminster pie while the set was going on (not far to go, and the music was still very audible). As I came back with my pie (the excellence of which no doubt contributed to the magic ...) I was able to take a look at the whole crowd on that August evening in the striking natural bowl setting of Green Man's main stage and see that there was atmosphere, that people were into it, that something was happening here.

I remember he had to persuade the stage manager to give him time to play one last song, which turned out to be The Trapeze Swinger, I remember the frisson of delight and recognition from the hardcore Iron and Wine fans at the front which alerted the more casual listener like me that this was a good one, and I remember (as you can tell from the clip) that the whole audience was utterly enchanted for those seven minutes.

That's what live music should be like, but, if we're honest, very rarely is. Sure, I enjoy most things I see one way or the other, but how many times have I truly been captured, mesmerized, elevated, transfixed like that?

Song 39: Hallelujah

Hallelujah - Jeff Buckley

What's the point of my writing about 'Hallelujah' when a million words have already been written about it, indeed when a man called Alan Light has just written a well-received book called 'The Holy or the Broken: Leonard Cohen, Jeff Buckley and the Unlikely Ascent of 'Hallelujah''?  In the past i'd almost certainly have bought the book, but I don't think I will this time, in particular as, in an interview with Mr Light, he seemed to say that the Jeff Buckley version wasn't his favourite, indeed that it was in some way limited - so clearly, for all that he's an acclaimed music journalist whose written an acclaimed book, he's batshit mental and has terrible taste.

The Jeff Buckley version is the best version of 'Hallelujah'. 'Hallelujah' is a Jeff Buckley song.

Not that I haven't seen loads of other folk do it - for a while there it seemed to be played at every gig I ever went to - Rufus Wainwright, Damien Rice, Kathryn Williams, I saw all of them give it a shot. Then there's Bob Dylan and John Cale (pre-Buckley), Bono, kd lang, Alexandra Burke, even Bon Jovi, and countless, countless others.

And the fact that it has now become a modern standard means people have started calling it a Leonard Cohen song, rather than a Jeff Buckley song, as if the Buckley version is just one cover among many, rather than the definitive version.

Am I being perverse? Affording the great Leonard too little respect? I've seen Leonard Cohen doing this recently (on TV) in concert, and it was super - he does a great version of the song he wrote, no doubt. Though the original is not it. It's pretty horrid. A lot of what Leonard Cohen did in the 80s sounded pretty horrid, but 'Hallelujah' in particular, all plinky-plonky and dodgy backing vocals, dispassionate and not even that well phrased.

I love Leonard Cohen, I love his 2012 album 'Old Ideas', I love Famous Blue Raincoat and So Long, Marianne and If it Be Your Will and Suzanne and Bird on the Wire and Teachers and all that. I'm not sure I'd put Hallelujah in my 20 favourite Leonard Cohen songs.

He clearly cared a lot about the song, it took him two years and he apparently wrote more than 100 verses, but it was Cale initially, and then, of course Jeff Buckley who rescued it and elevated it.

Several, several posts ago, I asked "Is it the singer or the song?" Well, in this case, it's the singer. And Jeff Buckley is still not quite mainstream. He's still a cult figure who lots of people have not heard of, and whose one completed album 'Grace' has not sold more than a couple of million copies worldwide. By the end of this year, when we've seen at least one of the three films being made about him, he may finally be mainstream. But maybe not.

How can I make this post about 'Hallelujah' worth anything? Well, if you don't, by some miracle, know the song, it's worth something, and, if you'd forgotten just how magnificent and definitive and magical Jeff Buckley singing this song is (as I occasionally have), it's worth something.

Anyway, I'll just write a little about my experience of Jeff Buckley. I'm not so cool that I got into Jeff Buckley before he died. Dammit. I could have. In the early 90s, Caitlin Moran used to write a weekly "New Music" bit in The Times, and I still remember reading and being intrigued by her little interview with this handsome son of a cult singer, who she was clearly mesmerized by. Back then, as i've already said, i hardly bought any music, but if I had, this is what I was drawn to, and I carried on looking out for his name.

But you didn't hear all that much of it really for a while. 1995/6 was all about Britpop, there might have been the odd mention in the press but not much else, and then, in one of the NMEs sent by my mum to Kenya, I read in May 97 that Jeff Buckley was missing presumed dead in the Wolf River. I confess this seemed sad but I think I was more pressed by the fact that Bob Dylan had a life-threatening illness at the same time.

When I came home that summer, a chap called Rory Mee recommended Buckley to me, and even played me a bit, but the album begins with 'Mojo Pin' and I was not yet hooked.

It was not, in truth, til the summer of 98 that he finally got his claws into me. I think it was Alex Frith who simultaneously copied me 'Grace' and gave me 'Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk' for my birthday. From that point, it was definitely 'Hallelujah' above all. It was one of those moments (like the next song I'm going to write about) where I simply thought it was the best song i'd ever heard and I'd never ever heard anything like it. Initially I didn't realise it was a cover, perhaps I was the tiniest bit disappointed when I found out it was.

My best memory of it was a late summer boating trip on the Norfolk Broads and playing 'Hallelujah' (and also early Leonard Cohen, funnily enough) constantly - I have one particularly vivid image of a rainy early evening, looking for a palce to moor near some reeds, with 'Hallelujah' ringing out across the three boats of our party. Wonderful.

I wasn't the only guy on that trip who was under its spell, and indeed over the next year at university, it seemed to figure regularly. It was almost a password, a note of recognition.

As the year went on, I began to find out how good the rest of Jeff Buckley's output was - I actually love 'The Sky is a Landfill', 'Opened Once' and 'Morning Theft' from My Sweetheart the Drunk, and i went through phases of obsessing over, at different points, 'Lilac Wine', 'Last Goodbye' and 'Grace'. It is that title track which has finally won the Buckley race for me, the most extraordinary, wild, possessed vocal performance.

He didn't sound possessed on 'Hallelujah' -  it was controlled, mysterious, elegant, virtuoso, but not out-of-control. An underrated part of the majesty of 'Hallelujah' is his guitar work (Jeff Buckley was a stunning guitar player full stop), chiming slowly. What a talent he was! And, yes, if he'd written 'Hallelujah' it probably would have been the finest song he'd written. I'll give that to Leonard. I loved the words, well, of course I did - a story from the bible! About a man struggling with his faith! Called David! And he was a king! What's not to love?

Jeez, I'm listening to 'Hallelujah' now and all those moments come flooding back - it was Buckley's singing that made the words so extraordinary, though, his pronunciation of "cold and it's a broken", his tiny speech imepdiment on the r's, utterly magnificent. It's the phrasing that makes him, in my view, so much of a greater pleasure to listen to than his father Tim Buckley- there's something a little harsh and hammy about Tim Buckley some times, and even when he lets go, it sounds more like he's showing off than it does with Jeff. Again, perhaps I'm not respecting my elders enough.

So, yes, Hallelujah has become a modern standard, sung by every X-Factor contestant and every sensitive singer-songwriter going, but I wish it wasn't. To me, no one else's version is worth shit. 'Hallelujah' is a Jeff Buckley song.

Song 38: Into My Arms

Into My Arms - Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds

This is the first time, after finding and posting a youtube link to the song I'm going to write about, that I've sat and watched the video all the way through.

It was actually the first time I'd seen the video to this song, released as a single in 1997. You may recall my post about "writing" the Embrace song 'All You Good Good People' when I read a review of it without having the opportunity to hear it. A similar thing happened with this song - I remember the NME reviewer saying that the first line, "I don't believe in an interventionist God" was hardly the usual stuff of hit singles, and I remember not really being able to conceive of how that line could successfully scan. But it could.

My experience of Nick Cave had been fairly limited up to that point - I'd read all about Murder Ballads and seen him on Top of the Pops with Kylie, I knew he'd had 8 (or was it 16) heroin overdoses, and I knew he looked a bit funny. I think it was a while yet before I really got into Cave - I remember buying The Boatman's Call on tape from this rather funny, bad-smelling, 2nd hand store in St Andrews - pretty certain that would have been 1998, but I'm also pretty certain I'd bought a Best Of before that - I've just checked and that came out in May 1998, so that all makes sense.

And I've loved him ever since. Utterly. But I must admit, my love is pretty much entirely for Cave since that point - I've never delved into the Birthday Party or the early Bad Seeds - just that which is on the Best Of. To put it straightforwardly, there are two Cave settings - deranged punk rock beast and tender balladeer, and it's the latter which floats my boatman's call. Which is not to say I'm not partial to a bit of 'Stagger Lee', a bit of  'There She Goes. My Beautiful World', 'Babe, I'm On Fire' even a bit of 'No Pussy Blues', but the news that his 2013 return will be on the more reflective side, after a couple of Grinderman albums to let off steam, are welcome indeed.

Nick Cave's very existence seems a rather blessed thing - this extraordinary passage which has taken him from an Aussie childhood through the very abyss and aforementioned ODs to the life of a contented family man in Brighton. One of the pleasures of receiving Popbitch every week is its regular updates on people spotting the wonder from down under carrying out mundane tasks on the South Coast - I think it speaks very well of this country that this most unique man has chosen to make it his home.

The fact that he is real, that he exists among us, seems unlikely. But 'tis true. I saw him myself. In Butlins. Yes, indeed, at All Tomorrow's Parties in 2007, there he was, wandering along staring at birds on the dining hall roof. He looked relaxed and cordial, but I couldn't shake the suspicion that if I went up to him and complimented him on his genius he might just, on a whim, rip my head clean off.

For a while I had the mistaken impression that 'Into My Arms' was the first beautiful piano ballad Cave ever wrote, but he had form - 'The Ship Song' and 'Straight to You', for example, were on previous albums.  But 'The Boatman's Call' was a distinctively restrained and dignified work, its dual themes of lost love and confused faith coming together to make one of the albums of the 1990s.

In time, it would be 'People Ain't No Good', the third track, that would creep its way to the very top of my list, but 'Into My Arms' is not far behind, that's for sure. He sang it at the funeral of Michael Hutchence, apparently, but I have fonder memories of it being sung at a happier occasion, the wedding of my friends Alex and Emily - sung by their friend Liz. Rather marvellous that a song with the first line "I don't believe in an interventionist God" could be sung, utterly without controversy or taint, at not only a church wedding but a wedding of faith. A wonderful memory (though the prize of musical highlight of the day went to Alex's own rendition of 'Close to You').

A lot has been made of 'The Boatman's Call' being about Cave's affair with PJ Harvey - he says she wasn't the alonly subject matter, so who knows if she is the subject of this song, if she's the one who believes in an interventionist God. Not all of the album is as graceful and generous is this song - there is plenty of bitterness and malice on some of the songs which led PJ Harvey to be a little put out, as I recall, but no one could mind being the muse for a number like this, could they?

Some songs you know will last last a few weeks, some a couple of years, some might make it a few decades and then there are some songs you highly suspect they'll be singing in 500 years, assuming humanity hasn't been wiped out by then, which, let's be honest, it probably will have been. But, apocalypse notwithstanding, 'Into My Arms' is such a song.

Song 37: I Predict a Riot

I Predict a Riot - Kaiser Chiefs

Madness were on Jonathan Ross last week. 37 years after they formed, 34 after their first album, still (apart from a hiatus in the late 80s/early 90s) going strong, having Top 10 albums and playing to tens of thousands of people. A national treasure, or whatever.

Seeing Madness playing to a packed main stage at Benicassim in 2006 was one of the great pleasures of my music-watching life. Reader, I skanked, I nutty-danced, whatever you want to call it, like some middle-aged skinhead in a North London pub. Madness. My first love. They made it all the way.

The year before at Benicassim, I'd seen the Kaiser Chiefs, and frankly they were almost as good. Utterly entertaining, full of good tunes and great stagecraft, they were chart stars and in their element. And I saw them again at the 02 in 2008, nominally supporting the Manic Street Preachers (the line-up also included the Klaxons, the Cribs and Bloc Party) for the NME Big Gig. Again, they absolutely rocked it, and I remember reading the review in the Standard next day saying that the Manics, in terms of popularity, should have been supporting them.

And being very surprised at how wrong this journalist was getting it. Because the Kaiser Chiefs' time had transparently already come and gone, while the Manics had been going for 20 years and could keep going for another 20 with a big fanbase if they wanted.
But the Kaiser Chiefs, bless them, were past it. They could still entertain 20,000 people but no one was going to buy their records anymore.

And I write this after reading their main songwriter has left the band but they're going to carry on without him. But, I guarantee you this, they will not still be going on chat shows and playing to 50,000 people in 30 years like Madness.

But I don't think that's their fault. I'm not the first to make the point, but they are the natural successors to Madness - an astute, witty, likeable pop/rock band with a string of great tunes who no one need take seriously. Hell, they were good on pop shows, the lead singer gave good banter - what could go wrong?

But Madness had about 20 Top 10 hits and spent hundreds of weeks in the singles chart while the Kaiser Chiefs had 5.

I'm sure they won't look at themselves as failures, but they are indicative of the boom and bust state of British music over the last few years. Your first album can go five times platinum, but that doesn't guarantee anything. The fans will desert you just like that.

Is that the fans' fault? A little bit. But there are lots of reasons, aren't there? The way the press works, the increasing choice, the lack of TV exposure bands get these days, the development. of the iTunes stores meaning the scope of the singles chart has narrowed and rock bands have all but given up on it. And, for me, quite simply, Madness were able to have 20odd hits in about 6 years because they never needed to stop - they could release an album a year and three or four singles every album, all of which would get on Top of the Pops. No end to the momentum.

Whereas bands like the Kaiser Chiefs release an album every two years at best, sometimes more. Now, I don't know all the in-depth reasons for this (Bob Dylan and Beatles did a couple of albums every year in the 60s, pretty much, and they're generally thought the greatest albums ever made) but, suffice to say, it is a "business" thing. The cycle of promotion, tour, try to break America, tour, rest etc seems interminable and seems to me to scupper the chances of so many bands to develop the kind of exposure and momentum that would allow them to become a Madness, a national treasure.

The Kaiser Chiefs were a singles band from the old school. They were never going to be Coldplay, thank goodness, they were never going to be Blur (though I'm sure they'd have liked to have been) - they should hav been enabled to keep on putting out single after single. It's likely people would have forgotten about them/tired of them anyway, but they never really stood a chance.

One thing is, Madness has a surprising gift for sentiment and poignancy even from the early stages, with the likes of 'My Girl' and were also very very good musically and more eclectic all the way than they're given credit for.
I'd say the Kaiser Chiefs are a pretty tight band, but I don't think they'd ever have been able to carry off heartwarming balladry.

Anyway, 'I Predict a Riot' ... perhaps there are some people who really hate it, I can imagine it being hated like 'Come on Eileen' by association, perhaps people have seen it soundtracking aggressive, beery lads, but, hell, I still think it's fun - a monster pop song with a great chorus, an adrenaline rush of a song with a bit of wry commentary. Perhaps it's too shouty, too graceless, but I don't see anything wrong with allowing room for indie floorfillers like this in your life.

If I'd been 8 in 2005, like I was 8 when I first heard Madness, I think Kaiser Chiefs might have been my favourite bands, and i think I'd be pretty gutted at how it had petered out for them.

Song 36: Sweeping the Nation

Sweeping the Nation - Spearmint

I'm sorry about the version above, it's the only one i could find on youtube, it's a shaky live version with uncommon intimacy. But that's rather fitting really. Spearmint are a little band who played little shows, and this is a song about live music, about indie music, about all the bands who never quite made it and how it's the music that matters.

I'm delighted to be writing about this song, because it sowed the seed for the bulk of the 101 songs blog. I remember coming up with the idea in my bedroom in Balham, how this, like Wilco's 'The Late Greats', was a song about tiny, or even imaginary, bands who never got anywhere, but celebrating music for its own sake, and I connected that to my own imaginary band, the Turkletons, who I imagined being an unsuccessful but tuneful US power-pop band influenced by Big Star, Jonathan Richman, The Replacements, even Hall and Oates a little bit.

They're something splendid about band names you've never heard before, whether real or made up, and this song begins with a spoken dedication to various tiny bands who never made the grade. Real not imagined, I'm pretty certain. It sets the song up brilliantly, as the last of the bands mentioned is Laverne and Shirley, which my research tells me was the previous band of Spearmint's lead singer, Mr Shirley Lee (apparently the Mr was often added to make his gender clear, that's what wikipedia says anyhoo).

And Spearmint became one of those bands who never quite made it, though this song almost did. I believe it has that rare distinction of one week on the singles chart at Number 75 - an almost-hit which deserved to be a hit. So the song is almost some kind of self-fulfilling prophecy.

It's a euphoric song with a Northern soul sample 'Out on the Floor' by Dobie Gray, and though this is the closest Spearmint came to a hit, there are several tremendous songs in their back catalogue, 'Isn't it Great to Be Alive', 'Left Alone Among the Living' for example, and several from their 2001 concept album 'A Different Lifetime', including 'Julie Christie', 'The Flaming Lips' and the wonderful 'Scottish Pop', as charming a song as exists on God's earth. Like 'Sweeping the Nation' it's a song about love for music and happily throws in a list, so really, the likes of me are in heaven.

'A Different Lifetime' came out in 2001 which, for me, was a great year for music and probably, up to 2002, the time when I was splurging the most I ever have on album after album, and though I think in terms of The Strokes and Bob Dylan, the White Stripes and PJ Harvey, actually 'A Different Lifetime' is certainly one of my favourites from that time, and really, in a different world, an awful lot of people would love it.

Spearmint's one brush with Hollywood is in the tiny-bit-too-self-consciously-indie-mainstream-high-fidelity-ish-but-still-quite-enjoyable '(500) Days of Summer', where Joseph Gordon Levitt says "It pains me we live in a world where nobody's heard of Spearmint". One hopes that gave the band's back catalogue a nice enough little boost, bit I imagine we still live in a world where about .001% of people have heard of Spearmint, and that rather pains me too.

Spearmint were the real thing, a genuine indie band who made indie pop, who never made it and exist in a kind of enthusiastic netherworld of geeky cool I've only ever looked at from the outside. These are the indie kids who keep going  into their 40s, who really probably weren't much good at sport but are very good at pub quizzes, who love cool, good music and films and refuse to give into the idea that it's also ok to like the shit stuff. It's terribly wonderful and admirable, I kind of feel i could never have quite had the hair or been skinny enough for this scene, but if there's any "scene" I ever wish I'd been a part of, I think it would be this one.

I kind of wish I'd seen 100s and 100s of unsigned bands rather than a handful, I kind of wish I'd deejayed at a Northern Soul night which got a small but committed following, I wish a fey, light humane tuneful sound would come out when i started singing rather than a violent bellow, and I certainly wish I could have written a few songs like 'Sweeping the Nation'.

Numbers up to 1

OK, bowing to popular demand, I'm going to take another little break from writing about individual songs, as I've conducted another exhaustive study so that you don't have to.

This one is extremely satisfactory, actually. Much more so than pretending I'd heard every album ever in order to list the Greatest Albums of All Time. In this case, I was inspired by looking up recent hits when doing my post on 'With Every Heartbeat' by Robyn. I realised that, though I, like a lot of people my age, have become dismissive of the pop charts and of what a Number 1 single is worth, there were still plenty of Number 1s of the last 10 years that I like in some way.

And the Number 1 single really is the definition of the pop side of pop music - it is the song that most people in the country are into, at that given point, like it or not. And, you know what, Britain's taste really is not that bad.

Like I said, this study was much more satisfactory than the one on Great Albums. There are an infinite number of albums, there have been just over 1200 UK Number 1 singles since the dawn of the chart in the early 50s, and I've heard the vast majority. So I can decide and I can assess. I was born in 1978 so some of my understanding of before that might be limited, but I have at least read an awful lot about popular culture before that. My understanding of the context of those songs may not be perfect, but it's not worthless.

So, I really spent my time on this one. I went through every single Number 1 and chose those ones I liked or knew were really worth something - I tried to be as objective as possible (oh i know i always say that!). I ended up with about 240 i would assess - pleasingly, there's a pretty good spread across the decades. You might say there shouldn't be, that Number 1s in the 60s and 80s were way better and more meaningful than they are now, which is kind of true, but the thing is there is a much quicker turnover over the last 20 years or so, so there are simply more to choose from, so no wonder there were still a few good ones in there.

I decided upon my criteria, and again, I think the criteria for something like this can be more satisfactory than for what is a great album. I called them
IMPACT
POPULARITY
X FACTOR
CATCHINESS
ARTISTRY
but those words incorporate various other things, so a song's impact can be very different from its popularity (eg Everything I Do I Do It for You). "X-Factor" left some room for personal taste, i was just thinking about things that might make a song special to my ears.

An apology in advance - my main aim in this was to avoid having a list of "The Nation's Greatest Number 1" which had 'Bohemian Rhapsody' near the top. Here, for example is the recent official poll. But I failed, as you will see. Despite having not been able to suffer my way through 'Bohemian Rhapsody' for the best part of 20 years (after a brief, infantile love for it) I could not, in all conscience, ignore its claims. And if anyone should complain, heaven forfend, that personal prejudice has led to a pretty low showing from Elvis, it's in fact that, surprisingly, a lot of the really great Elvis songs (Hound Dog, Heartbreak Hotel, Love Me Tender, Suspicious Minds) didn't get to Number 1.

Anyway, my results may disappoint, who knows. I'm going to list a full 100 (because there really have been a lot of good ones, and it would be churlish not to), and again, where songs have scored the same, I'll just use my own taste to separate them.

The score is out of 100, and the top score was 95. Here we go

1		Billie Jean - Michael Jackson
2		Crazy in Love - Beyonce featuring Jay-Z
3		Good Vibrations - Beach Boys
4		Hey Jude - Beatles
5		Umbrella - Rihanna featuring Jay-Z
6		Bohemian Rhapsody - Queen
7		Satisfaction - Rolling Stones
8		Going Underground - The Jam
9		Paint it Black - Rolling Stones
10		Stand and Deliver - Adam and the Ants
11		Can't Get You Out of My Head - Kylie Minogue
12		Bridge Over Troubled Water - Simon and Garfunkel
13		Somebody That I used to Know - Gotye featuring Kimbra
14		You Really Got Me - The Kinks
15		Rock Around the Clock - Bill Haley and the Comets
16		Stan - Eminem
17		Day Tripper/We Can Work it Out - The Beatles
18		Liike a Prayer - Madonna
19		Dancing Queen - ABBA
20		Great Balls of Fire - Jerry Lee Lewis
21		That'll Be the Day - Buddy Holly
22		Ashes to Ashes - David Bowie
23		Crazy - Gnarls Barkley
24		Ticket to Ride - The Beatles
25		Come on Eileen - Dexys Midnight Runners
26		All the Things She Said - TATU
27		Back for Good - Take That
28		You've Lost That Loving Feeling - The Righteous Brothers
29		She Loves You - The Beatles
30		Do They know it's Christmas - Band Aid
31		Lose Yourself - Eminem
32		Baby One More time - Britney Spears
33		Don't You Want Me - The Human League
34		A Hard Day's Night - The Beatles
35		Town Called Malice - The Jam
36		The Promise - Girls Aloud
37		Someone Like You - Adele
38		Video Killed the Radio Star - Buggles
39		Yellow Submarine/Eleanor Rigby - The Beatles
40		I Bet You Look Good .... - Arctic Monkeys
41		I Feel Love - Donna Summer
42		Independent Women - Destiny's Child
43		Ghost Town - The Specials
44		Cars - Gary Numan
45		Prince Charming - Adam and the Ants
46		It Wasn't Me - Shaggy featuring Rikrok
47		Bleeding Love - Leona Lewis
48		Call Me Maybe - Carly Rae Jepsen
49		It's a Sin - Pet Shop Boys
50		A Brimful of Asha - Cornershop
51		Ignition - R, Kelly
52		With Every Heartbeat - Robyn featuring Kleerup
53		Two Tribes - Frankie Goes to Hollywood
54		Killing in the Name - Rage Against the Machine
55		Toxic -Britney Spears
56		Under Pressure - Queen and David Bowie
57		I Don't like Mondays - The Boomtown Rats
58		Heart of Glass - Blondie
59		Patience  - Take That
60		Mr Tambourine Man - The Byrds
61		West End Girls - Pet Shop Boys
62		Sound of the Underground - Girls Aloud
63		If This Ain't Love - Spiller featuring Sphie Ellis Bextor
64		Three Lions - Lightning Seeds
65		Geno - Dexys Midnight Runners
66		Make Me Smile (Come up and See Me) - Steve Harley etc
67		A Whiter Shade of Pale - Procol Harum
68		Leave Right Now - Will Young
69		Jailhouse Rock - Elvis Presley
70		Firestarter - The Prodigy
71		Country House - Blur
72		Space Oddity - David Bowie
73		Hit Me With your Rhythm Stick - Ian Dury and the Blockheads
74		Nothing Compares to U - Sinead O'Connor
75		Stay - Shakespears Sister
76		Merry Xmas Everybody - Slade
77		Relax - Frankie Goes to Hollywood
78		Careless Whisper - George Michael
79		Gangsta's Paradise - Coolio featuring LV
80		Imagine - John Lennon
81		I Will Survive - Gloria Gaynor
82		Waterloo - Abba
83		Down Under - Men at Work
84		I Feel Fine - The Beatles
85		The Drugs Don't Work - The Verve
86		Sunday Girl - Blondie
87		Vincent - Don McLean
88		Metal Guru - T.Rex
89		Cum on feel the Noize  - Slade
90		What a Wonderful World - Louis Armstrong
91		Let's Dance - David Bowie
92		MMMBop - Hanson
93		Every Breath you Take - The Police
94		Help  - The Beatles
95		Things Can Only Get Better - D.Ream
96		Tainted Love - Soft Cell
97		Forget You - Cee-Lo Green
98		Everything I Do (I Do it for You) - Bryan Adams
99		Bad Romance - Lady Gaga
100		Without You - Harry Nilsson

 You all know most of those, don't you, so I don't have to provide links to them, do I? Just missing out on the Top 100 were some real crackers like Get Off My Cloud, Don't Look Back in Anger, Uptown Top Ranking, House of Fun ... so I was frankly very tempted to fiddle my scoring.

Anyway, any injustices in there? There could be even more Beatles in a way. I love late Beatles hits like 'Get Back' and 'The Ballad of John and Yoko' but perhaps they're less iconic as Number 1s.

I'm going to try and think of more lists/studies I can set my geeky mind to. I know that that's not what music is about, but hopefully it's informative and gets your own mind working a little.

Song 35: Sick 2 Def

Sick 2 Def - Plan B

Talking of UK hip-hop ... this is one of those who has had the success Roots Manuva hasn't. Plan B is his own little cottage industry, singing, rapping, acting, directing, and he's been pretty successful all round. He's seen as some kind of spokesperson for the yoof, and his chubby little glowering face seems to be everywhere you look.

Like Roots Manuva and Dizzee Rascal, he was, initially, on the indie side of the hip-hop coin - this, the very first thing I heard by him, I got free on an Uncut CD. It's probably the Plan B song I like the best. In truth, it's probably the only Plan B song I actively like.

Which is not to say I don't think he deserves his success. That's rather the point. I know, for every hunch we has that turns out spot on, we have five which come to nothing and we conveniently forget about (I woke up a couple of days ago convinced that Murray would be defeating Ferrer in the Aussie Open final  after Tsonga had beaten Federer and Ferrer beaten Djokovic- I mean convinced!), but as soon as I heard this song by Plan B, I thought "This kid'll go far, he's a bit special".

He hit the big time on his second album 'The Defamation of Strickland Banks', which is much more along the white boy soul lines - it's fine, his falsetto's a little dodgy really but he carries it off with gusto, but the first album 'Who Needs Actions When You've Got Words' was much more acoustic hip-hop.

This song is pretty shocking - it takes a lot for me to me be shocked, but he clearly enjoys employing the shock factor, fs and blinds aggressively and angrily - so far, so standard - bit what marks it out is his flare not just for language and turn of phrase, but his frame of reference and gift for storytelling. In a neat conceit, he tells a story in reverse towards the end of the song, and does so with absolute precision.

In the song, he references his inspiration for this, Nas, in the song 'Rewind'. Nas is supposedly one of the greatest MCs of all, and his 1994 album 'Illmatic' considered one of the greatest in all hip-hop. Funny thing is, in 1994, I was a kid who wore backwards baseball caps and ridiculous baggy trousers but I wouldn't have got within a thousand miles of buying or listening to a Nas album, while now I'm a balding 34 year old in brown slacks and woolly jumper and I recently bought 'Illmatic' and, you know what, it's really very good. I wonder if Nas thought as he was making it his album would be being bought 19 years later by suburban middle-Englanders. Anyhow.

Sick 2 Def. Learn to spell, boy. But how much is affectation with Plan B? His articulacy and artistry is without question, I've seen him accused of being a middle-class kid acting the hood, the truth is more complicated, as with all of us.

His music is not really my kind of thing, just as this kind of London-kid urban poetry thing like the Streets, say, or Scroobius Pip flatters to hold my interest for a while and then gets kind of irritating. But Plan B is a pretty immense talent and as long as he doesn't turn too quickly into a musical James Corden (I perfectly like Corden, but it's the ubiquity ... which, to be fair, he's pulled pack from a little) he could go from strength to strength. Listen to this song, it's pretty repellent, but the skill and control and genuine sense of menace he creates are hugely impressive.

It's definitely a song to be filed under "Don't put on compilation tapes that might ever be played in a car with your mum". My own finest ignoring of that rule is a tape I made which started side two with 'Over the Rainbow' which had my mum sinking blissfully into her seat, before (as I'd forgotten) 'Bring the Ruckus' kicked in for Track 2. Baffled but understanding, she was. But I think 'Sick 2 Def' might test anyone's understanding. It's brutal and misanthropic, but it's also the work of a born storyteller and clever little feller.

Song 34: Dreamy Days

Dreamy Days - Roots Manuva

Rodney Smith has the misfortune to often be described as the British rapper people who don't like rap like. You'd have thought that would be a lot of people, but it seems there really aren't that many people who don't like rap but like it enough to like the rapper people who don't like rap like.

Because Rodney Smith -Roots Manuva - has never been terribly successful. Despite being called the King of British hip-hop, the elder statesman, the best rapper in Britain etc for a very long time, despite a Mercury Prize nomination, TV appearances which had people gushing that they were epoch-shaping (I remember this from Jools Holland) and general reams and reams of positive press, he's always stalled in the lower reaches of the charts.

You could say he rather missed the boat - UK hip-hop, in whatever form, is now extremely successful, but Roots Manuva has no part of the success of the likes of Tinie Tempah, Tinchy Stryder, Plan B (more of whom later) etc.

I think an interesting comparison can be made with Dizzee Rascal, another UK rapper who had the critical acclaim before he had the big success. People forget that Dizzee Rascal's first couple of albums, though loved by the "people who don't like rap" were not massive sellers. What he did then was decide to make pop music, get involved with Calvin Harris and make music which people would dance to. Fair play. If it was "selling out" (which it wasn't), Roots Manuva never sold out and doesn't seem to have wanted to.

This song might be as close as he came to it. It's also probably my favourite Roots Manuva song. Its sample is taken from the extremely mental Jimmy Webb song 'McArthur Park' (apparently the version by someone called Floyd Cramer, though check out the Richard Harris version), and it's some kind of love song.

Roots Manuva is a wonderful lyricist (I hope you agree) and perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of his field of reference is the total lack of America - he sounds very much like an Englishman, a South Londoner, but from before British black (and white) culture was so flooded by Americana. His main other reference point is his own origins, which are Jamaican - musically, it's dub and ska, dancehall, heavy heavy bass, not a pop sheen at all.

His lyrics got picked up for referencing pints of bitter and cheese on toast and wooden spoons, and he even has a video wherein he plays cricket. He is very clearly a rapper after my own heart.

And, to me, his vocal style represents an interesting dichotomy - he's warm and witty, engaging, once you're into it, but his tone is deep and declamatory (his father was a preacher which he says had a massive influence on his style, and that comes across not just in style but in his subject matter), a bit like Chuck D of Public Enemy, another rapper "people who don't like rap" love. What's funny is that the likes of NWA and Snoop Dogg (at least early) had real violence and threat in their lyrics, but allied it to that smooth pop sound, and in case of Snoop Dogg, that sweet pop timbre which makes mothers love him so.

So, Roots Manuva could probably never have been a pop star, he just doesn't sound like a pop star. But also he never acted like a pop star. He was, and I use the term through gritted teeth, an indie rapper. (I guess that's why the likes of me are fans of his, indeed how he made his way into our consciousness).

This song reminds me of late 2001, my friend Alexander, when he was staying with me at my mum's, also loving  the song, particularly the line - "I got particulars, you got particulars, whole circles are sick of us" and then when he moved, briefly into a flat in Brixton, thinking he might have spotted Roots Manuva on the bus. It's perfectly likely, and it's, I think, a bit of a shame that Roots Manuva has remained at a level where he probably only gets recognised on buses by those very few "people who don't particularly like rap but like the best rapper in the UK".

33rd song: You Get What You Give

You Get What You Give - The New Radicals

So I'm starting again with this format, after a brief intermission, and my first target is this song which was briefly considered for my 'Guilty Pleasures' compilation, but I don't really think I've ever felt that guilty for loving this.

I mean, Joni Mitchell loves it. She said it rose "from the swamp of McMusic like a flower of hope". It was in Pitchfork's Top 100 songs of the 90s. It's not uncool. And it's awesome, of coursome.

But The New Radicals is a funny little tale. Basically a one-hit wonder, but it didn't necessarily have to be. The band was, to all intents and purposes, a man called Gregg Alexander, who'd released a couple of unsuccessful solo albums previously.

I remember reading an interview with him at the release of 'You Get What You Give' and he seemed a right-on fellow, full of righteous leftist fury at capitalism, commercialism, his peers and his paymasters. He was going to shake the fucking world up with power-pop! Bosh! And 'You Get What You Give' itself picked up some attention for the section where he berated Beck and Hanson, Courtney Love and Marilyn Manson for being fakes. He's setting himself high on a pedestal here, I thought.

Then he was on Top of the Pops, and it was the most desultory, weak, performance you can imagine, which was very disappointing, and the album 'Maybe You've Been Brainwashed Too' flopped somewhat (it actually sold a million copies, so not actually a massive flop).

I bought it - it's actually pretty good, full of extremely wordy, angry oomphy songs with big choruses, kind of exactly what he promised. I haven't listened to it all for several years, but just thinking about it I can recall all the tunes really well, which is a good sign. Maybe nothing else quite as great as 'You Get What You Give' but a few not far behind. The next single was due to be 'Someday We'll Know', a nice little powerballad which definitely could have had a bit of success with a following wind.

But by the time it came out, The New Radicals were already on the way out. He simply said he couldn't be arsed, he hated the whole business, this was not the life he wanted. Fair enough, kind of principled, I thought.

But then, not long after, Gregg Alexander's name started cropping up again in slightly less hip circles - he'd become a writer for hire, and did pretty damn well at it too. 'Life is a Rollercoaster', 'Lovin Each Day' by Ronan Keating amongst others of his, 'Murder on the Dancefloor' by Sophie Ellis Bextor, 'Inner Smile' by Texas, 'Game of Love' by Santana. Once you know they're all by him, you can hear his sound in all of them. I mean, fair enough, but it's hardly the revolution is it? Is it fair to say a cop-out? [It's a good example of how precise our taste is - I'm sure i'd have liked two or three of those songs if they'd been on the New Radicals album, but in the mouths of Keating (is what he does singing) or Charlene Spiteri (who is a good singer but i always found (probably unfairly) annoying, like she was born to be interviewed by Chris Evans or appear on Jools Holland's Hootenanny) I had no time for the songs.]

But I suppose, if your gift is writing punchy pop songs, whatever your political feelings, once you realise you're not going to change the world and you don't have the charisma and ego to be a rock star, it's a perfectly reasonable course to take to step into the background and make the most of what you've got. Gosh, I said some fairly caustic anti-establishment things when I was younger and had big ideas about what one should and shouldnt do, and I've ended up basically providing corporate entertainment to bankers and lawyers, so I'm no one to talk.

So basically, The New Radicals (a pretty terrible name) are known for just this one song, even though the man behind it had an awful lot more good tunes in him.

But it really is a great song, which stands outside genre and taste. As with, say, Going Underground, its lyrical anti-establishment message isn't rocket science but neither is it clunky or misplaced, it's a warm-hearted graceful song which makes people feel better about themselves, and as for the coda where he rants about bankers and health insurance before calling out the likes of Marilyn Manson, it may be a bit daft, but it sounds pretty good [he claims he put it in as an experiment to see if people would pick up on the juvenile insults or the anti-establishment political bit].

It's a song which ticks the right boxes, pushes the righ buttons, and warms the right cockles on a snowy January day, so it's perfect for today. Go on, give it a listen.

Guilty Pleasures

'Guilty Pleasures' was a lucrative idea of a man called Sean Rowley, whose musical claim to fame is that he is on the cover of 'What's the Story (Morning Glory)'. It started off as a slot on his radio show, and became a couple of compilation albums and a very successful club night.

The original focus of it was on seemingly cheesy but actually really good hits from the 70s, and then (in the scond compilation) the80s - kind of discarded gems there ought to be no shame in liking. And ... the Compilation albums are indeed very good, with some cracking pop songs on them (you've probably heard a lot of them on adverts in the last few years). And I've been to a 'Guilty Pleasures' night in some form a few times, and the first time I thought it was great. But, to be honest, the next couple of times there was not that much to distinguish it from the standard horror-cheesy disco I'd fled from at the infamous St Andrews University Megabop or Clapham Inferno's. I don't think there was 'Macarena', but there might have been ...

But the thing is, in the gentrification/hipsterfication of Guilty Pleasures, the very concept of actual guilty pleasures changed. Not that it ever really should have been, but now it would not be the slightest bit shameful to admit to liking a Hall & Oates track or a Carpenters track or ,for example, 'Afternoon Delight'. In a sense, that's a positive effect of the movement, which reflects the download generation as well. Anyone can like anything, it is very hard to live in one's own self-imposed musical ghetto now. If a song makes you feel good even a tiny bit, it doesn't cost much to your pocket or your pride to own it and listen to it, even if just once.

So, "Guilty Pleasures" really are not guilty pleasures. And 'Guilty Pleasures' seems, from my recent experience, to have become something which is not much of a pleasure at all. I mean, I'm not going to pretend I like 'Wannabe' just because that's what cool people do these days.

So what is an actual guilty pleasure? A song or a band you actually realise at the bottom of your being you actually quite like, but would genuinely be a bit embarrassed to reveal. Now, perhaps you have to have a certain sensibility and self-consciousness to acknoweldge this at all, but perhaps, even for the most liberated and carefree music-lover, or even for someone with not the slightest awareness of what might be considered "good" or "bad", there is still a little shameful corner in their tastezone.

I've had a good think about it and there are various aspects of this for me - so here comes the big confession of my Guilt ... Well, to start with, there are songs from the shows I've a soft spot for - Cats, Les Miserables, whatever - there are certain circles i might be a little reticent about admitting I like some of those, but to be honest, I have a certain bullish prid in ite - likewise with Streisand, Manilow or the Carpenters.

I suppose one aspect that lets someone off the hook with their taste is liking something, not as such ironically, but at least at one remove - "I enjoy this song, it makes me feel jolly, but it doesn't involve me emotionally in the way that my actual favourite music does".

And likewise with pop hits - it may be that I don't really like anything of the Spice Girls, but i'll freely admit liking the odd Girls Aloud song or Sugababes or Rihanna etc - gosh, it's almost uncool not to. On the other hand, I actually really admire those people who still have absolutely no tolerance for liking anything but a certain quality/genre of music or film - of not budging to enjoy anything "mainstream". Though I do think it's a little bit like a Classical Music aficionado who still links that all pop music is inherently inferior.
I sometimes get called a music snob, but, you know, i've met real music snobs and, to them, I'd be an absolute mainstream philistine.

So, ok, I still haven't got to the bottom of my actual guilty pleasures, the things I'm genuinely ashamed of quite liking, and I rather think this is a bit subtler. There is, first of all, guilt in the sense of being a little wary of revealing I like something to certain other people, but then there's an even more intricate guilt where I've almost lied to myself. So, it's time to admit something I never thought I'd admit, I didn't realise was true until recently, and something that will destroy me before a jury of my peers. Right, here goes ... I quite like 'The Day We Caught the Train' by Ocean Colour Scene ...

Phew. That took some writing. Now here's the thing. Some of you might be thinking "Well, of course you do, what's odd about that? You like Paul Weller, you like Oasis, that's exactly the kind of lumpen Hollyoaks-man-rock you do like". But no! Ocean Colour Scene were anathema, the whipping boys of all right-thinking people, just like the Stereophonics, Skunk Anansie or Feeder - there's that line in everyone's music taste where "close to what I like but not quite what I like" is the worst thing of all. And, to be fair, I was young and impressionable back then, perhaps it was the tastemakers that made me dislike Ocean Colour Scene.

Funnily enough, perhaps I'm still impressionable. It's actually Bradley Wiggins who has made me rethink, god (mod) bless' im. Not in wanting to slavishly follow what the beloved Wiggo likes, but it was just his description of how, initially, it was OCS who got him into the whole mod thing, who gave him the sense of something to believe in, some sense of community, that made me think "OK, i'm not a mod myself, that was never what The Jam was about for me, but what is so wrong and different about this band?" And I remembered what I actually felt when I listened to them, and I recognised the uncertainty, the fact I was kind of forcing myself to find something to not like about them. Hence, they are a REAL guilty pleasure.

Perhaps, also, there's something in the idea that we can be embarrassed to like something that is really heartfelt and po-faced and emotive - I also sometimes feel a twinge of guilt at liking something like 'Life Becoming a Landslide' by the Manic Street Preachers, as if it reveals too much about myself. Likewise, a band like Del Amitri or Gene [I saw Martin Rossiter from Gene, in a gig, quell the cheering crowd and introduce a song with 'OK, this one's serious' and, honestly, I felt embarrassed for him ...]

I'm not saying I'm going to start listening to Ocean Colour Scene 24/7, anything but, but you know what, they were OK. They were hard done by. I, along with others, was snobbish towards them. There, I've said it.

My friend Michael and I used to play this game ( inaround 2004) where we'd say "My favourite song in the world is ..." and then come up with some song, which, to our mind, couldn't possibly be anyone's favourite song, but it was really, really specific, it had to be a certain kind of mid-to-late 90s British song. It was fun, it's hard to know what we were mocking, if anything. Some examples I recall

Ready to Go - Republica, What Do I Do Now? - Sleeper, Being Brave - Menswear, Only the Strongest Will Survive - Hurricane #1

And when we introduced the game to other people, if they veered slightly off from what we thought [we seemed to be pretty much of like mind ourselves, though on the odd occasion we both picked songs the other genuinely liked], for example if they said, for example, 'Two Princes' by the Spin Doctors, or 'Alright' by Supergrass or 'Yellow' by Coldplay (all of these songs not applying to the narrow criteria of the game for disparate reasons] it just wouldn't be right. There was such shared-knowledge cliqueyness in that, it's strange, but that's the thing about taste, isn't it? It is self-conscious, and there are just little lines between things we like and things we don't, and it's not necessarily always dishonest or unkind.

And we define ourselves by our musical enemies - mine, say, have included, at different levels, U2, Red Hot Chili Peppers and Madonna down to the sheer awfulness of Westlife - so it can be confusing if said "enemies" do something we actually, in some ways, quite like, as the first three mentioned there have definitely done [as i'll almost certainly get to in other posts].

But what if Westlife had done something I'd liked? Was that possible? Well, yes, of course, a tune is a tune, at some moment, in some context, i could indeed be swayed or moved by something of this most ghastly of bands. It hasn't happened yet with them, but it's happened with other bands who were almost as much hated at sompe point, like Take That, say ...

To me, it's a big journey of letting go and un-self-consciousness (which has its ups and downs), which will eventually end up with there being no guilty pleasures at all, and may end up, who knows, with me crying along to 'Flying Without Wings' or doing the Macarena.

Anyway, here is a little GUILTY PLEASURES compilation, taking in mind everything I've said about different kinds of guilt. Enjoy! Enjoy!

I Write the Songs - Barry Manilow
You're the Best - Joe Esposito
Friday Night - The Darkness
Somewhere Only We Know - Keane
Complicated - Avril Lavigne
Getting Jiggy With It - Will Smith
Too Young To Die - Jamiroquai
What a Fool Believes - The Doobie Brothers
A Thousand Trees - The Stereophonics
The Day We Caught The Train - Ocean Colour Scene

It's a Hard Life - Queen
You Win Again - The Bee Gees
You Make My Dreams - Hall and Oates
I Miss You - Blink 182
This Year's Love - David Gray
Nothing Ever Happens - Del Amitri
Sometimes - Erasure
Bring Him Home - not Hugh Jackman but actually the guy who plays the Bishop in the film ...
I'm so Lonely - Cast
I've Had the Time of My Life - Bill Medley and Jennifer Warnes

Quell your hard heart, there's nothing there I'm ashamed of ... not really ... apart from Keane, and David Gray, and ... no, nothing

51 Albums

Oh Jesus no, I'm not going to do this, am I?

This whole blog began in early 2009 with an attempt to consider, subjectively, what might be the best 101 Songs of All Time (ie the rock era and just before), in terms of some nebulous idea of accumulated praise and place in our culture etc It was a fun task, inevitably polluted (now I look back on it) more than I could realise by personal taste. But the thing was - it was  a task just about possible to carry out, considering I had probably heard at some stage a pretty large proprtion of what might have been deemed contenders to the throne.

I mean, we all hear a lot of songs. There are lots of songs we don't hear too, but I think I've heard a pretty large number of songs widely within Western pop music considered to be great songs, even if they're not in genres I'm that well acquainted with.

Albums, that's a different matter. How many albums do we actually listen to properly? More, I suppose, if you've got Spotify, but in general you have to own something and listen to it several times to have a full perspective on it.

Like, I own Stevie Wonder's 'Fulfilingness' First Finale' and sure I've probably listened to it all the way through, but hardly ever and not for several years, whereas, say, 'Talking Book' by the same artist, I happened to own and listen to a lot for a while. It's an unfair comparison. Of course I'm going to rate Talking Book higher.

Likewise, albums aren't always how we come to an artist - like The Jam and Blondie, I came to via tremendous Greatest Hits compilations, and though i've bought their albums since, I can't really pay proper heed to All Mod Cons and Parallel Lines, because that's not really how I've listened to these bands primarily.

Hmm, obstacles, unfairnesses, still, I'm going to go ahead. I'm going to try and provide a list of the Best ... Albums Ever (with the proviso that, of course, that just means Albums I've given a really good listen to, which is more than most people, but you know, there are probably around 500,000 I'm not considering and only about 1000, if that, that I can, so it's utterly daft!)

And I am going to try to be subjective, to the extent that that's possible. I'm actually going to use criteria and a tally system. Perhaps the results will surprise me.

What will the criteria be?

Impact/ Capturing its time 10
Popularity 10
Critical Acclaim10
Consistency/ No weakspots 10
Extent to which it reflects/encapsulates artists 5
Packaging (eg Name, Cover etc) 5
How it makes me feel 10
Unity 10
Artistic Achievement10
Timelessness/Longevity 10
Breadth/Range including range of talent 10

I know, I know, utterly daft - I'm going to give 10 for all those and so each album will get a score out of 100 and I'll list them. And what albums will I pick? Will I veer towards personal favourites when they have no real critical mass behind them eg 'The World Won't End' by the Pernice Brothers. Well, I'll try not to. Oh, this is going to useless. Anyway, here we go ...

... right, I've done it. I'll tell you how it went down.

I began to take the task seriously and try to be as fair as possible, so I poured through various lists and books to make sure I handn't missed much. I went through the Rolling Stone Greatest 500 Albums of All Time (jesus, it's a great magazine but their lists are fogeyish), the Q Top 100, all the NME Albums of the Year, Uncut Albums of the Year, the Mercury Winners, Grammy Winners, I asked one or two other people for their thoughts.

But of course there were problems. I had to have listened to the album properly - so there is quite a lack of representation in pop, dance, hip-hop, Krafwerk, Pet Shop Boys, Jay-Z, Underworld, whoever you like. If it were songs/singles, it would be different, I know plenty of  these artists' songs, but i just haven't listened to their albums. Sorry.

And personal taste did come into it. U2 aren't on the list, or Never Mind the Bollocks, for example. But, generally, my points system rather weighted against personal taste. Only 10% was actually how it made me feel, which, actually, actually, when it all comes down to it, is the only thing that really matters.

If that had been the only criterion, the winner would probably have been Gold Against the Soul by the Manic Street Preachers, and you know, that is NOT one of the best albums of all time, but, gosh, it made me feel something when i used to listen to it.

So I went through 140 albums, a few personal favourites included but generally "consensus" classics. Scores have ranged from 94 to 64 - the one that got 64, Surf's Up by The Beach Boys, probably shouldn't have been on the list, but as an example of how "fair" I think I've been, one of the lowest scores ended up being 'The World Won't End' by the Pernice Brothers (mentioned above) which happens to be one of my own personal five favourites in the world ever.

This was not a list where the alt-country middleweights have flourished.

The list may well be accused of being a little bland, but so be it. Remember the criteria.

Impact/ Capturing its time 10
Popularity 10
Critical Acclaim10
Consistency/ No weakspots 10
Extent to which it reflects/encapsulates artists 5
Packaging (eg Name, Cover etc) 5
How it makes me feel 10
Unity 10
Artistic Achievement10
Timelessness/Longevity 10
Breadth/Range including range of talent 10
There were a lot of ties, and where there were ties, I will use personal taste to rank the artists, if that's ok.

I'll stop short of 101, so my list will be

THE GREATEST 51 ALBUMS OF ALL TIME (hohum)

Revolver - The Beatles		1
Automatic for the people - REM		2
Blue - Joni Mitchell		3
OK Computer - Radiohead		4
Ziggy Stardust - David Bowie		5
Grace - Jeff Buckley		6
Come on Feel the Illinoise - Sufjan Stevens		7
The Velvet Underground and Nico - The Velvet Underground		8
Tapestry - Carole King		9
Rubber Soul - The Beatles		10
Searching for the Young Soul Rebels - Dexys Midnight Runners		11
Have one on Me - Joanna Newsom		12
Is This It - The Strokes		13
Astral Weeks - Van Morrison		14
London Calling - The Clash		15
Yankee Hotel Foxtrot - Wilco		16
The ArchAndroid - Janelle Monae		17
Songs in the Key of life - Stevie Wonder		18
Ys - Joanna Newsom		19
If You're feeling Sinister - Belle and Sebastian		20
Talking Book - Stevie Wonder		21
Times they are a Changin - Bob Dylan		22
Pet Sounds - The Beach Boys		23
Blonde on Blonde - Bob Dylan		24
Hour of the Bewilderbeast - Badly Drawn Boy		25
Definitely Maybe - Oasis		26
The Stone Roses - The Stone Roses		27
Forever Changes - Love		28
Freewheelin Bob Dylan - Bob Dylan		29
Fuzzy Logic - Super Furry Animals		30
It takes a nation of millions to Hold Us Back - Public Enemy		31
Nevermind - Nirvana		32
Fleet Foxes - Fleet Foxes		33
Let England Shake - PJ Harvey		34
The White Album - The Beatles		35
Sound of Silver - LCD Soundsystem		36
Parklife - Blur		37
Songs of Leonard Cohen - Leonard Cohen		38
The Boatman's Call - Nick Cave		39
Everything Must Go - Manic Street Preachers		40
A Ghost is Born - Wilco		41
22 Dreams - Paul Weller		42
Moondance - Van Morrison		43
What's the Story, Morning Glory? - Oasis		44
Blood on the Tracks - Bob Dylan		45
Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space - Spiritualized		46
Funeral - Arcade Fire		47
Thriller - Michael Jackson		48
Bringing it all Back home - Bob Dylan		49
Abbey Road - The Beatles		50
Blur - Blur		51=
Grievous Angel - Gram Parsons		51=
The Soft Bulletin - The Flaming Lips		51=

Pretty safe, eh? A few ties at the end. I'm not surprised by the Top 2 - I'm not even, as such, a massive REM fan, but i do think that album is an extraordinary unifying achievement without a fault, and I think it's ok to have "the greatest band" at their most fruitful, tuneful and imaginative at Number 1.

If anyone's interested in the full working and full scores, get in touch, and please tell me what i've missed. There are some notable omissions, like 'Sgt Pepper's', which i think a lot of people share my view of being hit-and-miss (it finished 63rd). Also, no Rolling Stones, another band i've mainly enjoyed through songs, not albums, though I do actually like Exile on Main Street a lot.

It really has veered quite a long way from personal preference, which is quite fun really.
If you're interested, my Favourite 10 would be something like (not in order)

Blue - Joni Mitchell
The World Won't End - The Pernice Brothers
Have One on Me - Joanna Newsom
Blood on the Tracks - Bob Dylan
More Adventurous - Rilo Kiley
Grace - Jeff Buckley
No More Shall We Part - Nick Cave
Searching for the Young Soul Rebels - Dexys
Van Occupanther - Midlake
London Calling - The Clash

though five of those could be different on any given night.

This has been fun. I'll do one more post, and then I'll get back to the Songs ...