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ALL TOO OFTEN EXPRESSED, in my experience at least, it’s the laziest of all comments about music. ‘It’s just not as good as it used to be.’ The most annoying and wrong-headed, too. This idea a golden age has passed, and we’re left now to wander the wastelands of a pop-culture desert.

For sure, through the noughties began and accelerated profound changes in the way we access and consume music. Music itself has become less tribal. In the literal, commercial sense, the album, as a form, doesn’t sell nearly so well. The proliferation of social media has been a battering ram to the preservation of mystery and mystique. Anger, rage, protest, this much these days seems absent from the mainstream discourse.

There has never been, though, a dearth of truly great music. Of questing trailblazers. Often as not, operating from the margins, outside of ‘popular’ culture, but not so very hard to find with a minimum of effort and for the curious. Altogether, the following artists and records, and along with so many more, too many to have included here, defy the myth of music’s decline, are vanguards for its eternal power to inspire, provoke, move, excite, and bless us with a uniquely unbreakable bond of companionship…

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1. ELLIOTT SMITH From a Basement on the Hill (2004)

He’d meant his sixth album as his magnum opus, as a freewheeling double, and laboured on it for the better part of three years, with various producers, up to his tragic death in October of 2003. In the aftermath of that terrible event, two of Smith’s closest confidantes, Joanna Bolme and Rob Schnapf salvaged 15 tracks from the trove of more than 50 he’d worked up. Zeppelin-esque opener ‘Coast to Coast’, the almost overwhelmingly powerful ‘King’s Crossing’, the all too bittersweet ‘A Fond Farewell’, these are among a generational talent’s finest ever songs. It didn’t turn out quite how he intended, but it’s a remarkable, profoundly affecting work all the same.

2. EELS Blinking Lights and Other Revelations (2005)

The other outstanding American songwriter of the era, Mark ‘E’ Everett, with his sixth album as Eels and an actual double. Recorded across six years, with guests including Tom Waits and Peter Buck of R.E.M., and spanning 33 songs about “God and all the questions related to the subject of God,” as Everett himself put it, Blinking Lights… is a deeply personal and uniformly excellent motherlode. Jauntily ironic on ‘Hey Man (Now You’re Really Living)’, ornately decorous on ‘Losing Streak’, and all-round lovely with ‘Railroad Man’, brushed drums and mourning pedal steel soothing Everett’s cracked at the edges vocal and the resigned shrug of his lyric: “I guess I may never understand the times that I live in.”

3. BLACK REBEL MOTORCYCLE CLUB Howl (2004)

BRMC’s self-titled debut album of 2001 cast them in with the straight-ahead guitar rock revivalist movement spurred by The White Stripes and The Strokes. Three years on and with this, their third, the San Francisco trio were mining a fertile, ranging strip of their own land. One seeded with blues, gospel, and goth-rock flavourings, as heavy with import as its stark monochrome cover implies, Howl is laced with acoustic guitars, churchy organ, and the overarching sense of a band hitting its stride. Witness the stomp blues of ‘Ain’t No Easy Way’, or the darker shifts of ‘Weight of the World’ and ‘Gospel Song’.

4. JENNY LEWIS AND THE WATSON TWINS Rabbit Fur Coat (2005)

Rilo Kiley still had 2007’s Under the Blacklight in them when Jenny Lewis teamed up with Nashville twins Chandra and Leigh Watson to make this, the first of an unbroken run of splendid records under her own name. By Lewis’ description it’s “a sort of soul record,” more so it’s a lovingly assured take on traditional country and folk forms, with a side order of pure pop and the bonus of a deliciously sly take on the Traveling Wilbury’s ‘Handle With Care’. The Watson Twins’ harmonies bring colour, the likes of Conor Oberst and M. Ward add ballast, but Lewis is the star power.

5. JUSTIN TOWNES EARLE The Good Life (2008)

In his own troubled mind, Justin Townes Earle could never get out from under the looming shadow, nor win the approval of his father, Steve Earle. That much was too much for him to bear, the dreadful reality of it made all the more desperately sad by the fact of his obvious, manifest gifts. The Good Life, his debut, is as fine as any roots record made this century, Earle’s grace clearly apparent on the bluegrass swing of opener ‘Hard Livin’’ and the title track, his soul bared on the desolate loveliness of ‘Lone Pine Hill’: “So God grant me speed and grant me forgiveness and carry me on through the night.”

6. JOSHUA JAMES Build Me This (2009)

Operating from out of a farmstead in the rural hinterlands of Utah, lapsed Mormon James challenged himself to write a song a day for 50 days, whittling that number down to 13 for this, his second full-length album. In sum, Build Me This adds up to a literate, spiritual, righteously powerful kind of folk-rock record crowned by James’ swooping marvel of a voice. ‘The Coal War’ hits hardest, ‘Mother Mary’, gathering like a storm, makes the heaviest impression. James has kept on making superb records from his mountainside retreat, all of which merit a much wider audience.

7. THE DECEMBERISTS The Hazards of Love (2009)

Having flirted with the notion of comporting like R.E.M. merged with Jethro Tull on their previous records, with this fifth, Portland’s The Decemberists went the whole hog, fashioning a fantastical concept piece unfolding over 58:37 and through recurring themes and motifs and with guesting vocalists playing the various characters. The story, a dark fairy tale, is overpowered by the folk-rock-opera heft of the music, no bad thing, and since ‘The Rake’s Song’ comes on like R.E.M. at their hardest driving and the epic ‘The Wanting Comes in Waves/Repaid’ is only missing Ian Anderson dancing on one leg and furiously blowing upon his flute. Wholly, admirably singular.

8. BOB FRANK & JOHN MURRY World Without End (2006)

A collaboration between veteran Memphis songwriter Frank and the younger Murry, hailing from Tupelo, Mississippi, a second cousin to William Faulkner, this collection of original murder ballads, each one dated, is an extraordinary piece. The music ploughs a sparse, gothic country-blues furrow, Frank’s and Murry’s voices alternately rendering ten tales of bloodshed and death. There’s no fat, just prime cuts. ‘Little Wylie Harp, 1803’ concerns a character who has “his head sawn off with a pocket blade, nailed to a dead oak tree.” In ‘Kid Curry, 1904’, the titular gunslinger meets his inevitable end in a hail of bullets. Out of the violence, Frank and Murry craft a stark beauty.

9. MIDLAKE Van the Occupanther (2006)

As it’s turned out, Tim Smith, erstwhile singer-songwriter-visionary with Denton, Texas’ Midlake, appears to have just the one string to his bow, but for a while there he used it ever so effectively. As here, on the band’s second album and, too, over its almost-as-good follow-up of 2010, The Courage of Others, Smith’s last before departing. Smith invites us into an arcadian America, mystical and otherworldly, set to a soundtrack of richly detailed psych-folk-rock. ‘Head Home’ is a pastoral confection, evoking the Tull once more. ‘Young Bride’ glories to fiddle and acoustic guitar. The leading-off ‘Roscoe’ is the peak point of his craft, a gently, elaborately rolling thunder through an olde world of stonecutters and mountaineers in an imagined 1891 where “they roamed around and foraged, they made their house from cedars, they made their house from stones.”

10. LIFT TO EXPERIENCE The Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads (2001)

A second band out of Denton, Texas, this one a trio led by extravagantly gifted singer-guitarist Joshua T. Pearson, and another double and concept album. Pearson’s story casts Texas as the new Promised Land and into which Christ makes his Second Coming. To the head-spinning sound of Lift to Experience’s intensely dense, atmospheric, feedback-heavy psych-rock. Fabulously on the billowing ‘Falling From Cloud 9’, and mammoth closer ‘Into the Storm’, Pearson’s fusillade of effects pedals igniting through a vintage Leslie speaker, the longest song on an album of epics. All but ignored on release, it remains the great cult album of the era.

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11. GILLIAN WELCH Time (The Revelator) (2001)

Welch and partner David Rawlings don’t make too many records, just six have followed 1996’s debuting Revival, but they’re always well worth the wait. This, their third together, is their masterpiece, cut at Nashville’s fabled RCA Studio B, the two of them paring down their country-folk roots to the barest of bones and then again, stretching out on the transfixingly expansive, 6:22 near-title track ‘The Revelator’, and ‘I Dream a Highway’, bewitching over more than twice the span. In between, Welch and Rawlings summon eight more terrific songs, fireside spiritual ‘Dear Someone’ and the heart-stopping ‘Everything is Free’ being most especially ageless.

12. SPARKLEHORSE It’s a Wonderful Life (2001)

Mark Linkous had already survived an overdose that caused his heart to stop and left him in a wheelchair for six months by the time he made this, his nominal band’s third album. Both his most cohesive and approachable set, Linkous, playing all the instruments, on it delivers his own woozy take on trad country with a more focussed and urgent edge. Best heard on ‘Piano Fire’, a tornado of a song, PJ Harvey sharing the vocal with him, ‘Dog Door’, co-written with Tom Waits and partner Kathleen Brennan, and the heart-breaking ‘Little Fat Baby’. Ultimately, Linkous couldn’t outrun his demons. The magic he scattered about his path will live on.

13. THE TWLIGHT SINGERS Blackberry Belle (2003)

Second album from Greg Dulli’s second band, and as good as anything he’s ever done with The Afghan Whigs. Which is to say, very, very good. Written in grief and after the death of his close friend, film director Ted Demme, it’s a musical noir, shot on location in LA, Memphis, and New Orleans, the music and Dulli’s words combining to darkly dramatic effect. Prince’s Purple Rain foil, Appolonia sings back-up on ‘Teenage Wristband’, a chiming shaft of light, Mark Lanegan intones the magnificent ‘Number Nine’, Dulli is a seductively wounded soul man on ‘Esta Noche’ and ‘Decatur St.’. In a word, brilliant.

14. THE HOLD STEADY Boys and Girls in America (2006)

Brooklyn’s The Hold Steady’s still most perfectly realised slice of sharply observed rock ‘n’ roll. The group, guitarist Ted Kubler and pianist Franz Nicolay in particular to the fore, approximate the sound of a more streamlined, rowdier E Street Band. Frontman Craig Finn sets the scenes, poetically, enticingly. The songs, well, they’re resounding knockouts. Hurtling opener ‘Stuck Between Stations’, the rousing ‘Chips Ahoy’, and the slow burning, utterly involving ‘First Night’ most especially.

15. THE GASLIGHT SOUND The ’59 Sound (2008)

Also approximating and in celebration of the Boss and E Street Band’s glory days, The Gaslight Anthem, from Springsteen country in New Brunswick, New Jersey, hit for the bleachers on this cracking second album. Comprising 12 songs, each one imbued with the band’s fire and main man Brian Fallon’s vein-popping passion, it marries grit to grandeur, carrying with it a strong sense of time and place, to whit Darkness on the Edge of Town being relived by four young punks a couple of decades on.

16. THE HELLACOPTERS By the Grace of God (2002)

A four-piece from Stockholm, Sweden, fronted by the drummer from death metal band Entombed, doing a convincing job of corralling Lynyrd Skynyrd’s southern rocking kick to Cheap Trick’s way with a hook. Such are The Hellacopters and their reconstituted singer/guitarist Nicke Andersson, here at their peak point on a fifth album riddled with rallying songs such as the careering title track, ‘It’s Good But It Just Ain’t Right’, and ‘Rainy Days Revisited’, a sort of ‘Freebird’ in miniature with Anders Lindstrom in the Billy Powell role on piano.

17. SPOON Gimme Fiction (2004)

Austin, Texas’ Spoon don’t make bad, or even so-so records, just degrees of good ones. This fifth is at the top end of the scale, written by Spoon-in-chief Britt Daniel at a borrowed beach house in San Diego and loaded with smartly attired songs that snap, crackle, and bite. See the whipcrack pop-rock of ‘Sister Jack’ and ‘I Summon You’, the more involved brew of ‘The Two Sides of Monsieur Valentine’, and standing out, Daniel affecting a falsetto to navigate the tightly wound funk of ‘I Turn My Camera On’.

18. MANU CHAO La Radiolina (2007)

Paris-born and of Spanish Cuban heritage, Manu Chao grew up in thrall to The Clash and The Jam, and busking on the French capital’s subway. At a sprawling 21 tracks, La Radiolina, his fourth and still best album, is his London Calling, an entirely winning melange of punk rock activism and the joie de vivre of Latin-Caribbean folk music. The year after its release, he played one of the great Glastonbury sets, also amounting to 21 songs, on the Pyramid Stage, and with ‘Rainin’ in Paradize’, the barrelling highlight here, bringing a field of thousands to their feet.

19. TINARIWEN Aman Iman (2007)

Championed by Robert Plant, and here produced over two weeks in the Malian capital of Bamako by his band’s guitarist, Justin Adams, Tinariwen, a group of Tuareg tribesmen born from conflict and diaspora in West Africa, settled into a thoroughly hypnotic groove on this fifth album. Its title translates as ‘Water is Life’, and appropriately, its landscape is a scorched desert blues, bone-dry guitars and droning percussion pulling you in from the moment exotic opening track ‘Cher Achel’ sets off and never once letting go.

20. EXPLOSIONS IN THE SKY The Earth is Not a Cold Dead Place (2003)

Third album from the four-piece Texan post-rockers with the best, most apt ever band name. It expands over five gargantuan tracks as an orchestra of simmering then detonating guitars and rumbling drums, like a more earthy but no less vaulting Sigur Ros. Irresistibly on ‘First Breath After a Coma’, a heartbeat pulse, guitars pinging like an ECG machine, mushrooming to a crescendo, and the mighty, strident ‘Your Hand in Mine’, a headphones symphony used to fantastic effect on TV’s Friday Night Lights.

Now listen to prime cuts from all of the above on the playlist at the link

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CONTRARY TO THE LONG-held – and facile – notion that in Britain at least, 1977 belonged to, and was defined by punk rock, three of the best-selling records of that year were Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, Meat Loaf’s Bat out of Hell, and Out of the Blue by ELO. The ex-singer of Genesis made one of the most questing with his self-titled debut album. At 27, Peter Gabriel was seven months younger than Hugh Cornwell of The Stranglers. Angriest, by far, was Pink Floyd’s Animals, upon which Roger Waters imagined a Britain sunk into a cesspit of social and moral decay.

Yet not even Waters’s bleak dystopian vision was the year’s most extreme alternative to punk’s nihilism. That honour belongs to a record released in February of ’77, a week ahead of The Damned’s opening salvo, Damned Damned Damned, and one rooted in old English folklore.

Listening to its largely acoustic-based songs with their antiquated lyrics and shadings of mandolin, glockenspiel, pipe organ and flute still now conjures images of a mystical Neverland populated by sprites, goblins, elves, and faeries. The effect enhanced by the fact of it being a work crafted in large part by an unruly-haired, boggle-eyed man who habitually dressed as a medieval minstrel.

Jethro Tull’s tenth album, Songs from the Wood, both commercially and creatively, remains one of their most successful. Holed up in the 16^th century Buckinghamshire farmhouse he’d recently acquired with his new wife, Shona Learoyd, a retired ballet dancer, singer and band leader Ian Anderson fixated on a vanished England steeped in myth and legend. To welcome the listener into this arcadian world, there was Anderson on the album’s cover, done up as a kind of Middle Ages poacher. Clearly, not caring a jot for the encroaching punks.

“Quite frankly, I didn’t,” Anderson told me, delightedly. “It would have been ludicrous to even try and ingratiate oneself with the audience of that changing time. And remember, the punk thing began back with the MC5 and “kick out the jams, motherfuckers.” I know, because I was onstage supporting them in Seattle in 1969.

“Anyway, some of the Tull’s earlier music was brash and untutored. Famously, Johnny Rotten was quite a fan of ‘Aqualung’, the track, too. But given the mood of the times, Songs from the Wood was not street cred music. This was stuff that would have made Johnny projectile vomit.”

ANDERSON FOUNDED THE TULL in 1967, along with two grammar schoolmates in his adopted hometown of Blackpool. He was born in the Fife city of Dunfermline in 1947, moving south to Lancashire with his Scots father and English mother in 1959. The nascent Tull sounded so raw and primal, Tony Iommi briefly passed through their ranks before taking his guitar back down to Birmingham to spark up Black Sabbath. By the mid-’70s, the music weekly Melody Maker was posing the question, ‘Jethro Tull – Now the Biggest Band in the World?’

A uniquely captivating frontman, stood there on one leg, pirouetting and blowing his flute, Anderson emerged as their driving force and visionary. His high-flung ideas shaped two of their pivotal albums, Aqualung in 1971 and Thick as a Brick a year later. Another concept piece, 1976’s Too Old Too Rock ‘N’ Roll: Too Young to Die, sprung them into stadiums in the US.

Returning to England that same summer, Anderson removed himself to his farm. There, he pored over a book on English lore and legend gifted to him by the Tull’s de facto manager, a brash New Yorker, Jo Lustig – “The best way to describe him,” Anderson noted, “would be as a full-on, Neanderthal presence. He used to infuriate me, but his heart was in the right place.”

As Anderson read, the landscape of Songs from the Wood took shape in his mind. Coalescing as a pastoral song cycle as anachronistic just then as one of the codpieces he serially sported onstage.

“The countryside, too, provided me with some influence,” Anderson expanded. “Our English countryside is quite rich in different traditions and cultures, and elements of fantasy and fable.

“Songs from the Wood also drew on my background of listening to other kinds of music than rock. I’ve never really been a fan of rock music. I was thinking on when classical composers fooled around with the vulgar folk music forms. Beethoven, for one, knew a good folk tune when he heard it.”

His connections to the British folk-rock scene were well established. In 1974, he’d produced Steeleye Span’s Now We Are Six album, persuading David Bowie to blow sax on one song, ‘To Know Him is to Love Him’. Nevertheless, Anderson was at best ambivalent about aspects of the British folk tradition. As he set to the task of writing Tull’s new record, he resolved to fashion music distinct from what he once termed “a wet kind of folk.”

“British, and more particularly English folk music is always better, I think, when it doesn’t get caught up in its own very stylised past,” he ventured to me. “I was a fan of the more modern English, Scottish, and Irish folk music. People like Bert Jansch and Roy Harper did it for me.

“No disrespect to Steeleye Span, but there were one or two members of the band rather infatuated with the idea of gathering in barley by hand. I found that difficult to grasp. On the farm, I was driving a big old tractor and combine harvester. In terms of the rural English tradition, my world was about smoking diesels.”

Lyrically, he had no such qualms about delving back into a bygone, or else never-was age. The new songs he wrote were peppered with fantastical-sounding characters, Jack-in-the-Green, the Whistler, and the Green Man. Then again, with Pagan festivals and other ancient rites. The first verse of the opening, title track finds him trilling, like a playful storyteller stepped out from the pages of Tolkien, “Let me bring you songs from the wood… Dust you down from tip to toe, show you how the garden grows.”

“Playful is a good choice of word,” he said. “It sums up what the mood of the album was designed to be.

“It was me having a little fun with traditions and myths and legends. All of which could be very twee and, yes, seriously wet.”

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IN TOTAL, SONGS FROM the Wood was put down in less four weeks over August of ’76. Anderson arrived at the sessions with the bones of the record already set out. He was ever mindful, he said, of how much time could be lost with trying to wrestle ideas out of thin air.

“Plus,” he added archly, “I was a penny-pinching Scot. Also, I hated to have to go back into the same room to work, day after day. I liked to be on the first stagecoach out of Dodge.”

Alas, he gathered together the band – guitarist Martin Barre, bassist John Glascock, pianist John Evan, Barriemore Barlow on drums, and new recruit, organist David Palmer – not in a candlelit hay loft, but at the much less fanciful environs of Morgan Studios in Willesden, North London. There, the grimmer realities of the time intruded upon them.

“I would come out of Morgan each night and check under Martin’s car for bombs,” Anderson recalled. “These were the days when the IRA’s terrorism had extended itself and politicians, the military, and the police were targets. There was a certain concern that people in the public eye, such as rock and pop stars, might be next on the list.”

As he had on every Tull album since Stand Up in 1969, Anderson assumed the producer’s role. By his own admission, he was wont to “steamroll” his fellows into compliance. With Songs…, he strived for a more benevolent form of dictatorship, encouraging the others to dress the scenery of his songs.

Palmer’s ornate organ and keyboard fills, in particular, became a feature of the finished work. On the epic ‘Pibroch (Cap in Hand)’, Barre’s guitar approximated the sound of bagpipes a good six years before Big Country burst onto the scene.

“In general, I left gaps between sections of vocal or chorus where there was an opportunity for other members to come up with bits of their own,” Anderson explained. “Quite often, I’d leave the room to let them discuss ideas. That helped to make the album what it was, because David’s background especially was in classical music and composition, and he could do something I was not able to.”

Always, Anderson was as likely to be gripped by some spontaneous urge or other of his own. Relaxing at home one weekend in the middle of recording, the words and music to ‘Jack-in-the-Green’ popped fully formed into his head. He sat down to Sunday lunch and afterwards summoned his engineer, Robin Black, to Morgan and where he put down the basic track in a matter of hours, playing guitar and drums unaccompanied.

As a whole, Songs from the Wood amounts to perhaps Tull’s most coherent and fully realised statement. Not a concept album in the strictest sense, yet a very singular body of work. Each of its nine songs is linked by imagery and a shared musical language. As Anderson intended, it’s folk-rock with one foot in the past, the other tapping out a wilder and more audacious beat.

“It’s a collection of songs, nothing more, except for the most part they seem to belong together,” Anderson opined. “The Beatles did that admirably with Sgt Pepper’s… The same with Pink Floyd’s first album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. Those records were intact, whole, and served as examples to me when I started to write music.”

Initially, the portents for the album were not good. Tull’s label, Chrysalis, wanted to have it preceded by a Christmas hit and badgered Anderson to redecorate ‘Ring Out, Solstice Bells’, a celebration of a Pagan festival, to fit the purpose. He handed it over to Mike Batt, of TV’s The Wombles fame, whose Yule-flavoured garnish proved to no-one’s taste.

“That was somewhat sad for me,” said Anderson. “Also, though the band was probably at its best at that time, the seeds were being sown of musical discontent and personal differences between certain people. Within a year or two, it began to feel to me as if that cohesiveness we had was getting lost.

“Partly, I guess, because of the pressures and frequency of our touring. Things were quite stressful back then. It felt as if I was in charge of a juggernaut that could very easily run off the road.”

EVEN STILL, SONGS FROM the Wood itself was a roaring success. Released on 11^th February 1977, it gained Tull some of their most glowing notices since the halcyon days of Thick as a Brick. The NME, not yet entirely given over to cheerleading punk, proclaimed it ‘maybe the group’s best ever record.’ Tull’s fans concurred. A Top 20 hit in the UK, Songs… sailed to Number 7 in the US, the last of the band’s albums to fly quite so high.

Should there have been any lingering doubts as to Tull’s utter indifference to the zeitgeist, they were surely snuffed out by the clip they shot to accompany the second single plucked from the album, ‘The Whistler’. There was Anderson, perched on a stool, resplendent in, as he put it, a “frivolous pantomime cossie,” and leering like a loon. About him stand Palmer at his keyboard, puffing on an enormous old pipe, and Barre with a monocle clamped in his left eye.

“Well, it was kind of a light-hearted album,” Anderson reasoned, chuckling. “It didn’t have any terribly dark or brooding references, or the torture and aggression of certain other things we’d done earlier and maybe also did later on. From that point of view at least, it was inoffensive.”

Altogether, Songs… ushered in a second, if shorter-lived golden era for this most British of bands. They toured it around the UK, Europe, and American arenas for much of the rest of ’77, following it in 1978 with another excellent folk-rock confection, Heavy Horses.

Afterwards, John Glascock fell ill and was unable to participate in 1979’s Stormwatch, which ploughed the same rustic furrow but sounded tired and lacking in inspiration. Glascock died barely two months after it was released, on 17^th November 1979, from a congenital heart valve defect and aged just 28. Crushed by the loss of his close friend, Barriemore Barlow quit the band soon after and the line-up that had made Songs from the Wood was no more.

Carrying on through the ’80s, the Tull was a different beast. Racing to catch up with the times, Anderson added synths and an electronic gloss to the band’s sound. There were peak points, notably 1987’s revitalising Crest of a Knave album, but for the most part, this Tull was never nearly as endearingly eccentric as the one going before.

Today, the last of the true originals in every sense, Anderson continues to fly the flag, touring a version of Tull and their music around the world. As for Songs From the Wood, it stands tall still, as uncompromising as it is ageless, like something beamed in not just from another time, but from a whole other place and state of mind.

“It was a landmark for me,” Anderson concluded. “Yet I see it as a quaint anachronism in today’s terms. For me, it’s an important album as a writer and musician and in terms of giving the band a good few songs to play live. But it’s a little bit too tights and codpiece for most people…”

He caught himself just then, as though he’d remembered something that up to this precise point had lain buried and forgotten all these many years.

“Actually,” he picked up, “by the time we did Songs From the Wood, the codpiece had mysteriously disappeared and never to be found again. My suspicion, though she flatly denies it, is that my wife put it on the bonfire with the autumn leaves.

“From time to time, and in vain hope, I still look to see if it has turned up on eBay. Who knows, one day I may yet end up paying through the nose, if not through any other orifice for the return of it.

“Wouldn’t that be nice?”

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ENDINGS ARE THE HARDEST of all. All the how’s of doing it. With a bang, or then again, with a soft caress. With a scream, or a sigh. To stand up and shout or slip away like a phantom. Or else to not even trouble about it overmuch and just be done with it. Something, or anything.

Generally, by far, it’s the latter option taken with albums. They simply finish with yet one more track. Perhaps one the band or artist sincerely believes is better, or more definitive, than the others preceding it. The loudest, or the softest. Rocker, or ballad. No-one, though, is going to be left having discovered what Kane meant by “Rosebud,” or thinking on ‘This is not an exit.’

Which is say, the endings to most records, as with most films, or books, or with life as a rule, turn out to be not so very significant. They come, they go, we move on. And meaning the ones to stick with us, impact on us, hit hard or linger like seductions, are special. As with each of these 25 especially climactic songs, all of them the rarest and most perfect kinds of mic-drops…

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1. THE BEATLES ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’

From: Revolver, 1966

Still staggering to note that Revolver arrived less than three years after ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’. Their last album before retiring as a touring band, their first as true artists. Here was the point of their great leap forward. Lennon’s processed vocal, his lyrics lifted from Timothy Leary. Tape loops, reversed guitar, the drone of a sitar. A trip, and then some. Absolutely, “Turn off your mind and float downstream.”

2. THE WHO ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’

From: Who’s Next, 1971

Meant to have closed Pete Townshend’s aborted Lifehouse project, but instead bringing the curtain down on their greatest album, rock music doesn’t, never will, get more thrilling than the sum 8:32 total of ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’. The pin-pricking synth. Townshend’s crashing power chords, Keith Moon’s drum fusillades, The Ox doing boggling things in the spaces in between. Daltrey’s banshee’s scream at 5:57. How unfeasibly mighty they were.

3. THE JIMI HENDRIX EXPERIENCE ‘Voodoo Chile (Slight Return)’

From: Electric Ladyland, 1968

Hendrix, Noel Redding’s, and Mitch Mitchell’s third and final album together. What a way to go out, with a blazing double and this eruption, improvised on the spot by Hendrix, captured on their eighth and last take, as his miracle of a guitar blasts the blues into psychedelia. A revolution in sound.

4. QUEEN ‘Seven Seas of Rhye’

From: Queen II, 1974

They’d teased it as the snatch of an instrumental to usher off Queen I, the bones of a song the incomparable Freddie Mercury had knocking around from five years earlier with his old band Wreckage. Fleshed out with producer Roy Thomas Baker, it spirits II off to a fictitious world imagined by Mercury to the sound of his own gambolling piano and Brian May’s scything guitar, before dissolving with a flourish into “I do want to be beside the seaside.” The moment they became uncategorisable.

5. TOM PETTY & THE HEARTBREAKERS ‘American Girl’

From: Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, 1976

Upon release, Petty’s and band’s debut album, recorded with Moody Blues/Procol Harum producer Denny Cordell in Hollywood, barely registered in America and released as its second single, the rousing closer only snuck into the UK Top 30. Fifty years on, the Byrds-ian jangle of Petty’s and Mike Campbell’s guitars, that unmistakeable nasally voice of his, the sheer exultancy of the hook line, all of it is indelibly imprinted in the fabric of classic rock.

6. FLEETWOOD MAC ‘Gold Dust Woman’

From: Rumours, 1977

Conceived by Stevie Nicks as a wistful folk song, but become darker, spookier in the febrile atmosphere of the Rumours sessions. The longest track on the album, they cut the keeper take at 4am one morning, Lindsey Buckingham’s Strat sparking off Nicks’ witchy incantations, her lyrics laying bare the raw ingredients seasoning their intoxicating brew: “Rock on gold dust woman. Take your silver spoon and dig your grave.”

7. WARREN ZEVON ‘Desperados Under the Eaves’

From: Warren Zevon, 1976

The other seminal LA album of that year, Zevon’s second was cut with producer Jackson Browne at Sunset Sound and featured contributions from Nicks and Buckingham, plus Don Henley, Glenn Frey, Bonnie Raitt, and Carl Wilson. Rock royalty bearing witness to Zevon excoriating his own alcoholism through the prism of this, his finest song. Killer opening couplet, “I was sitting in the Hollywood Hawaiian Hotel; I was staring in my empty coffee cup,” and the precise sound the Eagles were to appropriate within a year for ‘Hotel California’.

8. BOB DYLAN, THE BAND ‘This Wheel’s on Fire’

From: The Basement Tapes, 1975

Yes, there’s ‘Desolation Row’ and ‘Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands’. ‘I Shall Be Released’ and ‘King Harvest (Has Surely Come)’, too. Even so, there is something otherworldly about the trove of music Dylan and The Band made together in Woodstock over the summer of ’67. Eight years after the fact, Dylan reliving his motorcycle crash of 1966, Rick Danko lacing the threads, Robbie Robertson on drums, ‘This Wheel’s on Fire’ sounded then, now, and forever magical and near mythical.

9. BOB MARLEY & THE WAILERS ‘Redemption Song’

From: Uprising, 1980

Within a year of Uprising Marley was dead, all too soon, and likely he knew what was coming for him when he put this down, solo, on acoustic guitar, at Tuff Gong in Kingston, Jamaica. His most explicitly Rastafarian song, his most nakedly unadorned, it’s not reggae but rather a folk spiritual, with words extracted from a Marcus Garvey speech: “Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery, none but ourselves can free our minds.” As powerful as it is poignantly profound.

10. THE ROLLING STONES ‘Moonlight Mile’

From: Sticky Fingers, 1971

In the midst of rock’s hottest streak, late October 1970, the Stones were gathered at Mick Jagger’s house, Stargroves, but with Keith Richards absent, gone off to who knew where, when Mick Taylor picked up the snatch of a piece Jagger had put down and fired it to the heavens. The last song they recorded for Sticky Fingers, ‘Moonlight Mile’ is also their most often overlooked. Narcotic, woozy, magnificent, like no-one else ever.

11. THE DOORS ‘Riders on the Storm’

From: LA Woman, 1971

His world collapsing, an indecent exposure charge hanging over him from the wretched Miami concert of 1969, wrung out, bloated and doomed, Jim Morrison summoned himself to a final peak. The last song he sung with The Doors, Elvis Presley sideman, the great Jerry Scheff on bass, ‘Riders…’ is at once somehow heroic, deeply haunting, spooked, and forlorn. “If you give this man a ride, sweet memory will die,” Morrison intones. Three months after it came out, he lay dead in his bathtub.

12. LUCINDA WILLIAMS ‘Jackson’

From: Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, 1998

Assembled in bits and pieces, and with Williams at odds with her demanding producer, Steve Earle, on Car Wheels on a Gravel Road she mined strength and soul from conflict. It remains her masterpiece. In closing, Earle on acoustic guitar, E Street-er Roy Bittan on piano, she finishes up singing her heart out on this plaintive but defiant ballad. “Once I get to Baton Rouge, I won’t cry a tear for you.” An open wound with true grit in it.

13. LYNYRD SKYNYRD ‘Freebird’

From: Pronounced ’Leh-’Nerd ’Skin-’Nerd, 1973

They’d put an early version of it down at Muscle Shoals in Alabama, Ronnie Va Zant singing sweetly, Ricky Medlocke on drums, the summer of ’71. By the time they were making their debut album proper, a couple of years’ road work had toughened it up some. Erstwhile roadie Billy Powell’s piano intro had been happened upon by accident, Allen Collins’ and Gary Rossington’s extended duelling guitar coda was initiated to allow Van Zant an onstage breather, and the ‘Roosevelt Cock’ on Hammond and Mellotron is their producer/manager and one-time Dylan foil Al Kooper. All put together, the southern-fried rock epic to end all rock epics.

14. LED ZEPPELIN ‘When the Levee Breaks’

From: Four Symbols, 1971

The song was Memphis Minnie’s, a country blues she’d written about the great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and recorded with Kansas Joe McCoy two years afterward. The seismic crunch, well, that’s all Zeppelin. Jimmy Page’s heaving guitar in large part, but here, the even greater contribution is John Bonham’s, the awesomely hulking sound of his drums captured by a couple of mics suspended above Headley Grange’s grand staircase, and as Bonzo pummelled away from the lobby below.

15. NEIL YOUNG ‘Rockin’ in the Free World’

From: Freedom, 1989

Until Freedom, the ’80s hadn’t been a good decade for Young. Only at its end did he rediscover his mojo. What would’ve been a fine album was transformed to a bowdlerising statement of intent by this, the splenetic roar upon which it went out. The title came from an offhand comment made by Crazy Horse guitarist Frank ‘Poncho’ Sampedro, stoically remarking upon the cancellation of a planned tour of the Soviet Union, “Well, I guess we’ll just keep rockin’ in the free world.” To which Young unleashed a riff like a stomping dinosaur.

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16. U2 ‘Love is Blindness’

From: Achtung Baby, 1991

Written by Bono for Nina Simone and then left off Rattle and Hum for not being ‘U2 enough’, ‘Love is Blindness’ finally sprung into being at Hansa in Berlin, pulled out from the prickling tension of the Achtung Baby sessions. The funereal throb of Adam Clayton’s bass. Edge, in the throes of a divorce, wrenching out his guitar solo. Bono fully invested, his lyrics like eulogy, or confession. “All the secrets, and no-one to tell… Won’t you wrap the night around me.” Magnificent.

17. PRINCE ‘Purple Rain’

From: Purple Rain, 1984

Taped live at the First Avenue club, Minneapolis, 3^rd August 1983, guitarist Wendy Melvoin’s debut performance with the Revolution. Prince fretted it sounded too alike Journey’s power balled ‘Faithfully’, and before sending it out into the world, rang that song’s writer, Jonathan Cain, to have his fears soothed. He thought of duetting it with Stevie Nicks. These facts aside, ‘Purple Rain’ amounts to genius at work. Prince’s own three-and-a-half-minute guitar freakout at its climax like he was letting it all spill out, uncontained and unrivalled.

18. DAVID BOWIE ‘Fame’

From: Young Americans, 1975

Out of glam-rock and into his ‘plastic soul’ period, Bowie himself never did care so much for ‘Fame’, the song, his treatise on the toxicity of fame, the state. Separating messily from manager Tony DeFries, he was spurred to it by John Lennon, visiting him at Electric Lady studio in New York one day in January of ’75 and scatting a melody over a drum beat they’d taped. With Lennon on back-ups and to Carlos Alomar’s jabbing guitar, Bowie let fly, hitting a spiteful kind of funk groove and spleen-venting, “Fame… puts you there where things are hollow.” About the song at least, he was wrong.

19. THE JAM ‘Down in the Tube Station at Midnight’

From: All Mod Cons, 1978

Paul Weller was just turned 20 when he made The Jam’s third album, in thrall to The Kinks, an angry young man otherwise. ‘Down in the Tube Station at Midnight’ summoned a hellish vision of a Britain going to the dogs, right-wing thugs terrorising the London underground, smelling of “pubs and Wormwood Scrubs.” Weller sang it as if his veins were about to explode. That much was largely absent from the Britpop he, as much as anyone, was the catalyst for, and which is to say, an utter need to express oneself and with unbridled commitment.

20. BRUCE SRINGSTEEN ‘Jungleland’

From: Born to Run, 1975

Famously, the Born to Run sessions were tortuous, agonising for all concerned, The Boss sweating and striving to realise the sound in his head. After six months gestating, ‘Jungleland’ exploded out in a glorious 9:33 drama of street gangs and cop enforcers “neath the giant Exxon sign that brings this fair city light,” and with the Magic Rat ultimately meeting his end in a hail of bullets. Fabulous enough in itself but raised to a whole other level by the Big Man’s glorious two-minute sax solo.

21. THE CLASH ‘Train in Vain’

From: London Calling, 1979

They almost tossed it away onto a free flexi disc for the NME, but at the last-minute common sense prevailed (too late, as it happened, for it to be listed on the original album track listing). Prior to starting on London Calling, producer Guy Stevens had handed The Clash a copy of Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours and urged them to absorb a lesson in songwriting. Evidently, they took heed. Written by Mick Jones after the ending of his tumultuous relationship with Viv Albertine of the Slits, ‘Train in Vain’ was the closest they were ever to get to an unabashed pop tune. It remains irresistible.

22. NIRVANA ‘All Apologies’

From: In Utero, 1993

Impossible now, of course, to listen to it without thinking on the terrible fate awaiting Kurt Cobain. Written to four-track by Cobain in 1990, taped by Nirvana with Steve Albini at poky Pachyderm Studios over a frigid February 1993 week in small-town Minnesota, and later on polished up by R.E.M. producer Scott Litt, ‘All Apologies’ even still stands above and apart as a terrific song, plain and simple. Wracked with an awful pain, yes, but blessed with an eternal gift, too.

23. R.E.M. ‘Find the River’

From: Automatic for the People, 1992

Scott Litt again, here overseeing what might just be R.E.M.’s highest point. The music was Mike Mills’, the band’s resident polymath featuring on bass, organ, piano, acoustic guitar, accordion, organ, and celestial harmonies. Bill Berry’s drums are brushed. Pete Buck isn’t on it. Michael Stipe’s vocal makes the heart soar, his lyric like a hymn to all of our inevitable ends: “The river empties to the tide, all of this is coming your way.”

24. THE BEACH BOYS ‘Caroline, No’

From: Pet Sounds, 1966

How else to sign off Brian Wilson’s fantastical symphony but with a song as richly detailed as it is impossibly lovely. He’d released it as his first solo single in March of 1966. Then recorded it again for Pet Sounds with a 12-strong session band. Either way, it can stop your heart.

25. THE BEATLES ‘A Day in the Life’

From: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, 1967

So good they had to be twice included. A year on from Revolver, unshackled from the burden of touring, Lennon and McCartney grew wings. ‘A Day in the Life’ packs so much into its 5:38. Four verses by Lennon. McCartney’s bridge. A 40-piece orchestra two times crescendoing and a high-pitched sound only dogs can hear. Musically, obviously, it’s a wonder. What surprises still is how achingly, despairingly sad it is, as if it’s carrying the weight of the world. “I read the news today, oh boy,” Lennon begins. Thereafter, miracles happen.

Now listen to all of these last words together on the playlist at the link:

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THE LAST TIME ANDY Sturmer and Roger Manning spoke to each other was in the spring of 1994. The two of them hooked up in Los Angeles to record a song for a tribute album to Harry Nilsson, the venerated singer-songwriter and bear of a man who’d once run wild with John Lennon, dead from a massive heart attack earlier that same year. Having cut their cover of Nilsson’s ‘Think About Your Troubles’ in an afternoon, the two high school friends went their separate ways. Manning to a career as a jobbing musician, Sturmer out of sight.

Both of them prodigiously gifted musicians and songwriters, each of Sturmer and Manning seemed to spark best off no-one so much as the other. In 1989, they formed a band to realise their shared vision of a single vessel through which they could distil all of the best parts of the music they’d discovered on FM radio growing in the 1970s. A heady mix of The Beatles, Beach Boys, Cheap Trick, ELO, Fleetwood Mac, Queen, 10CC, Wings, and more besides.

They called this group of theirs Jellyfish. During the course of just two albums together as the creative hub of the band, Sturmer and Manning pulled off a musical conjuring act. All at once, Jellyfish sounded like a haphazard jumble of ideas crashing together, and then again, something entirely coherent. Labyrinthine harmonies, soaring string arrangements, melodies as warmly evocative as a California sunrise, these were the lynchpins they corralled into their songs.

Which is to say, the greatest of them sounded like they could have been smash hits at any point during the two decades preceding. Their particular tragedy was that Jellyfish arrived at the very moment the music business was diving into the darker, gloomier waters of grunge rock. They were doomed to be men out of time and place.

STURMER AND MANNING FIRST met at high school in Pleasanton, a genteel, well-heeled suburb of San Francisco. A spotless surburbia of trim gardens and small ‘c’ conservative values.

This was the late-’70s, and Manning was a happy-go-lucky teenager whose uncle had once drummed for various psych-rock bands down the West Coast in LA. Manning learnt to play music on a second-hand piano gifted to him by his grandparents. The elder of the two by a year, the more diffident Sturmer excelled as both a singer and drummer. He was a member of the school’s crack jazz band to which Manning aspired.

“I’ve never seen anyone of his age with that expertise and command of his instrument,” Manning told me of Sturmer. “Andy was one of the first kids in our town who took music seriously and had a goal. He was my hero.”

Upon graduating, Manning left his hometown for LA and where he enrolled at the University of Southern California to study musical composition. There, he ran headlong into the city’s febrile mid-’80s music scene. A tumultuous brew of post-punk, goth-rock, the Byrds-obsessed Paisley underground, and most prominent of all, hair metal, just then exploding out from the Sunset Strip rock clubs. Manning, though, was captivated by a local group that stood apart, the flamboyantly attired Redd Kross.

Soon enough, he began to audition for bands, setting aside his passion for jazz and his goal to score films. Answering a newspaper ad from a teenage guitarist looking for like-minded musicians into ‘Bowie, XTC, and the Blue Nile,’ he fell in with Jason Falkner. The self-assured Falkner already looked like a rock star in waiting. They began meeting up at Falkner’s parents’ house, sharing with each other songs they were writing, Manning sat up at the Falkner family’s grand piano.

“Right away, I could tell Roger was an amazing musician,” Falkner said. “He was also really square-looking. His hair was short and he wore a Lacoste polo shirt.”

“I was like a writer in one of those old movies,” offered Manning. “Cranking out ideas for hundreds of songs, then screwing them up and tossing them in the trash.

“The first one I thought was as good as Elvis Costello or Andy Partridge of XTC, or any of my other heroes, was ‘Bye Bye Bye’, which Andy later on wrote the lyrics for and we recorded for the second Jellyfish album.”

As it happened, Manning had kept in touch with his old high school friend. He knew Sturmer, too, was writing songs and teaching himself guitar. Subsequently, Sturmer hooked up with a band from San Francisco called Beatnik Beach. They had a manager and a record deal. Starting off as their drummer, Sturmer fast gravitated to also sharing singing and songwriting duties with the group’s de facto leader, Chris Witt-Ketner. When Beatnik Beach’s keyboard player upped and quit, Sturmer recommended Manning to his new bandmates.

FOR A WHILE THERE, Manning embarked on a regular 12-hour commute between LA and San Francisco to play with Beatnik Beach. At the same time, he began now to write songs with Sturmer. Lavish compositions, poles apart from their band’s more earth-bound fare. Good enough so as when Beatnik Beach crumbled in 1989, Sturmer and Manning resolved to strike out on their own.

They holed up in San Francisco for the next year, working up a catalogue of songs and honing their blueprint for Jellyfish. They developed a fail-safe process. Invariably, one or other of them would bring an unfinished scrap of an idea to the table and together they would magic it into being a fully formed song. The songs poured from them. Swooning, aching ones like ‘The Man I Used to Be’, ‘That Is Why’, and ‘I Wanna Stay Home’, a rarity for being a solo Sturmer composition, and like Paul McCartney at his widest-eyed.

A peak of this intoxicating period was reached with ‘The King is Half-Undressed’. Here, Sturmer-Manning summoned a euphoric mini-symphony ranging across the kind of vividly detailed musical landscape painted by Lennon-McCartney and Brian Wilson. Manning described it to me as “the definitive Jellyfish song and all that we strived for as songwriters.”

Scouting for other musicians to help them demo their tracks, Manning got back in touch with Jason Falkner, persuading him to throw in his lot with them with the promise of a major label record deal. Falkner moved up to San Francisco, where he lodged with his older sister. Now sporting a head full of dreadlocks, Manning warned him he might find Sturmer somewhat tough to get along with, as the two of them were such likewise strong personalities.

“And boy was he right,” said Falkner. “I had trouble with Andy immediately. He is just a difficult guy. I respect him a lot, but there were days he wouldn’t even look at me, and this went on for three years. Roger and him didn’t have an easy relationship either. Roger came to me a couple of times, almost in tears, and said, ‘Screw this, it’s too hard.’”

According to Manning, it was their shared goal of creating the perfect record that saw Jellyfish through the making of their debut album. Recorded at Schnee Studios in North Hollywood, and released into the long, hot summer of 1990, Bellybutton was a seamlessly constructed statement of pure intent. Comprising ten vibrant songs chockful of invention and wit, it was further elevated by the assured touch of veteran producer Albhy Galuten, the man who’d recorded the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack album and the Bee Gees at their most high flying.

“It was a really exciting time making that record, but also bittersweet,” Falkner recalled. “The songs were the sweet bit. We were all very young. I was just 20, Roger and Andy not that much older, but the music is very sophisticated. It was hard because Andy and I weren’t talking.”

Sharing bass duties with Falkner on the record was Steve McDonald from Manning’s beloved Redd Kross. Manning, who recruited McDonald over pizza one afternoon, enthused to him how Bellybutton was meant to sound “somewhere between Queen and the Partridge Family.”

“I was blown away, because they actually achieved what they set out to do,” said McDonald. “I didn’t know of anyone that could do that, and I’d been trying myself for many years. It was just awe-inspiring.”

McDonald got another jolt when he saw the video for the album’s lead-off single, ‘The King is Half-Undressed’. There Jellyfish were, resplendent in their newly acquired thrift store costumes of billowing flared trousers, brightly coloured shirts, platform boots, and garish top hats. Precisely the boho-psychedelic look Redd Kross had been rocking for years.

“I felt a little duped by that,” he admitted to me. “But they were so good it didn’t matter. Plus, I was stoked having more freaks out there to identify with.”

BY THAT POINT, BELLYBUTTON had met with gushing critical acclaim, and MTV was quick to bestow its patronage on the band. With Manning’s younger brother Chris installed on bass, Jellyfish embarked upon a year-long tour, opening up for such kindred retro-spirits as The Black Crowes and World Party, their show striking for the fact of Sturmer being stood stage front and centre, singing and drumming, and for how accurately they managed to replicate the multi-layered sound of their album.

Along the way, Jellyfish built up a devoted cult following, most especially among their fellow musicians. The record itself, however, never did find a wider audience, and the months of close proximity to each other exacerbated tensions within the group. Chris Manning quit at the end of the tour for a quieter life as a producer. Increasingly frustrated at having his own songs ignored by Sturmer and Manning, Falkner was next to jump ship.

“I just had to get out,” he said. “I was diagnosed with an ulcer on my 21^st birthday. The doctor asked me, ‘What’s the problem, kid? Is there something or someone…’ I said, ‘Let me stop you right there. There is indeed someone.’”

Returned to a duo, Sturmer and Manning found themselves feted by the rock aristocracy. They collaborated with Ringo Starr on his Time Takes Time solo album of 1992. Next, they were invited to write songs with Brian Wilson. Their dream collaboration rapidly soured, amounting to a solitary, unproductive session with the troubled genius. Manning summed up the experience to me as, “Utterly surreal.”

Eventually, their thoughts turned to a second Jellyfish album, and for it be their masterpiece. Even at a distance of more than 33 years, Spilt Milk is an overwhelming work. A piece that thrills and awes, almost but never quite buckling under the great weight of its makers’ epic ambition.

Inspired by the grandiose feel of Steely Dan’s brace of mid-period jazz-rock classics, Aja from 1977 and 1980’s Gaucho, Sturmer and Manning assembled it in painstaking detail on vintage analogue equipment. They wrote the songs in their adopted city of LA between October 1991 and March 1992, Manning trooping over to Sturmer’s house, six days a week, 11am to 7pm.

Many more months were spent in the studio constructing their musical edifice and rendered by massed choirs and on strings, brass, flute, banjo, wind chimes, harpsichord and more. Altogether, Spilt Milk ran a gamut from driving pop-rockers like ‘The Ghost at Number One’ to tremulous ballads to a baroque circus show tune, ‘Brighter Day’.

To its ruin, it was sent out into the headwinds of grunge. February 1993, and no-one just then was waiting for a modern-day Pet Sounds. Sturmer’s and Manning’s labour of love peaked at 164 on the Billboard Hot 200, then sunk without trace.

“We were the most punk rock thing happening when Spilt Milk came out,” Manning reasoned. “I’m proud of the fact we were able to make a very personal and unique statement at a time that was very conforming.”

Dutifully, they toured Spilt Milk with another line-up of backing musicians, but their own professional and personal relationship was coming apart at the seams. The last thread binding them together snapped when they commenced work on a proposed third Jellyfish record at the beginning of 1994.

“We had personal issues, but it doesn’t serve us or the public for me share them,” Manning said, sadly. “If I’d known back then about therapy, and counselling, I’d have suggested Andy and I enrol in it.

“Bringing song ideas to each other, it was also clear we weren’t lining in the way we had in the past. His stuff had much more of a singer-songwriter feel to it, like Van Morrison or James Taylor. I remember going round to his house and he played me a song on acoustic guitar that was finished from beginning to end. It was a classic country ballad, but I left in tears because I had zero interest in recording it.”

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IN THE IMMEDIATE AFTERMATH of Jellyfish’s demise, Manning formed another band, Imperial Drag. It was short-lived, their one, self-titled album of 1996 sounding like a heavier, much less celestial version of his old band. Since when, he’s released a bunch of solo and collaborative records and continued to tour as a member of Beck’s backing group.

Sturmer got married and retreated into the shadows. For several years, he acted as Svengali to a Japanese pop duo, Puffy AmiYumi. Ever since, he’s carved out a lucrative career as a songwriter for the Disney TV network and such shows as Ben 10 and Teen Titans. Otherwise, Sturmer has remained elusive. Even those who have worked with him, such as fellow songwriter Mike Viola, with whom Sturmer partnered in LEO, a one-off homage to ELO, are left with no forwarding contact details.

Jason Falkner had last seen Sturmer in 2004. After his stint with Jellyfish, Falkner went on to make his own records and session gigs. At the time, he was at Ocean Way Studios in LA, recording with Paul McCartney.

“I was standing in the studio hallway when I heard a familiar voice talking to the girl on reception,” he took up. “It was five seconds or so before I recognised that it was Andy. Immediately, he told me that he’d had a premonition he was going to see me that day. Then he told me he was sorry for never having given me a chance. I was floored by that. We exchanged phone numbers, but neither of us has ever used them.”

Twice as long had elapsed since Roger Manning was in contact with Sturmer. Through a mutual acquaintance he knew Sturmer was still resident in LA. He’d heard, he told me, Sturmer was “very happy and successful, but that’s all.

“It was a surprise to me that Andy chose the route he did,” Manning continued. “I felt sure he’d make solo albums of his own original material, like the ballad he played me. That was brilliant. The world should hear it.”

Manning said he hoped he and Sturmer would get back in touch with each other at some point in the future. He dismissed out of hand the notion they would ever again write songs together. The 22 near-perfect examples of the form spread across Bellybutton and Spilt Milk will instead remain their lasting legacy.

“I’ve met so many musicians and producers through the years who’ve continually referred back to those records,” concluded Steve McDonald. “Those guys were miles ahead of everybody else. Together, they were masters.”

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‘THE MUSIC IS UNIMPORTANT, derivative, false, and above all else, IMMATURE. It quite honestly doesn’t merit serious analytical space in a rock ‘n’ roll paper; it deserves very little space at all… It’s very difficult to write about such complete rubbish without condescension or amusement.’

This was Paul Morley (and the capitals were his), pontificating on an album by Rush specifically, and hard rock in general, for the NME, back in the 1980s. Morley’s was the standard consensus among the self-regarding rock hacks of the time. Typically, hard rock was by them derided or else dismissed out of hand. In short, it was a galaxy’s span from being perceived of ‘cool’, ‘hip’, or ‘in’… and it was my music all the same.

The odd snatched, precious record at youth club discos in a provincial small town. A constant in my teenage bedroom, the source of countless battles with my dad over the precise definition of ‘too loud’. Coming out of the radio, just once weekly, and courtesy of dear old Tommy Vance’s Friday Night Rock Show on Radio One. ‘TV’ apart, the mainstream media otherwise pretty much ignored it.

Gloriously, savingly, there was as well Kerrang! magazine. A veritable bible. I happened upon it from issue four, German axeman Michael Schenker on the cover, and with it there was entry into a whole other world. One in which I wasn’t an outsider.

Eyeing some lurid photograph or other in the Big K!©, say, Gene Simmons spewing theatrical blood, Ronnie James Dio flicking the ‘devil sign’, Lemmy leering over a hardly clothed Wendy O Williams, Angus Young, a grown man attired as a sweaty schoolboy, my mum, God bless her, would habitually caution, “You’ll grow out of this.” She didn’t get very much wrong, and but for that.

Forty-four years later, I still love hard rock. The sound of it. The thrill of it. As, of course, do so many, many of us. It’s out of the shadows now, bidden into the light, stamped indelibly in the pop-culture lexicon. About time, and rightly so.

As for this list, it could as easily have numbered 60, or a hundred, or more. The ‘anthem’, after all, is what hard rock did, and does as a rule. Drop in at any point here, alight on any one song, and the effect will be the same. Pure, primal joy, and with it, a simple, but correct assumption: truly, Paul Morley, and those like him, were the most insufferably pompous kinds of FOOLS…

1. STEPPENWOLF ‘Born to be Wild’ (1968)

Out of Los Angeles, Steppenwolf’s third single was prised from their self-titled debut album, and the song that birthed the phrase, “heavy metal thunder.” Written by their Canadian guitarist Mars Bonfire, originally as a ballad, but sped up, bolted onto a neanderthal riff, and to be made famous soundtracking Peter Fonda’s and Dennis Hopper’s last chance power drive in 1969’s Easy Rider.

2. LED ZEPPELIN ‘Rock and Roll’ (1971)

Robert Plant is ever liable to get shirty should the Zep be branded a mere hard rock band. They were more than that, so they were, but not here, and magnificently. Jimmy Page cranking up an old Chuck Berry riff, Plant wailing, the Rolling Stones’ eternal sideman Ian Stewart boogie-woogie-ing on guest piano, John Paul Jones’ cement-solid bass, John Bonham summoning the apocalypse. It does nothing but rock, and hard.

3. DEEP PURPLE ‘Highway Star’ (1972)

Launch point for the Purps’ sixth and greatest album, Machine Head. Begun with Ritchie Blackmore noodling out the riff on a tour bus bound for Portsmouth, cut in Montreux, Switzerland before the gambling house burnt down, and engineered by the late, great Martin Birch. It’s all in the chug… Blackmore’s motorific guitar, Jon Lord’s plangent Hammond, Roger Glover’s rumbling bass… and then, bang! Enter Ian Gillan and Ian Paice and we’re off. 6:06 of sheer hard rock heaven.

4. GOLDEN EARRING ‘Radar Love’ (1973)

A Eurozone ‘Highway Star’, also breaching the six-minute mark, and likewise passing through several distinct sections. Written by the Dutch rockers’ guitarist George Kooymans and singer Barry Hay, from their ninth album, Moontan, and in this case, all about the chorus, which they tease, tempt, and then explode into.

5. LYNYRD SKYNYRD ‘Sweet Home Alabama’ (1974)

By the time of their sophomore album, Second Helping, Ronnie Van Zant’s rule by iron rod had made Skynyrd into a fearsomely tight band. Here, in excelsis, is their three-pronged Southern Rock guitar attack, Gary Rossington, Allen Collins, and Ed King (the riff’s his), in rip-roaring flight. Famously, a riposte to Neil Young, who actually loved the song, and eternally wonderful.

6. ZZ TOP ‘La Grange’ (1973)

Bittersweet right now (Frank Beard, RIP) but barnstorming just the same. Centrepiece of the righteous Tres Hombres album, this full-tilt homage to the notorious Fayette County brothel also immortalised in the Best Little Whorehouse in Texas is the Top at their lowdown and dirty finest. Billy Gibbons lifted the immortal riff from John Lee Hooker. The rest was hard baked in the Texan earth.

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7. ALICE COOPER ‘School’s Out’ (1972)

The one-time Vincent Furnier’s breakout hit, produced by Bob Ezrin, co-written with guitarist Glen Buxton, the man behind that barrier-crashing herald of a riff, and the impossibly exciting sound of teenage rebellion distilled into 3:30.

8. AEROSMITH ‘Rats in the Cellar’ (1976)

After their third album, Toys in the Attic, hit big, Aerosmith resolved to stir a harder-hitting brew on the follow-up, Rocks. Nowhere more so than on this rampaging highlight, born from a jam through Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Rattlesnake Shake’. Joe Perry’s murderous bottleneck, Steven Tyler yelping and yapping, “Going under, skin’s turning yellow; nose is running, losing my connection.” The Toxic Twins, before they were cleaned up in all senses, and musically at least, forever better this way.

9. RAINBOW ‘Lady of the Lake’ (1978)

Out of Purple, Ritchie Blackmore assembled Rainbow. Their second album of 1976, Rising, was titanic, but there’s a strong case to be made for the first half of their third, Long Live Rock ‘N’ Roll, being the genre’s monumental peak. Witness this, track two, Martin Birch again producing, in a French castle, and sounding just as epic as that implies. Blackmore, Cozy Powell, and Dio in tandem. Respectively, hard rock’s all-timer guitarist, drummer, frontman combination.

10. RUSH ‘A Passage to Bangkok’ (1976)

Introducing it on stage just recently in Toronto, Alex Lifeson proclaimed, “I love this song.” So he should. The one that comes right after the whole of ‘2112’, ‘A Passage to Bangkok’ unfolds from Lifeson’s exotic E minor riff, inspired by Jimmy Page’s on Zep’s ‘Kashmir’, takes a lyrical tour of the world’s pot hotspots, and altogether showcases rock’s most mercurial three-piece at the point of their fantastical flowering.

11. BLUE OYSTER CULT ‘Astronomy’ (1974)

New Yorkers the Cult were regular touring partners of Rush’s back in the day. A good fit, since BOC’s brand of hard rock was, too, cerebrally otherworldly. Drawn from a poem penned by producer/manager Sandy Pearlman and meant by drummer Albert Bouchard for a concept album about an alien master race on Earth, ‘Astronomy’ ended up instead the high point of their more scaled down but still excellent third album, Secret Treaties. Over 6:28, it gathers, dramatically, from brooding, atmospheric verses to eruptive crescendo. Very well covered by Metallica for 1998’s Garage Inc.

12. THIN LIZZY ‘The Boys Are Back in Town’ (1976)

Lead-off single from Lizzy’s sixth, and best, album Jailbreak, and utterly unmistakable. Twin lead guitarists Brian Robertson and Scott Gorham drive it along, the incomparable Phil Lynott wrote and owns it. Impossible to imagine ever hearing it and not wanting to punch the air.

13. WHITESNAKE ‘Don’t Break My Heart Again’ (1981)

A second Deep Purple splinter band, for a while there, and before David Coverdale ‘went Hollywood’, the ’Snake were quite something. A hulking blues-rock beast, founded upon Coverdale’s impressive vocal power, ably backed by ex-Purple comrades Lord and Paice, a couple of understated guitarists in Bernie Marsden and Mickey Moody, and dependable bassist Neil Murray. When they hit just the right groove, as here, the standout from fourth LP Come An’ Get It, the ever-present Martin Birch running the desk, they were unstoppable.

14. UFO ‘Only You Can Rock Me (Live)’ (1979)

De rigueur for all self-respecting hard rock bands of the golden era was the statement live album, preferably, but not essentially, a double. See these next three selections, and starting with this, the classic line-up of UFO – singer Phil Mogg, wunderkind guitarist Schenker, hooligan bassist Pete Way, Paul Raymond on keys, and drummer Andy ‘No Neck’ Parker – in their element, and as captured on the superb Strangers in the Night. Joe Elliott of Def Leppard once told me you could teach a gorilla to play the bass line to ‘Only You Can Rock Me’ and meant it as a good thing.

15. AC/DC ‘Whole Lotta Rosie (Live)’ (1978)

The definitive version of their best-loved song. Recorded in front of a baying Glasgow Apollo crowd, fabulously chanting “Angus! Angus!” in between each gonzo-boogie riff and preserved on If You Want Blood (You’ve Got It), a live classic contained on two sides of old vinyl. Simply, Bon Scott doing what Bon Scott did better than anyone else ever: “Wan’ tell you a story, ’bout a woman I know… 42-39-56, you could say she’s got it all.”

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16. KISS ‘Detroit Rock City (Live)’ (1977)

Own Kiss’ two live albums from the ’70s and you have all you’ll ever need know about them. The inner sleeve photograph on the gatefold of Alive II, picturing the explosive Kiss stage show in its full glory, was one I would pore over, spellbound, giddy, for literally hours. Cue, “You wanted the best, you got the best… the hottest band in the world… Kiss!” And ‘Detroit Rock City’. Larger than life in every sense.

17. MONTROSE ‘Space Station #5’ (1973)

The other four-piece band produced by Ted Templeman, with a hotshot guitarist and unmissable frontman, whose seminal debut album completely retooled the sound of Californian rock, Montrose at the time never got their due rewards. This was track three on Montrose, Ronnie Montrose’s earthshaker of a riff, Sammy Hagar singing the hell out of it, hard rock like a high-performance sports car, and yet they peaked at a lowly 133 on the Billboard Hot 200…

18. VAN HALEN ‘Ain’t Talkin’ ’Bout Love’ (1978)

…Leaving the way clear, five years on, for Van Halen to pick up the baton and storm the barricades. Van Halen I basically amounted to the Pasadena band’s ten-song live show of the period, put down at Sunset Recorders with Templeman, and unleashed on an unsuspecting world. Even today, and forever more, it sounds impossibly exciting, Eddie Van Halen’s trailblazing playing, David Lee Roth’s grandstanding. They were the whole package and more besides.

19. OZZY OSBOURNE ‘Crazy Train’ (1980)

“All aboard!” With those two words, near vomited out, Ozzy Osbourne, outcast from Black Sabbath, presumed wrecked, signalled his second coming. Behind him is that unforgettable circling riff, courtesy of Randy Rhoads, first and easily best of the generation of guitar heroes spawned by Eddie Van Halen, and a signature song to sweep all before it. “Mental wounds still screaming, driving me insane… I’m going off the rails on a crazy train.” He was, it bears repeating, one of a kind.

20. BLACK SABBATH ‘Neon Knights’ (1980)

Yes, yes, there is ‘Paranoid’, ‘Iron Man’, ‘War Pigs’, and so many others from the Ozzy era. Yet with Dio taking over the mic, and that man Martin Birch at the helm, Sabbath mounted an astonishing rebirth of their own on the Heaven and Hell album. ‘Neon Knights’ roared it out of the gates. A colossal Tony Iommi riff, the quintessential Dio lyric: “Circles and rings, dragons and kings, weaving a charm and a spell.” If Game Of Thrones had been a rock anthem, and greater, it would be this.

21. JUDAS PRIEST ‘Breaking the Law’ (1980)

Hailing from just up the road from Sabbath’s Birmingham, in the Black Country town of Walsall, the Priest were, and are, the hardest of rock, metal in actual fact, incarnate. From the self-explanatorily titled British Steel album, to the accompaniment of wailing police sirens and shattering glass (milk bottles, purloined from the local milkman, chucked around the studio carpark), Rob ‘Metal God’ Halford skewers Thatcher’s Britain as Glenn Tipton and KK Downing stage a dual-guitar assault: “There I was completely wasted, out of work and down.”

22. MOTORHEAD ‘Ace of Spades’ (1980)

Erstwhile Jimi Hendrix roadie Ian ‘Lemmy’ Kilmister on caveman bass and gargling-battery-acid vocals. ‘Fast’ Eddie Clarke on lightning guitar. ‘Philthy Animal’ Taylor pummelling the drums. British rock’s most uncompromising, and finest ever three-man wrecking crew. All gone now, sadly, but this will live on forever.

23. SAXON ‘And the Bands Played On’ (1981)

Enter the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, and a fresh bunch of powerhouse rock anthems. Barnsley’s Saxon peaked with their fourth album, Denim and Leather, a UK Top 10 hit, and this piledriver, written by frontman Biff Byford in awe from playing the first Castle Donington Monsters Of Rock festival the year previous. “See the people, feel the power, there were 60,000 there,” air-raid sirens Byford, as his band detonates around him. Pub fact: heroically moustached bassist Steve ‘Dobby’ Dawson was the inspiration for Spinal Tap’s Derek Smalls.

24. IRON MAIDEN ‘Wrathchild’ (1981)

They were never so good as they were with the yobbish Paul Di’Anno fronting them. Here with the choice song from second album Killers (produced by, yes, Martin Birch, the undisputed artisan of the hard rock sound), as punkish as they ever were metal, a 2:54 snarl of pure frustration and intent. “My mother was a queen,” Di’Anno spits, “my dad I’ve never seen. I was never meant to be.” Authentically real.

25. DIO ‘Holy Diver’ (1983)

Cast out from Sabbath, as from Rainbow, Ronnie James Dio hit back with a seminal album all of his own making. The title track, this is notable for the appearance of future Def Leppard guitarist Vivian Campbell, then a raw 20-year-old plucked from out of Northern Irish NWOBH-ers Sweet Savage, and with a pair of Dio’s ex-Rainbow and Sabbath cohorts, respectively bassist Jimmy Bain and drummer Vinnie Appice, completing the line-up. Essentially, though, it’s Dio’s anthem, his voice canyon-sized, eyes doubtless blazing, master of all he surveys.

26. SCORPIONS ‘No One Like You’ (1982)

Their album covers were, often as not, preposterously sexist. Ditto their lyrics. Yet, inarguably, Teutonic rockers the Scorpions were a fine-crafted hard rock machine. Their eighth album, Blackout, was all-round precision tooled, ‘No One Like You’ its muscular power ballad, a prime showcase for propulsive rhythm guitarist Rudolph Schenker, elder brother to Michael, and iron-lunged frontman Klaus Meine.

27. DEF LEPPARD ‘Too Late For Love’ (1983)

The other guru-producer of the period, Mutt Lange soared Def Leppard to new heights on their third album Pyromania, rock heft meeting pop smarts, ten million and counting sales in America the net result. ‘Too Late For Love’ was its power ballad, Lange making the absolute best out of singer Joe Elliott, the band supercharged, an armada of backing vocals, a hit out of the park.

28. GUNS N’ROSES ‘Nightrain’ (1987)

Aerosmith’s sass, Motorhead’s brute force, mixed into a cocktail of their own making. Easy to forget with the overblown nonsense of the ensuing years, but with Appetite for Destruction, Guns N’Roses fired a dose of pure, unfettered adrenalin into rock’s ailing heart. ‘Nightrain’, an ode to the gut-rot wine, Slash and Izzy Stradlin’s guitars a match to the petrol of Axl Rose’s vocal, summed up how they came on: “Loaded like a freight train, flyin’ like an aeroplane.”

29. MONSTER MAGNET ‘Negasonic Teenage Warhead’ (1995)

Written by main man Dave Wyndorf as a riposte to all those bands jumped on the grunge bandwagon, but as much a beacon flashing out hard rock’s ongoing path, ‘Negasonic Teenage Warhead’, awesome title, breakthrough hit from the Magnet’s third album, Dopes to Infinity, roars off the grid like a hot rod, and then keeps going, into the mother of all psych-rock, chant-it-from-the-bleachers choruses.

30. QUEENS OF THE STONE AGE ‘No One Knows’ (2002)

The keeper of the flame, Josh Homme, backed by Dave Grohl on Animal-from-The Muppets drums, and maniacal bass monster Nick Oliveri, and with a battering ram of a song co-written with Mark Lanegan. The Queens’ third album, Songs For the Deaf imagined driving through the California desert, the car radio tuning in and out of pirate radio stations broadcasting from the wilderness. Here, picking out the monster riff to end all monster riffs.

Now feast on the whole of this hard rock banquet on the playlist at the link:

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THE SUMMER OF 1965 would be the last time the teenaged Robert Plant’s parents were able to assert themselves when it came to his future prospects. At their behest, he enrolled on a short business studies course at Kidderminster College of Further Education, just nine miles along the road from the family home at 64 Causey Farm Road, on the more well-to-do fringes of England’s industrial heartland, the Black Country.

Before the new term began, Plant took a temporary job as a stock boy at Stringers department store on Stourbridge High Street. With money in his pocket, the young mod could be seen zipping around town on his scooter, sporting a parka jacket with a Union Jack emblazoned on the back.

Once he was at college, he continued to be animated much more by his life outside of academia. He was singing with a local band, the Crawling King Snakes, and ingratiated himself with a local promoter, Ma Reagan. She had him spin records in between acts at one of her venues, the Old Hill Plaza. Plant would play Stax and Motown tunes, but also selections by the Small Faces, the Rolling Stones, and the Beatles. On occasion, Ma Reagan also asked him to take on MC duties at the ballroom.

“I became the apple of her eye,” Plant told me. “I’d arrive at the Plaza on my Lambretta, go into the dressing room and put my suit on, and then go out and introduce people like Little Stevie Wonder. I remember he came out with his hand on his bandleader’s shoulder, who put him on the microphone. Then he started playing ‘Fingertips Part 2’.

“It was unreal to be able to hear such quality. To see that shit and still be in college. Man, you can’t ask for a better ticket than that. If that isn’t going to turn your head and make you say, ‘Is there anything else I can do?’”

There were more mundane matters to attend to first. Just as soon as he’d completed his college course, his father, also Robert, packed him off to an interview with a firm of chartered accountants in nearby Stourport. He was taken on as a trainee and went to work in the picturesque town on the banks of the River Seven on wages of £2 a week. Less than he could earn from doing a single gig.

The job didn’t stop him from going out most nights to perform, or else to watch other bands or go dancing in the clubs. As it happened, he dragged himself into the office for just two weeks before he was instructed to clear his desk. He decided to turn pro with the Crawling King Snakes, supplementing his income with additional labouring at a local carpet factory.

It was at this precise moment that Plant met John Bonham for the first time. Bonham, better known to one and all as Bonzo, approached him after the King Snakes had completed one of their regular 20-minute slots at the Plaza. Bonham told him the band was good, but their drummer hopeless. Bonzo inevitably took over the spot on their drum stool.

Bonham was only three months older than Plant but married already. He and his wife Pat were living in a caravan parked up behind his family home in Redditch. Not only worldlier than his new friend, in terms of ability Bonham was far ahead of anyone Plant had played with up to then. He was spoken of as a drummer of prodigious ability, a veritable powerhouse.

“Bonzo had been in a dance band,” Plant recalled. “He got all of his chops from being able to play those big band arrangements. I’d never seen anything like it.”

FOR A SHORT SPELL the possibilities for the King Snakes seemed boundless. With Bonham propelling them, they got gigs opening up for the Spencer Davies Group, Gene Vincent, and the Walker Brothers. Plant was brought closer than ever to the magical centre of things. He and Bonham stood together at the side of the stage at Stourbridge Town Hall, watching the Walker Brothers, listening to teenage girls scream at Scott Walker as if her were a god.

“There was no notion of where we going to, but no known cure either,” Plant said. “I mean to say, I didn’t have any concept of fame as a 17-year-old kid. It was just the fact of being able to get away from the clerks’ desk as a chartered accountant.”

And then, as was his custom in those days, Bonham walked out on the band. Lured back to one of his previous groups, the Way of Life, by the promise of more money. He needed it since Pat was now pregnant. With Bonham gone, the King Snakes dissolved. Yet Plant didn’t have to wait long for his next gig. DJ-ing one night at the Plaza, he became acquainted with the Tennessee Teens.

A three-piece, the Teens played blues and Tamla Motown covers. They were recently returned to the West Midlands from a club engagement in Frankfurt. Plant introduced himself to their guitarist, John Crutchley.

“He asked me if he could sing with us,” Crutchley explained. “That’s how it started. We were doing the Plaza three or four times a week. It would always be the last venue of two or three we’d do each night. Whenever we got there, Robert would get up and do a song with us. Some blues stuff, some Chuck Berry, Solomon Burke’s ‘Everybody Needs Somebody to Love’. Eventually, we agreed to make it into a band.

“He stuck out even then. He wore bomber jackets and he’d got this big, blonde curly hair. The rest of us were working-class lads and he came from a completely different background. We would go pick him up on a Saturday night. His mum, Celia, was quite prim and his dad an ex-sergeant major type.”

Watching their son traipse off with yet another group, Plant’s parents made one final, futile attempt to persuade him into an office job. He left home instead, taking up lodgings at the bed and breakfast his new band’s bassist Roger Beamer’s parents ran in the neighbouring town of Walsall.

AT THE START OF 1966, the Tennessee Teens changed their name to Listen. The band members also conjured up nicknames for each other, although it seems unlikely this over-extended their imaginations. Crutchley became ‘Crutch’, Beamer ‘Chalky’. Drummer Geoff Thompson’s bulk led him to be re-christened ‘Jumbo’. The derivation of Plant’s ‘Plonky’ is lost to time.

Fashioning themselves as a mod group, their first gigs as Listen were mostly in pubs such as the Ship and Rainbow and the Woolpack in Wolverhampton, alongside their warm-up engagements on the Ma Reagan circuit. Plant had developed into an impressive performer. His voice was strident, a blues roar, and he’d gained enough confidence to show off the dance moves he’d honed strutting his stuff on mod club nights.

“Oh, he was great,” Crutchley admired. “We’d start off our set with ‘Hold On I’m Comin’’ by Sam & Dave, and Robert would dance across the stage like he was floating. We rehearsed at my parents’ house, which was an old corner shop. My dad would ask me, ‘Is the Rubber Man coming tonight?’

“Rob gave us confidence. He was ambitious, but not so as it was in your face. For sure, he was very popular with the ladies, too.”

Bill Bonham, no relation to John, was then a 14-year-old schoolboy playing keyboards in another local covers group, Prim and Proper. They shared a bill with Listen at one of these early shows.

“To me, Robert was a star and I was mesmerised by him,” Bonham said. “We became friends, but you couldn’t trust him with your girlfriend for two seconds.”

That May, Bob Dylan and his new back-up band, the Hawks, played Birmingham Odeon. The very same tour on which a member of the audience at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall famously shouted out “Judas” at Dylan for the perceived crime of plugging in his guitar. Dylan was instrumental in whipping up the storm clouds of cultural change billowing into Britain from across the Atlantic. In all its speed-fuelled wonder, Dylan’s new record, Blonde on Blonde, cemented the idea of the rock album as an art form.

In Dylan’s wake, The Beatles made Revolver and the Beach Boys Brian Wilson’s extraordinary fantasia, Pet Sounds. The Byrds announced the arrival of the psychedelic movement with ‘Eight Miles High’ and its parent album, Fifth Dimension. These sounds coming out of America would soon enough have a profound effect on Plant, but Listen found inspiration closer to home.

Bringing together the pick of Birmingham’s musicians, The Move consisted of singer Carl Wayne, guitarists Trevor Burton and Roy Wood, bassist Ace ‘The Face’ Kefford, and drummer Bev Bevan, each of whom had served a beat-group apprenticeship. They were the first local group to add songs by the Byrds and the other West Coast acts to their repertoire, embellishing them with their distinctive multi-part harmonies and further set apart by the gangster-style suits they kit themselves out in.

Plant and his bandmates trooped off to a second-hand clothes shop in Aston and bought double-breasted suits. Future Slade bassist Jim Lea, then a member of the N’Betweens, often shared a bill with this new look Listen.

“Plant had got that testosterone-filled thing about him,” he remembered. “The first show we did with them was at Wolverhampton Civic Hall. He had on plaid trousers, a shirt buttoned up to the neck, and he’d backcombed his hair. He was doing this really exaggerated kind of strut.

“The girls thought he was wonderful. They used to have these Monday night dances at the swimming baths in Willenhall, down the road from Wolverhampton. I saw him there, dancing with a neck-coat on, showing off to all the birds.”

That May, Plant took himself off to see The Who play at Kidderminster Town Hall. Pete Townshend was forced into singing the lead vocals on the night, Roger Daltrey having temporarily walked out following the first of many clashes. After the show, Plant waited outside of the stage door for Townshend and offered him his services. If nothing else, he was ever so sure of himself.

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HIS RESTLESSNESS DIDN’T SETTLE. Mindful of the fact The Move had struck out beyond the Midlands, securing a residency at the Marquee Club in London, Plant convinced the others in Listen they needed to get off the local circuit, too. To this end, they took on a manager, Mike Dolan, proprietor of a tailoring business in Birmingham.

Dolan got them taken on by two booking agencies, Astra in Wolverhampton and the London-based Malcolm Rose Agency. Enough for Listen to start to get gigs at such far-flung venues as the 400 Ballroom in Torquay on the south coast, and up north at Newcastle’s Club A’GoGo. On the 30^th July, the day England won the football World Cup at Wembley Stadium, Listen opened for the Troggs, of ‘Wild Thing’ fame, at the Boston Gliderdrome in rural Lincolnshire.

“We went all over the place in a van Ma Reagan gave us,” said Crutchley. “A friend of Robert’s from Kidderminster, a lad named Edward, used to drive us. He was this chubby little guy who took loads of substances. A total nutcase.”

Carole Williams was then the receptionist at Astra. Each week, it fell to her to hand out the wages to the agency’s roster of bands.

“The lads came in and got their money on a Friday morning,” she said. “Listen were on £15 a night for two 45-minute slots, which was quite good in those days.

“Robert had an aura about him and stood out from the other guys in the band. He was drop-dead gorgeous, too. One Friday night, another Astra band called the Roulettes was doing a show in Shrewsbury, a couple of hours away. Robert offered to take me. He picked me up after work in this really old, black Ford Poplar. We trundled along to Shrewsbury, saw the band, and had a lovely night. We got home, and that’s when he told me he didn’t have a driving licence. To him, that was a mere technicality.”

What would be Listen’s last roll of the dice was to record a three-track demo tape for Mike Dolan to shop to record labels in London. Dolan managed to secure a deal with CBS, but unbeknown to the others, the label’s talent scout, Danny Kessler, had been taken by Plant’s voice, and it was their singer he signed, not the band. When the time came to record Listen’s first single, a cover of a song by American pop-rock band, the Rascals, ‘You Better Run’, it was Plant alone who was required to travel down to London.

Even at this distance, the power of Plant’s voice on the track is striking, and in spite of the smothering of Kessler’s own over-fussy production. By unfortunate coincidence, Jim Lea’s the N’Betweens, now fronted by a certain Noddy Holder, had also chosen ‘You Better Run’ as their debut 45, theirs a more stripped-down rendering.

Both versions were released the same day in November ’66. To boost Listen’s sales, Dolan directed his charges to go into every record shop in the area and pick up a copy of their own song. In the event, Listen’s ‘You Better Run’ crept into the UK Top 50 for one week, and then promptly vanished.

“After that, things started to peter out for us,” said John Crutchley. “A lot of money had gone into publicising the record. We were broke. We more or less sat down together and admitted it wasn’t working out.”

With no band or money coming in, Plant moved in with his girlfriend, Maureen, and her parents. He’d just turned 18 and he made Maureen a solemn promise. If he’d not realised his dream by the time he was 20, he would give it up and get a proper job.

DANNY KESSLER HAD HIS own ideas for Plant. CBS’s rival label, Decca, was enjoying great success with a couple of crooners. Tom Jones, plucked from the Welsh valleys, and the more unlikely Gerry Dorsey, an Indian-born club singer the company had re-branded Englebert Humperdinck. Kessler determined the middle of the road was also where Plant’s fortune lay.

Together, they reworked an old Italian ballad as ‘Our Tune’ and cut a more R&B-based song, ‘Long Time Coming’. Both of these singles flopped. Plant skulked back to the Midlands and with a relative of Maureen’s, Vincent Pereira, formed Band Of Joy, a group tailored towards the sound of the new American music. Most specifically, that being made by two bands out of San Francisco, Jefferson Airplane and Moby Grape, and one built upon the stellar talents of a couple of Canadians, Neil Young’s and Stephen Stills’ Buffalo Springfield.

Band Of Joy gigged on and off through 1967, the line-up shifting and with Plant persuading John Bonham to rejoin him on the drums, but audiences proved resistant to their Black Country variation of acid-rock. So, too, CBS, the label declining to pick up their option on Plant.

Going into 1968, approaching his fateful 20^th birthday, and with Maureen now pregnant, Plant returned to labouring jobs. One of them laying the Tarmac on West Bromwich High Street. Still, he couldn’t quite admit defeat. The other Bonham, Bill, had a new group, one with the truly awful name of Obs-Tweedle, and Plant talked himself into and over them. The summer of ’68, they played a bunch of local gigs together billed as ‘Robert Plant plus Obs-Tweedle’.

One Saturday night, 20^th July, they were booked to play the West Midland College of Education in Walsall. Their set stuffed with the same Buffalo Springfield, Jefferson Airplane, and Moby Grape songs Plant had performed with Band Of Joy. It didn’t go down any better now to a crowd of students.

“They just stood there and watched, trying to be cool,” bemoaned Bonham.

There were, though, two interested parties at least in attendance. One was The Yardbirds’ guitarist, Jimmy Page. The other was their manager, Peter Grant, a great, looming lump of a man. The reason they were in Walsall on this otherwise inauspicious evening was, in fact, Robert Plant.

With wunderkind guitarists Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck gone from their ranks, and their British blues-boom hits dried up, The Yardbirds were in their death throes. On their most recent, wretched tour, Page had confided to Grant his concept for a new band, one that could use the blues like heavy artillery and do much more besides.

Page had in mind an 18-year-old British blues singer, Terry Reid, to be his new venture’s frontman. Reid, however, was plotting a solo album and declined. He did think to tip off Page to Plant, recalling a gig he’d done with Band Of Joy. There Page and Grant had stood, watching Obs-Tweedle load their own gear onto the stage.

“They mistook me for a roadie,” Plant told me. “Makes perfect sense, I’m a big guy. Terry Reid had told me that he’d mentioned me to Jimmy, and I knew The Yardbirds had cut some great records. I’d seen them play with Eric. I didn’t have anything to lose.”

Extracted from my book Robert Plant: A Life, available to buy at the links: Amazon UK Barnes and Noble

1. ANGELA AUTUMN ‘Heavy Tobacco’

Coming on like a one-woman Appalachian Big Thief, Angela Autumn teases her upcoming new album, Believer, with the naggingly seductive ‘Heavy Tobacco’. A weeping pedal steel, nudging acoustic guitar, Autumn’s clasping voice, and an entirely arresting lyric: “When there’s no more money and no morphine, I’ll be living inside these dreams.” Altogether, terrific.

2. TOM MORELLO ‘Date Night’

Unmistakeable from the gut-churning riff to the Stuka shrieks he also wrestles from that beaten-up ‘Kill Fascists’ guitar, Tom Morello, accompanied by son Roman, is in typically angry-righteous form here, heralding his September solo album Everyone Gets Everything They Want. Good, just now we need him manning the barricades more than ever.

3. JOSEPH ARTHUR ‘Cinders’

A lovely, gravelly, keening ballad, this is the always appealing Arthur’s most immediately enticing song in a while. Which is to say, it’s striking with one play, unforgettable after two. His 17^th album, Heart, part two of his grand You’re Not a Ghost Anymore triptych, arrives next month. Consider me sold.

4. BECK ‘In the Night’

On the same tip, this outlier for Ride Lonesome, his first album in seven years, finds Beck back tilling his most fertile ground, from which sprung his three folksiest, and most excellent albums, Mutations, Sea Change, and the mighty Morning Phase. Weighty, cinematic, entrancing.

5. ARAB STRAP ‘Glamour Musick’

Just what the doctor ordered, Falkirk’s finest, to a thumping rhythm, satirising like Demi Moore in body-horror flick The Substance, only with wit. Among the many de-ageing treatments the engaging, thickly accented Adrian Moffat cops to here are liposuction, scrotal lifts, “facials with cat litter, gold-plated semen,” adding for good, punchline measure, “it takes years off me.” New album Half-Told Tales is due 4^th September.

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6. ABIGAIL ROSE, WESTON HUNTER ‘Betty’s in the Band’

An aural happy pill, Rose, likened by the New York Times to a Nashville Stevie Nicks, and fellow troubadour Hunter mount a joyful back-porch hoedown with wailing harmonica, acoustic guitar, and fiddle. Fictional firecracker Betty’s “got bruises on her legs from the tambourine… That girl was born to play.” Her song is irresistible.

7. PETE YORN ‘Trains’

Third song lifted from Yorn’s sterling new album, All the Beauty, after the title track and ‘Idyllwild’, this continues his hot streak. From a bittersweet beginning, it gathers around Yorn’s jangling guitar and sweeps to something heavily evocative of Elliott Smith on XO. In other words, it’s wondrous.

8. JON HOPKINS, IMOGEN HEAP ‘Reckoning’

Heap joins her erstwhile keyboard player turned-electro-powerhouse for this pulsating and ultimately propulsive set piece. Hopkins’s beats burst and flare, Heap’s ever fantastical voice spirits in and out of the mix.

9. SHEARWATER ‘Even Song’

Once of notable Texan alt-rockers Okkervill River, Shearwater lynchpin Jonathan Meiburg evidently took the lesson of opening records with a knockout punch from his old band into his current one. The leap-off point for Shearwater’s latest, The New World, ‘Even Song’ mixes sweeping strings, brushed drums, and buzzing noises to dramatic, near-celestial effect.

10. DRINK THE SEA ‘Parisian Voodoo’

The combined talents of R.E.M.’s Peter Buck, Barrett Martin, once the drummer of Screaming Trees, and Queens of the Stone Age/Mark Lanegan sidemen Alain Johannes and Duke Garwood, with a standout track from their third album together, a kind of Tom Waits fronting a desert-blown stoner rock band confection.

11. WAYFARER (FEATURING DAVID EUGENE EDWARDS) ‘Perdition’s Crossing’

All credit due to Colorado black metal outfit Wayfarer for this spectacular reinvention, a gothic Americana showstopper, like the theme song to a lost, spooked Spaghetti Western. A perfect platform for guest vocalist, fellow Coloradan David Eugene Edwards, once of the fabulous 16 Horsepower, here again doing his damned preacher thing. Stirring stuff.

12. ETHAN REGAN ‘Double Cup’

Raleigh, North Carolina indie-folk troubadour Regan gambolling through the wreckage of a ruined relationship to the accompaniment of a driving banjo and handclaps and with a rush of words. “You don’t give a shit about me. I don’t give a shit about you either and it’s cool.” So’s the song.

13. TRUMAN SINCLAIR ‘Right on Time’

Further proof of America’s boundless capacity for throwing up captivating singer-songwriters, Sinclair sits in the same retooled Americana lane as MJ Lenderman and Waxahatchee, which is clearly a very good thing. As is this, spare, spectral garage-folk, with a grabbing chorus, Sinclair sounding as if he’s singing from the wilderness.

14. 16 UNDERGROUND ‘Angel on the Run’

LA collective rushing us back to mid- to late-’90 Britain and the plangent sounds of Big Beat and Trip-Hop. In the case of ‘Angel on the Run’ via loops, an elastic bass line, squelching synths, and a heavy-bottomed beat. From their new EP, Without a Trace, out 14^th August.

15. WOLF ALICE ‘Hammond Song’

Ellie Roswell and co, joined by Julia Cumming of Brooklyn rockers Sunflower Bean and Toronto siren Bria Salmena, dial it down on this cover of an original by long-running New Jersey vocal trio The Roches. There’s a distinct Jenny Lewis vibe to the sheer dream-pop vibe of it all, and it suits them very well.

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16. WEEZER ‘C.E.O.’

Bless him, Rivers Cuomo is a funny old fish. Here serving up yet another sardonic slacker anthem founded upon Weezer’s base elements (stomping riff, saccharine vocal harmonies) and bemoaning the fact he’s doing the same: “Breaking out another ’90s jam. Wish I could do something new, but no-one wants to hear that.” At all, a promising upturn for their imminent 12^th album.

17. PAUL SIMON ‘Boy in the Bubble’

Simon’s Graceland, his seventh and still greatest solo album, is 40 this month. Its opening rush, ‘Boy in the Bubble’ also described the record as a whole: “These are the days of miracle and wonder.” That much it was, timeless it will always remain.

18. NEW RADICALS ‘Someday We’ll Know’

From a lucrative purgatory writing for the likes of Texas and Ronan Keating, Gregg Alexander has revived his old band for ‘One Night Only’, title song for a rum, Callum Turner and Monica Barbero-starring, new rom com. The song’s no more appealing than the film. Infinitely better is this, standout from the Radicals’ sole album, 1998’s Maybe You’ve Been Brainwashed Too, and one of the great lost pop songs of that decade.

19. THE AVALANCHES ‘Can’t Get Over Losing You’

Another dose of retro electro-pop, courtesy of the Melbourne ‘plunderphonics’ vets, here sampling ’60s soul man Wilson Williams to a Day-Glo groove and fashioning an instant slice of late-summer euphoria. A new album, No Bad Memories, lands in October.

20. THE DURUTTI COLUMN ‘Sargasso Sea’

Last, but by no means least, more vets, the Manchester post-punks are back with their first album in 16 years, Renascent. Top-notch it is, too, and as this testifies. Glacial piano, a shimmer of effects, and Caoilfhionn Rose’s mesmeric voice combined for a heart-stopping 3:24.

Sample the whole of August’s essential songs on the playlist at the link:

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I WENT TO DINNER with Noel Gallgher one night in April of 2009. An Italian restaurant as I recall, though it might also have been Spanish, in Primrose Hill, North London. An upstairs room set aside for just the two of us and where we sat, and ate, and talked for the better part of three hours.

As I always found him to be, Noel was impressive. Fiercely bright, stand-up comic kind of funny, never once dodged a question. His answers were thoughtful, expansive, peppered with laugh-out-loud observations, brother Liam most commonly being the subject of his skewering.

It was six months after Oasis had released their seventh album, Dig Out Your Soul. A solid enough if unspectacular collection, save for one track, ‘Falling Down’, a psych-rock showpiece and among Noel’s best songs. Within four more, Oasis would have split up, and after an explosive altercation between the two brothers backstage at the Rock en Seine Festival outside of Paris.

A good half of our interview was taken up with Noel expressing his frustrations at Liam’s behaviour, how he’d bailed from the Dig Out Your Soul sessions prematurely, left the job unfinished. He told me then he was intent upon taking an extended break from being in the band, sooner rather than later. The rest we know, and so here is the meat of the other stuff he talked about that evening. His accounting of Oasis’ golden era, from humble beginnings up to Knebworth and the hubristic fallout just beyond.

It is Noel Gallagher unabridged and, possibly, as you won’t have heard him before…

What’s your first vivid memory?

“Of having a big Irish family. I’ve got two brothers, but I must have a thousand cousins. My mother’s got seven sisters and each of them was possibly the most fertile woman in Ireland. They’ve all got at least three kids. We were in Ireland for six weeks in the summer and three at Christmas. My uncles own farms. I remember running around farms and going fishing.”

Can you describe the environment you grew up in?

“We lived on a cobbled-stone street. Our house was a real Billy Liar gaff. We had an outside toilet. It was three-bedroomed. Paul was the eldest of us, so he got his own room. I used to share with Liam. I was a pretty good kid. I got nicked for burglary and robbing the local corner shop, but when you think about what goes on now, they were almost Likely Lads kind of crimes by comparison. Cheeky young scamps nicking cigarettes.

“I was never really interested in school. I loved music and football. I didn’t realise it at the time, but from the late 1970s, going into the ’80s, my parents had started their long journey to divorce. They let us stay out later and later, so we were out of the house till all hours of the night. You’d tend to get into trouble, with the neighbours, or kids from other estates. Liam got into a bit more trouble than I did. It was just a sort of generational step-up. Instead of robbing the local corner shop, him and his mates would be off nicking cars or putting people’s windows in.”

Tell me about your dad.

“He plays a crucial part in all of this. He bought a guitar, and if it wasn’t for that… In hindsight, it seems to me he must have got me mum pregnant and never really wanted to get married. He was a bit of a free spirit. That’s fine. Just have one child, but don’t bring three kids into it. He was violent towards me mum and towards me. But no more violent than my mates’ dads. With the strikes and the Winter of Discontent, those were bleak fucking times. People turned to drink. And when times are hard, who are you going to kick if you haven’t got a dog?

“I bear no malice towards the guy. I feel sorry for him. Not in a patronising way. I bet he feels a bit of a knob now. Because my dad liked nice suits and flash cars. He could have been rolling in it now. Me mum’s the opposite. All she wanted was the quiet life. I think it all hit Liam harder than me. He had a different relationship with my old fella. He was like the golden child. When it all came crashing in… I still don’t think he’s dealt with it, because I’ve never met someone who has so much adoration and yet he’s the angriest man you’ll ever meet. Liam’s like a man with a fork in a world of soup.”

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Where precisely did your interest in music spring from?
“It was an Irish thing. There was no telly in my grandma’s house in Ireland, so they used to listen to the radio. My old fella was also a country and western DJ, so that was my first exposure to music. Then Irish rebel songs. They all seemed to me to be fist-pumping anthems of pride and loss and yearning for something else. It’s no coincidence that passed over into the first Oasis record.

“My dad had a massive record collection and he’d DJ at weekends. He used to make me carry his gear into the pubs. I also had my old fella’s guitar, and I started off playing Joy Division bass lines on one string. Then The Smiths were the first band where I was there from the beginning.”

At what point did you start writing songs of your own?

“At 15, but I didn’t really take it seriously. It was ludicrous to think that anyone from our council estate could go on to be a pop star. This was before Manchester ‘happened’. There was just The Smiths, and you could never aspire to be one of the main protagonists in The Smiths. You can’t be Morrissey – he’s an outrageous character. If you wanted to be a guitarist, you couldn’t be as good as Johnny Marr. It wasn’t until Happy Mondays and the Stone Roses came along that I went, ‘I could do that.’ That gave me the impetus to get going.”

You became a roadie for another local band, Inspiral Carpets…

“I met Graham (Lambert, Inspirals’ guitarist). It was my 21^st birthday, a Stone Roses gig at the International 2 in Manchester. I was stood in the balcony while the Roses were on, and I saw a little red light like that [nods at my recorder]... It was Graham and he was bootlegging the gig. After the gig, I tapped him on the shoulder and asked him if he’d send me a copy.

“We got to chatting and he told me the Carpets’ singer had just left. He asked me to come and have a practise with them. I had to get three buses to where they rehearsed at this old mill up in Oldham. It might as well have been the other end of the world to me. We did a few tunes, a version of the Stones’ ‘Gimme Shelter’, but I’d only learnt to sing in the previous five years. It was a bit ropey. Anyway, Graham gave me a lift back to the bus stop and asked me if I’d fancy going on tour with them and looking after his gear.

“I did that for three or four years from 1987. It was unbelievable. There were drugs everywhere, birds everywhere. I went to Russia, South America, Japan, America. On £300 a week.”

At what point did Liam form a band of his own, Rain?

“I was in Munich with the Inspirals. I called me mum and asked what our kid was up to and she said, ‘Oh, he’s singing in a band with Paul McGuigan and Bonehead.’ ‘Singing?! He can’t sing. What does McGuigan play, the dopey cunt? And is Bonehead still bald?’ They had a drum machine, and then they got in Tony McCarroll. I went to their first gig at the Boardwalk, a local band night. They were alright, I thought.

“They came out afterwards and asked me if I could get them some gigs, because I knew loads of people through the Inspirals. Then they asked me to be their manager, which I found hilarious. Anyway, it transpired they were rehearsing once a week on a Sunday afternoon. That’s how serious they were. It was at a place called the Red House, which to get to they’d have to pass my flat. I’d an electric guitar at home, and one afternoon they called and asked me to come and have a jam with them.”

What did you play together that first time?

“An instrumental version of ‘Columbia’ I’d had lying around for ages. Two weeks later, we had my first gig with them at the Boardwalk. I’d never played guitar standing up in my life. I didn’t even have a guitar strap. I literally had to re-learn everything.

“I never walked in and said, ‘I am now writing all the songs. You must bow to my vision.’ Liam and Bonehead were writing together. It was more a case of them asking me for more and more songs, because they thought mine were fucking brilliant. And mine were better than theirs.”

How did you progress from there?

“We moved to the Boardwalk for rehearsals, five days a week, 9am till 11pm, and if you’re not there, you’re out. For those two years before I wrote the first album, it was like, ‘This is it. This is our chance.’ You’ve got to have a work ethic. Work isn’t a chore. It frees the mind. Me mum worked two jobs. My dad was a grafter. That whole Irish background, they’re all grafters and workers. It’s instilled into you from pretty early on that you don’t get nothing for nothing.”

Give me a snapshot of the making of Definitely Maybe.

“It was not a fun time, because we made it three times before we got the record we wanted. What did my head in was other people were always saying it was nowhere near as good as we sounded live, but I had no idea what we sounded like live. I didn’t know what they were talking about. It wasn’t until Owen Morris got his hands on it and mixed it that everyone went, ‘Oh, wow.’

“There was also the realisation that Tony was going to play on this one record and that was going to be it. I’d already written not just a rough sketch, but pretty much what …Morning Glory was going to be like. I’d written the drum fill on ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’, and Tony couldn’t even play in a straight line. They were fun times, too, but it was hard graft and too many people were sticking their oar in. It was no coincidence that after that, I never let anybody take control of anything.”

The first US tour was eventful?

“We’d gone straight to America from Japan, crossed the international dateline. So Liam had two birthdays. One in Tokyo the night before we flew, and we got banned from the hotel. Absolutely, one of the maddest nights of all-time. We got pissed on the plane all the way to LA and it was his birthday again, still the same day.

“The night before the first gig at the Whiskey, the rest of them all went out. Some of them did crystal meth, which is worse than crack. We get on stage, and we’d been billed as ‘the hot new thing from England’, and we were fucking appalling. I was starting ‘Cigarettes and Alcohol’, and someone else was going into a totally different song. Liam sang the wrong words to ‘Live Forever’. I knew we were in the greatest band in the world, and these idiots were going to piss it up the wall.

“I was furious. Still am to this day. We had a massive fight afterwards and I went back to the hotel. In the middle of the night, I got the tour manager out of bed and took the tour float and my passport off her, and a big bag of Charlie. I went to the airport... I’d met this girl who lived in San Francisco, Amy. I had her phone number, called her and told her I was coming. It seemed like the right thing to do, Jack Kerouac and all that.

“It was only when I got to LAX that I realised I was turning up for a plane with $4,000 and a big bag of cocaine. I was in sunglasses, a leather jacket, and flares. Of course, it’s before mobile phones, so no-one knew where I was. I turned up at Amy’s gaff, got drunk and ranted, and she talked me down off the ledge. She made sure I ate. She’s the girl in ‘Talk Tonite’. All those lines are real. I was there for about a week, before they traced my telephone calls from the hotel and found her phone number. They called every day and were threatening her with calling the police.”

What’s it like to experience first-hand a phenomenon on the sheer scale of (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?

“It was probably the least anticipated second album of all time. Nobody gave a fuck. I only now get what it was all about. If I’d thought at the time 18 million people were going to buy it, I’d still be fucking about with it. I certainly wouldn’t have done as many drugs as we did. Or put ‘Bonehead’s Bank Holiday’ on the vinyl.

“We made that record in 12 days. Twelve days. Sonically, to my ears now, it’s an embarrassment. They were just demos. We were in and out the studio, because we were still on tour. I don’t remember anything about the sessions.”

Does Knebworth seem such a heady peak point to you even now?

“I miss those years of the band up until Knebworth. I don’t want to re-live them – I’ve done it once – but I look back, and everything up to that point was fucking brilliant. After that was when the phone calls came to be about sales figures. Be Here Now was all about the sales. You know, ‘The fastest selling this, that, and the other.’

“If you think about it, everything was crystallised into three years. It was a beautiful madness. Every day was different. I don’t even remember getting a hangover, not once. I down a pint of Guinness now and I get a fucking headache. When we played at Knebworth, I still didn’t own my own house. I was renting a place. Admittedly, it was a nice fucking house... I didn’t feel like a rock star then. I had butterflies all the time. We flew into Knebworth in a helicopter and we were all wearing Adidas trainers. Still a bit unprofessional.”

To what extent did that huge amount of success change you personally?

“My initial reaction is to say it didn’t. But I can’t be so arrogant as to say that going from a council estate to Knebworth had no effect. It’s got to change you in some way. Even if it’s just your outlook on what clothes you can afford. I think once Bonehead and Guigsy became millionaires, they wanted out. I don’t believe that they felt they were good enough to be in a band that big.”

How do you appraise the period after Knebworth through Be Here Now?

“We went mad. I didn’t give a fuck about being cool or reserved about it, someone had let me loose in the sweet shop. I was just going to enjoy it for all it was worth. I think that’s why people have loved us from the start. Given the circumstances, you’d have done the same.

“That being said, we should have let Morning Glory and Knebworth settle, and fade into the distance. Instead, we went straight back in the studio because I’d already written the third album. We shouldn’t have made that record. You have to accept there’s a moment in time when you’re ‘it’, you’re the news, but then it moves on. You have to let it go. There’s no point in chasing it.”

Is there anything you didn’t do that you could have done?

“We could have smashed it in America. You are not telling me that Coldplay and U2 are better than we were musically? Never. What they had that we didn’t was Chris Martin and Bono. We blew it over there. The day after Liam had a big dribble of spit coming out of his mouth at the MTV Awards, our record company in America virtually said goodbye to us.

“Up to that point, we’d sold four million albums in America, more than we had in England. We had it right there. It’s a big regret for me, because we could have been bigger than the Beatles over there, I know we could. See, Liam, ultimately in his heart of hearts, thinks he’s unworthy of it so he tries to destroy it. It’s raging fucking insecurity. All he had to do was keep his mouth shut, stand at the back, and leave the rest to me. There’s no need for spitting… No, no, that’s not what I was brought up on.”

And what, ultimately, were Oasis all about back then?

“We had something indefinable. Literally, we changed people’s lives.”

JOHN WAYNE’S DAVY CROCKETT and Richard Widmark’s Jim Bowie leading the last stand at the Alamo. Charlton Heston and Stephen Boyd steering their chariots helter-skelter around the colosseum in Ben-Hur. Steel-jawed Todd Armstrong’s Jason and his Argonauts battling the great Ray Harryhausen’s skeleton army. Richard Burton hurling godforsaken Nazis off a precarious cable car and into a snow-covered Alpine ravine in Where Eagles Dare.

Any, all of these still beloved scenes was a formative education for me in the actual art of the action movie. Sat there in the dark (even at home, a school summer’s holiday afternoon film on the telly, the curtains would have to be drawn), gripped, thrilled, an eager vessel pumped full of adrenalin. Oscar didn’t then, barely has ever since, acknowledged such things. Oscar’s loss.

Action movies hold us rapt. A class of their own in every aspect, they go on being refined, revolutionised even. Bringing me to this list. The 20 of them to have taken my breath away and tempted me back the most.

Rules go along with it. No superheroes. Nothing too stately and meaning however transfixing the bank heist shootout in Michael Mann’s Heat, the subterranean raid in Denis Villeneuve’s Sicario, or Javier Bardem’s army-of-one rampage in the Coen Brothers’ No Country For Old Men, the bits in between in all of these put them on a different plateau. As for Indiana Jones, just too family friendly.

All that being said, roll the bloodletting and ultraviolence…

20. EXTRACTION (2020)

Ignore the nonsense of its 67% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Also the involvement of MCU alumni Joe Russo (writer) and Sam Hargrave (director). Extraction is a beast. Chris Hemsworth is Tyler Rake, grieving father, killing machine, an Aussie secret forces weapon turned mercenary for hire, stepped from the pages of an actual graphic novel, Ciudad. Rake’s job is to extract young Ovi, an imprisoned drug lord’s son kidnapped by a rival and held in Dhaka’s urban jungle. Doing so, of course, entails, well, carnage. The 11 minute, 29 second jeep-racing, bone-crunching, falling-off-a-building-and-getting-clobbered-by-a-truck single tracking shot is simply sensational.

19. KINGSMAN: THE SECRET SERVICE (2014)

Another comic book adaption, this one by Brit writer/director Matthew Vaughn and with Taron Egerton as tearaway Eggsy, co-opted into the Kingsmen, a vigilante, crime-fighting secret society. Samuel L. Jackson chews the scenery as batshit villain Richmond Valentine, inevitably bent on global destruction, and memorably abetted by Sofia Boutella as prosthetic-limbed, ass-kicking death dealer, Gazelle. The joy, though, is in seeing stiff upper-lipped Colin Firth go full-on tonto in the centrepiece slaughter-in-a-Kentucky-church scene.

18. MIDNIGHT RUN (1988)

Robert De Niro is bounty hunter Jack Walsh, sent to track down on-the-lam white collar crim Jonathan Mardukas (Charles Grodin), an accountant charged with scamming money from the Chicago mob, and return him to LA to stand trial in Martin Brest’s gold standard action caper. De Niro and Grodin, both hilarious, bicker and gripe their way cross-country, pursued by Yaphet Kotto’s righteous FBI agent Alonzo Mosely, John Ashton as Walsh’s oafish rival, Marvin Dorfler, and assorted henchmen, and manipulated by the ever-watchable Joe Pantoliano’s conniving bondsman Eddie Moscone. There are chases, shootouts, double crosses, one-liners, and running gags galore. In short, it’s a blast. Striking the same notes, see also Russell Crowe’s and Ryan Gosling’s criminally overlooked Nice Guys.

17. TRAIN TO BUSAN (2016)

Director Yeon Sang-ho boiling the zombie movie down to the barest of action essentials. Flight, fight. Hedge fund manager Gong Yoo is in Seoul. His ex-wife Jung Yu-mi 260 miles away in Busan. He is bound by train to drop their teenaged daughter, Kim Su-an, off with her, but with the minor inconvenience of a zombie plague happening to break out just as they depart. An infected passenger bites a train attendant, two hours of relentless, wrenching, white-knuckle tension ensues, and towards an unforgettable coda. As with so many of these films, including all of the above, it spawned inferior sequels. Those are to be avoided, this is unmissable.

16. LIVE. DIE. REPEAT. (2014)

Retitled Edge of Tomorrow, the original deemed to somehow have been too confusing for a mainstream audience, in either guise this is prime sci-fi Cruise, scripted by regular collaborator Christopher McQuarrie, breathlessly directed by Doug Liman, and with top-notch back-up from the late, great Bill Paxton, Brendan Gleeson, and especially, Emily Blunt. The concept is fiendishly simple. A brutal, insectile alien master race, the Mimics, has occupied Earth. Humanity mounts a last, D-Day-style rearguard action, during which Cruise’s yellow-bellied Major William Cage is doused in ET blood, causing him to live the same pivotal day, and battle, over and again. There are twists, turns, and McGuffins on route, but essentially, it’s Cruise and Blunt versus alien hordes, and all-round terrific.

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15. LEON (1994)

French auteur Luc Besson’s greatest film, with Jeon Reno as the titular milk-drinking, plant-watering hitman, fatally compromised by his decision to provide sanctuary to Natalie Portman’s 12-year-old Mathilda, the girl downstairs whose family are slain by corrupt DEA agent Gary Oldman. Along with Danny Aiello as Leon’s mob boss Tony, all concerned are outstanding, Portman staggeringly assured, Oldman absolutely hatstand bonkers, and Besson artfully propels things to a bloody, bittersweet conclusion.

14. PREDATOR (1987)

Eternal action behemoth Arnold Schwarzenneger, as stogie-chomping special forces op Dutch, leading a hard-bitten troop of grunts (Carl ‘Apollo Creed’ Weathers, Bill Duke, and Lethal Weapon writer Shane Black among them) into an unspecified Central American jungle to rescue a downed politician. There to be hunted, and picked off by the Yautja, a ruthless alien warrior being. John McTiernan directs with a steady, assured hand. Arnie delivers the immortal pay-off, “If it bleeds, we can kill it.”

13. JOHN WICK 3 – PARABELLUM (2019)

Keanu Reeves’ other tailor-made role (which is to say, minimal acting, maximum muscle required), and really, any of the four John Wick films to date will do. It’s this one for the bravura, two-minute, assassins-on-motorbikes-and-sword fighting sequence, and for Halle Berry’s ever so smart turn as the killer forced out of retirement to aid Reeves’ near-indestructible Wick with testicle-shrivelling help from two genitals-chomping hounds. All roads lead back to the New York Continental, with its superb, stone-faced concierge Lance Reddick, and a suitably gonzo denouement.

14. APOCOLYPTO (2006)

Mel Gibson putting his wild-eyed craziness to good use. Who else but for ‘Mad’ Mel would mount an action blockbuster in 1502 Yucatan, using an entirely indigenous cast, and with subtitled Mayan dialogue? Unsurprisingly, the answer is no-one. The shock being this is an absolute stonker of a chase movie, staged by Gibson with wild flair and invention. The premise has Rudy Youngblood’s Jaguar Paw and fellow tribesman captured by a Mayan raiding party and marched off to their jungle city to be human sacrifices. Jaguar Paw escapes, fleeing for home, his captors on his trail, and bent on gory revenge. A two hour-plus assault on the senses, with a gut-punch ending. Brilliant.

13. MISSION IMPOSSIBLE – FALLOUT (2018)

The Cruise-ster again, here in his signature role as clenched-faced, eternally running IMF agent Ethan Hunt. The plot, involving terrorist overlords the Syndicate, their agents of chaos, the Apostles, and nefarious business with nuclear bombs, is a rum one, but a mere side dish to the ceaseless action set pieces, HALO parachute jump through an electrical storm over Paris, and a jaw-dropper of a helicopter chase included. Cruise’s fellow IMF-ers Alec Baldwin, Simon Pegg, and Ving Rhames do sterling work, Henry Cavill and Sean Harris almost steal the show in the villain’s roles, but that honour falls to Vanessa Kirby as morally ambiguous arms broker Alanna Mitsopolis and Rebecca Ferguson’s magnificent MI6 agent, Ilsa Faust. Sixth and best instalment in the series, it should also have been its last.

10. HARD BOILED (1992)

Hong Kong maestro John Woo had been perfecting his balletic craft for 18 years by the time he got around to Hard Boiled, and it shows. Taking inspiration from Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry, Woo’s story concerns a hard-boiled cop (Chow Yun-fat) waging war on a gang of Chinese Triad. Meaning, in Woo world, a blaze of bullets and slow-motion violence as artfully mounted as a Jackson Pollack canvas. Hollywood came knocking for Woo after it, vehicles for John Travola and Jean-Claude Van Damme ensued, and he was never nearly so supreme again.

9. THE RAID (2011)

In the same spirit as Woo, Welshman Gareth Evans set about this single-plotline frenzy. The Indonesian capital of Jakarta, and a National Police force raiding party storms a tower block meaning to take down a drug lord holed up on the top floor and whose soldiers guard the other floors. That, in essence, is it, albeit it’s unfolded by Evans at a furious pace, and with oceans of blood and a massive body count (honours for most creative offing going to the head-impaled-on-splintered-doorframe). Bleakly nihilistic, utterly compelling.

8. INCEPTION (2010)

Christopher Nolan’s sci-fi puzzle box dazzles and confuses in equal measure, but mind-bends overall. Leonardo DiCaprio leads a team of agents able to steal information from their targets’ subconscious thoughts and hired by Ken Watanabe’s corporate raider Saito to do the reverse and implant a key piece of it into Cillian Murphy’s mind. Tom Hardy, Joseph Gordon Levitt, and Elliot Page are in DiCaprio’s crew, Marion Cotillard is the wife he lost, and the pivotal mystery involves a spinning top. No matter the how’s, why’s, and inconclusive ending, feel Nolan’s retina-searing, collapsing cityscape imagery.

7. THE BOURNE ULTIMATUM (2007)

Matt Damon’s third turn as Jason Bourne, piecing his lost memory back together as Treadstone’s noose tightens around him. Kinetic direction from Paul Greengrass, and as the Bond-slaying action hurtles from frigid Moscow, across Tangier’s rooftops, onto a virtuoso sequence mounted at London’s Waterloo Station, and concluding in New York’s East River, set to Moby’s electrifying score. It would, should have been the perfect is-he-isn’t-he sign-off to Bourne’s odyssey, and but for Damon being tempted back for 2016’s inferior Jason Bourne.

6. TERMINATOR 2: JUDGEMENT DAY (1991)

Sequels the Jason Cameron way. Everything bigger, louder, bolder. Arnie’s T800 cyborg is once again sent back from post-apocalypse 2029, this time to 1995 Los Angeles and to protect future resistance leader John Connor from a more advanced Skynet model, Robert Patrick’s eye-poppingly liquifying T-1000. Linda Hamilton returns as a more indomitable Sarah Connor, Edward Furlong is hopeless as her uppity son, Cameron spectacularly crashes a lorry into the Bull Creek Spillway to the sound of Guns N’Roses, and Schwarzenegger gets to say, “Hasta la vista, baby.” Really, what’s not to like.

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5. ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK (1981)

No-one did more to shape the modern action landscape than B-movie kingpin John Carpenter, here in imperious form, writing, directing, and scoring Kurt Russell’s charismatic anti-hero Snake Pliskin on a rescue mission to a future Manhattan transformed into a giant, hellish maximum-security prison. Fabulously, Isaac Hayes is the criminal kingpin, the Duke of New York, pitching Russell into a death match with his colourfully psychotic minions. Perfect, right up to its cynically deadpan pay-off.

4. ALIENS (1986)

Cameron on transformative sequel duty once more, on this occasion picking up where Ridley Scott left Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley at the end of 1976’s Alien. Supplanting Scott’s claustrophobic chokehold with all-guns-a-blazing mayhem, Cameron’s is a war movie in space, Bill Paxton, Michael Biehn, and Al Matthew among the testosterone-heavy Marines dispatched to check upon the human colony established on the same planet where Ripley’s crew had fatefully touched down, HR Giger’s terrifying Xenomorph as the extraterrestrial Vietcong. Paul Reiser as a wheedling exec and Lance Henriksen as android Bishop are both excellent, compensating for irksome sprog, Newt, but the towering Weaver owns the film. As elsewhere, all concerned ought to have quit while ahead here.

3. DIE HARD (1988)

First of the three genuine game changers. The one that super-charged action movies into a whole new era. John McTiernan on a roll from Predator, Bruce Willis moonlighting from TV’s Moonlighting as Detective John McClain, right cop in the wrong place, the action vice-tight contained inside the confines of the Nakatomi Corps’ not-yet-completed skyscraper. It promised ‘40 storeys of sheer adventure’ on the tin and over delivered. Alan Rickman’s Hans Gruber, a villain and an exit for the ages, “Yippee-ki-ay, motherfucker,” and all. Is it a Christmas movie? Who cares, it’s a classic regardless.

2. THE MATRIX (1999)

No-one seeing the Wachowskis’ sensory overload of a sci-fi adventure for the first time wasn’t, and isn’t, plain bowled over. Keanu Reeves’ computer hacker Thomas Anderson takes the red pill of the two offered to him by Laurence Fishburne’s Morpheus and becomes Neo, conceivably the Messiah in waiting. Cue an alternate reality in which the human race is enslaved, the machines are once more in control, and Carrie Ann-Moss is jumping tall buildings and Hugo Weaving’s Agent Smith an omnipotent threat. Everything that follows is indelible, not including the rubbish sequels.

1. MAD MAX: FURY ROAD (2015)

Seventeen years and several false starts after Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, and at 70, George Miller rebooted both his own franchise and an entire kind of filmmaking. Tom Hardy is a suitably brooding Max Rockatansky, escaping the clutches of sociopathic warlord Immortan Joe, and to be pursued back and forth across another post-apocalyptic wasteland by his pole-vaulting, flame-throwing War Boys. The film, however, belongs to Charlize Theron, mighty as Imperator Furiosa, shaven-headed, one-armed, the action hero of the century so far. As for the action itself, it’s monumental and then some. A stone-cold masterpiece.

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IN THE RUSH OF 12 months, Fairport Convention made three trailblazing albums that all together birthed British folk-rock. Their recently recruited singer was a 21-year-old, rich with promise but little known at the point she joined them. A force of nature able to sing a hushed ballad like an angel, roaring rock with bruised guts like Janis Joplin. She was, too, loud, erratic, funny, needy, prone to veering mood swings. Her new bandmates, five nice, polite English lads from middle-class backgrounds, hadn’t encountered anyone quite like her, but then again, neither had anyone else.

Sandy Denny was born Alexandra Elene Maclean Denny, also into a comfortably off household in Wimbledon, South London on 6^th January 1947. As a child, she took lessons at classical piano and violin. Her paternal grandmother, Mary, would sing for her traditional Scottish ballads she herself had been taught growing up on the Isle of Mull. Her father, Neil Denny, a civil servant, was Glasgow born, by all accounts a rather aloof and distant man. Mother Edna was sharp-tongued and chiding. She would routinely rebuke her precocious daughter over her weight, sowing seeds that festered throughout Sandy’s all too short life.

At Coombe Girls’ Grammar, Sandy was lead violinist in the school orchestra, but otherwise a restless, uninspired student. She found her calling on the local folk club circuit, just then enjoying something of a boom. As the young Bob Dylan and Joan Baez became required listening among British hipsters, folk clubs and folk nights sprung up along the River Thames and around Soho. At 15, Sandy discovered one such place, Kingston Barge, founded in 1961 on a converted coal barge.

The Barge was where another local lad, John Martyn, debuted and a visiting American, Paul Simon, did a regular turn. Sandy began there singing floor spots, most often rendering something by Dylan or Baez.

In the interim between leaving school and going to art school in nearby Kingston, she took a job as a nurse at the Royal Brompton Hospital in Kensington. Next-door to the hospital, on Old Brompton Road, was London’s self-styled ‘oldest folk club’, the Troubadour. Tuesday nights after her shift, Sandy would walk to the Troubadour and into a whole other world. She went on singing there, and once an art student, as well at a club on Soho’s Greek Street, Les Cousins, where the cream of new folk talent was bubbling up, Roy Harper, Ralph McTell, Al Stewart, and more.

Through the fullness of the next year, folk music as whole was launched to the forefront of pop culture. Across the Atlantic, Dylan plugged in, the Byrds jangled, and prodigal son Paul Simon, who’d shared a Les Cousins bill with Sandy on the night of 27^th October 1965, hit paydirt with the second album he made with partner Art Garfunkel, The Sound of Silence. In Britain, 19-year-old Donovan broke out. For her part, Sandy started to pick up engagements out from London and across the country. Breaking up from her first year at Kingston Art School in the summer of 1966, she never went back.

BY EARLY 1967, SANDY was fronting for a couple of folk stalwarts, Johnny Silvio and Alex Campbell. With them, she cut her first two records. Both Sandy and Johnny and Alex Campbell and Friends were knocked out for ‘quickie’ specialist label Saga, live to tape, and neither made much of an impression. Her next move was to join a more established collective, the Strawbs.

Formed in 1964 as a bluegrass group, the Strawbs had shifted to a more English sound when their principal, Dave Cousins, spotted Sandy at the Troubadour. She was to spend a year singing with them, playing barely a handful of shows, but among them, a week-long residency in Copenhagen, the summer of ’67. In the Danish capital, Strawbs put down their debut album. Though it was to go unreleased for another six years, All Our Own Work contained a single outstanding song.

A graceful, lilting ballad, ‘Who Knows Where the Time Goes?’ was Sandy’s voice and guitar alone. The first song of her own she felt emboldened enough to share. In hindsight, it’s an almost unbearably poignant piece, like the weeping of a lost soul. Out of the Strawbs, Fairport loomed. They were then taking baby steps on London’s underground circuit, sharing bills with the nascent Pink Floyd and in thrall to the acid-rock sound blown in from the American West Coast.

She’d run into their manager, laconic, 25-year-old Harvard graduate Joe Boyd, on the London club scene. They were looking for a singer, having cut loose Judy Dyble, whose voice was pretty but insubstantial, and to team with their other vocalist, Ian Matthews. On 13^th May 1968, Boyd arranged for Sandy to audition in the back room of the Eight Feathers pub in Fulham. Five other aspiring singers also turned up on the day, but Sandy was offered the job on the spot.

Ashley Hutchings, 23 then, Fairport’s bass guitarist and elder statesmen, recalled the occasion to me six decades after the event. “Sandy was head and shoulders above the rest,” Hutchings said. “She didn’t just want to sing for us. She wanted us to play for her, and to see if we were good enough.”

“One of the best singers I’d ever heard in my life,” noted Richard Thomson, Fairport’s serving lead guitarist.

That July, the new-look Fairport started up sessions for their second album with Boyd. At a stroke on What We Did on Our Holidays, they sounded more assured and forceful. Individually, Thompson, Hutchings, second guitarist Simon Nicol, and drummer Martin Lamble was each an excellent musician. With their new singer, they now had a vessel through which to channel their collective power. Sandy was one of them, but also apart.

“As a personality, Sandy seemed bubbly, insecure, short-tempered, and a lot of fun, all those things together,” Thomson described. “The immediate impact she had, I think, was that at last we felt we were a real band.”

“She was in a different culture to the rest of us,” said Hutchings. “She liked a drink, or ten, and took drugs, soft ones mostly, I think, and we didn’t. We weren’t ‘in’ with her drinking buddies, but we loved her dearly. Onstage, she was sensationally good. She would open her mouth to sing, say, a slow, gentle song, and you could hear a pin drop.”

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THESE WERE HEADY TIMES, not a moment to catch breath. No sooner was their second album done than Fairport embarked upon their third, Unhalfbricking. Now, Sandy truly asserted herself. She gifted the band ‘Who Knows Where the Time Goes?’, nailing this new version in a single take, and weighed in with a second song, just as seductive, ‘Autopsy’. It was her suggestion, too, to re-imagine Dylan’s ‘If You Gotta Go, Go Now’ in French as ‘Si Tu Dois Partir’, their version going on to become a freak hit. They performed it on TV’s Top of the Pops, Sandy in a floral dress, the others in berets and hooped jumpers.

Ian Matthews featured on just one track, another Dylan cover, ‘Percy’s Song’. Once the record was in the can, they let him go. Even the album’s title and cover artwork bore Sandy’s imprint. ‘Unhalfbricking’ was a nonsense word she’d conjured during a game of Scrabble, a favourite pastime. On the cover, her parents were photographed posing outside of her childhood home, she and the other Fairport’s seen idling through the garden fence.

Her greatest contribution to the album, though, was to bring in a traditional song she’d picked up from the folk circuit. Fairport’s interpretation of ‘A Sailor’s Life’ unspooled over a bravura 11-plus minutes, Thompson’s guitar spiralling and the flashing fiddle of hired player Dave Swarbrick spiriting the listener off to more exotic, Eastern climes. Sandy’s vocal was a torch song masterclass.

Two months ahead of the album’s release, 11^th May 1969, and driving back to London from a gig in Birmingham, Fairport’s designated driver, sound tech Harry Branham, fell asleep at the wheel, just north of Scratchwood Services on the M1. Their van careered across the motorway, struck a crash barrier, and spun off down an embankment, scattering the occupants.

Lamble, just 19, and Richard Thompson’s girlfriend, Jeannie Franklyn, died on impact. Hutchings was left temporarily blinded and with a shattered pelvis. Sandy happened to have gone on ahead with her new boyfriend, Trevor Lucas, whose band Eclection had opened for Fairport that night. Like the others, she was weighed down by a terrible sense of loss and survivor’s guilt.

Even still, Fairport didn’t stop. As soon as Hutchings was out of hospital, they retreated to rural Hampshire and the confines of a 19^th century rectory, Farley House. Joining them Swarbrick, now enlisted full time, and Lamble’s replacement, Dave Mattacks.

“Privately, we grieved, but no-one had any counselling and so it came out in dribs and drabs,” Hutchings said of their trauma.

“In some says, all our actions and perspectives were warped by the accident,” said Thompson.

Summer passed into autumn, and on the other side Fairport emerged with a record delving back deep into the English song tradition, and to zoom it to an electrified present. Unloved at the time, simply too much of a jolt, Liege & Lief’s stature has grown exponentially over the years. Sounding at once ages old and newborn, on it, Sandy wrung pathos and drama from staples such as ‘Reynardine’ and ‘Matty Groves’.

“No-one before had ever played these songs with a rhythm section, so it was hard work,” Hutchings explained. “Sandy probably adjusted quicker than anyone else. All through the making of that record, she was like a breeze.”

Liege & Lief was, however, a last hurrah. Sandy had stockpiled her own songs, and didn’t want to tour apart from Lucas, not least because of his well-founded reputation as an incorrigible ladies’ man. That November, she served her bandmates notice she was quitting.

OFF THE BAT, JOE Boyd begged her to make a solo album, securing for her a £40,000 advance from A&M Records in the States. She flatly refused, using the money instead to fund the group she hastily assembled with Lucas, Fotheringay. The five-piece burnt through her advance, most wastefully on having an enormous PA built they were hardly to use.

Boyd produced their self-titled debut album of 1970, and which gloried in some of the most outstanding vocals Sandy was ever to commit to tape. They did just a smattering of shows to promote it, one an ill-starred headliner at the Royal Albert Hall that October when she seemed paralysed by nerves and they were blown offstage by their opening act, the young Elton John. They started a second album the year following but didn’t complete it.

Sandy turned to Richard Thomson to guide her through her solo debut, The North Star Grassman and the Ravens, recorded in the spring of 1971. It seems today a reflection of her state at the time, the songs, and her vocals, pensive and subdued. Not so with the guest spot she recorded over the same period, her bewitching rallying cry on Led Zeppelin’s ‘The Battle of Evermore’ (she’d known Jimmy Page from art school).

“Sometimes she would coast through a session,” said Thompson of his experience producing her. “She would know something was missing and be dissatisfied, but it was as if she had to have an absolute deadline to force her to produce the goods.

“Yet on the tour we did for that record, she was the most stable I ever saw her. When I think of Sandy now, it’s of her laughing and giggling. She could be great fun, and sometimes, performing onstage with her was a transcendent experience.”

Her equilibrium didn’t last. Lucas took over as producer for her next record, Sandy, in 1972. An often-sublime collection, her label, Island Records, had high hopes for it, even going so far as to have David Bailey shoot her portrait for the cover, but it tanked.

Her relationship with Lucas, always on a knife-edge, got more fractious, more damaging. Nevertheless, they were married on 20^th September 1973 at Fulham Registry Office. Appalled, her father refused to attend.

“Sandy was insecure about her looks, her appearance sometimes,” said Thompson. “I thought she was pretty, and a lot of men loved and chased her, but they weren’t the ones she wanted. She wanted the unobtainable ones.”

Once again with Lucas producing, she tried for a kind of sepia-tinted whimsy with 1974’s Like an Old Fashioned Waltz. Featuring two of her loveliest songs, ‘Echo’ and ‘Friends’, the latter inspired by an unconsummated liaison with Pete Townshend, it flopped.

She moved with Lucas out of London and into an old country cottage, The Twistle, in the Northamptonshire village of Byfield. At a low ebb, she accepted an offer to rejoin Fairport. Island paired them with Zeppelin/Rolling Stones producer Glyn Johns to make Rising for the Moon. An unyielding taskmaster, Johns got the best out of her, but the record peaked at a lowly 143 in the US. The tour they undertook for it was gruelling.

“Everybody could see that she wasn’t happy in herself,” said Dave Pegg, who’d taken over on bass from Ashley Hutchings. “There were nights she’d play bum notes on the piano. I remember one occasion, somewhere in America, she came off almost in tears.”

AFTER THE TOUR, SANDY bailed on Fairport again, and with her finances in a parlous state. Holed up at The Twistle, her drinking escalated, her mood often as not black. She made yet one more record with Lucas, Rendezvous. Her voice showed signs of the strain she was under, most especially on the cover of Elton John’s ‘Candle in the Wind’ she was coerced into by Island, but she was capable still of such a moment of wonder as the haunting closing track, ‘No More Sad Refrains’. The album sank without trace and Island let her go.

At the turn of ’77, Sandy found out she was pregnant. Her daughter, Georgia Rose Maclean, arrived on 12^th July, three months premature. Motherhood didn’t settle her.

“When Georgia came along we all thought it was going to be great for her, and would make her happy, but it didn’t,” said Pegg, her neighbour down the road in Cropredy. “She and Trevor were having serious problems and that caused her an awful lot of grief. She’d be driving around Cropredy on pub crawls. Often, her car would end up in a ditch, and we’d have to get someone to come and fish it out for her.”

“Sandy was a mess,” appraised Richard Thompson. “I had a really bad feeling that a tragic outcome was on the cards.”

That November, Sandy managed one last tour of the UK. Attendances were erratic, so too her performances. The following March, she took Georgia to visit her parents at their holiday cottage in Mullion, Cornwall. One afternoon there, coming downstairs, she stumbled and fell, hitting her head on the flagstone floor. Afterwards, she told friends her mother had refused to take her to hospital, embarrassed to be seen in public with her wayward daughter.

Back in Byfield, Sandy began to suffer debilitating headaches. Her GP prescribed her a painkiller, Distalgesic, potentially fatal when mixed with alcohol. Whatever occurred during those next dark, desperate days, it was enough to convince Lucas to take Georgia away from her, the two of them flying to Melbourne on a one-way ticket. That same evening, Friday 14^th April, distraught, Sandy called a friend, Miranda Ward, who came to pick her up and drove her back to London.

They spent the weekend together at Ward’s flat. On the Monday morning, Ward left for work at the Wandsworth school where she taught. She’d asked another friend, Jon Cole, a fellow musician, to look in on Sandy. Cole arrived to find her unconscious at the foot of the stairs, slumped across the toilet door. He called for an ambulance, and she was rushed to Queen Mary’s Hospital in Roehampton, in a coma. She was transferred from there to Atkinson Morley Hospital in Wimbledon, which specialised in brain injuries.

Her condition didn’t improve. She slipped away at 7:15pm on the evening of Friday 21^st April 1978. She was 31. The subsequent coroner’s report recorded her death the result of a ‘traumatic mid-brain haemorrhage. Accidental.’

In the time since, Sandy Denny’s recorded works have been serially reissued and re-evaluated. The extent of her influence becoming ever more apparent, the appreciation of her talent grown so much greater. In life, she wasn’t able to climb out from the black pit she fell into. In death, her light is undimmed.

Ashley Hutchings last saw her on a summer’s day in 1977. A café bar in West London. The place was all bustle and chatter when he walked in off the street, but one voice stood out. There Sandy was, sat at a table with a bunch of other people Hutchings didn’t recognise, larger than life and, as so often she made herself, centre of attention.

“She’d been drinking, of course,” he told me. “And when she saw me, she said, ‘Oh, Ashley, come and kiss my hand.’ She held out a hand for me. I should have made a joke of it, she was just drunk, fair enough, but I walked away instead, rejected her. It’s haunted me ever since.

“No-one came near to Sandy. She was the best. She had that very special quality. When she sang a beautiful song, it broke your heart.”

I’VE A PARTICULARLY VIVID memory of moving to London. September of 1991. I was bunking up with an old college friend at his flat on the 27^th floor of Trellick Tower, Erno Goldfinger’s brutalist slab of concrete rising the better part of 400 feet over West London. Third night there, we were listening to Mark Goodier’s Evening Session show on Radio One. ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ came on, and my world was shifted within the span of 4:38.

This much was to happen over again through the next nine years, as I went to work on rock magazines. Getting to hear an avalanche of new, unfamiliar, thrilling music, almost daily. A perpetual cycle of discovery, of conversion.

So much seemed to come along through the ’90s, so many scenes and sub-genres stirring and bubbling up. Grunge, hip-hop, pop-punk, trip-hop, Britpop, jungle, alt-country, and more besides. Too much almost to keep track of, the last time music was so tribal, so clearly demarked.

A surfeit of outstanding records, many inevitably overlooked, victims of circumstance, the cruel capriciousness of fate. The 20 listed here are personal choices. The ones that struck me the hardest at the time and endure for me still. An alternative soundtrack to an alternative decade…

1. DEATH IN VEGAS The Contino Sessions (1999)

Second album from the English electro collective, fronted by Richard Fearless, and an altogether more pitch-black brew than their 1997 debut, Dead Elvis. Holed up in their London studio, Fearless and cohort Tim Holmes fashioned an ominous sound pregnant with hulking beats, buzzsaw guitar, and an overhanging mood of dread despair. Mouthed by a retinue of guest vocalists. Primal Scream’s Bobby Gillespie on ‘Soul Auctioneer’, Jim Reid from Jesus and Mary Chain on ‘Broken Little Sister’, lurching, white-knuckle drones both of them, the whole of the London Community Gospel choir on ‘Aladinn’s Story’. The general tone of things summed up by Iggy Pop on standout ‘Aisha’, croaking through a fog of discordant noise, “Aisha, we’ve just met and I think you should know… I’m a murderer.”

2. THE TRAGICALLY HIP Road Apples (1991)

Somehow, the Hip were only ever big in Canada. By this second album, recorded at Daniel Lanois’ studio in New Orleans, singer Gord Downie had assumed lyric writing duties, adding a dose of literary surrealism to his band’s punchy alt-rock. From the off on ‘Little Bones’, comporting like a harder driving R.E.M., Downie yelping as if possessed, “Baby, eat this chicken slow, it’s full of all them little bones.” The songs were great, too. The roaring ‘Three Pistols’, concerning Canadian landscape painter Tom Thompson, spasmodic ‘Twist My Arm’, and stately ‘Long Time Running’ to cite just three more. As for the album title, Canadian slang for horse droppings.

3. THE JAYHAWKS Hollywood Town Hall (1992)

Hinged around the combined songwriting and entwined voices of principals Mark Olsen and Gary Louris, with their third album The Jayhawks opened up the alt-country wing of Rick Rubin’s cult blazing Def American label. Pristinely produced by Rubin’s partner, George Drakoulias, Hollywood Town Hall sounded, and sounds now, timeless, ageless, like it’s been preserved in an oak wood cask. ‘Waiting on the Sun’, ‘Two Angels’, the soaring ‘Crowded in the Wings’, these are songs as pitched perfect and evocative as the album cover shot, the band, a clapboard church, roadside in the snow at Hollywood Township, a rural outpost in their native Minnesota.

4. JELLYFISH Spilt Milk (1993)

As has been noted before in this very forum, no band was more unjustly overlooked than Jellyfish. After their supreme debut album, Bellybutton, got passed over, leading lights Andy Sturmer and Roger Manning tried again three years later with Spilt Milk. More of the same, symphonic power-pop, only with everything turned up to 11, Beach Boys-meets-Queen on the scale of Ben Hur. They bust their budget, toured it for a year solid, but even so, Spilt Milk sank and Jellyfish was done. Listen now, or any time, to ‘The Ghost at Number One’, or ‘New Mistake’, or ‘Joining a Fan Club’, and wonder at the madness of the world.

5. GIRLS AGAINST BOYS Venus Luxure No.1 Baby (1993)

Birthed in Washington DC, Girls Against Boys began by doffing their hats to hometown heroes Fugazi (that band’s drummer, Brendan Canty, initially moonlighted with them), while looking like male models, sharp dressed, angular cheekbones. Their second album, Venus… might also have had Fugazi’s producer, Ted Nicely, at the helm, but on it, they struck out their own furrow, like a kind of hardcore Velvet Underground, clearly defined by the urgent undertow of Eli Janney’s and Johnny Temple’s hulking twin bass guitars and Scott McCloud’s spilling ashtray of a voice. As articulated on the fabulous ‘Bulletproof Cupid’, “Everybody wanna live that sexy ride.”

6. WARRIOR SOUL Last Decade, Dead Century (1990)

Brainchild of motormouth frontman Kory Clarke, native of Detroit, erstwhile drummer with Raging Slab (see later) and performance artist in his adopted New York, Warrior Soul got snapped up by Metallica’s management team and signed to Nirvana’s major label. Arriving on the cusp of both the Black Album and Nevermind, and musically residing at a point between each, their debuting Last Decade, Dead Century should have hit hard but barely impacted. Who can say why, since it remains one of the true great metal albums of the decade. Clarke’s nihilist lyrics echoed Jaz Coleman’s with Killing Joke (the Joke’s ex-drummer Paul Ferguson was even powering the beat), and in ‘The Losers’ and ‘Lullaby’, he’d conjured a brace of titanic anthems.

7. THE AFGHAN WHIGS Black Love (1996)

At the time, The Whigs’ fifth album was generally appraised as being inferior to their fourth, 1993’s breakthrough Gentlemen, also superb. As so often, the consensus was wrong. Originally intended by Greg Dulli as the soundtrack to a film noir he wanted to make but never got around to, this is his band’s masterpiece. Who-sized classic rock next to tumultuous R&B, with a side order of late-night soul-searching balladry. Guitarist Rick McCollum starred, the velvet-voiced Shawn Smith complemented Dulli on the propulsive ‘Going to Town’ and ethereal ‘Night By Candlelight’. A hard-boiled opener, ‘Crime Scene Part One’, a celestial coda, ‘Faded’, and all points in between.

8. CHRIS WHITLEY Dirt Floor (1998)

Dropped by major label Columbia after his third excellent album in a row, 1997’s Terra Incognito, failed to find a big enough audience, Whitley retired to his father’s farm in Vermont and there, set up in the barn, cut Dirt Floor solo to two-track analogue tape, through a vintage ribbon mic, and over two days for tiny indie Messenger Records. The result was Whitley’s most nakedly unadorned and deeply affecting blues. As always, he sang and played his National guitar like an angel, a maestro. To hear ‘Scrapyard Lullaby’ and ‘Wild Country’ is to bear witness to a mighty talent.

9. GILLIAN WELCH Revival (1996)

The first sighting of Gillian Welch and partner David Rawlings, produced by T-Bone Burnett out of studios in Hollywood and Nashville, and over ten songs, summoning a heady atmosphere of sepia-tinted Americana, abetted by a stellar back-up band including Elvis’ one-time guitarist, the great James Burton, and ace drummer Jim Keltner. Austere, yet inviting and soulful, Welch’s and Rawlings’ songs sound rooted in Appalachian mud, baked in Tennessee sun. As per the freewheeling country-blues of ‘Pass You By’ and the lovely ‘Annabelle’.

10. WHISKEYTOWN Strangers Almanac (1997)

Of the same musical order as Welch and Rawlings, Whiskeytown were out of Raleigh, North Carolina, fronted by one Ryan Adams, having passed through a series of no-hope punk outfits and getting his Gram Parsons game on. Of course, with Adams involved, their path was never smooth, but rutted and difficult. They crumbled making Strangers Almanac, their second album, and as Adams seized control of the songwriting reins. Even as the sessions were just getting going, two-thirds of the band upped and left on the same day, leaving fiddle player Caitlin Cary and guitarist Phil Wandscher to stick it out with Adams to the bitter end. Whatever the pain, they made a terrific record. Adams’ hand is on all of the 13 tracks, with ‘16 Days’ and ‘Dancing With the Women at the Bar’ as good as any that he’s written.

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11. NEUTRAL MILK HOTEL In the Aeroplane Over the Sea (1998)

The album as near-mythical artwork. Primarily the work of Jeff Magnum, a musical polymath hailing from Ruston, Louisiana, who’d dropped out of university and drifted around the US, before settling in Denver, Colorado. There in 1996, and backed by a loose collective of musicians, he made Avery Island, his first album under the Neutral Milk Hotel banner. The second, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, was his lo-fi Pet Sounds, and Neutral Milk Hotel’s last to date. Over 11 songs and under 40 minutes, Magnum laced his music with psych-folk-rock flourishes, his lyrics dreamlike nursery rhymes, the combined effect dazzling. There was nothing like it then, hasn’t been since.

12. MARK LANEGAN Scraps At Midnight (1998)

Made as his band Screaming Trees were entering their death throes, Lanegan’s third solo album platformed his incomparable voice, an incantation from the darkest depths of his soul and to a soundtrack of wrenching gothic blues as sparse and raw-beautiful sounding as the Joshua Tree desert from where it was recorded. ‘Hospital Roll Call’ opens with weeping guitar and a rumble of drums, like thunder in the dead of night, Lanegan intoning a single word, “Sixteen”, the number he’d eyed scratched onto the wall of a run-down infirmary in Montreal he’d once been rushed to. Nothing lightens from there. It’s heavyweight, but with a whole lot of grace and import, too. “Living’s not hard,” Lanegan reflects on the hymnal ‘Stay’, “it’s just not easy.”

13. REMY ZERO Villa Elaine (1998)

Before they’d even cut a record and on the strength of a demo tape, Birmingham, Alabama’s Remy Zero were invited by Radiohead onto their tour for The Bends. After Villa Elaine, they toured with them again on OK Computer, but not so as they reached anything like Radiohead’s critical mass. It is, nonetheless, a supreme debut. Grandiose smart rock staged upon Cajun Tate’s beseeching voice. Most compelling on ‘Hermes Bird’, ‘Hollow’, and the magnificent ‘Prophecy’, Tate’s words a portent of what became of his band after their second excellent album, 2001’s The Golden Hum, was also shunned: “Look into the sun and see your soul is dying. Used to feel the faith but now you’re tired of trying.”

14. BRAD Shame (1993)

Shawn Smith again, here alongside Pearl Jam guitarist Stone Gossard, drummer Regan Hagar, who’d previously played with Gossard’s one-time Mother Love Bone bandmate, poor, doomed Andrew Wood, in Malfunkshun, and bassist Jeremy Tobias. As Brad, they were optimistically, erroneously billed as a ‘grunge supergroup’. In reality, their first album together, Shame was something more refined, as much R&B- and soft rock-based as anything, and the better to suit Smith’s mellifluous voice. ‘Raise Love’ and billowing ballad ‘Screen’ stand as the twin (very) highpoints. They went on making records as Brad until 2019 and when, tragically, Smith’s heart gave out on him, all too soon.

15. JOE HENRY Trampoline (1996)

In a mainstream way, North Carolina-born Henry made his name having one of his songs rearranged into a hit, ‘Don’t Tell Me’, by his sister-in-law, a certain Madonna, for her 2000 album Music. In a more lasting sense, he’s been making his own alt-country, jazz-and-folk-inflected way for 40 years now and through a procession of excellent albums. Trampoline, his sixth, is one of his very best. Put down with R.E.M. engineer Pat McCarthy in LA and New Orleans, it’s a kind of chamber-country piece, the songs finely etched with strings, brass, and loops, five run through, too, with Page Hamilton of hardcore band Helmet’s strafing guitar. Opener ‘Bob & Ray’ and the title track serve notice of its subtle power.

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16. URGE OVERKILL Exit the Dragon (1995)

Saturation, two years earlier, should have been the making of Urge Overkill, but wasn’t. Reunited with producers The Butcher Brothers, and having evidently gone through some profoundly dark times, Exit the Dragon, their sixth album, wasn’t so much a last tilt as a raw, narcotic confessional set to a series of classic rock, power-pop, and soul-stacked moves. Songs as irresistible as ‘Need Some Air’ and ‘Somebody Else’s Body’, words as open wounded as, “Dozed to New York City and I must’ve been gone. Stuck in a re-run house, watchin’ Japanese porn.” Brilliant, but too much for most, it peaked at 129 in the US. It was 16 years before they made another.

17. MASTERS OF REALITY Sunrise on the Sufferbus (1992)

Another band from Rick Rubin’s stable, Masters Of Reality formed in Syracuse, New York in 1981, but comported like a British power-trio from decades earlier. Fittingly, on this, their second album, frontman/guitarist Chris Goss and bassist Googe were joined by drum legend Ginger Baker and together imagined how Cream would’ve sounded had they survived to the ’90s and been two-thirds American. Such is the great joy of Sunrise on the Sufferbus, Baker playing up a storm on prime cuts such as ‘She Got Me (When She Got Her Dress On)’, ‘Rolling Green’, and ‘Tilt-A-Whirl’, and, amusingly, taking Americans to task over their tea-making capabilities on the absurdist ‘T.U.S.A.’ Obviously, Baker didn’t stay for longer than this one record, but Goss has kept on driving his Masters down their own lane.

18. BLIND MELON Soup (1995)

Blind Melon rode the grunge wave with their self-titled, three million-selling debut of 1992, also helped along by MTV hit ‘No Rain’, with its Bee Girl video, and singer Shannon Hoon’s teenage friendship with fellow Hoosier Axl Rose. Three years on, after the ‘Seattle Sound’ had waned and Hoon had rehabbed, Soup met with lacerating reviews and disinterest. It was, though, a far better record. Musically ranging across hard, prog, and folk-rock shapes, lyrically venturing into dark places. ‘Galaxie’ was an eruptive opener, ‘Mouthful of Cavities’ a heart-stopper, and ‘2x4’ hard to bear as Hoon unloaded, “Needle, foetal, someone’s pouring warm gravy all over me.” Capitol Records abandoned them after it flopped and Hoon suffered a fatal overdose on their tour bus on 21^st October of that year, aged just 28. Theirs is a brutally sad story. Guitarist Christopher Thorn has gone onto making music with The Afghan Whigs.

19. THE ALOOF Sinking (1995)

London’s The Aloof pitched themselves into the trip-hop, jungle, Big Beat scheme of things with their debut album of 1994, Cover the Crime. One year later, and with Sinking they were orchestrating a shift out of club culture and towards something more rarefied, an electro-blues cocktail dashed with a sense of rock ‘n’ roll and projected with the grand scope of a movie soundtrack. Lyrically, it explores themes of descent, into depression and addiction, whilst musically swooping and sweeping, as on ‘Bittersweet’, transfixing urban soul, and epic closer ‘Losing It’, put down at Abbey Road, coming on like a sci-fi Bond theme.

20. RAGING SLAB Dynamite Monster Boogie Concert (1993)

One more of Rick Rubin’s Def American bands. The Slab formed in New York, 1983, frontman Greg Strzempka and star bassist Elyse Steinman in thrall to both punk rock and southern boogie and fleetingly joined by the aforementioned Kory Clarke. By this, their third album, Clarke was gone, they’d pushed their classic rock-isms to the fore, and Led Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones was doing their string arrangements. From riff-heavy opener ‘Anywhere But Here’, through the ZZ Top-quoting ‘Pearly’, the name given by Billy Gibbons to his cherished Les Paul, and on via the easier rolling ‘Lynne’ and ‘Laughin’ and Cryin’’, it did just as the title foreswore, serve up explosive boogie of an outsized kind.

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DURING MY TIME ON music magazines, a period equal to the expected durability span of architectural shingle, or so I’ve read, the then annual compilation of our collective records of the year was a well-established ritual. From the editorial side at least, one with its own unwritten rules to it, and also with inevitable compromises and temptations ingrained.

The final list had to be reflective of our audience, or so we told ourselves. Put another way, it must include the artists we most wanted to be able to keep on writing about. To this end, there were inevitable compromises, entries compelled upon us. The better to keep record companies, managements, and fragile egos on side.

Then again, collectively and individually, there was the lure to present ourselves as arbiters of taste. Or put another way once more, to include numbers of records we’d heard, and you most likely hadn’t, and because you would have had to have trusted us implicitly and gone out and actually bought all of them.

Personally, I’m not so sure that last flaw isn’t a lifelong one now. An ever-ongoing inner monologue, ‘Look at what I’ve discovered!’ At risk of the same, what follows are my favourite records of the year to date. Otherwise put together from a basic criterion. They’re the ones I’ve found myself listening to, and enjoying the most of all…

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10. THE STROKES Reality Awaits

Six years since their last album, The New Abnormal, The Strokes have made their best since First Impressions of Earth, as far off as 2006. Like The New Abnormal, beardy guru Rick Rubin is back producing. As with First Impressions of Earth, Reality Awaits isn’t perfect, prone as it is on occasion to indolent posturing, but when it’s good, it’s terrific. Witness apparently effortless singles ‘Falling Out of Love’ and ‘Lonely in the Future’, or the spasmodic ‘Envy the Birds’, Albert Hammond Jr.’s and Nick Valensi’s guitars jabbing and prodding, Julian Casablancas singing as if with a mouthful of marbles. Why we fell in love with them in the first place.

9. DEATH CAB FOR CUTIE I Built You a Tower

The Cutie, as likely no-one refers to them, are one of those bands I’ve been aware of for what seems like forever, but for reasons unknown, without being compelled to properly engage with, and until this, their 11^th album. The prompt was the lead-off single ‘Stone Over Water’, one of the very best songs of the year, Ben Gibbard picking over the ruin of a broken marriage with a universal ache in his heart: “I’m trying to hold it together, I’m trying to sleep through the night. I’ve got my windows open to the weather; I keep telling my friends I’m alright.” Gibbard’s other songs here are just as wide-open and heart-tugging.

8. THE BLACK CROWES A Pound of Feathers

Picking right up where 2024’s unexpectedly potent comeback album, Happiness Bastards, left off, the Brothers Robinson go on existing in a classic rock ‘n’ roll-shaped universe, defiantly, gloriously untroubled by anything going on outside of it. Mostly, of course, this means various shades of the Rolling Stones. They do the strutting, swaggering Stones very well here on opening brace ‘Profane Prophecy’ and ‘Cruel Streak’, the woozier, more narcotic aspect even better on ‘Eros Blues’ and the outstanding ‘High & Lonesome’. Eternally, it’s 1971 all over again.

7. WILLOW AVALON Pink Pocket Pistol

One of the other great songs of the year so far is Willow Avalon’s I-done-wrong-and-so-what duet with Jason Isbell, ‘Cardinal Sin’, the stateliest of country ballads. It grandstands here on Avalon’s second album, among a bunch of other just as sharply funny, finely drawn Americana songs, stood out by Avalon’s appealingly distinctive voice, a kind of Dolly Parton on helium, and wry way with a lyric. Cheating partners get jilted, an abusive lover is offed, and Avalon winds up soothing on the lovely ‘Georgia Mile’.

6. ST VINCENT Live In London

The live album as platform for a singular, staggering talent. Recorded at the Royal Albert Hall with the 60-piece Jules Buckley Orchestra, Annie Clark here reinvents, or else finds new nooks and crannies to inhabit within, her own songs. On the former count, look no further than the seductively simmering, then eruptive take on ‘Los Ageless’, emerging as if through smoke wisps and then bursting into sodium light. On the latter, there is her breathtaking vocal on ‘Candy Darling’. More again is revealed with each listen.

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5. ZACH BRYAN With Heaven on Top

At 25 tracks, it’s a long haul, but Bryan hardly falters on this, his sixth album. The horn section is a welcome addition to already bursting-at-the-seams songs such as ‘Appetite’, ‘Sante Fe’, and ‘Rivers and Creeks’, and missed from the all-acoustic version of With Heaven on Top he also put out. On both, he’s ever adept with a lighter touch, as a careworn balladeer, or blue-collar everyman, and see ‘Runny Eggs’, ‘Plastic Cigarette’, or ‘Aeroplane’. Altogether, Bryan is still the obvious, and most likely inheritor of Springsteen’s mantle.

4. DINA OGON Manniskobarn

Tipped to me by none other than Greg Dulli, Stockholm four-piece Dina Ogon have fast become a new obsession. Manniskbobarn (translation: human child), their fourth album, imagines such a thing as a psychedelic Burt Bacharach in a Motown-appointed playpen, and spectacularly. It’s a heady, richly ornate cocktail. Try sampling either of ‘Orden Brann’, lush strings, vaulting choirs, or ‘Dalig Teve’, multi-layered, plain magnificent, and be hooked.

3. KACEY MUSGRAVES Middle of Nowhere

Musgraves’ post break-up record, Middle of Nowhere corrals, too, her musical roots, western swing rubbing shoulders with trad-bluegrass, pure pop placed next to outlaw country. Lyrically, she’s alone but not lonely, hard truth direct, and bitingly funny. In tandem with regular collaborators Ian Fitchuk and Daniel Tashian, at the top of her songwriting game. The title track is a knockout, ‘Dry Spell’ laugh-out-loud pointed, the duet with Willie Nelson on ‘Uncertain TX’ perfectly judged and mounted.

2. KURT VILE Philadelphia’s Been Good to Me

Thing with Kurt Vile is, he makes it all sound so damn easy. His first album in four years, and the first made without long-time creative partner, the late Rob Laasko, Philadelphia’s Been Good to Me settles back into a Neil Young on happy pills groove from track one, ‘Zoom 97’, and carries on from there in the same fashion. As if without breaking sweat, but with Vile’s kind of genius residing in how these songs burrow down deep into your brain, as if laser guided. Lead-off single ‘Chance to Bleed’ is pretty much all hook, the ten-minute plus ‘99^th Song’ bordering on hypnotic, ‘Red Room Dub’, on which Laasko plays, a fitting, rolling right along tribute.

1. WU LYF A Wave That Will Never Break

Fifteen years on from their excellent debut album, Go Tell Fire to the Mountain, the Manchester quartet return and better it. A Wave That Will Never Break holds firm to their conviction in big music, bold ambition, grand ideas. Seven tracks only, but six of them knockouts. Two, opener ‘Love Your Fate’, so exciting it raises the hairs on the back of your neck, and the near 11-minute turbulence that is ‘Tib St. Tabernacle’, stone-cold classics. Singer Ellery James Roberts still sounds as if he’s gargling gravel, the whole like it was recorded in a canyon. All is well.

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THERE IS NOTHING, WE know, more evocative of time, place, moment than a particular favourite song. Among the most acute in this regard are those reminding us of our summers past, the mood and temperature of them. The different senses they stir. The long, hot days of our childhood. The melancholy at the end of a summer’s evening, a cool breeze to go with the heat. The bittersweetness of a first crush. The promise of an open highway. The sepia-tint of a faded golden era.

Summer’s songs, those explicitly of and about the season, or the ones simply conjuring the feel and trace of it, are enduring, will never fail to spark us to revelry. They’re the warmth on our backs, the catch in our throats.

Compiling this list, I was struck, first of all, by their intrinsic common threads – melodic, harmonic, lyrical. Often as not, those things rooted in one or other of the California fantasia created in Brian Wilson’s head, or Caribbean jams, or with the eternal euphoria of a Motown or Phil Spector production.

Then again, by how perfectly formed and composed the very best of them are. How they crescendo like a sunrise, linger like a sunset. Within them are our dreams departed, our lost souls, the hopes we cling to, the warm beat of our best of times. They are all of our yesterdays, each of our yearned-for tomorrows.

Upon pressing ‘play’, we’re spirited right back to our glory days. As the man sang it, they’re gone forever, and we should just let them go, but…

1. THE BEATLES ‘Here Comes the Sun’ (1969)

Where else to start. Written by George Harrison at Eric Clapton’s country pile in Surrey, one especially sunny day in April. Cut for Abbey Road, Harrison on a prototype Moog, John Lennon having skipped the session, as irresistible, as soothing as the feel of the sun on your back.

2. THE BEACH BOYS ‘Good Vibrations’ (1966)

Seeking to match Phil Spector’s monumental production of The Righteous Brothers’ ‘You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’, Brian Wilson took seven months, using four different studios and 40 session players, to realise his grandest ‘pocket symphony’. A dazzling head-rush whenever, wherever you hear it.

3. BILL WITHERS ‘Lovely Day’ (1977)

Written by Withers with ace balladeer Skip Scarborough, Ray Parker Jr, of Ghostbusters theme tune fame, on guitar, and with Withers’s 18-second sustained note on ‘daaaaaa…..y’ at its climax. Not so much a song as the sensation of being eased down into a hammock.

4. THE LOVIN’ SPOONFUL ‘Summer in the City’ (1966)

The Spoonful’s songwriter-in-chief, John Sebastian, co-opted a song brother Mike had written at 14 for this, their signature moment. Summoning the urgency of evening’s relief after a broiling day in the city. Unforgettable in any context, even including over the opening credits of something as hokey as Die Hard With a Vengeance.

5. SEALS AND CROFTS ‘Summer Breeze’ (1972)

Title track of the soft rock overlords’ fourth album, and easy as a summer’s Sunday morning. Adeptly covered by the Isley Brothers also, but in Dash Croft’s and Jim Seals’ hands, like being taken out on a yacht and rocked on an ever so gentle sea.

6. CHRISTOPHER CROSS ‘Ride Like the Wind’ (1980)

Cross’ debut single, and what a way to start. The tale is one of a con on the run to the Mexican border, but blessed with Michael Omartian’s soaring production, Michael McDonald on back-ups, and the great Lenny Castro’s percussion fills, it’s the ultimate top-down-driving-anthem.

7. SLY & THE FAMILY STONE ‘Hot Fun in the Summertime’ (1969)

Released weeks in advance of their epochal set at Woodstock, this is Sly and his Family also before the darkness and madness set in, when he had magic at his fingertips, pop-soul miracles at his command.

8. MARTHA & THE VANDELLAS ‘Dancing in the Street’ (1964)

Gifted to them by Marvin Gaye, who also drummed on the track, and cut in two stellar takes. Singing it, Martha Reeves envisaged a riotous block party and ended up with a song that could start one.

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9. CHIC ‘Good Times’ (1979)

Not the 3:42 seven-inch mix, but the epic 8:15 version opening the Risque album. All the better to savour the extraordinary interplay between Nile Rogers’ funk-in-excelsis guitar and Bernard Edwards’ elastic bass, blended together a summons to even the most rhythmically challenged among us to get up and move.

10. GNARLS BARKLEY ‘Crazy’ (2006)

Factually, Brian ‘Dangermouse’ Burton was inspired by the era of great Spaghetti Western soundtracks (it even includes a sample of a song, ‘Last Men Standing’, from one, 1968’s Django, Prepare a Coffin) when pulling together this debut single in tandem with Cee Lo Green. More pointedly, he hit upon a universal feelgood sound. ‘Crazy’ spent nine consecutive weeks at Number One cheering the UK.

11. PRINCE ‘Raspberry Beret’ (1985)

“I was working part time in a five and dime, my boss was Mr. McGee,” it begins, scene established, musical vibe, technicolour psych-pop, set already. Thereafter, the pocket-sized polymath simply hits the button marked ‘Instant Sunshine’. Genius at work.

12. BOB MARLEY & THE WAILERS ‘Could You Be Loved’ (1980)

Marley had disco in mind when he had the Wailers put down this opening track to the Uprising album. The loose-limbed groove they locked into, twitchy, seductive, could raise the dead to dance.

13. STEVIE WONDER ‘Master Blaster (Jammin’)’ (1980)

Pop-soul’s other genius-polymath, here paying homage to the aforementioned Marley in that same year of 1980. Wonder was never again to be quite so unfathomably great, but then, this is a titanic brew.

14. BIG STAR ‘September Gurls’ (1974)

The title was Alex Chilton’s doff of the cap to the Beach Boys’ ‘California Girls’, and the song went down onto six-track tape for his band’s second album, Radio City. Hardly anyone at the time got to know about it. Hearing it now, gleeful, glorious, that borders on the criminal.

15. FLEETWOOD MAC ‘Everywhere’ (1987)

Fourth single lifted off the classic Nicks-Buckingham-McVie-McVie-Fleetwood line-up’s first comeback album, Tango in the Night. It’s Christine McVie’s song and dreamy vocal, Lindsay Buckingham’s master-craftsman touches with the feather-light harmonies. Altogether, wonderful.

16. TOM PETTY ‘Free Fallin’’ (1989)

Petty wrote up what he saw driving down Ventura Boulevard each day. Mike Campbell added a ringing 12-string guitar hook. Producer Jeff Lynne brought the widescreen production and the repetitive chord pattern from one of ELO’s old hits, ‘Evil Woman’. The resulting mix is magical.

17. DON HENLEY ‘The Boys of Summer’ (1984)

The Mike Campbell song Tom Petty rejected for the Southern Accents album and Henley turned to solid gold. No-one cannot be spirited back to their first summer love by the line, “I can see you, your brown skin shining in the sun.” No-one, surely, for whom this does not stir their soul.

18. CROWDED HOUSE ‘Weather With You’ (1992)

Written by the brothers Finn, Tim and Neil, on the first day of sessions for the Woodface album. The arrangement’s a rare one but works like a charm. The wait for a chorus to arrive out of the morning mist of verses, and then three of them shine through, one after another, like sunbeams.

19. RILO KILEY ‘Silver Lining’ (2007)

Opening track of their last hurrah, Under the Blacklight, and testifying to the sheer fabulousness of Jenny Lewis, here making the act of reimagining – and matching – Fleetwood Mac in their mid-’70s imperious phase sound as effortless as a summer’s stroll in the park.

20. LANA DEL REY ‘Ride’ (2012)

Rick Rubin producing, strings-and-piano-coloured blue-eyed soul in her sights, and from the point Lana Del Rey sings – the voice unmistakeable now, wounded and sensual all at once – the opening line, “I’ve been out on that open road,” a heavenly lift off.

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21. RED HOT CHILI PEPPERS ‘Black Summer’ (2022)

It’s Rick Rubin at the desk again and upon which the incomparable John Frusciante announced his return to the Chilis after a 16-year absence. Frusciante’s searing guitar back at the heart of things, nonsense lyrics (“Platypus are few, the secret life of roo,” anyone?), belter of a song.

22. GIN BLOSSOMS ‘Found Out About You’ (1993)

Doug Hopkins’s greatest song is just plain one of the all-time great songs, of summer or otherwise. It embodies the other aspect of the season, its ache, the never-to-be-forgotten pain of a doomed, lost love. Tragically, Hopkins took his own life the same year it was released. This monument he left behind will forever stand tall.

23. JOHN MELLENCAMP ‘Just Another Day’ (1997)

Not someone more normally associated with a carefree attitude to life, Mellencamp here plugs into the spirit of lazing on a summer’s afternoon and comes up trumps. Whoever “Bobie Doll and Big Jim Picato” are, and whyever “they don’t work and they don’t want to,” they sound like they’ve got it made.

24. MAGGIE ROGERS ‘Never Going Home’ (2024)

Maggie Rogers’ Don’t Forget Me album is a stupidly underrated, classic-pop masterpiece. Together with collaborator Ian Fitchuk, Rogers cut a song a day, in the chronological order in which they were written, at New York’s storied Electric Lady studio. Eighth to be put down, this is one of its best. Terrific scene-setting opening line, too: “Smooth out the lines on my face in the mirror and think about what I’m gonna do.” The eternal promise of a summer’s morning carried off by a driving, sugar-sweet melody.

25. JOURNEY ‘Stone in Love’ (1981)

Track two on the mighty Escape, right on the heels of ‘Don’t Stop Believin’’, Steve Perry going off into the stratosphere, a rocking Sam Cooke. “In the heat with a blue jean girl,” Perry sings, Neil Schon’s FM radio-friendly riff boosting him up, AOR nirvana.

26. BRYAN ADAMS ‘Summer of ’69’ (1985)

Sat facing each other in their writing room, Adams and songwriting partner Jim Vallance swapped recollections of their youthful summers, the best days of their lives. Then put them into a starburst of a song. Bonus points for sneaking the “me and my baby in a 69” line past the radio censors.

27. BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN ‘Girls in Their Summer Clothes’ (2007)

Outlier track on the otherwise hard-punching, state-of-the-nation Magic album, this is the Boss getting his Brian Wilson game on, such a lush pop extravaganza and with a keening heart.

28. MEAT LOAF ‘You Took the Words Right Out of My Mouth (Hot Summer Night)’ (1977)

First single to come off of Bat Out of Hell. Jim Steinman’s operatic impression of Phil Spector-meeting-Motown, the E Street Band’s Roy Bittan and Max Weinberg respectively on piano and drums, the erstwhile Marvin Lee Aday heroically voicing Steinman’s fever-dream teen fantasy: “It was a hot summer night, and the beach was burning/There was fog crawling over the sand.” No other word for it but magnificent.

29. ELO ‘Mr. Blue Sky’ (1977)

At end, the ultimate, pop-symphonic summation of a summer’s day. Written by Jeff Lynne at a Swiss chalet, after two weeks of miserable weather, and as the sun broke at last over the Alps. That feeling bottled, and turned wondrously, marvellously loose.

Now listen to all of these Summer Breezes on the playlist at the link:

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A SUMMER’S DAY IN July of 2011. A hot one in Venice Beach, the deep-blue Pacific Ocean sparkling under the California sun. Anthony Kiedis, perched on a sofa in the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ rehearsal space, was considering the abundance of turbulences to have assailed his band to this point.

“I love our story,” he told me, chocolate brown-eyes unblinking. “For better or for worse, for the pain and gain.”

Long before then, the Chilis’ collected store of ups and downs was overflowed. They’d actually begun as Tony Flow and the Miraculously Majestic Masters of Mayhem in Los Angeles, 1982.

Four Fairfax High schoolmates. Their singer Kiedis, son of a bit-part actor dad, screen name Blackie Dammett, Israeli-born guitarist Hillel Slovak, Jack Irons on drums, and bass player Michael Balzary, known to one and all as Flea on account of his diminutive stature. They were the Chili Peppers by March of 1983, their stock-in-trade a melange of punk spunk and bendy funk.

“As a 20-something kid who’s making noise, you really want attention,” Kiedis reflected of those early years scrapping around their home city. “At least I did. Flea and I would go from bar to bar handing out our hand-drawn fliers for our little shows. Telling anyone who’d listen that they had to come and see the most amazing thing ever.”

“Anthony and I were inseparable,” Flea furthered. “Even though our relationship was really fucking antagonistic. We’re very different types of people. We offend each other, and we can both be a couple of self-righteous twat cunt-faces, but I fucking love the guy, he’s like my brother.”

Nothing about their first couple of albums amazed. Both of their self-titled debut of 1984 and the following year’s, George Clinton-produced, Freaky Styley was a half-formed jumble, a mess. Irons quit and then came back for The Uplift Mofo Party Plan in 1988. They’d wanted Rick Rubin to work with them on that record. Rubin declined over their manifest drug issues.

“I was a time bomb always ready to go off,” said Kiedis. “There was some demon inside waiting to have its time with me.”

“We grew up in a drug culture,” Flea reasoned. “I did a lot of drugs as a kid. Every kind. I always found slamming a quarter gramme of coke would burst your fucking eyes out.”

It caught up with them, of course it did. Just home from the tour for …Mofo Party Plan, on the 25^th June 1988, Slovak overdosed on heroin at his Hollywood apartment. Dead at 26 years old.

“The emotional depths,” said Flea.

“Probably the most dramatic thing that’s ever happened to me in my life,” said Kiedis. “The turning point of our young lives.”

THEY CARRIED ON, BUT reeling. Irons bailed for good. Kiedis’ and Flea’s first attempt with a new guitarist, DeWayne McKnight, didn’t stick. By the end of that year, though, they had happened upon a powerhouse drummer, Chad Smith, and an 18-year-old wunderkind guitarist, native New Yorker John Frusciante. Together, this new four-piece made Mother’s Milk in 1989, their first platinum album, Stevie Wonder cover ‘Higher Ground’ and defiant funk-a-thon ‘Knock Me Down’ its twin peaks.

“I never felt like dying was a good idea,” Kiedis noted. “Never felt like throwing the towel in on this band.”

Next there was BloodSugarSexMagik in 1991. Made with Rubin at last, and at a Hollywood mansion where Harry Houdini was reputed to have once lived. An even bigger hit. The elastic ‘Give It Away’, and ‘Under the Bridge’, Kiedis’s hymn to his lowest ebbs, their first properly great songs. Platinum seven times over in the US. Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Smashing Pumpkins their support acts on the ensuing North American tour.

All of it way too much for Frusciante. Heroin again. He walked out on the band in the middle of a Japanese tour, May 1992. Flew home to LA, holed up in an apartment in the Hollywood Hills and sunk into his habit. Somehow, he was able to get a new band going, P, alongside Butthole Surfers’ frontman Gibby Haynes, Johnny Depp, and Depp’s 21 Jump Street co-star, Sal Jenco, but not as it was any good. In 1993, Depp and Haynes circulated Stuff, a gruesome 12-minute film they’d shot of Frusciante at home. A portrait of a lost soul living in squalor, destitute.

He did one of his few, chaotic gigs with P at Depp’s West Hollywood club, the Viper Room, the night of 30^th October 1993. It might have been remembered for the fact Flea was there, and but for 23-year-old River Phoenix dying on the sidewalk outside of the venue as the band was playing.

It took the Chilis three goes to replace Frusciante. Arik Marshall and Jesse Tobias came and went in short order, before Dave Navarro stepped into the breach and out of Jane’s Addiction. Not just then perhaps the best man to help them navigate to calmer waters. With Navarro, and Rubin again, they made One Hot Minute in 1995, adding up to a fine, freewheeling single, ‘Aeroplane’, and not much else that sounded as though it had come easy.

I had my first close-ish encounter with them that October, as they were embarked on the tour for the album. Stood outside of London’s Brixton Academy, listening to them jam through an open dressing room window, one floor above the street. A loose-limbed funk exercise, more fun sounding than the way they looked onstage. The three of them, and Navarro apart, like a stranger at a wedding party. Besides their dislocation, nothing else about the gig has stayed in my mind.

“It was a weird period for sure,” Kiedis admitted to me 16 years later. “Musically it was odd because personally it was odd. I’d kind of gone off the deep end and Flea was having his own personal struggles. God knows what Chad was doing, but it was probably in a darkened closet somewhere.”

“God bless Dave Navarro, he’s great, but his heart just wasn’t in it with us,” said Flea. “The whole process was like pulling fucking teeth, in every way.”

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RE-ENTER JOHN FRUSCIANTE. He’d checked himself into rehab in 1998, his apartment having burnt down, a latticework of track marks scarring his arms, his ruined nose requiring surgical reconstruction, dental implants replacing the teeth he’d lost to an oral infection, but he’d survived. Flea invited him back into the fold, and at which he broke down in tears. There was, said Flea, “a big feeling of rebirth.”

Out of it came Californication. Chock full of inspired songs. The emollient ‘Scar Tissue’. ‘Otherside’. The grandstanding title track. Their best yet by a distance, and with Frusciante’s liquid lead guitar lines running through it like sweet honey. I went to LA to interview them ahead of its release for Kerrang!, the four of them holed up in a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Not, for me at least, an especially enjoyable occasion.

Flea was guarded, Frusciante still ever so fragile seeming. Chad Smith tried the hardest to make nice, Kiedis was the prickliest. He repeated most of my questions back to me in an exaggerated English accent, took issue when I suggested they were now moved on from their more cartoonish moments.

“Name one,” he snapped back.

Socks on cocks. Lightbulbs on heads. I needn’t have gone on. He stalked out of the room five minutes ahead of our allotted time, without so much as a backward word, leaving Smith to smile, shrug, and make small talk. Californication went on to sell 16 million copies. They toured it for two years.

By The Way in 2002 was even better. Their masterpiece, in fact. Pet Sounds as if it’d been made by Jimi Hendrix. After it, no band coming out of the American alt-rock era could lay claim to more solid gold-standard songs. Certainly, there wasn’t a maestro to touch Frusciante.

“John is brilliant,” said Flea. “I would play something and he would – bam! – hit into it. In all different kinds of ways, melodically, chords, phenomenal.”

Another multi-million-seller, another globe-spanning tour. Friction bubbling under as ever and brought up to the surface by Kiedis’s tell-all memoir of 2004, also titled Scar Tissue.

“I’ve never read it,” Flea answered when I pressed him on the many revelations in Kiedis’ book.

“I could’ve revealed a lot more,” Kiedis insisted. “In retrospect, I did make some mistakes, and I made apologies for them.”

Two years on there was Stadium Arcadium. A terrific single album lurking inside of an elephantine double. Among their best ever songs, ‘Especially in Michigan’, the imperious ‘Wet Sand’, their first Number One record in the US, and Frusciante playing like an angel, but lingering, the sense of hubris.

“We wrung the sponge,” Kiedis confessed.

Not so much Flea. “I loved that it was a really good summary of everything we’d done up to that point. The intense funk backbone, hard rocking shit, melodic rock, it incorporated everything.”

For his part, Frusciante evidently felt spent. He departed, once more, in 2009. His friend, and their back-up tour guitarist, Josh Klinghoffer, took his place. Klinghoffer debuted with them on I’m With You in 2011, a solid record overall, but unspectacular as a rule. Gold in the US, nothing more.

I met up with them in Venice Beach ahead of its release. An easier interview this time. Flea and Smith pairing in a kind of comic double act. Kiedis, more attentive, charming even, tending to Klinghoffer, quieter, apparently not so certain of his place in the scheme of things, unfeasibly youthful looking.

“Oh, he’s gonna get all the pussy,” Flea cracked, cackling.

They could as well feel the earth was shifting beneath their feet. Pop culture lurching towards the more ephemeral, the disposable. Streaming and social media, here today, gone tomorrow. Reflecting on such things, Flea’s face was a picture of disgust.

“Tweeting makes me want to suck my own cock,” he barked. Abruptly, he changed tack. “Chad used to know this guy…”

“Oh, no, no!” Smith interjected, mock appalled.

“Well, I knew a guy… That better?” Flea carried on, unperturbed. “He had to drink a bunch of coffee to do his job, which was to squat naked on a glass table, under which lay these real pervert guys. He’d do really big, gnarly, brown, diarrhetic, psychedelic shits on the table, and the guys would lie there and whack off their cocks.”

“It was called,” Smith shared, “the Glass Bottomed Boat.”

“Humanity has given us such great things,” Flea concluded. “Bach, Da Vinci, Charlie Parker… The Glass Bottomed Boat.”

UNSURPRISINGLY, JOSH KLINGHOFFER’S TIME with them was limited. One more, largely forgettable record, The Getaway in 2016, and he was gone. Six more years passed before the third coming of their prodigal son, Frusciante. An album, Unlimited Love, heralded by a rousing single, ‘Black Summer’, Frusciante picking up right where he left off, their electric conductor. The rest of the album paled beside it, likewise the odds and sods Return of the Dream Canteen, arriving six months on its heels, but they went out and filled stadiums.

Fast forward to the present. Slovak honoured with a Netflix doc. Their music catalogue sold to the Warner Music Group for a princely $300m. A solo album from Flea, Frusciante promising the same, mutterings, too, of the Chilis also making new music together again. Kiedis, Flea, and Smith into their sixties now, Frusciante 56. Their spirits unbroken, their odyssey ongoing.

“There’s an expression,” Kiedis informed me. “You better find humility, or humility will find you. The same holds for change, I think. We’ve all been little bitches from time to time. And then again, we’ve grown up and been men along the way, too.”

Sitting there with them in Venice Beach, the evening sun slipping over the horizon, I asked him and Flea if they could possibly sum up the full arc of their journey together. Where they’d gone to, and to where they might go next.

“No regrets,” said Flea. “Nothing. Change all of the complete fuck ups and mistakes that I made? No.

“You come into this world, and you have to make your mistakes in order to grow. I’ve been a fucking rude, obnoxious, self-centred, self-righteous asshole many times, and I’m grateful for it.”

“I’m still a selfish pig,” Kiedis replied. “The older you get, the faster time goes. We all feel that, and I accept the challenge. I really kind of like the idea of defying the convention of what it is to be in your forties, fifties, sixties. Maintaining my youthful spirit.

“I think dying is the ultimate high. I like Chris Rock’s definition of how he wants to pass, which is driving 150mph while getting head from a Kardashian and listening to NWA’s first record at full volume. How do I want to go out? In the backseat with the other Kardashian sisters, of course.”

1. QUEENS OF THE STONE AGE ‘Easy Street’

Previewed in the Paris Catacombs, Queens of the Stone Age’s first single in three years, ‘Easy Street’ is something other than their more familiar kind of song, might conceivably even have come from another band entirely. Funny, breezy, apparently off the cuff, and effortless sounding. Terrific video, too.

2. INTERPOL ‘See Out Loud’

Motoric riff? Check. Icy synths? Box ticked. Gothically overwrought lyrics? “5am, teeth-marked skin, I can see out loud.” Done. Essentially, then, this is Interpol keeping on doing what they do so very well. More of the same highly likely on next month’s The Mirror Weighs a Ton album.

3. JIM JAMES ‘Come Again’

Also continuing to reliably plough his own furrow on this taster for his fifth solo album, due 28^th August, My Morning Jacket figurehead James here pilots a bubbling psych-rock groove through astral synths, celestial harmonies, and his own resonating guitar lines. Result, a heady trip.

4. PJ HARVEY ‘Voyager’

Composed for indie rock physicist Brian Cox’s Emergence touring show, and upon which Harvey casts herself as the voice of NASA’s Voyager 2 probe, but of course, this is aptly spacey and grand, sweeping synths and a full orchestra sending Harvey off to another bold new frontier.

5. DINA OGON ‘Dalig teve’

Full disclosure, I was tipped to Dina Ogon by none other than Greg Dulli. Very happily, too. This epically appointed retro-pop set piece is one of multiple highlights from the Stockholm collective’s current, excellent Manniskobarn album. Music to make your heart sing.

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6. PHOEBE BRIDGERS ‘Lost Boys’

Lead-off track for the forthcoming Lost Weekend album, six years on from Phoebe Bridgers’ last, Punisher, ‘Lost Boys’ is at once familiar, the nonchalance of her vocal, its folksy pop-ness, and then again, a step up and forwards with how it gathers up at, “This machine is killing me,” and from there propels into its widescreen chorus.

7. THE AFGHAN WHIGS ‘Jungle Roux’

Speaking of Greg Dulli, here he is with the third track advancing The Whigs’ imminent Self Control album. ‘Jungle Roux’ assembles like storm clouds, ominous, looming, dark at heart, mighty to behold. “There’s a quiet confidence that comes with being able to back it up,” Dulli says of his present state of mind. This is the proof in the pudding.

8. BASIA BULAT ‘Right Now’

Beautifully sung, exquisitely rendered, and which is to say, standard issue for the stellar talent that is Basia Bulat. Reworked acoustically here from her last album, Basia’s Palace, and as per the other repurposed tracks on her new EP, Bouquet.

9. WILLOW AVALON ‘Georgia Mile’

More gracefully poised, strings-sweetened country-folk, this is the closing track from Willow Avalon’s just-released, frequently excellent second album, Pink Pocket Pistol, among the best of the year so far.

10. MARGO PRICE, JOAN BAEZ ‘Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)’

Highlight of Margo Price’s digitally released, wholly entrancing collection of protest songs, Days of Unrest. Woody Guthrie’s tribute to 28 Mexican migrant workers killed in a 1948 plane crash at Los Gatos Canyon, California, flavoured by the Memphis Mariachi, and duetted with Baez, who performed the same song with Bob Dylan back on the Rolling Thunder Review tour. Timelessly wonderous.

11. SHADOWMAN ‘You Are the Love’

Combining Walsall-based bluesman John J. Presley, Blur/Depeche Mode producer Ben Hillier, and broadcaster/orchestrator Danielle Perry, Shadowman stir a Nick Cave-esque soup of woozy guitar, erupting electronics, and late-night mood to transfixing effect. Their self-titled first album together is out in September.

12. LAURA VEIRS ‘Pulse’

Recorded in her Portland home backyard studio with Veirs playing almost all of the instruments herself, her niece’s bass and step kids’ drums included, a freewheeling trumpet apart, ‘Pulse’ has a propulsive undertow to its typical stately folk-pop mounting.

13. PETE YORN ‘Idyllwild’

Yorn may never again replicate the breakout success of his 2001 debut album Musicforthemorningafter, but he goes on making high-flying music. This is the latest example, a steady-cruise, bittersweet hymn to fatherhood, and a taster for his 11^th solo album, All the Beauty, out 24^th July.

14. RYAN ADAMS ‘Cracks in the Photograph’

The Suicide Handbook was the album Adams meant as the follow-up to 2000’s Heartbreaker, his still-unmatched solo debut, but shelved for Gold. Long circulated as a bootleg, he’s finally put it out now. Altogether, and as the acoustic, keening ‘Cracks in the Photograph’ showcases, it reminds, apart from everything else, that he’s a profoundly, considerably gifted songwriter.

15. FINN WOLFHARD ‘Follow’

Upon which, and contrary to all of my expectations, the Stranger Things actor makes a more than decent fist of fan worshipping Paul Westerberg, specifically in his late-period Replacements mode. Taken from Wolfhard’s second album in under a year, Fire From the Hip.

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16. U2 ‘Street of Dreams’

At last, U2 rediscover how to be U2. With Larry Mullen back at the drums, ‘Street of Dreams’ locates the sweet spot between, well, ‘The Sweetest Thing’ and ‘Beautiful Day’, all at once meaning it’s joyful, euphoric, has Edge doing Edge-type things, and could be absolutely no-one else.

17. SAMANTHA CRAIN, FIRST AID KIT ‘Pott County Call Return’

Crain has toured in good company with the Avett Brothers, Neutral Milk Hotel, Brandi Carlisle, and First Aid Kit, with whom she cut this, a song she wrote in 20 minutes, targeting a Neil Young-meets-Emmylou Harris vibe and hitting the bullseye.

18. @ ‘Autosmile’

Philly duo Victoria Rose and Shane Filipczak swoon and stride through a 6:39 dream-psych-pop landscape, filigrees of acoustic guitar turning to something more urgent and bracing. Suggestive of their October-due second album being quite something.

19. NOAH KAHAN ‘American Cars’

Kahan remains a hit or miss singer-songwriter. Engaging, or else beige. ‘American Cars’, actually released back in April and the standout from his fourth album, The Great Divide, is his better side, a driving-with-the-top-down soundtrack for the rest of the summer.

20. JACK WHITE ‘Neighbors Blues’

Closing track on White’s new, seventh, and self-produced solo album, Frozen Charlotte, ‘Neighbors Blues’ does exactly what you’d expect by now, squealing, stomping, and skronking, and is just fine because of it.

Now sample the whole of July’s essential songs at the link:

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IF EVER I’M ASKED to choose an absolute favourite interview of my own, the two I did with John Mellencamp leap out. They were conducted four years apart, the first in 2010, both on glorious summertime days, and each for the greater part at his home just outside of Bloomington, Indiana.

I’d been a fan ever since first hearing ‘Jack and Diane’, another summer, the one of 1982. Lost touch of him for a little while there in the late-1990s, and then got jolted back by his excellent 20^th album, the T Bone Burnett-produced Life, Death, Love and Freedom of 2008. This month, he’s off on tour again, playing his hits, of which he’s many, and doubtless with a twist or two.

Faced with interrogating him, his reputation preceded. Stubborn, ornery, hot-headed, difficult. He was some of those, for sure, but so much more besides, too…

Round One: 26^th-27^th August 2010

IT’S A HOT, BLUE-skied summer’s morning in southern Indiana. John Mellencamp’s 21^st album, No Better Than This, has just been released to a warm critical reception. To accompany it, he and his band are embarked on a run of shows with Bob Dylan, 11 in total, at outdoor venues more off the beaten track. The first at Haymarket Park in Lincoln, Nebraska was a little over two weeks ago now. The next is tomorrow evening, a Friday, up in Bend, Oregon.

We meet at his art studio on his Lake Monroe property, ten minutes outside of Bloomington. My driver turns off the I46 and onto an unmarked, single-track road undulating towards and then disappearing into a great, green expanse of woodland. After a half mile of bumping along, we arrive at the electric gate guarding Mellencamp’s 63 acres. Over a rise and round a bend on the other side of it, the studio looms into view from a clearing among the trees.

A corrugated steel structure, it is dazzling in the dappled sunlight. Crickets chirp a high-pitched symphony from the undergrowth about. A louder, mechanical noise. Mellencamp hurtles up to greet me driving a dinky John Deere jeep, the brakes screaming a protest. He makes quite the impression as he clambers out from the vehicle.

Not a tall man, but ramrod straight. Pompadour of hair crowning his once boyish, now more crumpled face. Eyes hidden behind aviator shades. Popeye arms flexing out of a navy-blue work shirt. Scuffed denim jeans and heavy, black work boots. The overall effect accentuated by the fact he’s swinging from one clenched fist a gnarled, wooden Victorian walking cane topped with a gleaming silver handle.

He clumps over to me, unsmiling, with the other hand extended. His handshake is a bone-crusher. Then he steps back, coils, and in a single quick, flourishing movement, pulls out from the top of the cane a rapier sword. With a flick of his wrist, he brandishes the three-foot blade at me, the sharp, tapering point stopping within an inch of my left eye.

“You’ve got 60 fucking minutes,” is the first thing he says, barking out the words, not a flicker of smile still. He stomps off up the flight of steel steps leading to the studio door. Unbidden, I follow.

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IN THE EVENT, WE spend three hours talking. Him sat stiff-backed on one side of an antique wood table, me facing him on the other. Between us, an earthenware ashtray he proceeds to fill with cigarette butts, tearing off the filter on each, chain-smoking them down to the nub. The smoke he exhales slowly, savouring it, and so as he appears as if through mist, his black, black eyes hooded and squinting back like a snake’s.

This very morning, he says, he was lecturing his wife, Elaine, on the precise details of how she should arrange for him at his death.

“I said to her,” he croaks, “to lay me on a cooling board in the living room, like they used to. People who want to see me lying dead there can do so. After that, I said, ‘I don’t care what you do with me, but just don’t take me to the mortuary and have my guts taken out.’

“She told me to quit being morbid. Elaine doesn’t like that kind of conversation. I said, ‘Sister, I’ve got 20 years left if I’m lucky.’ I’m going to be 78 years old by then. With my smoking, I’ll be fortunate to see that.”

In any appreciable aspect, it doesn’t seem he’s especially trying to outrun the inevitable passage of things. He’s allowed his hair to streak and fleck with grey. At one point, wanting to sketch me a diagram of how T-Bone Burnett set up to record him, he pulls from his shirt pocket a pair of reading glasses and perches them on the end of his nose. At several others, he asks me to repeat a question, complaining his hearing is shot.

The arcane sounding No Better Than This was recorded onto reel-to-reel tape at various historical locations. Among them Sun Studios in Memphis, Tennessee and the very room at the Gunther Hotel in San Antonio, Texas where Robert Johnson’s blues was first set down.

“Do I feel like one of the last of my kind standing?” he asks. “Sure, and even within my generation. When I started out there were lots of guys like me. There’s just a few of us left now – Petty, Costello, Springsteen, and me. Rock ‘n’ roll is over. We’re on the last gasp, and probably we should be.

“When you’re a young man, the whole idea is that you’re playing for your legacy. Then you get to be an older guy, and you realise there is no fucking legacy. Here’s what they’re going to remember. There was a band called The Beatles, a band called the Rolling Stones, and this guy called Bob Dylan. That’s it. As big a statement as we all thought, say, The Clash was making? Get in line, guys, you’re just a footnote like the rest of us.”

NEXT DAY DAWNS BRIGHT and blue again. After breakfast, I’m taxied to an airfield a couple of miles outside of Bloomington. A solitary jet is idling on the runway, awaiting take-off for the three-hour flight up to Bend. Mellencamp arrives soon after, driven to the steps of the plane by Elaine. Out of the car, they embrace, kiss, and he summons me aboard the aircraft.

He’s not a good flier. Silent and fidgety. As we pitch through the clouds, his hands grip the arms of his seat. In Bend, the vibe at the Les Schwab Amphitheatre is more village fete than rock gig. The setting is picturesque, on the banks of the Deschutes River. The venue an expanse of lush green grass, room for 4,000 folks to sit out on deckchairs and picnic rugs. Vendors walk among them hawking glasses of chilled white wine.

Mellencamp and his band take to the stage as the evening sky is turning to pink. They play for 65 minutes. The laidback crowd responds most vocally to ‘Pink Houses’, ‘Small Town’ and ‘Paper in Fire’. Mellencamp sings his more recent songs with even greater conviction. Afterwards, I wander backstage to find him sat outside of the silver Airstream trailer he has towed to each show as his refuge and sanctuary.

He’s perched on a deckchair, changed into a pair of baggy grey gym bottoms, his reading glasses back on. He looks like someone’s bookish uncle. He motions for me to sit and offers me a coffee.

“You know,” he tells me, “if I’d have played ball with people a little better, I might have been more successful. I might not have been the underdog. But I seem to have this knack for rubbing people the wrong way.

“I’m not changing. I’m pretty content with who I am at 58 years old. I don’t see any point in trying to fit in now. I’m pretty much where I need to be.”

Round Two: 17^th September 2014

THE CANVAS UPON WHICH Mellencamp is at work this picture-postcard morning in late summer stands two feet taller than him and is the width of his outstretched arms. ‘Brown Sugar’ by the Stones booms from a set of expensive looking speakers in a corner of the room. Evolving on the canvas is a representation of a young woman, limbs and features exaggerated so she appears to be not quite human.

Sprawled in a high-backed wooden chair, she clutches in one hand the outline of an empty bottle, and in the other a broken violin. Miriam Sturm, fiddle player in Mellencamp’s band, was his model he tells me when we sit down to talk at the same wood table as the last time he welcomed me here to his Lake Monroe studio.

Today, he looks the part of the studious artist. Resplendent among splattered oils and pots of brushes in blue overalls covered in splodges and dribbles of paint. Like a walking Jackson Pollack. He cuts a very different character to how he was four years previous. He smiles, charms, disarms, greeting me with a bearhug. Still, though, smoking like a chimney.

He stays busily occupied. Next month, his travelling Paintings of John Mellencamp exhibition moves on to the Florida Museum of Art in Miami for a two-month staging. Next week, his new album, Plain Spoken, is coming out. The resignation and melancholy at the core of songs such as ‘The Isolation of Mister’ and ‘Tears in Vain’ begs for it to be viewed through the prism of his break-ups from, first, his third wife of 19 years, Elaine Irwin, and then Meg Ryan. He dismisses the idea with a slow, steady shake of his head.

“My personal life literally has nothing to do with what’s on this record,” he says. “Take a song like ‘The Courtesy of Kings’, for example. That’s an old expression. It means if I tell you I’m going to do something for you, I will do it. A promise made is a debt unpaid. The person in that song wanted to show the courtesy of kings, but she just couldn’t do it. Who that person is, I’m fucked if I know. Same with a lot of songs on this record. I don’t really know what the fuck they’re about. Songs just come to me.

“See, my inspirations in the last ten, 15 years, they’re not really from rock ‘n’ roll anymore. I’m looking at Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, and Steinbeck. I’m looking even at Shakespeare. There’s shit I’ve stolen straight from Shakespeare on this record.

“I’ve lost contact with the music world. I’m not interested in entertaining teenagers or acting like one. If I was one of those guys that got up and tried to behave the same way I did in my thirties, then I’d kill myself. I’d just as soon blow my fucking head off.”

Until he heads back out on the road, he’ll stick to his daily routine here at home. Up each morning at 9:30am on the dot, as specified as the time for a gentleman to rise in a book he treasures, Amy Vanderbilt’s Complete Book of Etiquette, a bestseller in the 1950s (“I don’t make the rules, I just follow ’em,” he qualifies).

A lifelong night owl, he paints all day, goes for a workout in the gym back up at the house, and is then occupied with taking care of business, or reading, until two or three in the morning.

Since Elaine left and their two boys, Hud and Speck, went off to school, he’s lived alone. Alone, he furthers, but not lonely.

“I take great delight in my own company,” he says. “I’ve been around people so long and I really hate to depend on anybody to do anything. So it’s best that I keep to myself, do things my way, and if other people are involved, don’t expect too much. As for me being a jolly fellow… not yet.”

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HE NODS BACK OVER to the portrait of the stricken violinist. He expects, he says, it will take him two or three weeks more to complete. He motions to another canvas propped against a wall. This one is an expansive portrait of him with Elaine. The two of them stare out at the viewer through pitch-black eyes, both of them younger looking and joined together still.

“That painting, I’ve been fucking around with it for ten years now,” he says with another slow, steady shake of the head. “I mean, fuck, that’s what I looked like when I started on it.

“In this room, if something’s not going right with what I’m working on, it’s just me. There’s no-one to be mad at but me. When I’m writing a song, it’s just me, but then it’s also the band. And with a song, once the fucker is recorded, you’re stuck with it. So I paint. Hey, I’m in the womb here.”

Standing, he straightens his chair, then mine, gathers up his cigarettes and lighter and leads me to the door. In less than three weeks’ time, he’ll turn 63 years old. As he walks me outside to my car, I ask him what he still wants to accomplish, what he feels he’s left to prove. He takes his time answering, just a beat or two, his brow furrowed, enough so he’s sure with his reply.

“I don’t have anything to prove to anybody,” he says then. “I think my records are good enough. Play me a better one than Plain Spoken. I’m all ears, let me hear it. That sounds fucked up, but that’s the way I feel. I’m really old school in thinking the cream rises to the top.

“Like I told you before, rock ‘n’ roll’s dead and nobody gives a fuck about it anymore. Where are you even going to sell records these days? I’m playing for something other than money. That’s not why I do it. A lot of people my age, they’re ready to fold up the tent, go home and take it easy. It hasn’t worked out that way for me. I’m still learning. I’m still excited. And I’m looking for trouble.”

Adapted and extracted from my book Mellencamp (Little, Brown/Astra Books, 2021), available to buy at the links: Amazon UK Barnes and Noble

THE BASIC FACTS OF the R.E.M. story are generally known and simple enough to lay out. Formed in Athens, Georgia in 1980. Michael Stipe running into Peter Buck in Wuxtry Records, the local indie store where the latter worked. Through a mutual friend, the two of them hooked up with a couple of University of Georgia students, Mike Mills and Bill Berry.

They were a trailblazing alternative band initially, then a superstar one keeping its credibility intact. Berry’s departure in the autumn of 1997 hit them hard. In truth, they were never again the same. They soldiered on without their monobrowed drummer for a further 14 years, and four more albums, before agreeing to go their separate ways. There hasn’t been even a hint ever since of a comeback. Their race is run.

Besides this, a deeper truth. They were the greatest band of their era. Easily. High up, too, among the select few greatest ever. From 1981’s debut EP Chronic Town, home to the sublime ‘Gardening at Night’, all the way to 1996, they hardly put a foot wrong. Fifteen years of being consistently, masterfully, inspirational and aspirational. The model of how to do this thing absolutely right. It stands as one of… Strike that, it’s the all-timer run of unbroken rock and roll excellence.

A strong argument could be made for multiples of different orders of ranking for the albums from R.E.M.’s glorious imperious phase. This one is just mine.

A case, if you will, and as Michael Stipe himself once almost sang it, of taking instinct by the reins…

15. Around the Sun (2004)

The moment the wheels truly came off. A year’s graft in the making, the bedding in of ex-Ministry/Revolting Cocks drummer Bill Rieflin, Around the Sun yielded a brace of good-as-ever songs in opener ‘Leaving New York’ and the Q Tip-featuring ‘The Outsiders’, but a whole lot more that, painfully, wasn’t up to scratch. Peter Buck hated it, and it limped to a relatively paltry 240,000 sales in the US.

14. Accelerate (2008)

Trumpeted as a return to form after the lifeless Around the Sun, Accelerate burst into life with the adrenalized ‘Living Well is the Best Revenge’, Buck’s blazing electric guitar to the fore, a defibrillator to the band’s ailing heart. Without too much hindsight, and the snap-crackling ‘Supernatural Superserious’ besides, the rest sounds like an exercise in second guessing. The very opposite of fun.

13. Collapse Into Now (2011)

As a deep dive into Stipe’s lyrics hinted, they knew it was the end. Resolved to go out on a high, and with Patti Smith and Eddie Vedder guesting, they grasped at former glories, most especially on the achingly melancholy ‘Oh My Heart’, but really, the soul had some time ago drained from them. As muted as its cover artwork, Collapse Into Now, ever so sadly, slipped away barely unnoticed.

12. Reveal (2001)

An album that sounded so much better at the time (it was the recipient of a five-star rave from R.E.M. scholar David Cavanagh in Q magazine), Reveal has faded like an old Polaroid. The good stuff, ‘She Just Wants to Be’, say, or ‘I’ll Take the Rain’, stands up still, with an urgency and conviction to it, and channelled through an impassioned Stipe in particular, but there’s a surfeit with the hue of dull beige.

11. Up (1998)

R.E.M.’s almost-great album. Berry quit after the initial sessions. Seeking renewed influence, his now erstwhile bandmates leant heavily on two Brians, Eno and Wilson (see, respectively, ‘Lotus’ and ‘At My Most Beautiful’, and the overall vibe), Radiohead, too, on skittering opener ‘Airportman’. ‘Daysleeper’ also was a terrific lead-off single… and yet, Stipe suffered with a pronounced writer’s block, and it showed elsewhere. Overarching, the sense of spurned lovers on the rebound.

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10. Fables of the Reconstruction (1985)

It was Stipe’s call to work with veteran Nick Drake/Fairport Convention producer Joe Boyd in London and over an English winter. Out of it came a record of shadows and brooding, subdued and minor key. The songs were there, the magnificent ‘Driver 8’, ‘Maps and Legends’, ‘Feeling Gravity’s Pull’, each a shoe-in for any all-encompassing ‘best of’, but Boyd stuck to them a sound like puddled mud, and so appraising Fables… was and is akin to looking through a smeared lens.

9. Document (1987)

Their last for indie label IRS, their first with producer Scott Litt. ‘The One I Love’ stands out, of course it does, it’s mighty, so, too, ‘Finest Worksong’ and ‘It’s the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)’ (home to the unlikeliest of eternally irresistible pop hooks: “Mountains sit in a line… Leonard Bernstein!”). Everything else pitched at solidly, obliquely dependable, the Wire cover, ‘Strange’, included.

8. Green (1988)

Bounding onto major label Warner Bros, with Green, recorded at storied Ardent Studios in Memphis and Bearsville in Woodstock, they were in uncompromising and questing mode, foreswearing to avoid ‘R.E.M.-type songs.’ ‘Stand’ remains irksome, ‘Turn You Inside Out’ coruscating, and ‘Orange Crush’ like all at once having your collar grabbed and ingesting a sugar pill. Buck enters with mandolin on ‘World Leader Pretend’, and with it, whole new vistas opened up.

7. Out of Time (1991)

Again with the mandolin. Stipe’s most prescient lyric, “That’s me in the spotlight.” ‘Losing My Religion’ and lift off into a whole other stratosphere. They managed it about as well as it’s possible to do. At this distance, ‘Shiny Happy People’, Kate Piersen of the B52s on beat-pop back-ups, hasn’t aged so very well. The more substantive aspects of Out of Time, though, remain significant. ‘Half a World Away’, ‘Texarkana’, Mike Mills taking the lead vocal, ‘Near Wild Heaven’, a much better use of Piersen, ‘Low’, these are extraordinary songs. Even more so ‘Country Feedback’, droned in from a different universe, one of their three most brilliant ever moments.

6. Monster (1994)

How it’s grown in stature. In the moment, R.E.M.’s ‘guitar rock’ album was divisive, not nearly so loved as its two immediate predecessors. Twenty-two years on, Monster is how Stipe described it then, “loud and brash,” and then again more, bold and itchy and reaching. Made under dreadful, pressing weights, the premature deaths of two of Stipe’s friends, Kurt Cobain, and River Phoenix, who’d done backing vocals on ‘Bang and Blame’, and the band breaking up during the sessions, it somehow came together as a coherent whole. Strikingly on ‘I Don’t Sleep, I Dream’, ‘Tongue’, Stipe singing falsetto, his Cobain tribute, ‘Let Me In’, and, especially, ‘Strange Currencies’.

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5. Reckoning (1984)

Perhaps R.E.M. at their most purely engaging. A year on from Murmur and reunited with the production team of Mitch Easter and Don Dixon, they wrote the songs in Mike Mills’ Athens living room, at the rate of two a day. Altogether, Reckoning bristles and bursts with that rush of creativity, of a band taking flight, unbound, and hitting for the bleachers on ‘So. Central Rain (I’m Sorry)’, ‘Pretty Persuasion’, and the simply, sheerly joyful ‘(Don’t Go Back to) Rockville’.

4. New Adventures in Hi-Fi (1996)

Taking their lead from Neil Young with Time Fades Away and sometime touring partners Radiohead with The Bends, they made New Adventures in Hi-Fi on the hoof during soundchecks and in hotel rooms, finishing it off in the wake of the troubled tour for Monster. It might have benefitted from the judicious pruning of one or two tracks, but not so much. In ‘How the West Was Won and Where It Got Us’ and ‘E-Bow the Letter’, stood out by Patti Smith’s witchy intonations, they were as daring as ever, on the criminally unheralded ‘So Fast, So Numb’ bordering on anthemic. Then there was ‘Electrolite’, second of their most brilliant moments. It’s Stipe’s favourite ever R.E.M. record. For sure, it’s their last truly great one.

3. Murmur (1983)

Each of the constituent parts was recognisable enough. The same firing alternative spirit as The Replacements or Husker Du. Guitars that chimed and harmonies that wrung like The Byrds. Put together, and in tandem with Stipe’s enigmatic lyrics, and sung-through-gauze vocals, it was something else, something ‘other’ entirely. Added up, one of the classic debut albums.

2. Automatic for the People (1992)

Begun even as Out of Time was being mixed, Automatic for the People pushed further, went deeper, and because of it was all the more powerful. Stalked by themes of loss and grief, it has a tangible heaviness to it, but then as well, the grandeur of a band in its pomp. ‘Drive’ is fabulously, spookily epic, Buck’s guitar scything through it, the surge of Led Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones’ sweeping string arrangement. ‘Man in the Moon’ is glorious, euphoric, ‘Nightswimming’ and ‘Try Not to Breathe’, lovely and filled with longing. ‘Everybody Hurts’ became ubiquitous, but it’s ‘Find the River’ that leaves the most lasting impression. Their third, and possibly most brilliant of all, moment.

1. Life’s Rich Pageant (1986)

Forty years old this month, and the most R.E.M. of R.E.M. albums. For one thing, there just is no more arresting one-two-three-four than ‘Begin the Begin’, ‘These Days’, ‘Fall on Me’, and ‘Cuyahoga’. For another, it keeps on going. ‘Hyena’… ‘I Believe’, ‘What If We Gave It Away’, ‘Just a Touch’, ‘Swan Swan H’, the closing super-sweet rush of Mills singing the bubble-gum pop cover of the Clique’s ‘Superman’. Producer Don Gehman gave them the folk-rock heft he’d brought to John Mellencamp, and ultimately, if typically cryptically, Stipe summed up it, and their strange, special, wonderful of-a-kind magic on the aforementioned ‘These Days’: “We are young despite the years; we are concerned, we are hope despite the times.”

Speaking of deep dives, take a scenic trip through R.E.M. country on the playlist at the link:

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THE COMMERCIAL SUCCESS AND creative triumph of Making Movies emboldened Mark Knopfler. As the new decade of the 1980s spooled out, he set about expanding his repertoire. He composed an aptly lovely film score for Bill Forsyth’s bittersweet Local Hero and produced an album for Bob Dylan, albeit one of Dylan’s more muddle-headed efforts, Infidels.

In 1982, he reconvened Dire Straits to make Love Over Gold. An album of just five songs, two of them stone-cold classics. The sprawling ‘Telegraph Road’ had been pieced together during soundchecks on the tour for Making Movies and unfolded like a literary novel, documenting the American industrial revolution. ‘Private Investigations’ was yet more outlandish, a somnolent music noir that Knopfler insisted be released unedited as a seven-minute single. Remarkably, it shot to Number Two on the UK chart.

Then Alchemy, a live double showcasing a band at the peak of its powers. Followed by two further film soundtracks, one for an Irish Troubles drama, Cal, the other for Forsyth’s Local Hero follow-up, Comfort and Joy.

To better enable him to work at his West London home, Knopfler bought an early synth-sampler, a Synclavier, but was baffled as to how to operate it. Enter tech whizz Guy Fletcher, just off touring Avalon with Roxy Music and known to Dire Straits’ manager, Ed Bicknell.

“The Synclavier was ridiculously expensive and very high-tech, and Mark needed someone to help him out with it,” Fletcher recalled to me. “Mark had a mews house in Holland Park. I literally knocked on his door with a keyboard under my arm. He played me a load of music he loved, a bit of Dylan, a lot of JJ Cale, and we just hit it off.

“First impressions? How intense he was, how deep in thought, how meticulous. A million ideas a minute.”

PARALLEL TO THE TWO film projects, Knopfler was writing songs for the next Dire Straits album. The source of one, ‘Walk of Life’, was a record of Cajun music he’d found himself listening to. The title of another, ‘Brothers in Arms’, was spoken by his father in a conversation they had about the Falklands War.

More often than not, the lyrics came to him first. Famously, those to a third song from a burst of dialogue he overheard in a Manhattan electrical store. A loud-mouthed delivery man, lent over his trolley, holding court to the store junior about the fecklessness of contemporary musicians.

“I just hid behind a stack of microwaves and listened in because every next line was better than the last,” Knopfler said. “This bone-headed guy would say things like, ‘What’s that, Hawaiian noises?’ He did actually say, ‘That motherfucker has got his own jet airplane,’ which I didn’t put in the song.

“All the possibilities were there in ‘Money For Nothing’. That’s a thrill.”

A summer’s day in 1984, Dire Straits reconvened at Knopfler’s home. The long-standing John Illsley, keyboard player Alan Clark, Love Over Gold tour drummer Terry Williams, and the newly enlisted Fletcher. There, Knopfler played them his new batch of songs.

Collectively, they were a mixed bag. Ranging from the knockabout ‘Walk of Life’ to the harder-edged ‘The Man’s Too Strong’, the simmering ‘Ride Across the River’, and a woozy, late-night confection, ‘Your Latest Trick’. They rehearsed them at Roxy man Phil Manzanera’s Galley Studios in leafy Surrey. From the outset, the quietly brooding, destined-to-be title track struck each of them as a substantial piece. It was, said Knopfler, the song upon which he laboured the longest.

“Because it’s quite deceptive,” he explained to me. “Each verse is slightly different from the one preceding it, these little variations are built in. It might just be one blue note, but it changes the way you feel.”

Both Knopfler and Illsley had gotten to know The Beatles’ urbane producer, George Martin, who in 1979 had opened up an outpost of his AIR Studios on the tiny, volcanic Caribbean island of Montserrat. Martin recommended Dire Straits follow The Police’s and Eric Clapton’s footsteps out to Montserrat to make their new album.

Not as they needed very much convincing. Martin’s place was idyllic. Serene, detached, the white-walled, plantation-style studio and accommodation block faced out to a swimming pool and, beyond it, to aquamarine ocean. There was an on-site watering hole, Andy’s Bar, for the visiting musicians to patronise. In the evening, they could unwind outdoors, dining on barbequed fresh fish rustled up by the resident chef, a garrulous, outsized gentleman known to one and all as Daddy George.

Then again, the sheer remoteness of the location made other practicalities a challenge. Knopfler’s chosen producer, a New Yorker, Neil Dorfsman, who’d engineered both his Cal soundtrack and Dylan’s Infidels, cajoled him into pioneering with digital recording. Two of the delicately appointed Sony digital tape machines ordered up by Dorfsman had to be transported out to them on the back of a pick-up truck, bouncing over pot-holed roads.

The weather, too, was prone to extremes. Four years on, Hurricane Hugo was to reduce AIR to rubble. The Straits’ party landed in November, into the jaws of the storm season. It rained solidly the first six weeks they were there. There was literally nothing else for them to do but record.

“It was an interesting period with the digital recording,” Knopfler reflected. “An adventure as well. Neil was chasing after what he ruefully refers to now as perfection, which is not something you can actually get, but he’d learnt his craft alright. He was tremendous. I used to just sit and watch him work, taking it all in, and he couldn’t tell me to clear off because it was my record.”

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THEY BROKE OFF FOR Christmas, returning to Montserrat in January 1985. Terry Williams had struggled with his requirement to play along to a click track and was relieved of his studio drumming duties. At Knopfler’s behest, in his place came an American, session ace Omar Hakim, fresh from a stint on Sting’s solo debut, The Dream of the Blue Turtles.

Williams had at least left behind one thunderous volley, serving as the intro to ‘Money For Nothing’. The track otherwise was proving a headache, never quite right whichever way they came at it. Over dinner one night, Dorfsman collared Guy Fletcher and encouraged him to try a synth part on the song. Or, in Fletcher’s translation, “to give it a sound like a dinosaur. I threw it down on my Yamaha DX1.

“The track was scheduled for the bin, but when the band heard it the next morning, it renewed everyone’s excitement in it.”

From there, simple good fortune intervened. The final flourish, Sting’s beseeching backing vocal, was an accident of fate. Knopfler was thinking on a promo spot The Police had done for MTV, sung to the hook of ‘Don’t Stand So Close to Me’. Over a band lunch one day, he speculated how ‘Money For Nothing’ would benefit from something similar.

“And one of the lads piped up, ‘Sting’s just along the beach from here, on his holiday,’” Knopfler said, laughing. “I mean, we’re on this speck in the middle of the ocean… So, Sting came up one afternoon and sang a part for us. It did feel blessed.”

In the spring of ’85, operations moved to New York and the familiar environs of The Power Station, the midtown Manhattan studio where they’d made both Making Movies and Love Over Gold. There, Knopfler set about adding horn parts to several of the songs, courtesy of jazz-schooled brothers Michael and Randy Brecker and the Average White Band’s Malcolm Duncan.

A New York session player, Jack Sonni, was hired to put guitar synth on ‘The Man’s Too Strong’. When Illsley broke his wrist jogging in Central Park, King Crimson’s Tony Levin and Neil Jason of the Saturday Night Live house band were subbed in to overdub bass parts. Notably in Jason’s case with his slapped contribution to the hitherto unremarkable ‘One World’.

“Another happy accident,” said Illsley. “A slippery path and the most stupid thing you could possibly do. I wasn’t even a runner, just in need of some air, but both of Neil and Tony brought different dimensions and which I wouldn’t have been able to do.”

RELEASED ON 17^TH MAY 1985, Brothers in Arms was met with scathing reviews from the British music press. The NME berated Knopfler for his ‘mawkish self-pity,’ the Melody Maker dismissed the album as nothing more than, ‘something very like the same old story.’ It was ever thus, Dire Straits were hardly critical darlings in their homeland, and it mattered not a jot.

Brothers… followed Love Over Gold to Number One on the UK album chart. From there, said Illsley, “nobody could possibly have imagined it going on to sell the way that it did.” Fate, once more, was on their side. The majority share in Dire Straits’ record company, Polygram, was held by Phillips, just then launching a brand-new CD player, the CD150, and what better way to push it than with a record specifically designed to be sonically pristine?

Ergo, wherever there was a CD150 to be found, right alongside it would be a copy of Brothers in Arms. It fast became the first record to sell a million copies on CD, plus 29 million more besides.

“It’s not very complicated, just a bunch of luck, really,” reasoned Knopfler with a shrug and a hangdog smile. “A fantastic time. It was what we all had been chasing, but I suppose you could say the fallout was much bigger than anything we could ever have foreseen.”

Beginning in Split, still then in the old Yugoslavia, on 25^th April ’85, the tour for Brothers in Arms ran for a full calendar year. In London, Dire Straits played 12 consecutive sold-out nights at Wembley Arena. A second London show was slotted in on the evening of Saturday 13^th July, just across the road at Wembley Stadium.

Dire Straits took to the Live Aid stage at 6pm that evening, in between U2 and Queen. They performed a brace of songs, ‘Money For Nothing’, with Sting recreating his album part, and ‘Sultans of Swing’. Even with such a truncated set, they were by then a powerfully formidable proposition.

“We literally walked off the stage, out of the stadium, and across the carpark to play the Arena,” said Fletcher. “I think John was even carrying his bass, and to some funny looks from the carpark attendants I might add.”

Crossing the Atlantic, they wound on through North America in the late summer and autumn, returning to Europe and the UK in the winter months, and in the New Year proceeding to New Zealand and Australia. A total of 248 shows in 118 cities.

“I would do a report for them every week which was shoved under each of their hotel room doors,” said Ed Bicknell. “It would give worldwide chart positions and the album and singles sales figures. I’m absolutely sure Mark would take his copy and put it straight in the bin.”

“When you’re in the eye of the storm, you don’t really notice it,” Knopfler offered. “It was a lot to pile up in a life, you know. There was one occasion a youth in Manchester shouted out to me on the street, ‘You’re top, man!’ No, no, no. I didn’t feel as though I was on top of anything. I never did.”

ALL TOLD, THE SHEER ubiquity attained by Brothers in Arms seemed to catch Knopfler, as much, if not more than anybody else, off guard. It would be more than four years before he summoned the band back together. November 1990, Dire Straits went into George Martin’s AIR London studio, on Oxford Street, Knopfler, Illsley, Fletcher, Clark, and with Toto’s Jeff Porcaro taking over from the definitively departed Terry Williams, there to make On Every Street.

It turned out a pleasant, but undemanding record, no more than a wisp of its illustrious predecessor. After it, an even longer tour, described to me by Ed Bicknell as, “An utter, utter misery.”

“It was exhausting, mentally and physically, no doubt about it,” Illsley expanded. “At the end of the tour, Mark and I agreed that was enough. Personal relationships were in trouble, and it put a terrible strain on everybody.

“We were changed by it, I think. Neither of us wants to go back to those days. Mark described it to me as being too much ‘white light’. Too much in the spotlight, and he was never comfortable with that.”

At 10:10pm on 9^th October 1992, Mark Knopfler bid goodnight to 40,000 people and walked off stage in Zaragoza, Spain. It was the last time he did so as guitarist-singer-songwriter and undisputed leader of Dire Straits. There has been no second act.

Though in the intervening years, the band’s stock has risen exponentially. Brothers in Arms is now the UK’s eighth best-ever selling album, level pegged with Michael Jackson’s Thriller. In 2018, Dire Straits were inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall of Fame. Knopfler skipped the New York ceremony.

Generally, he has kept out of the limelight while continuing to make music. Ten dependably solid solo albums, a couple of pleasing collaborative efforts with, respectively, Chet Atkins and Emmylou Harris, and six more film soundtracks to date, Guy Fletcher at his side still in his recording and touring band. He appears thoroughly content with his lot, happy to be pleasing himself.

His friendship with John Illsley endures. The one with brother David, however, remains distant, broken.

“I spent a lot of time doing therapy and dealing with my issues and ghosts and demons,” David revealed to me. “Maybe Mark has, too. I don’t know what he does. But I get the impression he goes for more of the alpha-male way of doing things, that kind of Ernest Hemmingway method of toughing it out.”

“People ask me when Dire Straits are going to get back together all the time,” said Ed Bicknell. “I tell them the same thing: why would they? None of them needs the money.

“My great friend, Peter Grant, once said to me, ‘When you’ve had an experience like I had with Zeppelin, and you with Dire Straits, there’s no point trying to reproduce it. He was exactly right. That was the one.”

Before he took his leave, I’d just time enough to ask Mark Knopfler when he’d last sat down and listened to Dire Straits. He pushed his glasses up his nose, the expression on his face one of mild bafflement.

“Never, never, never,” he replied with a chuckle. “I don’t ever go home and play me own records. Life’s tragic enough without adding to it.”

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WE’RE LONG PAST THE point of regarding the 1980s as a singular musical decade. As the sum of it being overblown, shallow, and entirely vacuous. Of it having been nothing but for invading British collectives with daft hair and plinky-plonky synths. No, from this more distant perspective, there was something for everyone. Like a multi-hued pick-and-mix extravaganza in an old sweet shop, so much, too much for anyone to grab a hold of in just the one go.

Personally, it was a teenage decade of discovery. Hard rock, soft rock, country-rock, alternative rock, new wave, post-punk, ‘the big music’, more besides, all of this was introduced, and feverishly exciting, to me. A veritable feast.

Generally, the actually big records were bigger than ever. And as always, so many of the really great ones fell between the cracks, or else lived on the margins. Then again, there were those that did take off in the moment but were to be sniffed at or dismissed as soon as it had passed.

A buried ’80s record collection? Now there is a thing…

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1. BOB MOULD Workbook (1989)

Two years on from Husker Du’s implosion, Bob Mould re-emerged solo and to bare and lick his wounds. Fronting another stellar trio, this one comprising Pere Ubu’s rhythm section, Tony Maimone on bass, Anton Fier on drums (and with occasional cello colourings by Jane Scarpantoni), on Workbook his template was for the most part more acoustic based, almost folksy.

Still, though, Mould’s songs seethed and writhed, never settled or still. There was hope here, witness the lovely ‘See a Little Light’, along with ladling’s of angst and regret, and real venom and rage, too. All at once on ‘Poison Years’, a splenetic tilt at his erstwhile Du bandmate Grant Hart, Mould sniping through gritted teeth, “Treason is the reason for my poison years.” The epically clanging riff-fest of ‘Whichever Way the Wind Blows’ aside, this was the very brooding gauntlet R.E.M. picked up three years later on Automatic for the People.

2. SOUL ASYLUM Hang Time (1988)

Following Husker Du and The Replacements in blazing out of their Minneapolis hometown, Soul Asylum made their major label debut with this, their fourth album, and under the producing hand of Patti Smith Band vet Lenny Kaye. As per Paul Westerberg with his band, Soul Asylum hinged on Dave Pirner’s knack for corralling punk rock bite together with classic rock melody.

Hang Time was Pirner and co at their best. Short, sharp songs (only ‘Endless Farewell’ slipped past four minutes), delivered as if on the point of falling apart. There’s breakneck glory to ‘Sometime to Return’ and ‘Beggars and Choosers’, rough-hewn tunefulness to ‘Marionette’ and ‘Cartoon’ (Pirner’s sole co-write with fellow guitarist Dan Murphy). Four years on, they’d refine the elements and strike gold with Grave Dancers Union.

3. THE JESUS AND MARY CHAIN Darklands (1987)

Their 1985 debut album Psychocandy was rightly acclaimed and stands tall, much less so the music press clamour just then to hail the Mary Chain ‘the next/Scottish Sex Pistols’ and the tiresome ‘controversies’ accompanying it. No more so than for the band themselves and as evidenced on this follow-up, an even better, wider ranging record and upon which original drummer Bobby Gillespie was replaced by a machine and brothers Jim and William Reid got their gothic-pop game on.

It’s William singing the chiming, lysergic title track and pitch-black torch song ‘Nine Million Rainy Days’ (sample lyric: “As far as I can see, I’m being dragged from here to Hell…”), Jim much of the rest, and including the magnificent ‘April Skies’.

4. THE BLUE NILE Hats (1989)

More Scots, The Blue Nile’s second album, Hats arrived five years on from their first, A Walk Across the Rooftops, and after they’d scrapped their first go at it and been sued by their record company for the delay. For all concerned, the wait was worth it, for this was the full flowering of the Nile’s master-craftsman songwriter, Paul Buchanan. A lovely, melancholy record of finely detailed, grown-up pop songs, sung with a kind of resigned world weariness by Buchanan himself and evoking a singular atmosphere of late-at-night reflection, Hats ploughed its own, near-perfect furrow.

Listen now to the aching ‘Over the Hillside’ or ‘The Downtown Lights’, with its bubbling-up bass, gentle synth jabs, and keening melody, and be swept away all over again. Buchanan has continued ever since to work at a painstaking, but ultimately rewarding pace, a law unto himself.

5. RICHARD & LINDA THOMPSON Shoot Out The Lights (1982)

Another record with a troubled past, husband-and-wife Richard and Linda Thompson’s first go at their sixth – and final – album together was funded by Gerry Rafferty of ‘Baker Street’ fame but ditched in an ugly mood of rancour. Richard’s old Fairport Convention producer, Joe Boyd, got them to try again, and what poured out is as an unflinching portrait of the Thompson’s disintegrating marriage through the prism of eight terrific songs.

Richard beseeches and recriminates on the opening ‘Don’t Renege on Our Love’ (“Do I take you for a lover, or just a deceiver?”), Linda summons the hard truths of ‘Walking on a Wire’ (“I hand you my ball and chain, you hand me that same old refrain…”). By the time of its release, they were separated.

6. THE DREAM SYNDICATE The Days Of Wine And Roses (1982)

Los Angeles, early 1980s, and the fleeting flaming of the so-called Paisley Underground scene. Garage rock guitars, psychedelic harmonies, lashings of The Byrds and Love and other groups of a ’60s vintage, and as grandstanded by the likes of Green On Red, Rain Parade, The Bangles initially, and at the vanguard, The Dream Syndicate.

This, their debut album, recorded in September of ’82 and released that October, a thrill of influences and inspiration. Imagine Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground jamming with Crazy Horse to locate attention-grabbing opener ‘Tell Me It’s Over’, the hard driving push and pull of ‘That’s What You Always Say’, the sprawling ‘Halloween’, and the grand gesture title track.

7. THE GUN CLUB Miami (1984)

Poor, doomed Jeffrey Lee Pierce’s rock’n’roll fixation sent him to an early grave in 1996, bloated and wasted at 37. Leaving behind Miami, his black-hearted band’s second album, produced by Blondie’s Chris Stein and with Debbie Harry singing back-ups, as his most potent legacy.

Altogether, it comes on like the soundtrack to an unmade David Lynch road movie. A blood-curdling dose of country blues, barely smoothed over by Stein, and lurking just under the surface, things troubled and unhinged. Lee Pearce’s ruined choirboy voice pitches ‘Carry Home’ as almost bright-eyed. Darker brews ferment through the rockabilly-ing ‘Like Calling Up Thunder’, the Tex-Mex groove of ‘Mother Earth’, and the speed-freak’s railroading of Creedence’s ‘Run Through the Jungle’.

8. XTC Skylarking (1986)

In the questing spirit of British pop’s grand visionaries, think Ray Davies with The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society or Syd Barrett with the Floyd and pre-frying his brain, XTC’s principal and blessed songwriter Andy Partridge, ably assisted by Colin Moulding, mounted this, their eighth album, as a lavish song cycle. Produced by American Todd Rundgren at his studio in Woodstock, and with whom Partridge serially clashed, it’s a record of dazzling flourishes and bounding ambition.

Intricate, bucolic, wonderous, and as on the summer-of-love burst of ‘Ballet For a Rainy Day’, ‘Season Cycle’, a Brian Wilson symphony located on the English seaside, and the sheer, kaleidoscopic magnificence of ‘Dear God’. Criminally, it peaked at 90 on the UK charts.

9. BIG COUNTRY The Crossing (1983)

They called it the ‘Big Music’, a brand of earnest, vaulting rock made by U2, Simple Minds, and others, and invariably produced by Steve Lillywhite. Big Country, formed by Stuart Adamson as his post-Skids band, fell into the category. They had Lillywhite to hand for this, their debut album, a hit at the time, but have never since gained the recognition, or endured as Adamson’s impassioned songs merited.

Released in three different coloured covers, red, blue, and green (an accumulation of all three was a badge of honour to certain provincial 15-year-old lads) and, yes, with Adamson’s and Bruce Watson’s guitars sounding like bagpipes, The Crossing’s impassioned trad-Scots-folk-meets-rock power remains undiminished. Euphorically so on ‘In a Big Country’, with a deeper, more windblown bent on ‘Chance’, the excellent ‘The Storm’, and billowing epic ‘Porrohman’.

10.MIDNIGHT OIL Diesel And Dust (1987)

The Oil’s sixth album opens with ‘Beds Are Burning’, the one song of theirs most everyone knows and which propelled Diesel and Dust to being an international hit, platinum in the US. It aside, the rest of the record is hardly ever, if at all held up to acclaim today, an abject oversight.

Conceptual about the plight of Australia’s indigenous Aboriginal people, and the environmental raping of their homelands, it’s an angry, defiant, and rousing collection of songs, sung with ferocious conviction by frontman Peter Garrett. See the simmering ‘Put Down That Weapon’ and the tribal thrust of ‘The Dead Heart’ for further proof.

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11.TALK TALK Spirit Of Eden (1987)

A decade and more ahead of Radiohead making OK Computer and Kid A, Talk Talk visionary Mark Hollis fashioned Spirit Of Eden, his band’s fourth record, and one with a sound completely of its own. As if beamed in from another galaxy. Hollis’ inspirations were those two great free jazz adventurers, Miles Davis and John Coltrane, the push for him to conjure music on the spot and through improvisation and instinct.

The album came together over ten months at London’s Wessex Sound studio, the recording room blacked out, and intermittently strobe-lit at Hollis’ instruction, and into where he ushered a stream of guesting musicians, violinist Nigel Kennedy among them, and bid them play along to the basic tracks he fed them through headphones. Somehow, magic happened across six not so much songs as extended pieces. ‘The Rainbow’ emerging as if from a fog, a woozy harmonica, bluesy guitar figures, and icy piano. ‘Desire’ inventing post-rock-jazz in the moment. The whole of it like nothing then, or since.

12.ROBBIE ROBERTSON Robbie Robertson (1987)

Breaking a nine-year silence after the demise of The Band, Robbie Robertson with his first solo album mounted a stirring, cinematic kind of artistic rebirth. Producer Daniel Lanois, on a break from the sessions for U2’s The Joshua Tree, captured a heavy, humid atmosphere, Robertson served up the songs: ‘Fallen Angel’, a celestial tribute to lost comrade Richard Manuel with Peter Gabriel on heavenly harmonies; the hard-hitting ‘Hell’s Half Acre’ next to the more soulful ‘Sonny Got Caught in the Moonlight’; a smattering of righteous rockers, ‘Showdown At Big Sky’, ‘American Roulette’, and ‘Sweet Fire of Love’, with U2 as his back-up group.

Inevitably, the looming shadow of his old group was inescapable, magnified by appearances from Garth Hudson and Rick Danko, and with Levon Helm’s story-telling the lyrical touchstone for the otherwise Tom Waits-esque ‘Somewhere Down the Crazy River’, but Robertson was their beating heart and this remains the best record made by any of them outside of The Band.

13.JOHN COUGAR MELLENCAMP Big Daddy (1989)

Ten albums into a career that had taken a scenic route to rock stardom, Mellencamp pulled back from the commercial peak he’d reached on The Lonesome Jubilee from 1987. Very much like Bruce Springsteen with Tunnel Of Love, Big Daddy was a quieter, more reflective record, albeit one with a burning social conscious. Rootsy, acoustic in large part, folksy as a rule.

Home, too, to some of his finest songs. The unbending strut of ‘Martha Say’, the heart-breaking ‘Jackie Brown’, the mournful ‘Void in My Heart’ for three examples. Musically, the outlier was the strident ‘Pop Singer’, but here Mellencamp served notice he was done pandering – “Never wanted to be no pop singer, never wanted to write no pop songs.” Ever after, he was plain John Mellencamp, the name he was born with, marching to nothing but the beat of his own drum.

14.THE REPLACEMENTS Don’t Tell A Soul (1989)

Paul Westerberg’s aforementioned trailblazers, here on their sixth album and in their twilight, too. Co-founding guitarist Bob Stinson was gone to his ruin, and Westerberg was to rail at how he’d felt compelled by their major label paymasters into making something he perceived to be too slick and over-produced by half.

Don’t Tell a Soul was indeed more polished than the five records preceding it, but not so as the fire didn’t still burn in Westerberg’s songs. Be it on the careering ‘Anywhere’s Better Than Here’, or the more wistful but still scuffed at the edges ‘Achin’ to Be’ and ‘I’ll Be You’ (from which touring partner Tom Petty ‘borrowed’ Westerberg’s “a rebel without a clue” line for his own ‘Into the Great Wide Open’). One year on, Westerberg cut the more downbeat All Shook Down with a cast of support players, and after which The Replacements’ death-or-glory race was run.

15.LITTLE STEVEN & THE DISCIPLES OF SOUL Voice Of America (1984)

Famously, Steve Van Zant quit the E Street Band just before Born in the USA made a household name out of their Boss. His second album with the Disciples Of Soul, Voice Of America came out four weeks ahead of that ubiquitous record, stood on a more rocking-minded platform than its Jersey Sound-based predecessor Men Without Women, and made a strong case for Van Zant’s conviction in electing to steer his own course.

History records it failing to reach even a slice of Springsteen’s audience and Van Zant eventually going back to base, but the songs here stack and stand up. Notably, anthemic lead-off single ‘Out of the Darkness’, ‘I Am a Patriot’, covered later by Jackson Browne, and the mighty ‘Los Desaparecidos (The Disappeared Ones)’.

16.THE PSYCHEDELIC FURS Talk Talk Talk (1981)

Riding the post-punk wave, by their second album, England’s The Psychedelic Furs were tilting at America, Steve Lillywhite’s Midas touch adding a radio-friendly gloss to sneering, snarling songs such as ‘Dumb Waiters’, ‘Mr Jones’, and ‘Into You Like a Train’, almost as impactful as its title.

Really, though, Talk Talk Talk boiled down to two core elements. Firstly, Richard Butler’s utterly distinctive, insouciant-on-40-fags-a-day vocals. Then one of the absolute knockout tunes of the era, ‘Pretty in Pink’, track two here, and within another four years, the title-bestowing soundtrack to one of John Hughes’ era-defining, Molly Ringwald-starring, teen-romance potboiler movies. No-one more than The Strokes, and Julian Casablancas especially, listened closer.

17.LONE JUSTICE Lone Justice (1985)

Truly, Lone Justice had it all. The most heavyweight producer possible for this, their debut album, Jimmy Iovine, coming off the back of engineering Springsteen’s Born to Run and Darkness on the Edge of Town, and helming Patti Smith’s Easter, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ Damn the Torpedoes, Dire Straits’ Making Movies, and Stevie Nicks’ Bella Donna. A knockout, superstar-in-waiting singer of their own in Maria McKee. And a surfeit of irresistible songs, foremost among them ‘Sweet, Sweet Baby (I’m Falling)’, written by McKee with Steve Van Zant and Benmont Tench, ‘After the Flood’, like a lost Dolly Parton standard, and ‘Ways to Wicked’, gifted to them by Petty and Mike Campbell.

They simply couldn’t miss, except they did, the whys and wherefores one of rock ‘n’ roll’s eternal mysteries.

18. THE NEVILLE BROTHERS Yellow Moon (1989)

Daniel Lanois producing again, and here on home turf in New Orleans, working out of an abandoned apartment building and with the city’s great musical sons, the Nevilles. Together, they stirred a rich, Bayou-based gumbo of soul, gospel, R&B, and blues. The atmosphere is thick with import, hot-baked and righteous, the Nevilles’ combined voices raising up Link Wray’s ‘Fire and Brimstone’, Dylan’s ‘The Ballad of Hollis Brown’, The Carter Family’s ‘Will the Circle Be Unbroken’, even Sam Cooke’s unassailable ‘A Change is Gonna Come’ with Brian Eno adding sound effects and keyboards.

The title track is Aaron Neville’s, an easy, gris-gris groove, an incantation, otherworldly and bewitching.

19.COWBOY JUNKIES The Trinity Sessions (1988)

In essence, the Cowboy Junkies’ second was a record made for myth making. The venue the Church of Holy Trinity in their Toronto hometown, secured for the occasion through the white lie of them being a family group taping a Christmas special for faith-based radio. Everything cut live to tape through a single stereo mic in one go on 27^th November 1987. Except even that stretched the truth, Margo Timmins overdubbing her acapella chanting onto ‘Mining For Gold’ days later.

None of which really matters. What does is the fact of this being music created and put down for its own sake, and as a living, breathing evocation. ‘Misguided Angel’, weeping harmonica, echoey guitar, transcendental; Margo Timmins singing like an angel on ‘Blue Moon Revisited (Song for Elvis)’ and Hank Williams’ ‘I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry’; her own and brother Michael’s spooked, haunted ‘I Don’t Get It’; the all-time-great Velvets cover, ‘Sweet Jane’. The whole of it a hushed, arresting, and devastatingly beautiful work of art.

20.STEVE EARLE Copperhead Road (1988)

Earle swaggered out of Texas, an iconoclast from the get-go, hitting his stride on this, his third album. ‘Power twang’ as Rolling Stone described it, a melange of Heavy Metal and bluegrass by Earle’s own judgement. Simply put, a country-rocking tour de force. On vinyl, side two is just fine, more of a trad-country feel to it, heart’s-done-time ballads and love songs, Maria McKee duetting on ‘Nothing But a Child’, ‘Once You Love’ a co-write with John Mellencamp’s guitarist Larry Crane.

Side one is where the real power lies. ‘Snake Oil’ railing at then President Ronald Reagan’s huckstering. ‘The Devil’s Right Hand’ stomping onto Springsteen’s turf and arranged by E Street Band bassist Garry W. Tallent. ‘Johnny Come Lately’ with Earle barnstorming alongside The Pogues in a hellraisers summit. And the title track, coming on like rolling thunder. As the man himself put it, “You could smell the whiskey burnin’ down Copperhead Road.”

Now sample selections from these buried treasures on the playlist at the link:

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IN COMMON WITH SO many other truly great songs, ‘The Boys of Summer’ was as much as anything else a result of accident and happenstance. Don Henley had begun work on his second solo album, Building the Perfect Beast, the year following the release of his first, 1982’s I Can’t Stand Still. That record, arriving a couple of years on from the messy break-up of the Eagles and upon which Henley was backed by the cream of LA’s session players, gave him a hit single under his own name, ‘Dirty Laundry’, went gold in the US, and was otherwise a slick if unspectacular confection.

For the follow-up, Henley once again called upon a stellar cast of musicians and enlisted the same pair of co-producers, Greg Ladanyi and Danny ‘Kootch’ Kortchmar, the latter also his co-writer. Ladanyi had made his name engineering Jackson Browne and Warren Zevon, Kortchmar as on-call guitarist for James Taylor, Carole King, and Browne, and as one of the leading lights in LA’s storied session crew, The Section.

They set to work at a couple of recording studios local to them, Record One in Sherman Oaks and The Villa in North Hollywood. The revolving studio group featuring at one time or another Randy Newman, Toto’s keyboard men, David Paich and Steve Porcaro, crack drummer Jim Keltner, and organist Benmont Tench from Tom Petty’s Heartbreakers band. In the studio, Henley was a study in contrasts, meticulous to the point of being obsessive, then too, according to Kortchmar, instinctive and impulsive.

“The great thing about working with Don was,” Kortchmar told me, “if I made a primitive demo at home, put it on a cassette and played it for him, he would say right away, ‘I can do something with that.’ Boom, we’re done. We’d go in the studio and start work on the track that same night.”

Henley also had no-one looking over his shoulder. The Eagles’ huge success had blessed him with creative independence, and an elastic budget at a time when the music business was still awash with ready cash.

“There was nobody telling us what to do,” said Kortchmar. “Nobody telling us we’ve got to hurry up. We did it our own way. Because of that we were able to experiment and try different things. Throw stuff away that didn’t work. It was a very creative experience.”

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IT WAS ANOTHER MEMBER of Petty’s band, guitarist Mike Campbell, who first brought ‘The Boys of Summer’ to Henley’s attention. Just then it didn’t have a title, much less any lyrics. What it amounted to was a backing track Campbell had put down on tape as a demo for Petty. An easy, driving beat, occasioned by Campbell’s experiments with a Linn Drum machine and synths, and with one of his typically expressive, liquid lead guitar parts.

Petty hadn’t bit, thinking Campbell’s sketch didn’t fit the bigger picture of the Southern Accents album he was prepping at the time. Jimmy Iovine, the Heartbreakers’ sometime producer and confidante, suggested to Campbell it might be right up Henley’s street. Iovine was spot on. Henley’s normal course of action with a nascent song was to listen to it in his car. If, as he was driving around, he found himself scatting melody lines, he’d know he was onto something.

“Don listened to Mike’s cassette and started singing along to it,” Kortchmar described. “He loved it.”

That much was the easy part. The next step was to have Campbell come by the studio and transfer the substance of his demo to multi-track tape for the purposes of Henley’s album.

“And Don wanted exactly what was on the cassette,” said Kortchmar. “Mike’s a great guy, very creative, and he was able to re-create a lot of it. He had the drum part and the keyboard part going, but there was one lick, the one that starts the song off, Don had him play that 30 times over.

“Don would sit there and go, ‘No, one more. No, once again.’ Mike was not used to that, I’m sure the Heartbreakers didn’t work that way. But that was Don’s choice.”

Once the basic track was finally complete, Kortchmar overdubbed onto it a Roland guitar synth part. Henley was then left to conjure a lyric. He took his inspiration from a 1972 book about the Brooklyn Dodgers by baseball writer Roger Kahn, The Boys of Summer. Kahn had, in fact, lifted his title from a Dylan Thomas poem, ‘I See the Boys of Summer’.

Once sparked, Henley found the words pouring out. As a piece, they fit the melancholy mood Thomas established with his opening line, “I see the boys of summer in their ruin.” Henley had the same ache running through his first verse and matching the music’s air of magic realism: “Nobody on the road, nobody on the beach. I feel it in the air, the summer’s out of reach.”

He got stuck, though, on the bridge. Couldn’t find the words or locate a melody. Once more, he was blessed with a serendipitous moment when behind the wheel of his car.

One afternoon, driving on the 405, south of Sunset Strip, the track blaring out on the car stereo, he found himself overtaking a 1979 Cadillac Seville in the left lane. Henley happened to look over and spy the ‘Deadhead’ sticker on the Caddy’s back bumper.

Later, he’d say how it struck him as ironic, paradoxical. He went right on into the studio and wrote out the song’s summing and most arresting lines: “Out on the road today I saw a Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac. A little voice inside my head said, ‘Don’t look back, you can never look back.’”

When he came to lay down his vocal part, Henley pitched his voice higher than the key Campbell had intended for the song. Henley was to maintain this was his idea. Whereas Kortchmar recalled to me, “There were a couple of notes that I encouraged Don to hit,” then qualifying, “but I didn’t force him to do it. He forced himself.

“Nobody is harder on Don than Don. He’s unbelievably good, and I’ll tell you why. He’s got soul, which is why he can get his message over. He grew up playing in soul bands in Texas. He grew up on black music, soul and R&B. Don has a fantastic high tenor voice, but it’s not enough just to hit high notes. It’s got to mean something. It’s God-given.

“You can’t go to school and learn to sing soulful. They don’t teach you that in school.”

THEY WERE TO CARRY on making the album well into the next year, but with ‘The Boys of Summer’, credited to Campbell/Henley, they’d captured already lightning in a bottle. It was to be the album’s lead-off song and also its fan-faring single.

Released in October 1984, one month ahead of Building the Perfect Beast, it went on to be a Top Five hit in the US and to win Henley a Grammy for Best Male Rock Vocal Performance. That, and to become a standard every bit as evocative and indelible as ‘Take It Easy’, ‘Desperado’, ‘Hotel California’, or any of the other Eagles’ classics preceding it.

Petty eventually copped to his mistake in passing on the skeletal version of the song. On the Heartbreakers’ next album, Let Me Up (I’ve Had Enough) from 1987, he and Mike Campbell even pretty much repurposed ‘The Boys of Summer’ for another song of their own, ‘Runaway Trains’. Excellent it was as well, mournful and elegiac, though it went mostly unnoticed.

Danny Kortchmar, and Campbell, were reunited with Henley a further couple of years down the line and to make his finest solo record, The End of the Innocence. Today, Kortchmar’s opinion of Henley remains stratospherically high, and in spite of provocations.

“Some guys can do it, and some guys can’t,” he reasoned to me. “Don can do it. It’s just that simple.

“He actually fired me three or four times during the course of the three albums we made together. He would do it by mail. And then I’d get another letter from him saying, ‘All is forgiven.’

“One occasion, it was my wife’s birthday and a bunch of us went out to dinner. We all put our credit cards down to pay for the meal. Next day, Don sends me a letter. He wrote, ‘That was a low move. You should have paid for dinner. Expecting everyone to pay…’ I didn’t expect everyone to pay. They just threw their cards on the table.

“But he was right, I should have said, ‘No, no, I got this.’ But I didn’t. As for that being a reason to get fired from a musical project? Mmmmm, that’s a stretch. So I sent him a letter back even nastier than the one he’d sent me. Six weeks go by, and then we went back to work.”

Quotes extracted from my current book, Raised On Radio: Power Ballads, Cocaine & Payola – The AOR Glory Years 1976-1986, out now in hardback and available to buy at the links: Amazon UK Barnes & Noble