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20 Albums That Changed My Life - pt 20

The Millennium – Again / Begin

If exposure to Dylan’s electric anger was a revelation, then my introduction to the soft psyche of The Millennium was equally so, but in an inevitably more gentle manner. And although I had nudged into some of the sixties sounds earlier through the likes of The Kinks and, yes, The Beach Boys, it was the introduction to the fascinating interconnected world of The Millennium gang that really got me going.

Of course there have been contemporary records that have meant a lot in the past seven years. There have been new groups that have excited me and whose records I have loved and over which I have enthused excitedly. But changed my life? Opened me to new horizons? Not really, no (although Jens Lekman’s When I Said I Wanted To Be Your Dog would probably be the best placed to refute that point).

I am not sure why I feel inexorably drawn back to the soft psyche and bubblegum music of the mid to late 1960s. It’s certainly not the music of my youth. It’s not the music that was playing during my most formative years, but perhaps it is the music that most perfectly captures the essence of those years; is the music from which so many of my later loves drew reference from. For so many of the songs and records of that time are rooted in the essential moments of late teenage awakenings; are suffused with a sense of the new and the now that last through the years like tiny fragments of energy and emotion captured in a photograph. It is nostalgia for an age I never knew, an age I was too young to remember and yet somehow yearn to have experienced. And all the while I know full well that what I’m nostalgic for is a false reality; a mediated illusion crafted from a cascade of imagery and sound.

But after all, isn’t that what all the records that change our lives are all about? They all connect together moments, places, people and emotions. Real or imagined, it’s all the same. It all comes together in the heart and the head; a string of fascination with the self and our place within the world. The records, like the films and the paintings, the photographs and the books are ciphers and conduits, sometimes sparks of illumination.

So whilst I don’t expect any album to change my life from here on in, I do expect the music yet to be heard, old and new, to subtly mould that life in unexpected ways. It’s really quite a thrilling prospect.

The Millenium - I Just Don't Know How To Say Goodbye

20 Albums That Changed My Life - pt 19

Bob Dylan – The Bootleg Series 4 - Live 1966

‘Like Dylan In The Movies’ indeed. I wondered what I should write about this record.  I realised I had already written it eight years ago. Here’s some edited highlights. It’s probably all you need.

The triumvirate of Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde On Blonde is a glory that cannot be denied. I could play these albums back to back for the rest of my life and never tire. From the squalling speedfreak eruption of 'Subterranean Homesick Blues' to the lilting surreal romance of 'Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands', the thirty four songs that stretch across the three albums are uniformly magnificent, taking in innumerable points that reach so high you need to be on another planet to see them. Naturally these three albums take you on journeys to those planets and beyond.

There are so many astonishing moments on these albums; so many reasons to fall ecstatically in love with the noise of raw, hell let's say it and be damned: the noise of raw rock and roll. Not to mention the sound of hearts breaking and tumbling over the pages of a thousand poetic notebook collages of real life as lived by, well, maybe a poetic seer, or maybe too 'just' some natural antecedent of Rimbaud, the French Symbolists and The Beats, which is nothing to dismiss too freely. It's certainly the sound of an Artist insisting on their right to be strange and to explore their own mind and heart instead of the surrogate minds and hearts of some vague 'generation' he was called the spokesman for.

It all reaches the most outrageously wired and strung out conclusion on the 'electric' side of the 1966 Live set, recorded when I was exactly one month old, in Manchester's Free Trade Hall. This recording was a revelation when I first heard it, and it continues to be so. It is the sound of walking the tightrope between sanity and madness, the fine line between celestial coherence and hellish dissolution. It's the sound of an artist battling both the demons of personal artistic vision that is desperate to reach the stars and the tethering demands of an audience apparently insistent on entropy, dragging him back to the muddy ground at every opportunity. The struggle is breathtakingly addictive.

The sound that Dylan and The Hawks (later The Band) make on this record is massive. It's a vivid, raucous, self-destructive purge of a sound that competes with the best moments of the Velvet Underground's immense 1969 opus, or the MC5's Back In The USA, and although it's probably true to say that this noise may have given birth to the shadiest rawk excesses of the late '60s and '70s, I'm not sure it's entirely fair to lay any blame here. Especially not when this all sounds so pure, so passionate, so filled with both a defiant hope and a raging despair.

It all reaches a climax, of course, before the set closing 'Like A Rolling Stone' with some wag's clearly carefully rehearsed outburst of 'Judas!' From that moment onwards, this recording always leaves me gasping. From Dylan's retorts, to his just heard call to arms aimed at the Hawks to 'play fucking loud!', to Dylan and Robbie Robertson's guitar strumming as the parrying goes on, punctuated by a few notes from Rick Danko's bass, I am all of a tremble, no matter how many times I hear it. And when Mickey Jones hits that drum and Garth Hudson's organ crashes in with everyone else in an oceanic swell of sound, I swear to god my heart stops.

Dylan wails like a man possessed throughout the entire seven plus minutes of the performance. He is spitting at the audience, battling himself, tearing himself inside out, a pyrotechnic swirl of colour, like Kerouac's fabulous roman candles exploding across the skies. The Hawks sounding like the most enormous band in the world helps, of course, giving a ravishing foundation, whilst atop it Dylan's harmonica stabs are the equivalent of John Cale's viola scrapes or the feedback wails of 'Sister Ray' guitars; they are Ornette Coleman's horn eruptions. And when it ends, his single 'Thank You' as he leaves the stage sounds so empty it could break your heart.

For that recording and that 'thank you' alone I have enough reasons to love Bob Dylan for the rest of my life.

Bob Dylan & The Hawks - Like A Rolling Stone

20 Albums That Changed My Life - pt 18

Belle & Sebastian – If You’re Feeling Sinister

Belle & Sebastian came out of the blue for me. I was totally disengaged from this kind of music at the time, lost in a world of jazz, electronica, post-rock and dark drum’n’bass. Carrie says she was amazed at the sound coming out of my geek Lair at the end of 1996. One minute it was all Photek, Optical, Ed Rush, Horace Silver and Lonnie Smith and the next it was this wispy whimsy. I can see her point.

I blame (and thank) Michael White. He used to send me mix tapes that simply thrilled me to bits. Stuff I had missed whilst excavating those jazz avenues. It was great to open out again, throw more things in the air, see what stuck. Mostly I remember The Yummy Fur, and a track about kissing girls in English at the back of the stairs.

So If You’re Feeling Sinister was the first Belle & Sebastian record I picked up, ‘The Stars Of Track And Field’ the song I kept coming back to, like Lindsay constantly spinning ‘Box Of Rain’ in that priceless closing episode of Freaks And Geeks. I was utterly captivated by the sound of Belle & Sebastian more than I had been by anything for so long. I remember being amazed that I could find something special and so utterly thrilling in what I had thought to be a tired and jaded art form. Guitars, drums, some horns and some keyboards; the ingredients of ‘indie’ pop. Hadn’t it all been done better in the past? Well, yes, and no. Especially, exquisitely no.

Belle & Sebastian managed the impossible. They sounded like a host of reference points and influences and yet sounded gloriously individual. So you could hear Love, Orange Juice, Felt, Nick Drake, Pale Fountains, the Velvet Underground and a load of others that thrilled. Yet it was never derivative. There was always something they had, and to some extent still have, that set them apart. It’s no one thing either. It’s a mysterious alchemical quality. The way great Pop has always been and always will be.

If it was only about the sound then If You’re Feeling Sinister would probably still be in this list, but there was more. Much more. All to do with connections and friendships, deep and lasting. Just like those days of sending letters and fanzines around the world, the world of Belle & Sebastian spread like a beautiful virus. It was a moment when the Internet seemed to burst into flower for me. How clearly I recall the thrill of being involved in the first tentative steps of the Sinister mailing list – a vibrantly real yet nebulous world of blissful sharing. Of passions and obsessions. It was a world of magic, where Belle & Sebastian were a common thread binding it all together like some unseen wizard behind the curtain. Some things matter much more than the music.

If You're Feeling Sinister is not my favourite Belle & Sebastian album (that honour would probably have to go to The Life Pursuit of Dear Catastrophe Waitress) but for all those reasons above, and a whole lot more, it is inescapably the one that will always mean the most.

Belle & Sebastian - Like Dylan In The Movies

20 Albums That Changed My Life - pt 17

Various – Headz volume 1

There’s a case to be made for other compilation albums in this list, notably the Pillows And Prayers, Wild Summer Wow! and Different For Domeheads collections. I’m probably being a little churlish not including at least one of those Creation compilations, but in truth the things that changed my life most around that time were singles, so…

I nearly didn’t include Mo Wax’s Headz collection for the same reason, but thought it would be equally churlish not to. It was a close call too between this and Warp’s Artificial Intelligence – two albums that had a big impact on my musical landscape at the time.

Headz, with its cover art by 3D of Massive Attack, was when Mo Wax went overground. It hooked a lot of people weary of the tired death throes of ‘independent’ pop and rock. As such I know that any scenesters reading this will sneer and ask why not Royalties Overdue, or Jazz Hip Jap Project and would suggest I must have been some faux Mo Wax lite faker. Which would be a fair point if only I ever cared about scenes and fashions. And anyway, Daniel had been sending me tapes from Bristol with all kinds of strange and wonderful tripped out beats for ages before Headz, and maybe it would be more accurate to cite those. But rules is rules.

So Headz falls for me in the same phrase of life as Parallel Universe. A time when The NME or Meldoy Maker were writing about… well, I forget. What were they writing about? Apart from that article that Kevin wrote about the how the trajectory from Mod was to be found in the grooves of the Mo Wax contingent. Or something like that. Anyway, it was a time when Grand Royal was the only ‘music press’ worth reading and 12” vinyl of beats and bass immeasurably more attractive than wispy 7”s full of whiny boys and shrill girly tweeness.

Sadly though the Trip-Hop tedium kicked in not long afterwards. Tainted by slacker hippy associations, the records increasingly sounded stale and tired, devoid of sparkle and freshness. It all became subsumed within The Lifestyle of the hipsters and so rapidly spiralled into a routine of re-hashed cliché and a cloning of obvious visual and aural reference points, just like the history of rock. Inevitable, perhaps, but there you go.

But for a few years it was startlingly fresh and it opened my eyes and ears to all kinds of different avenues. And for that, as well as for the still ravishing sounds held within its grooves, Headz holds a special place in my heart.

Attica Blues - Contemplating Jazz

20 Albums That Changed My Life - pt 16

4-Hero – Parallel Universe

It feels somewhat unfair to credit this one album with changing my life, but those are the rules, so here it is. That’s not to say that Parallel Universe was not a stunning album that completely took my breath away. It did. It still does. It’s just that there were actually a multitude of records that changed my life at that time. An array of different 12” singles, each as inspiring as the next. All lining up for attention on my record player, all coming together in one dizzyingly electric and clatteringly exuberant, exuberantly clattering cacophony of infectious noise. Photek, Metalheads, T-Power, Dillinja, Omni Trio. The list goes on and on.  On and on with fractured beats that sounded as though were from another world. Bass notes that curled around the spine and squeezed. Just so.

The drum’n’bass revolution took me by surprise. Took me by storm. I never attended a club though. That was not what it was about. Not for me. For me it was dancing inside, like the Pop Group sang about. It was the noise. The thrill of the new. Like nothing on earth. A parallel universe. Exactly.

It all crumbled of course. For a moment the jazz inflected drum’n’bass sounds were magnificent – the ingredients in perfect balance. But then it tipped too far one way and it just sounded like jazz fusion. Some started worrying about recreating the sound with real musicians and started acting out traditional rock industry antics, all of which rather missed the point. The dark side was good though, and although my interest waned and I sought refuge elsewhere, over time it came back to haunt me in the sounds of dubstep, and in particular the haunted dancehall delights of Burial, whose Burial and Untrue sets would be knocking on the door of this list. Indeed I’m certain if I were twenty years younger those records would undoubtedly be in there, probably playing the same role to Parallel Universe.

4-Hero - Wrinkles In Time

20 Albums That Changed My Life - pt 15

Beach Boys – Pet Sounds

This is probably the most obvious one in the whole list, but I’m trying to remember when Pet Sounds acquired its mythic status as The Greatest Album Of All Time amongst the music press. I do recall that when I was younger Sgt Pepper always seemed to be the one trotted out as the greatest. Never understood that. Still don’t. But then, as I am more than willing to admit (and gleefully so, no less) that I am hopelessly unable to be objective about the B group.

Somewhere along the way Pet Sounds took over that mantle though, and I am glad that it did. It is an immeasurably finer record and the Beach Boys are, frankly, on a different plane. I remember watching a TV show about Pet Sounds a few years ago. They played a snatch of two broadly contemporaneous recordings by both the Beach Boys and the other B group. One sounded horrible. Thin, weedy, shrill and irritating as hell. The other sounded thrilling, blissful, exuberant and breathtaking. I’ll let you guess which was which.

I resisted the Beach Boys, and in particular Pet Sounds for quite a few years. Friends would murmur about its genius and I would smirk and make some remark about old man’s music. I’m not ashamed to admit I was fabulously wrong.

The day I finally gave in and bought Pet Sounds is still a very fresh memory. An early summer’s afternoon in Reading, out of teaching practice early and in town picking up some drawing materials. Heading back to the bus station and passing a record store and figuring what they heck, let’s see what tempts me. The choice, as I remember it, came down to Pet Sounds or Ride’s Going Blank Again, which had been out for a few months and was all the rage amongst the young people. I’m not sure what exactly swung me to the Beach Boys, but I am so glad I made the choice I did.

Now it’s important to point out that I was never sucked into the cult of Pet Sounds, despite the fact that I loved, and love it still. Yes I have the CD box set with the outtakes and versions and whatever the heck else is on there, but I’m not ashamed to admit I’ve hardly ever played it. See I don’t care much about the legend. I don’t care much about the production magic or anything like that. All I care is that the songs take my breath away. All I care about is that this is a record that exudes remarkable beauty with every breath. It’s a record that soothes, seduces and inspires. Who could ask for more?

The Beach Boys - I Just Wasn't Made For These Times

20 Albums That Changed My Life - pt 14

Stockholm Monsters – Alma Mater

It’s perhaps a little disingenuous to suggest this album changed my life. Perhaps that’s true of all these records. Whatever.

I heard about Stockholm Monsters through a fanzine called Tony France. I was never particularly bothered about Factory Records at the time. Sextet and ACR were maybe the exceptions. Sure, I was aware of the label’s ‘importance’. I knew about Joy Division and New Order, and hey, weren’t the first James records on Factory? But really: me, a Factory Funster? No way.

My copy of Tony France landed at my feet thanks to some of those aforementioned enlightened and illuminating souls. It was a time of networks being formed. Connections through the postal service. These were friends who meant so much for the words they wrote and for the ideas they shared. These were important times.

Tony France was an important moment for me. That first line: “Soul. There can be only way to start. This is it. Shave your head.” That had me hooked from the get-go. Tony France made me desperate to hear Stockholm Monsters in the same way Up-Tight made it imperative that I hear The Velvet Underground and The Same Sky made me uncover The Kinks. Words should do that. Words are better at doing that than hearing a song on the radio can ever be. The words make the connections, paint the bigger picture, put the whole thing in context. And hey, context is everything, right? Right.

Of course, when I finally heard it Alma Mater sounded every bit as magnificent as I thought it would. The sound lived up the words and the words lived up to the sound.

Stockholm Monsters – Your Uniform

Read my first Stockholm Monsters article in the Young And Foolish book, downloadable here. 

Read the article on the LTM reissues of the Stockholm Monsters records on Tangents here.

20 Albums That Changed My Life - pt 13

A Certain Ratio – Sextet

Thank you Patrick Macklin. You were right. Sextet played through headphones on the beach at sunset is indeed spectacular.

If Sextet changed my life it was because it reminded me that ‘dance’ music could be so special and sublime. It was because it made me realize that we didn’t have to fuck either art or dance and do the other. We could both have our cake and eat it. Who knew?

My exposure to Sextet was from a very specific moment in my life; a time when I made connections with people who were immeasurably more informed and better educated in the world of popular culture than me, but who were so immensely generous with that knowledge. Not for them a concern with appearing hipper than thou, but rather a desire to share their excitement and passion for the music, artists, designers, writers, filmmakers, whoever. And in the end the thing I learned that was of most lasting value was that thrill of sharing; the delight in communication.

Some things to remember: That first sunset on Troon beach, for once a calm and clear May evening, alone by the edge of the sea, the sound of the waves mixing with the recording in my ears. Just walking as I did so often then, looking at the world around me and lost in my own of sounds and words and daydreams. Or of staying up all night at Robert’s place, drinking wine and talking excitedly about too many things to remember, then heading out to the Glasgow morning to see the sunrise before breakfast in some greasy spoon café. Coming back to Troon later that day clutching a bag of borrowed ACR records and ‘All Night Party’ going on and on in my head. Writing about sentinel dogs at the end of a path and about mourning most for the sorrows yet to blight us. Desert boots and Khaki shorts. El Alamein chic. 

Peerless and priceless.

A Certain Ratio - Crystal

20 Albums That Changed My Life - pt 12

Galaxie 500 - On Fire

I think I may actually have heard Galaxie 500 before I had heard The Velvets. I think it may have been partly the fact that people were whispering about The Velvets when writing about Galaxie 500 that made me determined to finally explore that past.

Whatever, I do know that the summer of the Velvets was also the summer of On Fire and that I lay on my back in my fading Strawberry Switchblade t-shirt gazing at the sun through black plastic RayBan copies, the sounds of Galaxie 500 hypnotizing me through my headphones.

I remember it felt glorious.

And sometimes simply feeling that great (and the memory of feeling that great) is enough. It’s all that matters. It’s that feeling of being on the brink of something; the sense that a vast ocean of possibility is opening up before you and your heart is filled simultaneously with euphoria and trepidation.  And for me, that’s the sound of Galaxie 500. A sound so big and yet so intimate. An enveloping noise full of gentle seduction and mesmerizing space. It’s all there in On Fire – the record that captured those feelings for my world exactly as and when I felt them for the first time. A world that was never the same again.

Galaxie 500 - Leave The Planet

20 Albums That Changed My Life - pt 11

The Velvet Underground – The Velvet Underground

I came late to a lot of the perceived ‘classics’. At the time I was mortally embarrassed about this fact and told a lot of little white lies. Looking back now, I think it was all for the best. Even if it would have made me seem immeasurably hipper, I don’t think I would really have appreciated The Velvet Underground if I had heard them when I was 16. I mean, really, did you see me when I was 16? Not pretty.

As it was, I was in my early twenties before I finally snagged some records and discovered what it was all about. I’d found the Up-Tight book and devoured it in a couple of days. I was rabid to hear all the records, follow all the lines of connection. Music books should do that. There are so few that do. It’s a tragedy.

It was summer when I finally discovered The Velvet Underground. I lay in the sun at my parents’ house, sheltering from the wind in the open garage doorway, poring over Up-Tight and dreaming of Edie and Andy, Lou and Mo Tucker and all the rest. The photos of the Exploding Plastic Inevitable shows looked amazing. Enormous Nico projected on the wall. So cool.

I taped the records and walked around for days with headphones in my ears. It was an amazing experience. I had never dreamt that The Velvet Underground would actually sound as breathtakingly sublime as they did. In my mind the hype was never going to live up to the reality. In reality it blew it all away.

One memory stays with me more than anything else: walking the beach in the dead of night with this album in my ears. From the Royal Troon golf course to the Ballast Bank and back down to stand outside Pebbles nightclub in the early hours. Watching my peers disgorge onto the sidewalk: argyle Pringles tucked into stonewashed jeans and a switchblade in the pocket. Me slipping softly into the shadows and creeping home over the golf courses and knowing more than ever that I had to leave.

The Velvet Underground - What Goes On