AND MY TOP FIVE ALBUMS ARE...
5. I’M YOUR MAN LEONARD COHEN
In music, Leonard Cohen did everything late. An acclaimed poet and novelist in his native Canada, he was 32 when he took up singing, whereupon a New York agent asked him: ‘Aren’t you a little old for this game?’ His first few albums, all strummed guitar and tortured romanticism, were fitfully fabulous, but he reached his peak after turning 50.
In middle age, Cohen discovered two things: synthesisers and self-deprecation. The synths, improbably, allowed his songs to swing, while the jokes allowed them to breathe. And he could still do gloom (First We Take Manhattan), romance (Ain’t No Cure For Love) and poetry (Take This Waltz, loosely translated from Lorca). Track to download Tower Of Song. Cohen’s poetics, and his midlife crisis: ‘I ache in the places where I used to play.’ Interviewing him years later, I wondered how those places were doing. He replied, gleefully: ‘I can’t even locate them.’
4. NIGHTCLUBBING GRACE JONES
They don’t make record labels like they used to. Island Records, founded by Chris Blackwell in 1959, was both cool and warm, reliable and innovative.
Way ahead of its time in bringing reggae to the wider world, it made a superstar of Bob Marley, yet also discovered Roxy Music and U2.
Grace Jones, with her brooding charisma, was the kind of talent Blackwell knew how to handle. Nightclubbing, released in 1981, came from Jamaica with everything: crunching rhythms from Sly & Robbie, songs from Bowie, Sting and Marianne Faithfull, instant iconography from JeanPaul Goude, astute direction from Blackwell, and Jones’s own huge presence. A sound so crisp it has never dated. Track to download Pull Up To The Bumper. Possibly not about parking.
3. BRIDGE OVER TROUBLED WATER SIMON & GARFUNKEL
Bob Dylan is more significant as a cultural figure, but song for song and chord for chord, Paul Simon is pop’s greatest solo songwriter. He is music’s Matisse, lacing his genius with joy. He can sing something simple that stays with you for decades. And in Art Garfunkel, before they fell out, he had a stupendous voice to go with his own very likeable one. This album has Cecilia (‘you’re breaking my heart, you’re shaking my confidence baby’), El Condor Pasa (‘I’d rather be a hammer than a nail’), Baby Driver, The Only Living Boy In New York, The Boxer, and the monumental title track, which was soon recorded by both Elvis Presley and Aretha Franklin. Track to download The Boxer. ‘Laila-lai’: three syllables capturing all the fun of the singalong.
2. SGT PEPPER’S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND THE BEATLES
It has been named as the greatest album of all so many times that some people find it irritating for that reason alone. But if you listen hard to it, as I did in 2017 for its 50th anniversary, it still comes up sparkling. Not for nothing has it regularly topped favourite Beatles albums polls around the world. Sgt Pepper is a parade of pleasure, from the rocking title track (instantly borrowed by Jimi Hendrix) to the haunting A Day In The Life, via the cheering With A Little Help From My Friends, the mind-expanding Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds and the rollicking Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite! Supremely British, Pepper embodied the band’s multifaceted draw. Track to download She’s Leaving Home. (Why would she treat us so thoughtlessly? How could she do this to me?) Paul McCartney, yet to have children, somehow sums up the empty nest.
1. THE RISE AND FALL OF ZIGGY STARDUST AND THE SPIDERS FROM MARS DAVID BOWIE
Of all the giants from the golden age, nobody tunes into our times like Bowie, with his glamour and neuroses, his gender-bending and genre-hopping. In the Seventies, he made one classic album after another, but, for me, Ziggy squeezes ahead of the rest on two fronts. One is the conviction with which he carried out his concept. By putting on a mask, Bowie found himself; by playing a superstar, he became one. The other is the sheer quality of the songs. Eight out of 11 have become classics, from the rousing chugger Starman to the breakneck rocker Suffragette City. Starman, with which Bowie stunned the nation one Thursday evening in 1972, is reason enough to revive Top Of The Pops. Track to download Five Years. A futuristic ballad and a brave choice to open the album. When Bowie sings ‘my brain hurt like a warehouse that had no room to spare’, he could be peering into e 2019.