QUESTION

The Rolling Stone review of the 1969 Led Zeppelin album proclaimed: ‘[Jimmy Page is] a very limited producer and a writer of weak, unimaginative songs.’ What other reviewers have got it so wrong?

LeD Zeppelin’s eponymous debut album is a classic and it’s hard to see how Rolling Stone couldn’t see it.

taking the heavy, distorted electric blues of Jimi Hendrix and Cream to an extreme, Zeppelin revolutionised guitar rock. the Rolling Stone review angered Jimmy Page so much that he refused to speak to the magazine for years.

Reviewer John Mendelsohn dubbed Robert Plant ‘as foppish as Rod Stewart, but he’s nowhere near so exciting’.

Rolling Stone once again showed it had a cloth ear when it came to heavy metal when it panned the 1976 AC/DC classic High Voltage.

According to critic Billy Altman: ‘those concerned with the future of hard rock may take solace in knowing that with the release of the first u.S. album by these Australian gross- out champions, the genre has unquestionably hit its all-time low . . . Stupidity bothers me. Calculated stupidity offends me.’

Al Stuart, Southampton. The Stone Roses’ self-titled 1989 debut album is considered to be the seminal indie-rock album, inspiring Britpop from Oasis to Blur.

When Nme (new Musical express) magazine reviewed it, they completely missed the point with the immortal words: ‘this is quite good. Just.’

to be fair, they later admitted the mistake: ‘ now, we don’t get it wrong at NME that often, but this was a clanger.’

However, they weren’t the only ones. Q magazine awarded it three stars, saying: ‘What could have been great merely bulges with promise.’

Tom Allen, Stevenage, Herts. In 1956, the new York times writer Jack Gould could see no future in a young singer called elvis Presley. He wrote: ‘Mr Presley has no discernible singing ability.

‘His speciality is rhythm songs which he renders in an undistinguished whine; his phrasing, if it can be called that, consists of the stereotyped variations that go with a beginner’s aria in a bathroom. For the ear, he is an unutterable bore.’

twelve years later, Mike Jahn, writing in the same newspaper, wrote a famously bad review of the Beatles’ White Album:

‘the album has nothing new and very little that is even recent . . .

‘Many songs are either so corny or sung in such a way that it is hard to tell whether they are being serious. In most cases, they seem not to be.’ He even dubbed it: ‘Hip Muzak’.

Michelle Grew, Colchester, Essex.