British singers strike lucrative note worldwide
Kanye West claimed it was his next one, so Neil McCormick has looked back over the past seven decades to produce his personal top 10
ADELE, Ed Sheeran and Sam Smith helped secure a booming year for the UK music industry in 2015, with British acts responsible for a third of the top 40 best-selling albums worldwide.
The 12 best-selling albums by British acts sold a combined total of 33.5 million records worldwide – a 7 per cent increase on 2014.
They included A Head Full of Dreams by Coldplay and two albums by One Direction, Made in the AM and Four.
Adele’s 25 topped the worldwide chart with almost 15 million sales, and was closely followed by Ed Sheeran’s X at number three and Sam Smith’s In the
Lonely Hour at four. “They make a huge contribution to the UK economy through jobs and revenue,” said Dan O’Neill, of financial services firm Centtrip which collated the figures. Its study also found that 2.7 per cent of the UK’s most wealthy 1,000 people worked in the music industry and were together worth £24.6 billion.
Of the five British artists who notched up global top 10 best-selling albums last year, four also made the top 10 in 2014 – Sheeran, Smith, Coldplay and One Direction.
When Kanye West proudly proclaimed on Twitter last month that his forthcoming album, Waves, would be “the greatest album of all time” he was greeted with widespread ridicule. It was not just going to be “album of the year”, boasted the American hip-hop star, but “album of the life”. Days later, West downgraded his claim, conceding that his seventh album, to be released this Friday, would merely be “one of the greatest” – which leaves that ultimate top position intriguingly unclaimed once again.
The album format has been around for more than 70 years and, despite declining sales, is still regarded as the pinnacle of pop’s artistic expression. There have been millions released, across all musical genres, with many thousands acclaimed by fans and critics. Most lists run to hundreds and constitute what has become almost an official canon, predominately drawn from rock, pop and soul and including the likes of The Beach Boys’ Pet
Sounds, The Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust, Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On and Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours.
Inspired by Kanye’s bold boast, I thought it would be interesting to shake things up a bit by looking at the key genres that have shaped modern music beyond the usual suspects and finding the greatest example of each. The criteria are an album that stands as a supreme artistic work, that had profound impact and cultural influence, reaching out to all listeners (not just fans of the genre) and that still sounds as good now as it did when it was made. Waves is going to have to be some kind of work of genius to get past this lot.
ELECTRONIC
Massive Attack Protection (1994)
10 The second album of eclectic trip hop from Bristol trio Massive Attack set a standard that remains hard to beat. It mashes together dub reggae, rock, synth pop, soul, rap and R’n’B, mixing electronica with lush classical orchestrations, employing samples and live musicians to produce a deeply groovy, psychedelic masterpiece.
COUNTRY
Ray Charles Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music (1962)
9 Few people would consider Ray Charles a country artist, but when the great soul man turned his attention to the tunes of the southern American states where he was raised, he shattered the genre’s narrow focus and demonstrated its potential as a form of universal pop. What still sets Modern
Sounds apart from masterful albums by such classic country stars as Johnny Cash, Dolly Parton, Willie Nelson, Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris is the genius of Charles’s musicality. He deepens melodies with jazz chords, harmonies and audacious playing, while delivering vocals that bring the emotional message home every time.
INDIE
The Smiths The Queen Is Dead (1986)
8 Coined in the Eighties to describe artists from independent labels, indie coalesced around a leftfield, maverick aesthetic, particularly in terms of idiosyncratic rock that challenged the macho mainstream. The Smiths are the perfect distillation of indie values and their third (of four) studio albums is their masterpiece, in which singer Morrissey’s poetic language, languorous voice and emotionally bereft world-view synced perfectly with guitarist Johnny Marr’s melodic song-craft and inspired guitar work. The songs sparkle like gems, though the album beats with a dark, lonely heart.
HIP HOP
Kanye West My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (2010)
7 West’s new offering will have to be truly magnificent to better his fifth, hailed by Elton John as “the Sergeant Pepper of hip hop”. There are purer rap albums, featuring audacious wordplay and samples from Jay Z, Tupac Shakur and Eminem, but the artistic daring of West sets him apart. Melodious songs are concocted with megalomaniac grandeur from startling samples, club grooves, glittering electronica and swooning classical orchestrations. The results are powerful and at times quite beautiful, and more accessible to music lovers of every taste than almost any other rap album (although I have to nod to Lauryn Hill’s 1988 The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill).
SOUL
Aretha Franklin
Lady Soul (1968)
Lady Soul
6 was not an attempt to make a definitive musical statement, it was just a supreme singer doing her thing with an amazing band (Bobby Womack and Eric Clapton feature on guitar) and perfectly curated songs (with legendary Atlantic Records head Jerry Wexler producing). In their Seventies prime, Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye took R’n’B on far-reaching journeys, but if we really want to cut to the essence of soul we surely have to hone in on the voice. Wexler called Aretha “the lady of mysterious sorrows”, and every note the impossibly dexterous Franklin sings is latent with emotional riches.
JAZZ
Miles Davis
Bitches Brew (1970)
5 Miles Davis’s 1959 masterpiece
Kind of Blue usually appears in jazz lists, in recognition of how the visionary composer and trumpeter guided jazz into a new melodic and harmonic freedom, but its revolutionary impact has receded over time. With Bitches
Brew the genius took on the rhythmic challenges of funk and rock, using the studio itself as a tool to create a mindbending exploration of sound.
POP
Michael Jackson
Thriller (1982)
4 Michael Jackson was a 23-year-old showbiz veteran when he crafted the bestselling album of all time with producer Quincy Jones, whose own background was in jazz and orchestral soundtracks. Between them, they worked up a futuristic blend of black and white musical styles that established a new pop dynamic that still underpins hit music 30 years on. Thriller has become canonical, yet still rushes to the head with rhythms that are liquid and alive, and that miraculous voice flies through it all with unbounded joy.
ROCK
Led Zeppelin
IV (1971)
3 In terms of what can be achieved with the primal elements of drums, bass, guitar and voice, it is impossible to surpass the swaggeringly virtuoso quartet of Bonham, Jones, Page and Plant. In these eight tracks you can hear all of heavy metal, the most slamming blues rock ever, a thrillingly energetic foreshadow of punk, with diversions into rootsy folk and an epic clamber to symphonic highs on Stairway to
Heaven. Arguably Nirvana compressed heavy rock and punk into its most dynamic and emotional essence on Nevermind in 1991, but the exuberant grandstanding of Led Zeppelin represents rock at its most life-affirming.
SINGERSONGWRITER
Bob Dylan Blood on the Tracks (1975)
2 There have been many extraordinary lyrical musicians but Bob Dylan towers over them all.
Blonde on Blonde may be his most explosive flourish of imaginative brilliance, but this musically sparse set composed during his divorce strikes deeper and harder. Dylan wanted to use language the way Picasso used paint, an abstraction of time and space coalescing into something we feel more than we understand. The picture he composed with this album represents a devastation of the heart only made palatable by the richness of its expression and rueful truth of the delivery.
THE GREATEST ALBUM EVER
The Beatles
Abbey Road (1969)
1 If there could only be one it would have to be The Beatles, for the combination of musical talents, the unparalleled expanse of their songwriting, the imagination of their arrangements, the emotional power of their message and the impact they had on the world. This, their final gift, was their most mature expression, by turns funky, heavy, sweet, funny, spiritual, rocking and soulful, and concluding with a veritable pop symphony and blissful farewell, disintegrating in perfect harmony. John Lennon and Paul McCartney were at the peak of their powers, supported by George Harrison reaching maturity as a songwriter and Ringo Starr playing his socks off. They came together to make one great and lasting work of art.