HERE ONCE AGAIN WITH an entirely randomly ordered, and equally subjective, list of the choice songs of the month. The majority newly released, but also ones that are either timely or just chime with other selections. Complete with a full playlist.

Going forward, the best possible thing would be being able to include recommendations sent to me from, well, you. All of them very welcome, at any time. For now, though, step into the first month of summer in song…

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1. RYAN DAVIS & THE ROADHOUSE BAND ‘New Threats From the Soul’

Opening, and title track from ex-State Champion man Davis’s appealing second album. Unwinding over 9:21 at a rolling ramble, with a dash of Dylan here, a sprinkle of Springsteen there, a colouring pedal steel, and Davis’s evocative, literary lyrics: “If you need me, you know where to find me/North of a puddle and west of a hole.”

From: New Threats From the Soul album

2. BELLA WHITE ‘Stuff’

Hailing from Calgary, Alberta, Bella White’s out-now third album, A Sign in the Weather, is a finely detailed, 11-song suite, made in New Orleans and suffused with bluegrass roots and a pervading sense of Appalachian otherworldliness. As fully encapsulated by ‘Stuff’, entrancing, atmospheric, and with White’s voice Emmylou-wondrous.

From: A Sign in the Weather album

3. AMANDA SHIRES ‘Piece of Mind’

Country rendered in a more straightforward, cut in Nashville, wronged-lover-hits-back kind of way and no bad thing. The standard-bearing track for Shires’ ninth solo album of last year, this stridently defiant outburst surely has ex-husband Jason Isbell in its sights. “I could never hate you, you’re wrong,” Shires, touring the UK this month, entreats, before kicking in with the pay-off: “But that was a real fucked up way to leave.”

From: Nobody’s Girl album

4. AMBLE ‘Moral Victory’

The Irish trio’s 2025 debut album Reverie rewards repeat listens, standout songs such as this, their latest single, dressed up with mandolin and banjo, and altogether lovely.

From: Reverie album

5. LANKUM ‘Ghost Town’

Trad Irish folk music here as envelope-pushing art form. Picking up where they left off with 2023’s stunning, Mercury Prize-nominated False Lankum album, and snuck out last year, this transformative cover of Jerry Dammers’ era-defining Number One manages to be every bit as spooked as the original, but something altogether else, an eight-minute drone existing in a world all of its own.

From: Single release

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6. DRIVE BY TRUCKERS ‘Outfit’

The aforementioned Jason Isbell has been playing this one written for his old band nightly on tour with his current one, the 400 Unit. Put down live from the floor for the Truckers’ fifth album, and Isbell’s bow with them, Decoration Day from 2003, it hits the spot hard and true, chiming guitar, heartfelt vocal, Deep South-spun.

From: Decoration Day album

7. PAUL McCARTNEY ‘Come Inside’

Eighty-four this month and still packing a punch. “All my life’s an open book,” Macca pronounces, the voice, but of course, rougher and rasping at the edges now, but the better for it here fronting what sounds like a garage band running on pure adrenalin. Put simply, it’s great.

From: The Boys of Dungeon Lane album

8. BRIAN FALLON ‘Not Bad For New Jersey’

Fallon’s first solo release in five years, title track of a September-due album, and with it the Gaslight Anthem man keeps on power driving down E Street. Propelled by a ‘Mighty’ Max Weinberg-style fusillade, in sum it’s euphoric and irresistible.

From: New single release

9. ICEAGE ‘No Fear’

Taken from their just-out sixth album, Copenhagen’s Iceage come on like a Scandi Strokes when the real thing still had smarts and spunk to spare.

From: For Love of Grace & the Hereafter album

10. BRIGITTE CALLS ME BABY ‘Slumber Party’

Another new take on old style New Wave, but with this Chicago five-piece channelling the idea of Interpol with Morrissey as frontman. The lead-off single from their second album, and an all-black-clad cracker.

From: Irreversible album

11. VIOLET GROHL ‘Bug in the Cake’

No guessing the music Dave Grohl’s and Jordyn Blum’s daughter has been reared on. ‘Bug in the Cake’ is equal parts The Breeders’ ‘Cannonball’ and Courney Love’s Hole, with a dash of Pixies and Violet Grohl’s own swagger. In short, it rocks.

From: Be Sweet to Me album

12.PIXIES ‘Planet of Sound’

Speaking of the alt-rock legends, they’re back with a 40^th anniversary-marking, expanded version of their Complete B Sides… compilation, now including this splenetic highlight of 1991’s Trompe Le Monde LP, recorded live at London’s Brixton Academy, and like being hit by a truck.

From: Complete B Sides: 1988-97 reissued compilation

13.RUSH ‘The Analog Kid’

Track two from Rush’s most underrated great album debuted in the R50 Tour setlist on the second night at the LA Forum. Onstage now, on record here, the careering interplay between guitar, bass, and drums is dazzling.

From: Signals album

14. FUTURE ISLANDS ‘One Day’

B-side to 2014’s ‘Seasons’ single, now grand-standing itself, ‘One Day’ is the Greenville, North Carolina collective doing what they do so very well, which is to say synth-pop of the most euphoric kind sung by a man, Samuel T. Herring, who sounds as if he’s gargling marbles.

From: From a Hole in the Floor to a Fountain of Youth compilation album

15.ELDERBROOK ‘Is It Over Now?’

More electro-euphoria, here at the hands of Londoner Elderbrook, Alex Kotz to his nearest and dearest. Plunging drops, a sugar-rush of a hook, the sound of summer.

From: New single release

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16.DEATH CAB FOR CUTIE ‘Stone Over Water’

Gorgeously mounted herald for the vet alt-rock crew’s 11^th album, frontman Ben Gibbard breaking hearts on the best chorus of the year so far: “I’m trying to hold it together, I’m trying to sleep at night. I’ve got my windows open to the weather, and I keep telling my friends I’m alright.”

From: I Built You a Tower album

17.COLD WAR KIDS ‘There Goes the Night’

Written for but left off of 2006 debut album Robbers & Cowards, about to be reissued in expanded form, and with its spiky take on classic rock tropes, a timely reminder of why so many of us got so excited about Cold War Kids in the first place.

From: New single release

18.THE AFGHAN WHIGS ‘Jungle Roux’

Third taster track for the incoming Soft Control album and where the previous one, ‘Duvateen’, mined a rich blue-eyed soul seam, this finds Greg Dulli back in lover-man guise and to an urgent mid-tempo groove. Classic Whigs, in other words.

From: New single release

19.JOSHUA JAMES ‘Frances the Dancing Girl’

It’s been five years since James sent a new album out into the world from his Utah mountaintop base. This ornate, Tom Waits-style carny ride suggests it’ll be well worth the wait for his next one.

From: New single release

20.KURT VILE ‘Zoom 97’

Lead-off track on Vile’s excellent new album, this slips right on into a typically easy, laconic gait, sprinkled with sing-song guitar and “ahh-ahh”-ing harmony vocals. Perfect for driving to in a top-down convertible, real or imagined.

From: Philadelphia’s Been Good to Me album

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

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IN THE SUMMER OF 1976, Mark Knopfler was travelling around America by Greyhound bus. The trip was a pilgrimage of sorts for him. To the country of Elvis, Chuck Berry, and Chet Atkins. To the land of his deepest inspirations and to the places where the music he loved the most was birthed. All the while he was clocking up miles on the road, Knopfler was sketching out songs in his head, and these, soon enough, would send him back to America and the world outside of it with his band, Dire Straits.

Knopfler was born in 1949, his younger brother David three years later. Them and their older sister Ruth into the comfortably off upbringing afforded them by their architect father Erwin, a Hungarian Jewish immigrant, and headmistress mother Louisa. The family was living in Glasgow at the time but moved south to Newcastle in the mid-1950s and where the Knopfler boys attended the local grammar school in Gosforth.

Theirs was a musical family. Louisa played the piano, Ruth classical cello. The boys learned the rudiments of boogie-woogie at the knee of their Uncle Kingsley, and of The Shadows from watching TV at their grandma’s. At 15, Mark Knopfer persuaded his father to buy him his first guitar, a copy of Hank Marvin’s red Stratocaster, for £50. He taught himself the basics of the instrument playing in school bands, and after his younger sibling followed his lead, the Knopfler’s formed their own folk duo, doing working men’s clubs at the weekends.

Mark moved away from home first, to Leeds to take a job as a cub reporter on the Yorkshire Evening Post. Since he was the only one on staff at the newspaper to have actually listened to Jimi Hendrix, he was tasked with writing the guitarist’s obituary in September of 1970.

In short order thereafter, Knopfler left the paper to take an English degree at Leeds University, married his high school sweetheart, Kathy White, and upon graduating in 1973, upped and ventured south once more, to London. The Knopfler’s marriage didn’t survive the move. Out on his own again, Mark did pub-rock gigs and lectured in English, and which allowed him the money to go off to America.

Upon his return to London, Knopfler got busy with his music. Brother David was in London now, too, working as a social worker and sharing a flat in Deptford, south of the Thames, with 26-year-old sociology graduate John Illsley, a bass player. The brothers and Illsley started jamming together at the flat, and over beers one night in the pub decided to start a band with a drummer Mark had met on a session date, Pick Withers.

The newly minted four-piece played their first gig together in the summer of 1977, a makeshift festival staged on a patch of grass out back of their tower block. The very summer London’s reigning pub-rock groups, Dr Feelgood and their ilk, were feeling the hot blast of the Sex Pistols and The Clash at their backs. By then as well, Withers was the only one of the four keeping up a steady job. Their general state of destitution prompted Withers to suggest Dire Straits as the name for their band.

“We didn’t talk about it, the band just evolved,” David Knopfler told me of this formative period. “But then, I think Mark and I had a different vision of what we were up to. I was building a democracy, and Mark was making an autocracy.”

For his part, Mark Knopfler believed his lack of any formal musical training was a freedom. “Innocence is bliss,” he reasoned. “You just go marching out into the middle of it, not really knowing what you’re doing.

“That’s how it went on. I staggered from one place to the next.”

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THEY CUT A FIVE-track demo using £500 Illsley had inherited from his grandmother. Put down at poky Pathway Studios in North London, it highlighted five of Mark Knopfler’s songs.

Among them was a languorous shuffle, ‘Down to the Waterline’, and a loose-limbed account of seeing a hapless jazz combo flailing in a London boozer, ‘Sultans of Swing’. Enough to have Dire Straits snapped up by a major label, Phonogram Records.

Their A&R man at Phonogram, John Stainze, invited a booking agent contact of his down to see them play at a club in Camden, Dingwalls. Ed Bicknell, a Shadows connoisseur, was taken in first of all by the fact of Mark Knopfler having a red Strat, next by his band’s tightness. Bicknell became their manager, booking them onto a 23-date tour of the UK with Talking Heads and in February 1978, ushering them into Island Records’ Basing Street studio to make their debut album with producer Muff Winwood, once of the Spencer Davis Group and older brother to Stevie.

Winwood pretty much recorded them live on the floor. Altogether, Dire Straits cost them £12,500 to make, sleeve artwork and all. Released that October, the intricacies of Mark Knopfler’s playing, the landscape of his songs, as wide-open and uncluttered as the prairies, stood them apart from the freneticism of New Wave, and as then being unleashed by contemporary groups of theirs like the Boomtown Rats and The Jam.

Knopfler aimed instead towards the great American troubadour tradition of Dylan, JJ Cale, and Ry Cooder, and hit a bullseye. The album went Top 10 all over Europe. Coming out six months later in the US, it climbed to the giddy heights of Number Two on the Billboard Hot 200.

“It had sold eight million within nine months,” Ed Bicknell, never knowingly understated, claimed. “We were literally reeling. Like, ‘Fuck me – what’s happening?!?”

Dire Straits undertook their first US tour at the start of 1979. The four of them driving themselves in a van. The spotlight naturally fell on Mark Knopfler. When Dylan himself came to see them in LA, he popped backstage specifically to invite the hotshot new guitarist to play on his own next record, Slow Train Coming.

“Mark was our standard bearer and ticket to being exceptional rather than merely good,” acknowledged brother David. “He was actually rather humble at that point. Hard for me to imagine now.”

HURRIED BY PHONOGRAM INTO making a follow-up, they were whisked off to the Bahamas to work with the legendary Jerry Wexler, the man who’d signed Led Zeppelin and recorded Ray Charles. Even under Wexler’s steadying hand and as was to become typical of Knopfler’s way of writing, the songs for Communique didn’t so much flow out as were eked.

“It was piecemeal,” Knopfler described. “I was never organised. I wasn’t a writing machine, ever.”

Arriving barely a year after their debut, Communique met with a cooler response and slower sales. In retrospect, it was a logical step forward. Knopfler’s melodies were more textured, his songs brought into sharper relief by Wexler. See languid opener ‘Once Upon a Time in the West’, or the quickstepping ‘Lady Writer’.

More damagingly, with the demands of their whirlwind schedule, and they were either holed up in the studio or else out on the road, cracks were beginning to show. Most obviously in the fracturing relationship between the two brothers in the band.

“Everything put a strain on us,” said David Knopfler. “It was just through being exhausted. Drinking too much every night. Doing drugs, partying, and wrecking your physical and mental health.”

“The issues between David and Mark, which for public consumption have been packaged as musical ones, well, they weren’t,” Ed Bicknell opined. “As John Illsley said to me at the time, ‘This has been going on since David was born.’

“I’m stating the obvious, but David was in the group because he was Mark’s brother. Not because he was the greatest rhythm guitarist Mark could have found.”

MARK KNOPFLER WASN’T FOR standing still. He approached Dire Straits’ next album determined to expand their horizons. To have their sound enhanced and for it to range across more scenic terrain. The first signposting to his intentions was a near six-minute song he worked up during a rare break at home, a musical rollercoaster ride through the wreckage of a shattered love affair. He took a demo tape of ‘Romeo and Juliet’ over to Ed Bicknell’s office and played it to him there. Bicknell was struck dumb.

“I just sat and stared at the ground in complete disbelief,” he said. “By then, Mark had cottoned on that this was his group and he edged himself into pole position.”

Summer of 1980, Dire Straits went into the storied Power Station studio, amid the hustle and bustle of Manhattan. According to Bicknell, their three years of near-constant work had left them in a parlous state. Emotionally, as well as physically.

“We went into that third record off the back of three out of the four of them going through break-ups,” said Bicknell. “Everybody was miserable. Certain people didn’t like certain people. It all got very fractious indeed.”

None of it eased by their being in the studio with producer Jimmy Iovine. A brashly abrasive New Yorker, the then 27-year-old Iovine was something of a wunderkind and coming off the back of a string of hit records he’d made with Bruce Springsteen, Stevie Nicks, and Tom Petty.

Iovine was demanding of, and painstaking with his charges. The whole first week at the Power Station was taken up with him getting the drum sound he desired.

In this febrile atmosphere, the Knopfler’s were fast at each other’s throats. David Knopfler grudging about the fact of Iovine taking Mark to see a Springsteen session even before they commenced their own.

“Mark’s jaw was on the floor,” David Knopfler recalled. “Everyone was calling Springsteen ‘Boss’, and he completely called the shots. But Bruce has spent 30-plus years in therapy learning to be boss and he’s very good at it. Mark had not long come from being a college lecturer, and he’d not been schooled in people skills.”

“Things started to go haywire between David and Mark,” John Illsley explained to me. “There was too much tension in the air and just trying to get things done in the studio became more and more difficult.

“There was always a strong consensus between Mark and me about how things should be. We rarely disagreed about anything.”

SOMETHING HAD TO GIVE. When it came, the blow up was swift, and brutal, and decisive. The brothers got into an especially explosive argument in the studio. It concluded with David Knopfler quitting the band, returning to England. He would go on to a solo career, the estrangement between him and his brother lasting years.

“David’s going wasn’t nice, but it was absolutely inevitable,” said Ed Bicknell. “Mark has got a strong personality and he’s very determined, and also quite ruthless. But you need to be ruthless if you’re going to climb the greasy pole.”

Absent of sibling rivalry, the pace of the sessions picked up. Iovine recruited the E Street Band’s pianist Roy Bittan to bring a dash of colour to Knopfler’s new batch of songs. One especially, another stirring epic, ‘Tunnel of Love’, and upon which Mark Knopfler located the sweet spot between Springsteen’s band’s hulking engine and Dylan’s rolling thunder. Hearing that one for the first time, said Bicknell, “it felt like a jet plane taking off.”

There was a bunch of grandly vaulting records released that year. Springsteen’s The River, John Lennon’s and Yoko Ono’s Double Fantasy, Sandinista! by The Clash, and Talking Heads’ Remain in Light to name but four. At very least, Making Movies stood shoulder to shoulder with them all. Knopfler’s driving ambition had added heft and emotional resonance to Dire Straits’ music.

Repeat listens brought its other jewels into focus. The driving ‘Solid Rock’ and ‘Espresso Love’, its two exquisite ballads, ‘Skateaway’ and ‘Hand in Hand’. Of its seven tracks, only the closer, the slight ‘Les Boys’, missed the mark. For the ensuing tour, Knopfler recruited an American rhythm guitarist, Hal Lindes, to fill the spot vacated by his brother, and a Geordie, Alan Clark, on keyboards.

The album was a hit. Platinum in the US, two times over in the UK. Creatively, Knopfler was on fire, his band feted. Dylan again and Mick Jagger turned out to see their triumphal LA show at the Roxy.

On top of the world, it surely didn’t take Knopfler long to turn his keen mind to the matter of where to lead Dire Straits to next. Ultimately, his answer would come in the form of a juggernaut, one bigger and more disorientating than any of them could possibly have foreseen. That, though, is a whole other story…

IT’S ONE OF THE things I miss most from the cinema these days. Strike that. The most. B-movies they used to call them back in the ’50s. Genre films, pulp entertainments, made on micro-small budgets. Their subject matter hard-boiled crime, or sci-fi, or horror, or plain weirdness. More often than not they were bloodily violent, gripping always, the very things that would entice you to sit there in the dark, although so many of them were redeemed, and found their audience, as old-school video rentals.

Essentially, I grew up on them, since the golden age for films such as these ran through from the ’70s to the end of the ’90s. They’d their own repertories of actors and directors. Artists like John Carpenter and Walter Hill, stars such as Steve Buscemi, Bill Paxton, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and the great Fred Ward. Trailblazers, visionaries, they were waging guerilla warfare on and against the mainstream.

Today, and but for the odd trace echo through outlier movies like Fall or Ready or Not, both excellent, it’s a brand of on-the-edge filmmaking vanished from the culture. Steamrolled by franchises, remakes, streaming services, and the wretched comic universes. By a paucity of imagination, an aversion to risk. And we’re all the worse off for it.

Twenty is nowhere near big enough a number in this case. Painfully, there’s a bunch of other terrific films I’ve had to omit from this list (Escape From New York, Repo Man, Big Wednesday… damn, I could go on, and very possibly will). For now, though, in random order, and with the fanciful notion of someone allowing me loose with my own movie channel, what follows are the first slate of highlights. Action…

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1. THE TERMINATOR (1984)

A cult classic from the moment Arnie, sent back by evil Skynet from 2029, in a flash of light, appeared naked in the litter-strewn alleyway. Back in the day when James Cameron knew how to cut a taut, tight movie, filmed mostly at night in LA on a scant $1 million budget, and propulsively brilliant. Schwarzenegger’s relentless cyborg pursuing Linda Hamilton’s Sarah Connor, Michael Biehn the other time-traveller along for the ride. No-one involved ever again did anything so masterful.

2. NEAR DARK (1987)

Director Kathryn Bigelow, Cameron’s future ex-wife, was here making her film debut. Bigelow pitched it as a neo-Western and only added in a vampire plotline when she struggled to get financial backing. Necessity being the mother of invention and all that. Adrian Pasdar is Caleb, Oklahoma farm boy falling in with a wandering band of bloodsuckers led by Lance Henriksen and also including Bill Paxton and a tortured Jenny Wright. Bigelow subverts convention from there, with dazzling results.

3. THE BIG LEBOWSKI (1998)

Jeff Bridges is The Dude, ex-Metallica roadie, the laziest man in all of LA County. You know the rest. The stoner Raymond Chandler plot. John Goodman’s volcanic Walter, Steve Buscemi’s sweet, put-upon Donnie. A seductive Julianna Moore, Peter Stormare and the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Flea as nihilists, Sam Elliott’s laconic voiceover, and John Turturro scene-stealing as (“Don’t fuck with the”) Jesus. The Coen Brothers’ highest point, beloved now, and with good reason.

4. HEATHERS (1988)

Back when Winona Ryder was a generational crush and the one time Christian Slater’s Jack Nicholson schtick fit. Ryder, luminously sardonic, is Veronica Sawyer, unwitting foil to Westerberg High’s reigning clique, the three cattish Heather’s (Shannon Doherty, Lisanna Falk, Kim Walker). Slater is J.D., the comically rebellious outsider steering her towards vengeance. Michael Lehman directs, serving up the drain killer-poisoning, jock-shooting antithesis to all those anaemic John Hughes teen dramas of the era and with a quite literally explosive finale.

5. MOON (2009)

There is hope. The most recent film on the list, directed by Duncan Jones, son of David Bowie, and with a stellar lead performance from Sam Rockwell as the unravelling astronaut on a three-year solo mission to mine the dark side of the Moon. Jones expertly cranks up the tension across 97 twisty, hallucinatory minutes, as Rockwell gradually, shatteringly comprehends the terrible nature of his fate.

6. MIAMI BLUES (1990)

Bloody, violent, and hilarious. Alec Baldwin’s sociopathic crim, just out of prison, shacks up with part-time prostitute Jennifer Jason Leigh, and wages a one-man crime wave. Fred Ward is the grizzled cop on his trail. There’s a great running gag involving Ward’s false teeth, a whole load of amorality, and a heart-pounding thrill to it all. Director George Armitage went on to make the just as terrific Grosse Point Blank with John Cusack, like this a box office bomb, and proving there’s simply never any accounting for people’s tastes.

7. RESERVOIR DOGS (1992)

Gangling, geeky, one-time video store clerk explodes pop-culture atom bomb. The essences of Quentin Tarantino’s heist-movie debut, its flip-flopping structure, snap, crackle dialogue, hysterical amounts of bloodshed, abundant homages to other movies, and eruptive soundtrack, have become his calling cards, but still it blazes with intensity and invention. And no-one, ever, has looked nearly so effortlessly, slo-mo, crazy-cool as Messrs White (Harvey Keitel), Blonde (Michael Madsen), Pink (Buscemi), and Orange (Tim Roth) line walking in their black suits.

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8. BLUE VELVET (1986)

Nominally, a neo-noir crime movie, but in the hands of David Lynch, Blue Velvet is something altogether other, too. A fever dream, bold and batshit brilliant. Kyle McLachlan is Jeffrey, buttoned-up college student, pulled into the nightmarish orbit of nightclub singer Dorothy (Isabella Rosselini) and Dennis Hopper’s for-the-ages gas-guzzling gangster psychopath Frank Booth. Sterling support from a young Laura Dern and Dean Stockwell, and with the first of Angelo Badalamenti’s haunting scores for Lynch. Once seen, never forgotten.

9. TREMORS (1990)

Fred Ward once again, here side-kicking Kevin Bacon in a perfectly pitched re-run of the kind of sci-fi schlockers that serially played on matinee double bills in the ’50s. The setting is a sand-blasted small town in Nevada, with Bacon and Ward as the hapless odd-job men happening upon giant, predatory worms out in the desert. Country queen Reba McEntire pops up in the support cast, and director Ron Underwood went on to shoot episodes of TV’s The Walking Dead. All concerned manage to keep things scary-intense but with tongues firmly in cheeks.

10.THE THING (1982)

Another monster movie, this one both fearful and relentlessly downbeat. Reuniting cult auteur John Carpenter with his leading man Kurt Russell, a year on from their teaming up in the magnificent Escape From New York, The Thing, a loose remake of a 1951 pulp, The Thing From Another World, pitches the crew of an Antarctic research station against a pitiless, shape-shifting alien being. Ennio Morricone’s score enhances the mood of dread terror. No-one here gets out alive.

11.BLOOD SIMPLE (1984)

Joel and Ethan Coen’s first movie together as writer, editor, director, a film noir in every sense. Dead-end Texan town barman John Getz is having an affair with boss Dan Hedaya’s wife, Frances McDormand. The cuckolded Hedaya finds out and pays sleazy P.I. M. Emmett Walsh $10,000 to kill them both. Double-crossing and dreadful death-by-burying-alive ensues.

12.ONE FALSE MOVE (1992)

In the very same crime-noir vein is this, mighty Carl Franklyn directing a cracking script by Billy Bob Thornton and his now regular collaborator, Tom Epperson. Thornton himself plays heartless, crazed Ray, gang-leading accomplices Fantasia (Cynthia Williams) and Pluto (Michael Beach) through a murderous drug robbery and on the run to the South Arkansas smalltown where Bill Paxton is sheriff and from where Williams’ character fled. Secrets and blood spill out from there.

13.EL MARIACHI (1992)

Writer/director Robert Rodriguez scraped together $200,000 to shoot this neo-Western immorality play in the Mexican border town of Ciudad Acuna. Carlos Gallardo is the titular lead, a guitar case-toting drifter misidentified by the local crime lord and his army of sicarios. Essentially, it’s an 81-minute shoot-’em-up, but more so, an object exercise in high-octane, stripped-to-the-bone action moviemaking. Two top-notch sequels followed, Antonio Banderas stepping into Gallardo’s shoes.

14.WARRIORS (1979)

Writer/director Walter Hill’s first masterpiece, a breathless chase movie, with the Warriors gang, framed for the murder of another gang leader, attempting over the course of one night to make it back alive from the Bronx to their Coney Island turf, and with vengeful armies in pursuit. Hill ratchets up the sense of threat and menace, the violence is balletic, and goggle-eyed villain David Patrick Kelly gets to deliver the immortal line, “Warriors, warriors, come out to plaaaay.” Panned on release, but of course, it endures as a cult benchmark.

15.DUEL (1971)

Shot as an ABC TV ‘Movie Of The Week’, initially with a 74-minute running time, and subsequently given a fleeting cinema run at 90 minutes, the bare-essentials plot here has Dennis Weaver’s travelling salesman terrorised, for no given reason, by an unseen truck driver across a sun-scorched rural California landscape. Gripping and transfixing, its promising young director was one Steven Spielberg.

16.BRAZIL (1985)

The mere fact Terry Gilliam can’t beg the funds to make his movies should shame Hollywood. A genuine visionary, Gilliam here ignites an Orwellian, dystopian sci-fi black comedy with typical panache and flair. Jonathan Pryce is downtrodden bureaucrat drone Sam Lowry, kicking against the system and pursuing the woman of his dreams. Robert De Niro, Bob Hoskins, Ian Holm, and Gilliam’s Monty Python-mate Michael Palin all cameo, Gilliam mounts a visual feast, and the ending pulls the rug from under us in a boldly shocking manner.

17.SOUTHERN COMFORT (1981)

Masterpiece number two from Walter Hill, another chase, this time it’s a band of hapless, foolhardy Louisiana National Guardsmen, on weekend manoeuvres in the bayou, fleeing their Cajun pursuers. Powers Boothe, Keith Carradine, Fred Ward, and Peter Coyote are among the guardsmen being hunted, and getting picked off one by one. A more brutal take on Deliverance, an inspiration for Schwarzenegger’s Predator, this is a slam-bang, white-knuckle ride.

18.ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13 (1976)

In which John Carpenter re-makes The Alamo, but in his hands with a shuttered police station under siege from a gun-toting criminal gang. Street cop Austin Stoker leads the defenders, aided and abetted by death-row con Darwin Joston and clerical secretary Laurie Zimmer. Out of this ruthlessly simple premise, and to his own pulsing score, Carpenter makes magic.

19.FROM DUSK TIL DAWN (1996)

Directed by Roberto Rodriguez, written by Quentin Tarantino, and an all-round blast. George Clooney and an ill-advisedly co-starring Tarantino are respectively Seth and mad Richie Gecko, murderous bank robbers fled to a border town bar, The Twitty Twister, gateway to Mexico, and with their hostages, preacher Harvey Keitel and his teenage kids (Juliette Lewis is the daughter) in tow. At start, it’s a standard criminals-on-the-run drama. Not so after Salma Hayak’s boggling snake dance, and when all hell breaks loose. Danny Trejo and Cheech Martin are among the transformative support cast.

20.MAD MAX (1979)

George Miller’s directing first, with a pre-meltdown Mel Gibson as Max Rockatansky, highway patrolman turned vigilante road warrior in a post-apocalyptic desert-scape. Shot in the Australian outback, without permits, this stands as a true ground breaker, spawning multiple sequels, an entire punk rock strain of sci-fi, and making a superstar out of Gibson, whose few words were dubbed for its 1980 American release.

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HE WAS BORN STEVEN Paul Smith, 6^th August 1969, in Omaha, Nebraska. Dad Gary was a Vietnam vet, mom Bunny a teacher. They divorced in 1970. Gary moved up to Portland and started a psychiatric practice. Bunny went back her native Texas, taking her baby boy with her, and where, in 1973, she was married again to a church-going travelling salesman, Charlie Welch.

Growing up in the Dallas suburb of Duncanville, young Steven became fixated on music. He dug The Beatles most of all, but Led Zeppelin, Rush, Pink Floyd, and AC/DC, too. Dad Gary bought him an acoustic guitar for his 12^th birthday, and he started played in school bands. All along, he took the act of making music more seriously, more devoutly than just about everyone else he happened across. Also, he had a difficult, fractious and, ultimately for him, ruinous relationship with his stepfather.

At 14, he bailed on Duncanville, upped and went to live with his dad and his new family in Portland. Passed through high school there, went off to college, where he changed his name to Elliott, and came back and formed his first proper band, Heatmiser. It was 1991, Nirvana was happening, and a local Portland label, Cavity Search, put out Heatmiser’s initial spiky alt-rock singles.

They went on and made a couple of decent albums, but all the while, Elliott Smith was writing his own songs. Just him, an acoustic guitar, putting to tape on an eight-track in his basement. They were heart-stopping, heartbreakingly good.

Eventually, inevitably, Elliott got around to making his own records. The first, Roman Candle, in 1994, also for Cavity Search. His self-titled second the year following for a bigger indie label, Kill Rock Stars, and by when he’d gotten himself a manager, Margaret Mittleman, the guiding hand to Beck’s ascent.

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THOSE ARE THE BASIC facts of Elliott Smith’s formative years as a songwriter and musician. They’re well established. So is his story from there to the end, its triumph and its tragedy.

If you know this much, you’ll know as well how Elliott Smith was more, so very much more, than basic facts. He was a precious kind of artist, truly touched by something other… genius, a higher power, call it what you will, but entirely out of the ordinary.

I wrote a book about him. The most wrenchingly difficult one I’ve done, but then again, one I found working on to be deeply, and profoundly, affecting. Elliott’s all too short life is painful to look into, to study. The easiest thing to do is to frame him as the quintessential ‘doomed artist’, a reductive cliché. I don’t believe I did that, and if not, thanks in greatest part to the many of Elliott’s friends and collaborators who were generous and trusting enough to share with me their memories and perspectives of him.

Out of all of it, above all else, my regard for Elliott as an artist only grew. He wasn’t just great, he was generational. Miracles at his fingertips. Not only the finest, most blessed songwriter of his era, but among the all-timers, and then some. Perhaps no-one can cope with channelling such heavy magic.

WHAT FOLLOWS IS AN extract from my book, Shooting Star. It’s the New Year of 1996 by now. Heatmiser are still a going concern, but barely, disconnectedly, and not for much longer. Margaret Mittleman has negotiated Elliott a solo publishing deal with BMG, one that will advance him money for each of his own records and set against their future sales. The first cheque he gets is for around $25,000, enough to free him from having to do labouring jobs around Portland and for him to consider himself a professional musician for the first time.

He’s working on two records at once. One is Heatmiser’s last, Mic City Sons, with Mittleman’s husband, Rob Schnapf, and partner Tom Rothrock producing. Previously, Schnapf and Rothrock had steered Beck’s breakthrough album, Mellow Gold from 1994. Schnapf and Rothrock will also be involved in the other one. The one that will herald Elliott Smith’s arrival as a major, singular talent…

SMITH WAS NOW ABLE to devote all of his energies to making music, and most of his waking hours were filled up with writing songs. He was running just to keep up with capturing them to tape. Some he put down on eight-track in his basement, others he demoed over at his on-off girlfriend Joanna Bolme’s place.

A big, amiable bear of a man, Larry Crane hailed from Chico, California, where he’d served as bassist for a band named Vomit Launch. He had moved up to Portland a couple of years earlier and opened his own studio in the basement of his house. Laundry Rules Recording was so-called because Crane kept a washer and drier behind his console board. On the sheetrock of the wall above them, there remained a past tenant’s handwritten instructions for their operations.

Having befriended Joanna Bolme at their local bar, La Luna, Crane invited her over to a barbeque party he was throwing in his backyard. Smith tagged along and Bolme introduced him to Crane. Smith asked his host if he could drop by another day to wrap up a song he was working on, ‘Pictures of Me’. Crane’s set-up was a simple one. He had the exact same Tascam 38 eight-track as Smith and a couple of half-decent mics.

Crane’s basement was dank and prone to flooding, but Smith was in his element there. He opened out the song working on it at Crane’s, layering onto it six vocal tracks and also a subtle but prodding organ part.

“My first impression of Elliott was he was quiet, but his attention to the detail of how to make records was finely tuned,” says Crane. “You didn’t have to guide him on the basics.

“The two of us became friends in the studio, but it was a slow build. One of the first things he said to me when we started off tracking was, ‘This might not work, I might butt heads with you.’ Elliott had strong opinions as a musician, absolutely he did. But in his whole life – his personal life, his professional life, everything – to a fault, he was always trying to be inoffensive, to not cause waves or be a bother to anybody.

“Even when he should’ve been speaking up and telling people what he wanted. It was a very frustrating aspect of his personality.”

All the while, the deluge of songs kept coming. By Crane’s estimation, Smith filled up six 30-minute reels of tape with his new music. These weren’t sketchy demos either, but complete takes made up of Smith’s doubled lead vocals, acoustic guitar, piano and drum parts. Furthermore, the depth of quality was remarkable. Within this abundance of material, there was nothing tossed off, no makeweights or filler.

In September, Smith broke off to go on tour once more. On this occasion, he was back to being the warm-up act and for a bunch of shows with Sebadoh. In general, their audiences carried on talking throughout Smith’s sets, but he won small victories, too. Each night, there was a few more people gathering at the front of the stage just to be able to hear him play.

“Those were some of my favourite times to see Elliott play,” says Dorien Garry, managing Smith’s press for the tour. “He seemed to genuinely enjoy performing back in those days. He would laugh so much. He would interact with the audience. He was in a special moment of not being freaked out or burnt out. He wasn’t yet rattled by the whole machine.”

WHEN IT CAME TO assembling his next record, Smith went back into Rob Schnapf’s and Tom Rock’s California studio, The Shop. There, Smith and his two producers endured a sometimes-tortuous process of re-recording songs and editing the material on Smith’s six tape reels down to a 12-track album. Smith passed from agonising over multiple choices to suffering a full-blown crisis of confidence about the songs themselves. It fell to the two producers to soothe and manage Smith over the line.

At The Shop, Smith also recorded yet three more new songs from scratch. The first, ‘Angeles’, was woven with intricate, finger-picked patterns. Afterwards, he claimed to have written the other two – ‘Between the Bars’, two minutes 20 seconds of bereft, but unbridled marvel, and ‘Say Yes’, bittersweet, ephemeral, and composed for Bolme – back-to-back, in a matter of minutes, and as he was watching an episode of Xena: Warrior Princess on TV with the sound muted.

Both songs made it onto the completed record. Altogether, Either/Or runs to 37 minutes dead. Not a second or note is wasted. Quiet, restrained for the most part, the songs are bruised and all too revealing. It stands as a mighty monument to Smith’s extraordinary gift and at the very point it was fully maturing.

“That record’s real,” says Schnapf. “It’s not like some studio construct. Those are actual performances. He’s singing it. He’s playing guitar. He’s doing it live, in the moment, and yes, it sounds amazing and undeniable.

“On Either/Or also, he didn’t have outsiders blowing smoke up his ass just yet. Part of what drove him was not knowing how good he was. That would have made him settle.”

“I wasn’t interested in what anyone else had to say, I felt it in my gut,” recalls Margaret Mittleman of hearing the finished record for the first time. “Did I think it would connect with people? I wasn’t sure. But I knew it was special and pure and brilliant. It was life changing.”

FOLLOWING ITS RELEASE IN February 1997, slowly but surely, Either/Or began to pick up praise and then to sell, much better than either of Smith’s two previous records had ever done. At the outset of touring it, he was booked two months of coast-to-coast dates, starting at a club up in Seattle, Velvet Elvis, on 26^th March.

Accompanying him on the road was a fellow singer-songwriter, Bill Santen, opening the shows, and tour manager Dan Mapp who drove them from place to place in a Ford Taurus rental car. A native of Philadelphia, Mapp made an instant, striking impression, towering at well over six foot and taciturn to the point of near-monastic silence.

Even on the longest drives, Mapp barely spoke a word to Smith, much less to Santen, and not one that wasn’t connected to their business at hand. He banned both of them from smoking in the car and operated a strict time-keeping regime. Mapp also sold Smith’s merchandise, ran his sound, and cracked the whip, collecting the nightly $250 fee Smith was guaranteed for each show.

“I was getting paid $50 to $100 per show, depending on the venue,” says Santen. “And Elliott often tried to overpay me out of his fee. Whenever he did that, Dan would go and have ‘the talk’ with Elliott.”

The earliest dates on the tour were sparsely attended, as low as a mere 15 souls for one show and not much more than 30 for the rest. Smith’s mood corresponded. Steadily, though, the tour picked up steam. As word spread on Either/Or, the shows grew fuller, the audiences more attentive. Smith’s temper picked up accordingly.

After a gig in Boston, he struck up an ardent conversation with a petite brunette named Amity. He never was to share Amity’s surname, but he was certainly enraptured. Even though their whirlwind romance barely survived the tour, Smith was moved to write the rarest kind of his songs about her, which is to say one that was both exuberant-sounding and explicitly personal.

They arrived in New York on 13^th April. Smith was playing a couple of consecutive nights at a club down in the East Village, Brownies, opening for Mark Eitzel. Of all the dates on the tour, these two were the ones where it was most obvious how the environment was changing for him. Almost as soon as he began his set both nights, the room fell still and silent.

“He was sat up on the high stage at Brownies, and you could have heard a pin drop,” says Mittleman. “It was quite a moment. It was like, ‘You got here. They’re listening. You did it.’ It was transformative for him.”

“The New York elite were out in force those nights and Elliott slayed,” adds Schnapf. “When Margaret started working with Elliott, people would say to her, ‘Singer-songwriter? Eeuw!’ The term ‘singer-songwriter’ had this connotation from the 1970s, like it was old news and obsolete.

“Fast-forward to a year later and it was like, ‘Oh my God, have you heard of Elliott Smith? He’s brilliant.’ Nothing changed, but for people starting to show up and listen.”

The tour ran full circle and ended up back in Seattle. The final show was at the Crocodile Café on 16^th May. It was even more apparent by then how much more charged the air was getting to be around Smith. Reviews for Either/Or were gushing. Rather than having to chase them up, Dorien Garry was now beginning to field requests for interviews.

Margaret Mittleman was already lining Smith up for another tour in the summer. The demands on his time were growing almost by the day. He had more questions to answer, yet more decisions to make.

On the morning of Thursday, 22^nd May 1997, Smith flew to New York with as many of his clothes, books, and other belongings as he could cram into a duffel bag, together with his acoustic guitar. Never to return to Portland to live among his friends and family, he was bound for new adventures, but he wouldn’t ever find such safe harbour again.

Extracted from my book Shooting Star: The Definitive Story of Elliott Smith, published by Nine Eight Books and available to buy here: Shooting Star

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ONE OF, IF NOT the, enduring joys of the album as an art form is the matter of a magical word. Discovery. That moment you happen upon a song to make the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end. Sifting gold, striking oil.

In another time, we’d put on a record knowing already the singles preceding it. Today, it’s the tracks streamed, and shared, ahead of it across social media platforms. In respect of this list, those don’t count. This is about the songs sent out into the world in long-form, just waiting to be found and loved. The deep cuts.

Often as not they’re the ones tucked away in the middle or kept to the end of things. Sometimes, but not always the secret weapon on a great record. Then again, an otherwise humdrum album’s saving grace, or else a bolt from out of the blue.

All kinds are track listed, and playlisted, here below. Dive in…

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1. JOHN MELLENCAMP ‘We Are the People’ (The Lonesome Jubilee, 1987)

At the time, Mellencamp believed there was no better band in the world than his, and he might’ve been right. Across The Lonesome Jubilee, guitarists Mike Wanchic and Larry Crane, Toby Myers on bass, Kenny Aronoff on drums, keys man John Cascella, Lisa Germano on fiddle, back-up singers Crystal Taliefero and Pat Peterson, and the ‘Little Bastard’ himself mixed a stirring folk-rock brew. Nowhere so potently as on this urgent, seething proclamation, track six of ten, and the heart and soul of the whole.

2. R.E.M. ‘So Fast, So Numb’ (New Adventures in Hi-Fi, 1996)

Claiming inspiration from Neil Young’s Time Fades Away and with how Radiohead, in part, made The Bends, R.E.M. followed Monster with a record created on the road, at soundchecks, and in hotel rooms. Their tenth overall, New Adventures in Hi-Fi was their last to grasp at greatness, and perhaps still their most underrated. Track 12, ‘So Fast, So Numb’, strident, almost hurrying to get to its soaring chorus and the more thrilling because of it, also stands tall among their finest ever songs.

3. ELTON JOHN ‘Son of Your Father’ (Tumbleweed Connection, 1970)

Their third album together was their love letter to Americana, and specifically The Band’s wondrous Music From the Big Pink debut from not two years earlier, and in spite of the fact neither of Elton John nor his lyricist partner Bernie Taupin had even set foot in the US when they cut it in a poky corner of London’s Soho. Not that you’d know it from a dose of this righteous barn burner, Madeline Bell on back-ups, John’s great rhythm section, Dee Murray on bass, Nigel Olsson on drums, paired for the first time, and the main man such a force of sheer, unbridled talent.

4. THE BLACK CROWES ‘Virtue And Vice’ (By Your Side, 1999)

Drugs, sibling rivalry, and yet more drugs and sibling rivalry, had put the Crowes in a pickle by the time they got to making their fifth album. Guitarist Marc Ford had gotten fired, bassist Johnny Colt had quit, and their record company had rejected their first go at it. By Your Side generally came off as a by rote amalgamation of the Crowes’ core classic rock values. Effective, but somehow bloodless. With this one exception, a wrenching soul-rock set piece with fire and brimstone in its belly, sung by Chris Robinson as if his very life depended on it.

5. JENNY LEWIS ‘Dogwood’ (On the Line, 2019)

Jenny Lewis’ third album out of Rilo Kiley was produced by Beck and, just before his casting into the wilderness, one Ryan Adams, and found her backed by a stellar cast of musicians. Even still, Lewis shone brightest of all. Shimmeringly on this standout, rising from seductive verses to a heavenly chorus, Lewis on vocals and piano, lightning conductor to Adams on guitar, Don Was on bass, Benmont Tench on mellotron, and the mighty Jim Keltner on the drums.

6. EMMYLOU HARRIS ‘All My Tears’ (Wrecking Ball, 1995)

The first woman of nu-, alt-, and most other variations of Country, Emmylou Harris, in cahoots with producer Daniel Lanois, updated her acoustic-roots sound on Wrecking Ball to spectacular effect. As atmospheric, steamy-humid as Lanois’ New Orleans workplace, it found one of popular music’s great interpreters reinventing standards by the likes of Dylan, Neil Young, and Steve Earle. This tune by Nashville songwriter Julie Miller, though, stood out. A hushed, hymnal, apparition of a song, and with U2’s Larry Mullen Jr. guesting on the drums.

7. NEIL YOUNG ‘Crime in the City (Sixty to Zero Part 1)’ (Freedom, 1989)

Like so many of his fellow trailblazers, Young endured a difficult, inglorious 1980s up to the point of Freedom, a blazing return to form grandstanded by its monumental closing track, ‘Rocking in the Free World’. Much less heralded, track two, ‘Crime in the City…’, was just as captivating. Sprawling over 12 verses taken at a steamy shuffle, with Crazy Horse drummer Frank ‘Poncho’ Sampedro and crack session man Rick Rosas on bass laying down a mean beat, Ben Keith’s alto-sax wailing over the top, Young wrote it while brooding alone on his boat, sailing from San Francisco to Hawaii.

8. THE NATIONAL ‘Oblivions’ (I Am Easy to Find, 2019)

One of life’s little mysteries is why more people haven’t woken up to the fact The National made an actual masterpiece with I Am Easy to Find. A sad, spooked, darkly affecting one at that, and with Matt Berninger’s hangdog baritone raised up by a retinue of supporting singers, Sharon Van Etten and one-time Bowie foil Gail Ann Dorsey among them. On ‘Oblivions’, an utterly bereft, but beautiful document of ruined love, it’s French singer Mina Tindle, wife of the band’s Aaron Dessner, playing the female part. The combined effect is mesmerising.

9. THE VERVE ‘Weeping Willow’ (Urban Hymns, 1987)

Richard Ashcroft described ‘Weeping Willow’ as like Neil Young playing in Hell. If so, it’s a holy concept. As Ashcroft ring leads, the song sweeps to a crescendo, and then surges onwards, guitarist Nick McCabe playing up a storm. The subject is salvation – “There’ll be no better time, there’ll be no better way, there’ll be no better day to save me,” Ashcroft beseeches – and the whole is transcendent.

10. BOB DYLAN ‘Man in the Long Black Coat’ (Oh Mercy, 1989)

As with Neil Young, so with Bob Dylan, only his Bobness’s 1980s were even more wrought. Until, that is, Bono introduced him to U2’s producer, Dan Lanois again, and Dylan once more got hold of his bearings. Oh Mercy was so good the story of its making merited a fifth of Dylan’s excellent 2004 memoir, Chronicles: Volume One. This gothic-dark, narrative folk ballad is its spellbinding high. “Somebody said from the Bible he’d quote,” rock’s finest storyteller accounts in an ominous croak. “There’s dust on the man with the long black coat.”

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11.TOM PETTY & THE HEARTBREAKERS ‘Runaway Trains’ (Let Me Up (I’ve Had Enough), 1987)

After the arduous, meticulous process of piecing together 1985’s Southern Accents, for this follow-up Petty and his right-hand man, guitarist and co-producer Mike Campbell, aimed at a looser, live-in-the-studio feel. A scrappy, uneven record came out of it, but with this stone-cold classic as its towering peak. Desolate but beautifully mounted, it’s as gloriously evocative as anything in Petty’s formidable cannon.

12.BECK ‘Country Down’ (Morning Phase, 2014)

Beck Hansen’s self-produced 12^th album is one of his very best, a 12-years-later companion piece to the also excellent Sea Change and with the same burnished golden age of California folk-rock feel to it. Tucked away, the slow burning ‘Country Down’, Beck backed by Joey Waronker on drums, the great Greg Leizsz’s pedal steel, and two Jellyfish men, Roger Manning and Jason Falkner, on keys and guitar respectively, an authentic slice of solid gold Americana.

13. THE ROLLING STONES ‘Thru and Thru’ (Voodoo Lounge, 1993)

Most all of the songs Tony Soprano tuned into in the dead of night to soothe, or else salve his diseased soul on The Sopranos were knockouts, this one no exception. Written and sung/phlegm-rattled by Keef, ‘Thru and Thru’ corralled classic Stones elements – Charlie Watts’ irresistible swing, Ronnie Woods’ and Richards’ own razoring guitars, ‘woo-ooh-ooh’ back-ups – into the masterful moment on an otherwise stupefied album. A ballad, but one with an internal motor, and the profound joy of hearing the Human Riff declare: “Cause now I got those fucking blues.”

14.PINK FLOYD ‘The Gunner’s Dream’ (The Final Cut, 1983)

Planned by Roger Waters as the soundtrack to Alan Parker’s 1982 movie version of his magnum opus The Wall, but turned into a stand-alone album, a ‘requiem on the post-war dream’ no less, at the prompting of The Falklands War, The Final Cut served to hammer the final nail into Floyd’s coffin. Waters ousted fellow founder member Richard Wright even before it and alienated both David Gilmour and Nick Mason during the course of it. The others moaned about his megalomania, but nothing the reformed Floyd went on to do without him even touched at the magisterial magnificence of ‘The Gunner’s Dream’, Waters railing to the bombastic splendour of the National Philharmonic, and another great Raph ‘Baker Street’ Ravenscroft sax solo.

15.FLORENCE + THE MACHINE ‘Morning Elvis’ (Dance Fever, 2022)

After the misstep of their fifth album, 2018’s High as Hope, Florence + The Machine recovered their mojo on their sixth. Much of it was euphorically epic, but Florence Welch is ever at her most compelling when she dials it down. As here, channelling Southern gothic soul to recall the time, desperately hungover, she missed a flight to Memphis with the band. There’s a profound sadness to it, a restorative power, too. “I just sweated it out in a hotel room,” Welch declares. “But I think the King would’ve understood.”

16.RADIOHEAD ‘Codex’ (The King of Limbs, 2011)

The black sheep of Radiohead albums, at eight songs and a mere 37 minutes, The King of Limbs seemed slight, but has proven to contain multitudes. ‘Codex’, track six, is emblematic. Made up of just two verses, yet one of the great Radiohead ballads, if not the great one. Ambient, affecting, translucent, and with an air of otherworldly mystery. “Jump off the end,” Thom Yorke intones. “Into a clear lake. No one around. Just dragonflies.”

17.ELLIOTT SMITH ‘King’s Crossing’ (From a Basement on the Hill, 2003)

A truly generational talent, Smith laboured over his sixth album for more than three years, playing most every part himself, and until his demons at last got the better of him. He intended it as a double, but as was, his long serving/suffering ex-producer Rob Schnapf and former girlfriend Joanna Bolme rescued what they could from what he left behind and it came out posthumously, a year after his death, as a single set. Nevertheless, it was, and remains, startlingly fabulous. On it, Smith laid his struggles bare, and to a musical landscape of Beatles brilliance and Zeppelin power. Unfolding from out of a disconnected drone of sound, ‘King’s Crossing’ is awesome and harrowing all at once. “I can’t prepare for death any more than I already have,” Smith confesses. “Give me one good reason not to do it.” Having this, all this much at his beckoning, tragically just wasn’t enough.

18.DAVID GRAY ‘Nos De Cariad’ (Life in Slow Motion, 2005)

Serially, and unfairly, dismissed as a beige kind of singer-songwriter, in partnership with Madonna/Bjork/Massive Attack producer Marius de Vries, Gray’s seventh album was an exercise in master craftsmanship. Gray cited Sigur Ros, Sparklehorse, and Mercury Rev among the influencers on it, all of which made perfect sense with ‘Nos De Cariad’, its fourth and best track, the title Welsh for ‘Goodnight, my love,’ the song haunted and glorious.

19.MAGGIE ROGERS ‘The Kill’ (Don’t Forget Me, 2024)

For her terrific third album, and teamed with Kacey Musgraves collaborator Ian Fitchuk, Maggie Rogers recorded a song a day, in the chronological order they were written, at New York’s storied Electric Lady, tilting at a 1970s kind of soft-pop seduction. Not only did she hit that mark ten times over, with ‘The Kill’, an ache of unrequited love, she served up a song so compelling, Linda Ronstadt might once have picked it out. One line, “I couldn’t fill the shoes you laid down for me from the girls that came before,” Polaroid-vivid and hitting especially hard and true.

20.RED HOT CHILI PEPPERS ‘Wet Sand’ (Stadium Arcadium, 2006)

An excellent single album lumbered with the ballast of a double, the Chilis’ ninth was hubris writ large. Almost lost among the sheer weight of music, track 13 on the first, ‘Jupiter’ disc (‘Mars’ was the other one, but of course), was ‘Wet Sand’, 5:09 minutes of utter greatness. In large measure down to John Fruiscante, a miracle of a musician, cut loose here, and with that unmistakeable guitar of his soloing to the stars.

21.BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN ‘Moonlight Motel’ (Western Stars, 2019)

Arguably, The Boss has made his last two most timeless albums apart from the E Street Band. The Ghost of Tom Joad in 1995, and 24 years later, Western Stars. On the latter, he summoned a specific Cali-pop spirit from the 1970s, the kind of ornate, orchestral flourishing habitually shown off by Glen Campbell and Bacharach and David. To close it out, there was this, a lovely, windswept, melancholy ballad set to Jon Brion’s upright piano and, once more, Greg Leizsz’s weeping pedal steel. Who better than Springsteen evokes a lifespan with a single line? See here: “Now the pool’s filled with empty, eight-foot deep, got dandelions growing up through the concrete.”

22.THE HOLD STEADY ‘First Night’ (Boys and Girls in America, 2006)

And who better than The Hold Steady evokes the rousing spirit of Springsteen with the E Street Band and in their Born to Run through to The River pomp? On this, their third album, the Brooklyn band fashioned what could have been a lost E Street record from that era, and with ‘First Night’, the classic teenage-opera Springsteen never wrote.

23.STEVE EARLE ‘Johnny Come Lately’ (Copperhead Road, 1988)

The whole of Copperhead Road was bluegrass with a rocking boot put up its backside. One imagines the sessions at Ardent Studios in Memphis being hellfire, but as nothing compared to the London sortie that birthed ‘Johnny Come Lately’, a martial folk stomp pairing Earle with The Pogues. The outcome every bit as riotous as threatened.

24. FLEETWOOD MAC ‘Murrow Turning Over In His Grave’ (Say You Will, 2003)

The classic Mac line-up’s last hurrah, Say You Will is a pretty damned good record, and with this one extraordinary outburst. Written by the outrageously gifted Lindsay Buckingham in the wake of the O.J. Simpson trial, despairing at the shallowing of the broadcast media, it came on like a rageful, even more envelope-pushing outtake from off of Tusk, and with Buckingham wreaking a kind of havoc with his strafing guitar. Soft pop? Not a bit of it.

25.U2 ‘Breathe’ (No Line On the Horizon, 2009)

U2 intended to make their 12th album with Rick Rubin producing and in 2006 even began the sessions for it with him. In the event, No Line On the Horizon emerged going on three years afterwards absent of Rubin’s hand but with Brian Eno, Daniel Lanois, and Steve Lillywhite all contributing and sounding like a hotch-potch committee meeting. ‘Breathe’ was an indicator of what might have been. Edge wrote its bowdlerising riff after filming the It Might Get Loud doc along with Jimmy Page and Jack White. Later that same year, I played it for Rubin at his home in Malibu. It caused him to leap from off of his sofa and proclaim, “Oh man, this is fucking great!” As so often, the beardy one’s judgement was well founded.

Listen to all of these deep dive treasures on the playlist at the link:

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TUESDAY 14^TH APRIL 1982 is a significant date in music history. This being the day Michael Jackson, together with uber-producer Quincy Jones, set to making what would be his sixth solo album, Thriller. The venue was Westlake Studios in West Hollywood, the same room Jackson and Jones had used for their previous collaboration, Off the Wall in 1979, a multi-platinum hit marking Jackson’s arrival in the upper echelon of the superstar firmament.

There was one song slated for this first session. The track destined to be Thriller’s lead-off single, ‘The Girl is Mine’. Jones had summoned a crack group of session players for the occasion, his most trusted regulars. Greg Phillinganes on the Rhodes, guitarist Dean Parks, bassist Lois Johnson. A fellow producer, David Foster, on synths, and four members of the rock band Toto, guitarist Steve Lukather, David Paich on piano, Steve Porcaro also on synths, and elder brother Jeff Porcaro on the drums.

Leaving just the one other contributor scheduled to appear that day, a certain Paul McCartney, Jackson’s duet partner on the song. In fact, McCartney and Jackson arrived at Westlake mere minutes apart and accompanied by a veritable cavalcade of other folks. First up Jackson, trailed by a camera crew, and along with Dick Clark, the buttoned-up host of TV’s American Bandstand, and an assortment of child actors, one of whom, Emmanuel Lewis, cherubic future sitcom star, Jackson was holding aloft in his arms.

Behind them came McCartney, and joining him his wife Linda, and George Martin and Geoff Emerick, respectively The Beatles’ trusted producer and engineer. “A truly surreal scene,” as Steve Lukather described it to me.

“The amount of security that day at Westlake was also insane,” Lukather continued. “This wasn’t much more than two years since John Lennon had been shot, and according to Quincy, McCartney was very nervous about meeting new people. At some point beforehand, we’d all had to be vetted.”

By way of easing into things, Paich struck up Stevie Wonder’s Motown standard, ‘Signed, Sealed, Delivered’, on his piano. Almost at once, the rest of the musicians slipped into the song’s easy groove behind him, and following them, first Jackson and then McCartney took up the vocal.

“It was a pinch-me moment,” Paich recalled. “Paul was doing a kind of blue-eyed soul, R&B thing. Michael tore into his part. He was spinning and dancing while he was singing. They were killing it. It was unbelievable.”

“You saw the whole control room light up,” Lukather added. “And man, it was roasting in the ’phones. I think I pooped myself. Just a little nugget, a turtle head at least.”

After that, McCartney visibly relaxed and the assembled duly breezed through ‘The Girl is Mine’ in a handful of passes. Afterwards, Lukather, Paich, and Jeff Porcaro retired to an adjoining room and sparked up a joint. Within moments, they found themselves joined by both Paul and Linda McCartney. Flinging open the door, the erstwhile Beatle stopped in his tracks, sniffed the air in an exaggerated fashion, and declared, “I smell musicians!”

Ironically, the three Toto men had been doing the exact same thing the very first time they heard ‘The Girl is Mine’. They were gathered then at Porcaro’s house and to where Quincy Jones had couriered a cassette containing a skeletal version of the song. Porcaro put the tape on for them, their rapt mood changing at the precise point of the first chorus, and with Jackson emoting, “The doggone girl is mine.”

“Well, we just fell about the floor laughing,” said Lukather. “We were, like, ‘Are they kidding? Is this a joke? The doggone girl is mine?’ We’d been expecting something funky, like Michael had done on Off the Wall, but here was this cheesy little pop song instead. Of course, it ended up being a huge hit, so what did we know?”

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THERE WAS A LULL of four months in between the session with McCartney and the next one at Westlake and allowing for Jones finishing up on a Donna Summer record. It was August when they resumed, high summer in Los Angeles. Jones was keen to put down one of the pivotal tracks on the album. The one he strategized would cross Jackson over into a whole other market, which is to say, white rock fans.

‘Beat It’ started out no differently to most all of Jackson’s songs. Jackson didn’t actually play an instrument, the most rudimentary keyboards aside, but he heard whole songs, words, melodies, hook lines, in his head. He would sing them to tape, scatting the words, beating out a rhythm with his hands on a wood box, and singing all the other imagined instrumental parts. This much Jackson and Jones would present to their musicians, batons for them to pick up and run with.

In the case of ‘Beat It’, and looking for a stellar guitar solo to grandstand it apart, Jones had sent Jackson’s scratch tape to Eddie Van Halen. Working with his band’s regular engineer, Don Landee, Van Halen laid down a typically dazzling part, but which also presented Jones with a technical headache.

“Landee had cut Eddie’s part on a two-inch tape,” Lukather explained to me. “And the SMPTE code on their tape didn’t sync to Quincy’s master tape. So he called Jeff and me and asked us to fix it with his engineer, Humberto Gatica.”

Porcaro went first, laying down a click-track with his drumsticks, timed to Jackson’s hand-beats on his box. He nailed it in two takes and in so doing gave Lukather something solid to play to. Lukather proceeded to cut rhythm guitar and bass parts, overdubbing his guitar onto four separate tracks through a double stack of Marshall amps.

“I sent what I’d done back to Quincy, and he said he thought it was fantastic, but too rock,” said Lukather. “He told me, ‘I’ve got to get this song to crossover to pop and R&B radio, too. Do the same thing again but use one of your little Fender amps this time.’”

That done, Jones paired Lukather with Jackson to complete the main riff. Jackson hummed the four-bar part he envisaged driving through the song. Lukather felt this would get monotonous over the song’s span of four minutes and suggested a change-up. He came up with it on the spot. Jackson’s duh-duh-duh-duh going into duh-da-duh-da, in strictly layman’s terms.

“So that it became an eight-bar phrase,” Lukather expanded. “In the studio, Michael’s body language said a lot. Whenever he got excited about something, he’d start to dance, do that Michael Jackson thing, and you would know you were onto something good.

“Soon as I played that change-up for him, he began to move. So I knew it was right in the pocket.”

THE WORK AT WESTLAKE went on through to that November. Up to the wire. Seeking another specific kind of song, something more seductive, Jones lucked into a tune Steve Porcaro had originally prepped for Toto. The band had set Porcaro’s demo tape of ‘Human Nature’ to one side, and pretty much forgotten about it. Jones had Lukather put a new guitar part onto it as well, got right up in his face in the studio and instructed him, “Come on! Make this funky for me!”

As noted, the rest is history. Thriller was released with a fanfare on 29^th November 1982. For all the darker, troubling, tragic aspects of Jackson’s life in general, it irrefutably, and forever, stands as a monument to sheer pop perfection, and to his unutterable genius. ‘Beat It’, the third single to be lifted from it, went to Number One in the US.

Then and now, in the broader sense ‘Beat It’ did exactly what Jones intended all along. Stopped you, me, everyone that heard it in our and their tracks. Not so much a song as a lightning bolt from the heavens, elemental and extraordinary sounding.

“I have one particular snapshot from Thriller,” David Paich shared with me. “Me sitting in a room with Michael, just the two of us, and he wanted me to play some synth on ‘Billie Jean’. Working with Michael, and Quincy, it was magical. I can’t say that it wasn’t.”

“For my part, I knew all along there was something special going on,” Lukather concluded. “The songs were great. When you have a roomful of cats with that level of musicianship, magic can always happen.

“Now, I’m not saying I foresaw it would be the biggest selling album ever, but it was a great honour to be the house band for that record. Those are our hands on the big hits.”

For more on Toto’s part in the making of Thriller, see my current book, Raised On Radio: Power Ballads, Cocaine & Payola – The AOR Glory Years 1976-1976: Raised on Radio And Steve Lukather’s terrific memoir, The Gospel According To Luke: The Gospel According To...

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SEPTEMBER 1976, AND BRIT prog-rockers Curved Air were playing a gig up in Newcastle. Their American drummer, Stewart Copeland, happened to fall into conversation with the bassist/singer of their local support act, Last Exit. A moonlighting English teacher, Gordon Sumner was better known to the rest of his group as Sting on account of the black-and-yellow striped jumper he all too often wore. Three months later, Sting moved to London and set about forming a new group with Copeland. Within six more years, it had become the biggest band in the world.

Originally, The Police three-piece was completed by a barely competent Corsican guitarist, Henry Padovani. To earn themselves some money, both Sting and Copeland also jumped at the chance to back up the former Gong man Mike Howlett in his latest sortie into space-rock, Strontium 90. Lead guitarist in Howlett’s collective was the infinitely more able Andy Summers.

The better part of ten years their senior, the classically trained Summers had done session work for Joan Armatrading, David Essex, and even the eminence grise of easy listening, Neil Sedaka (“Great fun, and he could play the shit out of the piano…”). After Strontium 90 dissolved, Sting persuaded Summers to throw in his lot as second guitarist with The Police. By then, punk rock was bubbling up on the London circuit, and The Police played their first couple of gigs together masquerading as nascent punks.

“Stewart was very intent on being punk,” Summers recalled to me three years ago now. He was speaking over the phone from his home in Los Angeles, a spry 80-years-old, curmudgeonly to start with but soon warming to the subject of his once great band. “Sting and Stewart were both pretty rough players,” he continued, “whereas I was too educated for punk rock. Too good for it. On another planet. It was very fast and a bit out of time, but I kept going with it. I felt there was something there.”

In short order, the hapless Padovani got given the boot, Copeland’s elder brother, Miles, took on The Police’s management, and Sting stepped up as their chief songwriter. He’d already written a version of ‘Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic’ by then. Seeking an opinion, he’d handed a sketchy version of it on a cassette tape over to Howlett, who in turn had played it for Summers.

“I thought it was rubbish,” Summers opined.

He had a more positive, visceral reaction to one of Sting’s next batch of songs. ‘Visions of the Night’ had an edge to it, he considered. It was energetic still but moving towards being its own thing.

“I found it exciting,” Summers said. He also believed he’d played the decisive role in releasing his new bandmate’s untapped potential.

“I saved the band’s life,” he stated. “Basically, Sting came to life when I joined. All the songs started to come out.

“The natural ability he had could be released through me. It never would have happened with Henry. Wasn’t possible.”

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THE POLICE BEGAN THE New Year of 1978 gathered in a poky studio above a dairy in the town of Leatherhead, Surrey, not much more than 20 miles drive out of London. There to make their first album, Outlandos d’Amour. Miles Copeland put up the £1,500 it would cost. Their designated producer, John Cale, once of the Velvet Underground, turned up, said Summers, “drunk out of his mind. Hopeless. Nothing came of it. I think he pissed off after about half an hour.”

Forced into self-producing, they got the record done at intermittent intervals over the next six months. Ten mostly short, sharp songs. Four of them knockouts. ‘So Lonely’, ‘Can’t Stand Losing You’, ‘Truth Hits Everybody’, and the one A&M Records signed them on the strength of, ‘Roxanne’.

Even still, The Police were a slow burn. The album barely made a ripple when it first came out in November of that year. It took six more months, and the rerelease of both ‘Roxanne’ and ‘Can’t Stand Losing You’ for them to lift off. They undertook their breakthrough 1979 tour of the US cooped in a Ford transit van. Hard miles.

“I learned that I was working with two total arseholes,” said Summers. “I struggled on. It’s usually humour that saves the day. You kind of bond through travel. We weren’t fighting for 500 miles. It would mostly be irony, shit food, and trying to sleep.”

Their next three albums all went to Number One in the UK. Each of them well-stocked with Sting hits. Regatta de Blanc in October of 1979 (‘Message in a Bottle’, ‘Walking on the Moon’). Then Zenyatta Mondatta the year following (‘Don’t Stand So Close to Me’, ‘De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da’), and Ghost in the Machine in 1981 (‘Spirits in the Material World’, a matured, not at all rubbish ‘Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic’). The pace they kept up was relentless, brutal. They were, said Summers, “always on tour.

“We never stopped. We were making a lot of money, so the manager never wanted us to rest. It was exhilarating and wonderful, and exhausting. It’s a very hard thing to balance. There’s the shadow side to it. I was married, and we had a baby. We got divorced. Same with Sting and Stewart. They both got divorced, too. Proper partnerships and marriages don’t go with a band at the fantastical point we were at.”

THEIR FIFTH ALBUM WAS their peak, and their last one, too. Recorded in rural Quebec, Canada and on the Caribbean island of Montserrat, Synchronicity served up grown-up pop songs such as ‘Walking In Your Footsteps’ and ‘King of Pain’, and their everlasting standard, ‘Every Breath You Take’. A US Number One, it went on to sell over 15 million copies.

It was as well a nightmare to eke out. Relations between the three principals had gotten so strained, they’d had to put down their tracks at AIR Studios on Montserrat from three entirely separate rooms. They supported the album with a stadium tour of North America, a 70,000 sell-out at Shea Stadium included. Though Sting was already touting his jazzy solo album, The Dream of the Blue Turtles, they reconvened in London in the summer of 1986, meaning to begin work on a new Police record.

“That was a complete fuck up,” Summers ventured. “Everyone was desperate for us to get together again. Sting was off on his own. We were going to have a trial run at a studio in North London, and Stewart went out on a horse the day before we started. He was playing polo in those days. Anyway, he fell off the horse, broke his collar bone, and couldn’t play the drums.

“And Sting didn’t want to write new songs. So all we did was a wanky new version of ‘Don’t Stand So Close to Me’. It was a pretty limp affair, and that was the end of it. A huge sense of loss. After all the noise and adulation, suddenly it’s not there anymore.”

EXCEPT IT WASN’T THE end for The Police, not quite. Each of them turned to doing their own things, solo records, and film scores. Summers remarried his ex-wife Kate, “four years later, once the insanity was all over.” In 2003, their former band was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Four years later, they were reunited onstage as The Police. The 11^th February 2007, to be precise, the star performing attraction at that year’s Grammy Awards ceremony at the Staples Centre in LA.

The Police Reunion Tour opened with a brace of shows in Vancouver, Canada that May. In the August, I caught them at Madison Square Garden, and then just over the Hudson River at Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey, playing to a 55,000 crowd. Onstage, they sounded rejuvenated. The intangible alchemy between them just as potent as ever.

Offstage, it appeared a different story. Each of them had a different manager. They arrived at the gigs in the same people carrier, but backstage gossip had it they were picked up on route at separate points and otherwise barely saw or had anything much to do with each other.

Ultimately, the tour ran for over a year. The third highest grossing of all-time at its end. Yet, by the time of the final date, back at Madison Square Garden, 7^th August 2008, they were as far apart as ever. They haven’t played together since.

“If it was up to me, I wouldn’t have let it go,” Summers insisted. “It’s an interesting subject and to do with fragility, frailty, ego, and all that. I thought we could have gone on and played for years. It’s sad. We could have done more, but it wasn’t to be. One of the greatest bands of all-time got short shrift, I’m afraid to say.”

What’s left to history are all of those songs. ‘Every Breath You Take’ with three and a half billion streams on Spotify. ‘Message in a Bottle’, over a billion. Those, and so many of the rest, unforgettable, indelible.

“That’s why it’s one of the greatest bands in history,” Summers appraised me. “The songs won’t go away, and they were made because of the chemistry that existed between the three of us. There’s no way you can duplicate that. Of course, it’s been said five million times over. ‘We could have done that.’ Well, you couldn’t, and you didn’t.

“The Police was a one-off. If one guy had disappeared from the three, it wouldn’t have happened. Take ‘Every Breath You Take’. God, it wasn’t even going to go on Synchronicity until I put that guitar part on it.”

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DYLAN STIRRING HIS ‘THIN wild mercury sound’. Lennon and McCartney sat knee to knee in one another’s teenage bedrooms trading licks and sing-song melodies. Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, and Leonard Cohen come down from Canada to make kinds of magic in Laurel Canyon. Brian Wilson in his sandpit. The ideal of the maverick singer-songwriter beating their own particular path, the landscapes they fashion and tend to along the way, has spoken to the power of unbound creativity for more than 60 years now.

The torch passing on through those such as James Taylor and Carly Simon, Tom Waits and Randy Newman, from Warren Zevon to Kate Bush, up to poor, doomed Jeff Buckley and Elliott Smith, and on again with, say, Fiona Apple, Feist, and St Vincent. Blessed, exceptional artists, ever able to pluck from out of the ether, and channel, sounds unheard by, inaccessible to the rest of us mere mortals. And in that same spirit, also boundlessly careering and vaulting through this millennium, there is each of this magnificent seven…

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1. PETE YORN Musicforthemorningafter (2001)

Recorded in his producer R. Watt Vincent’s Los Angeles garage over the course of a year, New Jersey native Yorn’s debut album struck an appealing balance between decorative West Coast pop and lo-fi indie-rock. On standouts like ‘Life on a Chain’, opening the record with the sound of a needle being dropped onto crackling vinyl, rock classicism worn on its sleeve, and the woozy, narcoleptic shuffle of ‘Lose You’, Yorn charted the very scenic course suggested by the spread of artists he was apt to cover, namely Bowie, Springsteen, and The Smiths. All at once, rugged, ranging, and soaring.

Either of ‘Strange Condition’ or ‘Just Another’, bittersweet and Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love-style cinematic both, should have given him a signature hit. As was, Musicfor… peaked at 111 on Billboard’s Hot 200.

2. JOSEPH ARTHUR Our Shadows Will Remain (2004)

Signed to Peter Gabriel’s Real World label, Arthur began writing this, his fourth album, off the back of a tour with Tracy Chapman and in the midst of battling his own demons and addictions. Recorded variously in New York, New Orleans, London, and Prague, it remains one of the great overlooked records of the noughties. A soulful, soul-baring document populated with songs just as liable to swoon seductively as crunch dramatically.

Epitomised by ‘I Can’t Exist’ and ‘Even Tho’, one of three tracks coloured by the strings of the City of Prague Philharmonic, and with Arthur declaring, “Gone, baby, even though I’m here you know I’m already gone,” each of which ebbs and soothes and drives along. ‘Stumble and Pain’ is all eruptive shifts, ‘Puppets’ imagines The Strokes wrestling with Paul Simon, ‘A Smile That Explodes’ and ‘Leave Us Alone’ are lovely and shattering, too.

3. AIMEE MANN @#%&*! Smilers (2008)

Virginia-born, Berklee School of Music dropout Mann progressed from fleeting success with New Wave band Til Tuesday to soundtracking the aforementioned Paul Thomas Anderson’s 1999 ensemble movie Magnolia as a solo artist. By the time of the latter, Mann was also one of the regular performers at LA’s boho-cool singer-songwriter hangout Largo (see also Elliott Smith, Fiona Apple, and master of ceremonies Jon Brion).

This, her seventh album, mixed intricate pop-rock (‘Freeway’, ‘Borrowed Time’) with pristinely appointed balladry (‘Phoenix’, ‘Little Tornado’, upon which author Dave Eggers whistles), adhering throughout to the ever-consistent Rule of Mann, meaning it’s altogether beautifully crafted and effortless sounding.

4. JACOB GOLDEN Revenge Songs (2007)

Given he hails from Portland, Oregon, Golden’s clear thrall to Elliott Smith should have come as no surprise. What does strike is both how evocative he is of the prodigious Smith, and also the degree to which he used him as his leaping off point throughout Revenge Songs, his second record. Golden managed, too, to fashion an atmosphere of his own, recording in underground carparks and concrete-walled art galleries around his city, ‘found’ sounds such as the ambulance siren wailing in the background of ‘Zero Integrity’ enhancing the general mood of spectral dislocation.

There are great songs here as well. In particular the especially Smith-esque ‘On a Saturday’, soundtrack pick for a season finale of teen-soap The O.C., the lovely ‘Shine a Light’, and ‘Out Come the Wolves’, urgent and billowing. Golden doesn’t appear to have made an album since, and more’s the pity.

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5. RON SEXSMITH Long Player, Late Bloomer (2011)

Canada’s Juno Songwriter of the Year for 2005, the eternally cherubic Sexsmith has had his songs covered by the likes of Elvis Costello, Rod Stewart, Feist, k.d. lang, and, um, Michael Buble. Small wonder, since he guarantees an affectingly sophisticated brand of adult pop.

Long Player, Late Bloomer, his 12^th album, was very likely meant as his big breakthrough, since it was produced by stadium rock overlord Bob Rock (Metallica, Motley Crue). It turned out to be no such thing, but credit Rock with steering clear of bombast and rather allowing Sexsmith’s finely brocaded songs the room to breathe. ‘Believe It When I See It’, ‘Eye Candy’, and much of the rest echoes the best of Ray Davies with The Kinks. Yes, that good. Ultimately, it didn’t chart but got bags of acclaim, same as it’s ever been for Sexsmith.

6. BASIA BULAT Heart Of My Own (2010)

A measure of Bulat’s manifest gifts is that it’s equally as easy to imagine her become a next generation Joni as an Emmylou Harris, or a Kate Bush. On this second album, produced by erstwhile Arcade Fire drummer Howard Bilerman and released via Montreal indie Secret City Records, the Ontarian from a Polish family handled trad-folk as an entirely malleable, progressive form fit to her frankly remarkable voice. To mesmerising effect on ‘Go On’, gathering like a storm, unfolding with a liquid consistency, and the magnificent title track.

Elsewhere, the waltz-time ‘Run’, stately ‘Gold Rush’, and heart-stopping ‘I’m Forgetting Everyone’ combine to evoke a sense of being travelled over a wild, windswept expanse of sheer wondrousness.

7. FIONN REGAN The End Of History (2006)

Another vaulting folkie, Regan was born to windswept wonder, or more precisely, in the County Wicklow town of Bray on Ireland’s east coast. This, his Mercury Prize-nominated debut album, set him at the vanguard of the British and Irish Nu Folk movement that also spawned Laura Marling, Johnny Flynn, Noah and the Whale, and, of course, Mumford and Sons.

Regan’s far more Marling than Mumford, which is to say, the music he makes is ethereal, mysterious, and as if beamed in from a mystical otherworld. As here with ‘Hunter’s Map’, ‘The Cowshed’, the glorious mini epic ‘Snowy Atlas Mountains’, and the whole deeper, darker undertow elicited by his lyrics – “My jumper is soaked in pig’s blood,” to quote just the last named of those songs.

Sample these seven superlative singer-songwriters on the playlist at the link:

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IT’S FEBRUARY 1979 AND Ritchie Blackmore and what’s left of his band Rainbow have journeyed to a French castle to make their fourth album. Chateau Pelly de Cornfeld is located on the border with Switzerland. The lovely lakeside city of Geneva is just a short drive away. From the grand old building’s windows, the view looks out to snow-capped Alpine peaks.

Very probably, Blackmore had other things occupying his mind just then than the idyll. For one thing, Rainbow was absent of a singer. Then again, they’d travelled to France without managing to have written a single new song for the record. The one they did have was a cover song Blackmore had brought along with him. A pop-rock confection, quite unlike anything previously bearing the Rainbow name, and titled ‘Since You Been Gone’.

Such had been the turbulent history of Rainbow to this point. Flouncing out of Deep Purple in 1975, Blackmore had essentially recruited one of their old support groups, Elf, to help him make his new one’s debut album, Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow. By the following year, only Elf’s singer, Ronnie James Dio, remained in the ranks, joined now by ex-Jeff Beck drummer Cozy Powell, a Scot, Jimmy Bain, on bass, and an American, Tony Carey, on keyboards.

Together, this line-up fashioned one of the titanic hard rock records of the era, Rising. Blackmore’s guitar pyrotechnics, Dio’s powerhouse voice, and the might of the Munich Philharmonic combined on its signature, eight minutes-plus epic, ‘Stargazer’. Even still, Blackmore bristled. Out went Bain and Carey, in respectively came Australian Bob Daisley and Canadian David Stone for 1978’s Long Live Rock ‘N’ Roll, a near-classic, six brilliant tracks, all muscle and melody, out of eight.

Of his experience working with the enigmatic Blackmore, Daisley told me, “I always found him to be a very aware person, intelligent, but he could be a bit quirky, and he didn’t suffer fools gladly or easily. I came to terms with the fact that it was Ritchie’s band, but I think Ronnie, more than anyone, had a problem with that fact.

BREAKING POINT FOR BLACKMORE and Dio arrived in October 1978. Blackmore had gathered yet another new Rainbow line-up in the verdant Connecticut town of Darien, where both he and Dio kept homes, to rehearse their next record. Stone was gone by then. Daisley, too. In their stead were an English keyboard player known to Powell, Don Airey, and Blackmore’s erstwhile Purple bandmate Roger Glover, a bassist but there as Rainbow’s freshly appointed producer.

Ever wilful, Blackmore it was who’d instigated Glover’s, and his friend Ian Gillan’s ruthless ousting from Purple five years previous. Glover had gone on to produce records for Scots rockers Nazareth and Elf. Enough for Blackmore to invite him back into his fold. For his part, Glover claimed not to hold a grudge.

“I thought, ‘Why not?’” he reasoned. “Ritchie was playing brilliantly and it was a good opportunity for me.”

Soon enough, Glover also found himself co-opted into playing bass in the band and after Blackmore had tried out, and dismissed, two other musicians for the role, Jack Green, ex-Pretty Things and a friend of his, and Clive Chaman, who’d been with Powell in Beck’s group. In all other regards, the sessions were catastrophic. Blackmore was intent on steering Rainbow in a more radio-friendly direction. Dio resisted him at every turn.

A week went by with nothing very much getting done. By Glover’s description, one day after the next, Blackmore would lead his fellow musicians through the pieces of ideas he was working up and as Dio sat off in a corner, absently scribbling in his notebook, or else staring off into space, but hardly bothering to sing. One particular evening, Blackmore summoned Glover over to his house. He had a tape of a new scrap of a song he wanted delivering to Dio for his consideration. Glover obliged him.

“I went on over to Ronnie’s and played him the tape,” he said. “He shrugged it off, and in return handed me a tape of his own he wanted me to play for Ritchie, whose reaction was just as dismissive. There was a huge gulf between them.”

Inevitably, Dio quit. So it was the latest incarnation of Rainbow came to find themselves in France a man down and seven songs short of an album.

BLACKMORE LIKED TO RECORD in castles. He’d angled to have Long Live Rock ‘N’ Roll made in another French one, Chateau d’Herouville, outside of Paris. Dating from the 13^th Century, Chateau Pelly de Cornfeld was reputedly haunted, also a hook for Blackmore. Its present owner was a Turkish-born international financier, Bernie Cornfeld. A colourful character, Cornfeld had dated both Audrey Hepburn and Dallas pin-up Victoria Principal and was just then about to stand trial in Switzerland on fraud charges.

They set up in the extravagantly appointed dining room with its stone walls, vaulted ceiling, and wooden beams. Jethro Tull’s mobile studio, hired for the occasion, parked up outside, leads and cables snaked through the open windows. In due course, they pulled together the required number of songs. Punchier, more streamlined offerings than those that had preceded them, and but for one throwback, ‘Eyes of the World’.

With Dio gone, Glover stepped up once more to becoming Blackmore’s co-writer and designated lyricist. Where Dio’s words occupied fantastical realms populated by dragons and wizards, Glover’s concerns were decidedly more earthbound. Witness ‘Makin’ Love’, ‘Lost in Hollywood’, and especially ‘All Night Long’, with its singularly ungallant proclamation, “Don’t know about your brain but you look alright.”

It was ‘Since You Been Gone’, though, that was the most emblematic of the musical volte-face Blackmore was orchestrating. Written by former Argent frontman Russ Ballard for his 1975 solo album Winning, it hadn’t been a hit first time around. Since when, an all-female band from South Africa, Clout, and Head East, rockers from Illinois, had each taken a stab at it. Blackmore had been tipped to it by Rainbow’s manager, Bruce Payne.

Both men thought it the potential calling card they were in need of to crack open FM radio to Rainbow in the States. Cozy Powell, an old-school hard hitter, loathed it to the extent he refused to play on it. Against this backdrop, Blackmore had several singers flown out to France to audition. None matched his checklist, which was for someone with the soul and grit of Paul Rodgers and as well the stratospheric range of Lou Gramm of Foreigner.

At the end of one day’s recording, they fell to a game of ‘Name That Tune’. Powell picking out the selections from his collection of ’60s tapes. One song, a Bee Gees cover, ‘Only One Woman’, a Top Five hit in the UK in 1968 for British duo Marbles, caught Blackmore’s ear. Specifically, its singer, Skegness-born Graham Bonnet (it’s pronounced Bonn-ey).

“Where is he now?” Blackmore asked of the assembled.

In point of fact, Marbles’ burst of fame was brief. After their one hit, Bonnet and his cousin, Trevor Gordon, went their separate ways. Bonnet to singing TV jingles. Then, the year previous, he’d struck gold again with a second Bee Gees tune, ‘Warm Ride’, a leftover from the Saturday Night Fever sessions and which took him to Number One in Australia. As luck would have it, Glover knew of a fellow producer who’d even more recently recorded a session with Bonnet. Calls were made, and it was arranged for Bonnet to fly out to France.

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BONNET SAW HIMSELF AS an R&B singer. That he was a man apart was obvious from the moment he turned up at the Chateau. Bonnet was attired for his audition in a suit and tie, his hair short and slicked back. He looked like nothing so much as a well-scrubbed James Dean.

He knew next to nothing about hard rock in general, never mind Rainbow’s music. Told in advance he’d be required to sing a Deep Purple song, ‘Mistreated’, he’d rushed out to buy a bunch of Purple and Rainbow records in order to familiarise himself with them. In the event, and even though he ran through ‘Mistreated’ off mic, he made a powerful impression.

“I thought the same as everyone else in the band,” Airey recalled. “The greatest singer any of us had ever heard.”

They offered him the job on the spot. By then, there were seven songs simply needing a lead vocal adding to them. Nevertheless, the process from there was fractious and painstaking. Glover coached Bonnet to sing each song four different ways. Blackmore chose the best version.

“Roger,” recalled Bonnet, “would give me a vague idea of melody and tell me to do whatever I wanted to make the song my own.”

That much wasn’t enough for him to gain any writing credits on the finished record. A source of frustration to Bonnet ever since.

“They knew I was the new boy,” he said to me. “And they pulled the wool over my eyes.”

Further frustrating him, the cavernous, echoey dining room was ill-suited to recording vocals. After two weeks’ trial and error, they decided to shift operations back to the American East Coast. Before they left France, Glover did at least order Powell into putting a drum track down on ‘Since You Been Gone’, albeit with a bare minimum’s effort on Powell’s part.

“He expressed his feelings by playing something overly simple,” said Glover.

Newly ensconced at Kingdom Sound, a studio on Long Island, Blackmore, Airey, and Glover added their parts to the song. Glover boosted Bonnet’s subsequent lead vocal with stacked back-ups, and additional percussion, and in the altogether, Powell’s cursory backbeat worked entirely in the song’s favour, driving it along. ‘Since You Been Gone’ had a punch to it, no doubt about it.

Chosen as the first single off the album, Down to Earth, it was released on 31^st August 1979 and progressed to being a Top Ten hit in the UK, and the desired gate crasher in America. Behind it, Rainbow set off on tour, beginning on the 2nd September 1979 in Lakeland, Florida, and from there, to three months’ criss-crossing North America, coast to coast.

“I probably enjoyed it too much,” Bonnet admitted of his one and only Rainbow tour. “There was always loads of booze in the dressing room, and along with a lot of girls.”

This being Rainbow, there was friction, too. Principally brought about by Bonnett’s penchant for sporting tailored jackets, Hawaiian shirts and aviator shades onstage, and the degrees to which this needled Blackmore. As the tour stretched out, Bonnet found the key to his wardrobe being spirited from his dressing room, or else items of his clothing vanishing altogether.

“Ritchie would throw my stuff away,” he insisted. “That was something that did get a bit nasty. I just wasn’t into the uniform at all, which is to say, spandex pants and Cuban heel boots.”

By the time they pitched up in the UK, the winter following, Blackmore had taken to stationing a roadie to stand guard outside of Bonnet’s dressing room door, there to prevent him from sneaking out to get a haircut. Bonnet rebelled in Edinburgh, 22^nd February 1980, a Friday. They were playing the city’s Ingliston Exhibition Centre that night. Bonnet slipped out through a window, made for a local barbershop, and asked for an especially severe crop.

“I didn’t see Ritchie, or anyone else, until I went onstage,” he said. “Ritchie came on, clocked my hair, and walked straight back off. He ended up playing the entire gig from behind his amplifiers.”

TWO MONTHS AFTER THE tour ended, the summer of 1980, Rainbow regrouped at Sweet Silence Studios in the Danish capital of Copenhagen. There was another new record needing to be made, another new line-up to do it. Bonnet was still there, along with Glover and Airey, but not Powell, gone off to a better paying gig with the Michael Schenker Group. Blackmore pitched up with a replacement drummer, an American, Bobby Rondinelli, a bar-band player.

Blackmore was also armed with a second Russ Ballard song, ‘I Surrender’. Bonnet got so far as to put down a guide vocal on it, and before the session ground to a halt. Blackmore, said Bonnet, “pretty much stopped coming to the studio. It was all very strange, and boring.”

“The same old bollocks,” appraised Airey. “The moods. Being late, playing badly on purpose, and being rude to everyone.”

Airey told Bonnet he meant to jump ship. Airey, ultimately, stayed on. Bonnet didn’t, fleeing back to his newly adopted home in LA. They tried to persuade him to return, he insisted, but his mind was made up.

“I should have stuck it out,” he said, with hindsight. “I mean, even my mum and dad and my then wife asked me what the hell I thought I was doing.”

Rainbow carried on without him, recruiting an American singer, Joe Lynn Turner for three more records, and until Blackmore and Glover bailed for the Deep Purple reunion of 1984. Bonnet followed Powell into the Michael Schenker Group and for a second combustible, all-too-short tenure. These days, he continues to lead his own band, still out there singing ‘Since You Been Gone’ every night.

“It was a fucking great band and people love those songs,” he said to me of his time with Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow. “But I’ve never listened to the whole of that album since the day that I left.”

IN ANOTHER LIFETIME, IN a galaxy far, far away, and while serving on Q magazine, I presided over what we called The Q 50. A simple thing, each month it compiled a list of the 50 songs we, as an editorial team, were collectively listening to, and by inference recommending. It seemed to be a popular thing. At least, it was perennially picked out by our readers as their favourite feature in those external surveys that never failed to be insightful/terrifying.

Here, then, begins my own revival of the same. Edited down to a more exclusive, and/or convenient, 20 songs. Simply, the ones I’ve discovered, kept going back to, or have sat me bolt upright each month. Brand new songs, older ones, too, an entirely personal selection. In the hope others might find something to cherish in the mix, and that this becomes an ongoing two-way street, and you’ll be good enough to share with me the songs rocking your world.

For now, my own starters for 20 are…

1. ANNA CALVI & IGGY POP ‘God’s Lonely Man’

The first new music from the prodigiously gifted Calvi in four years is worth the wait. Tribal beat, Calvi’s witchy vocals, the Ig’s mere presence, freaky-intimate accompanying video, and all. “Wake up through the night, five pills, phone call,” intones the great man. Wholly gripping stuff.

From: Is This All There Is? EP

2. KACEY MUSGRAVES ‘Middle of Nowhere’

Title and lead-off track from Musgraves’ back-to-the-roots new album, an exquisitely mounted dissection of a break-up set to an old school country-bluegrass mood. Altogether, it’s as evocative as the pedal steel weeping through it, laced also with smarts and humour. “Don’t tell me you miss me, I don’t care,” Musgraves dismisses here. “I’m in the middle of nowhere.”

From: Middle of Nowhere album

3. ROLLING BLACKOUTS COASTAL FEVER ‘Sunburned in London’

Eight years ago, Melbourne’s RBCF offered up a mini-classic in the shape of ‘Talking Straight’ from their second album Hope Down. This taster for their fifth, concerning the displacement of travel and also name-checking Dublin, Tokyo, Oslo, and their home city, has the same kind of driving beat and ingratiating hook. A very good thing.

From: New single release

4. DEER TICK ‘Everything Born’

The Providence Rhode Island four-piece’s ninth album, Coin-O-Matic is due next month. An essential listen judging by the self-produced ‘Everything Born’. Think late-period The Replacements, cutting up live in the studio, and you’re on track to its edgy Power Pop charms.

From: New single release

5. KASHUS CULPEPPER ‘Southern Man’

A former Navy vet and firefighter hailing from Alabama, Culpepper was tipped to me by fellow Substack-er Tamara Casey. Nothing more makes me give thanks for that steer than this fire-and-brimstone rock-soul stomper, a rousing summoning of the ghost of the Allman Brothers Band.

From: Act I album

6. THE BLACK CROWES ‘High & Lonesome’

Following on from 2024’s coming-back-with-a-vengeance Happiness Bastards, the Robinson brothers’ latest album does The Rolling Stones better than the Stones themselves have done it in five decades at least. For proof look no further than this easy-swinging voodoo blues.

From: A Pound of Feathers album

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7. CRAIG FINN ‘People of Substance’

This one’s been on repeat play for months. Finn’s excellent Always Been album of last year was produced by Adam Granduciel of War On Drugs and this has a dose of that band’s propulsive majesty. His opening line here is as striking as a great novel’s: “Dana, I don’t get depressed anymore. Except possibly this December at the Delaware store.” Master craftsmanship.

From: Always Been album

8. HAMILTON LEITHAUSER ‘Keeping Up With the Joneses’

Signature track from the Jon Hamm-starring, really-very-good Apple TV series Your Friends & Neighbours, currently in its second season, and entirely typical of The Walkmen man’s solo work. Which is to say, heavy on the ornate pop-rock flourishing and with an urgent undertow.

From: Single release

9. KURT VILE ‘Chance to Bleed’

Captain Laconic Vile’s upcoming new album, Philadelphia’s Been Good to Me, is apparently a love letter to his home city. This first peek suggests only good things. Almost all chorus but given it’s such a smile-on-the-face one, the better for it. Add its joyful video and serve for instant feelgood factor.

From: Single release

10.BON IVER ‘Man Like U’

Conducting like Dylan with his Bootleg Series, Justin Vernon’s first raiding of his band’s archives makes it all the more painful how he finds playing live to be such an ordeal. Recorded at the LA Forum in 2019, and with its title re-jigged from that year’s i,i album, this is simply celestial.

From: Volume One: Selections From Music Concerts 2019-2023 album

11.ST VINCENT ‘Candy Darling’

Another live set, this one a digital-only release and the full document of Annie Clark’s stellar 2025 show at the Royal Albert Hall with the 60-piece Jules Buckley Orchestra. That she’s such an extraordinary, vaulting talent is generally accepted by now. This makes the convincing case for her being one of the finest vocalists of her generation as well.

From: Live in London album

12.THE AFGHAN WHIGS ‘Duvateen’

Now in their 40^th anniversary year, the Whigs continue to scale new heights. From their imminent tenth album, ‘Duvateen’ might just be the one of Greg Dulli’s greatest songs. The blue-eyed soul moves are more refined than ever. His lyrics pack an extra punch. To wit: “Baby, won’t lie I want a cigarette. Fuck me twice, I’m bangin’ Nicorette.”

From: New single release

13.SOCIAL DISTORTION ‘Born to Kill’

One take-out above all from this, title track of the SoCal punk icons’ first new album in 15 years. At 64, Mike Ness and his band of cohorts still rock like motherfuckers. Or, as Ness himself better puts it here: “I’m the underdog who ends up on top. The rebel poet with a peacock strut.”

From: Born to Kill album

14.ZACH BRYAN & KINGS OF LEON ‘Bowery’

Bryan brings his Heaven On Top tour to UK stadiums next month. With the feel of a one-take jam and in partnership with the Followill clan, this is his essential essence in a nutshell. Unadorned, authentic, unashamedly classicist, and targeted to incite mass communal singalongs.

From: Single release

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15.MODEST MOUSE ‘Look How Far’

The Portland vets return with this jittery, spasmodic alt-rock-funk prelude to next month’s An Eraser and a Maze album, erstwhile Sleater-Kinney powerhouse Janet Weiss guesting on drums and frontman Isaac Brock shaking his David Byrne schtick. Excellent, in other words.

From: New single release

16.ANGINE DE POITRINE ‘Sherpa’

Social media buzz-band of the moment, the polka dotted-and-masked Quebec duo will doubtless survive their embrace by the chattering classes for the simple reason of their being actually thrilling. Presently signing off their UK and European tour sets, this staple of their 2024 debut album does their much-vaunted microtonal thing but more pointedly, motors along with the sheer, unbound glee of spontaneous creation.

From: Vol I album

17.WILLOW AVALON & JASON ISBELL ‘Cardinal Sin’

Georgia’s coming-star Avalon and the ever-dependable Isbell together make Johnny-and-June-style magic with this stately, slow-burning country confessional, put down in Nashville’s hallowed RCA Studio A. Avalon’s imminent second album, Pink Pocket Pistol, is already one not to be missed.

From: New single release

18.ARCTIC MONKEYS ‘Opening Night’

Alex Turner doesn’t half make it all look so very easy. Retrieved from an abandoned demo originally cut for 2013’s AM album and tracked at Abbey Road last November, this locates the sumptuous midpoint between that album’s serotonin-release rock and the more esoteric land staked with 2018’s Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino and The Car going on four years ago now.

From: War Child: Help(2) album

19.COURTNEY BARNETT ‘Stay in Your Lane’

Transplanted now from Melbourne to Los Angeles, Barnett has retained both her pronounced accent and gut-punch guitar sound on her fourth album. This, its full-throttling opening track, also recovers the defiant spirit that made her so refreshingly appealing in the first place.

From: Creature of Habit album

20.THE WATERBOYS ‘Don’t Even Have to Say His Name’

Hats off to Mike Scott. Still angry and energised enough at 67 to man the barricades with this short (2:42), sharp, barrelling protest blast. The best thing The Waterboys have done in years, but of course, it has the singular American nightmare in its sights. “I don’t even have to say the motherfucker’s name,” as Scott so eloquently puts it.

From: New single release

Check out The 20 at the playlist at the link:

“Gary’s a solid man. A well-rounded grown-up. Meat and two veg. Me? Meat and two veg, a Mars bar, and maybe a cake, all on the same plate.” - Robbie Williams

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THE FRIDAY TAKE THAT announced their reunion, 25^th November 2005, I was working on a redesign of Q magazine in a cupboard-sized office housed within the much bigger one occupied by the Heat editorial team. As the news broke, across the BBC, and if I recall correctly, my exact words to our Art Director were these: “Who, in the name of all that’s holy, is going to care about that?”

In my defence, it was only four-fifths of the now 30-somethings boy band’s original line-up getting back together. The four who hadn’t gone on become pop superstars in their own right apart from the That, and as the missing Robbie Williams so emphatically had. Also, even their erstwhile Svengali/manager, Nigel Martin-Smith had predicted the whole enterprise would be met with a collective shrug of the shoulder. Given their subsequent revelations as to Smith’s conduct, this hardly put me on the side of the angels, as sung by Williams or otherwise.

There was, too, an immediate clue as to the galactic scale of my misjudgement. The collective shriek, at a pitch to shatter glass, to summon baying hounds, going up from the Heat office. In short order thereafter, I was proven wrong over and again, in incrementally greater doses. As it transpired, a Google-led spot of research ranked ‘Take That comeback’ as the single most searched subject in the UK that year.

Following on, Gary Barlow, Mark Owen, Howard Donald, and Jason Orange combined became more ubiquitously popular than they’d ever been. No small measure given their previous history together, and with Williams. Founded by Martin-Smith as a British take on New Kids On The Block. Steeled to pop discipline performing at schools and gay clubs in their native north of England. Gone on to eight Number One hits in the UK. The fact of their 1996 split – less than a year after Williams’s stomping off, occasioned by his getting off his tits with Oasis at Glastonbury – jamming the Samaritans’ phone lines with distraught calls from inconsolable teenage girls.

Ten years on, and who knew, but certainly not I, their audience had grown up with them. Beautiful World, the comeback album, rocketed to Number One and shifted the better part of three million copies. Circus, the follow-up, became the fastest selling record in British pop history and was backed up by a sell-out stadium tour. The only question remaining, however could they top that? The answer, of course, was to kiss and make-up with their prodigal bandmate.

So it was, in July of 2010, Take That and Robbie Williams were officially reconciled and become one again. Even I’d eaten enough humble pie to have learned my lesson by then. By the time their second-second coming album, Progress, hove into view the next year, I’d already offered them the Q cover.

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THURSDAY 6^TH SEPTEMBER 2011, damp and grey in West London. I found myself at our designated photographer Bryan Adams’ house – yes, that Bryan Adams – in Chelsea, waiting upon the Take That five. Owen, Donald and Orange arrived separately, Barlow and Williams together. Once in each other’s company, there was much laughter passing between them and a surfeit of brotherly tactility, man-hugs and arms thrown around shoulders.

Some tiny, begrudging part of me wanted to not like them. For them to be rude, uppity, boorish, dull, anything but how they were, which is to say, utterly charming, eminently likeable. Damn them. Donald the quietest and humblest. Orange, bright, enigmatic. Scampish Owen, with his snickering laugh, would have made a very good Artful Dodger. Barlow, the most businesslike, firm of handshake, strong eye contact, handsome in the vein of a well-groomed CEO. Williams, tall, broad, oozing charisma in spades. As they gathered for Adams’ shoot, the other four, unbidden, parted to allow him to take the central spot.

For his part, Williams proceeded to reach down between Barlow’s legs and give his testicles a sharp tug. To gales of laughter, and from Barlow most of all. Truly, this was progress. In their years apart, Williams had described Barlow, their songwriter-in-chief, as “stupid, selfish, greedy.” Barlow, in a rare riposte back, was wounded enough to brand Williams, “An absolute fucking cunt.”

Williams’ sole gripe with Barlow that day was over the T-shirts their stylist had respectively assigned them. Barlow’s a Large, his an XXL. “That fucking hurts,” he bemoaned. “There’s a fat-off between him and me, and I don’t want to be the fattest in Take That again.”

I interviewed them separately, in an ante room at Adams’ place stocked with a couple of stools and, incongruously, a king-size double bed made with crisp white linen. Barlow took the first turn. Confident enough to forecast of this reunion, “I think it’s going to be massive, I really do. There aren’t enough events in music anymore, and this is an event.”

He didn’t duck the matter of Williams’ stratospheric success versus his own demeaning as a solo artist. “Fucking right I was envious,” he said. “He was getting all the stuff I wanted… It was snatched away from me overnight. I never took Rob seriously as a member of the band. Should have done, but he didn’t help himself.”

Williams came next. Eyeing the bed as he entered the room, he offered, “Oh, this is a setting I’m used to.”

Sat on the stool facing me, one or other of his legs bounced furiously all the while he spoke. He gave great quote, of course he did.

Asked to appraise Barlow as he found him to be now, he reasoned: “A solid man. A well-rounded grown-up. Meat and two veg. Me? Meat and two veg, a Mars bar, and maybe a cake, all on the same plate. If I write a hit, I do it by mistake. He writes them on purpose.”

As for Owen, Orange, and Donald, well, they gave three different, but illuminating perspectives on the matters of Williams’ departure from their ranks all those years ago and his being back now.

Orange: “Mostly, Robbie and I used to just piss each other off. I think he thought I was too uppity. I thought he was not serious enough. He was the kid in the band, and maybe I bullied him in some ways, not overtly but covertly. He was a pain in the arse a lot of the time.”

Donald: “Most of the shit that went down was between Rob and Gary. I remember Rob saying on TV once that he thought I was cool. I didn’t care what he said about the others after that.”

Owen: “To be honest, I still wake up every day and go, ‘Is he still here?’”

AFTERWARDS, ADAMS LED THEM outside to a cobbled courtyard and so as to take some more pictures of them stood next to (the other four) and astride (Williams) the vintage Lambretta scooter he had parked up. The minders accompanying them were ever so wary, since no-one just then had seen them re-joined in public. That much proved a red rag for Williams.

At a point, he heralded, “Alright lads, let’s go!” And off they trooped, Williams in the lead, one behind the other, through the towering gates guarding Adams’ property, over the main road running alongside it, and onto the embankment wall on the other side of it, the Thames as backdrop. The pursuing pack, managers, stylist and her assistants, the fleet of security staff, cut off from them by the barrier of the rush hour traffic.

Parading up there on the wall, they caused something of a stir. A couple of cars veered sharply. A black cab mounted the kerb, its passenger, a woman, hung out from the rear window to take pictures with her phone. More passengers, on the top deck of a bus, stood pointing and waving as it went by. Pedestrians performed extravagant double-takes, mouths agog, and one toddling-past old lady tutted audibly.

Next day, I travelled to hear their new album at Gary Barlow’s recently purchased studio-office in North-West London. The office was glass-walled with a walnut desk. A couple of framed portraits lent against the desk waiting to be hung, one of Lennon and McCartney, the other of Spinal Tap. The upstairs lounge-cum-playback room had wood floors, walls of deep purple, a walk-in bar through a mirrored door, a vast, two-tiered red sofa, and a state-of-the-art sound system.

Before I’d made it to the first chorus of track one, ‘The Flood’, the five of them filed in to listen to their creation with me. Heads nodded, lyrics were mouthed. Williams, sprawling himself on the floor, began to thrust his groin skywards. Progress was, as history has recorded, a big, sleek, electro-pop confection, bound to be the commercial juggernaut it proved.

“Chaps!” Barlow boomed when it had finished playing. “It’s chocolate o’clock!”

With that, an assistant was dispatched, returning with a tray laden with steaming hot mugs of tea and selections of Green & Blacks.

“We’ve come a long way,” Donald offered reflectively through a mouthful of Hazelnut Milk. “I’m definitely in a happier place now than I was back then.”

“That,” trumpeted Williams, breaking the ensuing pregnant pause, “is because Howard’s kicked heroin. Have you ever tried to dance on heroin?”

TEN MONTHS HAD PASSED when I saw them the once more. From a distance, five dots entertaining a jammed-to-the-rafters Wembley Stadium crowd. One of eight nights they filled the place. Six hundred and 70 thousand tickets sold. Such was the Progress Tour, a spectacularly staged, wholly ginormous pop event, and just as Barlow had foreseen.

Barlow had also stated it wouldn’t last ten months previous, telling me of Williams, “We know he’s not here for ever.” It didn’t, and Williams wasn’t. Even for a middle-aged professional cynic, though, it sure was fun while it lasted.

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THE BEST ALBUMS TELL a story. And, like all good stories, they have a well-established structure to them. Which is to say, a beginning, a middle, and an end. How they start, the immediate impression they make, matters hugely. It’s the guiding hand coaxing you ahead into the rest of the piece. Or else, the sharp jolt propelling you inexorably forward.

As to the greatest opening songs in rock history (and this is rock history, as opposed to any other pop derivation, that much would simply be too much), well, as scene setters, they’re the “Rosebud,” the “People are always asking me if I know Tyler Durden,” the “As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster’s” of the form. Picking out a list of just 25 is a fiendishly tricky, some would say a begging-for-damnation, kind of task, but such is laid before you here.

To what can be gleaned from it, I’d humbly posit the true art of opening records was clearly begun from the middle of the 1960s but refined to a most precise point through the decade following. Then again, that the assembled stands, if nothing else, as testimony to the magical and still enduring power of the long-playing record. With all that being said, and set to 33rpm, let the needle drop…

1. THE ROLLING STONES ‘Sympathy for the Devil’

From: Beggars Banquet, 1968

Committed to tape at London’s Olympic Studios on a Tuesday, 4^th June 1968, and completed with overdubs over the next weekend, so began the Stones’ imperious phase. Keith Richards on bass, as well as electric guitar. Poor, doomed Brian Jones shunted to an acoustic and buried in the final mix. Nicky Hopkins’ piano, and Marianne Faithful and Anita Pallenberg among the chorus of “woo-woos”. And Jagger, preening Mick, bidding to introduce himself, “a man of wealth of taste.” The greatest rock ‘n’ roll band of all-time taking flight.

2. AC/DC ‘Highway to Hell’

From: Highway to Hell, 1979

“Livin’ easy. Lovin’ free. Season ticket on a one-way ride.” Bon Scott, dead within seven months of it coming out, here immortalised his code for (fast) living. To the sound of Angus and Malcolm Young’s irresistible, gut-punching riff and bassist Cliff Williams’ and drummer Phil Rudd’s murderously tight rhythm section. The whole of it polished to a fine sheen by new producer Robert John ‘Mutt’ Lange. As Malcolm Young himself summed it up, “This one… it just stuck out like a dog’s balls.”

3. THE WHITE STRIPES ‘Seven Nation Army’

From: Elephant, 2003

The Stripes’ fourth album was put down in ten days, to eight-track tape, using analogue equipment, at a poky studio in East London, Toe Rag. Originally intended by Jack White for a James Bond theme tune, ‘Seven Nation Army’ distilled the crackling excitement of those sessions into this assault on the senses. Meg White’s primal drumbeat and that riff. Pretty much the sound of the summer of 2003 and perfection in 3:52.

4. BLONDIE ‘Hanging on the Telephone’

From: Parallel Lines, 1978

Roping in Aussie pop entrepreneur Mike Chapman to produce their third album was Blondie’s masterstroke. Chapman it was who instigated the ringing phone effect to summon this cover song. The original, by Power Pop band The Nerves, bombed. This gleeful version exploded Debbie Harry into an instant icon.

5. THE POLICE ‘Message in a Bottle’

From: Reggatta de Blanc, 1979

The Police’s second album arrived in the unlikely environs of Leatherhead in Surrey for less than £10,000. Its lead-off song gave them their first UK Number One. A song so indestructibly fabulous it even withstood a pummelling 20 years later from American heavy metallers Machine Head. Sting took the plaudits, but guitarist Andy Summers and octopus-limbed drummer Stewart Copeland were matchless as his foils.

6. THE CLASH ‘London Calling’

From: London Calling, 1979

Titled after the BBC World Service’s WWII regular announcement to the occupied countries of Europe, “This is London calling,” and encapsulating Joe Strummer’s spooked fears of an impending apocalypse, sown after the Three Mile Island nuclear incident, here lies the essence of The Clash. Strident, veins-a-bulging committed, and plain brilliant.

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7. LED ZEPPELIN ‘Whole Lotta Love’

From: II, 1969

The riff, the unforgettable, juddering riff, came to Jimmy Page one summer’s day aboard his River Thames-side houseboat in leafy Buckinghamshire. Robert Plant’s single-entendre lyrics were partly adapted/stolen from bluesman Willie Dixon, only later duly accredited. The whole, with John Paul Jones’ secret weapon bass and John Bonham’s dinosaur drumming, is hard rock. Hardly equalled, never mind bettered.

8. THE WHO ‘Baba O’Riley’

From: Who’s Next, 1971

The other peerless rock quartet of the era. Coming on the heels of Tommy’s convolutions and the neanderthal crunch of Live at Leeds, their fifth album was their high-water mark. Edited down from the nine-minute demo Pete Townshend recorded for his shelved Lifehouse project, with Daltrey singing the verses and Townshend taking the bridge, as The Ox and Moon the Loon throw elastic shapes around them, this is The ’Oo at maximum overdrive.

9. PINK FLOYD ‘Shine on You Crazy Diamond (Parts I-V)’

From: Wish You Were Here, 1975

Dark Side of the Moon was their blockbuster hit but Wish You Were Here is the Floyd’s pomp. Conceived in homage to their fallen colleague Syd Barrett, who turned up, unannounced and unrecognised, at the EMI Studios on the day it was mixed, ‘Shine On…’ is an entirely magisterial 13:32. The looming two-minute intro of synth, Hammond, Mini Moog, and glass harp a mere taster course for the gasp-inducing main event of David Gilmour’s weeping Fender Strat.

10.THE VERVE ‘Bittersweet Symphony’

From: Urban Hymns, 1997

Having split for two weeks prior to making it, and persuaded mercurial prodigal son guitarist Nick McCabe back into the fold, The Verve took a tilt at full-blown classic rock-dom on their third album. As signalled by this, Richard Ashcroft’s sweeping summons-to-glory, inspired to life by a sample snatched from the Andrew Oldham Orchestra’s 1966 version of the Stones’ ‘The Last Time’. That lift cost Ashcroft his due royalties until 2009. ‘Bittersweet Symphony’ had long before then realised his band’s boldest ambitions.

11.EAGLES ‘Hotel California’

From: Hotel California, 1976

“On a dark desert highway. Cool wind in my hair. Warm small of colitas, rising up in the air.” The Eagles at their swaggering apex, comporting like rock royalty. Spliced together from 33 different takes, Don Henley sung their hymn to lost innocence beautifully, Don Felder’s and Joe Walsh’s duelling, two-minutes-long guitar solo sent it soaring to the heavens.

12.TOM PETTY & THE HEARTBREAKERS ‘Refugee’

From: Damn the Torpedoes, 1979

Three years on from ‘Hotel California’, another standard wrought into being at an LA recording studio. On this occasion, producer Jimmy Iovine required a reputed 100 takes to capture this surging version of Tom Petty’s and guitar-slinging partner Mike Campbell’s most exultant song. However gruelling the process, and it nearly broke Heartbreakers drummer Stan Lynch, the final result is monumental.

13.BEACH BOYS ‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice’

From: Pet Sounds, 1966

In company with lyricist Tony Asher, Brian Wilson spent the first six months of 1966 realising his version of Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound, backed by The Wrecking Crew collective of ace studio musicians, Glenn Campbell on guitar, bassist Carol Kaye, and drummer Hal Blaine among them. This joyous, intricately assembled upsurge set the overall wondrous tone. ‘Genius’ is an overused affix, but not here.

14.THE BEATLES ‘Help!’

From: Help!, 1965

Recorded over 12 takes to four-track tape at Studio Two at EMI Studios, the future Abbey Road, on another red-letter Tuesday, 13^th April 1965. Lennon taking the lead vocal and singing of the Fab Four’s already meteoric rise, and in 2:18, the giddy thrill of hearing history being made on the hoof. Lightning in a bottle.

15.QUEEN ‘We Will Rock You’

From: News of the World, 1977

The Sex Pistols were making Never Mind the Bollocks in the next-door room at Wessex Sound Studios, North London that summer of 1977 (when the two bands happened upon each other, Freddie Mercury famously addressed Sid Vicious as ‘Mr Ferocious’). Post-the operatic grandeur of A Night at the Opera and A Day at the Races, Queen’s rejoinder was to strip down to this four-four foot-stomper, written by Brian May, and destined to be an eternal terrace chant.

16.IGGY POP ‘Lust for Life’

From: Lust for Life, 1977

Written on ukelele by producer David Bowie and with him on piano, propulsed by drummer Hunt Sales’ tribal backbeat, fronted by Iggy at his sniping, snarling best, and immortalised by its inclusion on the Trainspotting soundtrack. To paraphrase Pop’s own description of his signature song, altogether it rocks like a motherfucker.

17.DAVID BOWIE ‘Changes’

From: Hunky Dory, 1971

Opening up a more melodic, artful vein than the one he’d mined with 1970’s hard driving The Man Who Sold the World, and with Rick Wakemen guesting alongside the regular Spiders From Mars, Mick Ronson, Trevor Boulder, and Mick Woodmansey, this nod to his own chameleonic nature was Bowie’s first realisation of true greatness. Altogether now, “Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes. Turn and face the strange…”

18.BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN ‘Thunder Road’

From: Born to Run, 1975

Jimmy Iovine again, here engineering on a tortuously produced record, as Springsteen, under pressure to manage a hit, pain-staked over every little detail. Written on piano at his home in Long Branch, New Jersey, and originally titled ‘Chrissie’s Song’, he grasped hold of his desired sound, the grandeur of Roy Orbison’s pop hits running headlong into Phil Spector, here, and also set out the path-to-the-horizon he’s driven down ever since: “It’s a town full of losers, and I’m pulling out of here to win.”

19.MEAT LOAF ‘Bat Out Of Hell’

From: Bat Out Of Hell, 1977

Jim Steinman paid especially close attention to Springsteen’s Born to Run. Recruiting E Streeters Roy Bittan, on piano, and drummer Max Weinberg for his house band, and turning the songs he’d written for, of all things, a sci-fi, rock-opera version of the Peter Pan story, to the might of Meat Loaf’s voice, he struck gold with Bat Out of Hell. With producer Todd Rundgren recreating the sound of a revving motorbike, the title track roared it into life like an oversized ‘Leader of the Pack’, Steinman’s tale of teenage tragedy writ shamelessly, fabulously large.

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20.R.E.M. ‘Drive’

From: Automatic For the People, 1992

On a roll from Out of Time, R.E.M. demoed three additional tracks as they were mixing that album at Prince’s Paisley Sound Studios in December of 1990 – ‘Try Not to Breathe’, ‘Nightswimming’, and ‘Drive’. Inspired in part by Queen, Peter Buck and Mike Mills were fans, and with Led Zep’s John Paul Jones arranging the strings, it was the sombre, stately latter song that lifted off their zenith record, Michael Stipe’s clarion-call lyrics adding a note of uncompromising defiance: “Hey, kids, rock ‘n’ roll. Nobody tells you where to go, baby.”

21.PJ HARVEY ‘Big Exit’

From: Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea, 2000

Recorded in Milton Keynes but forged during the nine months Polly Harvey spent living in New York, and then back home in Dorset, Stories From the City… found her aiming at a more direct, sharper-pointed sound. As evidenced from the get-go with ‘Big Exit’, like a high-octane Pretenders, Harvey’s own stun-gun guitar riff and full-throated vocal pinning the unsuspecting listener to the wall.

22.U2 ‘Where the Streets Have No Name’

From: The Joshua Tree, 1987

Imagining a mythical, widescreen America, and conspiring to write “the ultimate live song,” Edge originally home demoed ‘Where the Streets Have No Name’ to four-track tape. Realising his full, epic vision for the song, producer Brian Eno estimated took up a good half of the entire sessions for U2’s fifth album. From the rising synth intro, through the introduction of Edge’s own ringing guitar at 0:41, with Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen weighing in at 1:09, and on from Bono’s initial fulsome entreaty at 1:46, “I want to run, I want to hide. I wanna tear down the walls that hold me inside…”, it proved a case of job very much done.

23.LEONARD COHEN ‘You Want It Darker’

From: You Want It Darker, 2016

Recorded at his home in LA, his brittle spine ruined from multiple fractures, and released just 17 days before his death, with his 14^th album Cohen confronted his own mortality head on. Here, awesomely, co-writer Patrick Leonard stirring the same kind of celestial choral opening he had for Madonna’s ‘Like a Prayer’ and to an ominous rolling bass, his voice husked, intoning, loaded with import, he faced down organised religion: “If this is thine glory, then mine must be the shame.”

24.NIRVANA ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’

From: Nevermind, 1991

The title was Kathleen Hanna’s reference to Kurt Cobain’s preferred deodorant. The idea, to write the perfect pop song, was Cobain’s own. The ingredients appropriations of the Pixies’ soft-loud dynamics and the riff to Boston’s ‘More Than a Feeling’. No-one, surely, has forgotten the first time they heard it. Personally, on Mark Goodier’s Evening Session show on Radio One, one night in the late summer of 1991. Epoch-making.

25.BOB DYLAN ‘Like a Rolling Stone’

From: Highway 61 Revisited, 1965

See also here, only even more so. Just five months on from making Bringing It All Back Home, exhausted from a gruelling “tour to England but running on pure creative fervour, Dylan went into Columbia’s Studio A in New York City and over two days in June 1965 invented the rock music of the future. Al Kooper improvised his Hammond parts on the spot, Mike Bloomfield played spiteful blues licks, Dylan hailed his own messianic path: “How does it feel? How does it feel? To be on your own. With no direction home.”

Enjoy these 25 seminal opening scenes bundled together on the playlist at the link:

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WHEN IT COMES TO Power Pop, pretty much it’s all in the name. The lush harmonies, hooky melodies, and big choruses are pure pop confection. Chunks of it lifted from off of The Beatles, and their Mersey Beat brethren, on this side of the Atlantic, a dose of the Beach Boys added in upon arrival in America. There’s power in the choppy, clipped barre chords. Garage rock-punk rock-new wave in execution in the transition over the decades. Blend together, shake well, and serve as an enticing, irresistible cocktail.

Badfinger, birthed in Wales’s city by the sea, Swansea, set the ball rolling over here. Their fourth album, Straight Up of 1971, co-produced by George Harrison and Todd Rundgren, and home to singer-guitarist Pete Ham’s most perfect distillation of raunch and saccharine, ‘Baby Blue’.

Then out of Memphis, the wondrous Big Star, 1972’s debuting #1 Record grandstanding Alex Chilton’s and Chris Bell’s stellar songwriting partnership, Power Pop as an art form. It didn’t go to Number One, nowhere even near, and Chilton forged on absent of Bell through two more dizzying records, 1974’s Radio City and 1978’s more desolate sounding Third/Sister Lovers without reaping anything like the rewards his mighty talent merited.

America’s Power Pop breaking-of-the-barriers fell instead to Cheap Trick and The Cars, and to The Knack and Rick Springfield, both of whose ‘My Sharona’ and ‘Jessie’s Girl’ did respectively vault to Number One. Onwards then, up to River Cuomo’s Weezer and, for 1998’s Celebrity Skin at least, Courtney Love’s Hole, and into the noughties with the more refined likes of OneRepublic and Bleachers.

Along the way, all through the 1990s, a clutch of bands, and records, that made more like Big Star than Bleachers. Which is to say, overlooked, cultish, ripe for re-discovery. Seeking a feelgood hit for this summer, then look no further…

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1. URGE OVERKILL Saturation (1993)

Formed in Chicago in 1986 by university buds Nash Kato and Eddie ‘King’ Roeser, both of them guitar-toting singers, the Urge began in the belly of the city’s noisy alt-rock scene. Steve Albini produced both their first EP and their scratchy debut album, 1989’s Jesus Urge Superstar. By 1993, Kato and Roeser were joined by drummer Blackie Onassis, sporting lounge suits, and comporting more like their fellow Illinoisans Cheap Trick.

Signed to major label Geffen, they unleashed Saturation, slick, super-smart, and with The Butcher Bros.’ luminous production, streamlined and hot-rod-powered pop to its core. See strident opener ‘Sister Havana’, or ‘Positive Bleeding’ for that much, ‘Crack Babies’ and ‘Erica Kane’ for when they put their feet to the pedal. As a whole, it should have made the Urge into the kind of rock stars they already were in their own minds but didn’t. Not even a tour with Pearl Jam, at their peak Grunge point, lifted it above 146 on the Billboard chart.

The following year, Urge did score a freak hit with an earlier song, their energised cover of Neil Diamond’s ‘Girl, You’ll Be A Woman Soon’, Quentin Tarantino plucking it from off of 1992’s Stull EP for his Pulp Fiction soundtrack. Emboldened, they summoned the rawer Exit the Dragon album, which fared even worse than Saturation.

2. REDD KROSS Third Eye (1990)

Their name allegedly inspired by the infamous masturbation-with-a-crucifix scene in The Exorcist, Redd Kross was the brainchild of teenage brothers Jeff (guitar/vocals) and Steve McDonald (bass), both of them still in high school in Hawthorne, California at the point they began playing gigs. Signed to Atlantic for this, their third album, and by then sporting colourful thrift-store hippy-chic garb, they decamped to an appropriately storied LA studio, Sound City, to best realise their amalgam of ’60s pop with a punk rock edge.

Heard to best effect here on the exultant near-smash ‘Annie’s Gone’ and ‘Bubblegum Factory’, as glitter-pop shiny as a mirror ball. Even Nirvana’s managers, though, couldn’t navigate them out from the alt-rock underworld and into the mainstream. Undeterred, the Kross ploughed on. Their Phaseshifter album of 1993 hosted the Power Pop classic ‘Jimmy’s Fantasy’, and they’re ongoing still today. Pub quiz fact: the near-naked model featured on the cover of Third Eye, listed as ‘Unknown’ on the album credits, is reputedly Sofia Coppola.

3. RUTH RUTH Laughing Gallery (1995)

As noted previously in this forum, Rick Rubin’s Def American stable throughout the ’90s enticed should-have-been-but-never-were bands like moths to a flame. Ruth Ruth, principally singer-bassist-songwriter Chris Kennedy, ably supported by Mike Lustig on guitar and drummer Dee Snyder, were drawn into Rubin’s ranks from New York City. Paired with Fugazi’s producer Ted Nicely, their debut album Laughing Gallery was intended to straddle the poles of alt-rock credibility and the in-the-moment punk-pop boom blasted off by Green Day’s Dookie.

Inevitably, it ended up falling between the two stools. More’s the pity, since Kennedy knew how to craft Power Pop magic, as per lead-off track ‘Uninvited’, all too briefly rotated on MTV, ‘Bald Marie’, and the gloriously pin-headed ‘I Killed Meg the Prom Queen’. Ill fate has sent Ruth Ruth splintering through various other labels and intermittent records ever since.

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4. THE POSIES Frosting on the Beater (1993)

No band better, or more lovingly, paid homage to Big Star than The Posies. Brought into being in the Washington State Canadian border town of Bellingham by dual songwriters Ken Stringfellow and Jon Auer, they based themselves out of Seattle just as Grunge erupted from the city. Their first two records crammed in other, British-based influences, Squeeze, XTC, Elvis Costello. This, their third, went the full Chilton.

‘Dream All Day’ might just be the greatest Big Star song the man never wrote. Seconded by ‘Flavor of the Month’, an otherwise sly dig at the multiples of bands migrating North-West to jump on the Grunge gravy train. The cruel irony being that it was Grunge that did for The Posies, just too bittersweet by half to be heard over the sludge rock clamour. They tried in vain again with 1996’s excellent Amazing Disgrace, giving up the ghost after the caustically titled Success in 1998. Stringfellow went on to play in various incarnations of the resurrected Big Star before a litany of sex assault allegations ended his tenure. A tawdry footnote to The Posies’ blooming.

5. JELLYFISH Split Milk (1993)

As also previously noted here, Jellyfish’s debut album of 1990, Bellybutton, is one rock’s great lost masterpieces. Remarkably, the songwriting team of Andy Sturmer (vocals/drums) and Roger Manning (keyboards) dusted themselves down and made a second record every bit as fabulous.

Spilt Milk took fabulous shape over six months from October 1991, Sturmer and Manning inspired by the grandiose feel of Steely Dan’s brace of mid-period jazz-rock classics, Aja (1977) and Gaucho (1980), and vowed to make a bold statement of their own.

With producers Alby Galuten and Jack Joseph Puig recalled from Bellybutton, they set about doing it in painstaking detail. Recording on vintage analogue equipment and adding strings, brass, flute, wind chimes, and harpsicord to construct a veritable musical edifice. Sturmer subsequently referred to it as their ‘Night at the Opera 2’, after Queen’s most epic-minded record, the one with ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, and true enough, there’s the same titanic-sized ambition to ‘Joining a Fan Club’, the utterly magnificent ‘The Ghost at Number One’, and, well, all of the rest.

Crazily, Spilt Milk peaked at 164 on the Billboard Hot 200. Tragically, Jellyfish never made another record. Certainly, their glory won’t fade.

Sample the pick of these five hidden treasures, plus a sprinkling of Power Pop gold standards, via the playlist at the link:

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THERE IS ONE ACRONYM, altogether benign seeming, still liable to bring me out in a cold sweat. EPoS. Or, as it is rendered in full, ‘Estimated Point of Sale’. This refers to information provided to the UK’s magazine publishers on a weekly basis collating how many copies each new issue of their many and varied titles has been sold out of selected stores that week, or else ongoing through the month. Extrapolated from this information is an estimate of what the final total sales will be for every issue.

If memory serves, as the Editor, I would be sent an EPoS for each issue of my magazine, via an email from the marketing department, every Tuesday afternoon. Opening those emails brought with it a rush of emotions. Trepidation, a tingle of anticipation, eternal hope, and most especially, and acutely, pure, cold dread. The fear residing within every Editor of a shunned, unloved, doomed issue. Amplified by the accompanying terror of repeat shunned, unloved, doomed issues. With that, the burden of failure, an expectation of imminent unemployment.

That much, every week, in my case for 12 consecutive years, is as good an accounting as any for the sorry lack of hair on my head today. The kind of stress you don’t forget, any more than it’s missed.

Thing is, generally you’ve actually foreseen what’s coming. It’s not like William Goldman famously wrote of the film business - ‘Nobody knows anything.’ In publishing, when it comes to music magazines at least, and in my experience, you know all too well. Principally, because nothing dictates the success or otherwise of each issue nearly so much as what’s or who’s on the cover. Very quickly, and however noble, or rational, your intentions and instincts at the outset, you trust to your judgement of the thing that’s ultimately gone out into the world.

Think it’s a terrific cover, likely it’ll sell. Wince on each occasion you see it on a shop shelf, and particularly if there are multiples of the wretched thing stacked up, the odds are just as sure it’s going to tank. Those inevitabilities, in spite of however many prayers, or oaths, one offers up, soon enough become a kind of torture.

IF YOU’RE A LUCKY Editor, you happen to find yourself on the right magazine, at a perfectly opportune time. Such was my good fortune to lead Kerrang!, the self-styled, then weekly, heavy metal bible, during the years 1999 to 2002. A period coinciding with the explosion into the mainstream of Nu-Metal (see bands such as Linkin Park, Korn, Deftones, System of a Down, Limp Bizkit, and many others consigned now to the dustbin of history). Add this to management prepared to invest decisive financial and strategic support into the hitherto black sheep of their magazine stable, and it equated to a sustained sales boom.

To ride that wave was a joy. Before Nu-Metal, there was no getting carried away with expectation on Kerrang!. Traditionally, it had appealed to a relatively small, but loyal audience of hardcore devotees. The numbers separating the hit issues from the misses were never so very great. After it, everything inflated, dramatically, and including my own self-confidence.

Such was the growing appeal of our new breed of artists, and that of the heritage acts known to have influenced them, I felt empowered to break all of the rules governing a weekly magazine in the UK market. Principally, the one stating multiple image covers, loaded with editorial ‘sells’, was the best, indeed only hard-fast formula towards cut-through on the packed newsstands. As a counter measure, we unleashed a series of single image covers, brazenly absent of a blizzard of text, featuring the likes of Dave Grohl of the Foo Fighters, Slipknot’s ‘Clown’, and Anthony Kiedis of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and got back record sales.

It was a glorious feeling, but a dangerous one, too. All too easy to come to think of oneself as invulnerable, omnipotent, visionary. I was only made aware of this after the fact, and in respect of a single cover. The one dated 23^rd March 2002 and for which I commissioned The Strokes as cover stars. To be sure, The Strokes operated very much on the outer limits of Kerrang!’s heartland. To me, they were a guitar band with attitude, and a thrilling debut album, so a shoe-in. To others working on and for the magazine, they were as appealing as a bucket of sick.

In the event, The Strokes themselves couldn’t have looked less thrilled about fronting Kerrang!. Their cover photograph had the air of five men induced before the camera at gunpoint. We even made it look like a police line-up. And yet, it sold. Like the proverbial hot cakes. Had I not been quite so full of myself just then, I’d have realised at once how this was that rare thing in magazine publishing, pure momentum. Kerrang!, and I by extension, was having a moment. I could conceivably have put nothing at all on the cover and still it would have sold.

Point being, it wasn’t down to me, my insight, my uncanny ways. It was happy circumstance, a blessing, one that could, and did, go away every bit as suddenly as it was bestowed.

BY THE POINT KERRANG!’s sales arc was down-turning, its upturn had taken me onto Q. The sensible parent to Kerrang!’s upstart tearaway. A more general music magazine, a monthly, and about which pretty much everyone in the publishing company felt comfortable with having an opinion on, and utterly unlike Kerrang!, which no-one outside of the editorial office professed to comprehending.

Politically, this made Q so much more challenging to edit. Practically, the task was being made exponentially harder by the proliferation of mainstream music coverage at all levels of the British media. For the first half of its history, no-one but Q would write about someone of the stature of, for example, Paul McCartney. By the noughties, a new McCartney record was ever likely to entice the broadsheet newspapers, the upmarket men’s magazines, a BBC arts programme, a chat show, and more besides. In short, where once it had grown-up popular music pretty much to itself, Q was now operating on a crowded playing field.

Even so, at the beginning of my tenure, there still was the ‘knowing’. My third issue as Editor, we gave The White Stripes their first Q cover. ‘Seven Nation Army’ had just come out. Our photographer of choice, Rankin, made Jake and Meg White look like superstars. I knew it would sell, and so it did.

Similarly, something properly out of the box could be relied upon for a beat longer to make a stir. Also in my first year on the magazine, we served up ‘world exclusive’ covers featuring reigning pop royalty, Madonna and Britney Spears respectively, and each one sailed from off the shelves.

As the storm forces of digital and social media blew in, though, draining specialist magazines like Q of their inherent power as trusted sources of recommendation, arbiters of taste, there was no longer anything like such certainty. Except, that is, in the negative aspect. Take, for instance, the December 2008 issue. I – and once more, it was my call, and mine alone – had elected to end the year with Johnny Borrell, mouthpiece of post-Britpoppers Razorlight, as our cover star.

Razorlight’s self-titled second album of 2006 had sold over a million copies in the UK. Personally, I’d liked it so much I had declared it to be, in print, the best British album of its kind since Oasis’ Definitely Maybe. A statement Noel Gallagher himself informed me, not inaccurately, was “fucking mental.” Undeterred, I bet the house on Razorlight’s follow-up, Slipway Fires, repeating, or even bettering the feat. Again, as per Noel’s words, fucking mental.

The day before the issue went on sale, I took a call from a spooked executive at the band’s record label, Mercury. He sounded in a state of profound shock. As if returned from bloody battle. “The Razorlight album,” he squeaked. “It’s a disaster.”

So it proved. Slipway Fires went on to sell much less than half what its predecessor had done. Bad enough so as the band didn’t try again for another ten years. In terms of our cover, and as I knew to my bones from that phone call, a catastrophe. The shame of it lingering like a bad smell for a whole month.

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AFTERWARDS, THE HARDER IT got to make any kind of impression, the easier it was to make such clunking mistakes. For me, at any rate. From trying too hard. Out of sheer desperation. One cover especially leaps ignominiously to mind. Another British band, Kasabian, were the nominal stars. The intention was to recreate the gothic-horror mood of the then omnipresent posters for HBO’s vampires-on-heat TV series True Blood, flickeringly ‘a thing’. The result looked far more like a ‘readers’ wives’ photograph from the dark depths of the 1970s.

It was awful. A rabbit trapped in the headlights of an onrushing train, I let it go and to meet its own sorry, deserved fate. Entirely my fault, and a sobering enough moment to stir me to weigh up how long I’d been at the coal face (conclusion: too long) and begin contemplating a future outside of an editor’s chair.

More than 14 years later, I do, from time to time, think on other, more momentous covers from my days on Q. Say, the special 20^th anniversary edition we published in November 2006 with 20 separate covers and incorporating David Bowie, Beyonce, Kate Bush, Keith Richards, U2, Jimmy Page, Pete Townshend, 12 other giants of rock and pop, and the destined to be accursed 13^th, Johnny Borrell. Or Lily Allen, fabulous Lily Allen, with two black panthers. Or then again, the issue guest edited by Yoko Ono and with her captured on the front alongside her beloved John Lennon, resplendent, eternal, and the one with David Bowie and Kate Moss I’ve previously written about here.

Sincerely, I believe we smashed it with all of those issues. Commercially, and creatively. More than that, over and above the ‘knowing’, those were the times when it was, simply, the absolute best job in the world to have done. I wouldn’t swap a minute of it.

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THE DEAL WITH ZZ Top all along has been a simple-clever one. As Billy Gibbons once told it to me, “We’ve always kept one foot in the blues and also maintained a willingness to do a little experimentation.” Add in a dose of their own mythmaking, and mix well for a 20 million selling, pop culture shifting recipe.

Prior to Eliminator, ZZ were self-styled as that ‘little ol’ band from Texas.’ Formed by Gibbons, a guitarist so able Hendrix genuflected to him, in his Houston hometown in 1969. Abetted by a couple of bar band vets, Dusty Hill on bass, drummer Frank Beard, Gibbons piloted them to becoming America’s biggest cult group by the time of their third album of 1973, Tres Hombres. That one had ‘La Grange’ on it, a murderous boogie, an object exercise in sheer cutting to the chase.

ZZ were bigger still by 1976’s Tejas. So big they hauled a Lone Star State-shaped stage, live stocked with longhorn cattle and a couple of glowering Black Vultures, around for 19 months on the Worldwide Texas Tour, and after which they upped and disappeared for a couple of years. Gibbons to travel around Europe, Hill and Beard spending time in Mexico and Jamaica respectively. When they returned, so their story has gone ever since, Gibbons and Hill just happened to have both grown out their beards. Beard, of course, hadn’t, it being funnier that way.

Nothing much changed musically for 1979’s Deguello. Then it did on El Loco in 1981. That was the album when Gibbons started to tool around with the prototype Fairlight keyboard he’d acquired on his travels. By his telling, through pushing buttons and seeing what occurred. Essentially, oddity tracks such as ‘Groovy Little Hippie Pad’ and ‘Party on the Patio’, and a halving of his band’s record sales.

All of which meant that, by 1982, ZZ Top were at something of a crossroads. Three paths to choose from, and Gibbons elected to take the sharp left turn. In Europe, he’d happened to have observed a club full of folks dancing to The Rolling Stones’ latest creation, the elastic-limbed funk-a-thon ‘Emotional Rescue’, and wondered on, since the Stones were not so much ZZ’s elders, why it was his band didn’t ever compel so much as a soul to strut their stuff.

“Billy’s extremely philosophical, a deep thinker, and musically very aware,” Terry Manning, ZZ’s long-serving engineer, having also done time with Led Zep, Otis Redding, and more, told me in 2016. “He concluded ZZ were not up to the required rhythmic capabilities to be played in dance clubs.”

To Gibbons, this was now a pressing problem and one he resolved to fix.

SO IT WAS ZZ began work on what was to be their eighth album. Beginning at Gibbons’ house on South Padre Island, a fingertip of land jutting into the Atlantic Ocean off of Texas’ gulf coast. To there, Manning shipped a portable studio, allowing Gibbons to put down riffs, fragments of ideas. Operations moved from there to Beard’s house on the outskirts of Houston, the three of them jamming together in the drummer’s basement studio, Gibbons’ source material their leaping off point.

They’d gather at Beard’s for 1pm, crack on until they grew weary, sometimes by late afternoon, others till gone midnight. Present at these sessions was one Lindon Hudson. An aspiring songwriter, sometime DJ and sound man, Hudson served as Beard’s house-sitter and general go-to guy. He’d installed Beard’s studio for him, and he’d gotten up tight to Gibbons.

“Lindon was quite an influential, inspirational figure,” Gibbons said. “He brought forward some production techniques that were then available. There was quite a bit of time that the two of us sat behind a mixing console discussing new ways to go about making popular music.”

Hudson had, in fact, made unspecified, uncredited contributions to El Loco. That album, though, hadn’t sold. As we shall see, ZZ’s erring was to ascribe to him the very same role on one that did.

From Texas, Gibbons, Hill, and Beard, accompanied by trusted manager/producer Bill Ham and Manning, decamped to Memphis and the storied Ardent Studios. Located a mile from downtown and the blues clubs of Beale Street and housed in a nondescript looking red-brick building, since opening its doors in 1966, Ardent had hosted Zeppelin, Joe Cocker, Leon Russell, and local heroes Big Star. Ardent Studio A had been ZZ’s room of choice from Tres Hombres.

They billeted at a grand old hotel downtown, The Peabody on Union Avenue. Just the kind of place for three rocking oddballs such as them. Back in 1940, the splendidly named Bellman Edwards Pembroke, erstwhile circus performer and animal trainer, had coached five ducks to parade through The Peabody’s ornate lobby and up onto the base of its decorative fountain. More than 40 years on, Pembroke was there still, The Peabody’s ‘Duck Master’, leading his avian troupe on their merry march twice daily, at 11am and 5pm prompt.

“A lot of musicians used to hang out there, too,” said Beard. “There was also a piano in the lobby. I walked in one night to find Jerry Lee Lewis sat up at it and playing.”

At Ardent, ZZ kept to a rigorous routine. Arriving at 9am daily, going about the business of putting down basic tracks until 9pm. Outside of these hours, they ventured out into the Memphis night, their ‘second home’ according to Gibbons, and parts beyond.

“We would go gambling and carousing about at a dog track across the Mississippi River in West Memphis, Arkansas,” Gibbons furthered. “Or else there were a couple of all-night, after-hours joints. Highly illegal, but where the dice games and good music would start to unfold.”

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MUSIC, OF A RHYTHM and electric blues kind, is baked into Memphis lore. That much, said Gibbons, was an ongoing source of inspiration to ZZ, a reference point to keep them on track. One occasion, Gibbons dashed from one of those after-hours joints to Ardent at 3am, inspired to put down in a single take two weeping blues solos onto a ballad the band had cut, ‘I Need You Tonight’.

Another late night, Gibbons found himself sat up at the bar at an East Memphis dive, thinking on another basic blues track they’d assembled. One still without lyrics, much less a title.

“A young lady walked into the bar wearing a painter’s white jumpsuit,” Gibbons described. “She had the words ‘TV Dinners’ emblazoned on the back. I went right back to The Peabody, holed up in my room, and scribbled out the words.”

The last track they put down as a band was based around a nagging, Stones-like riff, ‘Gimme All Your Lovin’’ as it became. Another, poppier confection rose up from Gibbons’s prodding at his keyboard and arriving at a sound, in Beard’s words, “like a flat tyre going down a muddy road.” This one, too, owed its lyric to a spot of people watching. Driving on the freeway, they espied a woman motorist, steam venting from her car, flag down a passing vehicle. Ergo, “She’s got legs, and she knows how to use ’em.”

“We’re a laugh riot alright,” Hill noted, sardonically.

To this point, ZZ’s latest record didn’t sound so much different from their old ones. Their parts done, Hill and Beard exited. Gibbons, Manning, and Ham, ‘The Triumvirate’ as they liked to call themselves, remained, moving their base to the studio in the attic at Manning’s house. There, as the three of them had done for the past ten years, they set about fashioning the actual sound of ZZ’s new music, and when something relatively radical did occur. ZZ got a different beat. Specifically, 124 beats per minute, the designated optimum for dance music.

“Frank and Dusty assigned me to the task of threading it all together,” Gibbons averred. “A sense of importance was placed on timing and tuning. We spent a lot of productive hours making the most of keeping that record on a good tempo.”

“To me,” said Manning, “Billy’s a true genius. Working with him was always a pleasure, and especially when we got to be just one on one. The two of us going crazy back and forth, trying out sounds and different instruments.”

ELIMINATOR WENT OUT INTO the world on 23^rd March 1983. ZZ hit the road 16 days ahead of it, the first date of what would be a nine-month tour in Lake Charles, Louisiana. The matter of replicating the recorded sound of their new songs dependent upon an eight-track recorder, purpose-built and operated by Terry Manning. The Tap-a-Top 22, as he christened it.

“That being ZZ backwards,” Manning explained. “The band would come up with a set list each night, and I would get sounds and beats to fit from the actual four-track master tapes. I edited them as required, for instance if they wanted to extend a particular song live. There were also lighting and stage automation cues. It was quite a thing to pull off. I’m not sure it always worked.”

As the tour rumbled on, Eliminator gathered pace. Principally fuelled by three interlinked videos Ham pressed them into shooting with TV commercials director Tim Newman. By 1983, MTV was booming. This was the year Madonna broke through on the music channel, and of Michael Jackson’s mini-horror movie for ‘Thriller’.

Armed with a 1933 Ford Coupe in racing red with a Corvette engine, also custom-built for Gibbons out in California, and written off against tax as a prop for the band, and the so-called ‘Eliminator girls’, dancer-model Daniele Arnaud and Playboy playmate Jeana Tomasino, ZZ found themselves in the right place, right time.

‘Gimme All Your Lovin’’ was the first clip and set the tone. Filmed at a gas station in the one-horse LA County town of Littlerock. The car, the girls, the gold ‘ZZ’ key chain, Gibbons, Hill, and Beard in boiler suits, comic foils in their own creation. Gibbons and Hill sporting headless guitars to better the joke.

“When luck is on your side, things just seem to happen at appropriate times,” Gibbons reflected. “The guy who does our guitars to this day, Mr John Bolin, told us we’d need something different for television. John had a lumberjack saw, so Dusty and I took our perfectly good instruments over to him and he cut the tops off of them.”

It won them an MTV Video Music Award. The one for the stuttering blues of ‘Sharp Dressed Man’ was next, more of the same. The third clip, for ‘Legs’, blew the roof off. A Cinderella story for a plot. Twenty-one-year-old Wendy Frazier made over from mousy salesclerk to, well, a dancer-model-Playmate kind of ’80s pin-up. For this one, Gibbons and Hill were tooled up with sheepskin-coated guitars that spun through 360 degrees.

“First time I tried mine,” said Hill, “I knocked the shit out of myself upside the head.”

The album was selling well even before the ‘Legs’ video. Afterwards, it exploded. To the point Gibbons and Hill couldn’t go without being recognised. “As Billy likes to say,” Hill reasoned, “some people put on a false beard as a disguise, but we couldn’t do that. Frank pretty much stopped hanging with me because I would draw crowds wherever I went.”

In due course, Lindon Hudson once more came a-calling. Hudson filed legal suit, claiming to have been closely involved with the creation of sounds, and the actual songwriting for Eliminator. ZZ settled the case in 1986, paying Hudson $600,000. Hudson was also granted sole copyright on one of Eliminator’s 11 tracks, ‘Thug’.

“That was a particular disappointment to me,” said Beard. “What happened with Lindon was a real drag, but… you have to move on.”

MOVE ON ZZ DID. Altogether, and for good and ill, Eliminator had a profound effect on how records through the rest of the decade were made to sound. So much so, ZZ themselves re-ran their own playbook with 1985’s Afterburner. Following on from that record, they steered a course back towards their roots, to once again becoming the ‘little ol’ band from Texas.’

Their last album, their 15^th, La Futura, made with Rick Rubin, was a good one and with a terrific signature track, ‘I Gotsa Get Paid’, but that was going on 14 years ago now. In the stead of new music, ZZ has stayed out on the road and with time tolling. Ham passed in 2016. Dusty Hill was taken in 2021, his longtime bass tech Elwood Francis stepping into his boots. Terry Manning departed just last year.

Billy Gibbons and Frank Beard, both now 76, roll on. Tonight, they’re at the Allen County War Memorial Coliseum in Fort Wayne, Indiana. For sure, ‘Gimme All Your Lovin’’, ‘Legs’, and more from Eliminator will be staples on their setlist.

“Those songs, if we don’t do ’em, we’d be strung up by our heels,” Beard reasoned to me. “I’d just gotten married in 1982. That five years up until 1987 was probably the best time of my whole life.”

Or, as Hill, his old comrade in arms, put it: “You can either enjoy a thing like that, or let it eat you up. We decided to enjoy it, and it was a hell of a ride.”

And what of The Reverend Billy G, whatever lessons has he taken from ZZ’s long, strange, and wonderful trip?
“BB King’s admonition to play heavy and don’t work too hard. That, and, man, to be afraid of learning that fourth chord.”

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FIFTY YEARS AGO THIS week, the Ramones released their self-titled debut album in the US. The history unfolding from this landmark, and what had preceded it, as well, is ever open to conjecture, dispute, and mythmaking. Facts mixed with subjective opinion. The latter often as not dependent on which side of the fence you set yourself on, Punk Rock as gospel or heresy.

What’s undeniable, Punk wasn’t – and in spite of what we’ll be force-fed next year upon the 50^th anniversaries of Never Mind the Bollocks, The Clash, and others – birthed in the UK. Neither did it begin with the ‘brothers’ Ramone. American garage bands, those corralled together by Lenny Kaye on his seminal Nuggets compilation of 1972, were making a proto-punk, barely-able-to-play, but because of it inspired, racket from at least a decade earlier. Groups such as The Seeds, The Electric Prunes, The Count Five, and many more.

Even farther back, there was Link Wray’s gloriously primal ‘Rumble’ instrumental single of 1958. A record that gripped one particular young tearaway growing up in Ann Arbor, Michigan by the name of James Osterberg, the future Iggy Pop. Pop’s band, The Stooges, proceeded to unleash a primitive assault of their own making on their self-titled debut of 1969. Their fellow Michiganders, the MC5, having blazed a trail for them the year prior on Kick Out the Jams.

As to who actually termed it ‘Punk Rock’, again there’s no conclusive answer. Ed Sanders of The Fugs was referring to his guitar solo technique as ‘punk rock’ as far distant as 1970. Various US rock critics, Lester Bangs, Dave Marsh, and Legs McNeil, co-founder of Punk magazine, included, have been ascribed to having first used it to frame a whole kind of music.

There have been at least three seminal texts written on Punk Rock as a pop culture phenomenon. McNeil’s and Gillian McCain’s oral history Please Kill Me and Michael Azzerad’s Our Band Could Be Your Life superbly covering different epochs of American punk, Jon Savage’s England’s Dreaming with the same accounting of the British expulsion. Even still, the perception of punk as all-conquering wrecking ball, laying waste to the entire musical landscape before it, is a massively over-inflated one. Among the hugest selling albums of 1976 and 1977 were Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, the Bee Gees-fronted Saturday Night Fever soundtrack, ELO’s Out of the Blue, and Meat Loaf’s Bat out of Hell. None of those records, or those artists, has been diminished.

Neither, though, has Ramones, or The Stooges, or so many of the records made during American Punk’s – Britain’s, too, but that’s for another day – various upsurges. Out of those two legendary Manhattan dives, CBGBs and Max’s Kansas City, in the mid-1970s. Or from the clubs of Los Angeles and Washington DC in the ’80s. Or brewed up in the Pacific Northwest and the Bay Area in the ’90s, and when punk did undeniably, momentarily, become the biggest noise in music. Altogether, and as with all great, true music made with heart, soul, and pure instinct, it goes on enduring, and thrilling, across generations.

All of which means there’s no possibility of there being a definitive listing of the absolute best American punk albums, one gaining universal approval. Neither to say there can’t be one covering its grand, panoramic sweep, and embracing a whole lot of timeless, extraordinary music…

20. YEAH YEAH YEAHS Fever to Tell (2003)

Singer Karen O and guitarist Nick Zinner were initially an acoustic duo. Craving something, by O’s description, trashier, punkier, grimier, and adding Brian Chase on drums, they unleashed this splenetic rush of a debut album out of Brooklyn’s poky Headgear Studio. Arty, danceable, and razor sharp, with songs that explode like star bursts and a compelling siren in O.

19. MINUTEMEN Double Nickels on the Dime (1984)

Amassing 43 songs in a head-spinning 74 minutes, Double Nickels… comes on like a fast and breathless collision between a garage-born Talking Heads and an art-rock Chili Peppers, with a side order of freeform jazz. That it was put down in just eight days, for the princely sum of $1,100, speaks to its creative rush. With Mike Watt’s elastic bass to the fore, and frontman D. Boon’s guitar skittering in and around it, Minutemen marked a great leap forward. Boon’s death in a road accident the year following tragically stopped them from bounding on.

18. THE DISTILLERS Sing Sing Death House (2002)

Birthed in LA in 1998 by Aussie expat Brody Dalle and signed to Epitaph Records subsidiary Hellcat, The Distillers struck hard and true on this second album. Self-produced and recorded over the span of a week, it marries Dalle’s Courtney Love-style hellion vocals to a bunch of rousing, furiously defiant tunes. See ‘I Am a Revenant’ and especially nihilist anthem ‘City of Angels’, Dalle hollering, “They say, this is the city, the city of angels. All I see is dead wings.”

17. ROCKET FROM THE CRYPT Hot Charity (1995)

Weary of Punk orthodoxy, Speedo, nee John Reis, in 1990 launched Rocket From The Crypt from out of San Diego as a kind of Punk Rock rhythm-and-soul show band, attired in matching bowling shirts and armed with a blistering horn section. This third album was the first to match the white-hot power of their live gigs, its nine tracks all snap-shot riffs, handclaps, and fire and brimstone. Later the same year, RFTC released a another album, Scream, Dracula, Scream!, through major label Interscope and with it briefly, gloriously, broke through to the mainstream.

16. BAD BRAINS Bad Brains (1982)

Begun as a jazz fusion collective, and named after a Ramones song, Washington DC’s Bad Brains mixed hardcore speed with Rastafarian righteousness. Recorded live to tape, their debut album was a brilliantly chaotic melange of rapid-fire hardcore, metal, and reggae, fronted by the incendiary H.R. Opener ‘Sailin’ On’ pulls a tune from collapsing musical rubble, ‘Attitude’ and ‘Banned in DC’ blitz like lightning bolts, ‘Jah Calling’ is an oasis of dub calm.

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15. MISSION OF BURMA Vs (1982)

Boston’s Mission Of Burma played their live shows with such a fury, they were forced to disband in 1983 as a result of singer-guitarist-songwriter Roger Miller’s worsening tinnitus. Debut album Vs approximates their onstage power, Miller’s shrieking, distorted guitar and the band’s off-kilter rhythms splintered with sound man Martin Swope’s battery of electronic effects. Boldly distinctive stuff, but with great songs, too. Witness barely reined-in opener ‘Secrets’ and the vaulting ‘That’s How I Escaped My Certain Fate’.

14. X Los Angeles (1980)

Produced by Ray Manzarek of The Doors, Los Angeles cemented X as the most reaching band to roar out of the late-’70s/early-’80s LA punk scene and alongside the riotous likes of Black Flag, Germs, and Fear, with whom drummer D.J. Bonebrake had a short stint. Over the swathe cut by Billy Zoom’s rockabilly guitar, front duo John Doe’s and Exene Cervenka’s yelps and sneers propel ‘Johnny Hit and Run’, the evergreen title track, and more like Chuck Berry gone goth. An instant classic.

13. DEAD KENNEDYS Fresh Fruit For Rotting Vegetables (1980)

Frontman Jello Biafra’s hysterical, unmistakable vocals, East Bay Ray’s scything guitar, and songs as murderously insistent as ‘Holidays in Cambodia’, ‘Let’s Lynch the Landlord’, and ‘California Uber Alles’. Fresh Fruit… is another of Punk’s undeniably all-time great debut albums. The cover artwork, a snatched photograph of cop cars ablaze during San Francisco’s White Night riots of 1979, sums up the general mood.

12. SLEATER KINNEY Dig Me Out (1997)

For this, their third album, singer-guitarist Corin Tucker and singer-bassist Carrie Brownstein were joined by drummer Janet Weiss. With Weiss’ classic rock chops bolstering their already well-honed flair for combustible melody, and a cover paying homage to The Kinks, Dig Me Out was Sleater Kinney’s lift off point. Furiously tuneful, tilting at gender stereotypes and sexism, with deliciously jagged guitars, call-and-exchange vocals, and all over plain great.

11. TELEVISION Marquee Moon (1977)

From the same East Village milieu as spawned the likewise daring Talking Heads and Patti Smith, and Blondie, too, Television fashioned a sound of their own that was complex, hooky, and profoundly New York. They struck gold off the bat here, frontman Tom Verlaine’s and Richard Hell’s guitars spiky, angular and interlocked in a way The Strokes would later ape. Compulsively jingle-jangling, the 10:38 title track was an immediate standard. The easy roll of ‘Venus’ and the plaintive ‘Guiding Light’ are equally as engaging.

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10. FUGAZI 13 Songs (1989)

From the ashes of his previous band Minor Threat, Ian MacKaye sought to fashion an ‘MC5 plus reggae’ sum with Fugazi. 13 Songs, compiling their first two EPs and released through MacKaye’s own Dischord label, went degrees further. Hardcore’s defining statement, jittery, funky, and brooding all at once, this was Punk Rock fuelled by boundless musical ambition as much as rage. Scorching opener ‘Waiting Room’ set the tone. ‘Margin Walker’ was MacKaye’s manifesto writ large, as he declaimed, “I’m gonna set myself on fire.” He lit a torch here carrying alt-rock through the next decade and beyond.

9. RANCID …And Out Come the Wolves (1995)

After their influential ska-punk band Operation Ivy went belly up, singer-guitarist Tim Armstrong and bassist Matt Freeman next piloted the more Clash-leaning Rancid out of the Bay Area. Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong declined an offer to be their second guitarist, Lars Frederiksen stepping in, and they hit a dizzy peak on this third album for Epitaph, produced by Brett Gurewitz of fellow SoCal Punks Bad Religion. Nineteen songs, no fat, Armstrong’s Joe Strummer impression hand-in-glove on such skanking highlights as ‘Time Bomb’ and ‘Ruby Soho’.

8. LIZ PHAIR Exile in Guyville (1993)

Self-taught on guitar, recording her whip-smart songs to four-track in her bedroom in Chicago, Phair took a $3,000 advance from New York indie Matador and extended it to this 18-song debut album. Sequenced as a riposte to the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street and swiping at the maleness eternally prevailing pop culture. The nuts and bolts of the concept aside, Phair’s songs were ragged, bittersweet glories. Rock swaggering and funny, too. As per ‘Fuck and Run’, Phair casually announcing, “I want a boyfriend. I want all that boring old shit.”

7. HUSKER DU Candy Apple Grey (1986)

Purists would likely cite one of the seminal Minneapolis-St. Paul trio’s earlier records for SST. Say, their white lightning, aptly titled debut of 1982, Land Speed Record, or 1984’s seismic double Zen Arcade. This, their major label debut for Warner Bros, though, is the apex of Bob Mould’s and Grant Hart’s battle to better each other with song. Ten tracks, six from Mould (including screamed opener ‘Crystal’, and the heartbreaking ‘Hardly Getting Over It’), four by Hart (two of them all-timers, ‘Don’t Want to Know If You Are Lonely and ‘Sorry Somehow’), altogether still peerless.

6. HOLE Live Through This (1994)

Matchless from the grunge era for its raw, lacerating power, Hole’s second album is Courtney’s Love everlasting impression. The songs are better, more tuneful than those on their 1991 debut, Pretty on the Inside, but Love’s coruscating force is undimmed on standouts such as ‘Violet’, ‘Miss World’, and ‘Jennifer’s Body’. Best of all ‘Doll Parts’, a searing, open-wound confessional, Love unforgettably baring, “I want to be the girl with the most cake. I love him so much, it just turns to hate.” The impact made indelible by the deaths of both Kurt Cobain and bassist Kristen Pfaff within two months of it coming out.

5. GREEN DAY American Idiot (2004)

Having played in Bay Area bands together since they were 15, and joined in Green Day by drummer Tre Cool, Billie Joe Armstrong and Mike Dirnt became overnight superstars with 1994’s Dookie. The comedown was rough and all too predictable, not so this second grandstand act. Having contemplated splitting after 2000’s leaden Warning, they instead dusted themselves down to make of all things a ‘Punk Rock opera’. A fabulous one, too, The Who’s Tommy on speed. Never mind the story, feel the super-sized magnificence of ‘Jesus of Suburbia’, ‘Holiday’, and the roaring title track.

4. THE REPLACEMENTS Let It Be (1984)

Minneapolis’ second hall-of-fame band, The Replacements coalesced around Paul Westerberg’s ramshackle but glorious songs and poor, doomed Bob Stinson’s snot-nosed guitar. Where their initial brace of albums for hometown indie Twin Tone reflected the messy nature of their live shows, this third polished the rough edges with rock and pop classicism. They were rampant still on ‘We’re Coming Out’ and off-the-rails Kiss cover ‘Black Diamond’, navigating the beginnings of Westerberg’s bruised-hearted pomp with ‘Answering Machine’, and covering both bases at once on ‘I Will Dare’.

3. THE STOOGES Fun House (1970)

It’s all put out there on The Stooges’ second from the opening song/sonic assault of ‘Down on the Street’. Iggy Pop’s baying, sneering, animalistic exhortations. The remedial, primeval, chugga-chugga beat doled out by the Asheton brothers, Ron on guitar, drummer Scott, and bassist Dave Alexander. The sense of something diseased, lethal, lurching out from the shadows. Thrilling as well. As when Pop, surely shirtless and wild-eyed, summons the magnificent ‘TV Eye’ with his caveman howl, “Loooooord…” Or as Steve Mackay’s skronking sax rips through ‘LA Blues’. Unloved at the time, unmatched ever since.

2. PATTI SMITH Horses (1975)

The original, and an original, punk poet at her crowning moment. From its icon-making Robert Mapplethorpe cover photo, through its urgent re-tooling of standard rock practices, the bastardising of Them’s ‘Gloria’ for an opening gambit, the snatch of Chris Jenner’s 1962 hit ‘Land of a Thousand Dances’ erupting from ‘Land’, via Lenny Kaye’s grease-grime guitar, and platforming Smith’s own stream-of-conscious improvisations, Horses marked a new kind of musical language happening on the spot. A work of sheer, wondrous art.

1. RAMONES Ramones (1976)

“Hey, ho, let’s go!” And off Jeffrey Hyman, John Cummings, Douglas Colvin, and Thomas Erdelyi, better known to history, respectively, as Joey, Johnny, Dee Dee, and Tommy Ramone, went at 160 beats per minute. The ultimate statement of dumb-genius intent, Ramones lit a fire that’s not ever since gone out. You’re not moved by ‘Blitzkrieg Bop’, ‘Beat on the Brat’, ‘I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend’, and the rest, you have no soul. They paid photographer Roberta Bayley a mere $125 for the cover shot. A little has never been made to go so far.

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BY THE DEFINITION OF the Urban Dictionary, Stoner Rock is, ‘A loosely termed genre of music that has heavy guitar riffs that are somewhat repetitive and hypnotic. Its closest relatives would be blues rock, hard rock, and metal.’ By any measure, Stoner Rock sounds, well, elemental. Like something forged within and extracted from the very bowels of the earth. Mineral, or fossil in form. Its compound elements musical – pronounced traces of classic rock, Sabbath, principally, but Cream, Zeppelin, Blue Cheer, Blue Oyster Cult, and others, too – and chemical, pharmaceutical.

Its origin points straddle the 1980s and early ’90. I learned of Masters Of Reality, Chris Goss’ trailblazing collective, from reading Kerrang!. Of Kyuss from being on the magazine and from two of its most reliable excavators, Steffan Chirazi and Morat. Both of those bands rocked in ways familiar, but also distinctive. Neither of them going on to sell too many records, Josh Homme had to venture forth from Kyuss to Queens Of The Stone Age to do that, but part of, and in and of themselves, a true cult.

Along with and out behind them came more bands with exotic, or else ridiculous sounding names, scattered about the globe. Fu Manchu from Orange County, California. Alabama Thunderpussy in Richmond, Virginia, and Zen Guerilla in Delaware. In London, Orange Goblin, The Heads out of Bristol. The mighty Spiritual Beggars from Halmstad on Sweden’s west coast and Wolfmother from Sydney, Australia. All made fine, powerful records well worth hunting out and tracking down. For the perfect, head tripping Stoner Rock six-pack, though, look no further…

1. MASTERS OF REALITY Masters Of Reality (1989)

If there is such a thing as a Stoner Rock ground zero, this is it. Formed in 1981 in Syracuse, New York by ace guitarist Tim Harrington and the prodigiously gifted Chris Goss (lead vocals, guitar, producer) and named after a misspelt label on Sabbath’s Master Of Reality album, the Masters’ list of influences ran the classic rock gamut, see all of those bands listed above and add King Crimson and ZZ Top.

Like so many great, but off the grid groups of the time, they were brought out of the shadows by Rick Rubin. Signed to Rubin’s Def American imprint, Harrington and Goss set about corralling a bunch of the freewheeling tunes they’d worked up into an all but perfect debut album. Alternatively titled The Blue Garden for its sleeve artwork, Masters Of Reality slips right on into an easy, rolling groove on lead-off track ‘The Candy Song’, proceeds through the psych-blues of ‘John Brown’, ‘Gettin’ High’, and ‘Domino’, Goss’ voice sweet and clear over greasy, Billy Gibbons-flavoured riffs, incorporates a propulsive Zep-style epic, ‘Kill The King’, and generally never lets up with the dazzling flourishes.

The band fractured after its release, Harrington departing, but Goss soldiered on, recruiting drum legend Ginger Baker for the just-as-superb Sunrise On The Sufferbus album of 1992.

2. KYUSS Blues For The Red Sun (1992)

Chris Goss again, here as producer to the first outlet for Josh Homme’s singular, swaggering gifts. Kyuss took shape in the Palm Springs desert, playing outdoor parties for friends and disciples, ‘mondo generator’ nights by their own terminology. They sounded accordingly, spacious, hot-baked, boundless. Homme’s dinosaur guitar, down-tuned and blasted out low and heavy through a bass amp, accompanied by madman bassist Nick Oliveri, hulking drummer Brant Bjork, and hippy-screamer singer John Garcia.

Their second album, Blues For The Red Sun was the perfect distillation of their unique approach. Heavy, groovy, soulful, and trippy. Its monster riffage and overall ethos summed up on its two signature tracks, ‘Thumb’ and ‘Green Machine’. “I’ve got a war inside my head,” Garcia bayed on the latter, and with conviction.

Altogether, it proved hugely influential, a template picked up and followed by bands throughout the next decade and beyond, and yet, ridiculously, it sold just 39,000 copies at the time. Kyuss lasted only two further albums, both terrific, neither any more commercially successful, but their legacy lives on.

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3. TROUBLE Manic Frustration (1992)

From the same year as Blues For The Red Sun, another criminally ignored, stone-cold hard rocking classic. Trouble lumbered out of Chicago as far back as 1978, conjuring a potent, doom-laden brew out of slowed-down Sabbath riffs and the fabulous Eric Wagner’s steel-plated pipes. Rick Rubin, again, picked them up for Def American for their self-titled fourth album of 1990, and then steered them towards Stoner Rock nirvana on this fifth.

On Manic Frustration, Trouble upped their tempos and made their sound more impactful, richer, not nearly so somnambulant, adding psych-rock colour splashes and a pronounced Beatles influence to the mix. The results were overpowering. From the rollercoaster leaping off point of ‘Come Touch The Sky’ to the comedown exhale of ‘Breathe’, this was a band grasping at and grabbing hold of their shot at greatness. See the barrelling ‘Tragedy Man’, the Fab Four-gone-metal ‘Hello Strawberry Skies’, and the heroically monstrous ‘Mr. White’ for further, ample evidence.

Of course, literally no-one bought it and today Manic Frustration has vanished to the point of not even existing on Spotify. Beg, steal, or borrow a copy if ever you can. It’s a lost treasure.

4. KARMA TO BURN Karma To Burn (1997)

A bunch of apparent degenerates from the boondocks of West Virginia, Karma To Burn planned on being an all-instrumental combo. A backwoods Sabbath, minus Ozzy, on cheap drugs. Roadrunner Records, the indie label that finally snapped them up, had other ideas, their contract dependent on the band finding a mouthpiece. In came friend Jason Jarosz, not so much a singer as someone who sounded like a serial killer intoning the voices in his head, and with him, Karma To Burn unleashed this hellishly brilliant record.

“I look forward to my death,” Jarosz psycho-growled on opener ‘Ma Petite Mort’, his new bandmates firing up a fearsome riff arsenal behind him and simply letting rip. On they went, into the even more brilliantly unhinged ‘Bobbi, Bobbi, Bobbi – I’m Not Good’ and ‘Appalachian Woman’, upon which Jarosz declaimed, “All my friends are alcoholics,” and you don’t doubt him. Two instrumentals, meanwhile, ‘Eight’ and ‘Six’, as their cursory titles imply, cut to the chase and just go right on ahead with cracking skulls.

All of it, frankly, is remarkable. I’d heard nothing like it back then and still haven’t now. Too much, as it happened, of course, for any more than a few diehards to digest, and Karma To Burn were promptly dropped by Roadrunner when it tanked. They fired Jarosz and proceeded, as they’d intended all along, without vocals and of a fashion until 2021, never again able to hit this high.

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5. MONSTER MAGNET Powertrip (1998)

Any album that starts off with its frontman declaring, “I started humping volcanoes, baby, when I was too young,” as Monster Magnet’s Dave Wyndorf does here on track one, ‘Crop Circle’, better comport itself in an entirely outrageous and oversized fashion. Boxes Powertrip, Wyndorf’s band’s fourth album just keeps on ticking.

The Magnet coalesced in Red Bank, New Jersey, in 1989, hinged around Wyndorf’s cartoonish persona and John McBain’s thunderous guitar. One of their earlier monickers, Triple Bad Acid, pretty much summed up their altered state of things. Prior to Powertrip, they’d made a couple of feet-finding records and an excellent third, 1995’s Dopes To Infinity, replete with a gloriously deranged near-hit, ‘Negasonic Teenage Warhead’. Conceived by Wyndorf in a hotel room located ten miles outside of Las Vegas, over three doubtless manic weeks, Powertrip blew off the doors.

A pummelling, grinding, searing assault on the senses, it was home, too, to a collection of fabulous songs. See acid-blues anthem ‘Space Lord’, the spiralling ‘See You In Hell’, and slacker call-to-arms ‘Bummer’, Wyndorf swearing, “I’m never gonna work another day in my life.” It went Gold in the US, a rare Stoner Rock head-above-the-parapet moment, and since when Monster Magnet have returned to ploughing their own furrow.

6. CLUTCH The Elephant Riders (1998)

Arising out of Germantown, Maryland in 1991, Clutch made an instant impression with their bowdlerising debut album, Transnational Speedway League. By this, their third record, they’d settled into a juddering, of-their-own groove.

Wearing its rock classicism on its sleeve, The Elephant Riders was produced by veteran Jack Douglas, who’d piloted Aerosmith’s run of hit ’70s albums. It sounded exactly like the picture adorning its front cover. Which is to say, just how you’d imagine a herd of elephants traversing the open plains would – lumbering, heavy-footed, relentless, but with a side order to it of albeit bone-crunching funkiness. The churning title track set it off to a tee, frontman Neil Fallon’s howled vocals and archaic bent for lyrics meeting Tim Sult’s churning riffs and a rhythm section swung like a lump hammer. Heard to similarly overpowering effect on ‘Ship Of Gold’, ‘The Yeti’, ‘The Soapmakers’, and the dizzying 12-minutes of closing track ‘The Dragonfly’.

Clutch are out there still, monolithic and unbowed. All power to them.

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THERE’S NO EQUATING COMMERCIAL success with the fact of being a rock star. Say, Ed Sheeran, Gwen Stefani, or Chris Martin? None of them rock stars in a month of Sundays. Josh Homme, Courtney Love, Chris Robinson? All day long. That much is a state of mind, a way of being. Attitude, swagger, pure, undiluted ‘don’t give a shit-ness’. And to those ends, Greg Dulli is the greatest rock star I’ve met.

It’s January 2011, a Thursday night in New Orleans. My cab from the airport has dropped me off outside of The R Bar, a dive joint housed in a 19^th century clapboard house on the fringes of the French Quarter. There’s a throng of people on the street outside. The honk and hum of traffic. And there, astride and draping the building’s wrap-round first-floor balcony, is Dulli. Dressed head to toe in black. Black overcoat, black dress shirt, black slacks, black shoes polished to a gleam. Introducing himself as per the classic Stones song, as a ‘man of wealth of taste.’

“Come on up, brother,” he hails me. “The night is young.”

I’d gone to the Big Easy to profile Dulli for Q. In truth, I’d commissioned myself the job purely out of self-interest. I wanted to get to know him better, plain as that. The first time I’d encountered him had been by happy accident. That was 1993. His band, The Afghan Whigs, was playing a club in London’s Soho, the LA2, on the back of their just released fourth album, Gentlemen. I was at the time serving as Reviews Editor on RAW magazine. Short of anyone prepared to give up a Friday night to write about the gig, I had to step in.

Altogether, I knew precisely nothing about the Whigs or Dulli. Not that he was born in blue collar Hamilton, Ohio in 1965 to a railroad worker father and a mother who toiled in retail. Or of how he’d played drums in various high school bands, dropped out from studying film and broadcasting in college, and migrated to Hollywood, where he’d worked in the Tower Records on Sunset Strip and auditioned for acting roles without success. Or how in 1986 he’d returned to Hamilton, hooked up with an old acquaintance, John Curley, a bass player, and a hotshot guitarist, Rick McCollum, and formed the Whigs.

Soon enough, I’d discover the Whigs were the first band from outside of the American northwest to be signed to Sub Pop. They were outliers from the start. Suited and booted when surrounding them in Sub Pop’s home city of Seattle were groups attired in shades of denim and plaid. Roped into the grunge boom by default, but collectively more in thrall to Marvin Gaye than they ever were to Black Sabbath.

Their first three records had barely nudged them towards the perfect sound combination Dulli had in mind. Which is to say, an approximation of two of the artists he held dearest, the Stones and Prince, joined at the hip. Gentlemen blew open the doors to that promised land. They stunned me that night in London and went on doing the same over the course of a couple more powerhouse records. Black Love in 1996, dark, funky and brooding, and 1998’s 1965, cut in riotous circumstances in New Orleans and comporting every bit like it.

In between times, Dulli sang John Lennon’s parts on the soundtrack to 1994’s Beatles-in-Hamburg movie, Backbeat, played guitar on the first Foo Fighters album, and did a stint with Queens of the Stone Age.

After 1965, the Whigs flamed out. Burned from too many drugs and too much struggle. Dulli leapt into another project, The Twilight Singers. A woozy, decorative debut album, Twilight As Played By…, in 2000 and then silence. Dulli simply exited stage left. Bought his first bar, The Short Stop, once a cop hangout, in his yet again adopted home city of LA, and stopped making music.

A tragedy brought him back two years later. His dear friend, film director Ted Demme’s death from a heart attack at 38. Dulli poured his grief and angst into Blackberry Belle, the perfect, most potent distillation of his rock-soul noir fixation. A record he described to me as being “engraved on my soul.” After it, Powder Burns, the first one he’d made clean and sober. Then Dynamite Steps, what would prove to be The Twilight Singers’ last bow and the one I was ostensibly in New Orleans to talk to him about.

DULLI’S PLANS FOR OUR interview were for us to first spend three nights “hanging out.” Then to sit down and talk on my fourth and last night in his second city. He was putting me up in one of the six guest rooms at The R Bar, the $300 a night Royal Suite. An open-plan studio room, all dark reds and exposed brick, it had a four-poster bed and an antique bathtub big enough to swim in. Dulli had taken care of the interior design himself.

Downstairs, the bar was populated by gaggles of students and a coterie of gnarly old hands. The place was low-lit, and had a jukebox, a pool table that had seen better days and, incongruously, a barber’s chair. Thursdays were ‘$10 for a shot and a haircut’ nights. Dulli had bought the place not long after he’d acquired The Short Stop, and since when he’d added a third LA bar to his business empire.

“I have expensive tastes,” he told me. “And that was never going to work on just my rock ‘n’ roll income.”

The ‘hang’ with him was quite something. That first night, we went to dinner in the Quarter, joined by Dave Rosser, guitarist and Dulli’s right-hand in The Twilight Singers. Afterwards, Dulli led us on a sortie to view a loft apartment a property developer friend of his was doing up and had left him the keys to. Several million dollars’ worth of real estate, and in which we sat looking through floor-to-ceiling windows to the hustle and bustle below, the city drifting towards morning.

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Second night, he took me to see the famed Preservation Hall Brass Band at another dive joint across town. A true New Orleans experience. Gris-gris righteous and rousing. We perched ourselves on two stools up at the bar and in between sets, he spoke to me of his youth and other things.

“Have you ever read Tom Sawyer? That was my childhood. I grew up by a river. My friends and I would take our bikes down there and jump into the swimming hole. Play baseball on the riverbank. We grew weed down by the creek and dealt it in the bowling alley.”

Next day, I took a walk with him from The R Bar, alongside the Mississippi River, and out to the shotgun house he kept in the city, on a quiet residential street. On the way, we ran into another friend of his, the actor Steve Zahn, in town filming the second season of David Simon’s post-Sopranos TV show, Treme. The house was decorated in the same dark reds and woods as the rooms at The R Bar.

Dulli mixed iced teas for us, and we stood at the back door looking out to the neat garden, lit up by strings of fairy lights, stone figurines dotted among the plants, and dominated by a huge hot tub.

“I had some fun in there the night before you came,” he said, a glint in his eyes. “An actress I know came over.”

Also, I found out from him he took anti-anxiety pills to fly and was obsessive compulsive to the point of having to pull his car off the freeway to wash it if he spotted so much as a speck of dirt on the windscreen. He’d never married, hadn’t had children.

“I’ve been lonely, and I’ve been alone,” he said. “Being alone is different because it’s a choice.”

He liked to go off travelling on his own. Around Italy, to Mexico, and the year previous, he’d undertaken an odyssey through South America.

“For my own pleasure, education, and enlightenment,” he said. “There’s so much out there and I’ve never wanted to miss anything.”

Of his other quirks, he listed a dislike of mirrors and how he hated to have his photograph taken. “Have since I was a kid,” he said. “I play things close to my vest. But in all the lying I’ve done in my life I’ve never lied in my songs.”

Dinner again that evening, with Dulli’s brother-in-arms Mark Lanegan having flown in from LA for the occasion. Lanegan was a serial guest on Twilight Singers records and tours, and they’d made a terrific, black-hearted record together as The Gutter Twins in 2008, Saturnalia. Lanegan was quiet, reserved. The two of them sat across from each other like a couple of old gunslingers. Enough hard-lived war stories between them to fill several volumes, but more animated now by the exact nature of the food they were ordering and the ongoing basketball season. Foodies and sports nuts, the pair of them.

ON MY LAST DAY, we drove to a diner Dulli favoured in the 9^th Ward, one of the neighbourhoods worst hit by Hurricane Katrina five years back. The evidence of the ruin it wreaked was still there. Crosses and numbers painted in red on the doors of many derelict houses. Denoting the fact of each place having been searched in the aftermath of the storm, and the number of dead souls found inside.

In the evening, we retired to my room and Dulli talked for a couple of hours and more about the nature of himself and his music. Of how he’d gone for eight days without sleep making 1965, “the first five on massive amounts of cocaine. The last three on Coca-Cola and chocolate. That record was our Exile On Main Street. Wild, non-stop fun. People got arrested.”

Altogether, he estimated he’d lost five years, and many thousands of dollars, to freebasing cocaine. Powder Burns, he said, “is all the monsters. As I writer, I needed to look at what I’d done and make sense of it. Exhume the body and do forensics on it.

“I’d always go to the edge. Like Wile E. Coyote, I never realised that there was only air underneath me and just kept running.”

These days, he said, his vices were reserved to booze and pot. Along with everything else, he’d quit a four-packs-a-day smoking habit. He excused himself to go take a piss. I couldn’t help but hear him from the bathroom, long and loud as a horse. When he sat back down, I asked him for his present state of mind.

“Cautiously positive,” he answered. “Strangely healthy. Child-like in its calculation. I think I’m candid and direct,” he furthered. “You can tell if I like you and if I don’t. That can sometimes be perceived as being cocky. Or being a prick.

“I can be a prick. I can be a sweetheart, too. It depends on which button you press. They’re clearly marked by the way. I didn’t always like myself, but I’ve come around.”

And as for an oft-repeated description of him as alt-rock’s Prince of Darkness?

“Like it. He’s had a million songs written about him. Always dresses well. Sinister, but probably a good guy to hang out with.

“Granted, I myself may have run too far into the jungle. But I learnt some things in there, and I’m back, baby.”

Since when, Dulli’s continued to march to the beat of his own drum. He re-gathered The Afghan Whigs in 2011 and has made three more excellent albums with them, Do the Beast, In Spades, and a career best in 2022, How Do You Burn?. Another is due this year, and with it, a 40^th anniversary tour. He has lost comrades along the way, Dave Rosser to cancer in 2017, Lanegan in 2022. Shattering blows, but he goes on carrying the torch.

I parted from him in New Orleans back downstairs in his place. He’d a date for the night, an attractive young woman waiting for him up at the bar. He put one arm across her back, escorting her towards the door, raising the other and waving to me as he left. Back turned, a big man, comfortable in his own skin and bearing, off into another night in the city that never sleeps.

The last thing I’d asked him to do was to complete this sentence: Greg Dulli is…

His reply was instant, nonchalant. “All yours,” he said.

For a Greg Dulli primer, please do explore the playlist at the link:

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NO-ONE WORKING IN MUSIC magazines during the mid- to late-1990s will forget Britpop. The Oasis and Blur hegemony, with a side of order of Jarvis Cocker and Pulp, was jet fuel to moribund copy sales. Lift-off towards the music press feeling, and being, culturally relevant once again. The last days of empire.

As with all such movements, of course, Britpop was both less and more than it seemed at the time. A whole load of thoroughly average bands ill-befitting the limelight on one hand. On the other, an entirely reductive view of what amounted to the best of British music during the period.

Some great music, yes. Though the records that have aged best – those by, say, Radiohead, Massive Attack, Spiritualized, and The Verve – ran counter to the blustering of the brothers Gallagher and Blur’s more ‘cor-blimey’-isms. Then again, the utter nonsense of the notion that vaulting British guitar-based pop began with Definitely Maybe and was ended by Be Here Now. Thirty years on from Britpop’s ascribed zenith, there exists a rich seam of excellent, wholly undervalued music bobbing along in its slipstream. Any, and all, of these records for instance…

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1. THE ALIENS Astronomy For Dogs (2007)

Brainchild of three former members of the Beta Band, vocalist/guitarist Gordon Anderson, keyboards man John MacLean, and drummer Robin Jones, The Aliens charted a more extravagant course to psych-pop nirvana. Recorded in a poky basement rehearsal space in Edinburgh, The Cave, their self-produced debut album, Astronomy For Dogs comes on like a splendorous collision between Sgt. Pepper’s… and Syd Barrett’s Pink Floyd.

Witness piledriving opening track ‘Setting Sun’, or the kaleidoscopic ‘I Am Unknown’. The confection worked, gloriously, but it made barely a ripple.

2. WU LYF Go Tell Fire To The Mountain (2011)

Great album title, as magic-conjuring and mysterious-sounding as the band behind it. WU LYF – that’s World Unite Lucifer Youth Foundation, obviously – didn’t so much emerge, as skulk out of Manchester. Declining interviews, revealing scant details about themselves besides their assumed identities, Jeau, Lung, Elle Jaie, and Evnse, and restricting their own description of the music they made to two words, ‘heavy pop’.

They would have been preposterous, had it not been for the fact Go Tell Fire To The Mountain was so accomplished. And so often extraordinary. Recorded in an abandoned church, and opening with a portentous organ part, it proceeds from the billowing ‘Cave Song’ to the eruptive ‘Heavy Pop’ in a Tom Waits-ian gothic blues fashion. The effect heightened by keys-playing frontman Elle Jaie (Ellery Roberts on his birth certificate) singing his incomprehensible lyrics as if gargling on battery acid. Their belated follow-up, 15 years in the making, is due tomorrow.

3. DOVES Kingdom Of Rust (2009)

Doves’ fourth album, Kingdom Of Rust finds them in their grandest setting, its stately, widescreen scope telegraphed by the opening lines to the title track: “I hear a sound, a sound above my head. Distant sound of thunder, moving out on the moor.” Add an Edge-like guitar pattern and press the button marked ‘Epic’.

Recorded at a converted farmhouse barn in bassist/vocalist Jimi Goodwin’s and twin brothers Jez Williams’ (guitar) and Andy Williams’ (drums) native Cheshire, its birthing was by all accounts laborious, difficult. The results justify the effort. Most especially on its two towering standouts, the aforesaid ‘Kingdom of Rust’ and ’10:03’.

4. CHERRY GHOST Thirst For Romance (2007)

Originally an alias for singer-songwriter Simon Aldred, but by 2006 morphed into a five-piece band, Bolton’s Cherry Ghost picked a melancholic strand of Britpop ever so well. Their debut, Thirst For Romance charted at Number Seven in the UK and deservedly won Aldred an Ivor Novello for its centrepiece song, the plaintively wondrous ‘People Help the People’.

There are further just as heart-tugging songs here, too. ‘Roses’ and ‘Mathematics’, with Jimi Goodwin, of fellow big canvas tunesmiths Doves, guesting on drums, to name but two.

5. STEVE MASON Boys Outside (2010)

Another Beta Band alumni, founding member/singer Steve Mason has gone on to make five solo albums to date. He struck gold with this first one. Ten songs steeped in Mason’s affecting near-falsetto, gently pulsing beats, and bucolic harmony. ‘Understand My Heart’ kicks off with a flourish. There is a brooding grandeur to the spooked blues of ‘Lost and Found’. And ‘I Let Her In’ is utterly, gaspingly lovely.

Boys Outside proceeded to a UK chart peak of 82. What fools are we.

6. SHACK H.M.S. Fable (1999)

Out of cult, but doomed Scouse indie poppers The Pale Fountains, brothers Michael and John Head jumped in 1987 into Shack. The Beatles with a hard streak. Their path from there was anything but smooth. In 1991, their studio burnt down, incinerating the tapes of their just-recorded second album, Waterpistol, and prompting them to split. That record finally came out in 1995, wonderful but all too late. Enough, though, to hasten the Heads to reform their hitherto cursed group and make an even better one with the Youth-produced H.M.S. Fable.

Here is Shack in excelsis. The strongest collection of Michael Head’s superior songs. Effortless seeming guitar-pop. Wistful like ‘Comedy’. Rousing on the marvellous ‘Pull Together’. Something as finely sketched as ‘Streets of Kenny’. Altogether, a truly great songwriter on a roll.

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7. THE BLUE NILE High (2004)

Speaking of which, Edinburgh-born Paul Buchanan wrote and made with The Blue Nile two of the highwater marks of ’80s British pop, A Walk Across the Rooftops (1984) and Hats (1989). Buchanan’s songs, elegantly sophisticated, bruised-hearted, didn’t apparently come easy, with High, his group’s fourth album, unfolding over a span of seven years at various studios in Glasgow.

Worth the wait. The grown-up ache of ‘The Days of our Lives’ setting the tone overall, and with ‘I Would Never’ and ‘Because of Toledo’ as great as anything in Buchanan’s imperious canon. After High, he put out an also exquisite solo album, Mid Air, in 2012, and since when he’s been silent.

8. TRAVIS Ode To J. Smith (2008)

Britpop reductivity cast Fran Healy as Noel Gallagher lite, his band as a PG-certificate Oasis. Unfairly, inaccurately. Travis hit a commercial peak with 2001’s Number One third album, The Invisible Band. After that, their star waned somewhat, but Healy grew wings. Inspired to snap-to simplicity by a recording session with hallowed Beatles engineer Geoff Emerick, and loosely conceptual to a theme of songs about or to nameless characters, he cracked out Ode To J. Smith in unfussy short order, repurposing Travis in the guise of a ’60s garage band.

One with harder edges on display on ‘Chinese Blues’ and ‘Something Anything’, still ever able to craft a tune as attention-grabbing as ‘J. Smith’. Having charted at 20, it’ a record ripe for rediscovery, one that’s stature only grows with return visits.

9. TOM MACRAE Just Like Blood (2003)

The son of a couple of Church of England vicars from Chelmsford, Macrae lists Billy Bragg and the sainted Kate Bush among his influences. His self-titled debut album of 2000 got him nominated for the Mercury Music Prize and invited by curator Scott Walker to perform at his Meltdown Festival of that year. Just Like Blood, the follow up, is an even better record.

Comprising ten songs, it’s moody, haunted, keyboard-heavy, prone to the occasional noisy expulsion. Best heard on ‘You Only Disappear’, ‘Ghost of a Shark’ (its opening lines conveying the general sense of existential dread: “I’m gonna leave any minute, see the skyline disappear; head out of the city, burn my clothes, bury my fears…”), and the magnificent ‘Mermaid Blues’.

10. THE VIEW Bread And Circuses (2011)

Dundee’s The View got off to a flying post-Britpop start with their UK Number One debut album of 2007, Hats Off To The Buskers, making like a scampish Libertines. Expanding their palette on their next record, Which Bitch?, tripped them up, and put the pressure on for Bread And Circuses. They rose to the challenge, suited and booted by Youth’s polished production job and with main men Kyle Falconer (guitar, heavily accented vocals) and bassist Kieren Webster serving up a tranche of spanking but sparkling pop-rock tunes.

‘Grace’ should have given them a powering lead-off single. ‘Life’ is a made for terrace-chant ballad. Neither made even a dent. The View have soldiered on, three more albums have followed, but none as insistent as this.

11. NOAH AND THE WHALE Last Night On Earth (2011)

Sprung from the same London nu-folk scene that spawned Mumford and Sons and Laura Marling (briefly, before going solo, a member of the band), Noah And The Whale was hinged upon Charlie Fisk’s literate, affecting songs. Having set out his stall, Fisk hit for the bleachers with third album Last Night On Earth, recorded in California and with a decidedly sun-kissed bent to its ten songs.

‘Tonight’s the Kind of Night’ glories to both an E Street Band piano sound and a Springsteen-esque last-chance-power-drive lyric. ‘Waiting For My Chance to Come’ is effervescent, ‘L.I.F.E.G.O.E.S.O.N.’ takes Lou Reed’s ‘Walk on the Wild Side’ to the beach on happy pills. Fisk’s arch crafting supplies the Englishness. The combination is a winning one.

12. JAMIE T Kings & Queens (2009)

Private school educated and from leafy Wimbledon, James Alexander Treays was, as with his foremost influence, diplomat’s son and boarding schoolboy Joe Strummer, recast through his music. As Jamie T, on his debut album of 2007, Panic Prevention, titled after the anxiety that crippled him as a teenager, he took essence of The Clash, hip-hop, and more, threw it against a wall, and stuck up a kind of Jackson Pollack sound collage.

On Kings & Queens, he repeats, but with more of everything in the mix. This is Strummer, Mick Jones, too, and like the whole of Sandinista! distilled and filtered through 11 boundless songs. At best, see ‘Hocus Pocus’, or ‘Sticks and Stones’, or ‘Emily’s Heart’, it’s a thrilling, intoxicating brew.

For further investigation, and minus the Spotify-shunning WU LYF, access the Alternative Britpop playlist at the link:

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BY NOVEMBER OF 2011, I, along with the rest of the Q magazine office and several million other folks, had been compelled to watch the clip Lana Del Rey made for ‘Video Games’. Many times over. It landed on YouTube like a bolt from out of the blue. Enigmatic, seductive, otherworldly, the song and video both, each suggestive of a performer who’d created her own universe at a stroke.

There wasn’t too much more to glean about Lana Del Rey just then. Detail was scant on her nascent Wikipedia page. She’d been born Elizabeth Wooldridge Grant on 21^st June 1985 to a couple of advertising execs, Robert and Patricia Grant. Grown up, along with her two younger siblings, Caroline and Charlie, in the upstate New York village of Lake Placid, and majored in philosophy at Fordham University in the Bronx, in the city where she now lived.

Taught guitar by an uncle, she’d been performing in clubs, coffee shops, and other pop-up venues around New York since 2006. Signed to an indie label, 5 Point Records, and released her first record through them in 2010. She changed her name for its title, though she spelt it differently at the time, Lana Del Ray.

What little attention the record got was for the fact of her using her advance to rent a trailer for herself at the Manhattan Mobile Home Park in North Bergen, New Jersey.

She’d extricated herself from her contract with 5 Point by the time ‘Video Games’ and the other homemade video she posted up in 2011, for ‘Born to Die’, dropped. Transplanted to a major label, Universal, she’d made the not-yet-released Born to Die album with various producers at studios in New York, Los Angeles, and London. Oh, and stirred a preposterous and altogether misogynistic fuss within the hand-wringing alt-rock critical community for how much she’d changed her appearance from Lana Del Ray to now. As if this somehow made her much less authentic, and/or was a result of surgery. So they wrote, and in a way no-one ever did about, say, Bowie’s transformation between his Thin White Duke era and Let’s Dance.

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IN THE MIDST OF this kerfuffle, Universal brought her over to Europe to play a bunch of live dates and make a TV appearance, performing ‘Video Games’, on the Beeb’s Later With Jools Holland. The first show was in Manchester, at the Ruby Lounge, on 4^th November. Followed by more in Glasgow, Paris, Amsterdam, Hamburg, Cologne, Berlin, and then at the Scala in London’s King’s Cross.

I saw her at the Scala. Her set that night was a short one, just eight songs, and she’d seemed nervous, tentative in front of an audience comprised in large part of journalists and other self-appointed tastemakers. She was upset by sound issues, not able to hear herself properly through the onstage monitors.

The day afterwards, 17^th November, I met her at the photo shoot we’d organised for her with Q. She was much more in control of that situation. The idea for the theme of the photos, a bloodied, bruised prom queen, was her own. It was for a cover feature.

Q up to this point hadn’t, as a hard, fast rule, ever put relatively new artists on its cover. They were meant to have proven themselves first, which is to say have become household names already.

For me personally, Lana Del Rey arrived at precisely the right time to break this unspoken diktat. Cards on the table, I was somewhat emboldened from knowing my tenure with the magazine was coming to an end. Then again, the world was spinning ever faster. So fast, we were going to miss things happening while we sat stroking our chins in contemplation. Last, not least, in a rare moment’s prescience, I also perceived her as being a generational kind of artist. The cover tanked when it came out, but that much at least I got right.

I went to interview her myself, 18^th November, a Friday. Seasonally grey and cold in London. She was billeted in a boutique hotel a stone’s throw from Trafalgar Square. We spoke up in her room. Just the two of us and for a couple of hours. She was dressed down casual, jeans and a sweat top, minimal make-up. Quite prim and proper in her mannerisms. A dainty hand to mouth here and there.

The room was spotless, not a thing out of place. When reception called up to ask if she wanted it cleaned, she replied, schoolgirl giggly, “I’ve done it myself, I’m all good.”

She’d got reason enough to be wary of the press, and there was a certain caution to her answers. As if she was measuring just how much of herself to give away. Or to embellish. No-one outside of her record company had yet heard Born to Die. It, like her, remained mysterious. Ours was the first major interview she’d done for the record, and was to be the last one I did for Q. I left her convinced she was bound to become something other.

Our conversation that day went as follows…

So you clean your own hotel rooms?

Lana Del Rey: “I do! Do you know what’s funny? My friends told me this is the hotel you go to if you never want to overdose. (Whispering) They come in the room every ten minutes, all day long. There’s never a knock. It’s a strange comfort to me. It’s like all these imaginary friends coming to see me.”

How does it feel to have had eight million people watch your video?

LDR: “You know, it was stranger at the beginning. When it was, like, 200 people on the first day, 400 on the second, and then it jumped by a thousand. I’ve been doing the same thing for a long time, setting moving pictures to my music.”

Have you a notion of what all these people are responding to with ‘Video Games’?

LDR: “The one thing I know is that it’s a beautiful song. And I do sing it really low, so that might be something that sets it apart. It’s very much myself in song form. I played it for a lot of people when I’d first written it, we brought it around. No one responded to it at all. Not even a little bit. But like a lot of things that have happened in my life during the last seven years, it’s another little personal milestone.”

What’s your natural disposition?

LDR: “Happy. At peace with myself. That’s the first thing that comes to mind, because it’s something I wanted for a really long time. When I was much younger, 17, say, I had a lot of inner conflict. I’ve become very much settled into myself. I’m still grateful for that, because I know what it’s like to have this constant internal dialogue going on. You know, being at war with yourself over all the decisions you make.”

And your most enduring memory of growing up in Lake Placid?

LDR: “It wasn’t of Lake Placid. We had gone away on vacation to Florida, the same small town down south where everyone from Lake Placid used to go. My memory is of just lying in the ocean with my dad. I really don’t remember that much from when I was younger. It was just really quiet. The population of Lake Placid never got bigger than 2,000 people. It’s in the middle of a national park, six hours from the city. It was tangibly far removed.”

Was it a happy childhood?

LDR: “I was a person who lived very much in my own mind. Always trying to figure things out. I was a very cerebral child. I didn’t understand why we were here, where we came from. I was just generally confused. My mom says that I thought I was a grown-up when I was little, and that her friends were my friends.”

Isn’t ‘precocious’ the word?

LDR: “Well, I didn’t want to say it. But that is the word my mother uses.”

What was the first thing you obsessed over?

LDR: “Nirvana’s ‘Heart-Shaped Box’ video. Because I hadn’t listened to popular music until then. Kurt Cobain was someone who struck me right away, and then I never heard another one of his songs until I was 17. I thought about him all the time, just from seeing him for three minutes. It was weird. It was something that struck me as being different from everything else and meaning more to me, even though I knew nothing about it.”

Who otherwise introduced you to music?

LDR: “As a family, we all lived together in the same town, down the road from each other. My grandmother, my grandfather, and two uncles. Every day we would sing together, but it was like older songs…”

You make it sound like The Waltons…

LDR: “Yep. It was like that. This is when we were really young. My dad has the most beautiful voice. He grew up in Memphis. He sings and writes with my uncle, who’s toured with Emmylou Harris for a long time. I’ve sung from when I was really little. I sang in the choir in the church we went to. When I was 14, I went to boarding school…”

By choice?

LDR: “I got sent. My sister and brother stayed at the Lake Placid high school. I was a bit of a wild child when I was much younger. It was a long time ago. I really enjoyed being out and living life after hours. I was a good student, too. I really enjoyed learning, but on my own terms. I was an editor for the student paper. I enjoyed writing. I was a runner. I ran mini marathons. I was sort of walking my own path.”

The prom queen?

LDR: “I was not the prom queen. I got to go to the prom when I was a freshman, at 14, but then I never went to another. No one ever asked me.”

In your high school yearbook, you were ‘Most Likely To…’ do what?

LDR: “This is embarrassing. I was the only one who didn’t have anything on my yearbook page. It’s blank. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t dislike anything. I was just waiting to find… my people.”

Who first broke your heart?

LDR: “I don’t know. It was more like, I had a really good girlfriend in high school and we were best friends, and then she decided she was going to merge into a different group. So maybe her.”

How did you find New York?

LDR: “New York was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. Seven years later, I’m not tired of it. I walk the same routes. I know every street like the back of my hand. I spent years wandering New York… I couldn’t believe I was finally there.”

You read philosophy at university, with an emphasis on metaphysics, apparently. It’s a mouthful just to say…

LDR: “It’s not as complicated as it sounds. My interest started in high school. I just felt comforted by finding other thinkers who wondered why we were where we were. The origins of the universe. How we came to be. It was mainly theorising on that.”

Found any answers?

LDR: “They call philosophy the science of questions with no answers. I’ve found my own personal reason to be here. I like music, but it hasn’t been my focus for seven years really. My own personal focus is just to be of service to the people around me in any way I can be. That’s my purpose.”

Meaning what exactly?

LDR: “My life since I got to New York has been split between music and service work. Those are my two worlds. Part of it is homelessness outreach work. Just helping people get their forms of identification back, their social security numbers, so they can start to apply for a regular job again. It’s like a transitioning process. It’s something I still do with a group of people I’ve known since I was 18.”

With music, you started off doing open mic nights. How did it feel to first step out in front of an audience?

LDR: “The same as it does now, which is scary. I was 18. I took along my guitar. I was not very good at the guitar. I went to Brooklyn, right off the L Train on Bedford Avenue. I played the one song I had written, ‘Pawnshop Blues’. I got off the stage, and two boys followed me out of the club. They were like, ‘You’re really good. Come open for our show in a couple of days.’ I went and opened for them, and pretty quickly, I realised that I was going to have a nice, simple career in Brooklyn. That’s kind of what I did for a few years, open for anyone. My performances weren’t exactly show-stopping. I sat, played guitar, and sang. That was it.”

How did the deal with 5 Points come about?

LDR: “A month after I did my first open mic night, I saw a flier for a songwriting competition. So I entered. I sang ‘Pawnshop Blues’. I didn’t win, but one of the judges on the panel was an A&R man for 5 Points. They didn’t have anyone on their roster. They gave me, like, $10,000 to sign with them and sent my demo to five different producers. One of them, David Kahn, wrote me back the next day. I spent the next five months staying with him and working.”

Could you review Lana Del Ray for me?

LDR: “Maybe I’ll send it to you. My inspirations have really remained the same, which is my life. And… everything that’s beautiful. Whether it be certain film scores or looking at all the old architecture on Wall Street. I considered it to be really autobiographical. I mean, I was struggling a little bit, just in terms of trying to figure out where I was going to go next.”

On ‘Kinda Outta Luck’ on the first album, you wrote, “Femme fatale, always on the run, diamonds on my wrist, whiskey on my tongue.” So was that much who you were at the time?

LDR: “I was just being visual. I’m not actually a femme fatale. And I don’t drink anymore. ‘Diamonds on my wrist’. Yes, that much I have going on. I think other lines might sum up who I am better. I love to write. At nighttime, I like to throw open the windows and write fiction. Just for fun, just for myself. I consider myself to be a writer first.”

There’s a sense just now of you being something of an enigma…

LDR: “But that has nothing to do with me. I’m not that mysterious. And I never said anything was a certain way when it wasn’t. Everything I’ve said has been true. I really did write my songs and make my videos...”

And go live in a trailer park?

LDR: “That wasn’t something I really wanted to talk about at first. It was something a journalist found out from an interview I’d done in the trailer park in 2008. When my first record label gave me that $10,000, I didn’t have anywhere to live. So I moved into the nearest trailer park to New York for a year and a half while I was making my first record. It’s not something, you know, that I glamorise, or planned to turn into a story to make myself a caricature. It was, like, for $500 a month I could actually live on my own and have my own place. You don’t plan on people later on talking about it as part of ‘The Story’.”

You’ve been subjected to an even more invasive kind of scrutiny about your appearance…

LDR: “The only thing I can say is, I hadn’t been on stage for two and a half years until I went to Manchester a couple of weeks ago. I was personally fully formed before people knew me. I’ve done the same thing for a really long time. Because I’ve lived my life in a very particular way for a long time, I have a clear idea of what I don’t want to be seen as. Which is as someone who does what everyone wants them to.”

According to your Wikipedia page, you took ‘Lana’ from Lana Turner and ‘Del Rey’ from the Ford Del Rey…

LDR: “Fucking Wikipedia! I don’t even know any movies Lana Turner was in. I like other stars from that era, like Lauren Bacall. ‘Lana’ was just because it was beautiful. ‘Del Rey’ the same thing. It’s not like it’s a different person. I considered what I was doing to be an art project. I like glamorous things, but I don’t do anything glamorous.”

What do you do then?

LDR: “It’s been changing. These last few months have been different. I’ve been practising with my band.”

What can you tell me about the making of Born to Die?

LDR: “Indirectly, I’d say I was working on it for 16 months. It was written two different ways. Part of it was from walking around New York, singing words and melodies into my phone. The other half was done from being with different producers. I’d ask them to help put my words to music. To set the chord structures, because I stopped playing guitar two years ago. I tried to direct them towards what I wanted in terms of beats and string sections. Things like that.”

In the song ‘Born to Die’, the line, “Let me fuck you hard in the pouring rain,” who are you singing that to?

LDR: “I’m singing it my boyfriend. It’s not a character and it’s not about fucking. It’s more about, like, when I found someone that made me feel really happy. That was so different from the way I’d felt before in my life. True love influenced me in such a strong way. Neurologically, I felt so different from the way I’d ever felt before. So when I wrote that, I think it was more like… fun. Like, even though we know we’re going to die, this is nice, just being together.”

It’s nighttime. You’re sitting down to write your own story. What happens next?

LDR: “I don’t think I would sit down and write my story. I like the record. The rest of it I’m not really sure about. I’d like to have a really nice run with it. And then go back to New York and to singing in clubs in the West Village.”