King Crimson’s seminal debut heralded the progressive-rock movement. What set King Crimson apart from many of their contemporaries were the psychedelic overtones, the medieval visions, the Gothic atmosphere and the romantic pathos in their music, particularly in both the title-track and Epitaph. One of the best tracks, if slightly out of place, is 21st Century Schizoid Man’– a brilliant, neurosis-charged distorted jam.
Underwater Moonlight (1980)
The Soft Boys
The sound of Underwater Moonlight is similar to the work of U.S New Wave band, Television and Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd. The band manage to merge the influences of the former and the psychedelic whimsy of the latter with the discordant fragmented blues of Captain Beefheart and the catchy power-pop of the Kinks and the Who. The end result is a distinctive and accomplished post-modern psychedelia that set in motion the psychedelic revival of the 1980s. Robyn Hitchcock is one of the most important British artists in rock history.
Exile On Main Street (1972)
The Rolling Stones
Exile On Main Street is the Stones masterpiece – representing their coming of age, musically and artistically. The playing is absolutely top notch throughout – at times restrained and understated, whilst at others forceful and aggressive. This album represents the sound of the era’s greatest rock and roll band at the top of its game. Beggar’s Banquet is a close second, but Exile is the Stones at their brilliant all-round decadent best.
If Only I Could Remember My Name (1971)
David Crosby
This beautifully crafted classic is a spiritual meditation that evokes a memory of a place lost in the mists of time. The atmosphere conveyed is one of sadness – a kind of dreamy lament which is overlayed by a philosophical resignation and existentialism. This is a work that is a tonal and harmonic baroque masterpiece that defines the post-hippie era of disenchantment in which it emerged.
The Band (1969)
The Band
The Band is the groups masterpiece. It is a superbly arranged and exquisitely played piece of music – a mature and beautifully varied, dense and understated work that chugs to a syncopated rhythm. In many ways, Whispering Pines, the albums centrepiece, is a work of immense beauty.
Faust (1971)
Faust
Faust is vaguely reminiscent of aspects of Zappa-style collage allied to the psychedelia of Red Crayola and prog-rock. Nevertheless, the album has a unique musical language and atmosphere. It is an audacious attempt at fusing expressionism, surrealism, theatre of the absurd, Brecht/Weill’s cabaret, Wagner melodrama and musique concrete to rock music. On the surface, the sound appears incoherent and ‘ugly’. It’s only upon repeated listens that the recording starts to make sense in its totality, akin to the solving of a cryptic puzzle. It’s not an easily accessible listen for the untrained ear. However, its appeal is one that tends to grow over time. Faust is a beautifully demented, fun and ultimately moving creation.
The United States of America (1968)
The United States of America
United States Of America is one of the most audacious and inventive albums in the history of rock. It manages to successfully straddle the fine line between parody, cabaret, electronic and psychedelic experimentation. The musical montages are brilliant. The album sounds like it’s from the future while paradoxically remaining an atypical expression of both time and place.
Spirit To Eden (1988)
Talk Talk
Spirit Of Eden is a stunning piece of advanced electronic and celestial free-jazz and rock in the tradition of Canterbury. This astounding achievement is the reference point for the far inferior and overrated ‘slo-core’ band, Radiohead.
Highway 61 Revisited (1965)
Bob Dylan
For a contemporary audience approaching Dylan for the first time, it is perhaps easy to underestimate the dramatic impact this album made on the cultural landscape of the period. Although Dylan’s phrasing and vocal inflections are very much an acquired taste, the solemness he expresses and his bohemian cynical humour was the template that was adopted by a succession of future generations of musicians. In this regard, Dylan was arguably the first to bring a ‘punk’ persona and attitude to the fore. Moreover, with the epic Desolation Row, he was the first to use rich poetic imagery within the song format. And, with Like A Rolling Stone, he set the template for folk-rock.
Shooting At The Moon (1970)
Kevin Ayers
Kevin Ayers produced two quirky and eccentric masterpieces – Joy Of A Toy’ his debut, and the follow-up Shooting At The Moon. Although both albums were in the innocent and playful tradition of Syd Barrett, it was the latter that stamped his claim as one of the greatest and most original British artists of all-time. Themes of existential melancholy, humour and nostalgia that emphasize Parisian decadence and eastern exotica, overlay an enchanting and often unsettling psychedelic underbelly emphasized by Ayer’s use of accordian, clarinet, strings and percussion.
Musically and technically as clinically executed as anything produced by the German masters, Can, Tortoise add a modern twist to the classical minimalist/jazz & prog-Canterbury genres. Despite the albums fusing of a multitude of influences – Miles Davis, Soft Machine, Steve Reich, Ennio Morricone – there is enough rhythmic experimentation by way of funk, dub and even Caribbean timbres that give the music on this record a wonderfully flowing and distinct richness.
We’re Only In It For The Money (1968)
The Mother’s Of Invention
This visionary work (alongside Captain Beefheart and the Velvet Underground), virtually invented what was to become the punk aesthetic. Frank Zappa’s cynicism and cutting wit is evident throughout the album. This, the third masterpiece of his psychedelic trilogy, is similar in structure to his first two, but this is possibly his most accomplished. Here he uses the collage of parody with added brilliant technical expertise. The album is the musical equivalent of a Burroughs novel – each cut-and paste piece while seemingly fragmented, are in fact welded into a seamless narrative continuity.
Have A Marijuana (1969)
David Peel
David Peel’s contribution to the counter-culture of the 1960s is a significant but under-recognized one. The punk aesthetics of the late 1970s can probably be traced back to the ramshackle street busking-style approach of Peel and his fellow travelling minstrels who utilize folk agit-prop and Fugs-style satire to comment on the social issues of their day. There is a wonderful organic sense of authenticity, albeit simplicity, in Peel’s art. His lyrics are deceptively clever, the spartan hillbilly hoedown nature of the music, story-telling and comedy skits fresh, and his the use of the streets of New York’s Lower East Side, an innovation. Politically and socially, the contemporary occupy movement can arguably be traced back to Peel’s street “happenings”.
Incunabula (1993)
Autechre
With Incunabula, the Manchester duo Autechre created a distinctive form of postmodern electronic music that was a far more organically sophisticated and carefully calibrated version of the standard techno/chill-out music of the period. The duos rhythms are akin to an intricate and meticulous ‘design in sound’ that skilfully bridge a number of related genres. These include synth-pop, Indian classical music, minimalism, ambient music, the electronic pop sensibilities of Kraftwerk and the transcendental psychedelic explorations of Tangerine Dream.
Pink Moon (1972)
Nick Drake
Unlike Drake’s previous two releases, the style of Pink Moon is stark, minimal and radical. The album appears to be the result of an increased existential anguish. Drake’s stories are desolate and anchored in refrains of solitude and obsession. The album – a sleight collection of deeply personal songs – consists of a chilling but deeply moving combination of surreal rhymes and apocalyptic ballads. Drake’s songwriting is highly influential and his supreme soft and melancholic style of delivery has a universal and timeless quality to it. Pink Moon is Drake’s masterpiece.
The Marble Index (1968)
Nico
This masterpiece was the album that introduced Nico’s unique art to the world. There is no precedent for the chanteuse’s icy gothic, medieval and neo-classical aesthetics – eerie and doom-laden but no less beautiful for that. This is a stunningly original, timeless and erudite work of art that surpasses commercial considerations. As John Cale put it in the liner notes to the record: “The Marble Index is an artefact, not a commodity.”
Bufo Alvarius, Amen (1995)
Bardo Pond
One of the most musically accomplished bands of their time (and of any time), Bardo Pond produced this brilliant album that comprises a maelstrom of guitar distortions and manic drumming underscored by repetitively brutal, cosmic and supersonic drones. The overall soundscape is one that merges the experimental post-rock of say, Sonic Youth, the acid jam of Grateful Dead, the electrifying powerhouse blues of the Stooges and the serene shoegazing of My Bloody Valentine. This is one of the key albums of the 1990s – it’s reputation grows with the passage of time.
Mirror Man (1971)
Captain Beefheart And His Magic Band
Mirror Man showcases The Magic Band at it’s most deliberately shambolic and free. Long ‘live’ primordial rambling jams extend the notion of the Blues standard to its limits. Structurally, Beefheart (Don Van Vliet) and his band game-play in the Delta-Blues tradition adding satirical and infantile elements over a creative carpet of complex rhythms and free Blues arrangements. The result is an extraordinary work of pyrotechnical brilliance. With its combination of a bedlam of guitars and tribal percussion, Mirror Man was the first rock album to shape an aesthetic of ‘anti-music’. Beefheart’s revolutionary artistic vision transcends the superficiality of the acid trip by servicing it to the musical theatre of the absurd. As one critic put it:“This music is the most faithful expression of the Freak culture, of its marginalization more than its rebellion, of its inexhaustible creativity, of its academic disgust, of its infantile ferocity of its desecrating vision of the world”
Tonight’s The Night (1975)
Neil Young
Tonight’s The Night is a solemn meditation on the pessimism of the 1970s that emerged from the idealism of the 1960s. This is a record of immense, but at the same time, subtle beauty borne out of loss and redemption. The warmth, humour and overriding sense of raw humanity and vulnerability depicted by Young’s rich lyricism, quirky vocals and the all-round brilliant but understated musicianship, touches the deep recesses of the psyche in a very profound way. This is arguably Neil Young’s most solidly consistent work from his most creatively fertile ‘Ditch trilogy’ period. This is a recording that will refuse to date because both the themes, raw poetic beauty of the lyrics and the quality of the musicianship are timeless.
Astral Weeks (1968)
Van Morrison
Recorded over the space of 12 hours, Astral Weeks is a beautifully unifying and ultimately brave work of art that merges jazz-rock elements, poetry and Morrison’s unique stream of consciousness vocal delivery. This, more than any other, is the album that I have been most drawn to over the last 37 years, having first listened to it as a 15 year old in 1977 when most of my friends were obsessing over the contemporary bands of the new wave. The sheer beauty of the music, and the timeless vivid imagery conjured up by the lyrics, are unmatched in the history of rock music. This album, probably more than any other, has been the soundtrack to my life.
The music and the synthesis of ideas that the Velvet Underground represented broke new ground in the 1960s. The group didn’t produce ‘songs’ that were indicative of popular music of the time but rather they were Freudian expressions of a lust for deviant but seductive behaviour; they were exotic, decadent and perverse fantasies.
The groups debut, their supreme masterpiece, The Velvet Underground And Nico (1967), was recorded in two days in the spring of 1966 and released in January of the following year. Andy Warhol produced the album, managed the group and created the now iconic banana album cover artwork.
Lou Reed composed the melodies, wrote the lyrics and ‘drone strummed’ his rhythm guitar. John Cale arranged the sound and created the avant-garde atmospheres with his innovative use of a viola and keyboards interspersed with his bass playing. Maureen Tucker played the drums with an obsessive and frenzied, yet exotic, tribal repetitiveness and Stirling Morrison’s rhythm and blues or country-influenced guitar playing kept the sound grounded in the style of The Byrds.
All of this was embellished by the icy vocals of Nico who sang lead on three of the album’s tracks – the cold, spectral, autumnal odes of Femme Fatale, All Tomorrow’s Parties, I’ll Be Your Mirror – and back-up on Sunday Morning, all of them masterpieces.
But the songs Nico had no part in are equally, if not more mesmerizing – in particular, Black Angel’s Death Song, the percussive boogie of Waiting For My Man, the orgasmic chaos of Heroin, andthe dissonant tribalism of European Son. If I had to pick a standout, it would be the Indian raga-imbued and decadent Venus In Furs which, in my view, is one of the masterpieces of all rock. Judge for yourselves:
But to single out one track for praise on an album where there is no weak link, is to do the album an injustice. The truth is, each individual piece on the album is a masterpiece in its own right culminating in a work that transcends the sum of its individual parts. All of the songs are immersed in an atmosphere that’s dark and oppressive but beguiling, epic and cool. It’s an album that fuses music and words in a manner that perfectly captures the tension of modernist metropolitan reality in all of its dark and decadent secrets. This manifests, as one critic puts it:
“in sexual fetishes and cathartic sadism, in latent orgasms and unnerving noises;and in the living contrast between the urban ways of Reed and the patrician ways of Nico, between Berlin in the 30s and the 60s in New York, between the subculture of crisis and that of the apocalypse. The seduction of the album is derived not only from the quantity of ideas in it, but from the fusion of so many strong artistic personalities, all directed by Lou Reed, who functions as catalyst.”
The overriding feeling one gets after listening to this album is of a group who set out to produce a creative work of art as opposed to a commercial product. In these less enlightening times, that’s a legacy worth preserving. Arguably, punk aesthetics, alternative art rock and indie rock were born the moment the Velvet Underground walked into a recording studio. The influence of the Velvet’s debut can be heard in almost everything interesting that followed – from the new wave movement of the late 1970s through to the post-punk and shoegazing movements of the 1980s and 1990s.
Emerging from the UK indie scene generation of this latter period were the bands signed to the seminal Postcard record label, many of whom would not have started a band if it were not for this album. That’s an illustration of how significant The Velvet Underground And Nico was to my generation. But this is not only true of my generation but subsequent generations. It was Brian Eno who famously stated that while The Velvet Underground & Nico initially only sold 30,000 copies, “everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band.”
Last Saturday (July 30) marked the 50th anniversary of one of the most historic sporting moments in history – when England beat West Germany 4-2 after extra-time to lift the World Cup. Avid football fans from all over the country joined legends Geoff Hurst, Gordon Banks, George Cohen and others from the 1966 team at Wembley for a special celebration. Ill-health kept others away.
Martin Peters, Nobby Stiles and Ray Wilson have all been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s amid fears that their condition was caused by years of heading heavy footballs. Both Alan Ball and Captain Bobby Moore, the latter who raised the Jules Rimet Trophy aloft on that memorable day, have died.
As a West Ham fan, my memories of the mercurial Moore are vague. I remember, at age eleven seeing him play one of his last games in a West Ham shirt against Arsenal at Upton Park. It is widely accepted among West Ham fans and the wider football fraternity that with the English trio of Moore, Hurst and Peters acting as the spine of the England team, it was West Ham who effectively won the World Cup for England in 1966.
Few people would have envisaged that four years after lifting the most prestigious of all football trophies, England’s world cup winning captain, West Ham United legend and international football superstar, Bobby Moore, would have had a major accusation of theft hanging over him. The accusations against Moore would last for a further two years.
The weight must of been hanging heavily on Bobby’s shoulders and that of his family during that period. In an era when colour hit many of our television screens for the first time in which a new decade premised upon optimism and hope was ushered in, professional football had become elevated to the kind of media spectacle that we have become accustomed to today.
In many ways, the changing face of football during this era became the defining feature of a society in a state of flux that had finally shaken off its post-war shackles of conformity and austerity. For the first time, foreign travel was to become the mainstay of the many not just for the ‘exclusive’ few.
No aspiring jet-setter could be seen without the trappings that came with it. For many of the working class beneficiaries of the post war boom who were fortunate enough to be in the financial position of being able to enjoy a yearly foreign holiday, this was a golden period.
It was the first time that I can remember excess being celebrated in such a gregarious, if at times, ostentatious manner. The media jumped on the bandwagon with their promotion of the ‘exotic’ lifestyles of the rich and famous most notably on the travel documentary programme, ‘Wicker’s World’.
The BBC sister travel guide show, ‘Holiday’, fronted by Cliff Michelmore was the zeitgeist of the period in as much as it brought home to the masses that foreign travel was now no longer the exclusive privilege of the rich, but was something that many ordinary people could do too.
Very few celebrities would have been seen photographed without the accompanying and obligatory ‘bling’. This captured the imagination of the public who also aspired to the demands set by the new mass consumption environment. For the first time in history, the profile of the top level professional footballer was akin to the movie star – and the ordinary working class garish man about town aspired for a piece of the action.
Each component part of the jigsaw shoehorned into one another fitting into place as smoothly as the velvet glove on the hand of Audrey Hepburn. Bobby Moore was very much the poster boy of his generation for this new socially mobile working class in much the same way that David Beckham was for his.
It was perhaps fitting, then, that if anybody with such a high profile as that of any footballing superstar in the world at that time was to be fitted up for a crime, then it was the handsome and photogenic captain of the world champions.
It was symptomatic of the times that Bobby Moore would be set up, not with stealing a painting or cash, but with bling. Its somewhat ironic that the last person most people would associate with bling is Bobby Moore who was so self-deprecating a public figure; so humble and unconscious of his ability and of his star status, that he regularly communicated personally with fans during the height of his fame.
But here Moore was in a Bogota Jewelry shop located close to the foyer of the plush Bogota Hotel in May 1970, the purpose of which was clearly to satisfy the media hordes’ need for a photo opportunity prior to the world’s biggest sporting event. Bobby was merely performing what he perceived was his role as an ambassador for a sport which he loved and was the poster boy for.
Set against this was the ‘bling’ which provided the backdrop for a scandal that was whipped up by an obliging media circus. The notion that one of the most famous and high profile athletes in the world at that time could be detained by the authorities for four days for allegedly stealing a bracelet in the context of somebody who was about to lead his county in the defence of the world cup that he had won four years previously, is incomprehensible – especially when viewed through the lens of today’s more enlightened social media age.
But it’s perhaps a sign of the times, that it was taken seriously, so much so that Bobby Moore, widely recognized as the most consummate professional in the game – both on and off the pitch – was accused, and subsequently arrested, for being a jewel thief.
Interest in the incident was stoked by the fascination the media had in Moore’s wife Tina, who at the time, was due to go out and watch England play in Mexico. Reminiscent of the subsequent ‘wag’ fiasco’s that have dogged subsequent England teams, wherever Tina went the media pack would be close behind.
What followed was an international media story on such a scale that it was to provoke diplomatic intervention at the behest of Prime Minister, Harold Wilson. The British establishment were so concerned by Moore’s arrest that Wilson requested repeated lobbying of the Colombian government by the British embassy in Bogota. It’s no exaggeration to say that a major diplomatic incident could easily have ensued.
Moore was kept under house arrest and although he was allowed to train to maintain his fitness levels, he was constantly followed by armed police guards. Within the high echelons of the football world, the accusations against Moore were treated with more than a heavy dose of incredulity, most predictably, perhaps, by his manager Alf Ramsay.
But it was to be the coach of Brazil who publicly proclaimed Moore’s innocence that was to arguably lend most weight particularly after he described a similar incident that involved his team Botafogo. It’s hard to believe that it got to the stage that Moore was actually tried before a judge in Bogota, where a re-enactment of the incident occurred, but that’s precisely what happened.
Needless to say, the case was thrown out due to the contradictory testimony of the plaintiff. According to Jeff Dawson in his book Back Home: England and the 1970 World Cup (2002) cries of “Viva Bobby” could be heard from the streets of Bogota.
Even harder to comprehend, is the fact that the case wasn’t formerly closed until two years after the incident, following a hearing at Bow Street Magistrates Court. Despite being cleared, the incident continued to dog Moore, and it has been suggested it was a major reason why he was never awarded a knighthood.
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, was recorded in two days in the spring of 1966 and released in January of the following year. Andy Warhol produced the album, managed the group and created the now iconic banana album cover artwork.
Road To Somewhere Else 