Elton John - Goodbye Yellow Brick Road

Released - October 1973

Genre - Rock

Producer - Gus Dudgeon

Selected Personnel - Elton John (Vocals/Piano/Organ/Keyboards); Davey Johnstone (Guitar); Dee Murray (Bass); Nigel Olsson (Drums); Ray Cooper (Percussion); Del Newman (Orchestral Arrangements); Kiki Dee (Backing Vocals)

Standout Track - Bennie And The Jets

People who say they outright don't like Elton John haven't heard this album all the way through. I'm prepared to stand by that. The brand of lightweight pop the man would come to epitomise in the late 70s and 80s may not be to everyone's tastes, but I simply find it impossible to fathom that anybody could give Goodbye Yellow Brick Road a proper listen and still claim that there is absolutely nothing on it they enjoy. It is almost peerless. Strangely, it wasn't actually the first full Elton John album I ever encountered - that accolade goes to Tumbleweed Connection - but it is undoubtedly the perfect place to start for people uncertain of where to go. That said, a huge proportion of its contents will already be overtly familiar to even the casual Elton fan, and certainly was to me. I spent my entire childhood listening to Elton John's greatest hits and first encountered this classic while on holiday in Spain back in 2005, by which time my awareness of Elton's work had expanded to include Tumbleweed Connection and Madman Across The Water, and my musical education had started to accelerate. No longer of the simple mindset that greatest hits compilations were all that one really needed to bother with, I was astounded by the more obscure material I found on Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, and when I came back to it again at uni while delving more completely into the rest of his discography, its excellence was hammered home all the harder.

Musically and stylistically, a lot had changed for Elton John since 1972's Honky Chateau. The simple singer-songwriter stylings that had defined him from his debut all the way up to that album became a thing of the past, at least for the foreseeable future. Things had gradually begun shifting towards more of a full-band focus than being grounded solely on Elton at his piano, while musical styles were shifting from simple piano ballads to catchy, up-tempo pop and rock songs. In that vein, Elton released 1973's Don't Shoot Me I'm Only The Piano Player, very much a transitional album that sees him giving his first stab at writing a pop album. While it has some strong moments ("Teacher I Need You" is a great pop song, and the classic "Crocodile Rock" is endlessly catchy, and shockingly different to the heartfelt folk rock of his earlier work), it also struggled to convince in many places, and it's a big surprise now that a record recorded so soon after something that saw Elton struggling so hard to deliver something really brilliant should be as effortlessly wonderful as this. The style remains, by and large, similar to that on Don't Shoot Me... - catchy pop-rock with the odd ballad, generally grounded by Elton's vocals and piano but always giving ample room for his band to flex their muscles and share the limelight. But the songwriting itself has come on by miles - this is the greatest collection of unforgettable melodies that Elton would ever assemble, and the lyrics are almost certainly Taupin's finest. As ever, they favour poetic imagery over earnest, heartfelt storytelling or introspection, but generally centre on a kind of fond nostalgia for forgotten American culture. Essentially, it follows on from Taupin's Americana obsession from Tumbleweed Connection but updates it - whereas before he wrote about prairies and outlaws and a long-dead American romance, here he wrote of drive-in movies and rock and roll and a vision of America still within living memory and still close enough to stir genuine nostalgia in listeners.

The album was never intended to be a double album, but gradually the amount of quality material the duo amassed became too much to cull down to a single record's worth. While the final track listing does still contain some unnecessary filler (particularly the bland reggae track "Jamaica Jerk-Off" or the country-influenced "Roy Rogers"), there's still much more than a single LP's worth of brilliant stuff here, so the gradual expansion of the album to double length is something every Elton John fan can be very thankful of. Things start off as grandiose and bombastic as you might expect from the glamourous, fantastical cover-image, as the funereal synths intone the opening of "Funeral For A Friend," supposedly composed by Elton as he tried to imagine the kind of music he'd want at his funeral. It's a stately, majestic piano instrumental that gradually builds in intensity before exploding into the sheer monster of a rock song that is "Love Lies Bleeding," an unrelenting classic that most albums would struggle to match the quality of after starting so strong. As a full-length suite of pieces, "Funeral For A Friend/Love Lies Bleeding" almost flirts with prog rock grandiosity in places and in one of his greatest unknown triumphs. I saw Elton live at Wembley last year and it was to my tremendous delight and disbelief that he opened with a full performance of the suite, an experience which only hammered home its brilliance all the more.

What follows is a trio of songs familiar to every Elton John fan - "Candle In The Wind" has been spoiled by the ubiquity and overly saccharine nature of its 1997 update to honour the tragic death of Princess Diana, but when one listens to the original, which was a tribute to Marilyn Monroe lamenting how she was never granted the right to a private life but was always beset by press intrusion, one is reminded what a touchingly simple ballad it is. "Bennie And The Jets," by contrast, is simply one of Elton's greatest rock songs, and perhaps the very first song of his I fell in love with, despite mishearing most of the lyrics (I have vivid memories of being about six and wondering aloud to my mum what "electric boobs" and "a pack of zyinos" were), and another highlight of that live performance I saw last year. It's built around a simple, glam rock stomp that keeps the pulse of the entire song as Elton's piano and synth solos and improvisations become increasingly erratic and jazzy and wildly frenetic around it. Finally, "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" itself is perhaps the finest, most memorable and evocative tune Elton ever penned, and a melody that's impossible to forget once heard - a beautifully simple and introspective song and not a million miles away from the kind of thing he did before his transition into a popstar.

After a brief lull, "I've Seen That Movie Too," a wonderfully dark and angry piece of Broadway-style cinematic drama set to stirring strings and featuring a wonderfully weird and distorted guitar solo from Davey Johnstone kicks off another run of unforgettably brilliant songs nestled in the middle of the double album. "Sweet Painted Lady" is a beautifully breezy and lazy song that makes you forget that it's telling the story of a prostitute, and "The Ballad Of Danny Bailey (1909-34)" is another glorious slice of heavy-handed drama. Then there's too songs that no self-respecting true rock fan can ever dislike no matter how much they feel they may hate Elton John. "Dirty Little Girl" is a swaggering beast of a song, with all the requisite misogyny of any rock classic, but just about able to get away with it by virtue of its gloriously brash tune and Elton's committed vocal performance. While Johnstone gets a chance to shine on "Dirty Little Girl," it's the awesome riff to "All The Girls Love Alice," a song about a schoolgirl experimenting with her homosexuality, that really proves his ability as a guitarist in his own right as well as playing second fiddle to Elton. It's certainly the greatest guitar moment in Elton's entire discography (although the riff on "Saturday Night's Alright For Fighting" later on in the record comes close), and comes close to stealing the show on the album as a whole.

One could go on and on about the individual moments that act as highlights on Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, but it's no substitute for just surrendering to it and marvelling at just how diverse and brilliant Elton John and his gang of collaborators were at this point. The album runs the spectrum of pop and rock and indulges in a wide range of styles, almost never putting a foot wrong (that ill-advised reggae take-off being the only genuinely uninspired moment) and proving that, while a lot of great music had been made in his early years, the man's transformation from folk singer-songwriter and balladeer to global popstar was an inspired one, and one he was more than capable of delivering on. To this day, it remains the peak of Elton John's career. He would continue making great music all the way up to this day (with frequent peaks and troughs in quality, of course), but even the highest of those peaks would never capture the brilliance and the innovation of this classic. It quickly became his best-selling album, a title it retains to this day, and cemented his place as one of the brightest lights in pop music. The albums that followed it would continue to develop Elton as an artist and continue to be both highly entertaining and to show a breadth of imagination and innovation, and it wasn't until later in the 70s that things began to falter for him. But for the time being, Elton John was untouchable and, alongside Bowie, became one of the biggest ane most important figures in pop music at the time.

Track Listing:

All songs written by Elton John and Bernie Taupin.

1. Funeral For A Friend/Love Lies Bleeding

2. Candle In The Wind

3. Bennie And The Jets

4. Goodbye Yellow Brick Road

5. This Song Has No Title

6. Grey Seal

7. Jamaica Jerk-Off

8. I've Seen That Movie Too

9. Sweet Painted Lady

10. The Ballad Of Danny Bailey (1909-34)

11. Dirty Little Girl

12. All The Girls Love Alice

13. Your Sister Can't Twist (But She Can Rock & Roll)

14. Saturday Night's Alright For Fighting

15. Roy Rogers

16. Social Disease

17. Harmony

The Electric Light Orchestra - ELO 2

Released - February 1973

Genre - Art Rock

Producer - Jeff Lynne

Selected Personnel - Jeff Lynne (Vocals/Guitar/Synthesiser); Bev Bevan (Drums/Percussion); Richard Tandy (Keyboards/Synthesiser); Mike De Albuquerque (Bass); Wilfred Gibson (Violin); Mike Edwards (Cello); Colin Walker (Cello); Roy Wood (Bass/Cello)

Standout Track - Kuiama

With their 1971 self-titled debut album, the Electric Light Orchestra had laid out a careful template of their vision which, on the whole, had been a compelling and exciting piece of work. It showcased a band that was the product of the joining of two creative minds, one (Roy Wood) pushing the artistic boundaries of rock music by applying classical instrumentation and compositional techniques to it, and another (Jeff Lynne) who quite simply had a brilliant ear for crafting catchy pop tunes. Working in tandem together, this creative partnership could have gone on to create a considerable amount of exciting progressive art-rock, but not long into the recording of their second album it became clear that this union couldn't last. Wood, the band's founding father, disagreed with Lynne about how to manage the band and soon left (having already contributed bass and cello parts to two songs, which happen to be easily the album's tow low-points). Given that Wood was the driving force behind the band's entire concept and modus opernadi, it could have been assumed that ELO wouldn't be able to continue under Lynne's leadership, or that it would immediately become a very different band. It's quite a surprise, then, to find that ELO 2, rather than immediately shifting the focus onto simple traditional pop-rock, continues to mine the same pioneering avant-garde orchestral sound as The Electric Light Orchestra and actually ends up being a far more consistent, daring and enjoyable record than even that excellent debut.

As the 70s rolled on, it would become increasingly clear that Jeff Lynne was far less invested in the "orchestra" concept than Wood had been. 1975's fairly tepid Face The Music would be the band's first all-out pop-rock record that more or less ignored, or at least relegated, the "orchestra" element of their name, but even by the time of third album On The Third Day later in 1973, Lynne was already putting more focus on short pop songs than grand orchestral pieces. But ELO 2 consists entirely of lengthy suites or instrumental jams and shows a real depth of imagination and artistic ambition that Wood himself would have been envious of (particularly considering he was off founding the tedious Wizzard). Of course, with the departure of Wood, the classical instrumentation had to take something of a back seat compared to its overbearing presence two years previous, seeing as he had played the majority of the classical instruments himself. Cellists Mike Edwards and Colin Walker and violinist Wilfred Gibson replaced him on strings, and Lynne simply felt no compulsion to replace the horn and woodwind parts Wood had contributed, instead recruiting Richard Tandy on keyboards to flesh out the band's sound. As such, there are no songs here that follow in the whole-heartedly baroque traditions of the likes of "First Movement (Jumping Biz)" or "The Battle Of Marston Moore." Instead, every single song is a conventional tune played on conventional instruments that's then fleshed out with ambitious instrumental passages and rich string arrangements.

Not all of them work - most notably, the two songs recorded before Wood's departure, "In Old England Town" and "From The Sun To The World," struggle to convince. Wood himself can't be directly blamed for this, as all the pieces are still Lynne compositions, but it does suggest that it perhaps wasn't until he felt free from Wood's controlling influence that he could really let his imagination take flight. "In Old England Town" feels stirringly dramatic in places, but sinks too often into pseudo-avant-garde posturing. Far better is "Momma," one of the most simply beautiful songs ELO ever recorded. A fairly conventional ballad at heart, its mesmeric string parts give it a grandeur far greater than it could have ever have achieved on its own, and it's a genuinely emotional and powerful piece as a result. Chuck Berry's "Roll Over Beethoven," meanwhile, makes for a great choice of cover for a band supposedly built around classical traditions, and also marks the only moment on the album when Lynne gives the band the opportunity to really rock out. Wisely still building his version around the iconic, frenzied rock and roll guitar riff, the song simply grows and grows from that hard-rocking starting point and becomes a manic beast of epic proportions, with pounding piano and truly manic violin solos driving it totally out of control. It's rare, particularly in their later years, that ELO really indulged themselves with a song where they let themselves loose, so it's great to hear such passion and energy from them in a song.

"From The Sun To The World" is simply a fairly uninspired and forgettable thing, and then there's "Kuiama," easily the most powerful thing in the band's discography, and also their longest and most ambitious piece of music. It's rare that a man with a brain simply attuned to rock and roll and pop songwriting should turn out a lyric of devastating potency, but in "Kuiama" Jeff Lynne tells the story of a harrowed soldier in the Vietnam War who has to explain to a lost orphaned girl that he was the man responsible for killing her parents. It's a truly powerful story, and the dramatic sweep of the strings and synths make it a piece that's almost cinematic in its scope. Later on it also incorporates a searing violin solo over a marching, militaristic drumbeat that's truly harrowing in its discordant power. Surprisingly for an album consisting solely of lengthy orchestral suites, the album sold fairly well, and "Roll Over Beethoven" became a relatively successful single. Still, this was the last time ELO would sound quite like this. By 1973, the complexity and pomposity of prog rock was already beginning to fall out of favour, with '74 generally being considered the year the genre "died." As such, a band like ELO that flirted with such grandiosity but hadn't fully embraced it, had the chance to become something different. Perhaps Lynne felt compelled to follow through on Wood's vision for this second album before truly following his own agenda. Whatever the reason, by the time On The Third Day came out, short and catchy pop songs seemed to be the highest priority, there was still room for some cinematic scope and orchestral flair. By the time of Face The Music, though, the music they were producing could have been the work of a different band. The journey to that new musical territory is an exciting and enjoyable one, but ELO 2 would be the last time the band sounded truly artistically ambitious and compositionally complex. It's the best of their early albums, and well worth seeking out if you're curious about their origins and enjoy something a little more imaginative and challenging than the stuff ELO would later become famous for.

Track Listing:

All songs written by Jeff Lynne except where noted.

1. In Old England Town (Boogie No. 2)

2. Momma

3. Roll Over Beethoven (Chuck Berry)

4. From The Sun To The World (Boogie No. 1)

5. Kuiama

David Bowie - Aladdin Sane

Released - April 1973

Genre - Glam Rock

Producer - Ken Scott & David Bowie

Selected Personnel - David Bowie (Vocals/Guitar/Keyboards/Harmonica/Saxophone); Mick Ronson (Guitar/Piano); Trevor Bolder (Bass); Mick "Woody" Woodmansey (Drums); Mike Garson (Piano)

Standout Track - The Jean Genie

By the end of 1972, there could be no doubting that David Bowie had firmly established himself as one of the major figures in the popular musical firmament, at least as far as the UK was concerned. His own breakthrough The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars had catapulted him to iconic levels of stardom, and he'd followed it up by proving his talents went beyond being a solo artist in his own right by acting as a musical svengali figure to both Lou Reed, whose solo career had yet to gather any momentum, and the ailing Mott the Hoople, producing their respective albums Transformer and All The Young Dudes and launching both to some of the biggest successes of their entire careers, either up to that point or from that point onwards. But perhaps the greatest test of his ability would be how his own solo follow-up to Ziggy Stardust would fare - was the enormous success of that earlier record a fluke, or could he genuinely sustain this newfound attention? And for Bowie, there was one place that would lie at the heart of his next record - America.

Aladdin Sane has always essentially been summed up by Bowie's own description of it as "Ziggy goes to America." Rather than feeling any great need to throw out everything he had done before and totally reinvent himself (a habit he would become notorious for as the years went on), the conceptual and stylistic heart of the new record would be the same as Ziggy's. Indeed, no artist who had achieved such unanimous praise for something need even consider the idea of reinventing themselves, but while the heart of the album would remain the same, the new avenues it began to explore would end up making it a very different kind of album indeed. Essentially, Aladdin Sane, despite the continued presence of the red-mulleted Ziggy persona in the iconic artwork, has nothing to do with the Ziggy concept. These songs are devoid of the theatrical space-age narrative, but Bowie was still thinking and writing and working in character as Ziggy, which inherently influenced the direction of the music. But the US, the place that had spawned his heroes Lou Reed and Iggy Pop, both of whom had been key influences on the creation of Ziggy himself, had yet to really pay much attention to Bowie, and so the new album would take shape while on the road across the pond. As the 70s wore on, Bowie's relationship with the States would come to be a dangerous obsession for him. It was a place inherently characterised by its sense of drama and danger, and it was while on tour there that his drug problem first started. Years later, Bowie would speak disparagingly of LA in particular, saying "That fucking place should be wiped off the face of the earth," long after its paranoia and elitism had driven him to a coke dependency that nearly destroyed him both mentally and physically. At the time of recording Aladdin Sane, that dependency had yet to really take hold, but one can already feel the schizophrenic line between obsession and revulsion that the country had begun to root in his mind. The album is far darker and moodier than Ziggy Stardust, with the euphoric glee of "Let the children boogie" all but absent from this collection of dark, dangerous songs of drug addiction and egomania. From the wide-eyed fright and weirdness of "Panic In Detroit" to the snarling cynicism of "Cracked Actor," this album feels very much like the product of an alien figure struggling to stay afloat in a world that fascinates him almost as much as it overwhelms him.

Of course, this schizophrenia and megalomania drives the music into uncharted territory, too. While this is still very much in the vein of fairly traditional glam rock, Bowie does a lot to begin unsettling his listeners and giving them something far more challenging than the simple sing-along tunes of his earlier work. For a start, guitarist Mick Ronson is more prevalent here than perhaps anywhere else in Bowie's discography (except perhaps The Man Who Sold The World, on which there are moments where Ronson is calling the shots far more than Bowie himself). But many of the songs here, from the swaggering Rolling Stones-esque riff of "Watch That Man" to the raucous solos of "Panic In Detroit" and the irresistible dirty crunch of "Cracked Actor" are built around the hard-edged, raunchy guitar of Ronson far more than anything on Ziggy Stardust was. That's to say nothing of The Jean Genie, perhaps the finest riff Ronson would ever play (regardless of whether or not Bowie had ripped it off from the Yardbirds) and easily the standout track of Aladdin Sane. Loosely based on the figure of French author Jean Genet, its lyrics ape the gritty reportage of the Velvet Underground as they follow Bowie through his own imagined odyssey of America's seedy underbelly, but it's that unforgettable riff, echoed by Bowie's own harmonica wheezes, that make it an instant classic.

But while many of the album's highlights are its harder-edged rock songs, there are two songs that very nearly steal the show were it not for "The Jean Genie's" undeniable classic status, which have very little to do with rock music. The title track (with its apocalyptic parenthesised dates predicting the outbreak of a third world war) is undoubtedly the weirdest thing Bowie had put out at this stage. While touring America the pianist Mike Garson had been added to their band and gradually became an integral part of the new music, nowhere more so than on "Aladdin Sane." While getting to know Garson, Bowie had been fascinated by his training in avant-garde jazz, a style of music totally unfamiliar to the mainstream music audience, and to Bowie himself. Garson was initially reluctant to potentially sink Bowie's career by indulging in a full-on avant-garde solo, but at Bowie's insistence went to the max partway through the menacing groove of "Aladdin Sane" to create one of the weirdest things the buying public would ever have heard. Of course, avant-garde jazz had existed in rock music before this time - a piano solo in King Crimson's "Lizard" from the album of the same name explores similar territory to Garson's excesses in "Aladdin Sane," but Bowie was certainly the first person to deliver such experimental sounds to an inescapably mainstream audience. Then there's the wonderful "Time," Garson's other big showcase. This time, the influence is Brechtian cabaret, with the menacing, icy trills of Garson's piano providing a chilling backdrop to Bowie's overtly theatrical crooning. It's Ronson's explosive rocket of a guitar solo that really sends the song into delirious madness, but it's another deliciously weird slice of experimental songwriting from an artist who really didn't need to be so experimental in order to win over new fans, and is therefore all the better for pushing boundaries so readily. Vocally, Bowie feels more mature than he did a year before as well - just as the sunny disposition of the music has vanished, so too has the cheerful grin he was able to communicate through much of his singing. Here, he feels angrier and much more cynical, even on the relatively lightweight songs like "The Prettiest Star."

Ultimately, it's not a perfect album and perhaps suffers from being slightly less cohesive than Ziggy Stardust given that it lacks that album's conceptual core. Songs like "Drive-In Saturday" are fairly redundant, as is the perfunctory and unimaginative (if fun) cover of the Stones' "Let's Spend The Night Together." But, while his previous album had perhaps been one of the first major mainstream pop/rock albums to show a real depth of imagination and style, here Bowie pushed himself much further and indulged in the weirdest collage of sounds he could assemble using the same band, and creates a dark, breathless kaleidoscope of an album. The buying public would reward Bowie greatly for his efforts - it became his bestselling album up to that point both in the UK and the US, although major success in his beloved America was still to come - it wouldn't be until "Fame" in 1975 that he actually achieved a number one single there.

Still, for Bowie, the continued momentum of Ziggy Stardust as a cultural phenomenon was too much and had to be halted. Quite why Ziggy was "killed off" later in 1973 is still up for debate - even drummer Mick Woodmansey was totally unaware of what was going on when Bowie announced onstage that the Spiders From Mars would not play together again. Essentially, Bowie felt the need to reassert his own authority over his alter-ego and to return to some form of artistic honesty and to halt something that had spiralled out of his control. The "retirement" of Ziggy would come to be seen by many as something of a false start when Bowie's next project, a cover of 50s and 60s classics entitled Pin Ups, saw him still dressed like Ziggy and still playing with Ronson and bassist Trevor Bolder (Woodmansey having been replaced by Aynsley Dunbar). Pin Ups was a horribly tepid affair, with Bowie proving that interepreting the songs of others rather than indulging his own imagination really wasn't his strong point. It wasn't until 1974's Diamond Dogs that Bowie really tried to reassert himself as a solo artist in his own right, cutting himself off from Ronson and Bolder, and even then the music still seemed rooted in glam rock, though that wasn't to last. Aladdin Sane wouldn't quite be the last time Bowie would make music like this, but it was certainly the end of an era in many ways, and acts as a superb full stop to the Ziggy era.

Track Listing:

All songs written by David Bowie except where noted.

1. Watch That Man

2. Aladdin Sane (1913-1938-197?)

3. Drive-In Saturday

4. Panic In Detroit

5. Cracked Actor

6. Time

7. The Prettiest Star

8. Let's Spend The Night Together (Mick Jagger & Keith Richards)

9. The Jean Genie

10. Lady Grinning Soul