Lou Reed - Berlin

Released - July 1973

Genre - Art Rock

Producer - Bob Ezrin

Selected Personnel - Lou Reed (Vocals/Acoustic Guitar); Bob Ezrin (Piano/Mellotron/Arrangements); Michael Brecker (Tenor Saxophone); Randy Brecker (Trumpet); Jack Bruce (Bass); Aynsley Dunbar (Drums); Steve Hunter (Electric Guitar); Tony Levin (Bass); Allan MacMillan (Piano); Gene Martynec (Acoustic Guitar/Synthesiser/Bass); Dick Wagner (Backing Vocals/Electric Guitar); Blue Weaver (Piano); B.J. Wilson (Drums); Steve Winwood (Organ/Harmonium)

Standout Track - Sad Song

The late, great Lou Reed is an artist I've long admired but never managed to become really captivated by. His work with the Velvet Underground was, by and large, brilliant (though White Light/White Heat continues to be an album I really struggle to enjoy), and most of his early solo work is stuff I love (songs like "Perfect Day" and "Walk On The Wild Side" are songs I've adored since I was a teenager). It was only as my sense of quite what a key influence he was on rock music throughout the 70s developed that I felt a compulsion to listen to more of his work, both his solo stuff and his stuff with the Velvets before his departure in 1970. Ultimately, he's sporadically brilliant but far too inconsistent to ever really secure a place as one of my all-time favourite artists and I've not had the burning desire to plunge too far into his considerable discography. Essentially, the legacy Reed leaves behind is that of a great talent and an enormously influential cultural figure, but one who was so bloody-mindedly committed to doing things his way and to avoid becoming a mainstream sensation that he would go to great lengths to alienate his audience and maintain his cult status. The best example is Metal Machine Music, his lengthy album of distorted, looped feedback and guitar noise in 1975 which was seen by some as a joke and by others as a way of getting out of a record contract. As far as I'm aware, up until his death Reed avowed that Metal Machine Music was meant as a serious piece of work, and it's probably simply the ultimate example of an artist who would do things solely by his own rules, or not at all.

The first time this impulse of his - the impulse to shrink away from commercial success and prioritise his own creative whims rather than the whims of the buying public - can probably be found in the wonderful Berlin, his 1973 followup to Transformer. Of course, that's not to say that he was courting mainstream success in his work leading up to 1972 - the albums he recorded with the Velvet Underground were all staunchly anti-commercial and wilfully difficult, but at that stage Reed had no career to be jeopardising by following his impulses. Transformer, however, briefly made Lou Reed into a star, giving him hit singles in the forms of "Perfect Day" and "Walk On The Wild Side." With the glam rock stylings injected by producers David Bowie and Mick Ronson, Reed had the opportunity to capitalise on his newfound success and produce something similar that could have seen him morph into America's own answer to Bowie himself (ironically, a cultural phenomenon that Reed had vastly influenced and indirectly created). Lou Reed being Lou Reed, he did no such thing. All glam rock flavour was abandoned completely, with Reed himself limiting to nothing more than vocals and acoustic guitar on the new album. Musically, the mood was sombre and stark and, from the jazzy cabaret-style piano of the album's opening title track to the cinematic orchestral flourishes of album closer "Sad Song," highly theatrical, almost akin to a Broadway musical in places. The moments that excitable young music fans could dance along to were few and far between.

But what makes Berlin so violently unlike what had come before was less in its music (which was unusual and confrontational enough as it was), but in its lyrical content. Reed had spent years with the Velvet Underground establishing himself as a Bukowski-esque figure, romanticising the seedy details of the underbelly of American society with tales of drug abuse and sexual depravity ("Heroin" springs to mind), but even he outdid himself on Berlin. It's possible that no pop/rock musician had ever confronted the issues Reed confronts on this album quite so boldly or unapologetically, certainly nobody who was as prominent a figure. A loose concept album, Berlin tells the story of a doomed romance between the figures of Caroline and Jim. The story takes in drug abuse and prostitution and also charts Caroline's suffering from physical abuse and violence from Jim. Ultimately, their children are taken away and Caroline cuts her wrists, leaving Jim unrepentantly unmoved by the whole situation in his reverie in "Sad Song." It's perhaps that lack of empathy, and that sense of cold detachment, that makes Berlin so chilling. Even outside of Jim's own character monologue that ends the album, Reed reports these events with such a laconic, couldn't-care-less drawl that the everyday horror of them is all the more affecting, most notably on Reed's pithy dismissal of Caroline's "poetry and stuff" while describing the scene of her suicide on "The Bed."

So it's worth knowing that going into Berlin is hardly an enjoyable journey, but it's a compelling and profoundly powerful one. Musically, there's nothing remotely as catchy or immediately memorable as the great tunes on Transformer, but it's music that slowly gets under your skin, and it's all lent a greater sense of grandeur by the orchestral arrangements of producer Bob Ezrin, which ornament a number of the songs (Ezrin would later go on to produce Pink Floyd's masterpiece The Wall, an album with a similarly skewed and dark sense of theatricality). Towards the top of the album, things are deceptively straightforward - after the initial shock of the wail of distorted feedback that opens the album, "Berlin" itself is a gentle-sounding cabaret number, while "Men Of Good Fortune" is a fairly stolid rocker with some nice guitar fills, and perhaps the closest the album comes to a traditional rock song. "Caroline Says I" is reminiscent of some of the Velvet Underground's more upbeat rock songs like "I'm Waiting For The Man," but lent greater cinematic sweep by Ezrin's orchestral flourishes. "How Do You Think It Feels," via its horn section and stirring guitar solo, is perhaps the most upbeat the music gets on the whole album.

Things begin to get progressively more downbeat through the menacing, almost-tuneless murmuring of "Oh Jim," and it's up to "Caroline Says II" to shift tonally into the horribly depressing second half of the album. It's a genuinely provocative ballad, with Reed's weak and wheedling tone rendering Caroline's passivity all the more tragic, while instrumentation is kept to little more than Ezrin's maudlin strings. "The Kids" is a hugely difficult song to listen to, let alone to love, but is by far one of the album's emotional high-points. It narrates the story of the pair's children being taken into care, and halfway through, as Reed plugs away at the same acoustic guitar riff, things dissolve into the repeated wailing and screaming of children. It's horrible to listen to, and even worse when you know the story behind it - in order to get the recording, Ezrin resorted to waiting until his wife was out of the house and telling his own kids their mother had died before locking them in a cupboard and recording their cries. It's a truly shocking and appalling story, and Ezrin was rightly castigated severely by his wife for his actions, but it makes for one of the most arrestingly powerful moments on the record, turning what is a fairly simple and unremarkable song into an unforgettably uncomfortable listening experience. "The Bed" is one of Reed's better-known songs and sees him dispassionately relating Caroline's suicide, with his cracking and tuneless voice on the "Oh oh oh oh oh, what a feeling" refrain heart-breakingly inadequate at conveying the true horror of the situation.

As mentioned above, "Sad Song" is Jim's uncaring lament for his wife, and ironically for such a cynically mirthless song, actually has perhaps the most compelling melody of all the songs on offer, although melody and tunefulness are hardly Reed's top priorities here. It's rendered all the more perverse and upsetting by the jubilant grandeur of Ezrin's orchestral arrangement. Ultimately, Berlin is a horribly uncomfortable listening experience, with moments of compelling and exciting musicality few and far between, with more focus on the lyrical content and the pervasive mood of quiet desperation. It achieved Reed's aims, of course, of totally alienating the mainstream audience he was in danger of securing for himself - in years to come, such stories of suicidal longing and domestic horrors would become less taboo and bands could enjoy mainstream success while exploring such territory (Joy Division spring to mind), but at the time when glam rock ruled the charts, such an album looked like career suicide, which is probably exactly as Reed liked it. It's without a doubt the most profoundly affecting album to be recorded in the early 70s, regardless of how difficult it may be to listen to.

Due to Lou Reed's own sporadically consistent output, my own delving into his own work has never really got much further than Berlin - he's undoubtedly a genius and a hugely important cultural figure, but I've just never felt the need to listen to much more of his stuff. The only exception is The Raven, a vast, sprawling album he recorded in 2003 that caught my attention for its being part of a collaboration with the New York-based director Robert Wilson (a frequent collaborator with my all-time favourite genius, Tom Waits), and for the involvement of Antony Hegarty (perhaps one of the most brilliant musicians working today) and, collaborating with Reed for the first time since 1972 on one all-too-brief song called "Hop Frog," David Bowie. Intended as an interpretation of the works of Edgar Allen Poe, the entire concept fascinated me and seemed like something I'd love considering the talent involved. Unfortunately, like so much of Lou Reed's approach to music-making, it's frustratingly uneven. It's far too long, with well over half an hour of it simply being recordings of Willem Dafoe and Steve Buscemi reading out Poe's dialogue (and there's nothing wrong with that per se, but one would have hoped that an album of Lou Reed musically reinventing Poe's works would have resulted in something a bit more innovative). The songs themselves are mostly fairly unmemorable, although it's well worth hearing "Who Am I? (Tripitena's Song)," which is phenomenally brilliant and one of Reed's finest compositions. Just don't bother listening to The Raven all the way through for that one song. But, while he never managed to achieve the same obsessive grasp over my listening habits that, say, Waits or Bowie or even Antony did, Lou Reed still made a huge amount of brilliantly compelling and exciting music that has stayed with me long after I heard it, and he leaves behind a truly vital and exciting legacy, regardless of its inconsistency.

Track Listing:

All songs written by Lou Reed

1. Berlin

2. Lady Day

3. Men Of Good Fortune

4. Caroline Says I

5. How Do You Think It Feels

6. Oh, Jim

7. Caroline Says II

8. The Kids

9. The Bed

10. Sad Song

King Crimson - Larks' Tongues In Aspic

Released - March 1973

Genre - Progressive Rock

Producer - King Crimson

Selected Personnel - Robert Fripp (Guitar/Mellotron/Electric Piano/Devices); John Wetton (Bass/Vocals/Piano); Bill Bruford (Drums); David Cross (Violin/Viola/Mellotron/Electric Piano/Flute); Jamie Muir (Percussion)

Standout Track - Easy Money

Reading back over this blog is interesting in many ways as it helps to retroactively apply patterns and structures to musical history that might not initially be apparent from casual listening. In particular, looking at the types of albums that make the list at certain times provides evidence of when certain cultural shifts took place, and it's interesting to note that 1973 seems to be the year that prog rock, the genre that's obsessed me for years, and one that had achieved surprise dominance of British rock music since the late 60s, begins to lose its grip firm grip. By this stage, the emergence of artists like David Bowie and Roxy Music had been able to deliver rock music that had intelligence and wit and theatricality without the tendency for self-indulgent excess that prog could fall victim to, and perhaps audience's tastes began to waver. It wouldn't be until the rise of punk a couple of years later that prog really became unfashionable, but it's interesting to note that a number of the big prog bands struggled to deliver something of true brilliance in 1973. Jethro Tull and Yes, for instance, having each delivered something of a magnum opus in '72 in the forms of Thick As A Brick and Close To The Edge respectively, struggled to match their achievements. Tull's A Passion Play is a by-the-numbers retread of the structure of Thick As A Brick that lacks all its colourful invention and tongue-in-cheek zest, while Yes foolishly attempted to one-up themselves by recording Tales From Topographic Oceans, a collection of four twenty-minute pieces, none of which has enough good ideas in it to justify ten minutes.

Perhaps this very gradual sea change was something Robert Fripp was aware of. Certainly, it's equally true of King Crimson that when they re-emerged in 1973 it was to deliver something very different to what had come before, perhaps as a deliberate stance against any sense that prog was losing its sense of relevance and importance. The early incarnation of Crimson was dead - Fripp cast off long-time lyricist and collaborator Pete Sinfield and all his other backing musicians and organised the band as a wholly new collective, with bassist and vocalist John Wetton, avant-garde percussionist Jamie Muir, violinist David Cross and, perhaps most curiously, drummer Bill Bruford, formerly of Yes. Bored of the overly complicated nature of working with Yes, Bruford defected to Crimson in order to embrace their looser, more improvisatory approach to music. And the music this new lineup of the band would make would be something wholly new, even for prog fans. With the ghosts of early King Crimson now definitively behind them, and no longer having to fit into the conceptual and lyrical constraints of Sinfield's influence of the band, they felt more comfortable doing things their own way rather than following the same songwriting templates Ian McDonald had set for them back in 1969. No more classically-inspired suites and the like - for the new record, the focus would be on sonic experimentation and free-form, jazz fusion-esque improvisation. Fripp had just finished working on his proto-ambient experimental album (No Pussyfooting) with Brian Eno, so at this point was clearly more interested in playing with the sonic possibilities of music than with writing particularly coherent songs.

And so we get Larks' Tongues In Aspic, the freshest and most weird-sounding prog record in a good year or so, and the most dangerous and strange King Crimson had sounded since In The Court Of The Crimson King. The mood is generally dark and savage and borderline psychotic, with Fripp's brutal, spidery guitar more to the forefront than ever before, and Wetton's fluid basslines and Muir's weird percussive sound collages lending everything a slightly alien and unsettling edge. Muir was a great advocate of using found sounds, and for his contributions would try to create music with anything that came to hand, be it light bulbs or chains or toys. The majority of the resultant album is built around free-form improv-based instrumentals, with three more "conventional" songs nestled in the middle, although "conventional" is a stretch. With Sinfield gone, the lyrics for the three songs to actually feature a vocal part were penned by none other than Richard Palmer-James, the former guitarist and lyricist of Supertramp for their self-titled debut album.

The title track (split into two, although there are few musical parallels between its two parts that bookend the album) kicks things off into gloriously unsettling territory. The slow build of Muir's weird percussive collages, using what sounds like thumb pianos amid a cloud of chirping and chiming, soon climaxes in the explosive roar of Fripp's heavy-metal styled riff. Via monstrously athletic guitar solos and bass solos, the piece continues to play with dynamics from whispering quietness to deafening noise and climaxes in one of the most intense and frightening passages in the band's discography, as David Cross's violin seesaws acrobatically over Fripp's intense guitar work into a cacophony of a finale. It's a truly frightening piece, and one that obliterates any memory of the generally serene and contemplative mood of Islands, heralding the arrival of this newer, rawer and more unpredictable iteration of the band. "Book Of Saturday" is the first regular song on offer, and perhaps the album's low point. Wetton's voice has always been a bit of an alienating factor for me, sounding strangled and uncomfortable. Of course, the band at this point were principally about instrumental work, and Wetton is a wonderful bassist, so it's not too big a problem (though his later work with the atrocious supergroup Asia in the 80s would push his singing to the limit), but it does make the regular songs slightly harder to enjoy. "Book Of Saturday" is fairly slight and forgettable, but what follows is better.

"Exiles" harks back to the classic Crimson sound, throwing a lifeline to the fan cast adrift, opening with a moody Mellotron part adapted from an earlier piece called "Mantra" that the band used to play in the late 60s. The song it leads into is a gentle acoustic ballad that incorporates flute and, Wetton's weird singing aside, has a genuinely pretty melody. It's totally blown out of the water, however, by the phenomenal "Easy Money." It opens with, hands down, the most killer riff Fripp ever came up with, over the slow, squelching, trudging percussion of Muir, the stately bass of Wetton and a chorus of scatted singing that's just effortlessly cool. Much of the song itself is a slow burn build-up back to this opening theme, via a slow, spidery cool groove that Wetton really gets under the skin of to give perhaps his finest vocal performance. After the undoubted highlight that "Easy Money" represents, "The Talking Drum" (which signposts the return to instrumentals) has a lot to live up to, and it's a piece I used to find difficult to love. It recalls the final minutes of "Larks' Tongues In Aspic (Part I)" with its excruciating slow-burn development from silence and the rush of wind, via frenetic percussive trade-offs between Bruford's drums and Muir's more off-kilter percussive effects, all over Wetton's steady bassline and underscored by Cross's meandering violin solo, to a rabid, frantic conclusion that ultimately bursts into terrified squealing that puts the listener in mind of a thousand baby birds screaming.

From there it's right into the brutal riff of "Larks' Tongues In Aspic (Part II)," which abandons the dynamic shifts of the first part and goes for all-out speed and aggression in a jazz fusion-inspired jam redolent of the likes of the Mahavishnu Orchestra, filtered via King Crimson's own wiry and menacing approach to music-making. By the end of it, the listener is left almost breathless - safe for the brief respite of "Book Of Saturday" and "Exiles," there has been no relief from the oppressive, sinister tone of the music, nor from its free-form weirdness and unpredictability. It's certainly a far cry from the band's earlier work, although it does capture the spontaneity and terrifying level of invention of the band's debut album far better than anything else they'd done since. While their work had continued to be exciting and enjoyable, this was the first time since 1969 that King Crimson had managed to sound like true musical pioneers and a force to be reckoned with. Not only that, they managed to do it at a time when most other big prog bands were having trouble maintaining their early levels of innovation and promise.

From 1969 to 1971, Crimson had come to be less of a band and more of a loose collection of musicians to orchestrate whatever ideas Fripp felt like exploring, but this new version of the band managed to work much more like a real band for a good couple of years. Unfortunately Muir, who was such a key part of this album's unusual sound, departed in 1973 due to a "spiritual crisis," meaning Bruford's role on the next album was expanded. Of course, given Fripp's difficult and obstreperous nature, such a role for the band couldn't continue and in 1974 he would temporarily "retire" from music, rendering King Crimson defunct for some time. The immediate followup to Larks' Tongues In Aspic, titled Starless And Bible Black, was similar in its free-form approach and oppressive, menacing tone but struggled to achieve anything as brilliant as on this album, save for a virtuoso guitar showpiece entitled "Fracture" that Fripp has gone on record as saying is the hardest piece he's ever played (quite a statement from such a fiendishly talented guitarist). But it would be followed by Red later the same year, the final master statement the band would make for many, many years.

Track Listing:

1. Larks' Tongues In Aspic (Part I) (Robert Fripp, John Wetton, Bill Bruford, David Cross & Jamie Muir)

2. Book Of Saturday (Robert Fripp, John Wetton & Richard Palmer-James)

3. Exiles (Robert Fripp, John Wetton, David Cross & Richard Palmer-James)

4. Easy Money (Robert Fripp, John Wetton & Richard Palmer-James)

5. The Talking Drum (Robert Fripp, John Wetton, Bill Bruford, David Cross & Jamie Muir)

6. Larks' Tongues In Aspic (Part II) (Robert Fripp)

John Martyn - Inside Out

Released - October 1973

Genre - Folk Jazz

Producer - John Martyn

Selected Personnel - John Martyn (Vocals/Guitar); Danny Thompson (Bass/Double Bass); Chris Stewart (Bass); Steve Winwood (Bass/Keyboards); Chris Wood (Flute/Horns); Remi Kabaka (Percussion); Keth Sathie (Tabla); Bobby Keyes (Saxophone)

Standout Track - Ain't No Saint

First of all, let me reassure on one point - I haven't suddenly decided to just make this blog all about John Martyn. He is a recent discovery of mine, but his sudden prevalence in the last few days is largely just down to the fact that he happened to release two great albums in 1973, which is where we're up to now. Unless I listen to Sunday's Child and really love it, chances are I won't cover him again until I get up to One World in 1977, so enjoy this while it lasts. So, Inside Out is the second (and, admittedly, lesser) of the two records Martyn recorded in that year, following on from the phenomenally successful Solid Air, which would become a cornerstone of British folk music. The temptation in the face of such sudden success is either to lazily replicate the formula in the hope of repeating the success, or to make an artistic stand and do something completely different that may polarise fans but will at least keep any sense of creative stagnation at bay. In a way, Martyn did neither - Inside Out is another folk jazz album very much in the same vein as Solid Air, and hardly represents a totally new direction, but it also sees him being far more experimental and innovative with the same musical territory than he had been previously, so perhaps it sees him trying to have the best of both worlds. For the most part, he gets away with it too. Although it's ultimately the least successful of the four Martyn albums I've heard at present, it's still undeniably bold and exciting and fresh and shows no signs of the man running out of ideas. Also, in its more sedate and traditional moments, it shows him as adept as ever at writing a beautiful and simple tune.

Musically, it found Martyn collaborating with a largely new collective of backing musicians, with the exception of his regular bassist Danny Thompson (among the new recruits were keyboardist Steve Winwood of Traffic). Surrounding himself with new people presumably kept Martyn feeling the need to innovate and to try new things rather than comfortably relying on people, and there are certainly moments on Inside Out that feel radically new for him, despite there being examples of precedents being set on his earlier work. "Fine Lines" is a deceptively traditional way to kick things off - it's a lovely, simple acoustic folk piece that harks back to Martyn's earlier work like Bless The Weather, and perhaps serves to reassure those new listeners who only bought the record because of Solid Air. Things quickly get weirder, though.

"Eibhli Ghail Chiuin Ni Cherbhail" is an arrangement of a traditional folk piece that's rendered totally alien and weird by Martyn's heavily distorted guitar. It's not one of the album's high-points but serves as a nice appetiser for some of the other stranger instrumental moments to come. "Ain't No Saint" is perhaps the album's finest song, a frenetic piece of acoustic fingerpicking that starts almost menacing in its intensity before erupting into a gloriously urgent chorus. The almost-title track that is "Outside In" is a very different beast, however, with none of the immediate catchiness or brevity of that great song, not that this robs it of any of its power. It's an epic free-form jazz improvisation that sees Martyn experimenting with the Echoplex effect on his guitar more than ever before, creating a piece of urgent, endlessly shifting soundscapes over which he periodically scats or mumbles, climaxing in a monstrously bear-like roar of "It must be love" as the musicians reach exhaustion. "The Glory Of Love" is a pleasant but easy-to-dismiss novelty number, perhaps the only way to come down after something as epic and strange as "Outside In."

"Look In" is another insistent distorted guitar work, with Thompson's resonant bass anchoring things under Martyn's alien guitar scratching. "Beverley" is perhaps the album's low point, a forgettable piece of further distortion experiments and instrumental noodling that seems to further illustrate a point that's already been made, and far less well than the earlier attempts at exploring the same territory (Beverley Martyn herself must have been disappointed with how the track named after her turned out). Things pick up again massively with "Make No Mistake," which starts as a genuinely beautiful acoustic piece about hard living (Martyn's passionate rendition of the line "to be dead drunk on the floor, to get up and ask for more" is hair-raisingly powerful) that then extends into a lengthy free-form coda. The final two songs are more traditional, with "So Much In Love With You" being a particularly lovely piece that's particularly notable for its jazzy piano part.

Unfortunately, not one of the songs is anywhere close to the brilliance of some of the best songs on Solid Air, and it also lacks the pretty simplicity of Bless The Weather - there are moments where its iconoclastic spirit and desire to experiment and break new ground becomes wearing rather than exciting. But very little of the music is actively difficult to listen to ("Beverley" is the only moment where I mentally tune out), and much of it is actively really beautiful or powerful or, at its very least, representative of a sense of innovation that's to be hugely commended. It takes a special talent to continue pushing themselves into new territory at a time when they could have gone the easy route and gotten away with it, so for that at least John Martyn should be applauded. That he managed to produce a genuinely great album while pushing himself is all the better. The path from Inside Out to One World is one I'm yet to explore - Sunday's Child was to come in between in 1975, and I've yet to work out whether it's an album that's essential listening. But suffice to say, whether or not it was his very next release or the one after, further greatness was still to come.

Track Listing:

All songs written by John Martyn except where noted.

1. Fine Lines

2. Eibhli Ghail Chiuin Ni Chearbhail (Traditional, arranged by John Martyn)

3. Ain't No Saint

4. Outside In

5. The Glory Of Love

6. Look In

7. Beverley

8. Make No Mistake

9. Ways To Cry

10. So Much In Love With You

John Martyn - Solid Air

Released - February 1973

Genre - Folk

Producer - John Martyn & John Wood

Selected Personnel - John Martyn (Vocals/Guitar/Synthesiser); Richard Thompson (Guitar/Violin/Autoharp/Mandolin); Simon Micol (Mandolin/Violin/Autoharp); Sue Draheim (Violin); Tony Coe (Saxophone); John "Rabbit" Bundrick (Piano/Organ/Clavinet); Danny Thompson (Acoustic Bass); Dave Pegg (Bass); Dave Mattacks (Drums)

Standout Track - Don't Want To Know

As I explained on my review of Bless The Weather, John Martyn has become a fairly recent obsession of mine and, thanks to the concentration of most of his best work in the early 70s, it means there'll be a few posts about his work in a row here. Mind you, despite the obvious loveliness of Bless The Weather, if Martyn had continued recording albums exactly like it for his entire life he would probably ultimately wind up being an artist I found enjoyable, but hardly essential. Solid Air was the first of his albums I heard back in early January, and thanks to all of its idiosyncrasies, its level of comfort in such a diverse range of musical styles, I was immediately struck by an artist who would obviously be someone who would fascinate me. Offhand, I honestly can't remember hearing an artist who grabbed me so immediately as I was when I first heard the opening bars of this seminal album's title track. I'm undecided as to whether this is my absolute favourite of the handful of Martyn's records I've heard (1977's One World is spectacular as well, and the decision would be a tough one), but from what I've heard it's certainly one of his crowning achievements, and one of the pinnacles of British folk.

Of course, to label this simply as "folk music" is diminutive - in working on it, Martyn would incorporate the sounds and styles of jazz music almost as centrally as he drew on folk music, and it's in this richness and versatility that the album really excels. There were signs of what was to come already on Bless The Weather - songs like "Glistening Glyndebourne" showed signs of Martyn's free-form improvisations that he would further indulge on later work, and songs like "Head And Heart" showed an increasing jazziness, while the inclusion of jazz bassist Danny Thompson (who would continue to be one of his major collaborators up until Martyn's death in 2009) further pushed things in that direction. Perhaps sensing how this direction seemed to revitalise his music, Martyn resolved to explore that territory further on his next record, and the results are nothing short of spectacular.

Perhaps one of the most curious innovations of Solid Air is the total reinvention Martyn imposed on his own voice. On Bless The Weather he sounded in fine voice, but not much unlike any number of British folk singers. Here, from out of nowhere, he sings in a semi-slurred, rich drawl that veers from silky, perfumed over-enunciation to raw, ragged and impassioned mumbling. It would become a trademark of all of Martyn's most popular work, and one that seems to split fans down the middle as to whether they love it or hate it, but personally, I can't imagine a way such smokey, late-night jazzy music could be sung differently, certainly without sacrificing a lot of its devastating effect. Martyn also diversified his musical pallette considerably, going from a principally acoustic guitar and bass-driven affair to something that incorporated much more electric guitar as well as more dense percussion, saxophones, electric keyboards and all sorts that rendered things more exotic and exciting to the ear than the usual folk album. The mood is almost uniformly one of late-night reflection, whether that be via the energetic mood of "I'd Rather Be The Devil" or the mournful tones of "The Man In The Station."

The title track, with its moody saxophone, mesmerising keyboards and slow, bluesy tone, is a piece of reflective majesty, made all the more tragic by the ultimate fate of its subject. It was Martyn's tribute to his friend and label-mate Nick Drake, who at this stage had released his final album in Pink Moon and was struggling with severe depression. The lyrics observe Drake's suffering with his condition, and try to pledge some sort of affinity and support for him - "I know you, I love you and I can be your friend, I can follow you anywhere, even through solid air." It's a beautifully touching statement of support for a friend struggling through difficulties, and that the friend in question should die from an overdose of antidepressants a year later renders it all the more heartbreaking. Given how unrecognised and under-appreciated Drake's work was at the time of release, it's perhaps the ultimate tribute to the man ever recorded. By contrast, "Over The Hill" is a beautifully jubilant and upbeat folk song that leads into the album's high point, the sensationally moody and cool "Don't Want To Know," with its slow, shuffling conga percussion and meditative tone that builds to a more rousing and ecstatic climax. Quite simply one of the finest anthems about love (as opposed to a simple love song) I've heard in an age.

It's followed by a cover of Skip James's "I'd Rather Be The Devil," which is perhaps slightly over-long but gives plenty of opportunity for a percussion-based jam around the framework of the song, as well as a platform for further Echoplex-based experimentation with guitar sounds and textures. Not one of the album's high-points, but still enormously entertaining. "Go Down Easy" is a fairly simple jazz-inflected folk song that's a great showcase for Danny Thompson's atmospheric bass playing, and "Dreams By The Sea" comes close to being a straight-up rocker, anchored by Martyn's distorted electric guitar riff. "May You Never," despite being far from one of the truly great songs on offer here, went on to become a much-covered Martyn standard. It's a prettily simple folk song with a catchy and memorable melody, but why it went on to become the song from this record with the longest shelf-life is a mystery considering the brilliance of what surrounded it. "Brilliance" is a word that applies perfectly to the desperately beautiful "The Man In The Station," blessed with one of the most effortlessly lovely, mournful and wonderful tunes and guitar parts Martyn would ever pen, decorated even further by the gentle keyboard part, while Martyn's soft vocal performance is pitch-perfect. A paean to the desperation to return home to a loved one, and the resentment felt when forced to be apart from the ones you love, it's easily the most emotionally powerful song on the record along with the title track. Things finish up in a more light-hearted vein with "The Easy Blues," a simple traditional blues number about a jelly roll baker which, much like the cover of "Singin' In The Rain" on Bless The Weather, wraps things up in a gloriously feelgood mood (it would also be memorably covered by Joe Bonamassa on his album Sloe Gin in 2007).

For some, Solid Air would be the pinnacle of all Martyn's musical achievements. For me, One World matches its brilliance, but it's certainly true that this is representative of all the genius Martyn possessed at his peak, and easily serves as one of the finest British folk albums of all time. Its musical beauty and perfection, paired with its ability to blend with jazz styles and traditions as well, made it just as irresistible to the critics and the general public at the time, and Martyn was soon enshrined as one of the very best British singer/songwriters of the time. Not one to be rendered lazy or apathetic by success, Martyn would respond not by simply trying to replicate the achievements of that album, but rather took the template it laid out and continued pushing his music into uncharted territory in order to continue challenging himself as an artist. The result would be an album perhaps less consistently brilliant but just as fascinating, called Inside Out. More on that momentarily...

Track Listing:

All songs written by John Martyn except where noted.

1. Solid Air

2. Over The Hill

3. Don't Want To Know

4. I'd Rather Be The Devil (Skip James)

5. Go Down Easy

6. Dreams By The Sea

7. May You Never

8. The Man In The Station

9. The Easy Blues

Neil Young & Crazy Horse - Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere

Released - May 1969

Genre - Hard Rock
Producer - Neil Young & David Briggs
Selected Personnel - Neil Young (Vocals/Guitar); Danny Whitten (Guitar/Vocals); Billy Talbot (Bass); Ralph Molina (Drums/Vocals); Bobby Notkoff (Violin); Robin Lane (Backing Vocals)
Standout Track - Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere

I'm breaking the chronological nature of this blog once again in order to momentarily zip back to 1969, although this time not to include an album I've only recently become familiar with. On the contrary, I've known Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere for a long time now and have always struggled as to whether or not to include it on my list of great albums. Initially, it did little to really excite me and it's only over time that it's come to grow on me. As is evident by how long it took me to eventually decide to include it on this list, it's still far from being my favourite Neil Young record, but ultimately I came to realise that, while there's stuff on it I don't particularly like, it's still well over half the record that I do really enjoy (particularly considering the length of two of the tracks), so not including it just seemed churlish. As I think I detailed in my review of Young's 1970 masterpiece After The Gold Rush, for a long time all I knew of his work was that album and its equally brilliant followup, Harvest. It was only over the last year or so that I gradually took more interest in Young's wider work and was surprised to find, given his reputation as one of the greats in country and folk music, that he had had an enormously significant role in the development of hard rock. In later years, his work with Crazy Horse would even see him heralded as the "godfather of grunge," the accidental forefather to the rise of bands like Nirvana and Pearl Jam in the early 90s - an idiosyncratic legacy for the man who wrote "Heart Of Gold."

Since learning of the breadth and diversity of Young's work I've become much more familiar with his Crazy Horse work, and it all starts here in 1969. Having released a fairly unremarkable folk record under his own name, Young set about doing something radically different for his next album, and hand-picked guitarist Danny Whitten, bassist Billy Talbot and drummer Ralph Molina from a band named the Rockets and made them his backing band. Dubbing themselves Crazy Horse, this collection of musicians would prove to be a key part of Young's music over subsequent years. He would periodically switch between albums that were predominantly acoustic and focused more on his songwriting, and albums with Crazy Horse that focused more on extended jams and grooves and the collective musicianship of the band members. Crazy Horse would even develop a musical life of their own outside of Young, releasing occasional albums as a separate entity without him, though their best work would always be that which had Young as its creative lynchpin.

Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere is a hybrid album of sorts, given that the Crazy Horse sound and identity were in their infancy and quite what Young was able to achieve with them hadn't been carved out yet. It's a far cry from being an out-and-out garage rock album of brutal, punishing riffs and jams in the vein of 1990's Ragged Glory or their most recent effort, 2012's Psychedelic Pill. But it's also notably different from Young's solo work, with its emphasis on melody and lyrical content. Essentially, it's an album split down the middle between the simpler country rock songs and the more raw, free-form jams and heavy rock numbers. Overall, it's the latter that really shine here - quite why is a mystery, as Young would ably demonstrate the following year with After The Gold Rush that he was more than capable of writing simple folk songs with devastating effectiveness, but perhaps in the midst of writing more raucous material for Crazy Horse the shorter songs just didn't work as well.

The opening "Cinnamon Girl" has become a Young classic, and the first ever evidence of the loose, ramshackle power of Crazy Horse's sound, with its crunching, defiantly simple guitar riff. It's too short to really go anywhere, but acts as a brilliant distillation of the plodding, amateurish noise this band would come to excel at. Refinement and musical perfection were far from the order of the day here (as is evidenced by Young's infernally brilliant one-note guitar solo on "Cowgirl In The Sand"), shifting the focus onto the feel and the gut impact of the music. The other two hard rock numbers are the album's two lengthy jams, "Down By The River" and the brilliant aforementioned "Cowgirl In The Sand." The former is the weaker of the two, and is perhaps a little overstretched, but still provides ample evidence of the band's ability to play around with a song structure and inject it with some passion and energy. "Cowgirl In The Sand," meanwhile, is pure brilliance. The simple vocal refrain is memorably angry and defiant, and the band simply let loose with an intense free-form jam as Young and Whitten trade blistering guitar licks. It's undoubtedly the clearest evidence here of the kind of fearsome music Young would be able to make while allied with Crazy Horse, and one of the all-time great rock jams.

Still, although "Cowgirl In The Sand" is the most obviously great song here, for me, the song that's always endeared me the most is the cheerfully simple title track. It's a country song so upbeat and feelgood it almost feels like a pastiche, with all the requisite guitar twang and "la-la-la" choruses of a great country number, but its melody is so brightly irresistible that it's always been my favourite song on offer. Unfortunately, as I mentioned earlier, the other more typical folk songs on offer are fairly disappointing. "Losing End (When You're On)" is another country song, but this one plodding and unimaginative where "Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere" was fun and exciting, and "Running Dry (Requiem For The Rockets)" is made interesting by the inclusion of Bobby Notkoff's violin, but is still ultimately a bit of a drag to listen to. "Round & Round (It Won't Be Long)" is pretty enough, but again too slow and by-the-numbers to do anything to excite.

For a long time, those three tedious songs prevented me from really loving this album, but on balance, the presence of four great songs, two of which are getting on for ten minutes in length, means it's impossible to deny that this is ultimately a great record. It's a long way from his best, as I said - ultimately, I love Neil Young as a folk singer/songwriter more than as the head of a ramshackle hard rock outfit, undeniably brilliant as his work with Crazy Horse would go on to be, so the early muddled sound of them all trying to figure out how they would work together is fun to listen to, but a far cry from my sense of the most essential Young albums. Young would continue working with Crazy Horse sporadically over subsequent decades, and perhaps the fact that he has never relied on them consistently but only recorded with them when he felt the need to is the key to how they are still able to make music that's exciting and passionate even today - they've never exhausted one another creatively, but have simply known they can rely on each other when they need to. Crazy Horse would appear on a few select tracks on After The Gold Rush the following year (most notably the brutal rocker "Southern Man"), before Young abandoned the sessions with them and decided to focus more on his own songwriting than on full-band sessions.

One other point of interest for Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere is that it's the only full album Young made with Crazy Horse to feature the band's original guitarist Danny Whitten, whose death in 1972 from his drug habit would haunt Young for years and would be a crucial inspiration for the bleak Tonight's The Night that he recorded the following year. Whitten would crop up on the odd Young song between 1969 and 1975, but this, their first full outing together, is the only place where his talent is fully showcased alongside Young's.

Track Listing:

All songs written by Neil Young.

1. Cinnamon Girl

2. Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere

3. Round & Round (It Won't Be Long)

4. Down By The River

5. The Losing End (When You're On)

6. Running Dry (Requiem For The Rockets)

7. Cowgirl In The Sand

Genesis - Selling England By The Pound

Released - October 1973

Genre - Progressive Rock

Producer - Genesis & John Burns

Selected Personnel - Peter Gabriel (Vocals/Flute/Oboe/Percussion); Tony Banks (Piano/Organ/Mellotron/Synthesiser/Keyboards); Steve Hackett (Guitar); Mike Rutherford (Bass/Rhythm Guitar/Sitar); Phil Collins (Drums/Percussion/Vocals)

Standout Track - Firth Of Fifth

I detailed the importance of Selling England By The Pound in my review for Foxtrot - before I listened to it for the first time a few years ago, Genesis were one of the few major prog bands I had consistently resisted, being fairly certain I wouldn't like them (quite why I took up this self-consciously difficult stance is beyond me, considering how big a fan I was of most of their contemporaries). In my defence, I did eventually agree to listen to Nursery Cryme in 2011 and found it overly pompous and tuneless even by prog rock standards, and never warmed to it (which continues to this day. Perhaps one day I'll suddenly get it). I grudgingly agreed to give Genesis one more chance and listened to Selling England By The Pound and, while it didn't immediately blow me away, I was surprised to find that it intrigued me and that I wanted to listen to it again. Eventually, thanks purely to my initial appreciation of this album, I came to have some fondness for early Gabriel-era Genesis. They remain one of the few big prog bands I continue to have difficulty unreservedly loving, though my subsequent love of Gabriel's solo career would never have come about had I not developed an interest in his early work with the band. As for what happened to Genesis in the 80s, it barely bears talking about. Most prog bands had to morph into cheesy pop-rock stadium acts in order to survive into the next decade and some of them, like Yes, managed to do it right. Let's just say Genesis emerges from the 80s with perhaps one of the most tarnished records, at least from an artistic perspective, of any classic early 70s band, despite the enormous commercial success of their synthpop stuff.

But in 1973 such horrors were far off and the band were busy crafting what would be, in my opinion, their finest record. Stylistically it picks up pretty much exactly where Foxtrot left off and does little to radically alter the sonic palette or musical approach, although side-long epics like "Supper's Ready" have been consigned to the past, with a new focus on slightly more concise mini-epics (most of the songs on offer here are over eight minutes, but most of them manage to avoid the vague sense of bloating and sprawling that settles in on certain moments of "Supper's Ready.") In contrast to the portentous, dense Mellotron soundscapes that opened Foxtrot in the intro to "Watcher Of The Skies," here things start with beautiful simplicity in Peter Gabriel's a cappella sung intro to "Dancing With The Moonlit Knight," soon accompanied by a beautiful acoustic guitar riff from Steve Hackett. The song soon sprawls into an uptempo monster of a rock song, with Mike Rutherford's resounding bass and Tony Banks's grandiose keyboards propelling it to its final, quiet, haunting lullaby of a denouement. The lyrics are supposedly a meditation on the current state of Britain (as a response to accusations that Genesis were becoming too US-centric), though as with most Gabriel lyrics of the era, it's mostly just colourful imagery and nonsense. What's always appealed to me most about Genesis is that, while they lack the musical ferocity of King Crimson or the epic intricacy of Yes, they have such a zest and a tongue-in-cheek vivacity about them (principally through the theatrical bent of Gabriel himself), that they manage to overcome any shortcomings that the music itself may possess.

"I Know What I Like (In Your Wardrobe)" is a perfectly decent song, but never one that's really engaged me much, and its enduring popularity remains a mystery to me. It's a little too kookily off-kilter for my liking and struggles to really find an engaging tune. It's followed up by perhaps the finest piece of music Genesis ever laid down, the magnificent "Firth Of Fifth" (its title another tongue-in-cheek joke, in reference to the Firth of Forth in Edinburgh. The meaning of the title is, as ever with Genesis, irrelevant). The epic and intricate grand piano intro is proud and magnificent and affects an amazing transition into the explosive organ swells of the song itself, over which comes Gabriel's declamatory vocals. After a pretty flute solo from Gabriel, the song expands from its ponderous intro to a raving behemoth as most great longer Genesis songs do, giving Hackett an opportunity for a particularly frenetic guitar solo, and Banks has great fun with the various keyboard effects at his disposal. "More Fool Me" shows the band demonstrating an uncharacteristic amount of restraint, with drummer Phil Collins (who, after Gabriel's departure, would go on to succeed him as lead vocalist) singing to a pretty and simple acoustic guitar accompaniment. It's a pleasant interlude between the grandiosity of "Firth Of Fifth" and the frantic mania of the next song.

"The Battle Of Epping Forest" starts with a slow, militaristic march but soon transforms into a fast-paced epic with Banks's organ again to the forefront and Rutherford laying down a nimble and acrobatic bass part. The main star, though, is Gabriel, who uses the song as an opportunity to indulge all his theatrical aspirations, shifting between a whole host of different voices, dialects and tones to tell a story ostensibly about gang warfare in East London, though again it's such a colourful and nonsensical piece of music that any attention being paid to the narrative rather than the general theatrical fun of the song is misplaced, really. The other epic on offer is "The Cinema Show," and perhaps is the only major letdown on the album. "I Know What I Like (In Your Wardrobe)" may be a little humdrum, but at least it's short, but "The Cinema Show" is altogether too long for how interesting it is to listen to and nudges this album into the "ever so slightly too long to be undeniably brilliant" territory. The album closes on the brief reprise of "Dancing With The Moonlit Knight" that is "Aisle Of Plenty" and sees Gabriel, ever the humourist, trying to namecheck as many supermarkets in one couplet as he can. ("Easy, love, there's the safe way home, thankful for her fine fair discount, Tess co-operates...")

As ever, one of the major things that sets Genesis apart from other (and, in my opinion, better) prog bands is their novel approach to using the lineup of instruments on offer. Whereas most rock music tended to be guitar-based and used keyboards as a sort of decorative or supporting instrument, Genesis's music seems consistently to be driven by organs or keyboards, with Hackett's guitar work mostly reserved to a more unobtrusive role and the odd solo or the like. That, plus the band's obvious sense of humour and theatricality, makes listening to Genesis feel different to listening to any old prog band, and keeps the attention from wavering in the moments when the actual songwriting dips below the usual standard. Still, on Selling England By The Pound, they mostly manage to make a really genuinely great album, that just suffers on account of a couple of its lesser tracks. It became the band's biggest success up to that point, with "I Know What I Like (In Your Wardrobe)" becoming a surprisingly successful single, and Genesis had successfully managed to join the ranks of Yes and Jethro Tull as one of the biggest and most promising prog bands of the era. Of course, prog's death knell wasn't far off and, like so many of its best bands, major things would happen in the next couple of years that set the band off on the path to becoming one of the most nauseously terrible 80s pop bands that we ever had the misfortune of having to listen to. They still had at least one more great album in them, though...

Track Listing:

All songs written by Tony Banks, Phil Collins, Steve Hackett, Peter Gabriel & Mike Rutherford

1. Dancing With The Moonlit Knight

2. I Know What I Like (In Your Wardrobe)

3. Firth Of Fifth

4. More Fool Me

5. The Battle Of Epping Forest

6. After The Ordeal

7. The Cinema Show

8. Aisle Of Plenty

John Martyn - Bless The Weather

Released - November 1971

Genre - Folk

Producer - John Martyn & John Wood

Selected Personnel - John Martyn (Vocals/Guitar/Harmonica/Keyboards); Richard Thompson (Guitar); Smiley DeJonnes (Percussion); Beverley Martyn (Guitar/Vocals); Danny Thompson (Double Bass); Tony Reeves (Double Bass/Bass Guitar); Ian Whiteman (Keyboards); Roger Powell (Drums)

Standout Track - Go Easy

Last summer, I found myself writing reviews for Nick Drake albums barely a couple of weeks, or even a matter of days after I'd listened to them (partly so that I could still crowbar them into this blog with a vague semblance of a chronological order), and as such found myself writing reviews for albums that were still very fresh in my mind, but so undeniably brilliant that they required very little time for me to be well aware that I loved them. Now, several months on, I find myself in a similar position with one of Drake's closest friends and contemporaries, John Martyn. I only started listening to Martyn's music over the last month or so, and Bless The Weather in particular is one I listened to for the first time barely a week ago, but already he's come to be a figure who's delighted and fascinated me, one who has the same expert eye for effortlessly effective and powerful simple folk music while also (later on in the 70s, at least), developing a demonstrably experimental and innovative streak, willing to push the boundaries of his music to keep it unpredictable and daring as well as being powerful and memorable.

As with a bunch of artists, I owe my awareness of Martyn to by brother Barney, who told me a couple of years ago that he'd been getting into him and one of his albums would make a good birthday present. I bought him Sunday's Child, which I still haven't gotten round to listening to, and thought no more about it until I found him fairly well-represented in the book of 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die, while also learning of his connection to figures who had become major heroes of my own in the intervening time - most notably Drake, but also Paul Kossoff of Free. As a result, I started dipping into Martyn's extensive discography, and it's probably a journey that I'll continue going on over the coming months. There was also the fact that Barney talked about Martyn in such passionate and convincing tones that I couldn't help but be interested in him - he was keen to point out certain parallels between Martyn's upbringing and our own, namely that he was the son of classical musician parents who divorced when he was very young. He went on to describe him as "basically a modern-day Falstaff" and as "a man eating life." Essentially, he was presented to me as a figure I couldn't help but be interested in, particularly as a counterpoint to the legacy of Nick Drake, a shy, introverted and deeply troubled man. Here was somebody who seemed to make the same kind of music but informed by a whole-hearted love of life rather than a tremulous fear of it.

As is habitual for me in choosing which of an artist's albums to prioritise, I came to Bless The Weather thanks to its high rating on rateyourmusic, and the fact that it seems to have created something of a legacy for itself (nothing near the legacy of his most celebrated albums, Solid Air and One World, but it seemed a good jumping-in point for his early work). By 1971, Martyn had already released a couple of solo albums as a folk singer-songwriter before then working on a further couple of albums as part of a creative partnership with his wife, Beverley Martyn. After the second of these albums, The Road To Ruin, Island Records decided that Martyn was easier to market as a solo act than as part of a husband-and-wife double act, so returned him to centre-stage for Bless The Weather, though Beverley still provides guitar and vocals here. Though I've not heard any of these early albums, I understand that Bless The Weather represents the culmination of all the work Martyn did in the late 60s to find his voice and his sound before achieving huge success with 1973's Solid Air. Certainly, it doesn't have the inventiveness and the real mastery of ambience and atmosphere that that album has, but what one does see here is somebody who has mastered simple, beautiful folk music.

Bless The Weather is by no means a particularly challenging or daring record for somebody already familiar with a lot of folk singer-songwriters of the late 60s and early 70s - most of the songs recall the light and breezy acoustic guitar style of Nick Drake, although here Martyn is able to maintain the focus on a core group of musicians without a studio executive overdubbing full string arrangements that threaten to muddy the palette of sounds on offer, as on Drake's Five Leaves Left. And it's a talented group that Martyn gathers together, and one that suits his own sensibilities well - the inclusion of guitarist Richard Thompson from Fairport Convention and double bassist Danny Thompson from the Pentangle shows how adept Martyn was at picking the best the folk scene had to offer, while Danny Thompson's freeform bass style allows for jazzy playfulness on the likes of "Head And Heart" that anticipates the more whole-heartedly diverse musical stylings of Solid Air. Principally, though, it's Martyn that's the focus of attention here - there's no sense in listening to Bless The Weather that we're listening to the work of a fully-fledged folk band like the Pentangle themselves, rather that we're listening to a singularly creative mind effortlessly painting his work onto the canvas presented by the other musicians.

Martyn's voice here is soft and clear, not a million miles away from Drake's, and starkly contrasts with the gruff drawl he would use from Solid Air onwards - that such a marked change in his vocal style should happen so abruptly from one album to the next is surprising, but personally I find his later style far more engaging and exciting to listen to. On Bless The Weather he sings prettily, but not outstandingly. Rather than taking the listener on a journey with moody atmospherics and moody growls, here he maintains focus on the prettiness of the songs themselves. "Go Easy" is one of the most simple and unaffected folk songs of all of Martyn's stuff I've listened to, with a brilliantly affecting and memorable melody and a beautiful acoustic guitar part. Personally, I find "Go Easy" as brilliant as anything on Solid Air or One World, and the rest of the album struggles to live up to its early promise. Not that the other songs disappoint, by any means, but "Go Easy" just strikes me as a truly brilliant song, at once beautifully and lazily reflective and unbearably poignant. The title track is a slightly darker, moodier and jazzier piece that sees Danny Thompson's light-fingered bass put to good effect and anticipates some of the smokey, late-night atmosphere of Martyn's later work. "Head And Heart" is in a similar vein, but the use of congas for percussion and the more insistent acoustic guitar riff makes it more immediately engaging and propulsive to my ear. "Back Down The River" is a gloriously simple and pastoral folk song, and the short cover of the timeless "Singin' In The Rain" may be slight and of little depth, but it's also a brilliantly sunny and feelgood interpretation that rounds off the album on a beautifully optimistic note.

Unlike some of Martyn's later work, there is some redundant material here - "Sugar Lump" is a fairly by-the-numbers and uninspiring blues number, while "Walk To The Water" suffers from a tedious and vaguely irritating steel drum part. "Glistening Glyndebourne," while not enormously engaging, is a very interesting piece worthy of comment. Over the course of his early albums, Martyn had gradually developed a signature sound involving running his acoustic guitar through the Echoplex distortion unit, and "Glistening Glyndebourne" is a lengthy free-form jam that utilises the unusual sound experiments of this set-up. Parts of it are genuinely exciting and cool-sounding, notably picking up pace about halfway through, but most of it feels too much like an aimless jam with little tune or direction. But it does ably demonstrate that, even when working on what was predominantly a fairly traditional folk album, Martyn had an eye on trying to create sounds that were unusual and genuinely innovative.

Ultimately, having heard only this and his two most celebrated works, it's impossible for me to get away from the fact that Bless The Weather is the worst of Martyn's albums I've heard, but then it's early days for my interest in him, and it faces stiff competition. It suffers only for its lack of ambition when compared to his later stuff, and ably showcases a musician of great talent who could churn out beautiful and interesting folk music in his sleep. After this, Martyn would indulge his experimental streak a little more and incorporate more jazz musicians and instruments into his lineup of recording artists to create an album of incredible atmosphere and beauty. But for a piece of gloriously simple singer-songwriter fare, you could do much worse than Bless The Weather and it's probably a fine place to start getting into the work of a genuinely remarkable artist.

Track Listing:

All songs written by John Martyn, except where noted.

1. Go Easy

2. Bless The Weather

3. Sugar Lump

4. Walk To The Water

5. Just Now

6. Head And Heart

7. Let The Good Things Come

8. Back Down The River

9. Glistening Glyndebourne

10. Singin' In The Rain (Nacio Herb Brown & Arthur Freed)

Fripp & Eno - (No Pussyfooting)

Released - November 1973

Genre - Ambient

Producer - Robert Fripp & Brian Eno

Selected Personnel - Brian Eno (Synthesiser/Keyboards/Treatments); Robert Fripp (Guitar)

Standout Track - The Heavenly Music Corporation

This is an album I've been familiar with for a good couple of years now, but I've literally only just decided today to include it on my list. My principal reason for not including it initially was purely down to the fact that it's a difficult album to listen to and really enjoy, and it's not one I go to particularly often. But it's an album of such huge historical significance, particularly with regard to a lot of music that I've gone on to really appreciate and get a huge amount of, that it feels churlish not to include it purely on grounds of its relevance. Throughout history, there are many albums that have been declared as "the birth" of a certain genre, and it's often a case of overstatement. Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is often called the birth of psychedelic rock, despite the fact that it was actually a series of reactions and responses to a number of gradually evolving ideas in the music of a wide number of artists at the time. But it's very difficult to view (No Pussyfooting) as anything other than the definitive birth of ambient music. Not intentionally, of course - it would be another two years before Brian Eno sat down and deliberately tried to produce a piece of music with the specific aims and intentions of ambient music in mind, resulting in Discreet Music, and it would be another five years before he coined the term "ambient music" itself with Ambient 1: Music For Airports. But in (No Pussyfooting), he produced the first example of music that obviously had similar effects and qualities as the genre he would later spawn.

Unlike ambient music, the aim behind (No Pussyfooting) wasn't specifically to create music that could acclimatise to the textures of the room around it or that could be listened to as easily as it could be ignored. Such specific targets and goals for the genre were all to come. For the time being, all Eno was working on was the idea of treating sound in unusual ways to see just how much it was possible to achieve with limited resources. Since his first tentative forays into the world of music after his upbringing in fine art, Eno had never been attracted to the idea of playing conventional music on instruments, but rather to the idea of treating and manipulating sound, and most of his early work consisted of tape loop experiments with simple sound fragments, like striking a pen on a lamp, to see how one sound could be altered and shifted. As such, the VCS3 synthesiser became his instrument of choice due to its ability to manipulate samples of sound, and his work with Roxy Music consisted mostly of lending weird atmospherics and sonic textures to their music. Of course, by the time (No Pussyfooting) emerged, Eno's time with Roxy Music had finished (as I'm progressing alphabetically through each year, my review of their brilliant second album For Your Pleasure is still to come), and he decided to focus more attention on his own obsession, the treatment of sound to create unusual results. This he did in two ways, firstly by starting work on a more conventional "rock" record of his own that approached conventional songwriting from the same off-kilter, weird standpoint as early Roxy Music, and would result in 1974's Here Come The Warm Jets.

But Eno was keen to devote more time to a purer sonic experiment. He had devised a method of setting up a tape machine with too loops connected together so that it could record sound at the same time as playing back sounds recorded earlier at varying pitches. All he needed was an instrumental performance to subject to the process. Enter Robert Fripp. Fripp has become one of a handful of people, along with the likes of Peter Gabriel, to escape the unfashionable prog rock label. While early King Crimson had been the epitome of pure prog, as the genre became less and less fashionable, Fripp became less interested in complicated song suites and more interested in the idea of approaching rock music from the angle of sonic experimentation rather than conventional songwriting, much like Eno. Crimson had been on a moderate hiatus since 1971's Islands and when they returned in 1973 with Larks' Tongues In Aspic they were a very different beast, with their focus now very much on weird soundscapes rather than orchestral epics. As the 70s went on, Fripp would associate himself more and more with art rock's pioneers like Eno, Gabriel and David Bowie rather than his fellow prog rockers, who struggled to maintain a commercial following. As such, in 1973 it seemed like Fripp's changing attitude to music made him a prime candidate for Eno's experiment.

Put simply, the result of that experiment, which is titled "The Heavenly Music Corporation" and takes up all of side one, is more or less what you'd expect from its premise. The distorted, shimmering aural textures are the sound of Fripp's guitar, distended and distorted by Eno's tape loop treatments, while Fripp plays a second languid, slightly distorted guitar solo over the top of his earlier recording. As a whole, it's as fascinating piece of work and ably demonstrates Eno's mindset that even a single sound sample can be treated in such ways as to render it completely alien and endlessly transmutable. Given that it arose purely out of blind experiment rather than design, the piece does lack some of the warmth and sense of care of Eno's later ambient music. Music so formless and full of space and devoid of rhythm or structure is usually great to relax or even sleep to, but (No Pussyfooting) is harder - the music here isn't quite as airy or empty as ambient music would come to be, but feels harsher and weirder, more like some sort of alien soundscape than an experiment with the absence of music as ambient would become. Still, as difficult as it may be to sit through and really enjoy, it's an enduringly fascinating piece and a wholly crucial harbinger of a whole new movement and genre in music that was to come.

The second track, "Swastika Girls," was recorded almost a year later after Fripp and Eno decided they wanted to try the experiment a second time in order to generate enough material to actually release a record, is less successful. It's recorded using exactly the same techniques (albeit with a few more synthesiser tweaks from Eno himself on top of Fripp's guitar work) but feels a little too busy for the experiment to really work. Fripp's decision to try a faster bit of finger-picking rather than a slower, mournful wail as on the first track, results in there being altogether too much going on when we listen to the sounds layered on top of each other and treated as before. Anybody who does put on (No Pussyfooting) to try and sleep to and manages to drift off to "The Heavenly Music Corporation" might just get a rude awakening when the more hectic buzzing of "Swastika Girls" kicks in. But, difficult to listen to as it may be, it serves as a further indicator of Eno's theory that music production offered infinite possibilities and far more room to experiment than had been taken advantage of up to that point. In many ways, Eno in the 70s was following on from what Phil Spector did in the 60s, who first posited the theory that the recording studio could be used to alter the way we perceive sound and could sculpt a song using recording techniques as much as with instruments. The experiments showcased on (No Pussyfooting) are like a radical evolution of the idea, and as such place Eno as the next in a line of important producers over the twentieth century who would go above and beyond the idea of producing music just to entertain in order to really push the boundaries of what sound can do.

Fripp would continue working with King Crimson over the subsequent years, producing very different material to their earlier work, before taking a hiatus from the music industry as a whole (only to return later in the 70s as a regular collaborator with the likes of Gabriel and Bowie), while Eno would continue pushing his solo musical career into uncharted territories and looking for similarly unusual artists to collaborate and discover new things with. The Fripp & Eno partnership would reunite twice, once in 1975 for Evening Star, which is again interesting and actually more thoughtful and contemplative than (No Pussyfooting), but ultimately less memorable due to its repeating of an old formula, and again for The Equatorial Stars decades later in 2004, which manages to be easily the most enjoyable and beautiful album the duo produced together. But it'll be a while before I get around to reviewing that - we're still only on '73, after all...

Track Listing:

All songs written by Brian Eno and Robert Fripp.

1. The Heavenly Music Corporation

2. Swastika Girls