Mike Oldfield - Hergest Ridge

Released - August 1974

Genre - New Age

Producer - Tom Newman & Mike Oldfield

Selected Personnel - Mike Oldfield (Guitar/Organ/Keyboards/Percussion/Mandolin); Lindsay Cooper (Oboe); Ted Hobart (Trumpet); Sally Oldfield (Vocals); Terry Oldfield (Woodwinds); Clodagh Simmonds (Vocals)

Standout Track - Hergest Ridge (Part I)

Mike Oldfield had plenty of reasons to be cheerful in 1974. His pioneering one-man-symphony Tubular Bells had quickly become one of the biggest-selling and most talked-about albums of the previous year, providing Richard Branson and Virign Records with the hit they needed to get the fledgling record company off the ground, thus giving them the impetus to become the huge business empire they would eventually grow into. Tubular Bells, with its complex symphonic structures, tapped into the prog-rock obsession with complexity and artistic ambition, and yet the music's eclectic styles and influences also captured the imaginations of those beginning to tire of prog's formula and looking for further ways to develop music in new directions. Not only that, but the use of the opening motif of Tubular Bells as the main theme to William Friedkin's hit film The Exorcist ensured it was a hit in the US too. But, in the huge media scrutiny that surrounded him in the wake of such a hit, Oldfield found little to take comfort in. He was a painfully shy and introverted individual (to the extent that it was only after several personal counselling sessions to raise his self-confidence later in the 70s that he was ever able to consider touring or performing live), and hated the sudden pressure to talk about his music and publicise it and answer questions about it, preferring to let it speak for itself. He was that rare thing in rock music, a hugely talented musician who did what he did not remotely for any of the ego-boosting or fame or repute it might get him, but purely because he loved creating music and pushing himself into new territories.

Virgin, understandably, were keen to push for an immediate follow-up, but Oldfield felt he had to address his own feelings of intimidation and insecurity first, and so retreated to his country home near the town of Kington on the Welsh border, near a hill named Hergest Ridge, to work on his next project. What emerged was an album which, while perhaps being inherently less groundbreaking or surprising as Tubular Bells, was far more mature, intelligent, heartfelt and beautiful than what had come before. The problem I've always had with Tubular Bells is that it feels more like a man trying out lots of different ideas and not being sure how to coalesce them all together - every one of them is compelling and imaginative and brilliant in its own way, but I find that, as an album, it slightly struggles to all come together. Oldfield would go a long way towards rectifying this with Hergest Ridge, the album he would eventually name in tribute to the countryside that helped to inform it.

That sense of peace and introversion and solitude bleeds through in every moment of Hergest Ridge - it's a more intensely personal work than Tubular Bells (ironically so considering that here Oldfield did actually delegate some of the instrumental work to musicians other than himself). But one can hear his desperation for solitude on this record, his need to be on his own and in control of his mood and his music rather than letting it be debated and picked over by consumers. The whole thing is far more stately and more placid, and the sheer feel of the countryside and its effect on Oldfield's psyche is powerfully audible, from the plaintive cor anglais melody halfway through Part I to the muted, textured vocal effects. Oldfield was keen to diversify and push in new directions in some areas, and in others to be more restrained and controlled. He incorporated a broader instrumental palette, including his brother Terry on woodwinds and sister Sally on vocals. He still wasn't keen to actually write vocal melodies, however, and the vocal parts are deliberately kept low in the mix so their effect is purely atmospheric rather than melodic, with his own electric guitar or Terry's woodwinds more often carrying the lead melody. But, while in terms of instrumentation he was allowing himself to be more ambitious, this time things are kept far more restrained in terms of the musical structure, with themes and melodies slowly layering on top of each other and rolling quietly and elegantly into the next passage rather than leaping abruptly into the next musical idea as on Tubular Bells.

On "Part I," the first twelve minutes or so are spent slowly building and layering a single melodic idea via the woodwind parts, while Oldfield's acoustic guitar and organ effects build up several layers of lush and gorgeous sonic architecture before a more up-tempo section is introduced that sounds almost threatening until the addition of sleigh bells shifts the music in a new, jauntier direction as the first half winds to a close with a fine electric guitar solo. "Part II," for me, has always been the less successful side of "Hergest Ridge," in that its aggressive mid-section has always felt totally out of place to me on the album. In general, Hergest Ridge feels particularly powerful and poignant for me because of its stateliness, calmness and sense of repose. Even in its more upbeat and faster-moving moments, its purpose, I feel, is to articulate the sense of peace and bliss gained from solitude, and then there's a thunderous, discordant mashing of layered electric guitars all screaming together which I find too tuneless and angry to even work that well as hard rock music - it's just a wall of noise that disrupts the mood of the album itself. Of course, this was almost certainly Oldfield's intention, perhaps trying to articulate his own sense of discomfort at how the media's intrusion had shattered his own sense of solitude while working on his music, or perhaps that's reading far too much into it. Either way, whether it's intended as a statement or not, it's a moment that breaks the spell of the album for me and that I never really enjoy sitting through.

That aside, though, Hergest Ridge is generally a perfect evocation of stillness and solitary peace, and a clear sign of Oldfield's maturation as a composer and musician. It's naturally less exciting a record than Tubular Bells, as by this point the general premise of Oldfield's one-man New Age symphonies was no longer surprising, but it's certainly, overall, an improvement over his earlier album and a big step towards the career peak that would come the following year with Ommadawn. Hergest Ridge, while not quite selling at the level that Tubular Bells did, was another big hit and reached the top of the album charts before being knocked off by Tubular Bells itself, which was still riding high even a year later.

Track Listing:

All songs written by Mike Oldfield.

1. Hergest Ridge (Part I)

2. Hergest Ridge (Part II)

Etta James - Top Ten

Released - 1963

Genre - Blues

Producer - Leonard Chess

Selected Personnel - Etta James (Vocals)

Standout Track - At Last

It's a bit of an anomalous entry, this one, really, in that Etta James's Top Ten is an album I didn't even know I owned until yesterday, and that I immediately included on my "Greatest Albums" list before I'd even listened to it all the way through as an album. I'll explain. Etta James, one of the most iconic and timeless stars of soul, blues and R&B music, has been firmly enshrined as one of my favourite artists for the majority of my life. I remember her unforgettably sassy, raunchy cover of Willie Dixon's "I Just Want To Make Love To You" (first recorded by blues legend Muddy Waters) when it was used in a Pepsi ad in the mid-90s. The surprisingly (for the early 60s) upfront sexiness pretty much went over my head as a six or seven-year-old and I remember just thinking it sounded cool, and it became one of the first songs that I enjoyed enough and that made a big enough impression on me for me to really remember it and let it lodge itself in my memory. Of course, I was too young to start taking an active interest in musical artists off the back of one song, but even as I was growing up I continued to be surrounded by Etta James's music as she has been responsible for so many songs that have become unavoidable due to their classic status.

By the time I was able to start developing proper musical tastes and interests of my own, Etta James, the woman behind that song that had made me sit up and pay attention as a very young child, was high on my list, and I availed myself of a number of greatest hits compilations and extensive retrospective anthologies, but never once bothered to listen to an Etta James studio album. My reasons for this, essentially, are that the business of making music was very different before the mid-60s and certainly didn't have the same focus on studio albums as began to develop in that decade. While jazz musicians started making interesting albums in the 50s that they had creative control over, like Miles Davis's wonderful Kind Of Blue, it wasn't really until the rise of folk and rock in the mid-60s that more mainstream popular music began to focus more on albums as well. Before that, within the world of pop, soul and R&B music, everything was very much controlled and created by record companies, who would assign songs and session musicians to particular artists, orchestrate the sessions for recording the songs and market the resultant recordings as singles. Albums were rarely much more than a collection of recent singles from that particular artist, and the pop music of the late 50s and early 60s has just always struck me as an era that's equally well represented through greatest hits compilations and retrospective best-of's as through studio albums, which simply didn't have the same level of care and creativity put into them as became typical in the 60s.

But, while researching Etta James's studio discography in an idle moment I happened to notice that, among the greatest hits I owned across the compilations I'd become familiar with, I happened to have all the songs that made up a 1963 album of hers entitled Top Ten. On looking further I found that that album consisted of a number of my very favourites of hers, and it was immediately a shoe-in for talking about here - an album containing some of my very favourite songs by one of my favourite singers, what's not to love? That said, its inclusion here does have to come with caveats, in that it's still not, strictly speaking, a true studio album in that it consists mostly of Etta's best-selling singles from the previous two years along with three new songs in the form of "Pushover," "Stop The Wedding" and "Would It Make Any Difference To You." The inclusion of new material just about scrapes it a "studio album" status, although it doesn't quite fit in with my rules. Still, the now established notion of what a studio album even is is one that wasn't really fully understood by the music industry at large until the mid-60s, so the fact that this comes close is good enough for me, and quite apart from anything else, it lets me talk briefly about an artist I've loved my whole life but assumed I wouldn't ever get round to talking about on this blog as I never thought I'd end up listening to one of her actual albums.

Essentially, what this album does is provide a concise overview of just how astoundingly good Etta James's music was even in the first two years of her solo career. Her voice is equally at home in the smooth, breathy registers of ballads like "A Sunday Kind Of Love" as it is making hoarse, passionate cries of protest on more upbeat songs like "Stop The Wedding." The music, too, is impressively diverse for an early 60s popstar, who are so often manipulated and sculpted by record executives into repeating a particular formula until it exhausts itself. There are high-tempo R&B numbers like "Something's Got A Hold On Me" alongside more lushly orchestrated jazzy ballads like "Trust In Me." Somehow, despite her being one of a vast number of young soul singers in the early 60s, Etta's music has always struck me as being far more individual and far more noteworthy than any number of similar artists at the time, and her relationship with label chief Leonard Chess seems to bear that out. For one thing, although Chess was convinced James would become a success making popular, mass-appeal ballads and encouraged her to record more songs of that genre, he never succeeded (if indeed he ever attempted) to totally convince her to leave behind her blues and R&B roots entirely, and there is always that earthier, rawer energy to her music alongside the lush sentimentality of the ballads. Not only that, but on pretty much every album she released there was at least one or two songs co-written by Etta herself, which suggests a greater degree of creative control over her musical style and identity than many similar artists were allowed at the time.

Etta's history before she became a musical icon is a fascinating one, too, and helps to further suggest that spirit of creative independence that shines through even on her most popular and commercial songs. Having never known her father and rarely seeing her mother, she was raised by a series of different foster parents and started being given musical training from the age of five (hence why a voice so masterfully mature, diverse and majestic could emerge from such a young woman) and ended up becoming a sort of local attraction, being beaten and intimidated by her music tutor so that she would give public performances. From this she developed a lifelong fear of being ordered to sing on demand, and this seems a fascinating glimpse into why she chose to pursue music as a career - she had enough negative memories of performance to give her a lifelong complex about it, but still took enough joy and pleasure in singing itself to make it into the thing that defined her, as long as she was permitted to do it entirely on her terms. Within this context, the striking individuality and independence of her music becomes not just a curious indicator of her talent, but a fascinating insight into the mentality and the creative drive that fuelled all her work.

The songs collected together on Top Ten represent some of the very pinnacles of her recording career, culled from her early run of albums for the Chess label. The immortal "Something's Got A Hold On Me" starts with a slow, gospel vocal intro before picking up pace into a frenzied, impassioned celebration of love complete with gospel-styled call and response and an unforgettable melody. It's sadly now probably best known due to the fact that its intro was sampled and repurposed as the chorus of Flo Rida's "Good Feeling" a couple of years ago but, as fun as that song is, Etta's bluesy original is a far superior song. "At Last" is perhaps the most immortal and iconic song she ever recorded, a masterfully beautiful and romantic song with soft, chiming piano and swirling, swooning strings providing the perfect backing to Etta's soulful evocation of long-awaited love. "Fool That I Am" and "A Sunday Kind Of Love" are two more near-perfect ballads, evoking a kind of lazy sensuality that infuses most of the album's first half.

The second half contains all the new material, with main single "Pushover" an upbeat R&B number with squawking saxes and a fun, bouncy vocal turn from Etta. "All I Could Do Is Cry" takes a classic blues template and adorns it with woodwinds, choral vocals to turn it into a lovely pop ballad, while its theme (feeling miserable at the wedding of a loved one) also inspires the following "Stop The Wedding," another new single. With its opening spoken vocal from the priest, it's gloriously contrived and hilariously heavy-handed, but again shows Etta completely dominating and owning the tune, escalating her vocal into a series of declamatory outbursts towards its conclusion. The closing two tracks are slightly less iconic but still great examples of her vocal prowess.

Altogether, I do feel very much that I'm bending the rules here by including this album, as a collection of previously released singles plus a couple of new tracks hardly feels like an actual coherent, creative piece of work worthy of great analysis, but it's just nice to be able to say a few words in favour of a beloved artist whose studio discography happens to have passed me by. If nothing else, though, it's remarkable to think that, of the career-wide anthologies I'm already familiar with, so many of the very best songs happened to all come from this intense period of creativity in the early 60s, undoubtedly her peak of significance and achievement. Discovering this album has also made me feel that, one day, I ought to put more time and effort into listening to the full studio output of 50s and 60s artists I love who I'm mostly familiar with through greatest hits compilations (Nat King Cole and the Inkspots are two of my very favourite artists from this era, but again I've always had a nagging feeling that their greatest hits are the best way to listen to them given that their music was developed and marketed chiefly as singles anyway). One of these days perhaps I'll give them a more thorough exploration, but for now there are so many artists who have worked consciously on making albums that are full representations of their own creativity that most 50s and 60s artists are on the back burner for me. Perhaps one day this blog will be stuffed full of Etta James and Nat King Cole studio albums, but for now I'll continue to content myself with listening to their classic singles, and this semi-album serves as a nice way to salute her musical achievements and encourage a few more people to look into her work if they're not already familiar with it.

Track Listing:

1. Something's Got A Hold On Me (Etta James; Leroy Kirkland & Pearl Woods)

2. My Dearest Darling (Eddie Bocage & Paul Gayten)

3. At Last (Mack Gordon & Harvey Warren)

4. Fool That I Am (Floyd Hunt)

5. A Sunday Kind Of Love (Barbara Belle; Anita Leonard; Louis Prima & Stan Rhodes)

6. Pushover (Billy Davis & Tony Clarke)

7. All I Could Do Is Cry (Billy Davis)

8. Stop The Wedding (Freddy Johnson; Leroy Kirkland & Pearl Woods)

9. Trust In Me (Milton Ager; Jean Schwartz & Ned Wever)

10. Would It Make Any Difference To You (Bob Forshee)

King Crimson - Red

Released - October 1974

Genre - Progressive Rock

Producer - King Crimson

Selected Personnel - Robert Fripp (Guitar/Mellotron); John Wetton (Bass/Vocals); Bill Bruford (Drums/Percussion); David Cross (Violin); Mel Collins (Saxophone); Ian McDonald (Saxophone); Mark Charig (Cornet); Robin Miller (Oboe)

Standout Track - Starless

Red, the final album by the band that can truly be said to still count as King Crimson (in years to come a band under that name would re-emerge, but it's difficult to think of it as the same band) was actually the second of the band's albums I ever heard, after their iconic debut In The Court Of The Crimson King, and has long been vying with that classic for the top spot as my favourite Crimson album. In The Court... invariably always wins out in the end, but as the band dwindled to a halt in 1974 they managed to create an album that gives that earlier record a serious run for its money. Like a number of prominent prog musicians in '74, guitarist and de facto band leader Robert Fripp perhaps caught wind of what way music was headed, and was beginning to show interest in other projects. After the effective "reboot" of Larks' Tongues In Aspic in 1973, King Crimson was already a very different band from the jazz/classical/psychedelic beast they had been in 1969, replete with Medieval and classical imagery. They had become something far more weirder and more dangerous, incorporating weird, free-form violin solos into the mix as well as punishing guitar riffs and strange sonic textures. The next step had been Starless And Bible Black earlier in 1974, an album similar in tone but lacking as many truly great songs (although the mind-blowingly complicated "Fracture" is one of Crimson's finest songs).

Violinist David Cross, who had been a key element of some of the weird new sounds on the previous two albums, departed the band before doing much work on Red (his only contribution here is on the improvised live take "Providence,") effectively reducing King Crimson to a core trio of Fripp, bassist and vocalist John Wetton, and former Yes drummer Bill Bruford. As a result, the ideas within Red end up being far simpler than on the last couple of albums. Although horns and woodwinds are used sparingly on the songs (curiously, with founding member Ian McDonald, not involved with Crimson since 1970's In The Wake Of Poseidon, and another former member, Mel Collins, each contributing saxophone), the focus is kept squarely on the taut, rumbling bass of Wetton, the clattering drums of Bruford and, most prominently, Fripp's always savage and weird-sounding guitar effects. While prog has always been about musical invention and the incorporation of unusual sounds and ideas, I've always had a sense with Fripp around the time of Larks' Tongues In Aspic and Red that he's one of the few prog musicians, along with perhaps Peter Gabriel, to have a keen interest not just in musical experimentation, but in actually playing with sound itself in order to create something genuinely strange and unsettling. He had already undertaken a mammoth experiment in how to play with the sound of his guitar playing on (No Pussyfooting), his collaborative album with Brian Eno in 1973, and here he continues to incorporate a range of weird and alien sounds, from the almost synthesiser-like buzzing that laces "One More Red Nightmare" to the rubbery resonance of the note that opens "Fallen Angel."

The music is generally a sort of jazzy, freeform hard rock replete with menace and danger. The opening title track is a relentless instrumental that switches through a number of complicated time signatures and features a number of different guitar overdubs from Fripp. "Fallen Angel" starts out as a deceptively pretty tune, Wetton's always unusually strained (though not unpleasant to listen to) vocals crooning through a genuinely lovely tune decorated with cornet and oboe before the final few minutes pick up into a more ferocious and characteristically dangerous coda. "One More Red Nightmare," the only actual song (as opposed to instrumental) of the 1973-74 incarnation of Crimson to not feature lyrics by former Supertramp guitarist Richard Palmer-James, is allegedly about John Wetton's fear of flying, and opens with a high-tempo, jazzy tune that Wetton has a huge amount of fun belting out. Again, its final minutes involve a repeated, savage guitar riff over which McDonald's and Collins' saxophones warble and squeal.

What follows is another example of one of King Crimson's bad habits, which is the inclusion of extended supernumerary tracks involving nothing but quiet, tedious, mind-numbing improvised instrumentals. Improvisation can often be a huge virtue and a gateway to truly intuitive creativity, but only when anchored to a genuinely compelling musical idea whereas Crimson have a habit of just saying "Right, let's go for it" and seeing if something good can be conjured from literally nothing. "Providence" is highly reminiscent of the tedious instrumental segment of "Moonchild" on In The Court Of The Crimson King, and is essentially eight minutes of violin scrapes, guitar noodling and the odd percussive clatter. Not even interesting enough to be engaging. Thankfully, things pick up again at the end with one of the finest songs in King Crimson's discography. Fripp dusts off the timeless Crimson Mellotron one last time for a slow, mournful intro over which his distorted guitar weeps out a pretty riff. Halfway through this funereal song, after Wetton's meditative vocals, comes one of the most infuriatingly brilliant guitar solos of all time, in which Fripp manages to eke out several minutes' worth of soloing using only one note, in a passage that builds in intensity and threat until exploding into a breakneck cacophony of a conclusion that's as angry, troubled, mad and frightening as anything else Crimson ever recorded, and a fitting end to this stage of their history.

"Providence" aside, it's by far the most consistently brilliant and inventive and engaging album the band had made since In The Court... and only slightly falls down in comparison for the fact that this time it's coming from a band where some of their ideas feel familiar and is less of a sensational bolt from the blue as their debut was. It has all the mournful melancholy of "Epitaph," all the threatening intensity of "21st Century Schizoid Man" and all the grandiose drama of "The Court Of The Crimson King," but never feels like it's retreading ground as Fripp's visionary mind and ear for unusual sound keeps things feeling endlessly inventive. After Red, Fripp soon decided to call it a day with King Crimson, claiming he had no interest in the stardom afforded by fronting a high-profile rock band as he felt it was detrimental to his doing the work he wanted to do as an artist. Although he attempted to generate further record deals for an ongoing version of King Crimson consisting of Bruford, Wetton and McDonald but not him, that offer was rejected by his managers and he decided simply to abandon King Crimson "forever."

For the next year or so he would continue working on less high-profile and more eclectic musical projects that furthered his artistic explorations, such as another ambient collaboration with Eno entitled Evening Star. In the late 70s, after "retiring" from music for a few years, he then became a much sought-after session musician, playing for the likes of Bowie and Peter Gabriel, before eventually the new ideas and sonic inventions of art-rock and post-punk bands in the late 70s like Talking Heads seemed to renew his interest in being part of a rock band. Eventually, of course, King Crimson did return in the early 80s as a very different outfit indeed, one that's difficult to identify as the same band at all were it not for the involvement of Fripp and, for a while, Bruford, but that's something we'll look at another time. The King Crimson of old was finished, and Red is a fine full stop to their glorious musical legacy.

Track Listing:

1. Red (Robert Fripp)

2. Fallen Angel (Robert Fripp; Richard Palmer-James & John Wetton)

3. One More Red Nightmare (Robert Fripp & John Wetton)

4. Providence (Bill Bruford; David Cross; Robert Fripp & John Wetton)

5. Starless (Bill Bruford; David Cross; Robert Fripp; Richard Palmer-James & John Wetton)

The Stooges - Raw Power

Released - February 1973

Genre - Hard Rock

Producer - Iggy Pop & David Bowie

Selected Personnel - Iggy Pop (Vocals); James Williamson (Guitar); Ron Asheton (Bass/Backing Vocals); Scott Asheton (Drums)

Standout Track - Gimme Danger

Let's talk about punk a little bit, as it's a big topic I'm going to have to deal with at some point. The main chronology of this blog (we're at 1974, remember) is still a good year or so off the peak of punk's impact, but a recent interest in the post-punk movement has made me ever so slightly reappraise, if not punk itself, then at least some of its more significant ancestors. Essentially, punk arose in the mid-70s as a conscious reaction against the established traditions and formulae of rock music. It's also a genre I have always never shied away from saying I have absolutely no time for. Don't get me wrong - its theory is totally sound, in that any form of artistic expression needs always to be challenged to extremes in order to be reinvented and stopped from becoming predictable. In achieving that, punk should be commended. But one of the major things I've always resented about punk is that it successfully created the myth that the traditional, classic, art or prog rock of the early 70s was devoid of any artistic integrity or musical value, that it was either pomposity and showing off for the sake of it (in the case of prog rock and art rock) or that it was turgid, unimaginative recycling of established formulas (classic rock, blues rock, folk rock). It's a myth that too much of the world has taken on as established fact, nodding along to the idea that the traditional rock of, say, Neil Young, was devoid of emotional sincerity, or that the likes of King Crimson were all just bluster and demonstration and lacked any actual musical ingenuity. I'll argue against that lie until I'm blue in the face. Punk sought to burn rock to the ground by reducing it to the minimal ingredients, pushing a homemade, "anyone can do it" attitude of short, amateurish songs that consciously aimed for political comment and social outrage in order to restore authenticity and meaning to music.

Personally, I don't enjoy punk music. I kind of understand the message and ethos behind it, even if I violently disagree with the idea that the music of the early 70s was in the dire need for revolution that they claimed it was, but the music itself just does nothing for me. It's of course easy to forget how fresh and exciting that music must have been at the time, but in a world that has become crowded with uninspired two-chord songs, the clumsy simplicity of punk no longer sounds exciting, it simply sounds slightly dim-witted and inept, certainly to me when contrasted with the more powerful and eye-opening ideas of accomplished and inventive musicians. One also has to raise an eyebrow to the fact that what made punk a "phenomenon" all of its own was more its timing and its marketing than its own ideas, as few of them were genuinely original.

The idea of making music that sounded primal and savage and clumsy rather than polished and accomplished was by no means invented by the artists to spearhead the punk movement like the Ramones or the Sex Pistols. Garage rock had existed for years, and its most notable practitioners were probably the Stooges. Admittedly, punk threw in far more political ire than the Stooges ever bothered to concern themselves with, and also tried consciously to distance itself from the deliberate theatricality and ego of Iggy Pop's stage persona, but in that way I actually feel it's in some way inferior to what the Stooges aimed for. Their music may have been inane and savage, but at least the whole daft cacophony was purely in service to one man's ridiculous ego and sense of intuitive fun rather than trying to make some rather contrived political or social point. The first time I listened to the Stooges about a year ago, it was because of David Bowie's involvement with them, and I didn't like what I heard, finding it difficult to pinpoint much difference between them and the musical genre that left me totally cold. But, in the wake of getting more interested in post-punk music, I've gone back to the Stooges and suddenly felt like there are some great ideas within them, as well as a lot of fun to be had.

In their early years the Stooges, led by the idiot madman born James Osterberg but soon renamed Iggy Pop, established a reputation as one of the most dangerous and borderline psychotic bands around for their ridiculously over-the-top live shows, which made the Who's instrument-smashing antics look decidedly tame. Iggy would leap into the crowd and smear himself with peanut butter, strip naked and cut himself with glass onstage, creating an atmosphere of total riotous abandon that soon made the band legends. Their music was by no means tuneful or, it could even be said, particularly enjoyable, but the idea with this band was clear - the music was a means by which to channel a kind of psychotic energy rather than something that was supposed to be appreciated in and of itself. 1970's Fun House is an attempt to distil the live energy of the band into a record and has a few fun moments on it but also, as is inevitable in any attempt to capture that kind of experience, features a good few songs of nothing but thrashing, primal noise and Iggy's ear-splitting screaming. It's not an album I've ever quite been able to truly enjoy.

As the band's heroin habit began to destabilise their performances even further, they were soon dropped by their label and left in limbo, at which point Iggy ran into David Bowie for the first time. Bowie had been aware of Iggy for a while and, while their music was a million miles from one another, had taken Iggy's who-gives-a-damn, Messianic vision of himself in his stage persona as a model for his Ziggy Stardust alter-ego (as well as being an obvious inspiration for the name). Iggy has also gone on to say that Bowie was the only person at the time to actually recognise any genuine quality in Iggy's songwriting rather than just his live performances. Hoping to help Iggy's career to continue, Bowie brought him and Stooges guitarist James Williamson to Britain and helped secure them a deal with Columbia Records, eventually also bringing Stooges Ron and Scott Asheton to complete the lineup and record a new album. Bowie himself wasn't involved in the sessions, but ended up mixing the final album after Iggy attempted to do it himself and made a total mess of it.

The result was Raw Power, a record which sees Iggy, perhaps inspired by Bowie's confidence in him, focus slightly more on songwriting and less on primal savagery. Not that this is suddenly an album full of grandiose ballads or anything like that - the mood is still one of plodding, angry, noisy rock played with maximum energy and very little finesse, and there are still some songs that descend into fairly tuneless, thrashing onslaughts of noise, like the fairly numbing closer "Death Trip" or "Your Pretty Face Is Going To Hell." But Iggy really did channel a lot of time and energy this time into writing memorable hooks and riffs and vocal melodies (even if his swaggering, crooning, wailing vocal style makes it difficult to really call any of this tunes "melodies" as such). "Search And Destroy" sees Williamson thrashing out a vicious and raw guitar riff over which Iggy rants and raves, and "Gimme Danger" is an uncharacteristically slow and menacing song built around Williamson's strummed acoustic guitar. It also sees Iggy, for perhaps the first time, discovering some nuance and variation within his own vocal delivery, not leaping straight to furious, raging wails but simmering down into quiet menace. "Penetration" similarly sees Iggy hissing and panting his vocals over an insistently threatening riff, and "I Need Somebody," another unusually slow number, has him run the whole gamut from a rich, deep crooning verse to a hoarse, screamed chorus in a wonderfully sleazy, slow rocker that sounds like the aural equivalent of strutting through mud.

For me, the songs that work less well are actually the ones that stick closest to the Stooges' established template of high-tempo, thrashing noise rock, but then I'm not much of a one for tuneless aggression. It's not a perfect album and does occasionally fall victim to the same noisy failings as Fun House, but when it finds time to slow things down slightly and focus more on songcraft and dynamics than on pure aggression it actually manages to sound pretty cool. And, while this pits me against a huge number of people, I feel that music like this, that's chaotic and anarchic, is so much more enjoyable when that chaos is in service to theatricality and showing off than when it's in service to an overly principled, political ethos as in punk, a movement that started out with an agenda and quickly burned itself out as it immediately became a marketing-led phenomenon just as that which it had set out to replace had done.

As for Iggy and the Stooges, they formally disbanded not long after Raw Power due to Iggy's ongoing heroin dependency and increasing unpredictability and erratic behaviour. Having created the primal, noise-based template that punk could draw upon in order to stage its scorched earth approach to rock music a few years later, Iggy then retreated into rehab along with Bowie and emerged with an album called The Idiot that, along with Bowie's solo album Low, to which Iggy also contributed, would become a key template for the far more imaginative, inventive and exciting music of the post-punk scene, a movement that tried to look at the rubble of what punk had attempted to achieve and to transform its failures into something more constructive. But more of that another time. For now, suffice it to say that Raw Power, while imperfect, is a good testament to how fun the Stooges were able to be when they managed to reign themselves in a bit. It's easy for me to resent them for seeding an idea for the punks that enabled them to destroy my favourite genre of music, but ultimately they were just a bunch of idiots messing around and having fun with music, and it's impossible for some of that energy and madness not to come through on this album.

Track Listing:

All songs written by Iggy Pop and James Williamson.

1. Search And Destroy

2. Gimme Danger

3. Your Pretty Face Is Going To Hell

4. Penetration

5. Raw Power

6. I Need Somebody

7. Shake Appeal

8. Death Trip

Sly & The Family Stone - Stand!

Released - May 1969

Genre - Funk

Producer - Sly Stone

Selected Personnel - Sly Stone (Vocals/Guitar/Organ/Piano/Bass/Harmonica); Freddie Stone (Vocals/Guitar); Larry Graham (Vocals/Bass); Rose Stone (Vocals/Piano/Keyboard); Cynthia Robinson (Trumpet); Jerry Martini (Saxophone); Greg Errico (Drums)

Standout Track - Everyday People

Stand! is an album that I really should have gotten round to listening to much sooner and not purely out of my recent "let's start listening to as much funk as possible" odyssey, as it's so much more than just a landmark funk album. It is that, of course - Sly & The Family Stone were one of the most significant bands who constructed funk as a genre in the late 60s, picking up from where James Brown left off and incorporating more diverse sounds from psychedelia and rock, paving the way for the likes of George Clinton and Funkadelic. But Stand!, and the Family Stone in general, represent far more than that and are a landmark moment in musical history in general, summing up a lot of what music came to mean in the sixties. There's also the fact that, on top of its historical and cultural significance, it's one of the most upbeat, colourful, inventive and exciting albums of the decade by far, and one I wish I'd heard much sooner than I did.

By the mid-to-late sixties, Sly Stone had already established an unusual and important cultural role for himself as a DJ for an R&B radio station who, alongside permitted R&B songs by black artists, also played songs by the likes of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones in the hope of trying to engender a more integrated musical consciousness in the American public, one that wasn't necessarily dictated by genre or race, but simply enjoyed good music. Such a stance in the mid-sixties, with the notion of integration still a fairly recent one, was a bold one and one he would go on to make even more directly when he formed the Family Stone out of various siblings and friends. Pretty much uniquely for the era, Sly & The Family Stone were a band that contained both black and white, male and female performers, with the women notably playing instruments themselves and not reduced to mere set dressing or backing vocals or the like. Such a musical collective was unheard of at the time, and made Sly's vision of social harmony through music all the more visceral. More than just such visual emblems of harmony without boundaries, though, the band incorporated that manifesto into their very approach to music-making. Sly, Freddie and Rose Stone and bassist Larry Graham would each take turns to tackle various verses of vocal parts rather than having a single dedicated lead vocalist, with Cynthia Robinson frequently shouting ad-libbed vocal commands to both the band and the audience, while the music itself borrowed equally from Motown and Stax-influenced pop, James Brown's early funk and the psychedelic rock innovations of people like Jimi Hendrix.

Their early records established a great interest in the band, with early single "Dance To The Music" proving a huge hit, but it wasn't until 1969's Stand! that they truly became a phenomenon. Essentially, Stand! manages to successfully distil all the euphoria and optimism and experimentation that characterised the sixties into one gloriously sunny, surreal and hugely entertaining gem. The sound manages to veer from experimental weirdness with distorted fuzz guitars and scatted vocals processed beyond recognition on songs like "Don't Call Me Nigger, Whitey" and "Sex Machine" to simple pop brilliance on effortlessly memorable songs like the title track or "Everyday People." To me, it's most reminiscent of the psychedelic rock of the Jimi Hendrix Experience, but here Sly Stone has a keen eye on pop sensibilities and mainstream appeal. So, while the experimentation and weirdness and sonic invention is all present and correct, things are kept far more concise, memorable and simple than on the sprawling, occasionally meandering experiments of something like Electric Ladyland.

The two most exemplary examples of that simple pop sensibility are the glorious title track and the infernally catchy "Everyday People," both of which explore similar messages of social and racial tolerance. "Stand!" has a wonderfully ascendant, triumphant vocal melody that's trilled at the highest possible pitch on the chorus and becomes almost rapturous in its message of victory for the under-represented and the disadvantaged - "There's a midget standing tall, and a giant beside him about to fall" - summing up all the optimism and the social togetherness of the late sixties. It then transforms in its final minute into a sharp, vicious organ-driven gospel break that's one of the coolest moments on the record. "Everyday People" is a simpler song, perhaps, but infinitely more catchy with its sing-a-long, nursery rhyme choral vocals and stick-in-the-mind phrases (it popularised the phrase "Different strokes for different folks" in its exploration of racial harmony).

Then there are songs that push the experimentation a little further. "Don't Call Me Nigger, Whitey" has never really grabbed me, being a little too limited in terms of melody or musical dynamics, but it sees Sly singing through a vocoder and distorting his own vocal contributions beyond recognition, while "I Want To Take You Higher" is a vicious, ecstatic and high-tempo funk jam. Larry Graham's bass thuds and thunders throughout while the band take turns in practically screaming their vocal parts, interweaving with the punchy refrains of the horn sections. "Sex Machine" (not to be confused with the James Brown classic) is a lengthy jam that again sees Sly distort his vocals and provide an opportunity for each member of the band to indulge in an extended solo. It's not the finest epic jam ever, being a little too simplistic in its structure, but it's a fine example of the instrumental prowess of everyone involved.

The remaining songs, like the deceptively fun "Somebody's Watching You," which seems to be about pervasive paranoia, are great fun too. There's not one moment on this album that doesn't push fun and optimism to the forefront, really - even the fearsome moments of "I Want To Take You Higher" or the more sluggish passages of "Sex Machine" are just irresistibly fun to listen to or dance to or whatever you feel like doing. There's a sense with this album that Sly & The Family Stone didn't just create something of huge musical significance, but also sent out a message of great cultural significance as well in its attitude of social togetherness and hope for the future. It was enormously successful and established the band as a phenomenon, with "Everyday People" becoming a number one hit. Sadly, the optimistic and ecstatic mood of their music wasn't to last as the social optimism of the late 60s began to fade. Over the subsequent two years, the decline of the civil rights movement, the rise of police brutality and social malaise changed the state of the nation severely, while Sly Stone fell into a serious cocaine dependency that changed his behaviour and attitude. The band remained quiet for a couple of years before releasing There's A Riot Goin' On in 1971, an album that sought to take stock of the dramatic decline in America's social health. The album is revered as another classic, but as yet it's not an album I've been able to love. The songwriting is considerably below the standard set on Stand! and the production and arrangements are muddy and uninspired, with the pace deathly sluggish throughout. Perhaps it's one that will grow on me and will one day appear on this blog with a mumbled apology, but for now I feel that Sly Stone's true brilliance went hand-in-hand with his health and his optimism, and that when both began to depart him it affected his musical output. On Stand! though, he created a piece of music so brilliant that his place in history is assured whatever you make of his later work.

Track Listing:

All songs written by Sly Stone.

1. Stand!

2. Don't Call Me Nigger, Whitey

3. I Want To Take You Higher

4. Somebody's Watching You

5. Sing A Simple Song

6. Everyday People

7. Sex Machine

8. You Can Make It If You Try

Joni Mitchell - Court And Spark

Released - January 1974

Genre - Folk Jazz

Producer - Joni Mitchell

Selected Personnel - Joni Mitchell (Vocals/Guitar/Piano); John Guerin (Drums/Percussion); Wilton Felder (Bass); Tom Scott (Woodwinds); Chuck Findley (Trumpet); Joe Sample (Electric Piano); David Crosby (Backing Vocals); Graham Nash (Backing Vocals); Larry Carlton (Guitar); Cheech Marin (Vocals); Tommy Chong (Vocals)

Standout Track - Help Me

It's been a while since I've written about Joni Mitchell here, largely due to the fact that I've always considered her 1972 album For The Roses to be a bit of a by-the-numbers letdown, though in fairness following up the exquisitely beautiful Blue with anything even half as good would have been a tall order. While For The Roses was well-received at the time, Mitchell was perhaps aware of the fact that it wasn't quite up to the standard of her previous albums and took a full year off in 1973 to really focus herself on the writing for her next record, which would ultimately become the most commercially successful album of her career. This is a position that's always puzzled me, as it's some distance from being Joni's best record - it lacks the incredible imaginative breadth and invention of her more experimental jazz albums from 1975 to 1979, and also lacks the devastatingly honest and insightful confessional storytelling or narrative poetry of her earlier, more stripped-back singer-songwriter fare. As such, it's always huddled nearer the bottom of the list of Joni albums to have my affection, occasionally making me wonder whether it should be included on this list or not. Ultimately, though, what it does that struck such a chord with the public is that it distils all of her songcraft and lyrical majesty into a collection of simple, catchy, upbeat pop tunes which, while they might not be pieces of groundbreaking art, are undeniably great music.

It also does begin to nudge towards the more experimental streak that would take dominance in her albums in the later 70s. During her year off she began to take a keener interest in jazz music and to start introducing elements of it into her songwriting and arrangements. "Help Me" in particular features jazzy horns and trumpet flourishes and chirpy jazz-like backing vocals, while similar flourishes and moments of jazzy orchestration throughout the album. "Car On A Hill" boasts further great jazzy horn interludes. Even some of the rhythms and song structures, as on the shuffling, slightly off-beat melody of "Free Man In Paris" feel looser and freer than the simpler folk music of her earlier work, and there's certainly a sense here that the music is beginning to move towards a more unusual extreme, although here such elements keep themselves restrained enough for the music itself to be simple and easily listened to. The musical pallette is extended too, being less focussed purely on Joni's guitar and piano but fleshing things out to a full band soon on pretty much every song, the sound diversified by the odd screech of Larry Carlton's electric guitar or the rumbling crash of John Guerin's drums.

The musical mood of Court And Spark is generally one of upbeat, sunny optimism in stark contrast to the desperately sad and mournful tone of Blue. Here, Joni sounds like someone who has moved through despair and loss and arrived at a kind of optimistic equilibrium that sees her looking towards the future. The warm chord sequences and full, rich sound of her acoustic guitar infuses nearly every song with this sense of mellow optimism, but the lyrics themselves feel slightly more circumspect. If a single theme can be identified in Court And Spark, I'd say it's largely about the wariness of giving in totally to love. On Blue we saw Mitchell honestly and frankly lamenting the breakdown of her relationship with James Taylor, a woman broken by love and finding strength in her music. Here she feels happier and more self-reliant, but someone who has definitely been made more cautious. It's there in the opening title track, where she speaks of being almost obsessively intrigued by a new object of affection but unable to totally give in to her interest in him - "The more he talked to me the more he reached me, but I couldn't let go of LA, city of the fallen angels."

On "Help Me," a song that's surprisingly lyrically simplistic for a songwriter of Joni's talents, she sings of the "trouble" of falling in love, and the dilemma of knowing "you know your loving, but not like you love your freedom." It's there again on the jazzy "Car On A Hill," where she casts herself as a nervous girl desperately and anxiously waiting for a lover to come and collect her as the hours tick by. All of it speaks of someone who's been hurt by love before and is now ever more cautious of the world around her and the pain that can come from giving in to it too whole-heartedly. It's not the only theme explored, though - on "Free Man In Paris" she pays homage to David Geffen of Asylum Records, a man so devoted to "stoking the starmaker machinery behind the popular song" that he is unable to live the simple life he would love, as a free man. Then there's the absolutely wonderful "Down To You," at once perhaps both the bleakest and most hopeful song on the album, which sees Joni taking stock of how her opinions of the world and of herself have changed over time, and what that change means. "Old friends seem indifferent, you must have brought that on, old bonds have broken down, love is gone." Ultimately, beneath all the changing and shifting moods and values of a lifetime she comes to a joyously positive conclusion, placing total control of one's outlook on the person themself - "You're a brute, you're an angel, you can crawl, you can fly too, it's down to you, it all comes down to you." The song is also notable for the lovely orchestration that decorates its mid-section between verses.

"Down To You" is the most maudlin and downbeat the music or lyrics ever gets on Court And Spark, and the mood is resolutely lifted again afterwards with the upbeat fun of songs like "Raised On Robbery" (seemingly about an encounter between a self-pitying prostitute and a disinterested potential customer) and "Twisted," featuring none other than Cheech and Chong as guest vocalists, ensuring that the mood stays an optimistic one. It's perhaps that cheeky sense of fun, largely absent from most of Mitchell's previous albums, that ensured that the record reached such a wide audience and became enshrined (perhaps unfairly to some of the better work she did elsewhere) as her most popular album. But beneath its sunny exterior is evidence of a vulnerable woman still struggling to maintain her strength and fortitude, yet this album not only explores that sense of trying to find and sustain confidence for the future, it also provides her with the means of achieving it. In the jazz flourishes of Court And Spark Joni found the seed of an idea that would come to define her work over the next few years and see her creating by far the most interesting and imaginative work of her entire career. For that reason, Court And Spark is, for me, very much a transitional album rather than a career pinnacle in itself, journeying from the intimacy and simplicity of her early work to the experimental audaciousness of things to come. And if an artist is able to achieve enormous commercial success with an album that's ultimately a transition from one artistic peak to another then that artist must be a very special one indeed.

Track Listing:

All songs written by Joni Mitchell except where noted.

1. Court And Spark

2. Help Me

3. Free Man In Paris

4. People's Parties

5. Same Situation

6. Car On A Hill

7. Down To You

8. Just Like This Train

9. Raised On Robbery

10. Trouble Child

11. Twisted (Annie Ross & Wardell Gray)

Genesis - The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway

Released - November 1974

Genre - Progressive Rock

Producer - John Burns & Genesis

Selected Personnel - Peter Gabriel (Vocals/Flute/Percussion); Tony Banks (Organ/Mellotron/Piano/Keyboards); Steve Hackett (Guitar); Mike Rutherford (Bass/Guitar); Phil Collins (Drums/Percussion); Brian Eno (Treatments)

Standout Track - Counting Out Time

My relationship with Genesis's most mammoth offering has always been a slightly difficult one, and it's an album I deliberately left off this list for a long time before eventually giving in to its positives. My main problem with it, I think, is that it's exactly the kind of album that gives prog such a bad name. Today, prog is a genre that's sniggered at and dismissed as pompous, excessive and ludicrous despite containing some of the finest and most ambitious music in the history of rock, but it's difficult for us prog nuts to whole-heartedly defend it when albums like The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway exist. Of course, prog is generally chock-full of pomposity and excess, but albums like Yes's Close To The Edge are simply so consistently brilliant that anybody who held it up as an example of prog's failings is somebody I couldn't really take seriously. If they used The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway to make the same point, though, then I'd have to concede that maybe they're part right. It's also by no means the worst offender (the direct followup to Close To The Edge, the horribly overblown Tales From Topographic Oceans, probably takes that title), but it's perhaps one of the best-known and as such will provide ample fuel for prog cynics for years to come.

Ultimately, it's greatest crime, though, is that it's just far too long. At over ninety minutes it's yet another entry to the long list of double albums in history that would've been immeasurably improved by a bit of liberal editing. It includes a number of meandering, tuneless and totally forgettable instrumental pieces like "Broadway Melody Of 1974" or "Silent Sorrow In Empty Boats" which served purely to cover Peter Gabriel's costume changes in the live show. While it's admirable to see a band taking creative steps to keep part of their minds working on the idea of live performance, it's a shame they couldn't try to make those instrumental passages a little more interesting as it doesn't make for a particularly gripping listening experiences. It also suggests, in its insistence of generating extra material in order to accommodate Gabriel's theatrics, a slavish dedication to a concept and storyline that ultimately very few other than Gabriel himself would care about, listeners included. The album, like so many prog concept albums, explores an almost impenetrable and ludicrous story, this one about a Puerto Rican street youth called Rael who goes into the sewers to look for his brother John, where he encounters the Lamia, a mythical being, and a colony of mutated monsters called Slippermen. Eventually he finds John in a ravine but it turns out that John is actually a part of himself or something, in a classic prog rock switcheroo case of "This nonsense we've been spouting for ninety minutes has actually been exploring split identity and personality disorders the whole time, you just didn't realise." It's not the stupidest story to a prog concept album ever, although it ranks pretty highly, but it's perhaps the most laboriously told, and there's a sense that Gabriel's flights of fancy were starting to be a higher priority than concise, quality musicianship.

Inevitably, this dynamic would end up being a key element behind Gabriel's subsequent departure from Genesis. He had actually been absent for most of the writing and rehearsal sessions for the album's music due to personal problems involving his pregnant wife, meaning that the majority of the music was composed by Tony Banks, Phil Collins, Mike Rutherford and Steve Hackett. When he was able to rejoin the band he decided to focus on vocal melodies and lyrics, overseeing the whole grandiose story and presumably demanding those additional instrumental passages so the album would fit into his vision of how it could be staged. One of the other more interesting creative presences on the album, however, is none other than Brian Eno, recently ex-Roxy Music, who was already establishing a reputation as somebody who could apply particular sonic effects to music that rendered it totally alien. Eno's sonic sensibilities seemed to gel well with the story of psychological disturbance and displacement and mythic grandiosity that Gabriel had in mind, and Eno's distinctive treatments are all over "The Grand Parade Of Lifeless Packaging" and "The Waiting Room," neither of which is a particularly compelling piece of music in itself and is only really rendered interesting by Eno's unusual sonic sculpting.

Beneath all its ludicrous excesses, though, one has to concede that The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway contains some of Genesis's finest music, if you're patient enough to sift through all the filler and the nonsense to find it. It's one I include here largely because it falls just short of genuine greatness but does so with great gusto and ambition, which is something to be applauded in itself. Also, it's worth including it here if only to give one last salute to Genesis before they began their slow decline into one of the worst bands of all time. The first truly show-stopping song is "Fly On A Windshield," a piece which opens with quiet, trembling menace before the droning howl of Tony Banks's keyboards and the slow thud of Phil Collins's drums crash in thunderously to signal the true beginning of the album. "In The Cage" is one of the more epic songs on an album that, by and large, abandons Genesis's penchant for long song-suites and again gives Banks opportunity to shine with a number of acrobatic keyboard solos. "Back In N.Y.C." is another fine piece of overblown prog, although it doesn't really do anything that "In The Cage" didn't do better, and then there's "Counting Out Time."

I've mentioned in some of my other reviews of Genesis's work that what they really have going for them that some of the other big prog bands don't is a real sense of colourful silliness and a sense of humour. They may not be as fearsomely powerful as King Crimson or as intricately beautiful as Yes, but they have an odd knack, largely through Gabriel's quirky vocals, of making something that sounds a huge amount of fun (this is the band that managed to pull off the lyric "There's Winston Churchill dressed in drag, he used to be a British flag, plastic bag, what a drag!" back on Foxtrot), but that sense of slightly camp silliness is largely abandoned here in favour of a darker and more sombre tone, but "Counting Out Time" goes a long way to redressing that balance in one of the most gloriously fun, chirpy and upbeat tunes the band ever wrote, also boasting a fearsome guitar riff from Steve Hackett on the chorus, and a gloriously silly distorted, almost vocal solo ushered in by Gabriel's "Whoopee! Take it away, Mr Guitar," easily my favourite moment in Genesis's discography. It's followed by "The Carpet Crawlers," a fairly bland ballad that has proven an unaccountably popular Genesis classic.

The album's second half kicks off with more filler but picks up with "Anyway," a song dripping with menace and longing and blessed with a truly lovely piano riff and a passionate guitar solo from Hackett, while "The Colony Of Slippermen" is another highlight. It's one of the album's silliest moments, with Gabriel's gargling monster voice, and is all the more daft for being apparently played fairly straight, in contrast to the blatant silliness of "Counting Out Time," but it also boasts further great soloing from Banks. "The Light Dies Down On Broadway" is perhaps the album's emotional highpoint, with Gabriel's strident and pain-wracked vocals being surprisingly affecting as Rael catches sight of his brother lost in the ravine. And the album closer of "It" is a stirringly upbeat note on which to finish the album, powered by the intense strumming of Hackett's guitar, finally giving him something of note to do after an entire album that left the majority of the showing off to be shared between Gabriel and Banks.

The autocratic control Gabriel had taken over the album's lyrics and concept having been absent from the writing of most of the music had exposed certain divisions between the band, and these weren't made any better by the album's monumentally ambitious and theatrical tour which included costumes, mannequins, lasers, explosions and the like. Both the critical and audience reactions to the show seemed to place all their focus on Gabriel himself and ignore the contributions of the rest of Genesis, something that understandably riled the band. Gabriel had actually made the decision fairly early into the tour that he was going to leave the band but, though tensions continued to rise, things remained amicable enough that he would see out the entire tour before announcing his departure to the public. It seems more, then, that his departure occurred due to an inevitability of the two moving in different directions than due to some sort of explosion of clashing personalities. Whether or not Gabriel's fairly domineering control of the band at the time was a little questionable, he would go on to be one of the finest art rock musicians in history in the late 70s and up to the present day, while Genesis's fortunes would slowly start to fade.

1976's A Trick Of The Tail has some great moments in songs like the "Squonk" or the beautiful "Entangled" but fall a bit too short of real brilliance, and from there things just got worse. Hackett departed to pursue a fairly underwhelming solo career, and the remaining three soldiered on as a trio, with Collins now in the lead vocalist seat as well as drumming. By the time of 1980's Duke they had started to morph into a more commercial pop-rock outfit and developed a knack for producing albums that contained one or two genuinely brilliant songs (the title track from Abacab or the great "Mama" and "That's All" from Genesis) but, alongside those standouts, an album's worth of the most execrable dreck ever recorded by a band that used to be good. While plenty of prog acts went pop in the 80s, some of them managed to do so with confidence and style - Yes in the 80s may have been glossy and over-the-top pop-rock but they were also really, very good at it, while Genesis just produced horrible-sounding music that's genuinely difficult to listen to more than once. Finally, in 1986 they managed to ape Yes and record an album that, while hardly of any great artistic merit, was at least a genuinely good pop album in the form of Invisible Touch, but until then The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway was the last time the band made something that can be deemed a success on its own merits.

It's by no means flawless, and there are plenty of moments that I tune out of, but the fact is that, if the band had only had the restraint and the self-control to prune perhaps as much as half of the material, it does contain some brilliant stuff, some of it among the best material the band recorded. Perhaps in that sense it summarises my overall feelings towards Genesis as a whole. While bands like Yes or King Crimson or Jethro Tull are bands I've been able to whole-heartedly love and become obsessed by, there have always been just a few too many moments that come across as too overblown, forced or meandering for me to ever truly abandon my reservations. Ultimately, the thing Genesis must be thanked for above all else is that it led us to Peter Gabriel's astoundingly good solo career, and for that alone they must be saluted. And in leading us to that they also provided us with some genuinely great music. It's just a shame they had to give prog such a bad name while they were doing it.

Track Listing:

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

1. The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway

2. Fly On A Windshield

3. Broadway Melody Of 1974

4. Cuckoo Cocoon

5. In The Cage

6. The Grand Parade Of Lifeless Packaging

7. Back In N.Y.C.

8. Hairless Heart

9. Counting Out Time

10. The Carpet Crawlers

11. The Chamber Of 32 Doors

12. Lilywhite Lilith

13. The Waiting Room

14. Anyway

15. Here Comes The Supernatural Anaesthetist

16. The Lamia

17. Silent Sorrow In Empty Boats

18. The Colony Of Slippermen

19. Ravine

20. The Light Dies Down On Broadway

21. Riding The Scree

22. In The Rapids

23. It