Timeless Albums

Music has been a passion of mine since my early teens and over the past twenty-five years I’ve amassed a sizeable collection of vinyl, tape, CDs and digital media. Although I can’t quite agree with John Peel’s extreme sentiment that last year’s music is as uninteresting as last week’s newspaper, I do find that my listening is mainly contemporary. I buy a minimum of five new CDs per month and listening to them sometimes doesn’t leave much time for the existing items in my collection.
Nevertheless, occasionally it’s good to revisit old favourites and that’s just what I found myself doing a few weeks ago. As I was picking albums off the shelf, I started to become aware that there was a certain pattern to what I was choosing. However, defining that pattern wasn’t exactly straightforward. Ever-interested in structure and categorisation, I dimly perceived something potentially intriguing in the growing pile of CDs on the dining table.
Playing the albums over the next few days, I found myself discussing the issue with online and offline friends (which is where the instant messaging extracts that I published on Friday come from). I started to realise that there was a subconscious set of parameters that defined what I had chosen, plus a more overt emotional definition of how I felt about these particular works.
I categorised these choices as “timeless” because, although many of them remind me of specific periods of my life, they have an ongoing appeal that surpasses nostalgia. This is the part that I’m finding hardest to describe, but I think what I’m aiming to say is that I feel an ongoing emotional connection to them as a thirty-four year-old, despite the fact that I originally bought many of them when I was in my teens and my twenties.
In fact, some of them are albums that initially I wasn’t keen on, or albums that I played for a few months then totally ignored for years until I returned to them and heard them differently. Several of them are not albums that I would have said, within a month or two of first buying them, that I would consider so important to me ten, fifteen or even nearly twenty years later.
In some cases, many of my favourite artists are not represented here. I think there are several reasons for this. Firstly, some of the artists that I like have such extensive bodies of work that it’s hard to view specific albums in isolation. Either that, or some of them have a habit of producing flawed gems, albums that have one or two weak points, which as a fan I can forgive but as an archivist I would be ruthless about discounting from the list. Another reason might be that their work reminds me too much of a specific time in my life, thus excluding itself from the definition of “timeless”.
At least one of the artists in my list has produced little else that I like, despite extensive research and several wasted purchases. (Except they’re not wasted, of course, because they served their purpose of discovery.)
So, here they are, in chronological order:
Eurythmics Sweet Dreams [1983]
I had liked Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart in their previous band, The Tourists. I read that they had reformed as a duo and were focusing on a more contemporary, synthesizer-based sound, working with the German producer Connie Plank. At this point I didn’t realise that they had already released their first album and for some time I was under the mistaken impression (under which many remain) that this was their debut. This album contains the absolute pop classics Love Is A Stranger and Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This), but the rest of it is hardly filler material – spartan, hot-and-cold electronica that includes the fabulous This City Never Sleeps.
Lloyd Cole & The Commotions Rattlesnakes [1985]
I didn’t even like this album at first, though I taped it from my friend anyway. I remember specifically describing it as “Sixties” to my school-friends. This was my harshest musical insult at the time, given that I was listening to lots of typically 1980s, angsty, difficult, European art-rock (4AD, etc). However, there was something nagging about the melodies that caught my imagination. We went to see Lloyd Cole play live in 1986 and it was one of the most boring shows I’ve ever seen. However, when I went to university I found myself playing the tape more and more and eventually I bought the album on CD in the early 1990s. Cole’s lyrics have been described as Sixth Form poetry, which I think merely highlights the fact that their naïve charm is their strength rather than weakness.
Throwing Muses Throwing Muses [1986]
I loved this album immediately on the first listen and it has been a constant favourite ever since. In fact, I recommended it to someone only days ago. Scattergun, hysterical, uplifting, contrary, complex, looping, poetic and, above all, compelling beyond my wildest dreams. Its record label, 4AD, was quite small at the time and I used to phone them regularly and chat to label boss Ivo about his forthcoming plans. He had been raving about Throwing Muses for months and when I heard the album, I wasn’t disappointed. Though much of their subsequent material has been equally good, no single album ever bettered this debut.
Mary Margaret O’Hara Miss America [1987]
I used to like a lot of 4AD’s prettier, more ambient female-vocal stuff (Cocteau Twins, This Mortal Coil, Dead Can Dance) and this album initially seemed to fit into that stable. However, the more I played it, the more I realised that it probably sat more comfortably alongside Patsy Cline, Tom Waits and even Throwing Muses. MMO’H is a fractured, fragile singer who conduits raw emotion at both ends of the scale. She gained a reputation as a woman who seemed constantly on the verge of falling apart during her performances. Despite an odd Christmas EP release and one or two guest appearances here and there, she has never released a formal follow-up solo album (though she recently handled the soundtrack to the recent film Apartment Hunting – my CD copy is on order direct from Canada, more when I get it).
Marianne Faithfull Blazing Away [1990]
I borrowed this from the library, intrigued by its sleeve. It’s a live performance of many of her most well-known tracks, recorded in a cathederal in Paris. Her voice has never sounded better. I love the ambience of this recording, you can really feel what it’s like to be there. I’ve subsequently seen the video of the show, but it’s almost unnecessary. This is a perfect album for a long car journey home, late at night. My most memorable experience of listening to this album was while heading south on the A1(M) through an intense thunderstorm.
Massive Attack Blue Lines [1991]
I remember sitting on a chair outside a changing room at the Jigsaw clothes store branch opposite Charing Cross station. They were playing this and, although I knew the single Unfinished Sympathy, I didn’t know the album. I had to ask the checkout assistant who it was and I had purchased it within the hour. I went through a strange phase during the mid-90s when I lost all interest in music for about six months; during that time this was the only album that I could stand to listen to.
Plastikman Sheet One [1993]
This album was responsible for extending my tastes in electronic music beyond The Prodigy and into the more experimental, eclectic waters inhabited by the likes of Aphex Twin, Panasonic, Autechre, and so on. My interest in those artists has now subsided, but Richie Hawtin remains a firm favourite and the sparse beats and lithe rhythms of this album demonstrate exactly why.
Jeff Buckley Grace [1994]
A friend lent me a copy of this album shortly after it was released but the tape was of such poor quality that for some reason I dismissed it out of hand. Then a couple of years later I saw some concert footage of Buckley playing at Glastonbury festival and it was an epiphany. I saw an intensity and range of emotion in his performance that I hadn’t seen for a long time. Within months, he had tragically drowned. Subsequent posthumous releases have aroused mixed emotions for me – the moments of intense beauty are mixed with sadness at the fact that he’s not around any more.
Björk Homogenic [1997]
I’ve been a long-term fan of Björk’s music, both solo and within The Sugarcubes, but much of it appeals to me on an intellectual, rather than emotional, level. I find its eclectisicm endearing, but occasionally frustrating. Where Homogenic stands out for me is in its consistency of tone, its emotional directness and its four-dimensional mixture of hardcore electronica and lush strings. Rarely was the cliché “dark jewels” so deservedly applied to a collection of songs.
Billy Mackenzie Beyond The Sun [1997]
Billy Mackenzie is inextricably linked with Jeff Buckley for me because I became interested in them around the same time and then they died within months of each other. Although I had known of his band The Associates for years, I only ever got around to investigating their music seriously in the mid-90s. The more I heard, the more I realised what an astonishing talent Mackenzie had apparently wasted. Via the internet I got in touch with a friend of his, who advised that he was recording a new album for Nude Records (then the home of Suede). I was overjoyed. Sadly he committed suicide before the album was released and thus, like Buckley’s posthumous releases, listening to Beyond The Sun is a difficult affair. However, every single song is so superb that it makes a fitting tribute. The inconsistency of tone that characterised all of his previous recorded output is completely absent here. I have recommended this album to tens of people and I have yet to find anyone who doesn’t like it. It’s one of those things that you play when friends come round and they always ask “who’s this?”
On reflection, I realise that I have subconsciously applied the following ‘rules’ to my choices:
1 – selections should be from your own ‘musical lifetime’, i.e. probably from your early teens onwards, not just stuff of historical interest;
2 – selections should be over five years old, to get some critical distance from them;
3 – selections shouldn’t be purely based on nostalgia, but items that genuinely continue to move you.
On this basis, I excluded two of my long-term favourite albums from the list, because I investigated them as ‘classics’ in the first place. The first was Patti Smith’s Horses [1975], which I found as astonishing on first listen as I do now. The second is The Doors’ Morrison Hotel [1970], which many seem to pass over in favour of their first or last album, but which for me is their most satisfying work.
My predictions for stuff that will be on this list in a few years from now? You always think that you’ll forever love the music to which you’re currently listening, so I’ve kept this deliberately brief. I have a strong suspicion that two Irish albums from a couple of years ago will be with me for some time: Sinead O’Connor’s Faith And Courage [2000] and U2′s All That You Can’t Leave Behind [2000]. Both move me almost to tears in places and are mature works from artists at the peak of their creative powers.
I wonder if the criteria I’ve defined here for “timeless” are so personal and specific to me that they are meaningless to anyone else, or whether I’ve just added one or two non-standard qualifiers to the traditional exercise of choosing your Top 10 favourite albums. On this note, I have two things to say. Firstly, the fact that there are ten albums is purely coincidental – I chose the albums that fulfilled my criteria and that’s how many there were. There could have been seven or seventeen and they would all have been included. Secondly, I am trying to achieve something different to a simple “favourite” albums list. While many of the items above would be on such a list of mine, there would be other stuff that I’ve discounted here.
So, now it’s over to you. Based on everything I’ve outlined above, which albums do you consider timeless?