Toby Creswell - 100 Best Albums Of All Time

Contents

S unshine Superman by Donovan was the first album I ever bought, circa 1969. It cost me $5.25 from Palings in George Street, Sydney, and I have it still. It was on Epic with a yellow label and it was a thing of mystery and wonder. The title track was the hit single but that was just the door into a strange world. On the album theres Season of the Witch, with its classic line beatniks out to make it rich, which summed up the exotic new world of the 60s that was seductive and dangerous; The Trip, a Dylanesque story about taking LSD; The Fat Angel with the admonishment fly Jefferson Airplane, get you there on time; or Berts Blues, a slice of steamy, slightly sleazy jazz blues that pays tribute to guitar player Bert Jansch.

Sunshine Superman was like a rock that landed in the pond the ripples just went out and out. Season of the Witch is a trip all in itself, across its many and varied versions (including Mike Bloomfields and Stephen Stills 16-minute improvised version, or the numerous versions used in films of the 60s as few songs sum up the dark side of the 60s better). Then there are the resonances through people like producer Joe Boyd, who named his production company Witchseason and went on to bring Nick Drake and Fairport Convention, the Incredible String Band and R.E.M. to the wider world. And then there are all of the other versions by Terry Reid, Julie Driscoll, Hole, Luna, Dr. John, Lou Rawls, Joan Jett, Richard Thompson and Karen Elson. Just that one song will lead you into a whole pantheon of music. There is also the journey you could take with Bert Jansch, following the trail led by the song Berts Blues. Jansch was one of the masters of English music, whose unique guitar style was the bedrock of Jimmy Pages style and from Page whole generations of heavy metal. And, of course, Page himself plays on Sunshine Superman. Although only the title track of Sunshine Superman got any radio play, the meat of the LP was all in the album-only songs.

The point of this lengthy trip down my memory lane is to illustrate how albums can be more than the sum of their parts. There have been songs that changed the way people saw the world, for example: I Want to Hold Your Hand (the Beatles), (I Cant Get No) Satisfaction (the Rolling Stones), Thats All Right (Mama) (Elvis Presley) or Smells Like Teen Spirit (Nirvana). But the album as a piece of work was something that you could explore and live with. (I use the past tense because in this digital age albums have a more precarious, uncertain place.)

The classic album format was a long time coming. In April 1955 Frank Sinatra released In the Wee Small Hours, one of the first 12-inch vinyl records. The album contained songs that all fitted around the theme of despair and lost love but they were all expressed with a lush emotionalism. Sinatra wanted the album to make a singular statement. Sinatras success notwithstanding, singles dominated music in the 1950s and early 1960s. The demands of Top 40 radio determined the shape of pop music, as songs needed to be around three minutes to accommodate advertisers.

Artists pumped out singles and twice a year compiled those singles with whatever happened to be around to make an LP. There were titles like Ella Fitzgerald Sings The ColePorter Songbook, which did have a conceptual framework. And then, as jazz took on greater artistic aspirations, works appeared like Miles Davis Kind of Blue (page 126), which was an album statement. The individual tunes existed on their own but were greatly enhanced by being within the larger format of the album.

The merging of the Beatnik era, the folk music boom and pop music, which occurred in the early 1960s, gave a greater artistic depth to popular music. By 1965, when Bob Dylan was planning Highway 61 Revisted, even the lead track Like a Rolling Stone was too long to be a single early versions were split across two sides of a 45 rpm disc. Dylans song was sufficiently powerful to get radio airplay despite its six minutes-plus length, but that was still an anomaly.

Then in 1967 the Beatles released Sgt. PeppersLonely Hearts Club Band, an album that was conceived to fit an overarching concept. After Sgt. Peppers, artists began to think of their work differently. We had an age of rock operas and concept albums and triple albums and whatever else. The album, because of its higher unit price and greater profitability, changed the music business and turned it into a profit-making machine.

But it was in the late 1980s that the rot began to set in. The compact disc format provided digital quality reproduction, a more resilient object and 70 minutes with which to record music. In retrospect, 40 minutes the optimum running time of a vinyl LP is the ideal format for a popular music long player. CDs just go on too long.

Now we have digital downloads. Yes, the compression required for internet distribution does degrade the sound, but more damaging is the way that these single tracks are disassociated from any context, possibly robbing the songs of meaning and certainly divorcing them from being part of a bigger narrative. The beauty of the LP was that in listening to Sunshine Superman you also found Season of the Witch. That serendipity will happen less and less as time goes on.

My personal history notwithstanding, SunshineSuperman doesnt make this list of the 100 best albums of all time. Nor does In the Wee SmallHours or Sgt. Peppers. The methodology we adopted for creating the list was that, regardless of genre or era, the albums had to be the best; full of undeniable artistry and internal qualities that have continued to resonate through the years. All the records included here are of huge, rare artistic merit. They arent necessarily the biggest sellers or even the most influential (although very often they are both of these).

For us, Sgt. Peppers is a line in the sand. Too often critics and lists have praised Sgt.Peppers because of its game-changing qualities, encouraging popular artists to focus on a body of work rather than just individual songs, and because it marked the end of the Beatles as a performing (read: teenybop) band and the beginning of them being a more experimental (read: serious) studio band. And obviously it was incredibly successful the first genuine blockbuster album. However, while Sgt. Peppers may have boasted a high concept, the conceptual thread is weak and it is arguably the bands most patchy collection of songs. Yes, there are moments of greatness (A Day in the Life, Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, Shes Leaving Home) but equally there are weak, throwaway moments (Good Morning Good Morning, Lovely Rita, When Im Sixty Four). The spirit of Sgt. Peppers was, in fact, better articulated by the Kinks on The Kinks Are the Village Green PreservationSociety (page 220).

For the next 30 years artists thought in terms of creating albums building a format that could tell multi-dimensional stories. Fleetwood Macs Rumours (page 44), for instance, famously documents the conflicts of the couples within the band. These soap operas are contained within one of the most complex, orchestrated pop operas. Similarly the Beach Boys PetSounds (page 58) and Van Morrisons Astral