Geoff Brown - 25 Albums That Rocked The World

Copyright 2008 Omnibus Press

This edition 2009 Omnibus Press

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ISBN: 978-0-85712-044-1

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D URING THE N INETIES Omnibus Press published a series of books under the generic title The Complete Guides To The Music Of They were shaped like CD jewel cases and designed to sit alongside the CDs on your record shelf, and were written by experienced rock critics whose brief was not just to be objective about the music and sort out the wheat from the chaff in any given artists repertoire, but also to offer background information about the circumstances in which the albums were recorded.

As the commissioning editor of this series, it was my hope that the books would most benefit newcomers to the increasingly large catalogues of rocks greatest performers. I envisaged a teenager in a Virgin or HMV megastore being bewildered and discouraged by the amount of different CDs in, say, the Jimi Hendrix or David Bowie sections, and not knowing what to buy. Our Complete Guide books were designed to steer them in the right direction, especially when commenting on the merits of compilations and whether they offered value for money.

In the end, Omnibus published almost 50 books on artists ranging from Frank Sinatra to The Sex Pistols. The first batch of six - on Elvis Presley, The Beatles, The Doors, Bob Marley, Queen and Led Zeppelin - were chosen because I thought their catalogues were complete and the books would therefore not require any further updating. How wrong I was! Even though with all these acts the artist or a member of the group had passed on, I wasnt taking into consideration the ingenuity of record labels when it came to reissuing back catalogues. All these books were soon out of date, as were most of those that followed, so keeping the series up to date became a bit like painting the Forth Bridge - an endless task.

Talking of record labels, one major approached Omnibus with a view to packaging our miniature books with CDs by the acts in question. It sounded like a great marketing opportunity but I was obliged to point out to the label representative that the books were objective, that there were occasions when the author may have been a bit harsh about this or that album and suggested, perhaps, that the creative muse had somehow failed the artist on this particular record, and offered opinions on the music that the artist might not necessarily share and which might therefore cause some embarrassment in the boardroom. The major label took the point and discussions were aborted.

I believe the books worked best with those acts whose back catalogues are best described as untidy. These were artists who, like Jimi Hendrix or Bob Marley, signed unpropitious record deals early in their careers long before they recorded their best-known work. Once the artists were famous these early recordings would come back to haunt them, often marketed under dubious titles like The Fabulous Early Years or The Roots Of Genius, clearly designed to hoodwink the unwary into parting with their money for substandard product. Anyone who read the Complete Guide books would know what to avoid in this regard. For those acts with tidy catalogues, like The Beatles or U2, the books served more as reference works than consumer guides, but I like to think they contained some useful information, fine writing and thoughtful analysis, even if everyone already knew that Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band and The Joshua Tree are pretty good records.

Both those albums are in this book, along with 23 others that I think either defined their era, pushed the boundaries back a bit or, in one or two cases, simply sold in such huge quantities that they are impossible to ignore. For this reason I thought it worthwhile to combine into one single volume critiques of 25 of the greatest records of the last 50 years.

The first long playing record, with finely spaced grooves that turned at 33 1/3 rpm, was introduced by Columbia Records in the USA in 1931, and the first compact disc for commercial release rolled off the assembly line in 1982 at a Philips factory in Germany. In the first decade of the 21st century, music largely exists as a non-tangible entity that can be accessed down a telephone line in a fraction of a second, and it is possible to carry 20,000 songs around on a gadget not much larger than a cigarette packet. Albums, as such, are giving way to individual tracks. Soon they will be no more, redundant because most new consumers wont want to buy them as tangible entities anyway.

But for now, heres 25 of the best ever made.

Chris Charlesworth, 2008.

The Sun Years

1954/5

By Peter Doggett

A T 706 U NION Avenue, Memphis, Tennessee, stands Sun Studios the birthplace of the most important collection of rocknroll tracks ever recorded. Between 1954 and 1960, Suns owner, Sam Phillips, produced pioneering rockabilly, blues, country and pop sides by artists such as Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, Charlie Rich and Elvis Presley.

Before Elvis was signed to Sun, in the summer of 1954, Phillips label was renowned as a centre of excellence for the blues. Like scores of independents in the Southern states, Sun scuffled to survive from one release to the next. Phillips financed the labels early years by freelance production work, handling sessions with artists such as Howlin Wolf and B.B. King for larger companies. He supervised the making of whats generally regarded as the first rocknroll record, Jackie Brenstons Rocket 88. He proved to be an equally sympathetic producer of hillbilly country music. And in 1954, the future King of RocknRoll fell into his lap.

Elvis Presley had been born on January 8, 1935, in a tiny shack in Tupelo, Mississippi. He was raised in Memphis, and working as a truck driver for the local firm of Crown Electric when he made his first amateur recordings at the Memphis Recording Service, part of the small Sun empire. Presley had been performing blues, country, gospel and pop songs in public for a year or two by then, and had attracted the attention of some of the hottest gospel quartets in the State. But he needed the reassurance of hearing his voice on a record before he felt confident enough to make his music into a career.