In-depth reviews of classic or neglected albums, mainly from the 1960s and 70s, now a 30 volume e-book series.Artists covered include Beach Boys, Beatles,Byrds, CSNY, Dire Straits, Grateful Dead, Hollies, Jefferson Airplane/Starship, Kinks, Monkees, Moody Blues, Pink Floyd, Rolling Stones, Searchers, Simon and Garfunkel, Small Faces, 10cc, The Who+Neil Young.Sister site to https://kindredspiritbooks.blogspot.com/ (scifi novels) and https://alonsyaliensdrwho.blogspot.com/ (Dr Who episode reviews)

Wednesday, 11 December 2024

The AAA Review Of The Year 2024

Well, that wasn’t how the script was meant to go in 2024 was it, dear readers? Fascists in power, riots in the streets, a pandemic that keeps raging and that people keep ignoring, the destruction of my favourite social media app where I so enjoyed talking to you during my ‘song of the day’ chats (you can continue the chats over at BlueSky under the @alansarchives name), a mini Spice Girls reunion…2024 has for so many social and political reasons been a year to not only forget but bury deep to where we can never ever lay eyes on it again. Thankfully it’s been a much more memorable year music-wise with more releases to review than ever before (yes we keep saying that, but every year it’s been true – and this is our sixteenth annual review this year believe it ot not!) Yes 2008 what a year: Oasis were splitting, CSNY and Neil Young were dipping into their archives, there was a glut of Beatle solo re-issues, David Gilmour was breaking a near-decade long silence and The Beach Boys were re-releasing their Christmas album. What a change dear readers! For soon you’ll be reading in this year’s review about Oasis’ reunion! Err plus CSNY and Neil Young archive releases, four Beatle solo album re-issues, David Gilmour breaking a near-decade long silence and The Beach Boys re-issuing their Christmas album. Wait, what? Well it seems the more things change the more they stay the same – a salutary lesson we should have been paying more attention to in the election. Join us here same time next year for more reviews and music. If there’s still enough of civilisation left to release it to.

In the meantime you might have noticed that there haven’t been as many book releases this year. Not to worry! One because ‘Experience’, book 7 of my scifi-drama-comedy-action-politics-philosophy-with-endless-music-references series ‘Kindred Spirits’, is the longest yet at 794 pages and should keep you all busy for a while anyway. And two because there’s a lot more goodies in the pipeline: an 8^th volume of ‘Kindred Spirits, ‘Maintenance’, that’s nearly ready to go and a 9^th, ‘Evidence’, at the planning stage. Plus last year you might remember I was celebrating the anniversary of TV show Dr Who by writing a review of every single story every day. I’ve returned to them this year, fleshing them out to full length detailed reviews and have got to the two-thirds point, so hopefully that will be out in 2025. At the moment it’s at 3000 pages and looks likely to be a seven volume set. So it’s definitely been a busy year. Not as busy as Neil Young’s year obviously (he pops up on this list six times!) but still a pretty busy one. So, to sign off, the same thing I once said back in 2008: things are really taking off here at the AAA. Thankyou all for reading whether you’re readers from the past present or future (hi there! Sorry about all the mess we left you). Even though the AAA books are all six-four years old now and I tend to only post here a couple of times a year I’m astonished how many of you are still out there still reading and occasionally leaving me smart messages about a small point in review I wrote 15 years ago that I’m dumb to remember. Thankyou all! In fact we had our highest daily stat in November: a grand total of 1613 of you! Have the very happiest of festive holidays and the most nurturing of new years and see you in 2025…I hope!

New Releases:

1) “Liam Gallagher/John Squire”

Well, this is a surprise. Liam was meant to be taking the year off this year – to get married, amongst other things – but instead here he is again with his sixth album post-Oasis and the first record since ‘Be Here Now’ on which he doesn’t have his name in the writing credits. That’s because they’re all written by John Squire, the guitarist in The Stone Roses the Manchester band that – alongside The Beatles – was Oasis’ earliest influence (Liam even started off trying to sing like the Roses’ Ian Brown on their earliest recordings, while the Sally in ‘Don’t Look Back In Anger’ was based on the character in The Roses’ best known song ‘Sally Cinnamon’). John Squire has always been fond of the band who kept his group in the spotlight and I’ve always likened their relationship to the way 1950s acts treated their 1960s counterparts – with surprise, fondness, gratitude for the extra royalties and maybe just a little jealousy. John was a special guest at the famous Oasis shows at Knebworth in 1995 (playing ‘Champagne Supernova’, a song that ideally needs three guitarists to pull off, and even goosing Liam as he walks off stage on the second night!) and John turned up again in 2022 at Liam’s triumphant return to Knebworth; it was while backstage there that John casually mentioned, in his typical low-key way, that he’d built up an album’s worth of material but had no one to sing them and would Liam like to guest appear? You can see why Liam would have been thrilled: having one of your heroes ask for your help is a real boost to the ego and even though Liam has grown into a finer writer lately (especially his last solo set ‘C’Mon Y’Know’ that was a real from-the-heart CD) he’s not that prolific as yet. You can see too why Liam would have identified with these songs: despite the decade difference in age both men are at very similar parts in their lives. A much-ballyhooed Stone Roses reunion was abandoned in 2016 after just one patchy single and there was much bad blood and resentment between the Roses since their split in acrimonious split in 1991 that’s only now beginning to cool and be replaced by gratitude as those years of struggle have made Squire all the more appreciative for having had a taste of fame at all. The songs here are very like those on Liam’s three solo sets in fact, where in between bouts of anger and frustration he reaches out a healing hand to partners lost, both marital and bandmates and if you’d have told me they were Liam’s songs too I’d have believed you.

Both men have what the other needs: John Squire’s had a difficult time of things since the Roses split, with his band The Seahorses falling between the cracks the same way Liam’s post-Oasis band ‘Beady Eye’ did despite, at their peak, being as good as their parent bands; they were simply around too soon for their audience to quite forgive them and too similar for the critics to take proper notice of just how good they were. Like Noel before him, Squire also began to get fed up of more extrovert bandmates getting all the attention and having to write words for Ian Brown to sing in his style (while, unlike Oasis, he never got B-sides to himself to ease the tension). Ian is a very different singer to Liam: he’s laidback to the point of falling over while despite being such a naturally passionate expressive emotional writer and he’s not always had a singer to match that (Ian Brown isn’t exactly in-yer-face either). With Liam John can be much more direct and he makes the most of having a singer whose vocals are so direct and uncompromising that they can strip paint (the biggest difference is that if Liam ever sang ‘I Wanna Be Adored’ he’d really mean it, compared to the delicious irony of the Roses original). You get the sense across this record that John is finally letting out demons that have plagued him and built up for a long time now that he has someone to sing them into oblivion for him. Liam, for his part, isn’t yet at the point where songwriting is so natural he has songs pouring out of him all the time and he gets to turn the clock back thirty years to when the responsibility for the material belonged to someone else and he was ‘only’ the frontman. Better than that, though, they’re written by a songwriter he admires and who will actual listen to his suggestions along the way without a fistfight over every point, the way he once had with his brother (Liam is, intriguingly, credited with ‘remixing’ quite a few of these tracks).

The result is an album that’s a surprise simply by existing (nobody heard anything about this album until January when first single ‘Just Another Rainbow’ came out of nowhere) but one that isn’t really much of a surprise if you know these two bands. Oasis fans get the better of the two fanbases: this is very much uptempo Beatley pop rather than the trippier rave tunes that the Roses are known for, with a focus and attack the Stones, for all their brilliance and potential, never had. It is an excellent consistent set of songs, with only two duffers out the ten, that feels as if Squire’s been keeping them in his back pocket for some time (his last full album being as long ago as 2011) and Liam’s sneer sounds better than ever, with a very Lennonish growl that doesn’t have the softer ‘McCartney’ edges of his solo records (although I’m A Wheel’, in particular, continues the Beatlesy references by nicking wholesale from Wings’ ‘Let Me Roll It’). The strength of this album is that nothing much goes wrong, bar a wheely odd cod blues and a rather ordinary closing ballad aside. The weakness is that there are no surprises, nothing to test Liam or have him lost in an unfamiliar musical world the same way his solo albums have now and again, and there’s nothing outside his comfort zone here: a lone song purely in the Stone Roses hippy trippy mould, after all these year, might have been a worthy experiment. After all we know Liam could carry it off in his younger days (‘Colour My Life’ from the infamous Oasis demo tape of 1993 back when they were still known as ‘The Rain’, gets closer to the Stone Roses than any tribute band could).

Even so, there’s a lot to love here. ‘Raise Your Hands’ is full of Britpop swagger and turns the clock back successfully musicwise, though lyrically it’s a very interesting song about growing older and looking back on missed opportunities. The Roses and Oasis both have a special relationship with their fans (the only gathering even close to Oasis at Knebworth were the Roses at Speke in 1990, a festival so important they even made a drama film about it): once again they reach out here to a generation they both haven’t talked to in some time in a song that sounds as if it might have been inspired by that second Knebworth gig. ‘I can see you, raise your hands, we’re alive’ might sound more Rutles than Beatles as choruses go, but in between verses about feeling lost and confused and sung by Liam in that piercing sneer it sounds like an anthem, a moment of togetherness and unity very similar to The Who’s audience-message song ‘Listening To You’. Second album single ‘Mars To Liverpool’ has a perfect pop structure and sounds made for radio though it’s stranger when you sit down and actually study it: an apology for a breakup they didn’t mean to cause that could apply to both men and both their bands and marriages. Squire mentions being on a ‘voyage of self-discovery’ very much like the one on Liam’s last album and may well have been inspired by it: Squire’s certainly enough of a fan to know that Liam sounds great singing the words ‘Sunsheeeine’ and ‘Rain’ and uses weather analogies a lot here. A song about second chances and realising just how rare and special they are, it’s surely too about playing to such a large size crowd again after all those years and the feeling that, at last, you’re back where you belong. Squire plays a blinder of a guitar solo too, a very vibrant and youthful fizz of noise that Ian Brown would never have allowed, a firework of sheer joy. Goodness knows what it has to do with Mars or Liverpool though: as a Mersey-area local it sounds really wrong hearing the word ‘Liverpooool’ in broad Mancunian.

‘One Day At A Time’ is a love song and one that, I suspect, dates from a while before the album sessions. When read rather than heard it’s very sweet and tender, a self-motivation reminder that you’ve been in bad scrapes before and always got through them and that time heals all wounds, while there are some things you just have to accept don’t go your way. In Liam’s hands, though, it has quite a different feel, more offensive than defensive: ‘There are some things you’ll carry till the day you die’ he snarls, while the song’s big payoff line is the very Oasisy ‘You should have fucked me when you had the chance’, an ambiguous line that could work for musicians or romantic partners both! Either a sad song trying to sound happy or a happy song trying to sound sad; this is one of those works that changes every time I hear it. Skipping past the awkward blues of ‘I’m A Wheel’ (which really doesn’t work) and we’re at the albums one true masterpiece ‘Just Another Rainbow’. The rest of the album is tentatively happy, the sound of a man sticking his head nervously out of a parapet and being relieved that nobody is waiting to knock it off anymore, but ‘Rainbow’ is right back in the depths of despair. Liam sounds great angrily turning on a fake hope that once got him out of bed, the chance for a comeback that faded away to nothing as something dashes his hopes yet again, leaving so much bitterness and resentment with nowhere to go. Liam is mixed to sound in the distance and sings to just squire’s echo-drenched guitar for the first half of the song, which in context sounds like a mirage shimmering away to nothing. The moment when the song takes a break for a middle eight where Liam recites the colours of the rainbow is simultaneously the most wretched and the best few seconds on the album: a real ‘they’re not going to try to get away with this are they?’ Alas the song fizzles out after this, falling back on a lesser guitar solo (which tries hard to copy ‘Champagne Supernova’, but it’s not that sort of a song) and a straight repeat of where we started, but for three minutes there this album doesn’t simply remind you of past successes but creates a whole new one in a whole direction neither man had ever taken before. The trippiest song and therefore the most Stones Roses moment on the album (albeit without their natural swagger or warmth) it makes you wish Liam and John had met halfway a few more times across this more Oasisy sounding record because it’s genius.

‘Love You Forever’ is more straightforward and one many fans, perhaps not noticing the lyric credit, have assumed is for Oasis: however it’s not Oasisy so much as Beatlesy, with lyric references to ‘I Feel Fine’ and ‘Across The Universe’ and a musical stomp accompaniment straight out of ‘Hey Bulldog’. Only Liam can roar an affectionate love song with a sneer and make it sound like a horror movie and he sounds mighty powerful on a song about ‘growing old disgracefully’ and promising loyalty ‘till the end of time’. It could have been stupidly simple as just another squires solo song but here is where the collaboration works best, with that sneer inspiring some similarly cutting guitarwork that lift the song to another dimension, giving what should be soft and gooey so many right angles you feel in danger of cutting yourself. John is having such a great time playing he even kicks back in for an instrumental coda at the end that the other musicians clearly aren’t ready for: as I’ve said a few times down the (gulp) sixteen years I’ve been writing this site it’s always a sign of a good album when its full of big improvised fadeouts, because if the musicians don’t want to stop for lunch then chances are neither do you as a listener. ‘Make It Up As You Go Along’ is a gift for all the sarcastic reviewers who hate both bands and say that’s all they’ve been doing since 1990, which makes this critics put-down song delicious, as Liam gets to sing ‘thankyou for your thoughts and prayers – and fuck you too!’ A song about stripping away the myth of art, by showing that every piece ever made however great was made up by someone who is only Human and born to make mistakes, despite the very Oasis attack it features the most Rosesy lyric on the album and even comes with a verse of acid trip psychedelic stream of consciousness gibberish (‘I got a candy coloured tangerine flake streamline, baby!’ before mention of ‘green and blue’ marijuana). It’s all very promising but alas just ends up going round in circles rather than going somewhere new: after all, a song about the magic of creativity should be, if nothing else, creative. It’s no ‘Up In the Sky’ in the criticising critics stakes either, but for a sixty-one-year-old and a fifty-one-year-old (John being the elder) it still rocks with some more power than it ought to.

‘You’re Not The Only One’ is the most naturally Liamy song here, with the banging piano that filled up many a song on the under-rated first Beady Eye set ‘Different Gear, Still Speeding' (still my pick as the best post-Oasis spinoff album). The opening line ‘something in the way she talks’ has a real debt to The Beatles’ ‘Something’ and it is indeed another love song, one about mutual respect that might be John writing for Liam or might be about his past band or past loved ones, or all of the above. A tale of finding a kindred spirit just when you felt you were going to be alone forever, it’s about the joy of finding purpose and direction after thinking that you were doomed to live out the rest of your life as a failure. John plays another fine guitar solo that’s much more the sort of thing Noel would play in the olden days, while the guitar weaving is pure Bonehead/Gem. Perhaps the most interesting song is ‘I’m So Bored’, a track that could have come from either man’s first albums back in the 1990s and sounds like the whine of a younger generation wondering where the artists are who represent them. It’s an open secret amongst musicians that we’re living in a really dark time for music: Spotify pays their artists next to nothing so the only way people make money from music nowadays is by charging their loyal fans a small fortune to own a physical deluxe copy that costs thousands with a ‘free’ parrot once featured on the album cover or something similarly daft, or by making something so safe and so generic that it appeals to the largest common denominator and sells across the board to every demographic. Nearly everything sounds the same nowadays and even the best of modern music simply reminds you of something good from past years that they’re desperately trying to copy. Liam has one of the best ‘complaining’ voices in the world and John has great fun writing for his persona, while Liam has great fun singing for it on a quick-stepping fast-turning song that’s one long angry old man diatribe about how nothing is like it used to be and everything keeps going round in circles. ‘I’m the monster, I’m the mod!’ spits out Liam on a very ‘I Am The Walrus’ style song about being unsatisfied in every aspect of your life, with another gutsy guitar solo and some particularly fine drumming by Joey Waronker. The album should have ended there, with Liam’s toddler whine fading away into the distance treated with more and more echo until he sounds like a relic from a bygone era. ‘Mother Nature’s Song’ is an anticlimax by comparison and though it’s nice and indeed rare to hear Liam singing about saving the planet, it feels like the wrong song in his hands and Squire sounds on less solid ground too. The slower tempo shows up the limitations in the band without all the noise and bluster to cover the streamlined sound that tried hard to ape an Oasis wall of sound without as many costly overdubs.

Even so, this is a more than worthy album overall, one that feels a bit special, a collaboration no one was expecting and which certainly no one was expecting to work as well as this. Full credit to the engineers who make Liam’s voice sound better than its sounded in a long time, though bigger credit still goes to John for getting inside Liam’s head and writing words that sound right for him to sing (a lot harder than it sounds: even Noel seemed to lose the knack somewhere around 2002).In private John’s a very reserved sort of chap who barely says a word and he’s been in his element letting Liam do all the talking in interviews the way he used to do with Ian, despite having a lot to say and get off his chest on song. John, clearly, always secretly wanted to write for the power of Oasis without the bother of the fame, while Liam always wanted to be as cool as the Stone Roses and in a band with a little more cut than mainstream appeal. Now they get to be both together and clearly each is loving their part in this last-minute project. Though the album cover, a shopping basket filled with products that have the name of each of the songs stamped on them, cheekily suggests the collaboration is purely to make big bucks it sounds far more natural and organic than that, a true meeting of likeminded souls who are in much the same place in their life, coming to terms with life beyond the band that made them famous and working on their gratitude, with sudden bursts of uncontrollable anger still below the surface. It’s a more than worthy addition to both their back catalogues, even if it lacks the variety and courage to be a truly great album the way that all three of Liam’s solo records have been in their different ways (particularly the first and third). It’s most definitely not ‘another Revolver’, as the always effusive Gallagher hyperbole had it when this album came out: in truth it’s more of a ‘With The Beatles’, an album that polishes everything the band had already done in a new slightly more modified format rather than a pioneering LP that went somewhere different with every track. Even so, I say that as someone who really likes ‘With The Beatles’ and I like this album a lot too. Not quite a masterpiece maybe and it will be interesting to see if both men ever go back to their day jobs after this, whether this is a full-time project or a side hobby (stop press: Noel’s been on the phone, the oasis reunion is on!) and I’m sad that their joint gigs have just been playing this album without Squire turning Oasis songs into acid house or having Liam tearing through the layers of irony on the Roses songs and making them his own; three hours of that might have been the concert of the decade down right (‘Toniiiiight I’m an acid house star!’) Even so, for the most part, this record pretty successfully finds common ground between the two men and has an energy and crackle that sounds like the best of Oasis with the sensitivity that’s behind the best Stones Roses too.

2) Isobel Campbell “Bow To Love”

Well, she finally did it. After eight albums with or without much missed collaborator Mark Lanegan best described as ‘promising’ the Belle and Sebastian singer delivers an album that’s pretty much brilliant from start to finish. Not nearly brilliant, or half-brilliant, or with enough promise to bode well for next time, but actually brilliant. ‘Bow To Love’ is one of those rare records that does everything: treads new ground, consolidates lessons learned on previous albums, finds new things to say about old subjects and works as a cohesive whole. It’s a ghostly, haunting, thirteen-track soliloquy on the state of a world in a state of disrepair that desperately needs rebooting, full of lost drive lost ideals and lost chances, held together with Isobel’s more usual personal themes of lost love. It’s a record that starts with the line that ‘everything falls apart you son of a bitch’ and ends forty five minutes of aborted attempts to recover and regroup, with the soothing balm of Dire Straits cover ‘Why Worry?’, a song that’s equally parts hopeful and mocking. How can life possibly go right again you might ask yourself after listening to an album full of ghosts and mistakes and failed opportunities and the general sense that the centre cannot hold and life is getting worse for all of us. It was a record that already made quite a dent in my subconscious back in June when it came out but even more now the world took another lurch to the right. It’s been a bumpy decade or so for the singer, who lost her record deal after falling out with Lanegan (for booking a solo tour and pinching her guitarist without telling her), who then later made up with the promise of a fourth duets album only for him to get sick and die from covid at the age of just 57, with covid also overshadowing Isobel’s planned big return with ‘Voices In The Sky’ that came out in the first half of 2020 when fans were too busy struggling to survive to care about comeback records. For this album the timing seems right though – Isobel’s chuntering and angry bitter lyrics about the chaos of Brexit, the incompetence of the conservatives, the increasingly unstoppable curveball of climate change, the rise of artificial intelligence and the lack of hope in the world might have been too much with another voice, but when sung with Isobel’s half-whisper, sounding like a little girl o the verge of discovering that Father Christmas isn’t real, it works a treat, idealism and realism colliding head on. By the end of the record you feel as if you’ve been on a journey to hell – but also back again. Maybe a little.

The record starts strongly with ‘Everything Falls Apart’ which feels as if it’s about all the above happening at once and like Campbell’s best work with Lanegan is a tough streetwise song that disarms you by being sung in such a gentle caring manner. Read the lyric sheet with its constant swearing (‘You son of a bitch!’ is the hookline) and it could be a modern rap song, but melodically it’s a summer of love hippie song, with a skip and a dance. ‘Cyber Vacuous’ is a more typical sort of Campbell lyric, ambiguous as to whether it’s being aimed at a real lover hiding behind faceless technology or a chat spam robot trying to sell her something, but driving her mad with their incessant obliviousness to the way she wants to be wooed all the same. ‘Do Or Die’ has nearly the same melody before a sudden urging power pop chorus suddenly switches the lights on, leaping headlong from a downtrodden minor key to a triumphant major. Lyrically it’s the most revealing song on the album about how, after all those years left waiting and her career put on hold, Isobel thought she might never record a song again. She spends the song still torn in two, delighted at being moved to write again and horrified at the sheer amount of things going wrong that have caused her to pick up a pen, worrying that her comeback might be too late to do us any good. Of all the songs o the album this one sounds most like Isobel’s ‘Gentle Waves’ records cut anonymously at the tail end of ‘Belle and Sebastian’, with the same sense of empty space, haunted quiet despair and an excellent string arrangement. ‘Spider To The Fly’ is perhaps the most straightforward song here and the closest to her solo career in the main, with Isobel being tempted by a predator she knows is bad for her and a lovely sighing melodyline straight out of her one-time boyfriend Stuart Murdoch’s back catalogue. ‘Tell me what my life’s about’ she teases, both because she’d tired of being mansplained to and because she’s still trying to work it out herself. It’s the catchiest song on the album that, had it been sung with full power, could have been a big hit for someone.

Talking of Murdoch, ‘Second Guessing’ refers to a flame from the old days and is similar indeed to Murdoch’s latest set of lyrics, sprinkled across the last trio of B and S projects ‘Days Of The Bagenold Summer’ ‘A Bit Of Previous and ‘Late Developers’, reflecting on a longterm relationship that’s forever in a n awkward dance, ‘two steps forward and three steps back’. Officially both are happily married to other people now and haven’t talked in decades, but could it be?...I mean, they both spent the entire first half of their careers singing about each other Abba/Fleetwood Mac style, so it would only be natural to still be writing about each other and that strange disconcerting feeling of watching someone you loved going their own way without you in their lives after you were both once everything to each other. If so then this song seems to spell an end to the fling Murdoch raised rather hopefully last time out, as it becomes ‘crystal clear we’re headed down a wrong track’. It’s a strong song, with another very Murdoch-ish grace and beauty surrounding an inner steel and stubbornness. The title track is next and has the silliest melody, being a sort of cowboy-children’s novelty song, but has the ‘other’ most revealing lyrics of the album. The phrase ‘Bow To Love’ is a clever one and Isobel uses the ambiguity well: it’s a speeded up tale of romance that in different verses finds the singer ecstatic and dead miserable. At first she wants to bow to love in gratitude of what a wonderful gift it is to be hit by cupid’s bow, then realises that she’s better off alone because ‘it’s not enough to bow to love’ and that in the past she’s bowed over too far and compromised too much of who she is, so she doesn’t need it anymore. Plus, of course she’s a cellist whose long found music intertwined with love; what she does to find a little romance I her life if pick up her bow and go back to work. Just as the album is getting a bit samey we get the mysteriously titled ‘4316’ (Mark Lanegan would have been 59? The single was released on his birthday in fact) and a whole bunch of modern technology on a catchy throbbing track that was deservedly picked as the album single. Lyrically it might well be about Mark or maybe even Murdoch again, reflecting as it does on a long journey between two people who clearly know each other really well, someone who ‘gave me my best and gave me my worst’. ‘I don’t hate anyone!’ the song explodes, in just the same way Murdoch once sang ‘I don’t love anyone’, adding a cheeky ‘not even you’ before both saluting a ‘dream I’m still riding on’ and talking about the misery of finding out that ‘the emperor had no clothes’ (a phrase that, in context, means lots of things at once: that a hero turned out to be ordinary, that the music business turned out to be a nightmare rather than a dream or that a platonic relationship that offered innocent joy turned sexual against her wishes). It’s another nicely catchy song, perhaps the best balance of production, melody and words on the album.

‘Dopamine’ is the prettiest song, a sleepy psychedelic ballad about that hit of happy chemicals you get from being in love, most likely inspired by her marriage to one time engineer and this album’s producer Chris Sczech who provides his loudest contribution across the record yet, with a slow burn of throbbing strings that work well against Isobel’s direct voice. The other half of the relationship wants to go fast and Isobel is the ‘tortoise’ who just wants to bathe in the chemicals of new love without worrying what the future holds – it sounds like a problem waiting down the road maybe especially with the edginess of the shimmering sounds, but for now it’s – just about – the happiest song here. Rather fittingly this song releases lots of nice chemicals in this reviewer’s brain too with its shooting whooshing happy noises. Which is immediately dispelled by the album’s angriest song ‘Keep Calm, Carry On’. It’s a bitter sarcastic song about going home to the town of your birth and no longer recognising it, now that so many shops have shut and the people you used to know seem worn down and beaten. The lyrics make it one of the first AAA songs to mention Brexit by name (I thought there would be lots by now) while it recalls Graham Nash’s gorgeous song about returning home to Manchester ‘Cold Rain’, not least in all the references to the weather with a touch of Beatles in the chorus line about how we all need to get back to where we came from, as people as a town as a community and as a country, because we’ve been sleepwalking around hoping things would get better for too damn long. ‘Saturday’s Son’ is probably for Chris too, an update for one of my favourite Isobel songs ‘Thursday’s Child’, the closer to 2006’s patchy ‘Milkwhite Sheets’. Finding herself at a crossroads with a lover who works hard for a living, his battles still only ‘half won’, Isobel isn’t sure which way to turn on a lowkey pretty folk lament that’s the album’s quiet grower, too slight to notice at first but is the one that will stay in your head the longest once you know the album well (for the record Murdoch was born on a Sunday so ether she’s got it wrong or this song definitively isn’t for him, despite what some fans naturally assumed).

The closing quartet of songs are the darkest and most complex. Take ‘Take This Poison’ a throbbing pulse of synth notes heard against Isobel’s a capella words about the state of the nation in 2024, forced to drink down things that we know are bad for us without complaining, before urging the listener to ‘hear the word out on the street’ with hope that things will return to normal when we ‘find our feet’. Nicely spooky in a lowkey way, this song recycles the melody from ‘Thursday’s Child’ to atmospheric effect, especially when multiple Isobels suddenly start singing in a round. Heard now, after Trump’s poisonous words of fear trumped ones of love, it’s almost scary. ‘Om Shanti’ is a simple plea for peace, as Isobel tries to find her balance in a world that keeps trying to unsettle her, with a rare (for this album) full band appearance with some especially hypnotic guitars and Isobel’s prettiest singing. It should feel empty (the lyrics simply repeat the title over and over) but after such a tough old album singer and listener both deserve a chillout moment and the chord progression is quite lovely. The song manages the clever art of sounding both troubled and soothed all at once. A brave yet bewildering choice as the album’s second single. ‘You’ sounds like classic Pentangle, as if an old folk song has somehow fallen down a time tunnel and ended up in the exact month when folk-rock made way for psychedelia with a jazz drum shuffle to boot. It’s another pretty hummable melody that hides quite a complex lyric. It’s another love song of sorts, as a lover ‘wasn’t what I planned’ yet ‘supplies every demand’ with ‘magical hands’, before reaching out to damn other couples for being ‘sheep’ that pick partners for all the wrong reasons. There’s something in this song that sounds slightly wrong though, full of shadows and trapdoors, while Isobel’s whispers here make her sound less like the little girl of old and more like a predator turned serial killer, someone who knows she’s taking advantage of someone but is too starved of love to know how to stop. The album then ends with a cover of Dire Straits’ comforting classic ‘Why Worry?’ from their seminal-yet-patchy bestseller ‘Brothers In Arms’. The song trades in the original’s gruff realism for some floaty pixie strings which don’t work quite as well as the rest of the album, but in context of the gloom of the rest of the songs here it works well as a surprise finale, a last burst of hope after an album of dystopian warnings though one born more out of hope that things will get better than the certainty with which mark Knopfler once sang it.

In all, then, a pretty decent collection of typically pretty songs that, nevertheless, dig a bit deeper than all of Isobel’s records. Not that Bow To love’ is a departure from them or anything like that as the same characteristic touches, the innocence and the despair, are all there and Isobel’s keening breathy little-girl-lost voice is much the same as it always was. Isobel hasn’t sold out or traded in her strengths despite the time away and the fact this album really needs to re-launch her career, but then nor should she have to; she was always a rare and unique talent, one that deserved to be respected on a Kate Bush level, a feminist eccentric doing things totally her way. For instance about six months after the album came out Isobel released a deluxe edition of ‘Bow T Love’ for the Christmas market. The second disc isn’t made up of outtakes or documentaries or karaoke singalongs like lesser artists but the entire album heard again. This time in French. Filling a whole album from beginning to end was always the Achilles heel for Isobel after so many years in a band where she got one or two songs if she was lucky against the sheer prolificness of her boyfriend’s work, but the long time away has given her the time to sharpen her skills and allow only the best songs through. Is ‘Bow To Love’ quite as complex, beautifully made and emotionally resonant as Belle and Sebastian? Probably not (though I was disappointed with their last album ‘Late Developers’, which this one smashes in every way). It is, however, proof that we were right to think that the bored looking cellist in the corner really was one to watch and that she too was a distinctive singer-songwriter with a unique voice who deserved her own space.

3) Roger McGuinn, Chris Hillman and Marty Stuart “Sweethearts Of The Rodeo” (Live)

This set has been rather a long time coming. The two ex Byrds and their Gram Parsons soundalike pal Marty set out on the road for the 50th anniversary of their pioneering country-rock hybrid album in 2018, then sat on the tapes for a full six years before their surprise release in October. I confess I’m not much of a fan of the original record despite it’s colossal reputation: a couple of Gram’s songs are mini masterpieces (‘Hickory Wind’ ‘One Hundred Years From Now’) but for the most part it sounded like a pure rock band playing at country and not quite knowing how it worked, with weirdly Christian gospel songs nestling with opposite songs about outlaws and drinking, never quite sure if it wanted to shock or us or have us pray for its forgiveness. Despite ‘Rodeo’s fame as the first ever country-rock album many other bands got there first too, including The Monkees and Grams’ own band The International Submarine Band (whose lone album ‘Safe At Home’ is a lot more convincingly half and half than the often uneasy mix on ‘Rodeo’). For me ‘Rodeo’ is the weakest Byrds album, bar the eponymous reunion record, if only because it has the least actual Byrd input of any of them and replaces their always progressive sound with retro tales of traditions and legends that should have long since buried. That said I know a whole load of Byrd fans disagree with me and call the original album their favourite. And dang me, if listening to this fine concert album if I’m not beginning to see what they mean for the first time. It’s not that anything is that wildly different, just that these songs are played by musicians who have an extra five decades’ experience behind them now, ones who better understand that putting a rock beat behind country music is a little different to simply sticking a beat behind folk music, that it has a different lilt and feel. Chris, so often stuck at the back in Byrds gigs, is clearly having the most fun he’s had in years, totally at home here in a countryish setting after years in the Flying Burrito Brothers (with Gram) and the Desert Rose Band recording lots of songs like these. Roger, too, has really embraced the part of an old troubadour keeping old traditions alive with his ‘Folk Den Project’ gig and there’s a lot of overlap with country songs sung round a campfire – far more so than the psychedelic jazz The Byrds had been pioneering before ‘Rodeo’ came out the first time. Marty is a great find too, a one-time Johnny Cash sideman whose been making his own solo records since the 1980s; you’ll never replace a one-off like Gram but he gets closer than you might think, doing his songs proud.

‘I haven’t had this much fun in forty years’ said Chris in a period interview. Sometimes that sense of fun doesn’t always make it to record when people say that, but in this case it does: a tour that started through sadness (Roger and Chris were both close to Tom Petty who died suddenly in 2017, while Chris’ house burned down shortly before the tour taking many treasured possessions with it) ends up a joyous experience for all the men concerned and ‘Rodeo’ never sounded crisper or brighter. Chris sings a gorgeous version of ‘100 Years’, Roger has aged nicely into quirky reflective Dylan track ‘Nothing was Delivered’ and Chris is now at just at the right age to sing ‘I Am A Pilgrim’ from the heart after decades of devotion rather than as a fresh-faced wannabe; only Roger’s slogfest through a tuneless ‘Christian Life’, which makes you want to take up any religion except this one, palls. It’s the songs that weren’t on ‘Rodeo’ given a similar country-rock makeover, though, that shine the most: ‘Old John Robertson’, Chris’ song from ‘Notorious Byrd Brothers’ about an eccentric adult he used to laugh at as a child who seemed much more interesting now that he’d dropped the square friends and become an eccentric adult himself, sounds great in the new surroundings, the biker anthem wasn’t Born To Follow’ sounds terrific with a country flavour to it (but still with a ‘psychedelic’ outbreak in the middle, played on country instruments!) and a country-jazz ‘Eight Miles High’ works a lot better than I ever expected it to, the old school hitting the even-older school head on in a glorious collision that makes this work of mind expanding genius sound as traditional as a fiddle. Had the 1968 Byrds been better friends (only Roger survived intact to the next LP from the quartet who started the album), been older and with more life experience then they might well have got ‘Rodeo’ to swing like this and it might have ended up near my favourite Byrds album from the beginning. As it is, better late than never: it was a joy having these two old friends back in the saddle together for the first time in nearly forty years and even more of a joy that we have a souvenir of it to treasure at last after having to make do with odd-angled mobile camera footage and hissy bootlegs.

4) Neil Young “Archives III”

I don’t believe it: we waited some thirty years to get ‘Archive I’ and now here’s the third set a mere four years after the second one. I was all prepared for a lengthy wait; so was my bank manager given that it’s taken something along that time to pay the last set off! What’s more Volume III is the longest Archives box yet, covering eleven years this time rather than the previous four or five (a commercial decision, apparently, as Neil didn’t think his ‘Geffen’ years would sell as well, which is a shame – surely he’s learnt what fanatics his fans are by now? We’ll buy anything – and frequently have!) across a massive 222 songs (admittedly rather a lot of them brief seconds-long ‘raps’ between live recordings before you get too excited). It all seems a bit too much, what with a massive shelf-sinking box set containing seventeen CDs and five blu-rays, recorded in the years between 1976 and 1987 (so basically ‘American Stars ‘n’ Bars’ to ‘Landing On Water’ though it actually begins with the greatest two Crazy Horse gigs ever, at Tokyo’s Budokan and London’s Hammersmith Odeon’ the acoustic shows were both included at the end of ‘Archives II’ weirdly - and ends with the ‘pop songs’ recorded during early sessions for ‘Freedom’). It’s an odd place to draw the line, with the rebuilding after the ‘ditch trilogy’ reaching a high commercial peak with the folk of ‘Comes A Time’ and the punk of ‘Rust Never Sleeps’ then the trough through the entire Geffen ‘experimental’ years and on to the early rebuilding with Reprise. Goodness knows how Neil got the rights off Geffen’s estate to all these recordings following their legendary bust-up for Neil Young making albums ‘that didn’t sound like Neil Young’ too: I fully expected those to delay this set more than the other two!

The sheer size and scale of this set proves that anything is fair game for Neil’s mercurial brain and that there are few musical avenues he hasn’t explored in his quest to keep things ‘real’. Of course there have been more than a few cul-de-sacs too, albums that few fans care for like the rockabilly ‘Everybody’s Rockin’ and the heavy metal ‘Landing On Water’. However the brilliance of sets like these is that it sets everything back in context: rather than hear these albums in isolation as finished products you get to hear them as songs come and go across years, tried out in different styles till finding their final homes and get to see each individual album as part of a longer running ‘series arc’ of ideas and situations running through Neil’s ever-busy brain. As with the first two volumes the best of this set comes with the surprises that might not look much from the outside but turn out to be the biggest surprises, utterly different renditions of songs we thought we knew backwards. There are lots of great moments on this set. The much-bootlegged and much-loved ‘Like A Hurricane’ from ‘Hammersmith’ is so long overdue an official release. It makes the finished record sound like a gentle breeze, so passionate and powerful is it, the band playing directly into the face of a giant fan on stage. I’ve never been big fan of the noisy stomp ‘Drive Back’ from ‘Zuma’ about Neil’s split with Carrie Snodgrass and all the many visitors she used to bring round to party but, played live a year later with lashings of noisy guitar and an extra cutting verse (‘I guess somebody is on your mind, look into my eyes let me find you, from yourself and all your old friends, every god man comes to have it…I won’t be there, I won’t call you, drive back to your home town, I wanna wake up with no one around!’) it’s suddenly one of Neil’s toughest, grittiest songs, one last bit of self pity wrenched from the heart even in an era when most biographies say he was having a great old time. There’s half a disc of rehearsals for ‘American Bars’, the first time Neil met never mind sang with Nicolette Larson who instantly clicks with him in a way few singers can – uncharacteristically murky as the sound of this disc might be, weak and cliched as many of the songs are, stop starty as the sessions might be, it’s a great chance to be a fly on the wall for a recording not even the biggest fan even knew existed until this box’s press release. There’s a lovely version of Neil singing his own lullaby ‘Barefoot Floors’ too, written for newborn son Ben and given to Nicolette for her 1994 album ‘Sleep Baby Sleep’.

We get to hear bits from entirely unreleased albums: 1978’s ‘Oceanside Countryside’ turns out to be ‘Comes A Time Mark I’ with an exquisite early version of ‘Comes A Time’ itself plus folky early versions of future fan favourites like ‘Pocahontas’ with a few oddities like bitter nostalgic cover ‘It Might Have Been’ and Crazy Horse spinoff album leftover ‘Dance Dance Dance’ as well as being the ‘real’ home of future released recordings ‘Lost In Space’ and ‘Love Is A Rose’ that make so much more sense on this album than they do on other compilations and collections. There’s a gorgeous folky version of one of the greatest used-to-be unreleased songs in the Young discography, the aching quaking overwhelmed ‘Bad News Comes To Town’ from 1977 a decade before it was drenched in horns for the Bluenotes sound. A live 1977 recording of the bootleg favourite ‘Lady Wingshot’ that has a real oompah flavour and sounds a bit like a first draft of ‘The Ways Of Love’, a terrific live solo show from the Boarding House in 1980 that features bootleg favourite ‘Shots’, the hard-nosed angry rant from ‘Re-Ac-Tor’ played as a sweet acoustic ballad. A ‘Hey Hey My My’ played as a marathon jam with Devo and stretched out to nineteen blistering feedback drenched minutes, a dinosaur totally owning in the new wave (the version from the ‘Human Highway’ film but with a lot of studio chatter at the start). The fed up song ‘Get Up’ that’s as monotonous as the rest of the album it was recorded for, ‘Re-Ac-Tor’, yet somehow more interesting, as Neil resents the ticking clock that means he just doesn’t get a break in between caring for his poorly son Ben. ‘Sunny Inside’, later treated to horns for Neil’s ‘next’ album ‘This Note’s For You’, is also very different played with a full Crazy Horse crunch that makes it sound like an entirely different song, sarcastic and angry rather than bouncy and cute (and I’m still not sure which version I prefer more). 1982’s half unreleased ‘Island In The Sun’ album (where the more ‘normal’ songs from Trans started life) has long been top of my wants list and doesn’t disappoint: ‘Raining In Paradise’ and ‘You Got Love’ are top-notch songs while an early and very pretty ‘Silver and Gold’ (finally released as the title track of a Neil album in the year 2000) is gorgeous, so much better than the re-recording you want to go back in time and ask Neil what he was playing at. An early ‘Razor Love’ played with the crunch of ‘Landing On Water’ and gurgling croaking synths rather than the cool acoustic gentleness of ‘Silver and Gold’ (Neil was right to take a ‘razor’ to his first go as the acoustic re-recording is much nicer, but it has a very different feel and is fascinating to hear). The cracking bootleg favourite ‘Road Of Plenty’ – a first stab at what became ‘Eldorado’ – that’s far lighter on its feet without the synths getting in the way even if the lyrics are about a car journey rather than, y’know, the history of civilisation told as a bull fight. A first basic stab at ‘American Dream’, the future title track of a far too poppy CSNY album that sounds light years here played with full bitter irony (and no sodding pan pipes!) Such is Neil’s muse you never quite know what’s going to happen next as, the first time round at least the listener gets to play one of the greatest games of musical hide-and-seek ever, wondering where the next surprise is going to come from.

There’s a real joy, too, to owning rare or previously unreleased films: the visuals that go with the audio of concerts in Japan in 1976, the solo show at the Boarding House in 1978 included as a soundtrack, the ‘Rust Never Sleeps’ concert film from 1979, the Trans live tour from 1982, a so-so show at the Catalyst in 1984, the unfinished warts-and-all Crazy Horse documentary film ‘Muddy Track’ which made pioneering use of a ‘secret cam’ to record people’s thoughts on the tour without any cameraman being in the room – Neil was reputedly so shocked by the vitriol directed towards him he stuck it in a vault to never see the light of day again, though this many decades and similar tales later it isn’t quite as insightful or as rude as fans have long been led to believe, a rather weird animated film by Micah Nelson (Willie’s son and Promise Of The Real guitarist) that ‘tells the story’ of ‘Trans’ using ideas Neil once had planned for a ‘video EP’ (all the rage 1982-84) that Geffen refused to finance (which is interesting indeed but doesn’t add much we didn’t already get from the lyrics and would have benefitted from more input from Neil) and the mad ‘Human Highway’, a mad movie from 1983 o-written with Dean Stockwell in which Neil plays the comedy role of nuclear power station mechanic Lionel and Dennis Hopper lays the hapless Cracker filmed in between bouts in an insane asylum, something almost certainly acerbated by this weird film (I’ve long wondered if it’s the end result of the Stockwell collaboration Neil originally planned to go alongside the song and album ‘After The Goldrush’ – the similarities, about wondering what will become of us in the future, what aliens think of us and radioactive ‘birds’ are there if you look for them though admittedly this weird film about nuclear waste could be about anything – and knowing Neil probably is. This is a new edit by the way, a ‘director’s cut’ that adds in much of the material cut from the 1982 original. Which begs the question ‘they thought that worked as a highlights reel, complete with 10 minute Devo jams, extensively choreographed cover of Woody Guthrie’s ‘It Takes A Worried Man To Sing A Worried Song’ as you’ve never seen it before, performed by nuclear workers in radiation suits dancing as the world explodes and endless scenes of Neil gurning?!’

It wouldn’t be the ‘Archives’ project without some really questionable decisions too though. Firstly the omissions: for this price (£230 at the time of writing!) you’d expect to have everything Neil recorded in this period in there somewhere but large swathes are missing, including about half of every album from ‘Hawks and Doves’ through to ‘Life’ (including some of the best tracks – where is ‘Like An Inca’ ‘Payola Blues’ ‘Misfits’ and ‘Mideast Vacation’?) There are whole swathes of unreleased stuff that just isn’t here: nothing from the Stills-Young Band album ‘Long May You Run’ that feels a bit wiped from history (not even the CSNY versions long believed destroyed that mysteriously turned up in part on the Stills box set ‘Carry On’, while there are lots of great bootlegs of the tour dates far tastier than the record – surely Neil recorded those in better sound than we’ve got too?) the original ‘Old Ways’ had a whole bunch of songs Neil never returned to, great numbers like ‘Leavin’ The Top 40 Behind’ (written when Neil turned 39) ‘Hillbilly Band’ ‘Your Love Again’ and ‘Time Off For Good Behaviour’ that are probably four of my five favourite songs from either ‘Old Ways’ sessions that have been axed again in favour of clumsy-footed or near-enough identical originals compared to the re-recordings. There are no real alternate studio takes of any of these songs either: I would give anything to hear rehearsal takes of ‘Trans’ without the overdubs of vocoder vocals for instance, while the studio chat for the ‘Transband’, made up of musicians from Neil’s Buffalo Springfield, Crazy Horse, CSNY and multiple solo projects all working together must have been a treat. There’s a lot more of interest out there from the Shocking Pinks and International harvesters tours of 1983 and 1984 than we get too. As with the first two volumes as well far far too many tracks that would have been hugely impressive heard together for the first time have been diluted through the fact they’ve already been released in the last few years as well, making this box feel like a cheat, one of those films that put all the god stuff in the trailer and pretended it was better than it really is; by all means stick them out afterwards cheaper for fans who can’t afford the whole thing and want to cherry-pick but it robs the set of much of its’ wow’ factor (that’s ‘Hitch-hiker’ ‘Chrome Dreams’, ‘A Treasure’ a weird CD amalgamation of highlights from live show ‘Songs For Judy’ and The Ducks show from 1977 - where Neil played anonymously as just another pub band guitarist in a band with Bob Mosely and Jeff Blackburn before it got too big – that has been reduced to tatters, cut down from twenty-five tracks to nine so you only get the ‘Neil vocal’ songs and not the rest, which means you’re missing out on some great bits of Neil guitar). Given that you could pretty much buy the entire 64 Neil Young album collection secondhand on CD for the small fortune this set is selling for it seems ridiculous to me that you actually have to buy other CDs to hear two of these discs complete! Plus which Neil fan dedicated enough to buying up this behemoth didn’t already buy them complete anyway?

It has to be said, too, that there are some truly cringeworthy moments in between all the brilliance: the patronising ‘farmer’ songs from Neil’s live charity performances in 1986 have him trying too hard to sound like new pal Willie Nelson without really getting what being a farmer is all about and they’re easily the worst things Neil wrote till ‘Greendale’ (‘Nothing Is Perfect (In God’s Perfect Plan)’ and ‘Last Of His Kind’), an unhappy remnant of his brief period as a rightwing Reagan supporter on the ‘wrong’ side of history. ‘Soul Of A Woman’ too is another of those occasional misogynistic Neil songs made worse by having Nicolette singing along, while unheard track ‘Winter Winds’ is as feeble and empty a Neil song as I’ve ever heard with its cheery false horns and boogie woogie riff. That’s not counting the previously released stuff of course: half of ‘American Stars’ much of ‘Re-Ac-Tor’, a fair bit of ‘Everybody’s Rockin’, a lot of ‘Old Ways’ and the vast majority of ‘Landing On Water’ are all pretty uninspired too. Also in keeping with the first two boxes the packaging too leaves a lot to be desired: there’s a pullout ‘filing cabinet’ poster that’s hard to read and even harder to pin up while on the other side there’s a sort of family tree of where these songs ended up and what happened to them, while the rest of this box is white going on being with Neil’s handwritten scrawl all over everything. If you’re going to make a set this big and this expensive and this supposedly definitive you really need to have everything; a better deal for fans would have been to cut it in half and do it more comprehensively regardless of how many copies it sells.

Overall, though, it’s still a really decent set with more unreleased gems in one go than most box sets have track totals. Despite being from one of Neil’s more turbulent and less inspired eras I actually found this a more interesting box song by song than either of the other two – there are less straight folky repeats of similar live shows with identical setlists while the set does good work of summing up the era, when Neil chopped and changed the suit of clothes of the songs he was writing but which all came in different flavours of the new things that were important to him in his era: his family, his friends, his country and his relationship with his maker, all of which kept changing from session to session in his quest for the truth. At least Neil has taken mercy on those of us with bank balances smaller than our postcode by releasing a single disc sampler ’Takes’ featuring one rarity from each CD in the box set and thus covering each era once over; I don’t agree with all the choices (especially in the second half) but as a sampler it works well, giving a decent flavour of all the different styles of the album an making you long to hear more.

5) Alan Hull “Singing A Song In The Morning Light: The Legendary Demo Tapes 1967-70”

Lindisfarne seemed to appear overnight with a string of classic songs between 1970 and 1972 starting with radio hit ‘Lady Eleanor’ but, like a lot of overnight successes, they’d put in years of work before getting that big break together and separately. Alan Hull, for instance, had been on the verge of success so many times between 1967 and 1970 he practically lived there, as a solo act, as a duo with old mate Skip Bifferty and with his original band ‘The Chosen Few’ all on the verge of stardom. Again and again Hull would troop into ‘Impulse Sound’, the recording studio in Wallsend, Newcastle run by his pal Dave Wood to record his latest batch of songs and dream about a day when his hobby could become his full-time job, a practice he continued right up until Lindisfarne’s first big tour on the back of ‘Nicely Out Of Tune’. Hull often said later that his richest period as a songwriter came when no one was listening to him and when he wrote songs in between work as a window cleaner, a psychiatric nurse and basically anything he could get his hands on: Hull married and had children young so for a time did any occupation he could to put money on the table, that struggle to keep going in the face of the daily grind a constant theme of many of these early songs. Throughout Lindisfarne’s career if Hully ever found himself a song or three short he would dip back into this prolific period for something that took his fancy: there are two such songs on the ‘Happy Daze’ album, a song apiece on his first two solo albums, one on 1982 Lindisfarne reunion album ‘Sleepless Nights’(which is really a completely different song bar the title ‘Never Miss Your Water’ and the metre of the words the title is sung to) and a generous helping on the three albums by the original Lindisfarne. Fans have known about these demos for years and clamoured for their release (me included) since his death in 1995 but Alan’s widow Pat has kept a tight rein on her husband’s legacy and has only allowed them out in dribs and dabs down the years: Rubber Records released the wonderfully named 1971 compilation album ‘Take Off Your Head And Listen’ which featured the four Chosen Few songs among lots of others as a bit of a cash-in on the Lindisfarne name including a rather stately early go at ‘We Can Swing Together’, the rather lopsided and bitter folk-rocker ‘Golden Apples’ (a song that could be either about Alan’s own lack of success or a critical commentary on The Beatles’ company gone sour) turned up on the 1980s Lindisfarne rarities set ‘Buried Treasure’, six songs made their way unexpectedly (and anachronistically) as bonus tracks on the CD re-issue of ‘Happy Daze’ and Alan’s son-in-law Dave Hull Denholm made the most of his family connections (he married Alan’s daughter Francesca after working as Lindisfarne’s roadie and later joining the band properly as guitarist) by recording eleven of them on the under-rated 2016 set ‘The Alan Hull Songbook: Some Other Time’. We all knew, though, that these releases were just a trickle from what sounded like a full-blown sea of creativity, a seemingly neverending bag of leftovers that kept giving.

So the biggest joy for many of us is that this set exists at all. Hearing no less than eighty eight of these demos (a full seventy-seven of them unheard in this form and a whopping sixty-three of these songs unheard at all in any form, ever) is quite the experience, a parallel world of all those hit Alan Hull albums that might have been had that big break come through a few years earlier. Though this is an album best heard in small goes rather than all at once it’s the sheer quantity that knocks you out – the sheer amount of hard work and hours that went into songs that nobody heard before Hull picked himself up and went back to a menial job before writing his heart out all over again. We all know now that Hully is one of the greatest songwriters of his generation, with a genius ability to reflect the world around him, but it’s worth remembering that back here almost nobody thought that but him (and even he doubted it some days, with more depressed-sounding songs than we were expecting). The sheer perseverance of the man when all odds were against him as he hones and shapes his craft, slowly but surely, is what you take away from this set the most. You can really hear that development in this chronological too, as Alan learns bit by bit what works in his style and what doesn’t going from naïve to cynical to a more rounded outlook about life in its many shades. The same themes crop up time and time again across these songs for instance but in very different contexts: the love of family (‘Berenice Patricia’ where Hulls’ daughter is struck by so many passing emotions in the pace of a few minutes her dad gets dizzy just watching her, ‘lost in love and touched by fear’ ;‘Song For A Sleeping Princess’ is a psychedelic and surprisingly serious first go at his lovely song ‘For The Bairns’ from ‘Pipedream’ in a far less childish version as daddy Hull sighs about how he dreads his first born’s childish innocence being robbed from her by a cruel world and wishing she could stay his baby forever), Hull’s frustration at the unfairness of people writing him off as a no one just because of his working class roots (‘Better Town’ is a trial version of the songs written for second solo album ‘Squire’ and all the pot shots at town planners who never have to live in their own monstrosities as heard on Lindisfarne albums one and two), lots and lots of boozing (as early as the third song ‘Bang It On The Bass Drum’ he’s declaring ‘It’s summer time and I’ve had a drink, I’ve had so much I can hardly think!’ not to mention the repetitive drinking song ‘Let’s All Get Drunk Now, Huh?’), the injustice of the world in general where some people always have to suffer for others to get ahead (the set’s unheard highlight ‘Sometimes I Wonder’ with a ‘Winter Song’ style take on a kind-hearted tramp struggling to get food while a mean politician scoffs it all) and best of all Alan’s utopian vision that it’s all going to work out if only he – and the world – can keep going (the set’s other unheard highlight ‘Somewhere Out There’), something flickers and dies many times across this set as the years go by without success, only for something to urge him on to keep going for a better day all the same.

All this fans could probably have guessed; Hull never wandered that far from his favourite themes across his career and many of these songs feel more like baby photos of old friends we know and love rather than complete strangers. What is a surprise is the genre clothes that so many of his favourite themes are dressed up in, many of which he dives into wholesale in contrast t the genre-bending and dabbling he goes on to become known for particularly the folk-rock: we start with the very 1966 sound of folk which Hull dabbled in many times in his career but never quite so purely (much of the first quarter of this set is more Fairport Convention than Lindisfarne), move on to freakout total psychedelia (‘Arthur Mclean Morrison Jones’ sounds very much like a flower power era Bee Gees), boogie woogie (‘Swinging Along’ which is Jools Holland forty years early), that sort of weird amalgam of rock, jazz, folk and psychedelia that was everywhere in 1968 (with ‘Schizoid Revolution, a seven minute epic that sounds like every song from The White Album playing at once), prog (‘The Storybook Of Man’ is King Crimson via The Moody Blues), music hall (‘Pub With No Taste’ is positively Victorian), blues (the Skip Bifferty tracks, which really don’t sound as if they belong here despite the Hull credit, the biggest cul-de-sac on the set), that particular kind of 1960s folk protest story song that people stopped making by 1968 (Mary McGhee At Laws Stores’) and lots and lots of Beatley pop. Even so, the amazing thing is that they all sound like ‘him’, even when you can hear how hard Hull is trying hard to be anyone but himself (because he can’t get a break being Alan Hull). Along the way Hully slowly builds his confidence, his guitar playing adding more and more chords to support his growing talents and his piano playing turns by degrees from basic thumping into little nuggets of melodic beauty. The characteristic Hull voice though, unashamedly ‘him’ on every recording with that Newcastle working class twang and sudden switches from agonising emotion to hard-nosed cynicism, is already there from the very first (with one exception, the Lee Marvin style gravel voice of perhaps the set’s oddest entry ‘There Is Nothing Between You And This Song’).

The downside to all this is that this is a fascinating historical document rather than a treasure trove of brilliant material. Among his many other gifts (and unlike many of his idols from Paul McCartney down) Hull always knew what his best songs were so there’s nothing here the equal of his highest peaks or even the songs he returned to later. Not many of these long lost treasures are the sort of thing you’ll play for fun too many times or even twice. There are, mercifully, so many songs here that a few are welcome exceptions: ‘Sometimes I Wonder’ is a sighing folk song that sounds like a first go at ‘Winter Song’, burning with the rage of injustice and misery that Hull sees around him but sung with a quiet compassion too, with a middle verse wondering why other people get all the luck and leave the songwriter behind in his tiny house ‘wondering the point of wondering’ (heh heh little does he know what the future has in store…) Of all the songs here it’s the one that most got away. ‘Somewhere Out There’ has the same chord flow as a lot of the ‘Squire’ album but very different lyrics about how life is ‘a joke, the rules unexplained’, a mystery to be unravelled sometime, somehow, if only the narrator can keep searching. ‘Dream Your Life Away’ would have been my pick for Lindisfarne to record properly had I had the chance to choose, a neat little postmodernist wordplay song with a tight and twisting melody and words about Hull ‘looking round for a poem but all I find is a door!’ as he tries to get his songs heard and entertain people and finds himself reduced from discussing the meaning of the word to good-natured pop ditties. Then there’s ‘All The Way Home’, a delightful and very playful song that sounds like an early ‘Fog On The Tyne’ as a merry (inebriated?) Hull suddenly realises the secret to life and what it all means (but in a very Lindisfarney moment is too busy enjoying it to tell us what it actually is!)

For an eighty-eight track set, though, those are fairly low returns. If anything I’m even more impressed by Hull’s magpie abilities, to take the bits that clearly work out of songs that clearly aren’t and create new songs out of those than I am with his out and out abilities as a writer. Maybe 90% of the best songs here are the ones that he re-recorded with Lindisfarne or as part of his solo career and I don’t think that’s just from over-familiarity or because a full band is playing them: there’s clearly magic in the air when Hull plays ‘Winter Song’ for the first time (in an acoustic recording remarkably similar to the one on Lindisfarne debut ‘Nicely Out Of Tune’, just the odd nuance or word emphasis apart) or when the fledgling Lindisfarne (then still known as Brethren) tentatively perform a wonky but lovely ‘Lady Eleanor’ right at the end, or perhaps best of all ‘River’, the earliest deep cut here wondering about God and life and the universe and everything that became the highlight of ‘Happy Daze’, an under-rated album if ever there was one (though a bluesy ‘You Put The Laff On Me’ from the same LP is clearly undercooked just now). A case in point is the long-awaited much yearned-for ‘Clear White Light’, one of its author’s most celebrated songs and one we’ve long known dates from this time when Hull was working in a hospice and inspired by the sad stories his patients told him with their dying breaths. Lindisfarne released ‘Part Two’ of the song on their debut LP, a joyous sunny burst of optimism that we might all get to live on without pain or fear in heaven and meet again which, despite being written by a lifelong atheist asking questions rather than providing answers, has just enough power and certainty there to leave you feeling uplifted, your heart aflame with possibilities. Fans have wondered for over half a century if the unreleased part one could possibly be as good – alas, it isn’t, being a rather ordinary speak-song that’s far more depressed and discouraged, wondering what life is for when we’re just going to be forgotten, the ‘clear white light’ here the realisation that life is empty blackness rather than the lights of Heaven.

Had the majority of these songs been recorded by anyone else they’d have been forgotten for good reason. But of course they’re not. Alan Hull died so young (just fifty when he had a fatal heart attack at home after falling ill at bandmate Rod Clements’ birthday party) that there simply aren’t all that many songs of his around so fans treasure each and every one of them as if they’re precious jewels, even the occasional one from the 1980s Lindisfarne albums or the later solo records or the lone album fooling about with new wave band radiator that in truth never dazzled anywhere near as bright. Yes the songs we have here aren’t, by and large, anything like as precious as the ones we know and love and if you come to this set expecting to find another twenty ‘Lady Eleanors’ you’re going to be sadly disappointed: a lot of what we have here are works in progress, with much of disc four minute-long fragments. However this set adds another three-quarters to the Alan Hull discography all in one go. If nothing else as an insight into a songwriter, as a chance to get inside his head and see him grow in confidence and ability, to hear him create masterpieces not out of instant magic but the sheer hard slog of writing and writing and writing until song-writing becomes second nature it’s as valuable as any archive set you can buy. How brilliant that, after so long hearing about these demos we finally get to actually hear them and all in one go too pretty much rather than in a series of dwindlingly interesting volumes or as bits and pieces scattered across yet more compilation albums. Remarkably, too, some 99% of them are in perfect sound and could have been recorded yesterday, better in quality even than most of the Lindisfarne albums these days. In other words if you want to know what the great man was all about it’s probably best not to start here – but as a place to return when you know just how wonderful a catalogue the rest of it is, boy, is it a neat way to end.

6) Mark Knopfler “The Boy”

Mark Knopfler releases are like busses –you wait six years for one then three come along all at once. Or, if you happen to live in a seaside town, they’re a bit like carnivals: empty most of the year but suddenly with a hubbub of activity in a small period of time. Carnivals are the theme of this standalone EP released by Mark a month after his all-star ‘Going Home’ single and the full ‘One Deep River’ album and a suitable encore to what many fans have begun calling the last release of all (technically Mark has only said he’s retiring from touring, not making music, but at seven year gaps between albums and the general ‘farewell’ element of these two projects you have to wonder if there’s a more final end planned here, if only as a ‘just in case’ thing). Released as a record store day exclusive ‘The Boy’ is very like the main album in that it looks at an aspect of Mark’s past and wonders what might have happened to the characters he remembers passing by in his youth, the difference being that this is a standalone piece because they’re all connected to the carnivals of his 1950s youth he loved so much (and where he first played music) and as a sort of extended metaphor for where Mark’s career went after he first picked up a guitar. Returning to the monochrome Tyneside of ‘Tunnel Of Love’ also takes us back nearly a full circle, with the running theme of a boxer walking into a carnival ring to defeat all newcomers a handy metaphor for the music business. ‘Mr Solomon Said’ starts off as a character song about a boxer headed for the big time, Mark a ‘country boy’ watching and cheering him on. The song swaps halfway through so that now it’s the narrator whose name is in lights, signing up to a life he never expected full of lightbulbs flashing and constant attention with all mention of boxing gone – Mark is surely writing his own experience of stardom here, wondering if it was ever really worth it. This is a curio lowkey opener, the stylised 1930s stylings a welcome change if you come to this track straight after the album’s bluesy folk, but it’s a style that demands a lightness of touch that Mark’s more lived in, low key voice can’t quite match. The title track picks up the same theme, a teenage singer-songwriter whose surely Mark leaving the familiarity of Newcastle for the bright lights of London, with no more luggage from his past than a sandwich. If this is meant to be autobiography, though, then it’s something of a fairytale version: Mark wasn’t really that young in real life (he was in his late twenties, which might seem like ‘a boy’ to him now he’s in he’s 75 but was old compared to his contemporaries). This song, too switches gears halfway through and has Mark visiting a boy whose trying to make it big after ‘turning pro so young’ – could this be his younger brother David? A final verse ties this character back in to the boxer of the previous song. It’s a sweet enough song but, like the LP, the lyrics are let down by a tune that rather noodles it’s way floating rather than socking a punch. ‘All Comers’ is the closest thing to an uptempo song on the entire twin Knopfler works of 2024 but it’s still more of a slow trot than a rocker an that’s a shame because it sounds as if this song ought to be one. The boxer is up to box in the ring any member of the public who want to fight him and they do, every Summer when he joins the carnival at his home town. A very Dire Straitsy guitar solo hits a very solo-era fiddle head on, as if to mimic both the show business life that keeps demanding Mark slug it out in the charts relentlessly every year and his true calling he hears in the distance. Inevitably it’s all going to go wrong and it does with the finale ‘Bad Day For A Knife Thrower’. That’s the trouble with life in the carnival: you can have bad days as well as good ones and life in the open air without a net is tough when it starts raining. ‘I still don’t have a plan’ admits Mark as he grows older, still slugging it out against people younger and trendier than him in the ring and growing more apart from his loved ones after all that time on the road. This sweet elegiac song is clearly meant to be the end of Dire Straits ‘sitting like a dud in the fairground mud’ but afraid to leave the paycheque behind and follow the path that’s harder yet more fulfilling. It’s a sad but honest way to bow out and yet again it feels more like a strong poem than a finished piece of music, but it’s a fascinating insight into a period of Mark’s life he did his best to avoid writing about at the time (the final Dire Straits years across ‘The Notting Hillbillies’ and ‘On Every Street’ is where mark stops writing about himself and starts inventing characters to write about), so the fact he turns himself into one at the point he stops finding anything interesting to say about himself is a neat joining of the dots. Overall I like ‘The Boy’ a little more than the full album. There’s such a neat concept running through these four songs and a sense of the veil lifting, as if a conjuror is finally revealing his tricks to his audience as he contemplates retirement, while the lyrics are the perfect match of truth and character. I just wish there was a bit more variety in here, something that goes double for the full album.

7) Mark Knopfler “One Deep River”

Talking of which, ‘One Deep River’ is another typically fine Knopflersque collection of fine songs that rather loses impact all heard together in one big lump. All twelve songs have the same slow-to-mid tempo waddle, the same sad bluesy refrains and there’s no variety even within the same songs: choruses flow into verses and on to middle eights without any change in pace or key. That’s a shame because lyrically this might well be Mark’s finest solo album yet, with the same part-fact part-fiction of the EP and the same blurring lines between the two that makes Mark’s past feel so far away he’s now turned into one of his characters from his songs. Heard separately this album is great, with plenty of fine additions to the catalogue; it’s as an album it doesn’t quite work. There are no instant winners on this album, no catchy pop singles, no ear-worms that bury themselves into your psyche and not much here you’ll want to listen to over and over. On first listen it’s actually quite dull: there’s so little energy across this album and even the fastest song is slow. Song by song, though, ‘One Deep River’ has its moments, especially when Mark’s soulful guitar picking hits up against a particularly revealing lyric and there are no bad songs on the album – part of a general trend across Mark’s ten studio albums that start off quite the rollercoaster ride (my favourite solo songs are all on ‘Golden Heart’ and ‘Sailing To Philadelphia’ but both albums also have a great deal of awful songs I skip when I play the albums through) but lately, across ‘Tracker’ and ‘Privateering’, have ended up at the point where nothing is bad but there are few masterpieces too.

This is the sort of album that works best if you’re the sort of fan who knows the true story really well so you can see which bits are real: the poverty of a childhood born to a Hungarian immigrant father and a Scottish mother trying to forge a new life in Newcastle, the stalled career as a reporter for the Yorkshire Evening Post, the switch to be an English lecturer, the marriage to the childhood sweetheart that’s all given up when Mark makes the move to head to London and seek fame and fortune, which he finds (and how!) before giving it all up to move to America with a new love. His past solo albums have seen Mark, an American citizen for several decades now, remember snippets of his past and weave his memories into songs, but this album takes a logical next step as he wonders what became of all the people he used to know and how their lives all turned out – not the friends and family he’s still in contact with but the strangers who passed him by; the Newcastle dock workers, the families hit by tragedy that he met as a junior reporter, the failing musicians who never made it, even the people on the international stage whose stories really affected him when he read about them in the news. It is, you could say, a journey in all meanings of the word – not least because so many of the characters in it are travelling by boat by train or by automobile. Sometimes their stories are metaphorical, as Mark walks ut the door and onto a new horizons; sometimes it’s literal; sometimes it’s a metaphor, as with a car the narrator buys to take him places, a tale of a train robbery that ends up in murder or a train that heads off into the sky to new adventures. Fittingly the album cover is the Tyneside bridge (odd to see it with no fog after years of appearing on Lindisfarne picture sleeves…) which merges two of the three modes of transport with boats below and with two lanes of cars going in and out of the county; so many of these songs take us back to the moment Mark decided to leave his home town for the bright lights of London but this album, like all his solo albums but more so, finds Mark coming home again in his imagination, wondering what life might have been like if he’d never been brave enough to take that turning, if Dire Straits had turned out another pub band like the real ‘Sultans Of Swing’ that inspired the song.

Most Knopfler albums tend towards the melancholy but this one, especially, is dripping with it, asking big questions of life and what it all meant – all those people who suffered, the ones that made it and the ones that faded, their voices largely unheard. Mark can’t work his life at all; he can do is record his memories as fragments and hope they connect with someone. They do largely, more than usual if you hear this album a song at a time, not least because they feel like some grand final statement. There’s been much fuss about whether this is Mark’s last album before retirement or not; it’s very Knopfler not to actually announce that this will be the last anything but Mark has said that this accompanying tour his last and there’s been something in his eyes this past year that makes me think he might simply slip into quite retirement when the fuss over this record dies down. There’s a sense of ticking last boxes, of tidying loose ends, of turning full circle and the feel of a last will and testament to this CD. It’s a bittersweet journey this record, re-tracing Mark’s steps across his life, a tale of crazy paving rather than a set path to the top, with confusion as to what the top really was not least because Mark seems to have hated his peak Dire Straits fame with a passion). This is a record of one step forward and two steps back, ending with a past-present-future trilogy that takes one last bow, thanks the audience for putting up with him for all these years and worries what will happen to the people in the future based on the current trends he can see all around him.

‘Two Pairs Of Hands’ opens the album with Mark I his twenties trying to find a good work-life balance, making ends meet at work, spending enough time with his wife to keep her sweet and finding enough time to make music a hobby. The relentless metronomic swipe of the beat relentlessly pushes him on but Mark’s guitar soars over the time, bending back time as surely as he bends notes, as he tries to hang on to what he enjoys most and push his music into the ‘work’ and ‘home’ parts of his life. It’s at one with the gruffer workingman’s songs of Mark’s other 21st century albums, though one you sense has more autobiography than his songs of dock-workers, railroad layers, graphic designers and fast food retailers. ‘Ahead Of The Game’ is the single and a rather sweet sequel to Sultans Of Swing’, the moment when Mark makes the choice to devote his attention fully to his music despite all the problems he knows it will cause at home. Mark left ‘some of my dream’ there in the backstage sawdust, chasing money in a hand-to-mouth existence as he finds out just how tough life can be as a jobbing musician, but while this song doesn’t have the same joy or excitement as ‘Sultans’ that makes you want to jump on stage yourself you can hear just what this sound means to Mark. Like the rest of the album, though, it’s an odd combination of folk-blues rather than rock-pop and stumbles rather than soars. It is, perhaps, the one track in Mark’s solo career you can imagine Dire Straits playing – and sadly you sense they’d have probably made it a lot more exciting. ‘Smart Money’ is the odd song out: it’s one of two tracks here clearly based in America not Britain (with California’s Santa Ana Winds getting their first AAA name-check since The Beach Boys in 1979!) It could be Mark’s decision to leave Britain behind for his new life sometime in the late 1990s, although it could simply be another of his ‘character’ songs, imagining what the back stories of the prostitutes and celebrities he meets there might be and finding them so different to his own. The narrator feels out of place and lost, realising that all bets would have to be against ‘this dog’ now to anyone making them, and yet there’s no sense of panic or urgency in this sleepy song, which finds him adjusting to his new more leisurely life quite happily.

‘Scavenger’s Yard’ could be set anywhere at anytime, a chugging bluesy lament for people scrabbling to make a living, although the title makes it sound particularly English. A tale of swindlers and suckers, it’s tempting to see this as Mark’s first meeting with business managers and there’s a tension about the staccato backing track unusual for the usually more straightforward Knopfler that sounds like a wild animal weighing up whether to pounce or not. Though the song isn’t that great in and of itself Mark’s guitar break, as he cuts through the backing with a moment of pure sighing melody and power, makes sitting through the rest more than worthwhile. ‘Black Tie Job’s is interesting. Mark is trying hard to be the dispassionate junior reporter he was trained to be in his teens but he finds that when he’s called to talk to a local family about a horrible event that changed their lives and dig the dirt on them (what that event was we never do find out) he just can’t do it – he feels their pain too strongly to write, offering his handkerchief, asking timidly for a photo, stepping over eggshells to do his job. As an ex reporter myself I can’t tell you how true to life this song is: finding a way to get the details of something awful from people who don’t want to admit that it happened even to themselves and deliver it for a tight deadline was by far the hardest part of my job. Mark captures that feeling of helplessness and despair well in this lyric, but even by this album’s standards the tune is almost absent entirely, Mark mumbling rather than singing over a tune that mostly seems to consist of one note. Had this song had a melody full of the same yearning and despair, with Mark in the middle trying to stay centred while his emotions are tugged all over the place, this could have been the album standout. ‘Tunnel 13’ segues into a tragedy that, for all we know, could have been the one the reporter was talking about, although if so it couldn’t have been autobiography of course: it happened in Oregon’s Siskiyou mountains half the world away from Tyneside and a full twenty-six years before Mark was born. In a botched robbery, born of desperation and poverty, the D’Autremont brothers blew up a mail train, accidentally using a full box of dynamite to blow open a door instead of the tiny amount they planned and killing four people in the process, ‘leaving widows and children and heartbreak behind’. It’s at one with past Knopfler songs about railways and robberies and illicits some more delicious playing and the best vocal on the album, dripping with empathy and sorrow, but runs out of steam long before the end, after a holdup in a siding too many. Special guest star Emmylou Harris returns for the first time since their duets album ‘All The Roadrunning’ in 2006 providing some atmospheric wordless vocals but I wish the mix had brought them to the front a little more. Goodness knows what it’s doing on the heart of this album too: it really doesn’t fit the mood or the theme.

‘Janine’ is an interesting song. While there are flashes of autobiography in the tale of a man and his wife struggling to make ends meet and heading in different directions the setting is clearly pure fiction. This is cowboy land, a Wild West that just isn’t wild enough and the chorus borrows heavily from Dolly Parton’s ‘Joleen’, a similar tale of love gone wrong without being quite as catchy. Lashings of lovely Knopfler guitar and Greg Leisz pedal steel make it more palatable, however. Listeners with long memories might wonder if it relates to ‘Once Upon A Time In The West’ from Dire Straits’ second album ‘Communiqué’, about the which was really about the Wild West of London at night, a world away from the sobriety of the day job being a lecturer in Newcastle. ‘Watch Me Gone’, however, just has to be real. It’s the moment Mark told his childhood sweetheart Kathy that he’d made up his mind and was leaving for London and stardom for good. He asks her to come with him but she refuses – her life is in Newcastle and she doesn’t share that dream or understand it. This is a theme covered lots on the first two Dire Straits album but while those songs are mostly angry, a young man burning with fire who doesn’t understand why the person he loved most wants to extinguish it, this song is far more laidback and kind about it all. Mark all but admits that he was being selfish, putting his love of music ahead of his romantic love and while the song starts off a little cocky (‘watch me babe, watch me go!’ Mark sings as he walks out the door) by the end the song is more of a plea, hoping the person he loves still remembers him and is still watching, that she now understands why he had to do it. It’s kind of ‘Where Do You Think You’re going?’ turned inside out, with Mark the one whose leaving and he’s doing it through heartbreak, not anger (I’m convinced, by the way, that ‘Sultans Of Swing’ was written to say to Kathy to say ‘see what you’re missing – this is how brilliant and exciting music can be!’) Together with a lovely if laidback tune and some more Knopfler guitar bursts of pure emotion and feeling it’s my second favourite song on the album. ‘Sweeter Than The Rain’, however, might well be the least interesting (albeit not actually bad) song here, one written to the same pure anonymous folk as a lot of Mark’s solo albums. Lyrically it sounds like the morning after the night before, as Mark questions his decision to walk out and walking out with next to nothing against a snowy backdrop ‘low on prospects and future plans’. Mark tries hard to wrap his album themes up with a tale of a cowboy riding his horse into areas unknown, but it’s a bit of a strained metaphor and his voice is even more strained to go with it on another song written to a key so deep he struggles to sing it.

No such problem with ‘Before My Train Comes’, however, the clear highlight of the album. This song really feels like a farewell, a Cat Stevens-style goodbye to a fanbase who’ve kept Mark clothed and fed on his great journey but who still have questions about his life and art. Mark is afraid he’ll never get to make that last message they clamour for that wraps his life up in a neat bow as he hears the whistle of the great unknown coming to whisk him off to another part of life (or death) so before he goes he tries to give us his last farewell. That message is that even if he’s not with us he’ll always remember us, just as he’s remembered all the people he’s passed along life’s stations, that while some memories are destined to fade ‘some will not – and yours all mean a lot’. It could, too, in the context of the autobiography of the album, be the moment Mark knocked Dire Straits on the head to go solo. Mark’s guitar really does sound like a train whistle calling out from the great beyond and an extended finale features some great musicians playing what’s easily the most memorable melody on the album, one that sounds like lots of past solo Knopfler songs stuck together (which is no bad thing), although even this song ends after just two verses and a chorus, getting stuck down a siding far too soon. Having said goodbye to us fans Mark says goodbye to the world, with a song about Mark’s fears for the future of the people he loves which could be about his British or American family/friends/strangers given that our two countries are in similar, ahem, ‘dire straits’ these days. ‘This One’s Not Going To End Well’ is an agonised country lament, a ballad about a tyrant whose caused no end of grief and misery who sounds one part Donald Trump one part David Cameron. Mark still sees a future beyond that though, that the world will go about it’s business as normal, surviving until it can be thriving again, when the modern austerity that so reminds him of his penniless childhood has been lifted and wrongs have been set right. Like solo favourite ‘Don’t Crash The Ambulance’ though the lyrics are decidedly downbeat, history student Mark seeing so many parallels with past struggles and knows that this is a bump in the road that can’t be avoided. The album then closes with the title track, a song that says goodbye to the Tyne, the river that ran close to Mark’s boyhood home and which runs through him like a stick of rock wherever he goes. An atmospheric song, this tries hard to be another ‘Brothers In Arms’ with lyrics about a friend whose deeper even than the waters in Newcastle and how we all live under the same evening star that falls over our home no matter how far away we travel, but it’s all a little too anonymous for an album closer, a singalong that’s a bit too slow to sing along to.

There are no less than nine bonus tracks doing the rounds too: five on the CD, four on the vinyl, none of them to date available for streaming or download (the compact disc is my recommendation based on this). None of them are all that special, but all are worth hearing. Over on CD ‘The Living End’ has an interesting lyric that plugs the gap between poverty and stardom (between tracks nine and ten), Mark walking round feeling like he’s made it, hitting the stage for a full hour of music before finding that once brought him so much inspiration has become a drag, a countdown to the fifty nine minutes more he needs to play before he can get off stage. Women are throwing themselves at him, which takes him by surprise and boosts his ego no end, until one day he wakes up and realises that the connections were to the fame not the real him and that everyone has moved on to someone else (not quite how it happened, given the years Mark spent running from making a follow-up to ‘Brothers In Arms’ and all but demanded his fanbase go away and leave him in peace, but a bit of artistic license is fair enough to make a valid point). ‘Fat Chance Dupree’ is the worst song from all the 2024 Knopfler releases, continuing the curse of the Grateful Dead’s worst song based on the same true 19th century Wild West tale of a man who ended up in prison for robbing a jewellers at the request of his slightly barmy girlfriend who wanted to be treated ‘right’, uncaring what happens to her husband if she keeps the jewel. ‘Along A Foreign Coast’ is a more cryptic, poetic song than the others with mentions of ‘Privateering’ and a tune that makes it sound more like an outtake from that album, as if Mark is clearing out his desk to make sure he’s left nothing behind in retirement. It fits this album in the sense that it’s a song about travel, of starting all over again in another country, but it’s more travelogue than autobiography this time. ‘What I’m Gonna Need’ extends the storytelling to Spain and is an odd song about a man in a hotel wanting wine. A tale of excess it could be rockstar Mark believing his own publicity before getting cut down to size but, equally, might not be about very much at all. ‘Nothing But Rain’ really should have made the album proper: not that it’s particularly better than anything on the main CD but this tale of waking up from a nightmare, unsure what part of your past you dreamt and what is real, scared that you somehow missed a train you should have caught or a life that would have finally given you the stable happiness you crave, sums up the album’s themes well.

Over on vinyl ‘Dolly Shop Man’ is a Dupree sequel about precious jewels and the ugly things such beauty makes people do to get them. ‘Your Leading Man’ is an out of touch celebrity who turns up to mingle with the public at some do and then disappears again. It would be tempting in context to see this as Mark laughing at his peak ‘Dire Straits’ years of stardom, except that there are lots of references to acting and turning up to Wimbledon that don’t sound like him at all (is it Tom Cruise?) ‘Wrong ‘Un’ is a simple tale of watching somebody you love fall for someone whose not good for them and being powerless to stop them because everyone has to make their own mistakes, a nice theme that doesn’t get very far past the repetitive chorus. And finally ‘Chess’ is the tale of the big man sending the little men out to do the dirty jobs for him, this time out at sea. It’s the flipside of ‘Black Tie Job’, a man without compassion in a job where he’s meant to keep people safe – an intriguing idea but at two verses its over before it really has time to say very much. And that’s how it ends, this colossal work, before Knopfler fades away without a bang but a whimper.

Overall, then, I’m not sure I quite agree with the passionate fans who are calling this the best album Mark’s ever made (Dire Straits included), but equally I don’t agree with the fans who find this album dull and lifeless. It is very slow, with some places where the album seems to crawl to a standstill, desperately in need of variety to liven things up and there are few songs I’d rate as true masterpieces. However as a mood piece this is sublime – a sort of patchwork quilt of true life, story songs, British poverty and Americana that are very skilfully tied together, the different strands from the two halves of Mark’s lives knotted together in a neat bow. If this does end up being the end then it’s a highly fitting way to bow out, a typically thoughtful and careful album from a man who long ago stopped looking for the spotlight and yet who deserves it more than the vast majority of songwriters from the 1970s still making music. This river might look calm on the surface but – as with practically every song Mark’s released since the opening tracks of the first Dire Straits album ‘Down To The Waterline’ - those still waters run deep ad there’s enough here to get lost into for hours when you dive in to the bottom. If you’ve followed any of this journey from the earliest days in 1978 to the last album ‘Tracker’ then this maybe-ending is a very powerful last stop and even if turns out that there’s more life in the old engine yet then it’s still a very worthy picturesque stop.

8) Crosby Stills Nash and Young “Live At The Filmore”

Forget the rather sweet and nostalgic reminiscences from Neil about what a happy time this was in his life and how much the band meant to him because tonight is the night CSNY crashed and burned, the night they went to war against each other and broke up (for the first time. Of many). Here we are, less than a month after their first show together (their second was Woodstock if that helps with the dating) and a mere week after a brilliant gig at the Big Sur Festival (their highpoint as a live band as far as I’m concerned – why aren’t those tapes out officially?!) and the quartet’s nerves are getting frayed by life and by each other. In the audience tonight is a very special guest Bob Dylan and Stephen Stills, particularly, wants to go out of his way to impress the Bobmeister. He can’t decide what song to sing in his solo spot given that this is by far his most prolific writing period and he could literally have chosen any from about fifty so decides to play four – all quite long (sadly only two of them, ‘Go Back Home’ and ‘4+20’, are on this ‘highlights’ disc), hoping against hope to get a smile from Bob. Meanwhile his colleagues are waiting in the wings to go on – and quietly seething. Nash is the first to lash out, berating Stills backstage and letting him have it after weeks of pent up aggression, calling him out on his un-professionalism. This all allegedly happens while Stills is taking a backstage drink and he doesn’t say a word but gets crosser and crosser and crosser, slowly crushing the can until it’s foaming all over his hand and trying not to throw it at Nash’s head. Crosby finds the whole thing hilarious; Young is ready to make one his famous quick exits. Thankfully the band patch things up enough to take the stage for an electric set which has gone down in CSNY folklore (and in contemporary reviews) as ‘fiery, cathartic’, turning all that rage and frustration into an electric maelstrom of rage and passion.

Given all that the news that Neil Young had discovered a recording of this very show in his archives recorded by his own little ‘team’ in perfect sound was greeted with the sort of ecstasy not seen since last year’s Beatle reunion. But like ‘Now and Then’ this show isn’t what it’s being presented as – far from being the full three hour show, full of daring and invention and fire, we get a 77 minute version that’s best described as cosy, if not a bit bland. The first half is acoustic and not delivering many surprises. The harmonies are raw and ragged like the Woodstock show or the later 1974 shows but somehow the power isn’t there. The foursome were always throwing newly written songs into the setlist and changing it up but not here, not tonight – ‘Back Home’ is the closest this show comes to rare, here as an acoustic lament rather than a showoff blues workout with Eric Clapton. As for the electric show that sounded so promising that’s a bit of a dull plod; the closest CSNY get to rage is on ‘Down By the River’ and that slows down in the middle so much it practically comes to a full-stop (compared to the version from Big Sur the week before, all fireworks and intense raging for 15 minutes, this version is a snoozefest). It’s not that the show is bad – heck it’s CSNY, the only band I know with four true musical geniuses in the lineup– but by their standards this is the dullest show of theirs I’ve ever heard and as almost every other night of theirs has been bootlegged bar this one it’s a surprise how bland it is. What’s more it’s been cut to shreds to fit it onto CD and while I’ve never seen a complete list for what was played that night we do know a few: a rare cover of John Sebastian’s ‘Where Have You Been?’ that’s been doing the rounds on bootleg thanks to another show and a tribute to the man once considered instead of Neil (Sebastian does indeed guest on forthcoming LP ‘Déjà vu’), Stills solo workout ‘Black Queen’, Neil’s acoustic rendering of Buffalo Springfield collage ‘Broken Arrow’, Nash’s on tour powerhouse ‘Pre-Road Downs’ and a one-off performance of the first song David Crosby ever sang professionally, Dino Valentini’s early 1960s hippie prototype ‘Let’s Get Together’, plus of course the two other Stills songs performed that night. Worst of all the one moment here that’s a true revelation, Stills’ tortured ‘Bluebird Revisited’, is cut short, slammed straight into ‘Sea Of Madness’ and I’d be mighty surprised if they did that in the original show. Problems with the recording? Censorship from a musician notoriously controlling about the recordings going out under his name? Or budget cutting? Whatever the cause, it’s a shame.

You see, to be fair to Stills he’s not in a good place here and he’s the one band member not blissed-out on good vibes but passionate and desperate. His infamously on-off relationship with Judy Collins has finally collapsed for good and his songs for her are all laced with a wild fierce energy tonight. ‘Suite: Judy Blue Eyes’ changes night by night anyway but here it’s a tormented song of heartbreak, the line about ‘where is my woman can I bring her home?’ and the lines about ‘can there be no peace?’ from ‘4+20’ are played with a sullen sneer, the first song CSN ever sang on ’You Won’t Have To Cry’ is played with a sullen grouchiness unlike the usual prettiness of this lovely song, ‘Go Back Home’ that nice blues pastiche played on record as a duel with Eric Clapton is heard here pre-release as a folk lament in Judy’s own style about a man who thought he was moving forwards with his life who now finds himself going backwards, while Stills even adds a harmony vocal to Neil Young’s Buffalo Springfield song ‘On The Way Home’, emphasising the cutting lines about how ‘I won’t be back till later on, if I do come back at all’. By the time the electric set has reached ‘Bluebird Revisited’, perhaps the most tormented of Stills’ tormented love songs for Judy, he’s in a bad place, half-serious half-joking, as he throws in some blues wailing which clumsily crashes into Neil’s own relationship lament ‘Sea Of Madness’ about his own relationship troubles with first wife Susan. Which wouldn’t matter quite so much had it not been the only recording from this show that’s been released before – masquerading as the version CSNY played at ‘Woodstock’ on the multi-million selling first compilation album of the concert (the one with the boyfriend and girlfriend in the mud wrapped in cloaks; sad to say he died last year just short of their 64th wedding anniversary). This is, in so many ways, the beginning of the end: within the next few weeks the rest of CSNY end up in grief and despair too, Crosby losing his girlfriend Christine in a car crash, Nash breaking up with Joni Mitchell (despite being audibly in love on his ‘Joni’ songs tonight), the death of Crazy Horse guitarist Danny Whitten sending Neil off the deep end and Nixon’s tin marching resulting in four dead in Ohio the following May. That’s all to come though; for now CSNY are caught between two stools, the joy of their earliest gigs disappearing into the rear view mirror and the new sense of purpose that grows in their live shows across 1970 (as heard on ‘4 Way Street’) having not yet arrived.

There are gems here too mind: ‘I’ve Loved Her So Long’ from Neil’s eponymous debut LP is positively gorgeous in his solo set, the best version of it I’ve heard him sing with some lovely and clearly unplanned Nash harmonies towards the end; there’s a gorgeous crystalline ‘Guinevere’ with the Crosby-Nash jazz scat harmonies perfectly in synch with each other and a solo ‘Our House’ back when it was a brand new song played on what sounds like a church organ. However there’s nothing else here to match ‘CSNY ‘74’, the triple CD set of their stadium tour that came out a decade ago now, not to mention the superlative ‘Four Way Street’. Alas most of the rest is passable. The long awaited and much advertised epic fourteen minute version of Neil’s shoot ‘em up song ‘Down By The River’, the litmus paper test of many a CSNY live show, is a huge disappointment considering we still haven’t got an official version on our shelves at the time of writing. Tougher than even the Crazy Horse arrangement, this song varied every time they played it, ranging from sarcastic sophisticated charm and unhinged psychopathic murder. This version doesn’t sound as if it could swat a fly. In fact the band trip over on all their toughest songs tonight: ‘Long Time Gone’ is woefully slow and almost pretty in the way it hovers in the air (note that’s not a compliment: it’s not a song designed to be pretty) and ‘Wooden Ships’ – a tale of nuclear war and radioactive death – sounds more like a holiday cruise, wandering down so many cul-de-sacs it almost sinks (Stills, clearly still smarting from what’s just happened backstage, opens the song with an outrageous guitar line that departs so far from the straight and narrow you can’t help but that feel that he’s still showing off – alas after that he goes sullen and quiet and barely opens his mouth again till a slightly fast and not terribly heartfelt ‘Find The Cost Of Freedom’ still months away from being the B-side of ‘Ohio’). It doesn’t help that the chatter, always so interesting at CSNY shows, has been cut out too so a lot of the atmosphere has gone (though full marks for including a version of ‘Helplessly Helping’ where CSN helplessly get the giggles halfway through!) while Crosby’s voice sounds as if he has a cold (he only sings lead on two and a half songs out of the seventeen and doesn’t even sing as much on that half as usual, with Stills taking an extra Crosby verse on ‘Wooden Ships’ – more sabotage or an attempt to cover for his ailing friend?; Either way some tribute this is as the first CSNY release after his death last year this is). In short, this is a bit of an anticlimax after waiting for it for so long and not a patch on the shows out there already, a mediocre release by a great band. However they are still a great band and official shows are hard to come by so it’s still worth having in your collection; just don’t throw your copy of ‘4 Way Street’ away anytime soon. Let’s hope Neil recorded some of the other nights from this show too though because, believe you me, this is not the best of them by any means, whatever the sleeve notes say. Oh and one final note: apparently the vinyl version is produced on ‘AAA lacquer’. Much as Alan’s Album Archives would love to take the credit, sadly it’s nothing to do with us! Apparently it’s a ‘fully analogue recording’, which is true for most new releases first recoded this long ago; if nothing else it’s a great advert for Neil’s belief that analogue sound trumps digital as the sound quality is pristine, even for a Neil Archives release!

9) Pete Townshend/Rachel Fuller “The Seeker”

Well here’s an oddity. Pete’s come out of effective solo retirement not for another Who tour or his first solo album in 31 years but as a main performer in his wife Rachel’s project that she’s been working on for years, one named after one of Pete’s songs (which is also featured in the piece sung by the young hero as a duet with the older Pete) and a project every bit as big and expansive (and indeed expensive) as ‘Tommy’ ‘Lifehouse’ or ‘Quadrophenia’. Though Pete only sings on part of it, as the ferry man who takes the lead character Siddhartha to the beyond, it’s very much a Townshend work, about searching for identity and answers and enlightenment, a floaty ethereal work that nevertheless has a toughness and edge to it, like the best Townshend works. ‘The Seeker’ is the biggest budget extravaganza Pete’s been part of since the similarly all-singing all-dancing Tommy (the 1972 version with the London Symphony Orchestra, Richard Harris, Maggie Bell, Ringo Starr, Rod Stewart and Stevie Winwood alongside Roger Daltrey). Fittingly it’s a work based one of Tommy’s great ancestors and biggest influences ‘Siddhartha’, the 1920s novel by Herman Hesse. A young Indian boy, ill suited to a world of work and with his head full of mystical thoughts, embarks on a journey searching for the answers beyond his home. Like ‘Tommy’ Siddhartha finds answers that satisfy him but which everyone else hates, like ‘Lifehouse’ seeks to connect the world including the parts of it that would rather stay disconnected and ‘Quadrophenia’? Well, that’s maybe the hardest to spot but it is similar, too, in the way Siddhartha spends so much of the piece looking for answers from others before finding, at the end, that the answers really come from within. Though it’s based on the story of Buddha, rather than Pete’s favourite teacher Meher Baba, it very much sounds at one with Pete’s songs even before the new version of ‘The Seeker’ turns up, a very Meher Baba way of looking at the universe, with the secret to being happy to live in the moment and make the most of what is in front of you now. Pete only appears near the end, in the form of the wise old head whose seen the world but still doesn’t quite understand it and may have closer ties than fans realise; ‘The Ferryman’ is recycled here, a Townshend song released in demo form on ‘Another Scoop’, Pete’s second collection of demos in 1987, with the verse ‘The water becomes Siddhartha’s teacher, sometimes powerful and stern, sometimes gentle forgiving, it never changes its direction, as it carries even mountains down to the sea’. Alas Pete’s performance is a bit, well, shoutier than his original which, while far from the best song on ‘Scoop’, at least had melody on its side. To date Rachel and Pete haven’t talked much about this album but I’d love to know if it was an idea Pete’s had for decades and which his wife finished, or whether by chance they were both inspired at different times and Pete’s forgotten all about one of his most oblique songs.

Anyway, it’s good if far from perfect. Overlong admittedly (a double CD set this would be a triple album in old cash and the plot just isn’t worthy of that, with too many similar supporting cast members offering lessons who come and go) and repetitive, with Fuller’s distinctive string arrangements fans will already recognise that are very pretty when heard in isolation but pall across a full work. A lot of these songs are far too similar; you can tell that this is s piece created for the stage primarily, with lots of reprises and re-arrangements, but even without those most of these songs come with a melody so similar they might as well all be one song. Lovely as that one song is for a few minutes at a time after two hours it makes you want to seek medical help not feel closer to God. It’s the biggest thing spectacle wise Pete’s been involved with since ‘Quadrophenia’ and even though it doesn’t have a lot to do with him it has that feel of early 1970s Who, or more accurately the feel of the 1972 London Symphony Orchestra version of Tommy that was fun yet bloated. This is a piece about staying humble after all – it feels as if a smaller feel would suit it better but then it wouldn’t have made such a splash so I can see why they’ve made it all singing all dancing.

The few Who re-recordings are disappointing: ‘The Seeker’ is fine but pretty much a carbon copy of The Who’s 1970 post-Tommy single. ‘Bargain’, one of Pete‘s greatest songs, is a fitting choice given it’s a similar song of religious devotion but it worked so well in 1971 because The Who version was direct and heartfelt; this version is plastered with a cacophony of strings and booming percussion. The rather more obscure ‘I Like It The Way It is’, a far too revealing song about addiction and doing things you know are bad for you even when you know they do you harm, is easily my favourite ‘Scoop’ song and I’ve been dying to hear a ‘finished’ version for decades but alas guest Sunidhi Chauhan sings it like she’s in a big musical without the honesty or the crack in Pete’s voice. Some of the guests don’t deliver of their best: Elton John’s turn as the gambler on ‘Dice’ is clearly meant to remind you of his turn as ‘The Pinball Wizard’ but it’s woeful part and he doesn’t perform it very well. Siddhartha himself, South African singer Nakthane, doesn’t sound entirely comfortable with the work at times either – it’s not that he’s miscast so much as that he’s clearly taping this piece before any performances of the work have been given and without too many rehearsals or takes.

Still, his is a nice voice and the narration, with what turned out to be Christopher Plummer’s last acting job (before his death in 2021, which shows you what a long gestation period this project has had), is delicious – none of Pete’s songs have ever had an omniscient narrator who knows more than the characters do but it works well, breaking up the music with cheeky asides that cut through Siddhartha’s smugness and disillusionment to keep the peace on the straight and narrow. You can hear Plummer get visibly older and frailer as the piece goes on; it’s a credit to the work and the actor both that he used so many of his last precious breaths doing this piece justice. Some of the songs are lovely too, such as ‘Awakening’ with its very Townshendesque bounce and ‘Pinball Wizard’ style acoustic guitar. ‘Drown’ is beautiful, like a slowed down version of ‘Drowned’ as Siddhartha finally discovers a divine guide he’s been searching for his whole life, embracing it with awe and beauty, ‘drowning in dreams I cannot see’. Even though it carries just Rachel’s name in the credits she’s clearly been inspired by her husband’s work in this beautiful piece about pure belief in all its many forms and dimensions. She deserves much of the credit though, as producer writer arranger, co-ordinator and interpreter, making the most of Pete’s contact book and getting to the heart of a moving but complex source work without losing any of its essence. More than any one single piece or performer, though, what’s best about this work is the whole message, the wisdom that there’s no one thing you can follow that will help any one being discover the truth – you have to find out the path it lies in for yourself.

10) Graham Gouldman “I Have Notes”

We kind of know what to expect from Graham by now, with the bassist’s seventh solo album - his third in seven years – another reliable collection of breezy pop with the odd deeper cut that arrives in another clever 10cc-ish punning title with tie-in album cover (God handing down a parchment of musical notes). All of Graham’s solo albums feel like slippers warmed by the fire compared to the fizzing fireworks of his parent band, full of melodies that feel as if you’ve been humming them all your life even on first hearing and it’s only after you get to know the album really well that you realise just how much new ground it’s actually covered while you’ve been singing along, how many little nuggets of emotion and insight have been dropped into the catchy riffs. Alas this isn’t Graham’s best, especially at the start which seems a little too clodhopping and empty compared to past gems, a little too silly and frivolous, sounding more 21st century Paul McCartney than Beatle era McCartney. This is, you see, another loved-up album following Graham’s third marriage to wife Ariella in 2012 and like many talented composers before him that’s great for him and fans who’ve followed him through so many hard times but it’s bad for his art as he’s in too warm and cosy a place to really stretch himself. Novelty songs like ‘Play Me (The Ukulele Song)’ – the instrument is very sad because no one’s playing him – and the curious big band throwback and Beth Chapman duet ‘A Christmas Affair’ (the twist at the end: it’s between husband and wife trying to escape the kids) are the worst of Graham’s writing: insincere, slightly awkward and so accurate a pastiche that you feel as if you’re listening to something secondhand. Previous albums, especially the excellent ‘Love and Work’, found Graham halfway out of the dark and trying to seek the light, but this album is nearly all light and there’s no contrast, just a bunch of pretty but also pretty forgettable songs that delight in being in love and not much more. The only song that stands out is the one released in 2022, a collaboration with Queen guitarist Brian May about the James Watt telescope’s images of Earth as seen from space (one of our songs of the year). As for the next four songs: you’ll probably never ever play them again. In fact good luck getting to the end of them once.

Don’t give up, though, because the second half gets past all the billing and cooing for some really sumptuous songs, ones that look backwards to how hard life used to be and full of relief that things worked out just when it looked as if they never ever would. ‘Couldn’t Love You More’ is a gorgeous Beatley love song (fittingly that’s Ringo playing the shakey drums), Graham happily skating over the top of a scary bunch of minor chords and vocoder harmonies that keep trying to trip him up but fail, because he’s learned the hard way not to take such a certain love for granted. The deliciously bittersweet ‘It’s Time For Me To Go’ has Graham heading back on tour, suitcase packed, his heart torn in two – it’s a sort of sequel to 10cc’s ‘Lifeline’, with the thought of coming home again getting him through the lonely days away from home (it’s not one of those ‘my heart belongs on the road’ songs either, Graham being practical enough to know it’s the only way to make the money he needs to keep a home to come back to). ‘I’m Lazy’ is the darkest song Graham’s written for some time too (perhaps because it started life as a late period 10cc song in 1982): the narrator doesn’t know it but he’s clearly deeply depressed, unable and unwilling to get up and face the day. ‘I wasn’t always like this you know - I was an early bird’ he sighs as he burrows under the bedclothes and hides, before the shock revelation of a buried memory that he found his wife in bed with another man and now can’t get out of his, ‘just me and the memories’. Throughout the song you can feel the darkness descending, Graham’s natural get-up-and-go suppressed, but still you can feel the narrator trying, the song dancing between major and minor chords before the weight of the world descends again. Best of all might be the instrumental ‘Celestial Light’, which sounds like a George Harrison song, complete with ‘Blue Jay Way’ chords and slide guitar as well as some ‘I’m Not In Love’ block harmonies. It really is a very pretty song with one of its creators prettiest tunes which, given the many that he’s written, is really quite something. The album ends with a bonus track, a cracking live version of Graham’s early breakthrough ‘Heart Full Of Soul’, The Yardbirds’ overlooked follow-up to another hit Gouldman cover ‘For Your Love’ that’s nicely tough and gritty. An album of two halves then, not as consistent as the rest of Graham’s impressive 21st century run, but even after the cosiest half-album of his career these comforting slippers still have plenty of ‘sole’!

11) Garfunkel and Garfunkel “Father and Son”

Well, this is a surprise. The last time we had a new Art Garfunkel album was 2007 when Arty strummed his way through the Great American Songbook ‘Some Enchanted Evening’, back in the days when everyone with half a voice was doing the same thing. Since then it’s been a difficult near-two decades professionally as Arty reached such a low point he lost his record deal then largely lost his voice (after an accident choking on a bit of lobster that rubbed against his vocal chords in 2010), then was arrested for possession of marijuana twice and ended up reduced to flogging his live albums through The Daily Mail (a fate worse than death and breakfast put together) and left largely kicking his heels at home. Personally, though, it’s been the most stable time by far of his sometimes turbulent life, as he’s had time to become the family man he always longed to be, later in life than most of his contemporaries. There are signs of both sides of Arty’s life across this album, a duets record made with his son James (who we last saw as a ‘special guest’ on that live album ‘Across America’ aged six singing ‘Feelin’ Groovy’ with bags of charm, energy and enthusiasm if – understandably - not always accuracy; fans are still split over whether it’s the most charming moment of a wretched record or the moment they threw the album in the bin). James has since grown into a real chip off the family block. He might not quite have the musical texture of his father or his way with a phrase (and lost the trademark Garfunkel curly hair earlier than his dad) but he’s another seriously good singer and there are moments across this record where he sounds scarily like his old man fifty years ago, somewhere near at his peak. Arty sounds understandably frail by comparison, now aged eighty-three and with his voice audibly not back up to full strength yet. However after so many years of resting his vocal chords he now sounds better than a lot of his contemporaries who spent the last decade continuously gigging, including Paul McCartney and his old friend Paul Simon whose voices are now husks of what they were when Arty ‘retired’. The album leans into the big elephant in the room which is that Arty can’t reach the high notes he used to by having his son reach them effortlessly and then contrast their approaches on a set of songs about how time changes you and passing the baton on to the next generation is all a natural part of life. Like Johnny Cash’s Rick Rubin ‘Americana’ albums the record doesn’t try to hide the problems, even if the song’s don’t hit quite the same levels of intense emotion. Talking of family the front cover is shot in the Garfunkel family kitchen where Art once sat, aged thirty-eight, for the front cover of one of his better LPs ‘Fate For Breakfast’ in 1979; now he sits in front of the wooden cupboards with many of the same bits of pottery on display - including the same duck gravy boat tucked away on a shelf - with his son, aged thirty-four. It’s the perfect cover: everything has changed and yet so much remains the same.

As for the music the album is, at least, a step up from ‘Evening’, with the most skippable songs, Cole Porter’s ‘Blue Moon’ and Jo Stafford’s ‘You Belong To Me’, the only throw backs to that era on an album that’s madeup largely of pop standards that suit Arty much better. Father and son have real chemistry and while the track selection isn’t that original or daring (it was inevitable the title track, Cat Stevens’ tale of generation gaps, would be here) they perform these songs well these two, Arty stripping back the years for the warmth of his old Everly brothers favourite ‘Let It Be Me’, monochrome Lennon-McCartney classic ‘Blackbird’ and Don McLean’s colourful ‘Vincent’. The album is at its best when it’s being experimental, or at least as close to experimental as such a cosy family affair like this album gets, such as Cyndi Lauper’s ‘Time After Time’ slowed from its original manic panic to a thoughtfulness that suits the slower older mood and Bud Green’s moving tale of regret ‘Once In A While’. There’s also, inevitably, a Simon and Garfunkel song in there, ‘Old Friends’, a tale of septuagenarians which scarily is now being sung in the past (this is the first time either Simon or Garfunkel have sung it at an age older than when the song is set), Arty’s favourite piece by his former colleague sung with added feeling now this tale of nostalgia and slowing down is real not acted. Taking of which, Arty’s talked a lot in the press about his relief at having made up with Paul Simon recently, following the pair’s longest period of going no contact yet (fourteen years!) A cynical ploy to make fans buy this record? Perhaps, but there’s a sense deep within this album of making sure that boxes are ticked and there are no lingering regrets as Arty sings all the songs he’s always really wanted to do and never had a chance to sing till now. Certainly there’s nothing cynical about this lovely rendition of ‘Old Friends’. Is there one last poignant reunion album with Paul to be had? Probably not, given Paul’s own health issues (with his hearing) but if we could have the best of this album and the best of Paul’s classic from last year ‘Seven Psalms' I would be one very happy fan.

As for this album it’s no classic, best heard in small doses as together the tempos are painfully slow and the orchestration treacly, but then that’s been the case with most Garfunkel records. If anything the modern (but not too-modern) vocals by junior help give this record a period toughness Arty’s been lacking since ‘Angel Clare’ in 1973. It is, however, something of a lost opportunity when compared to Arty’s brief but brilliant flowering as a songwriter on ‘Everything Waits To Be Noticed’, his masterpiece from two albums ago in 2002 or the bits and pieces abandoned on compilation ‘The Singer’ in 2012. There’s nothing too deep here, nothing revolutionary nothing that kicks into first gear and lets its hair down: it feels like being dressed up and all smiles in a family photo rather than anything truly revealing or directly from the heart. There isn’t one moment that rocks, despite Artys solo catalogue having a plethora of great tough rock songs, from ‘I Believe’ to ‘Scissors Cut’ to ‘Hang On In’ to ‘Bounce’. However it’s all made with love and care and with arrangements that bring out the best in dad’s now growly whisper and son’s soaring falsetto. As a stepping stone on the difficult walk back into the spotlight and a way of knocking off the cobwebs it’s highly promising and as an album in its own right it’s a sweet gentle mood piece. Not a career high exactly, but after this long away a highly welcome extra.

12) David Gilmour “Love and Strange”

The new David Gilmour album is here, at last, a mere…nine years after the last one. And as the title implies it’s both lovely and strange. Perhaps because they’re so rare every time we get a lesser-spotted Gilmour album actually out in the wild everyone always falls over themselves to say how wonderful it is and how it’s so much better than the last four that were ‘disappointing’. Honestly though? It’s the same as the others: a couple of truly beautiful haunting moving pieces, three or four okay songs that, despite taking the best part of a decade to write, still sound as if they need a bit more work, a couple of instrumentals and a couple of others that just don’t go anywhere. In a move that will surprise absolutely no one it’s a slow-burning lazy groove album, just like ‘On An Island’ and ‘Rattle That Lock’, one that saunters and plods with the air of an album that has all the time in the world, even though lyrically it’s an album about quite the opposite, dealing with the recurring Floydian themes of mortality and old age, an album full of songs that sound like a follow-up to the song ‘Time’ about how there might not be much of that around anymore. Yet nowhere does Gilmour sound hurried or even particularly worried and the album never fully breaks itself out of its hypnotised trot.

Which is by no means to say that it’s bad. Like the Knopfler albums before it ‘Luck and Strange’ is one best heard in little pieces individually where the power of the songs can wash over you, rather than grouped together on a whole LP where everything is in danger of sounding the same. Once again this album’s strengths are the way the tracks combine to make up a lone meditative mood piece about mortality’ it’s strengths are the lack of variety with which it tells that tale. As ever with Gilmour’s solo albums he’s still one of the best guitar players in the business, with playing as sharp as ever and the best moments across this album (as per the others) are nearly all instrumental, moments of pure shimmery beautiful guitar-work that could have been recorded at any time in the past fifty years. I honestly don’t know how he does it: nowadays the formula is to record an album over a year or two, then play three or four big concerts in support of each album, so how does David sound so good so often? I lose the power to write when I’ve been away from my keyboard a day (some would say more often than that), never mind nearly a decade of pootling around for fun. I prefer this band to at least the ‘Rattle That Lock’ one too: the musicians (mostly old friends like Guy Pratt, Roger Eno and Steve Gadd) are happy to play in the background leaving the sound of the guitar front and centre and there are no attempts to plaster these songs in unnecessary layers of production or too many female choirs. Gilmour himself plays most of the keyboards interestingly and has come a long way since his first stabs back in the 1980s, with a subtle wash of sound that really enhances these thoughtful tales.

Gilmour is a very different type of writer to Roger Waters: he doesn’t have as many burning passions or things to say and as with the last two albums the record is so laidback languid and slow that it just kind of floats away without leaving much of an impact most songs noodling for five minutes plus while barely changing chords. David sounds good vocally for the most part, but with only ten tracks and two of them instrumentals it’s not as if he has a lot to test his vocal chords. Especially as daughter Romany takes lead on another two of the remaining eight songs (rather than the charge of nepotism some fans are complaining over she’s actually a placeholder substitute during the covid lockdown era when dad was making her two songs then figured no one could ever improve on them!): she has a fine voice and hearing her sing words by her mum about the worry of what world she’ll grow up in and offering advice to enjoy learning from mistakes, written to warmer and more optimistic music from her dad, is a neat trick that works with the overall theme of handing things on to the next generation. The problem is she doesn’t sound much at all like her dad, whose in danger of getting shunted to guest spot on his own solo album, with only the guitar solo giving away who this really is on her two songs. Every track on the album is a ballad and all go on too long (except for the instrumentals that are too short) without any variation, no middle eight, no chord change, no variety in instrumentation while everything comes at the same mid-paced tempo (Gilmour’s forgotten how to write decent rock songs – it’s been thirty years since his last decent one!) Sometimes an album like this can be saved in the editing room, but the production sound is annoyingly the same throughout too –every track takes time out at the end for the same silky stretched out guitar solos and only the sound of Rick’s haunting Farfisa organ on the title track (which started life as a jamming session in 2007 for an aborted follow-up to ‘On An Island’, a year before his death –the full fourteen minute piece is heard without overdubs as the CD’s lone and hypnotic if rather dull bonus track) shines through the heavy anonymous production murk. Despite the title there’s frustratingly little passion or love here and nothing that’s actually that strange or in any way different to what we got on the last two records.

Alas it’s the lyrics that are the biggest problem. In common with everything Gilmour’s worked on since 1994’s Floyd finale ‘The Division Bell’ they’re written by his wife Polly Samson, a one time poet before they married whose work is best described as…controversial. Fans have debated thick and fast about the suitability of Polly’s words for thirty years and whether she is right to put words into her husband’s mouth that are passed off as his own; as usual they’re a mixed bag. Sometimes Polly’s words are poetic and powerful – ‘A Single Spark’ might be her best lyric since ‘High Hopes’, an epic song about what life is all about which wonders if some greater entity ‘keeps the world turning’ when humanity’s future seems so uncertain and watching hope die out as ‘despair bends my knee’ (even if her husband chooses this, of all moments, to write a bland la-la-la tune and stick a modern intrusive drum track on top). ‘Scattered’ too is a moving piece about husband and wife walking arm in arm along their favourite places an unspoken silence between them wondering who is going to go first into the great beyond as ‘time is a tide that disobeys me’. And other times her words are a nonsense, there to say not very much at all: ‘In the light before dawn shadows snake in my peripheral’ is the album’s opening line while later in the title track ‘heart beats with fear in the theatre of my soul’. They never sound quite ‘real’, dressed up to impress rather than move, which tied together with a guitarist whose playing mostly for fun and something to do makes ‘Luck and Strange’ even less urgent and more forgettable than its two predecessors. The song ’Between Two Points’, about the Gilmours nobly turning the other cheek during constant attacks is also a rather pious take on the Gilmour-Water wars over claims of anti-semitism that, rightly or wrongly (and you can argue both ways) Polly herself started and got her husband to back her up. ‘You’re right, they’re wrong’ is the declaration, on an entire song about doing the right thing by ignoring your critics that seems to go on and on. It’s disingenuous and not the way it happened so this sequel to ‘Lost For Words’ is hardly as powerful or as righteous as it wants to be. The biggest problem with ‘Luck and Strange’ though is that husband and wife are speaking from two different places: this is a musically sleepy snoozy album about…the shortness of our lifespans and the urgency with which we need to get things done. Which pauses for a guitar solo after almost every verse and takes timeout to noodle. The result is an album that’s frequently not as powerful as by rights it ought to be, with that guitar soaring on songs about that subject. There are far too moments that are perfunctory though, even ugly, as a track just sits there not doing very much.

However the moments when it comes together are all worth it, when the pair speak from the heart about losing old friends or worrying about the world their children might grow up in, which are powerful indeed. Take ‘The Piper’s Call’, a folky song about undoing the last knots tying you to your life on Earth because you won’t need them in the next world, while realising that stardom is a trap in this one that catches too many out, a masterpiece half-embracing half-afraid of what comes next. As the Floyd-debut referencing title suggests David wrote it for his much missed friend Syd Barrett, reflecting on a flame that burned so bright it was never going to last and the people who took advantage of the fact, damning the drug pushers who were the ones calling the real tunes on the pipe that led poor Syd astray. It’s not just for Syd though but for every creative who becomes addicted or dies before they had a chance to show the world what they were made of, with Gilmour surprised to have lived this long in one piece after losing so many god friends that way. There’s a delicious crunching middle too, the one moment on this album that rocks, as Gilmour turns back the clock to a pretty decent facsimile of his 1968 rock sound. It’s the old debate Neil Young once had on ‘Hey Hey My My’ back in 1979, of whether it’s better to burn out than it is to rust. For his part Gilmour’s quite happy to rust if it means he gets to lie and think and breathe in one piece. The irony in the fact that this most thrilling moment on the record comes after a verse about the importance of taking the slower, calmer road if you want to survive is not lost on me though; at least Syd’s music was always exciting and always daring and rule-breaking, while his catalogue of three-ish solo albums (one unfinished) recorded in a single year isn’t far off what Gilmour’s managed in fifty. Despite my issues with it, too, there’s no denying the beauty of ‘Between Two Points’ or the beauty with which daughter Romany sings it, haunted, as if she’s singing not about her dad being tarnished in the music press but an entire generation her elders look on sceptically even though they’re the cause of half their problems. ‘They’re right you’re wrong’ takes on quite a different meaning in her voice, on a lyric about broken promises and how she’s ‘stopped hoping from an early age’ that things would get better. It’s beautifully bleak and dad’s guitar solo, busy and warm and trying to shake the sleepy backing track out of its stupor and into life, recalls the great one played on ‘Comfortably Numb’ in all the best ways. At seven minutes and barely two notes ‘Scattered’ is painfully slow for the most part but there’ s a moment, towards the end, after a lyric about refusing to grow old gracefully and the need to rage against the dying of the light that inspires another gutsy solo out of nowhere and song swells into the ether, propped up by heart-tugging strings, that’s a really effective album closer. Goodness knows why the old-fashioned but really lovely ‘Yes I Have Ghosts’, a duet between dad and daughter originally written for mum’s book ‘A Theatre For Dreamers’ got banished to the level of ‘bonus track’ either as it’s easily the prettiest song on the album, a sweet of memories good and bad, the narrator looking back over a busy life and wondering if he could have done better, not always liking what the nasty parts of life turned him into, mercifully temporarily.

As for the rest, well it’s the epitome of forgettable. The ninety second long ‘Black Cat’ barely has time to raise a paw and the simple chord progression is trying too hard to sound like Rick without understanding his exquisite understanding of minor chords and when less notes mean more. The title track is indeed strange, the most unusual song on the album by far, a sort of bluesy 12 bar that keeps throwing in odd little extras, but it’s 2000s vintage and the way it formed organically from a forgotten jam simply reminds you of how much further Gilmour used to reach than this. The song added over the top is clearly meant to be surreal and psychedelic, impressionable and hallucinatory, possibly about what happens after we die, but it really doesn’t work at all. Long and repetitive as it is the uncut jam session is far more interesting – nice to hear Rick one last time, though. ‘A Single Spark is forgettable, a too simple music and an over-written lyric about difficult times that has nothing much to say over than ‘eeh by gum, isn’t it all awful?’ There’s a synth choir and a passing ring from the division bell but that’s not enough to cover up the fact that this is a poem set to music not a song and Dave is really struggling to even work out where the song should go. ‘Vita Brevis’ is what the album should be doing, a nugget of feeling and crystalline beauty as Gilmour plays wah wah guitar over plucked harp strings and synth washes, only it ends a mere forty-seven seconds in before it has the chance to say anything. ‘Dark and Velvet Nights’ tries the album trick in reverse, an overly noisy melody with a very 1980s soundtrack that ruins one of Polly’s better set of words, a simple devotion of love and how after decades together they can read each other’s mind and become one person, worrying what will happen when they get old and ‘whether I’ll be left holding your hand or you’ll be left holding mine’. The last remaining song is ‘Sings’, a sea shanty that’s clearly written to be another ‘Smile’, one of the highpoints of ‘On An Island’, with a similar low scale feel, but has nothing to say beyond ‘ee, I wish we were young so we could do this all over again, chuck’.

Had this record not been so long in the making I’d declare it a bit rushed: there’s so much more that could have been made with these songs while the ones that work are so good precisely because they have more going on in them and feel like they have more to say. Half of it gets by on luck alone and half of it isn’t strange enough and while the theme of growing older, shorter of breath and closer to death from an older perspective is exactly what Gilmour should be doing on paper (after all his best songs recently have all been on this theme, such as the beautiful ‘A Boat Lies Waiting’, by far the highlight from ‘Rattle That Lock’) in practice it makes for an album that’s the musical equivalent of hanging around the old folks home winding out the days with the least effort possible until the end. And is it the end? Well mercifully Gilmour says no and that he wants to release the next album a bit quicker, rather than the near-decade gap. I really hope so because I truly believe there is a first class solo Gilmour album waiting to be made, one the equal of anything the band or Roger did; goodness knows he’s talented enough as the highlights of all his solo works demonstrate. For an album about raging against the dying of the light, though, it’s oddly slumbering and could have done with more raging and light and a lot less dying.

13) Micky Dolenz “Live At The Troubadour”

Micky’s certainly been busy since the sad death of Monkee bandmate Mike Nesmith a couple of years ago, as if the loss of his friends has made him more determined than ever to keep at least one flame burning bright now he’s the last Monkee standing. This live gig, taped at London’s Troubadour nightclub where many visiting American musicians liked hanging out in the 1960s, is a good summary of his live show and a general guide to his solo work, featuring a large dose of Monkees but also lots of other things as well. A career overview, with songs broken up by extracts from Micky’s quite gappy but generally delightfully happy autobiography ‘I’m Told I Had A Good Time’ (in a style pioneered by Ray Davies on his ‘X-Ray’ tour back in the mid-1990s) it’s like a cross between two of his recent releases ‘Live At BB King’s and ‘An Evening With Peter Noone’. If you’re a Monkee regular then you’ve probably heard Micky’s nostalgic reminiscences before – how he pushed for Jimi Hendrix to be a Monkee opening act (there’s a nifty performance of ‘Purple Haze’ thrown in for good measure!), how becoming a ‘real’ band was like Spock ‘becoming a real Vulcan’, how bandmate Peter Tork was ‘brown rice, kale and herbs’ in contrast to his own fast food diet, how the four men expected to work together as a group were strangers until just before shooting began. There are some lovely ‘new-ish’ bits as well though – an earnest reading of Buffalo Springfield’s ‘For What It’s Worth’ with a mention of how close Stephen Stills came to being a fellow Monkee (losing his audition only because he was losing his hair and teeth), a nostalgic ‘That Was Then, This Is Now’ which works far better as a sad tale of living in the moment than it did as a 1980s Monkee comeback single, The Beatles’ ‘Good Morning Good Morning’ which the Monkees got special dispensation to use in their final TV episode ‘The Frodis Caper’ (which Micky wrote) – theirs was the only non-documentary TV show until the 1980s The Beatles and Apple allowed to be associated with one of their song); another Beatles cover ‘Sgt Pepper’s’ which works well but sounds out of place near the end of the first disc rather than the start of the second where it belongs, surprise renditions of The Spencer Davis group’s ‘Gimme Some Lovin’ (groovy!) and Elton John’s ‘Your Song’ (err, not so groovy! Micky recalls seeing him at the Troubadour before his first record came out – and at a party later they find out they have the same taste in t-shirts!) All that plus another nine Monkee classics, including the rarely sung No Time’ the improvised jam from ‘Headquarters’ and three songs that, until that last Micky ‘n’ Mike tour, Davy always got to sing: ‘Daydream Believer’ ’A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You’ and ‘Valleri’, as well as Mike’s pre-Monkee Linda Ronstadt hit ‘Different Drum’ and the Tork number he’s always sung ‘For Pete’s Sake’ that used to be the theme tune for the Monkees’ second series. If you’ve been here before then you might still feel short-changed, not least because Micky’s backing band are a bit closer to pub rock than some of his others, but if you’re new then you’ll learn a lot and laugh a lot while Micky himself remains a fine raconteur and very pleasant company for a couple of hours.

14) Pentangle “Reunions and BBC Sessions 1982-2011”

We finally got the very last AAA albums awaiting their first CD release in 2022, when Pentangle’s five studio and one live record made between 1984 and 1995 were finally released in a big box set padded out with period BBC sessions. Now we get the slightly less interesting follow-up, which covers the remaining unreleased radio work the new-look Pentangle recorded for the BBC across those years and a two-disc ‘finale’ from their big reunion of 2008 that sadly turned to be their last show (released on disc separately already in 2016) which – for reasons best known to the record company – appears as part of this set in all the physical formats but not on streaming services. It’s an odd little quirk that the original Pentangle did very little radio (and not that much TV) and barely any singles: they were marketed as being somehow above it and yet still sold bucketloads (at least for a while) on the back of a TV theme tune and word of mouth. But the 1980s was different. The reunion band’s management had a very different vision of the band as folk singers people could relate to and moved them away from the concert halls and festivals to art centres and onto as many radio programmes as would book them, however unsuitable. It’s something that backfired at the time: the 2022 set’s booklet features much sighing and eye-rolling over how lots of airplay time resulted in little to no sales because the people who listened to these programmes had stopped buying records or going to concerts by and large (not to mention the rather rude introductions between the songs from DJs who have clearly never heard of Pentangle before or by the other token are amazed they’re still alive). What was an odd move forty odd years though is welcome now as there’s a treasure trove of untapped Pentangle for Cherry Records to release and, unlike some bands who performed their songs in the studio as near as close to the records as could be, Pentangle were always doing something different, never playing a song the same way two nights running.

Pentangle’s marketing hasn’t really got all that better in the interim, however. The previous set ‘Through The Ages 1984-1995’ featured a whopping twenty-nine individual songs as performed for BBC radio. Rather than repeat them on this set, which is what I thought at first they were doing, instead they’ve gone for the remainder, most of it taken from one long concert in Italy that kicked off the reunion in 1982, with a smattering of live broadcasts that haven’t been released yet alongside. It all makes the two sets very uneven: if you have anything but total collectoritis (all too easily caught and alas only preventable by death) then you don’t really need this set (though you still really need the last one) and if you do then chances are you already own half of it anyway; though the performances are different the songs and the arrangements aren’t. It looks as if Cherry Red Records either didn’t think their two sets through or just discovered another bumper cache of recordings: my money’s on the former. So what worked nicely as extra bonuses on the ends of hard-to-din records pals across multiple discs of the same songs ad infinitum. Pentangle were always a nervy kind of band live, one that played as any bad shows as good ones and their days of astonishing telepathy are long gone by the 1980s and 1990s, not least because what starts out as 4/5ths of the original band in 1984 have become just Bert Jansch and Jacqui McShee by 1995. That’s especially true of that 1982 show which anachronistically takes up the whole of the second disc where the band haven’t played together in nine years and have barely had a chance to say hello to each other and aren’t yet communicating with that typically brilliant Pentangle telepathy; Equally, glorious as it was to see the band again for ‘Finale’ in 2008, all five members present for the first time since that year, that’s not exactly one of their better gigs either (and especially if you already own it from eight years ago).

Even so if you’re a Pentangle fan you’ll know that even in their darkest days they were capable of something sublime and unexpected just when you’d given up hope and so it is here: in between the tired folk songs and the sluggish improvisations there’ll be a mini-masterpiece like Jacqui’s a capella rendition of John Renbourn’s moving folk song ‘A Bold Young Farmer’ from a show in Milan in December 1982 that’s bold and daring, brilliantly modern yet respectful to the ye olde source material like all great Pentangle things, ‘If I Had A Lover’, a gorgeous song of longing from Bert’s solo album ‘Thirteen Down’ given a beautiful full band arrangement, a bittersweet song of jealousy and spite that sounds so natural coming out of Jacqui’s mouth and with John Renbourn duelling with Bert’s guitar just like the days of old, a sumptuous ‘People On The Highway’, Bert’s song of disillusionment from 1972 as Pentangle split up played as a sort of ‘where were we?’ moment that’s much bouncier and happier than the version on ‘Solomon’s Seal’, a particular fiery seven minute version of ‘Bruton Town’ from near the end that knocks spots off the one on ‘Live 1995’, a twelve minute jazzy improvised ‘Pentangling’ that might not fly like the days of old but does at least demonstrate that the old fire and courage still burned bright, even if everyone’s fingers were a tad slower by the 1980s and an unusually angry version of Middle Ages feminist anthem ‘Let No Man Steal Your Thyme’ from a final-gig promoting radio show on Radio 2 in 2008.

In between there are a lot of songs that don’t quite hit the mark, including rare band performances of solo Bert songs ‘Open Up The Watergate’ and ‘Moonshine’ that sounds like five musicians playing five different things at the same time (like so much Pentangle at their worst) and a lot of songs you’ll know and love well from the records that sound as if the band have never played them before (their most famous song ‘Light Flight’, alas, crashes soon after takeoff). In other words if you’re a Pentangle newbie wondering what all the fuss is about then this probably isn’t the best place to start and even if you’re a collector who owns the original albums and is desperate to know what happens next you want the 2022 set ‘Through The Ages’ not this one: this is just the leftovers. All that said having any of this stuff out officially, after forty years of listening to them in inferior sound on low quality cassettes for so many years, it’s great to have them all in one place and in decent sound at last – and this really is all of them now, too, as far as I know, for better or worse. I’m so glad that fans at least have the chance to hear these recordings again: the reunion Pentangle have been overlooked for too long and while the packaging is basic and clearly made on a budget it’s also done with love and care.

15) Neil Young and Crazy Horse “Early Daze”

Alas the two other Neil Young ‘archive’ releases (though one’s kinda recent) are far less interesting than the parent box. Once again the Neil surprises everyone by delivering an album that’s been talked about and half-promised for so many decades we thought we’d never ever see it and once again it’s missed the boat because most of the biggest prizes on it have trickled out already on different records. Back in early 1969 Neil Young was a year out of the Buffalo Springfield and had just made his first solo album, a process that he hated given all the many intricate overdubs and re-recordings it involved. By the time he finished a track he was sick of it and his bus brain moved on so fast he was already on to the next batch of songs. What he wanted to do with his follow-up was use a really tightknit band that he could trust to pick things up quickly and that’s just what he found when he stumbled across a doo-wop vocal group turned rock and roll sextet named ‘The Rockets’. Borrowing their guitarist/lead vocalist Danny Whitten, bassist Billy Talbot and Ralph Molina with the promise of returning them thereafter, Neil set about recording ‘Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere’ in January 1969, trying out some abandoned sessions in August 1969 and adding a few tracks later in October 1969. This is the last two sessions combined, with the January ones (which resulted in such classics as ‘Cowgirl In The Sand’ ‘Round and Round’ and ‘The Losing End’) missing. Ever since the seven-song album release, heralded as an instant classic, Neil’s teased us with the thought of all those other goodies that never made the album and even released a few of them himself: ‘Helpless’ ended up being re-cut by CSNY in 1970, the early sloppy band version of ‘Birds’ featured here first appeared as the rare non-album flipside to ‘Only Love Can Break Your Heart’ (while the gorgeous largely solo final version was a highlight of ‘After The Goldrush’), Danny’s hauntingly beautiful yet troubled ‘Look At All The Things’ was the highlight of the eponymous first Crazy Horse album released in 1971, a different killer recording of Danny’s song ‘Downtown’ with Nils Lofgren playing Neil’s parts ended up on that same LP and a live recording with Neil ended up on Young’s 1975 Whitten tribute album ‘Tonight’s The Night’, a different take of ‘Winterlong’ turned up on 1977 compilation ‘Decade’, ‘Wonderin’ got a rockabilly makeover for ‘Everybody’s Rockin’ in 1983 and Neil can be seen singing ‘Dance Dance Dance’ in his 1971 ‘In Concert’ TV special (while the Horse cut their own version for their first LP). That casual scattered brilliance of career high best songs frittered away on these different albums apparently at random, coupled with all those anecdotes about how brilliant those sessions were and Neil’s insistence that his ‘first thought best thought’ policy results in all the great moments of his back catalogue, have built the tapes’ reputation up to impossible heights, embellished when the rather good outtake ‘Everybody’s Alone’ sneaked out on ‘Archives One’ in 2008 which might be the best of all, pained and hurt and raw.

Had this album come out in 1969 as semi-intended? It would have been a big hit, a stepping stone between ‘Nowhere’ and ‘Goldrush’ that lacked the fizz and intensity of the former and the beauty of the latter but would nevertheless been a more than stellar collection of songs mostly relating to the heartbreak of the end of Neil’s first marriage to wife Susan Avacedo, with an emphasis on bitterness and disillusion. Chances are Neil would have got rave reviews but most fans would have considered Crazy Horse’s performances – glorified rehearsal takes really given how fast Neil was working them - too sloppy to do such promising material justice. In 2024 though? Not so much. I mean, the material still sounds fabulous, especially if you’ve never heard the parent LP, represented here by a cheeky ‘remix’ of the best known cut and joyous singalong ‘Cinnamon Girl’ (which differs only in the final peal of notes, faded on the original and here loud and proud) and ‘Down By The River’ (an intense seven minute game of cat and mouse, heard here with a lazy Neil guide vocal that he sensibly replaced for the final record).‘Everybody’s Alone’ and ‘Dance Dance Dance’ are good, but identical to the ‘Archives’ versions. That leaves six recordings which are different to what’s been out already, but all are clearly inferior: ‘Helpless’ is such a CSNY song, fragile and pretty and calling for harmonies, that it’s rather a shock hearing it get the bare-bones raggedy-ass Crazy Horse treatment and they’re completely the wrong casting for it; Danny’s two utterly brilliant songs ‘Look At All The Things’ and ‘Downtown’ haven’t caught fire with the band yet, the first a throwaways ballad here without the edge, the nervous energy and sense of mortality of the Crazy Horse versions recorded when Danny, by now a heavy drug addict, knows he’s not long for this world and the latter merely a ploddy rock song without the desperate cheek of the drug-peddling lyrics from someone whose passed the line from habit to obsession. A plodding Horse version of ‘Birds’ is too heavy to get off the ground, unlike the feathered beauty of the solo version on ‘Goldrush’, a dodo by comparison to the final versions’ nightingale. Only ‘Winterlong’ and ‘Wonderin’ live up to the hype, the fragility of these early takes well suited to these songs about trying to keep it together and not to fall apart, Danny’s cheeky surfer-happy harmonies playing the cheery Tigger to Neil’s grumpy Eeyore and the pair’s chemistry already off the charts. Both of these outtakes are special (if not up to the ‘finished’ versions on ‘Decade’ and ‘Everybody’s Rockin’ respectively), but buried away amongst half an hour of stuff we’ve largely heard before and charged £15 odd for it, somehow it’s harder to get excited about. This 1969 era is undeniably a great fruitful period in Neil’s career, maybe even the best and had this record come out at any time during the 20th century its importance would have been colossal; now it just feels old hat. The frustration is that there’s a great set in here somewhere: had Neil been brave enough to open his vaults and release everything, perhaps splitting this album in two between the January and October 1969 sessions with a few alternate takes and demos, this could easily have been the highlight of the year – instead it feels like yet another ‘Archive’ release that takes away rather than adds to the legend. Alas worse is to come…

16) Neil Young and The Horse “Fu##in’ Up”

You know the recent trend for musicians to re-record one of their ‘classic albums’ live? Well I never thought I’d see the day Neil did something trendy but in the wake of so many other musicians (including bandmate Graham Nash’s ‘Songs For Beginners/Wild Tales’ a couple of years ago) here’s Neil’s take and it is, if not his best or most famous album by any means, at the very least a compromise between being a popular album that’s comparatively easy to play and indeed has been close to being played complete in his setlists over the years anyway. ‘Ragged Glory’ was a lucky accident in 1990: a so-so album that gained classic status amongst fans given that it caught the mood of the world in 1990 and captured the spirit of home-made grunge away from the pop-riddles mainstream the year before Nirvana became big. This show was recorded at a ‘private party’ for business mogul Dani Reiss, owner of the clothing firm ‘Canada Goose’ at his home in Toronto on November 4th 2023 (hey if we’re doing requests can Neil perform all of ‘Trans’ complete with ‘Archive’ outtakes for my birthday please?!) Billy Talbot and Ralph Molina are there from the original release but guitarist Frank Sampedro (who retired a few years ago after an injury on the Horse tour bus when Neil accidentally shut a door on his hand) has two replacements: longterm Horse collaborator Nils Lofgren who joined the band officially five years ago and Micah Nelson, the son of country star Willie, who played in Neil’s ‘other’ recent band ‘The Promise Of The Real’ (and was in charge of the ‘Trans’ videos on Neil’s archive III’). That ought to make a huge difference given the humongous differences between the three of them (Sampedro is a very fluid instinctive player, Lofgren a very melodic reliable player, Lucas a very rhythmic one) but oddly it doesn’t: if it wasn’t for Neil’s slightly (pun unintended) hoarser vocals you could easily believe this was a Crazy Horse live album from the actual ‘Don’t Spook The Horse’ tour that supported ‘Glory’. Only not a particularly good or necessary one: it’s not that the new-model Horse play badly, just that we already had half of ‘Ragged Glory’ played live on the career highlight ‘Weld’, a live album packed with rage and passion and meaning (the band played live to a backdrop of the Gulf War as broadcast on CNN news every night, adding their feedback to the live feed of bombs falling in real time) and the other half, frankly, doesn’t need to be resuscitated. Honestly a performance in front of a multi-millionaire paying the bills doesn’t have anything like the same level of bite or purpose. Many fans are left scratching their heads over this whole enterprise, wondering why if Neil was going to go the fan-friendly route he didn’t choose ‘Harvest’ or ‘Harvest Moon’ but I can kind of see why: there are parallels in Neil’s inner and outer life both, with his life in 1990: there’s an illegal war raging (actually make that two) that he feels powerless to stop, while I remain convinced, given the hints in many of the songs, that the songs from ‘Ragged Glory’ were written after first meeting current wife Darryl Hannah but when Neil was still unsure about breaking up his ‘happy home’ to leave wife Pegi and his children (then still quite young) to be with her; it’s a closing of the circle, Neil singing about past difficult decisions from the perspective of someone whose made them now. Weirdly the original closer ‘Mother Earth’ , Neil’s biggest ecological statement and something of a bit of fortune-telling given how conditions on the planet are worse nowadays, isn’t performed even though it would be the most prescient track here (and Neil performed it only recently, as the opener to his 2016 live record ‘Earth’, the one with an audience of pigs, frogs, grasshoppers and chickens just to give newbies an idea of how weird most of Neil’s live albums usually are!)

Which is to say that this is passable rather than another ‘Road Rocks’ or ‘Return To Greendale’ or any number of the concert album horrors seemingly designed to test our patience Neil has inflicted on us in the past, while I’d still take it over yet another live album from 1971 (there have been rather a lot of those from the Neil Young Archives series lately). However for maybe the first time in his career Neil is far too respectful of the source material and changes little to nothing from the original arrangements – indeed the only difference you can tell without an audio microscope are a couple of slower tempos (which don’t work) and an extra Crazy Horse laugh on the line ‘they say it’s just a joke’ on ‘Over and Over’. Oh and of course the really weird decision to rename all of the original songs on this album, which the cynical half of my brain wonders is an attempt to fool fans into buying something they already kind of own in the hope that it’s a record of new songs (perhaps for copyright purposes the 1950s cover ‘Farmer John’ is left alone). Alas The Horse are more My Little Pony at times, without the drive passion telepathy or sheer power of the original: you only have to play back the deeply sleepy version of new de facto title track ‘Fu##in’ Up’ now renamed ‘Heart Of Steel’ (weirdly the ‘censored’ letters are different; apparently 2024 sensibilities can cope with a real ‘I’ now but are still ashamed of the letter ‘k’) with the 1990 or 1991 versions to hear how little the band’s heart is in this project. ‘Over and Over’ (ahem ‘Broken Circle’) is the one version here that compares to the original, a nicely tight and powerful rendering given that it runs a full nine minutes. However that’s one song amongst nine: there’s a particularly sloppy ‘Love To Burn’ (sorry, ‘Valley Of Hearts’) that sounds as if it’s falling apart from the first note never mind the final one nearly thirteen minutes later and the lust of garage classic ‘Farmer John’ sounds even more wasted, loose and lecherous than before if that was possible, as if the protective father farmer’s just been run over with his own tractor. Also a lot of these songs just aren’t made for live performance, hence why Neil never played them the first time round: the folk tune and psychedelic lyrics of ‘Mansion On The Hill’ (oh good grief…’Walkin’ In My Place’) sounding most out of place against the roar and the noise of the other songs and treated to a Molina drum-wobble that doesn’t really fit, plus the Dylan steal ‘The Days That Used To Be’ which is just ‘My Back Pages’ in melody and theme (flipping heck… ‘To Follow One’s Dream’) too pretty a song for such raw power. All in all while not the worst or weirdest thing Neil’s done…this year, but this is all still very pointless and this Crazy Horse album is ultimately a ‘mare best skipped.

Re-issues:

1) George Harrison “Living In The Material World” (50th Anniversary)

George’s second album ‘proper’ never got the dues ‘All Things Must Pass’ did. After all, it’s a very different humbler record that sets its sights far lower: a single album set not a triple, recorded when George was struggling with the end of his marriage to first wife Patti, the fallout between old Beatley friends and the death of his mum Louise, it’s a record where he sounds like a man asking difficult pertinent questions rather than the spiritual musical guru with all the answers. At the time fans really weren’t at all sure what to make of this record, which had been nearly three years in the making: they wanted another comforting hug from someone who could show them the joy in the universe anew, but what they got instead was an ex-Beatle asking for a hug instead. George doesn’t even sound that sure about his relationship with his maker either, despite ‘My Sweet Lord’ being such a hit a few years earlier, alternating between more dictatorial about his faith than ever (‘The lord Loves The One That Loves The lord’, the one religious Harrisong that goes too far condemning us all to being barred from the afterlife for being disbelievers) and asking why he’s been abandoned (the album’s best known song, the hit single ‘Give Me Love Give Me Peace On Earth’ is more of a hopeful request than the expected positive statement while ‘Don’t Let Me wait Too Long’ is impatience in song); fans didn’t like the fact that the religious songs they’d taken to heart as the ‘gospel truth’ was now being challenged by the person who had first given it to them. That sense of, to quote a future George album, of ‘extra texture’ with Phil Spector’s echoey wall of sound and massive name guest stars has also been replaced by something much simpler and humbler, as a troubled George with a busy mind tries to find peace in the stillness, creating what will end up being his most ‘minimalist’ album. Yet the funny thing about ‘World’ is that the original album was also massively overproduced, given a slick commercial feel more in keeping with the period glam rock records, that really didn’t suit this set of humble troubled questioning songs and seemed at odds with the album’s big them, of the importance of avoiding falling into the traps of living in the ‘material world’. Fans who thought they knew what they were getting and confused as to why anyone wouldn’t simply want to re-create such a ‘hit’ gave the album a critical mauling and George’s solo work got a bad reputation that lasted right up until ‘Cloud Nine’ in 1987 and the Travelling Wilburys beyond. Even this re-issue feels a bit overlooked despite the hoo-hah lately for, despite what the official title of the box says, they missed the 50th anniversary of the original by a year (was there a delay? Or did they pull it to avoid conflicting with the big reunion Beatle bash of last year, one George would totally have hated and seen as a return to the lows of the ‘material world’? It would have been very George to release a 51st anniversary’ and pretend they intended it that way!)

I’ve always had a soft spot for this troubled record though and felt there was a great record in here trying to get out. I love George at his most honest and this album is in many ways his confessional to follow the sermon of ‘pass’, the moment George quietly admits his faults to us and all the ways he’s found wanting. Much of this album is George kicking himself for getting things so wrong – the impending split with wife Patti and a string of affairs he wasn’t bothering to keep secret any more (‘Try Some, Buy Some’ originally given to Doris Troy for her record on Apple but perfectly suiting this album’s mood of quiet regret), the Apple courtcase where Paul had to sue the others to escape manager Allen Klein who’d finally come out and showed his true colours even to his biggest supporter John (‘Sue Me Sue You Blues’ and ‘Sail Away Raymond’, the name of Klein’s lawyer), falling into worldly traps of sex drugs and rock and roll that makes him a bad follower (the title track, which is the definition of ugly pretty, forever getting close to the true beauty of life only to lose it all again). There’s a real sadness and melancholy that runs through a lot of George’s work but especially this album which doesn’t just dip its toes into this water, it bathes in I it, while there’s a lot more autobiography than on ‘Pass’ which was a much more ‘universal’ record, about the human condition – this album is all about George, the closest he came to writing his own ‘Lennon/Plastic Ono Band’. Which is why that original production shine was so intrusive: it should have been done the same way, raw and honest and pure and hungry, not hidden under layers of excess fat. That’s long been this record’s Achilles heel: the pre-punk 1970s sound that demanded everything be slick and dosed with dollops of extra sugar. The songs have always suffered for it and unlike ‘Pass’, where the simple tiny songs were made to sound bigger by the might of the cast of friends invited to play, this poor record always sounded swamped.

That’s all changed now thanks to one of the best remixing jobs I’ve heard (by Paul Hicks as per most Beatley things nowadays, the son of Hollie guitarist Tony Hicks doing his dad’s old rival proud). ‘Material World’ always sounded busy yet, like an ornate Victorian plate in a junkyard, covered by so many layers of dust that it still looked bland and single-coloured. But oh the layers were so very beautiful when you studied them closely. So it’s a relief to say that much of that production shine has been taken away by a mix which, equal with the ‘Double Fantasy Stripped Down’ set of 2010, must surely rank as one of the most radical of Beatle-related overhauls we’ve had so far. Everything sounds much better than it used to, not just clearer but as if everything has been moved into widescreen so you can actually hear the simple washes of colour George put in the album that somehow got mixed into black-and-white. ‘Give Me Love (Give Me Peace On Earth)’ snowballs, starting as small and humble as it always was until each round of hope turns it into a communal singalong in a way only hinted at before. The thoughtful ‘Light That Has Lighted The World’ is now less a cold spiritual dirge and more a warm hymn. The haunting Indian ‘spiritual sky’ part of the title track now bursts forth into technicolour to better contrast with the relentless rock thud of the ‘material’ bit. The sly stop-start rock of the Apple-lawyer bonking ‘Sue Me Sue You Blues’, a track deliberately made to be as repetitive and frustrating as its courtroom subject matter, but which is now a layered musical cornucopia of sound. Best of all is the minimalism of ‘Be Here Now’ (a song about living in the moment that so impressed Noel Gallagher he borrowed it as the title of Oasis’ third album on the back of the success of nicking ‘Wonderwall’). I’ve long considered it one of George’s prettiest if minimalist songs, all stuck religiously to a single chord, but it all sounded largely one note (that’s not a criticism: holding still in the midst of chaos and regaining your balance is what the song’s about). Now it’s a masterpiece in miniature that has the time and space to breathe: there are organ notes giving swashes of colour, subtle harmonies embedded into the background, even a sitar part I’m not sure I’ve ever heard before and, fittingly for such a song, the more you look at it the more you begin to see (well, hear), like the beauty of life flowering away quietly in nature if only we take the time out of our busy day doing manmade things to look. Usually when a re-mastering job changes this much it means some tracks sound a little better and some a little worse but every song here is an improvement –perhaps because they’re all coming from much the same place of small quiet desperation in the face of big life changes. Only the ugly mocking ‘you’re not going to Heaven’ rant of ‘The Lord Loves The Lone Who Loves The Lord’ lets the side down and even that has George ranting in my ear clearer than he ever was before.

You also feel as if you know this record better thanks to a big fat second disc of outtakes which beat the similar ones on the ‘Pass’ set for two reasons. One is that this collection has been far less dipped in: only the overdub-free ‘Light That Has Lighted The World’ has been heard before (on ‘Early Takes’) and it’s a nice reading, cautiously awed like ‘Long Long Long’ rather than strident and certain as per ‘My Sweet Lord’. The other is that these outtakes are all very different, with one per song: George’s ‘guide vocals’ are all over the place but they’re much more successful in conveying the honesty and bitter truths at the heart of these depressed songs and they’re so much better and more ‘real’ heard this way. Without the many special guests and in many cases reduced to just a voice and a guitar the backings are free to glide, their quiet beauty no longer hidden by the sheer spectacle of it all. Honestly I’m not sure I’ll play the main album that much again now I can hear the outtakes. Not everything is a gem (beautiful closer ‘That Is All’ has now become a tuneless shrill closer with George attempting an unwise falsetto, while I never thought ‘The Lord Loves The One That Loves The Lord’ could actually sound worse!) but there are lots of revelations here: a more weary ‘Give Me Love’ before it was turned into a pop song but still with a quiet bounce all of its own, a noisier and more assertive ‘The Day The World Gets Round’ that George really should have kept, a joyous rendition of ‘Don’t Let Me Wait Too Long’ impressively happy despite the fact that apparently the band have already clocked up 49 takes (!) and best of all the moment that’s really got fans talking, a fragile, impressionistic ’Be Here Now’ that has George’s warm honeyed vocal front and centre rather than pushed out to the sides by the general ‘hum’. All this plus silly B-side ‘Miss O’Dell’ written for Chris, one of the unsung heroes of Apple the secretary who was due to visit George in his Los Angeles home but got lost in a ‘Blue jay Way’ fog and ended up so late he’s written a song while waiting for her (alas just the ‘giggling’ version, not the straight version around on bootleg!) and my second favourite of the songs George gave away to Ringo (‘It Don’t Come easy’ being the first), ‘Sail Away Raymond’ which is even more of a country hoedown than the finished version. Is the album itself a long lost classic? Does it deserve to be regarded alongside ‘All Things’ as the best thing George ever did. Arguably not, with far more misses than its predecessor despite being a third of the length, but equally it’s a really strong under-rated album that’s never ever sounded as good as this. The packaging is lovely too, with lots of extra shots around Friar Park and outtakes of the rear cover, the studio band gathered on George’s lawn for a banquet that looks a cross between a formal dinner and The Mad Hatter’s tea party, with goodness knows what going on in the background, a witty take on the overall theme of how a millionaire musician feels both cut off from and has more time for the spiritual world he seeks, if only the stumbling blocks of real life like eating and hosting friends stopped getting in the way so he could devote himself to it properly (although, sadly, there’s no equivalent of the ‘Pass’ gnomes or bits of George’s lawn to buy in this version, even the super deluxe model - although given that the front cover is a creepy hand palm covered in symbols and what looks like ravioli as if it’s involved in some Kaili ‘Help’ style cult, which used to really creep me out when I was a kid I’m quite merciful we didn’t get that as a statue of that or something). Of course, the irony about paying a fortune for a re-issue of an album I already own several times over and which should have sounded more like this in the first place, which is a themed album about falling into the traps of living in a world ruled by material wealth, is not lost on me…

2) Paul McCartney and Wings “Band On The Run” (Underdubbed Mix)

Remember last year when I said that we’d had yet more re-issues we didn’t need of two of the three most re-issued AAA albums in ‘Pet Sounds’ and ‘Dark Side Of The Moon’? Well here’s the third most re-issued AAA album right on cue, the third time this album’s been remixed and put back out this century even without counting the straight re-issues and vinyl pressings. It’s not what we fans were expecting, to say the least (and, yet again it’s not the ‘London Town’ and ‘Back To The Egg’ archive sets we were promised years ago in the last box ‘Flaming Pie’ four Christmasses ago and which would have been far more interesting). Yet this might well be the most important version of ‘Band On The Run’, still Macca’s most popular album by some margin for some odd reason, since the first one. For we don’t just get the album as completed but the album as it was at the ‘halfway stage’, effectively a whole new genre of ‘under-dubbed’ albums with the overdubs removed that might be a one-off or might, you suspect, be a series depending on how sales go. Basically it’s how ‘Run’ was shaping up after Paul, Linda and Denny Laine’s sojourn in Africa, a series of ‘recordings so far’ mixes that engineer Geoff Emerick put together for Wings’ benefit on their return back to London so they could see where work still needed doing. The tapes have been left exactly how they were, so there’s no ‘Helen Wheels’ (a song added to the American edition of the album and the only song taped from beginning to end in London as part of the overdubbing sessions) and the original aborted running order, two things that have confused many people who can sing the original note-for-note.

This set has been getting a lot of stick from fans as well it should (the cost is ridiculous: £30 odd for a straightforward reissue of the album we’ve all owned twenty times and a series of tapes with bits taken away is asking far too much and that’s just on CD; it costs £50 on vinyl in most shops). I share their reservations but for different reasons: whisper it quietly but frankly ‘Band on The Run’s not that good. I mean it’s not that bad either: ‘Jet’s always been one of my favourite McCartney rock songs, ;Let Me Roll It’ is tough and nasty, deliberately made to sound Lennonish on a catalogue that’s so often irrepressibly McCartney while the full-on blast of ‘1985’, adding a production powerhouse to one of the smallest songs Paul ever wrote, is impressively bold and daring. But the rest? Meh. The title track is a poor re-make of ‘Sgt peppers’ that seems there to provide an idea for the album cover more than anything else, ‘Bluebird’ is as flimsy as McCartney ballads come, ‘Mammunia’ is six tiring minutes of gibberish and ‘Picasso’s last Words, supposedly a surreal production powerhouse, is the emptiest and silliest 1970s McCartney song by some margin. ‘Band’ is just another Wings album: some great stuff, some ghastly, most of it somewhere in between, successful more because of the marketing and the timing than anything else (with long enough since the Beatle split for Paul to be ‘forgiven’), musically not a patch on ‘Ram’ ‘Venus and Mars’ or ‘London Town’ for my tastes. Far from being the greatest album any of the four Beatles made after the breakup, as so many fans and critics say, for me it’s not even the best album Wings made in 1973 and giving it so much attention when there are better albums out there desperately waiting for a return to the spotlight seems like a real waste. As a result I wasn’t looking forward to this record as much as most. However I’ve really enjoyed seeing this album in a new light and played it more times across the year (it came out at the beginning of February, unusually) than I expected. I’ve always felt this and indeed most of the Wings albums were overproduced and often find myself playing the barebones versions from bootlegs more than the real thing, so while I sympathise with the complaints about feeding a multibillionaire extra money for something that’s ‘less’ of a record than before, for me it works – if you treat it like a rare bootleg (in great quality) rather than ‘the next big McCartney project’.

Of course if you’re a casual fan you might not notice much as the album is very nearly there, with only tiny differences throughout, but of course if you’re the sort of fan whose played this album to death then those tiny differences are fascinating. ‘Band On The Run’, for instance, sounds very different without that famous orchestral buildup (and just the guitar), though its only really the instrumental break in the middle that’s any different; ‘Mamunia’ is missing some extra harmony vocals (the echoing ‘well the next tiiiiime’ part) and you can hear Macca’s previously unintelligible chatter over the fade far more clearly (‘…It’s the same old sound, I like it, woooh!’); ‘No Words’ is one of the big revelations of the set, the lack of orchestra making it sound much tougher all round, with the middle and the closing blistering guitar solos sounding better than ever without so many other things getting in the way (it might be my imagination but I think it runs a handful of seconds longer too); ‘Jet!’ is more subtly different with the lack of orchestra not really changing it all that much, although you can hear some of the harmonies more clearly (while others are missing entirely) and Macca’s opening whoops and hollers sound a lot clearer (he also sings the notes where the orchestra riff at the end will go) while he also ‘sings’ the horn part at the end, although the big difference is that the third verse around the two minute mark hasn’t been written yet and it’s treated as a straight instrumental break; ‘Bluebird’ is identical right up until the Howie Casey sax solo which isn’t there yet – instead you can hear Paul, low in the mix, humming what it’s going to be; ‘Mrs Vanderbilt’ is most notable for the improvised chatter at the ending which you can hear much more, particularly Linda’s giggles, although given that the biggest difference the whole take is a ‘yeeeha!’ from Paul you do have to seriously ask yourself sometimes what you’ve just spent your money on; ‘1985’ has been getting the most criticism given that it’s a straightforward backing track but that was the state the song was in when the band left Africa and for me it’s the highlight of the set, with the chance to hear a cooking backing track without the sometimes silly words getting in the way. The famous Wings ‘spooky’ mellotron has never sounded more menacing and the guitar solo at the end is just nuts, one of the most inspired and purely ‘out-there’ Paul ever played, so much easier to hear without the orchestra there and taking off into the stratosphere, though the final piano chord without the strings or the reprise of the title track is a bit of an anticlimax; ‘Picasso’s Last Words’ (my least favourite Wings song) doesn’t sound much at all without the effects there, though Paul’s vocal sounds different to me, clearer and with better pronunciation; ‘Let Me Roll It’ is the most different, with a weird mellotron ‘horn call’ near the start and a very different take on Paul’s Lennonish vocal drenched in far more echo than the finished version. It doesn’t entirely work, as the words are hard to hear and Paul doesn’t sound that natural singing this song yet, but even that’s half the fun of albums like this one, hearing the differences for better or worse.

Overall, then, it’s a worthy project worth a listen or three, with no huge revelations but lots of little ones. I can’t help thinking though that it would have been better off as a bonus disc in the ‘Band On The Run’ archives set the first time round or as a bonus in a much cheaper re-issue of that set or even one disc in a multi box set of underdubbed Wings albums together rather than yet another costly release. For this price we deserve a lot better packaging than just the ‘negative’ of the album cover too (on a white background not black). There’s not even a tribute to Denny Laine in the packaging, even though he died a few weeks before it came out (just too late for the royalties to pay for his hospital treatment sadly, though Paul did auction one of his rare 7” vinyl single box sets to send the proceeds to his old bandmate in time). I can totally see why so many fans are refusing to buy it and why this set is causing so much fuss with most fans considering this set underwhelming as much as underdubbed; after all, Paul’s a billionaire already and The Beatles used to be one of the most cost-conscious value-for-money of all 1960s bands; sets like this do his reputation more harm than good and there’s still endless variations of this album out on bootleg that could have been included alongside it, such as the acoustic demos Paul hastily recorded after his original tapes got nicked by an African mafia gang. If anything this album would sound better more pared down still, with mixes of how the album sounded in its rawest most primal takes with Denny on guitar and Paul on drums and the odd bit of Linda keyboard and nothing else. All that said though I’ll be first in the queue if Paul continues this series, as Wings records like ‘Venus’ ‘Speed’ ‘Town’ and ‘Egg’ are all at their best the less that’s going on. Will the critical backlash put Paul off though? Stay tune and find out in next year’s review…

3) Paul McCartney and Wings “One Hand Clapping” (1974)

First up is this soundtrack a new release or a reissue? You see most of it has been out before but split across different releases – it’s never been gathered in one place before and never heard complete. However I’ve bunged it in ‘reissues’ for no other reason that it makes a good pair with the underdubbed ‘Band On The Run’, an ‘after’ snapshot to the previous review’s ‘before’.

If you’re new to the music of Wings and you’ve recently jumped on the ‘Band On the Run’ train you might be thinking to yourself ‘what happened next after the band got back to London?’ This is the answer, a documentary that was recorded directly after making the record when the newly formed ‘Wings Mark II’ were still hot to trot from overdubs and recording ‘Helen Wheels’ and ‘Junior’s Farm’, but never officially released in full till now . However so many of extracts from it have turned up that most fans assume they do know it: indeed there was a full fifty-one minute edit of it included on the ‘deluxe’ archives collection version of ‘Band On The Run’ in 2010 and I’m willing to bet the very vast majority of fans have seen/heard at least some of it –for a time in the 1990s and 2000s the soundtrack was one of the most common Macca-related bootlegs around. The documentary is very much the Wings equivalent of ‘Let It Be’ and like that film a bit of a cheat: ostensibly we’re watching the brand new line up of Wings, with Jimmy McCulloch on guitar (the talented teenager with the very broad Scots brogue) and short-lived drummer Geoff Briton (the one posing in his karate black belt any chance he gets), record their overdubs for ‘Band On The Run’; in reality they’d already finished the album and what we have here is an extended ‘getting to know you’ jam through the album that also served as the warm-up for the next Wings tour. There’s no context for these recordings given and everyone is a little too nervy to fully let loose on how they’re really feeling with the cameras rolling so they’re mostly polite and guarded (all except Denny Laine, whose clearly sloshed!) It’s interesting, actually, to compare the two films: is this what Paul’s original plan for ‘Let It Be’ was, a series of the best rehearsal takes with pithy interview snippets in between made as a public relations exercise that doesn’t go anywhere near the awkward questions that a ‘real’ investigative journalist would have asked? (‘Are The Beatles getting back together?’ ‘How come John now hates your guts? ‘Isn’t Wings just a pale imitation of the fab four?’ ‘Wasn’t going to Africa to record a bit dangerous?’ ‘Who says your missus can play?’ and ‘What happened to nearly half your band? Wings isn’t even two years old yet and here you are with new members!’) oh and if you were wondering that’s one time Beatle tape operator turned producer Geoff Emerick himself in the control room, the source of the increasingly irritating catchphrase ‘how was it for you Geoffrey?’ as if Wings are auditioning for children’s TV series ‘Rainbow’.

Here, at last, is the complete audio, now running to eighty-three minutes spread across two CDs with a bonus nine minute 7” single of another bootlegger favourite the ‘Barnyard’ tapes where Paul, on his Mull of Kintyre farm, runs through a medley of new songs and old friends while Linda hangs out the washing and various children and animals run around madly (like most things Wings it’s both self-indulgent and charming all at the same time). We’ll deal with that first given that it’s the most ‘new’ thing here: we never do get to hear a finished version of ‘Blackpool’ which is just a bunch of road signs sung to a blues chord progression that quickly gets stale but that said, like most bootleggers, this song’s been a part of my life for forty years so hearing an ‘official’ version in pristine sound is still quite breath-taking. There are charming run-throughs of ‘Blackbird’ (the first time Paul had played it since The White Album), B-side ‘Country Dreamer’ a year on that’s cute as a button and three oldies, Eddie Cochran’s ’20 Flight Rock’ (the song that got Paul into The Beatles) and two songs celebrating the fact that Paul’s just bought up Buddy Holly’s catalogue. If you already hate Paul this bit of lo-fi whimsy isn’t going to convert you, but if you already love him it’s a great example of how he can just turn on the charm and musicality at the drop of a hat and a plectrum, finding music more effortless than almost any other musician alive.

As for the main course ‘One Hand Clapping’ is better than any previous version, both thanks to having the often awkward bits of chat removed and because it’s heard complete. While you can see that the ‘right’ songs got axed in time for the final edit nevertheless it’s great to have it all in one place. Les start with the title track, an improvised simple moog-heavy instrumental that may or may not have morphed into the TV signature tune and’ Band on The Run’ (the song) B-side ‘Zoo Gang’ (they actually repeated that series – a sort of curious posh James Bond - on my new favourite channel Rewind TV this Autumn for the first time on UK telly since it went out on 1974: another Wigs thing I thought I’d never get to see!) ‘Band On The Run’ the album is so fresh and new that most of it sounds the same even with two new players playing live (if you skipped the other review above that album is overdub city, with Paul and Denny Laine handling all the parts, plus the odd mellotron line from Linda) and yet there’s a rawness to these performances that make them better than the album in many ways, with a guttural scruffiness tidied up by even the underdubbed/half-dubbed version. Highlights include a tense ‘Let Me Roll It’ that’s at its most McCartneyish, purring between gears and sung with a delicious excitement in Paul’s voice, a killer ‘Jet!’ that’s weirdly mixed here compared to the 2010 version (with way more moog getting in the way) but still sounds fab, a looser ‘Bluebird’ I actually prefer to the straight-laced album version and a thrilling solo piano version of ‘1985’ that cuts to the full band in the second half. As for the rest there’s a ‘Live and Let Die’ that knocks spots off the hit version (this version weirdly first released on the soundtrack of ‘The In-laws’ film in 2003), a funky early version of next single ‘Junior’s Farm’ that might lack the tight pop single precision of the finished product but is a lot more fun (and instead of the famous ‘take me down Jimmy’ into the guitar solo Paul goes for the more reserved ‘take me down James!’),and best of all the orphan of Wings catalogue relegated to live albums, the nonsense rock song ‘Soilly’ which might be about a cat in satin trousers getting messy when you read the lyric sheet but when heard screamed at full pelt sounds like the definitive McCartney rocker, better than even ‘Helter Skelter’ or ‘Long Tall Sally’. Less interesting (and often cut) are the jokey half-hearted revival of the previous year’s ‘C Moon’ crashing into B-side ‘Little Woman Love’ with no subtlety or panache whatsoever and the moments of an un-likably smug Paul in millionaire phase tinkering around with his piano, showing off the more laboured and uglier side of his songwriting, with charmless gormless unfinished songs like ‘Suicide’ and future 1982 B-side ‘I’ll Give You A Ring’ alongside a whole load of 1930s and 1940s standards he’s just bought the rights to (was Paul inspired to cover ‘Baby Face’ after seeing The Kinks play it across 1973?) L7 Paul, not cool!

New to this disc is mostly more of the same: a surprisingly polished cover of ‘Blue Moon Of Kentucky’ very like the ‘MTV Unplugged’ version from 1993, a tentative go at ‘Power Cut’ from previous album ‘Red Rose Speedway’ (which still sounds frustratingly incomplete and unfinished), quickie performances of ‘Let It Be’ (on an organ!) ‘The Long and Winding Road’ and ‘Lady Madonna’ (again, the first taped returns to these iconic songs since the Beatles split – you can hear Paul slowly stumbling towards coming to terms with his Beatle heritage almost in real time) and a whole new McCartney ditty ‘Love My Baby’ – all seventy seconds of it! Though daft and unfinished it’s another sign of just how naturally inventive Paul was back then, with the same simultaneous feeling of ‘it’s being made up on the spit!’ and ‘surely it must have been around forever it sounds so right!’ that you get listening to ‘McCartney’ or ‘McCartney II’. Wings return for a welcome encore too: a passionate ‘Wildlife’ (with Denny briefly on lead!) and a sloppy alternate ‘Junior’s Farm’ have long been bootlegged but are nice to hear in decent sound, while a fine slow and bluesy ‘Tomorrow’ and a scrappy solo ‘Sally G’ have not been heard at all before to the best of my knowledge and ‘Hi Hi Hi’ and Denny Laine’s Moody Blues warhorse ‘Go Now’ both run substantially longer than any copy I ever heard. All are welcome additions to the Wings catalogue and although none of it is exactly un-missable or the sort of thing you’ll play over and over, it’s all most interesting.

How was it for me, Geoff? Goodness knows what would have happened had this documentary film been screened in 1974 as planned: chances are all the goodwill and love and respect Paul had just won over with ‘Band On the Run’ would have been out the window and he’d be back to square one again as, frankly, you have to be a real fan to get the most out of this film, the way you have to be a real fan to get the most out of half albums like ‘Wildlife’ and ‘Red Rose Speedway’. In 2024 though it’s a different matter: this documentary film is a delightful historical as well as musical document and it’s great to have it out complete at last, with parts that – like many a McCartney project – really should have been in it the first time. The show sounds a lot better without the interviews too which were always more than a tad intrusive, and forever interrupting the music: for the record a drunk Denny Laine compares being a one-hit wonder in The Moody Blues to Paul finding a new life outside The Beatles, Paul chatters inanely about how easy it is to write songs in mind-numbing detail (‘I used to write out the notes in a little notebook but I tend to use a tape recorder nowadays’) and Linda, whose only been making music for a couple of years, visibly getting on the drummer’s nerves every time she tells him off for something he got wrong (one of them clearly had to go and it wasn’t going to be her’ Geoff’s replaced by Joe English y the time Wings go out on the road). There was, though, a fun bit over the credits when Paul talks about how he once thought 25 was too old to be making music until he got there and pushed his deadline back past 30, 35 and on to 40 (for the record he’s turning 32 somewhere around here) before admitting ‘now I reckon I’ll keep playing till I drop!’ Now just put the whole flipping film out on physical media please I beg of you and follow it up with fellow rare/obscure/unreleased Wings TV specials ‘Wings Over The World’ ‘The Bruce McMouse Show’ and ‘James Paul McCartney’ and I’ll be happy!

4) John Lennon “Mind Games” (Deluxe)

There’s an unprecedented fourth solo Beatle re-issue out this year and against all the odds that’s great too, so much so that it was a struggle to work out where the four should go in order; George wins by rarity value, consistency and price but even though the Lennon set is more sprawling and pricier there are still a lot of good things here and it’s a fourth worthy way of looking at an album in a different way. Although ‘Mind Games’ is the third Lennon solo album to get the ‘deluxe’ treatment (so he’s one ahead of George and way behind Paul!) it’s the first with son Sean fully in charge, taking over from mum Yoko fully now she’s 91 and, well, he’s been playing some mind games of his own. At the time of release in 1973 ‘Mind Games’ was, much like ‘Material World’, seen as a bit of a failure – a step up from the crude politicking of ‘Sometime In New York City’ maybe but far from Lennon at his best. As late as 1980, in the months leading up to John’s murder, it became notorious as the first Beatle-related album to be passed onto EMI’s ‘cheapo’ label ‘Music For Pleasure’ reserved for cut-price albums that had stopped selling altogether, beating even Ringo’s solo stuff to the bargain bins in record shops. Somehow, though, a fierce marketing campaign – which included sending free boxes to multiple Beatle youtubers and bloggers in return for gushing reviews – have tried to revise this album to the point of it being a ‘true classic’, one worthy of a pricey reissue containing six CDs, two blu-rays and multiple glossy boxes stuffed with detailed booklets. Well, Sean didn’t send me a box – or if he did it seems to get lost in the post – so for all the bells and whistles I stand by what I said in my original review from around a decade ago, that ‘Mind Games’ is a lot better than it’s ever given credit for with a lot of unfairly neglected and revealing songs but that it’s also easy to see why it got lost in between ‘Imagine’ and ‘Walls and Bridges’ because it’s also Lennon’s flimsiest, emptiest album in so many ways (that’s not the contradiction it sounds as you’ll know if you know the album; there’s a lot said here but a lot left out that Lennon would usually come right out and say) and all the super-duper remixes in the world and exotic packaging won’t rescue the fact that this isn’t a long last masterpiece but a collection of (by and large) Lennon’s most one-dimensional songs.

Admittedly they’re pretty great one dimensional songs and, again like ‘Material World’, if you’re ever going to listen to this album then this is the way to hear it and out of all three Lennon super deluxe sets so far this is the one that needed remixing most: having recently split up with Yoko following a misguided drunken affair at a party under a pile of coats that deeply embarrassed his wife in the other room and with the equally under-rated ‘NY City’ album giving Lennon the first critical backlash for a ‘mainstream’ record in his life (if a collection of songs about Ireland, marijuana and jams with Frank Zappa can be called ‘mainstream’) John’s confidence was at an all-time low. ‘Mind Games’ ended up an uneasy hybrid of the directness of his first classic solo album and the lushness of ‘Imagine’, with Lennon – who always hated the sound of his own voice – masking it under layers of echo (people bang on about hating Yoko all the time but it was her that encouraged her husband to really sing direct and without her around as much he’s free to do what he likes). Sean and engineer Paul Hicks (yes, again!) has removed all that murk for an album of ‘Ultimate Mixes’ that sound piercingly clear. You sense John himself might have hated it or been embarrassed by it but to these ears the remix makes him sound a hundred times better and more fully ‘in control’; even more than ‘Double Fantasy Stripped’ all the extraneous noise has been taken away to reveal just the basics that Lennon himself was always too unsure to release and they sound fab. Honestly, alongside ‘Material World’ it’s one of the best remixes of a Beatles album I’ve heard (funny, isn’t it, how all three post-Beatles albums sound better the more is removed from them this year?) Removing the very 1973 production makes this album sound more contemporary and punchy and helps every track on the LP but three in particular: ‘Mind Games’ now sounds like a multi-layered masterpiece rather than a wowwy ballad with ADHD while album highlight ‘Aisumasen’ positively crackles with regret and hurt honestly without the production trappings making it sound like a generic drippy ballad and closer ‘Meat City’, once an unlistenable bit of warped noise that sort of parodied ‘California Girls’, in a straight-talking homage to Lennon’s newly adopted home of New York City that never sleeps, now has just the right manic energy and glassy stare, as if recorded by a band that have been up for three nights straight. All of the tracks sound better but the others simply reminded you of what you knew was already there - these three tracks are a revelation.

Songwise ‘Mind Games’ will never be another ‘Lennon/Plastic Ono Band’ classic but there are moments here when the rawness and vulnerability of John’s breakup songs are finally matched by his vocals – album highlights ‘Aisumasen’ in which John even learns enough Japanese to apologise to Yoko and one last gorgeous political diatribe in ‘Bring On The Lucie’ – where this album sounds as good as anything Lennon ever made. At other times, though, you can tell his confidence has taken a dip and that – for perhaps the first time since 1964 – he has one eye warily on his audience and commercial sales rather than simply obeying his muse, which lends an artificial air to the album. If, as some fans say, ‘Band On the Run’ is the most Lennonish of McCartneyish albums (it’s energy and relentlessness plus the sarcasm of ‘Let Me Roll It’ and the ‘I Dig A Pony’ style word play of ‘Mammunia’, though there’s no way John would ever have stuck anything as arty yet empty as ‘Picasso’s Last Words’ or as stupidly catchy as ‘1985’ out) then ‘Mind Games’ is the most McCartneyish of Lennon albums. It’s an album that at times is trying too hard to be tuneful and poetic to be ‘real’, as if a broken-hearted John is trying to write long distance love songs for his muse and (‘Lucie’ aside) too scared to talk about real world politics again with the FBI on his tail and it’s just not John’s natural style. John was inspired by his old writing partner in more ways than just the songs though given that he hired guitarist Dave Spinozza directly after hearing his blistering work on ‘Ram’ and he’s the highlight of many of the ‘elemental mixes’ on ‘Mind Games’, with many parts that were also ducked in the mix before (the Spinozza closing solo on ‘Aisumasen’, dripping with regret and hurt, is a real thing of beauty we could barely hear before, while his fiery guitars and John’s voice make for a fine duet on ‘Meat City’ without all the overdubbed extras getting in the way). Alas, like the elemental mixes on ‘Ono Band’ and ‘Imagine’ the rest of the elemental mixes are a mixed bag that tend to pull out the worst moments from the album not the best and, as this is an album where John barely plays, there are less Lennonish parts to tease out: in a move that no fan ever was calling for we get four minutes of pulsing organ parts or the gospel choir who were added to ‘Lucie’ and UFO song ‘Out The Blue’ solo. The ‘Element Mixes’ are better, following each song from earliest surviving demos or session takes to finished product, with the evolution of the title track from hippie song ‘Make Love Not War’ to the cerebral spookiness of the finished version particularly revealing. Though a lot of these demos and outtakes have been heard before there are still an impressively big pile of surprises. ‘Only People’ started life as an entirely different song, about a lad named Billy that’s never been heard before, ‘You Are Here’ started life as a tough and intense acoustic song in ‘Working Class Hero’ mode rather than the sleepy ballad it became, while the raw rough and ready demo for ‘You Are Here’ is far more intense and already quite beautiful (not sure if either are any better than the finished product but they’re definitely different and changes how you view a song about getting lost; incidentally it’s so close to George’s ‘Be Here Now’ it’s spooky, even though both albums came ut too close together for it to be anything more than a coincidence). There’s also a lovely bit of intricate Beach Boysy style harmony work unusual for Lennon that regrettably got dropped from ‘I Know I Know’ (prefaced by a studio snippet of Lennon imploring his overdubbing selves to ‘think of Mama Cass’!) However I’m still in two minds about these mixes: it enables us to speed through a lot of outtakes without the repetition of other sets but hearing these snippets in extract form is also a frustrating experience given that these recordings presumably survive in full somewhere and they pass by your ears too fast to get a real hold on. At this price and for a collector’s market this niche you’d expect a second disc of them at least so we didn’t have to hurry through them so fast.

As for the ‘Outtakes’ disc it really depends on whether you’re enough of a collector to have either heard the ‘Lost Lennon’ radio shows of the late 1980s and the rare ‘Lennon Anthology’ box set of 1999 as a lot of these performances are repeated from there – they’re good ones though and deserve to be out again. Ditto ‘I’m The Greatest’, John’s demo for his old sparring partner Ringo, which never sounded better than it does here, cheeky and playful (it suits Lennon’s tongue-in-cheek arrogance far better than Ringo’s ‘loser’ shtick). There are some nice surprises here again: a ‘Mind Games’ title track which stripped of all the production extras and reduced to block piano chords sounds almost boogie-woogie and even more like an Elton John song, a nicely funky ‘Out The Blue’ with one vocal rather than several competing for space, an eleven (!) minute sleepy version of ‘You Are Here’ with multiple repeated verses that has great fun meandering despite the directional lyrics and a no-frills six minute two-take jam packed jam rendition of closer ‘Meat City’ that knocks spots off the finished version and even ends with Lennon ad libbing lyrics to old Beatles cover classic 'Keep Your Hands Off My Baby' and Little Eva's 'Do The Locomotion' fifteen years before Kylie! Best of all is a solo acoustic guitar performance of ‘Tight A$’ from a radio broadcast (alas they cut the chatter after John has a request for ‘the one after ‘Mind Games’ on the ‘Mind Games’ album’ and takes a while to work out what song that might be, even though the album’s only just come out!) None of these are quite the revelations of the ‘Plastic Ono Band’ deluxe set or the best of the ‘Imagine’ set and it can be annoying having certain takes cut short or run into others Frankenstein style, but Lennon’s sessions tapes remain some of the best and most fascinating: he’s always doing something that catches the ear, making some comment or tweaking some arrangement rather than going through the motions like so many others and as well as being a great musician he’s a fabulous natural comedian whose jokes, once heard only by the privileged dozen in the studio, are too good to keep in the vaults. Finally there’s the ‘Raw Studios Mix’, which is basically the album with the overdubs removed (‘Band On The Run Underdubbed’ style) which is less interesting than you’d think, partly because of all the other mixes in the box which have as good as presented us with that already (albeit on demos and alternate takes) and partly because it can never throw off the tag that it’s all been done artificially; unlike ‘Run’ this isn’t the album captured at a certain work-in-progress state but manhandled with elements taken back seemingly at random. It all sounds a bit flat and maybe a disc too many (although the album’s best song ‘Lucie’ is truly rocking with a Lennon guide vocal and full ending-come-collapse, 'Aisumsen' really allows you to hear the painful crack in Lennon's voice unfiltered by production sheen the way it always should have been heard and it’s nice to hear ‘Only People’ for one without the extra choir!) I pity, too, the poor people who don’t know this album and didn’t read the small print and spent, like, £6 on six separate downloads of ‘The Nutopian National Anthem’ in six different versions and got…thirty seconds of silence for their money (and anyway, how can you remix silence? That sounds like a Yoko art piece all by itself!) For in case you didn’t know this track was Lennon’s quirky response to America trying to deport him for past (made-up) drugs charges, in the early days of his quest for his green card when a chicken Nixon was so afraid of his influence he tries to have Lennon kicked out as being an ‘undesirable’; ‘Nutopia’ was an art concept of a world without borders that every fan could belong to, without the hassle of emigrating. The joke is that John has fans from so many different countries that a ‘national anthem’ would be impossible and we’re all connected, through the music, by something far bigger and more important than nationalism. In these days of war and propaganda and disinformation, when the world is more disconnected than ever, it makes more sense than it did in 1973, although given that we’re also in an age of cost of living crisis you can just pause playing the album for a few seconds every hour or so.

As for the packaging, well, Sean’s been getting a lot of stick for basing it on a concept work of his mum’s (‘Danger Box’ from 1968, just after she met John, in which the box collapses to form the different boxes of vinyl with the warning that ‘your hand may never be the same again’ once you’ve inserted it into the hole – if this was the groundbreaking ‘Plastic Ono Band’ album then that might be true, but really it’s more a warning for collectors that they’ll never be able to line the vinyl up inside the box as perfectly ever again without ruining the packaging!) and the amount of times Yoko has been named inside has been getting him a lot of stick. But this is an album about Yoko, perhaps more than any other Lennon work outside ‘Two Virgins’: it’s an album dominated by her presence and absence, where eight songs are clearly about the struggle of life without her, where two more songs are clearly inspired by her works and trying to think like her (‘You Are Here’ which started life as a gallery exhibit before becoming a song and of course ‘The Nutopian National Anthem’) and where the album cover is of John walking away from a Yoko-shaped hill, his bags packed. She even turns up on the session tapes a lot considering the pair had officially broken up by then – one of those little bits of info you get on deluxe sets like these that we simply didn’t know before. Talking of which there’s one page of documents in the booklet that’s positively mind-boggling: a Lennon memo on Apple headed note-paper chattily inviting Paul to add Wings to a planned series of concerts in aid of Northern Ireland in a three-way gig alongside the Stones, which would have been huge both from a musical and political point of view (no doubt because of Wings under-rated single ‘Give Ireland Back To The Irish’ released around the same time as John’s ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday and ‘Luck Of The Irish’; John even adds that he’ll keep Allen Klein away if that makes it ‘cool’ for his old buddy to attend - sadly we don’t have Paul’s reply). The other rare and gorgeous photographs and essays get to grips with this most overlooked of solo albums rather well too.

I even sort-of approve of the ‘Mind Games’ meditations, the very Yoko-ish idea that you stop a counter at random and find a lyric from the title track to ponder on (it’s a bit of fun and different, although I’m still struggling to work out what ‘Absolute elsewhere’ actually means and the Youtube promo videos with interview extracts over single held notes from the album don’t do much for me). I even approve of the marketing, half natty half nutty, that Sean’s been doing for this album including the ‘Mind Games’ treasure hunt that took place in Liverpool and the promo videos featuring unseen home movies of the Lennons recovered from Tony Cox (Yoko’s first husband). But I can’t approve of the price: however neglected, however improved in many ways, however fun the glow-in-the-dark vinyl and the zoetrope pictures of Lennon dancing might be, charging over a thousand pounds for the true deluxe version is a colossal cheat. Even the ‘standard’ deluxe version (is that not a contradiction in terms?) costs way too much: some £50 on vinyl. For a musician who always knew how precious and pricey music was, who came from a band who once offered value for money like no one else, this feels a colossal slap in the face: admittedly the McCartney archive sets and Harrison’s ‘All Things Must Pass’ with the ‘free’ garden gnomes were a rip-off too but at least they were (almost all) loved albums; ‘Mind Games’ is the sort of album it’s hard to work up much emotion about and which few fans would consider their favourite solo Beatle work. I mean, I’ve always been fond of ‘Mind Games’ and wanted to hear a decent remix of it, which I can at last and I’m oh so glad that it’s got its time in the sun alongside the better known albums. But I can’t bring myself to spend that sort of money on a record that, with all the will in the world, was always a bit undercooked. Even adding so many courses to it and showing off how good the ingredients that went into making it could be, even the marketing adding a website of meditations and affirmations (www.citizenofnutopia.com) which is exactly what John would be doing as promotion in the 21st century, it’ still not that great and all these ‘Mind Games’ messing with our heads trying to pretend it’s a masterpiece of the highest order are ultimately just that. Still, roll on next year when we might get the ‘Walls and bridges’ deluxe album and there’s an album which is an unsung masterpiece…

5) The Byrds/Buffalo Springfield “Monterey Pop Festival 1967”

Here’s a real curio: the complete Springfield and Byrd performances in front of their career-biggest crowds at the gig generally regarded as the first rock and pop music festival of any great size. While most of both of their performances have turned up down the years (including a marvellous 20th anniversary edition broadcast on Radio 1 back in 1987 – which I still play a lot – and a four CD box set of highlights in 2013) this is the first time we’ve had absolutely everything the two bands played uncut and in the right order and the only time they’ve been presented back to back without other acts on there. Released solely on vinyl as a ‘Record Store Exclusive’ I’m intrigued to see how many copies it will sell: collectors have been after this stuff for decades but it does seem a bit…niche for all the effort given how tricky the licensing rights must have been to untangle. After all, it’s not seen as a career highlight for either band, who were both dismayed at how this all-important show turned out for them and have largely unhappy memories of it.

Take The Byrds: they’ve just lost Gene Clark, been on a badly received British tour and had already splintered so much they were simply never in the same place long enough to rehearse. David Crosby sees his opportunity to take over the power vacuum and takes centre stage, delivering all the stage patter and including many of his songs in the setlist – it’s a coup that will end in disaster when ‘Lady Friend’, the band’s new single, implodes in the charts and a few arguments too many cause bandmates Roger McGuinn and Chris Hillman plot to get rid of him. However what really got McGuinn’s goat in particular were Croz’s stage announcements: quoting Paul McCartney saying that ‘if all politicians took LSD we’d have world peace’ adding ‘I agree – heartily’, pointing out the inconsistencies in the JFK assassination (‘information have been suppressed, witnesses have been killed – and this is your country ladies and gentlemen!’) and introducing the audience to two acts he clearly feels are much cooler than The Byrds: a ‘cat whose going to perform here named Jimi Hendrix’ (who the crowd haven’t heard of – not till his fiery performance the following night anyway!) and ‘Hugh Masekela and Big Black’, his drummer 'one of our favourite people' (you can't really hear the trumpeter compared to this onslaught poor Michael Clarke doesn't stand a chance!) Crosby is forever painted in Byrd biographers as a sabotage but to be fair to Croz somebody had to take charge and as the band’s fully paid up hippie he felt this was ‘his’ crowd and could relate to them better than the coffee club kids or the school gymnasium crowd who want to hear the hits and knew exactly what they wanted. Yeah sure he takes it too far but have you seen this crowd? This is not a normal gig and he knows that, probably better than anyone else who performed that weekend. The set itself is ragged and raw, a million light years away from the polish of The Byrds’ studio albums and they’re clearly struggling to perfect their psychedelia precision live on stage but it’s still a great garage-style gig, highlighted by rare Crosby-McGuinn collaboration ‘Renaissance Fair’ so perfect for the festival (‘I think that maybe I’m dreaming!’), the poignant Kennedy tribute ‘He Was A friend Of Mine’ and one of their best Dylan covers ‘Chimes Of Freedom’, tweaked for the hippie crowd (‘Remember that’s freedom…flashing’ adds a stoned Croz). The big news: their messy previously unheard cover of folk song ‘I Know You Rider’ (better known for the Grateful Dead version and once rejected as a Byrds single in favour of ‘8 Miles High’) has been restored to the concert at long last where it belongs, right before cynical finale ‘So You Want To be A Rock ‘n’ Roll Star’. Goodness knows why it’s been missing all these years: it’s hardly a polished performance of precision but it’s no worse than anything else in this free-for-all gig!

Another thing bugging the Byrds was that Crosby was never around to rehearse with them – because he was busy with new pal Stephen Stills, helping out a full two years before CSN were formed. To be fair to Croz again he’s doing the band a huge favour: at this point in time they were a one-hit wonder on their downers, the success and momentum of ‘For What It’s Worth’ having dissipated across a troubled year of undeserved flops. Monterey was their big chance at a turnaround, so the Springfield were horrified when their guitarist Neil Young decided to quit right on the eve of the gig. They never did recover their momentum either, even with Neil returning (and quitting) a few weeks after the show. Crosby plays some fine rhythm guitar and adds some harmonies to songs that, little does he know, he’ll be singing on stage with Stills on and off for the next half century or so, which makes this a set of historical value for that reason alone. Understandably the Springfield too play a ragged gig, one that’s not up to either their live reputation or the handful of other Springfield gigs around (please someone put the Huntingdown Beach show out officially I beg of you, that would be guaranteed a top spot in the next yearly review!) You can tell that this line-up have a hole missing that even Crosby and the more usual Neil replacement Doug Hastings can’t fill, while they simply don’t enough time to win the crowd over. However there are still many highlights: Richie Furay’s then-new acerbic commentary on Neil’s disappearing act ‘A Child’s Claim To Fame’ (you might know Neil’s reply song ‘I Am A Child’ agreeing with most of the accusations here), the single most joyous ‘For What It’s Worth’ around played in front of a crowd convinced they’ve ‘won’ (‘There’s a man with a gun…nowhere!’ Stills ad libs at one point) and the world first Crosby-Stills collaboration ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Woman’ (inspired by Grace Slick – please say there’s an Airplane Monterey set next year as they really do play a great show!) which is going nowhere till drummer Dewey Martin takes charge and announced new single ‘Bluebird’ midway through, the band hitting their marks together like pros as if they’ve been playing it that way all their lives and launching into an epic rendition. This set’s rarity not often heard in other re-releases is ‘Pretty Girl Why’, a well pretty Stills song (one of his earliest for Judy Collins) unheard till the Springfield’s final album ‘Last Time Around’ the year after Monterey and yeah sure it’s all over the place but it’s full of passion and love.

The sound quality of both shows is pretty darn great considering it’s vintage, the performances really are complete (there’s even the announcements intact, by pals Mike Bloomfield and Peter Tork respectively), there’s a very 1960s cover complete with goofy thick art style lettering not seen since about 1969 and these recordings have never seemed a better purchase quite honestly. Expect the perfection of the records by either band and you’re in for a shock, but if you’ve been after these performances complete for as many years as I have this release is a joy. I just wish they were around in a format in addition to the vinyl!

6) 10cc “Twenty Years: 1972-1992”

Yippee! Finally the notoriously hard to find 10cc back catalogue is out properly and this time it’s the full whack: not a particular era, not a particular album, not a box set or a compilation or a rarities set but most of the discography: everything released under the band’s name between their 1974 debut and their 1983 breakup, plus a rather disappointing reunion record from 1992 fans don’t talk about much. Why has it taken so long? Well, you thought the negotiations of the Israel-Palestine peace deal were difficult but that’s nothing on 10cc. Like many a band in the 1970s their music was split between three different record labels (Jonathan King’s UK Records, Mercury and Polydor) which has made co-ordinating a re-issue of their albums something of a nightmare, but the thawing between them all which enabled the completion of the ‘Tenology’ box in 2012 pointed to a possible easing in relations between everyone and finally, twelve years on, here we are again not for a highlights-and-rarities set this time but something a bit bigger. Alas, as the title makes clear, it’s still nowhere near fully complete: there are no Hotlegs recordings here (when 10cc were a trio of session musicians for hire recording their own stuff during downtime at their own Strawberry Studio in Stockport before Graham Gouldman officially joined, so no #2 UK hit ‘Neanderthal Man’), no ‘Mirror Mirror’ (the second and almost equally unloved reunion album from 1995), no GG06 (Gouldman and Kevin Godley’s recordings from the 21st century frequently a filler in 10cc compilations), and no live recordings bar the one most recognised as being ‘official’ 1978’s, ‘Live and Let Live’ (even though live recordings from a final gig in 1982 appeared as B-sides to the 12” mix of the band’s masterpiece ’24 Hours’). That still leaves room for an impressive fourteen discs of albums though, plus two discs of extras with the very 10cc title ‘Some Of The Bits We Missed’ (mostly B-sides already included on various compilations and album re-issues over the years including ‘Tenology’ but great to have all in one place, especially the 1992 stuff which is very hard to get and most of which hasn’t been out on CD for over thirty years).

If you’re new to this band then you’re in for a treat: no band were funnier, or more eccentric than the Godley-Creme era of the band and I have long had a soft spot for the more forgotten band the duo left behind (I still say the forgotten final album ‘Windows In The Jungle’ is their masterpiece, even with all the brilliant records that came before). If you only half know the story, or just the hit singles, or want to upgrade worn out albums, or are a total newcomer then this is a fairly decently priced (£80 at the time of writing) way of getting hold of most things and you’ll at least like pretty much all of it (only some of the B-sides and the mean-spirited comeback nobody wanted to make except the contract-waggling record company ‘Meanwhile…’ lets the side down). The upside: an excellent thick booklet that does a good job at capturing the rollercoaster ride that was 10cc, lovely replica cardboard sleeves for all the albums that re-creates the original artwork rather than do anything clever to them (most of their album covers were by Hipgnosis, the design team behind Pink Floyd and if anything the 10cc cover designs are even weirder!) and there’s excellent sound quality throughout, something which really matters with this and more than perhaps more than any other band in my collection given how stuffed all of their songs are with every sound effect or instrument they could cram in. The downside: by 10cc standards the packaging is still a little basic and feels thrown together as cheaply and as basically as possible, particularly the dark black plus logo of the outer box – if ever a band should be bamboozling you with colour and spectacle it’s this one. Equally as well as the missing items outlined above there are no unreleased tracks and even the handful of originally unreleased songs that have come out in the years since the split (like the work in progress version of ‘People In Love’ and the session tapes of ‘The Dean and I’ from Tenology and some of the extras added to the CD re-issue of ‘Windows In The Jungle’) are missing. Is this the perfect set I’ve dreamed of all these years then? Not quite, but this is perhaps the closest yet, far more complete and comprehensive than the Tenology Box and a lot cheaper than trying to track all the CDs down individually. The set has apparently done better than expected saleswise and I've already seen an advert for a 'sister set' dedicated to Godley and Creme 'Parts Of The process' due early next year!

7) Grateful Dead “Dave’s Picks Volume Fifty”

Alas we lost another of our heroes this year, with the sad loss of Dead bass player Phil Lesh in October at the age of eighty-four, a tragic loss to Deadheads everywhere not least because he was still in his prime: he played a terrific gig for his last birthday as part of his band ‘Phil Lesh and Friends’ in March for instance, one of the musical highlights of the year for me. Alas there’s no official release o that show yet but Phil happens to be well catered for on a series of archive sets this year, almost all of them already released before his tragic death in October. The best of these is from the ‘Dave’s Picks’ series, Dead archivist Dave Lemieux’s replacement series for the much-missed Dick Latvala’s series ‘Dick’s Picks’, which reaches its own mega-milestone with its fiftieth release in just twelve years and a show that takes us back to a mere fortnight before the concert released as Dave’s Picks Volume One. The month of May 1977 is very highly regarded by Dead aficionados and is by far the most covered month out of their entire thirty year run on their archive sets. On first glance releasing another period gig, this one recorded at New York’s Palladium on the third of the month, seems like overkill, but this is one of the best so far – perhaps since that volume one show. The Dead are in ‘Terrapin Station’ mode high on confidence, Jerry Garcia has temporarily got his demons under control, Keith and Donna are happy (Donna’s several months pregnant here, not that you’d know it from one of her more together performances) and there’s a good mood in the Dead camp who are firing on all cylinders. The only negative point really is the setlist, which is low on surprises or songs that really stretch the band even though they sound very capable of it, though some of the performances here are amongst the best they ever play some of these songs, particularly the 1970s ones: ‘Row Jimmy’ is a delight, slow and thoughtful but with an underlying grit and determination, Bob Weir’s solo song ‘Lazy Lightnin’ > Supplication’ really dances as the band all play off each other and there’s an epic closing arc as a faster-than-usual ‘Eyes Of The World’ segues into sonic weirdness and out into a soulful bowed-but-unbroken ‘Wharf Rat’ and out into a downright funky ‘Not Fade Away’ and a joyous ‘Around and Around’. Not every performances flies: an interminable thirteen minute ‘Sugaree’ starts crooked and never quite rights itself before the end, while a closing encore of ‘Uncle John’s Band’, never my favourite Dead song, suggests the band have sung themselves hoarse. The hour or so taken from the following night’s show at the same venue can’t compare either, with the band on far looser form (although a rocking cover of Johnny Cash’s ‘Big River’ might well be the best the band ever played that song too). By and large though this is one of the best entries in the series, five hours of the Dead at somewhere near their best and a more than worthy purchase.

Other Dead archive releases out this year included ‘Dave’s Picks Forty-Nine’, one of the better 1980s shows taped at Stanford California’s Frost Ampitheatre on April 27th and 28th 1985 highlighted by the comparatively rare B-side ‘My Brother Esau’, a jazzy nine minute ‘Eyes Of The World’ that goes further out into space than most versions from the decade and one of the more tuneful ‘Space’ improvisations. That said it’s a mixed blessing: Brent Myland’s very 1980s keyboards are high in the mix drowning out the rock and roll, there’s a particularly weak version of one of the Dead’s worst cover songs ‘Women Are Smarter’ (one that appeared on a lot of Deadhead Kamala Harris stickers this year) and there’s an interminable ‘Drums’ performed on tinny 1980s digital drums that sounds like an oedipal cry for help more than actual music. Still, if this is ‘your’ era where you were the right age to see every gig then you’ll love it anyway: so far the mid-1980s shows, when Garcia was really poorly and about to slip into a diabetes-instigated coma, are few and far between and this is arguably better than any of the other ones out from either 1985 or the years either side of it so far.

Not forgetting ‘Dave’s Picks Fifty-One’, a fine show from Scranton Pennsylvania in a Catholic Youth Centre of all things from April 13th 1971. It’s a fiery gig that again alternates between moments when the band are all over the place and moments of pure magic. A case in point: the show starts off with one of the sloppiest ‘Truckin’s around, with the band missing their cues and kind of sleeping their way into it but by the end it’s on fire, Billy Kreutzmann refusing to give up on the song by playing a blistering drum solo that turns by osmosis into the single best ‘Good Lovin’ around, the Dead colliding off each other like a firework as the song keeps exploding out into unexpected directions in turn. It’s one of those moments Deadheads live for which comes out of nowhere when the band clicks together as only he Dead can. Only for the band to fall back onto the set’s rarity, a wobbly version of The Supremes’ ‘I Second That Emotion’ that doesn’t suit them at all (no wonder they barely played it thereafter). The show then stumbles on like that throughout: huge wonderful leaps into the unknown followed by the band tripping over their feet on the basics.

‘Friends Of The Devils: April ‘78’ is an epic box set that includes eight full shows played across ten days and collected in an ear-watering nineteen disc box set. As ever with these sorts of things what impresses you most is how little repetition there is night by night – by 1978 the Dead’s repertoire was so big they didn’t repeat much at all. Alas they’re a little bit on the turn by this point, not playing badly exactly but a little slapdash when heard back to back with, say, the 1971 and 1975 shows out this year. Highlights include a raw and gutsy ‘Terrapin Station’ that positively growls (from the 7th, April gig at Pembroke Pines Florida), a super fast ‘Scarlet > Fire’ (from a gig at the Veterans Memorial Coliseum at Jacksonville Florida on the 8th), a funky sixteen minute ‘Franklin’s Tower’ (performed at Atlanta’s Fox’s Theatre, Georgia on the 10th), one of the band’s better ‘Drums’ that lasts a full twenty-two minutes of percussion and freaky noises (a second night at Fox’s Theatre on the 11th), a rocky messy but fun ‘Sugar Magnolia’ (from the 14th, a gig at Cassell Coliseum Virginia) and a frenetic jazzy rendition of ‘Eyes Of the World’ (from the final show at Huntingdon Civic Centre West Virginia on the 16th). Not many musical oddities this set but lots of spoken word ones, such as Bob Weir’s long rambling story about a poacher who makes out he’s being attacked by the deer carried over his shoulder (it’s after Jack Straw on the 7th show and the guitarist tells it again on the 10th after ‘Passenger’, much to the band’s horror) and Bob’s story about a tiny lumberjack who cut down trees in the ‘Sahara’ which is no longer a forest (it’s after El Paso on the 10th : I’m convinced when people talk about bad ‘dad’ jokes what they really mean is bad ‘Dead’ jokes). The show from the 12th April, recorded at the Cameron Indoor Stadium in Durham North Carolina was released as the set’s only standalone release under the name ‘Duke ‘78’ but it’s a strange choice: the Dead sound nervy and a little out of sync most of the night (it’s the final gig of the 16th that’s best). Oh and in case you’re wondering why the show from April 15th is missing that one’s out already as ‘Dave’s Picks Thirty-Seven’ and not included here. A solid release, not the best not the worst.

The last release of the year, a mere fortnight after Phil’s death, is ‘Dave’s Picks Fifty-Two’, a comparatively good show from a lousy era when Jerry Garcia was at the height of his drug dependency and the Dead’s famously rollercoaster quality had dipped it’s average as low as it would ever go. Still they could intermittently catch fire as they do quite often here at a show recorded at Sante Fe Farm at Santa Fe Downs, an old horse racecourse in New Mexico, back in September 11th 1983. Not many surprises at this gig, unless you count a messy semi-rare of Willie Dixon’s Wang Dang Doodle, and the Dead mostly seem to pick their easier rockier songs tonight. Perhaps because their slower ballads are sooo slow tonight (‘Morning Dew’ is about half the speed and even the uptempo ‘Sugar Magnolia’ skirts dangerously close to being a ballad!) There’s not much of their old journeying into new horizons here in the first set but a second set at least has a go, opening with a brave stab at their ‘Blues For Allah’ opening trilogy ‘Help On The Way > Slipknot > Franklin’s Tower’ which finds a nice groove in the middle and an epic sixteen minute ‘Let It Grow’, although they soon give way to a torturously slow ‘He’s Gone’ and an aimless drift through ‘Drums’ and ‘Space’ that are probably on repeat right now in Guantanamo Bays torture area. Three songs performed at the same venue the previous night are used to fill out the running time of disc three and have far more life about them, especially the only Phil co-write on the set a fast-paced ‘Cumberland Blues’ as well as a comparatively streamlined thirteen minute ‘Playin’ In the Band’ and perhaps best of all a surprisingly noisy take on Garcia’s exquisite suicide song ‘China Doll’, usually sung in a whisper but here a full-throated rage against the dying of the light. As with quite a few entries in the range, maybe they released the wrong show?

8) Grateful Dead “From The Mars Hotel: Angel’s Share”

The fourth release in the Grateful Dead studio session tapes whisky distillery (the ‘angel’s share’ is the part from the bottom of the barrel that floats to the top, in theory with the fullest flavour!) continues the good work of the ‘Workingman’s Dead’ ‘American Beauty’ and ‘Wake Of the Flood’ sets with all the listenable surviving master reels presented half a century on so that you can listen to an album take shape in real time. Though like the others it’s clearly out as a bit of copyright fudging (there’s a rule that means anything that’s been left unreleased for fifty years is fair game, so bootleggers would be able to sell their own versions of the tapes) it’s smartly presented and crammed with little goodies that reward fans who know the resulting albums really well. Alas ‘Mars Hotel’, the last album the Dead made before their 18 month hiatus, isn’t as interesting or pioneering an album as the other three – as the title suggests it’s more of a stopping off point at a motorway services on route between career highlights ‘Wake Of the Flood’ and ‘Blues For Allah’ which both step out much further into the unknown. The year 1974 is one that most Deadheads tend to skip: Jerry Garcia’s at the start of a long slow decline from drug abuse and pianist Keith Godchaux is hurtling down the same slippery slope at a rate of knots, while his wife Donna is at her squawliest on vocals. Officially nothing much was going on in Bob Weir’s life, which might be why he’s at his lowest ebb creatively too, providing just the one song these sessions and ‘Money Money’ is far from his greatest moment. By and large the Dead’s famous telepathic interplay is largely missing from these songs too, which tend to take rough shape and then stay there, without the more drastic changes from take to take that could be heard on the other sets: slogging through near-identical take after take of some of these songs in a row is an even bigger test of your patience than the other three even though this one is far shorter. Another problem is that by now the Dead are recording their backing tracks and their vocals separately, so what we get here aren’t the full thrilling performances of ‘Beauty’ but more often than not backing tracks without any voices.

Against all odds it’s much missed bassist Phil Lesh, who died six months after this distillation, who comes to the fore in these sessions, with two lovely songs (his first for the band in six years), the tricky complex song suites ‘Unbroken Chain’ and ‘Pride Of Cucamonga’, the only two songs here that really test the band and make them think. A first take of the former is the most interesting thing on this set by far, Phil’s guide vocal cutting in and out as he guides the band through their most complex set of changes of the decade on a song that keeps lurching from one time signature to another. I always assumed from both the finished version and the refusal of the band to play it on stage because it was ‘too hard’ (the song only turns up on stage in their final years in the 1990s, where more often than not it’s a complete mess) that the Dead in their sleepiest period really struggled to get this song down on tape but clearly they’ve been rehearsing it lot before the tapes start rolling as they’re on it from the beginning: the only real difference are the tentative pauses as the band are audibly trying to remember what part comes next while staying in the moment. ‘Cucamonga’ is a bit more leaden but the extra country stylings on the early passes and the slight tweaks in tempo on the road to success are what anorakky sets like this were built for. There’s also a great rollicking second take (the first is here too, but breaks down early on) of the cheery album highlight ‘Scarlet Begonias’ one that’s much closer to the muscly way the song later turned out on stage without the lightness of touch of the finished studio version, though it’s a great version nonetheless.

Otherwise that’s kind of it though: there are a lot more gaps here than normal, with lots of album songs represented merely by ‘remixes’, none of which sound all that different. There’s far less studio chatter too: a chair creak at the end of the finished take of the gorgeous ‘China Doll’ (heard here in rather limiting ‘acoustic’ form that cuts out the electric guitar, bass and drums) about as interesting as it gets. Like the album itself it feels as if the Dead had less to say to each other between songs in this era. Perhaps, too, now the Dead were fully in charge of making their own music for their own record label they started taking less interest in cataloguing their own tapes? The result is most definitely the lesser of the four Angel’s sets out so far and a relative disappointment after the joys of ‘Wake Of The Flood’ last year, but then most Deadheads probably already guessed that given the album’s comparatively lowly status in the fandom; the bottom line though is that it’s still great that we’re getting these in-depth sets even for records that have less mainstream appeal and they’re always a joy to listen to…once. The good news is that the next set due out, somewhere around September 2025, should be ‘Blues For Allah’ if the series continues and as the Dead’s jazziest, most free-form album (a lot of whose session tapes are already out on the end of official re-issues and bootlegs galore) that one promises to be a real highpoint.

9) Grateful Dead “From The Mars Hotel 50th Anniversary Edition”

As well as the ‘Angel’s Share’ collection of studio recordings the Dead also released their now customary half-century anniversary of the album itself by re-issuing a re-mastered version of it with a handful of demos and a full concert recorded at The University Of Nevada-Reno on the 12th May 1974 roughly six weeks before the album’s release. As always with these sets the demos are some of the best things here, though there’s only a couple of them this time: ‘US Blues’ back when it was still known as ‘Wave That Flag’: fans have known the alternate, dafter and less cutting lyrics of this Nixon-baiting song for a long time with several official live performances collected on the band’s various archive sets but the goofy Chuck Berry novelty song style backing comes as a surprise, as a pair of twin Garcia guitars boogie while an overdubbed maraca shake gets the song flying; there’s also a not-that-different demo for ‘China Doll’; weirdly the band haven’t seen fit to re-issue the other two demos that came out the last time round for Phil’s songs ‘Pride Of Cucamonga’ and ‘Unbroken Chain’ both of which are delights (and a rare chance to hear Phil’s country burr singing alone without harmonies). The concert is a gig of contradictions; despite this being officially a university gig it was one of the few outdoor arena shows the Dead played this particular year and despite being one of their last outings for their ginormous (and expensive) wall of sound made up of the biggest speakers around at the time they mostly sound muted by their highest standards here. Legend has it that the Dead were playing in the middle of a whacking great storm that frequently blew the audience off their feet; by contrast the Dead sound kind of still and nailed to the floor, as if trying not to be blown away (Billy’s drumming, particularly, sounds as if he’s struggling to fight the wind so much it’s an uphill battle just to play the main beat). Sometimes the Dead fight off the conditions long enough to soar: cowboy classic ‘Jack Straw’ sounds particularly rich and golden tonight, an epic fifteen minute ‘China > Rider’ is one of the chunkier funkier versions of this beloved medley around with a delicious waddle so different to the more psychedelic freeform versions out there and a swinging ‘Mississippi Half-Step Uptown Toodeloo’ is played with real rocking defiance rather than the usual self-pity. Sometimes the conditions win out though: ‘Truckin’ is such a struggle the band call it quits after just seven minutes (the song usually lasts three or four times that!), a freeform ‘That’s It For The Other One’ loses the thread of the song early on and a sleepy ‘Row Jimmy’ capsizes before it leaves the harbour. Typically, despite this being part of the ‘Mars Hotel’ set, the Dead play very little from the new album they’re supposed to be promoting and none of it sounds as good as it did in the studio: a rocking ‘US Blues’ sounds great backing-wise but Jerry is struggling with the words and ‘Ship Of Fools’, perhaps the Dead’s most boring original song, isn’t exactly done any favours by the really slow performance here. By the time you reach a messy but fun final encore of ‘Sugar Magnolia’, which veers from ecstasy to agony with nearly every chord, it feels like a draw. Not the worst of the anniversary sets out there then, but far from the best, while the re-mastered sound doesn’t add that much either if you own a past version (though it’s lovely to see the attention to detail on the vinyl reissue which even adds the ‘Ugly Roomers’ matrix code that was etched on the vinyl of the original!)

10) Oasis “Definitely Maybe” (30th Anniversary)

The big news of the year – Oasis are back baby!!!! The signs have been there for a while now – interviews where Liam and Noel both sounded wistful watching back old videos, guarded bits of praise about what the other each brought to the band and Liam’s comments that he openly wants a reunion with Noel in reply not saying his usual flat ‘no’ but more of a ‘can’t be arsed’. Behind the scenes, too, things have been moving and it’s all because of divorce – Liam’s been so much happier and more comfortable in his skin since the end of his marriage to Nicola Appleton in 2014, writing his heart out on an under-rated trio of albums that show a real maturity and understanding of his frailties and faults (just check out last year’s single ‘More Power’. Delicious!) In short he’s no longer at war with everyone and his brother because he’s no longer at war with himself in quite the same way he used to be when he felt the universe was against him. As for Noel his wife Sara couldn’t stand her brother-in-law from first meeting and it seems to have been her who turned Noel’s very real and angry rant against his brother at that last gig in 2009 from a single flared moment of aggro of the sort that have littered every oasis tour (and lets’ face it most oasis gigs) into a longer lasting cold war of silence. Since Noel announced his split to Sara last year, releasing his own best record in years full of maturity and wisdom (‘Council Skies’ – check out ‘Dead To The World’. Equally delicious!) there’s nobody whispering in his ear to stay away.

I’ve heard tell, though, that the real person to thank for this reunion is none other than Paul McCartney, who earns himself another star by his name in the rock and roll hall of fame. I’ve heard tell on the grapevine that the moment when Noel decided to get back with his brother was after meeting up with Macca backstage at one of the Beatle’s gigs. One of Paul’s favourite jokes with his celebrity friends is to tease the ‘so when are you guys getting back together?!’ question the way he was teased for years, something he does with every band going, only Noel was in a thoughtful mood when he asked it. ‘Paul, did you ever wish that you had reunited with John?’ Noel’s said to have asked, to which Paul went quiet. ‘Every day’ he said, or words to that effect ‘We were always going to get back together sometime, we just thought we had all the time in the world – and then we didn’t. So make it up with your brother before something happens – if only for the sake of your mum’. Noel has made it his life’s work to listen when Beatles talk and that seems to have been the final nail in the coffin of the ‘wilderness split’ years. Will that reunion turn out to be the right thing to do? Only time will tell, but it feels like the right time: there’s been long enough for water to have gone over the bridge and hell to freeze over, while both men are more aware of how much they need each other, not to make great music (they’ve both done their share of career highs the past fifteen years) but to feel like the Rock Gods they were meant to be, rather than dismissed as ex-members of a band that somehow both went on too long and collapsed too soon. The world, too has never been more disconnected and music more anyone and overdubbed and synth-based and gimmicky. We need an exciting energetic guitar band who can speak to their audience like no other. There’s no other band around that can do that with all the original members still alive. Whether they’re all in the new line-up, of course is unknown: will it be Oasis’ ‘real’ founding member Bonehead whose played on Liam’s tours, even though he’s recovering from a rare case of tonsil cancer? Will there be Andy and Gem from the last breakup, despite the bitterness and feuds between Beady Eye and Noel’s High Flying Birds (and feelings of betrayal when Gem played with Noel straight after Beady Eye split?) Will the drummer by Tony McCaroll (who last played them in 1996 and had great fun entering for tickets and proudly giving his name in the entry, a clever oasis failsafe to make sure that only true fans –or at least ones that could be bothered to Google – applied for tickets). Alan White (who last played with them in 2002), Ringo’s son and Keith Moon’s Godson Zak Starkey (who last played with them in 2008) or Chris Sharrock (who played on that last tour in 2009 and ended up in Beady Eye)?

Of course its Oasis so it all went wrong quite quickly, the announcement of a tour at self sabotagingly eye-wateringly high prices making the supposedly ‘working class boys’ the butt of all the jokes online for weeks. It’s a real shame the glitz of decent publicity immediately got swamped because of ticketing sites getting greedy and crashing computer systems; my loyalty says that the band were innocent victims of it all but even I could see a crashed computer server coming the day the tickets were released – and my last gig was in 2009, before ticketmaster was a thing, while let’s not kid ourselves over motivation either: divorces can be costly). For all my cynicism though I think the reunion and the improvement in relation between the two brothers is genuine and comes at a time that’s good for both of them, each proving that they don’t need the other to make good music or fill anthems but that together they can do something biblical while the really decent glut of reissues the past few years means they have a fanbase whose still mad fer it, including many kids too young to have ever seen Oasis play. Even so there’s a genuine swing and swagger in both men’s steps these days, an eagerness to let bygones be bygones and make 2025 the year of the big return, with maybe an album next year to go alongside the (rather short) world tour?

Anyway, the re-issue which got rather overshadowed by the announcement but seems to have been deliberately timed to remind people just how great the band once were with a re-issue of their debut. ‘Definitely Maybe’ is still the best Oasis album, no maybe about it, a defiant working class anti-grunge statement that life was better spent with a community who get you and that life was something to embrace (‘Live Forever’ was deliberately written to be the antithesis of Kurt Cobain’s plan to top himself across three increasingly painful albums). That power and anger, juxtaposing youthful idealism with frustration at how rubbish life often is, drives nine of the most powerful rock and roll songs around, plus the two songs that never quite worked odd acoustic bitter twinge of ‘Married With Children’ and novelty song ‘Digsy’s Dinner’, included so Noel says because the album was in danger of becoming too perfect and he wanted to give himself something to top it with the next one (which they never quite did). The performances are tight and electrifying with a twenty-seven year-old Noel putting all the tricks he’s learnt as a roadie to good use on the bedrock of guitars that allows everyone else to swim and a twenty-two year old Liam discovering his voice almost in real time, a disdainful sneer that demanded better of everybody even when he was a nobody. Living through its release was to me what all my elders who lived through The Beatles said that felt like and even though it was a far shorter and in the end far less varied and adventurous journey than the fab four’s it still felt life-changing.

Before the recordings that made them famous, though, there was an entire set of aborted sessions at Monnow Valley (Rockfield), the first time the band had ever been in a recording studio and they were both incredibly nervous and more than a little naïve, bullied into being recorded the way every other rock band was back in the mid-90s. A couple of the recordings have been heard before, such as in the ‘Supersonic’ documentary, but for the most part they’re recordings fans have read about rather than heard till now when they fill up nearly an entire disc of ‘extras’. Honestly, they’re awful: it’s hard to say why they don’t work but they really don’t. Is it the fact Liam is still singing in the laidback manner of his idol Ian Brown? The endless use of the wah-wah pedal? The one layer less of guitars? McCarroll’s shaky drums and the odd seemingly random tambourine overdubs? Is it that the speeds are all that bit too slow? Is the mix that bit too spaced out? Are the band just a bit too scared and not quite hungry enough? Is it the oddly cutesy harmonies? (what is Noel doing in ‘Cigarettes and Alcohol’? He sounds like Alvin and The Chipmunks!) A second batch of sessions, at sawmills Studios in Cornwall, also released here for the first time, really weren’t too much better: they’re rawer and Liam is discovering his voice which is good, with Oasis encouraged not to think about things too much and just play as if it was a live sound, but the engineers still don’t know how to mix this band to sound nasty dirty rather than clean or use constantly moving sound to seem big and powerful rather than weaving lots of little bits together to sound small,. So the end result is just empty, as if Oasis are playing next door through a thick wall rather than in yer face the way this album needs to be played. ‘Live Forever’ is the song that comes closest to the bounce of the finished version, but it still sounds like a poor first go while over at sawmills ‘Up In The Sky’ is a big step forwards to the band finding its groove though it’s still clearly not quite there. ‘Digsy’s Dinner’ of all songs is the only song that sounds tougher in early form and close to an improvement, whilst a noisy formless ‘Ciggies and Alcohol’ comes off worst, a live recording of debut single ‘Supersonic’ - usually so light on its feet - that sounds as if it’s being bludgeoned to death by a punk band still learning how to play, an extended ‘Columbia’ feels as if it drags on for hours (at Morrow anyway, the sawmills version is pretty decent) and candidate for greatest ever Oasis song ‘Slide Away’ sounds as if the tape’s running slow (it isn’t, it’s just that Oasis are deep in their ‘Stone Roses’ laidback phase, a feel that has its merits but is all wrong for a breakup song that’s meant to be torn from the heart).

Either way it’s like an alternate universe where Oasis were just another wannabe Britpop band who never quite made it rather than the greatest band of their generation. They were clearly right when they pleaded with manager Alan McGee for a third go, as was he when he risked putting record label Creation into debt by letting them do just that. What made the difference? Desperation, plus Noel’s friend and engineer Owen Morris who understood the band even better than they did and took the best halves of the two approaches combining the raw sound and overdub cavernous echoes into one massive behemoth that sounded bigger than the sum of its overdubs. Oasis never looked back. Till now, anyway. And that’s the thing about a re-issue like this one: I’ve been clamouring to hear these tapes for so many years it’s not as if I can mark it down just because they’re not very good; to have them at all is brilliant. You’ll never ever play these recordings a second time because they’re awful, yet nevertheless they’re fascinating to hear once, as like all the best re-issues they really shed new light on to what we thought about the finished album and show how what seemed effortless about the final product was in reality lots and lots of work. I’m sorry they didn’t just do the obvious and make this disc three of an extended 20th edition box set; instead you still need the old one for the more interesting outtakes, live performances and demos – it’s a brilliant box after all, as is the 20th ‘Morning Glory’ one (I was hoping they’d do the whole run that way but alas they stopped after two). If you’re a casual fan whose merely interested in what the fuss was all about I’d stick with the single album anyway, that’ll tell you all you need to know. If you’ve spent the past thirty years wondering what these legendary and infamous recordings might be like, though, then now at last you can – and that’s a great thing. Err, honest. So it is a definitely form me? Erm probably more a maybe to be fair, worth buying if you find it cheap, not worth mortgaging your house for. A bonus unheard demo (for ‘Sad Song’, sounding much like the finished B-side as its basically just Noel and an acoustic guitar anyway, only the big difference is…wait for it…Liam on lead, singing in the exact same way his brother will on the final version; it’s a nice version but it’s a song that suits Noel’s brotherly guru rather than Liam’s pained child better) and generous levels of packaging might help swing the deal either way depending how you feel about one of the more .

11) Oasis “Definitely Maybe – 30th Anniversary (7” Singles Box)”

In addition to the album itself the original box set of all the singles from Oasis’ debut has been re-issued. Originally released in November 1996 it’s as straight re-issue as you’ll get, complete with rare and classic B-sides that deserve to be compiled on a ‘Masterplan II’ one day (including the thoughtful ballad ‘Take Me Away’, Noel’s Kinks-like tale of nostalgia for childhood ‘D’Yer Wanna Be A Spaceman?’ and an early acoustic arrangement of ‘Up In The Sky’, classics all) and clever packaging that looks like a cigarette packet (amazing, really, to think this was considered ‘normal’ back then just a few years before the smoking ban. Rumours were that the ‘Morning Glory’ box was going to be an ‘alcohol’ bottle, but no!) The only downside is that this box only features the 7” singles – there are no 12” extras (so you don’t get to hear the really rare stuff, like the early version of ‘Columbia’ or the Stones Rosesy ‘Cloudburst’, where Liam sings ‘here comes the rain’ a few months before nailing ‘sun-sheee-ine’). A bit of a waste if you ask me given all that extra running time going empty but, still, if you missed this popular set the first time round thirty years ago and thought you’d never have a chance to own it, like I did, then you’re in luck. The ‘splatter colour’ discs are quite fetching too, even if the colouring seems to have been chosen at random (does ‘Shakermaker’ really scream ‘lime green’ to you?! It should have been coca-cola coloured, surely?!)

12) Oasis “Supersonic” (30th Anniversary)

There are moments in every collector’s life when they know they’re old. Mine was when we had the 20th anniversary re-issue bonanza of oasis albums a decade ago. I mean, one of my first musical memories was the publicity bonanza for ‘Sgt Peppers’ in 1987 (‘It was twenty years ago today!’) and that was presented as an eternity ago. That couldn’t have happened to one of my bands from my lifetime too could it? Well it could, it did and here we are what seems like just five minutes later with a 30th anniversary blitz, though sensibly Oasis have gone for the singles this time around. Unlike the rather excellent re-issues of the first three Oasis albums, packed with all sorts of extras, the singles simply replicate the originals, at least in terms of packaging and contents: at first I thought the pearl-coloured vinyl was a misprint it looked so weird but no, apparently it’s meant to look like that (because pearl is the traditional gift for 30th wedding anniversaries, see?) Alas, too, these vinyl editions only recreate the 7” singles with one B-side apiece as opposed to the more mainstream four-track format most of their singles were sold in originally. I guess thirty years is long enough for fans to have worn their copies out so it’s a nice little extra for Record Store Day, but I have to admit to it’s the sort of money-making con the young and hungry Oasis of 1994 would have been horrified to be a part of.

13) The Rolling Stones “Hackney Diamonds – Anniversary Edition”

I really feel for the Stones. They released their first album of new material in nearly twenty years last year only for it to be overshadowed by their old rivals The Beatles who got all the attention with their wretched ‘comeback’ single ‘Now and Then’, whereby the Stones record toppled out the charts just as it was gaining momentum. Releasing an ‘anniversary edition’ is an odd move and feels like an attempt to get some belated interest, only they actually missed the anniversary by a couple of months – delayed, no doubt, by the plethora of Beatle-related reissues in this list. If you did miss it last year then ‘Hackney Diamonds’ is something of an uneven sprawl, with more clunkers than usual for the Stones (since the 1980s?) but a crystal clear production that brings the best out of all the players included the much missed Charlie watts’ contributions – and the best Stones song of the century so far in the moving tribute to their drummer ‘Sweet Sounds Of Heaven’. What you get this time round is a live gig promoting the concert from October last year and it sounds better live – there’s more life to it and more often than not these hard-nosed songs suit the in-yer-face performances while the band have knocked off some of the rough edges. It won’t change your mind about the album or be full of great revelations and none of it is all that different (even the special guests from the album, like Lady Gaga and Stevie Wonder turn up again) but it’s a good little show. The Stones perform four songs off the album: ‘Angry’ is a revelation, the runt of the original little toughening up no end on stage as the famous guitar weaving of Keith and Ronnie knock great lumps out of each other, the more lyrical ‘Whole World Over’ crackles with a raw energy missing from the record, ‘Bite My Head Off’ is vastly improved now the band aren’t playing quite so hard and though the least improved ‘Sweet Sounds’ was always pretty amazing and close to being as sweet as ever. As for the oldies they’re a mixed bag, much the same as they are every time the band play them with a smart-ass ‘Shattered’ though ‘Tumbling Dice’ comes up somewhere in the middle and ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ sounding more than a little decrepit. Still in the wide pantheon of officially available Stones concerts it’s somewhere towards the top end. The only real black mark against it is that at the time of writing it’s only out on vinyl and runs to a stingy seven songs – no doubt the full show will be released in a more expensive format some day so we get the joy of buying it all over again.

14) The Rolling Stones “Voodoo Lounge”

I still think of this as the ‘new’ Stones album (it is, after all, just three studio albums of new material ago) so it’s made me feel rather old that they’ve released a 30^th anniversary edition of it on coloured double vinyl (in a nicely zombieish red and yellow). It’s a better, more varied set than it’s often given credit for, with some of the best latterday Stones songs (the under-rated minor hit single ‘Love Is Strong’, the gorgeous ballad ‘Out Of Tears’ and the hard-rocking and primal ‘I Go Wild’) alongside some tracks that are atrocious (‘Suck On The Jugular’ and ‘Blinded By Rainbows’, maybe the two blandest most pointless songs in the Stones catalogue). A special edition includes a white EP which contains the hard-to-find period B-sides, none of which are lost classics exactly but all are nice to have out again and all of which are making their debut on vinyl: the bluesy ‘The Storm’ is the best, raw and basic in a way the Stones hadn’t been for a while, while ‘I’m Gonna Drive’ is a typical Stones song about getting juice in the tank that could mean a car or a girl, ‘Some Girls’ outtake ‘So Young’ is a typically retro blues riff turned into a song about groupies that doesn’t have the shock factor they think it does and ‘Jump On Top Of Me’ is a real oddball, a laidback song about passion after a hard day at the office.

15) Alan Hull “Alright On The Night – Live At Clifton Poly 1975”

A welcome re-issue for this comparative rarity, released in 2009 and not seen since, in what turned out to be a brilliant year for Alan Hull fans. The sound isn’t great but the gig is, as the Lindisfarne singer-songwriter plays an intimate atmospheric if echoey solo set with arrangements much sparser than the records. This was an interesting period in Hully’s life: Lindisfarne had broken up twice, first solo album ‘Pipedream’ had won rave reviews but not many sales and second album ‘Squire’, despite having a higher budget, had mostly beendied without trace. The songwriter is staring into the commercial abyss here just four years after Lindisfarne were outselling every other British act (including ex-Beatles): after all since when was Clifton Polytechnic, a tiny college in Nottingham, a haunt worthy of the man they once called the British Dylan? There’s a punkish I’ll-show’ em feel about his acoustic performance as Alan rips into songs old and new with the same level of intense attack, between joking-but-not-joking banter about being a ‘modern day Robin Hood’ attacking the rich for attacking the poor and ending up poor himself before asking some enthusiastic singers in the front row ‘wanna join my band? I can just about afford to pay you two pints of Guinness per week!’ It’s the songs that were furthest away from being sparse acoustic songs that sound particularly good here: the ones from the often over-polished ‘Squire’ for instance have a raw working class anger without being dressed up in production bonnets while ‘Gin and Tonix All Round’ sounds far more sober here with just once voice and a piano rather than the Lindisfarne Mark II band arrangement and there’s a heartfelt ‘Breakfast’ from masterpiece ’Pipedream’ , about an affair where both parties have to go home to their old lives, which is a very different beast raw and painful and without the camouflage of a full band and synthesisers making funny noises. There’s one oddity too in ‘Cheeky Mouse’, a chaotic pre-Lindisfarne fast moving ninety-second piano song based on a rodent who used to slip into Hully’s house and nick his cheese! You miss the might and power of Lindisfarne elsewhere though, especially on a truncated toothless ‘We Can Swing Together’ and a sparse, sleepy ‘Lady Eleanor’, while this must be the one concert the man gave that doesn’t include his other masterpiece ‘Clear White Light’. As ever with Hully too half the fun is that you never know when he’s going to hit a bum note or reach an inspirational peak that leaves you gasping, often within the same song. It’s still a decent concert though, one well worth tracking down if the set of Alan Hull demos makes you wonder ‘what happened next?!’

16) Lindisfarne “Brand New Day: The Mercury Years 1978-79”

As if four discs of their leader wasn’t enough we also get three discs by the parent band. Hot on the heels of last year’s BBC sessions set is a re-issue of three of the harder-to-find Lindisfarne albums from their first comeback phase on record label Mercury: a glossy best-selling studio album that fans tend not to like that much, a poor-selling follow-up that fans tend to quite enjoy and a fan favourite double live album from their 1977 reunion live show at Newcastle City Hall that’s really hard to track down despite being re-issued as recently as 2012. That’s the highlight of this three disc set, an atmospheric show full of camaraderie as old friends blow away the cobwebs five years after their original split and tackle all the best songs from their original trio of albums ‘Nicely Out Of Tune’ ‘Fog On The Tyne’ and ‘Dingly Dell’ with such panache and (unusually for Lindisfarne) precision it’s as if they’d never been away. There are a few a surprises thrown in too: Jacka gets back to his blues roots with a cover of ‘Bye Bye Birdie’ (a traditional song the original Denny Laine-era Moody Blues put on an LP back in 1966), cheery instrumental B-side ‘Scotch Mist’ and some rarer songs like ‘Wake Up Little Sister’ and the glorious anti-town planning single All Fall Down’. The highlights though are the old warhorses: a thoughtful ‘Lady Eleanor’, a singalong ‘Meet Me On The Corner’ and a majestic finale of ‘Clear White Light’ that lasts for seven glorious minutes. There’s just one problem that gives this set a massive black star: those last three songs aren’t from the original ‘Magic In The Air’ show but the 1983 tour released as ‘Caught In The Act’: great in their own right but hardly a substitute for hearing an original live album complete. The ‘Magic’ versions are even more, well, magic too just to rub it in! Most of the between-song patter, the highlight of many a Lindisfarne show, is missing too in the desperate need to cut it back to a single disc rather than double while I remain annoyed that one of my favourite songs from this show (a gorgeous and rare rendition of ‘Alan In the River With Flowers’) is still missing, seemingly forever doomed to remain in low quality on bootlegs.

By the end of the show the five wary musicians, still angry from the way Lindisfarne split up in 1973 hammered by too much touring, tuning squabbles and bad management, are back to being friends again. A full-time reunion seemed inevitable after they had come together as a ‘proper’ band again but ‘Back and Fourth’ surprised many with its lush strings and middle-of-the-road sound, with Gus Dudgeon’s slick production a little too ‘grown-up’ for the signature ramshackle but real Lindisfarne sound (the band don’t play as often together as they should). It’s a strong album for Alan Hull at least, highlighted by the nostalgic hit single ‘Run For Home’ and political rant ‘Marshall Riley’s Army’ about the working class march from Jarrow to London to protest about unemployment in the Great Depression, with Jacka suddenly coming out of nowhere to be second songwriter in the band with the catchy commuter comedy ‘King’s Cross Blues’ and the coyly cosy ‘Warm Feeling’, both co-written with ‘Lindisfarne Mark II’ guitarist Charlie Harcourt. The rest is unexpectedly wretched though, unlistenable and soul-less, with opening track the crudely sexual ‘Jukebox Gipsy’ (‘One more poke and you can do it all night!’) my pick as the nadir of the band’s entire catalogue. What they should have done is replace that lesser half of the album with the many outtakes from the sessions, with an impressive nine bonus tracks included here. Before you get too excited most of them are previously released and heard on other Lindi sets like the ‘Buried Treasure’ series but are well worth hearing again all together at last for the first time, especially Si Cowe’s B-side anti-racist tale of brotherly love ‘Stick Together’, Hull’s oddly serious standalone single ‘Brand New Day’ and a revived Jack The Lad outtake (a Lindiasfarne spin-off) ‘See How They Run’ the highlights. New to this edition is ‘Happy Or Sad’, a third sweet Jackson-Harcourt song, not up to the pair that made the album but better than a lot of the Hull ballads that did. The song ‘Reunion’, though, isn’t: again presumably accidentally it’s actually the song ‘Loving Around The Clock’ apparently included by mistake – technically by a ‘different’ band, a reunited ‘Downtown Faction’ which is what Lindisfarne were called before Alan Hull joined them. There’s a shorter mono mix of ‘Warm Feeling’, too, for some reason even though mono was long dead by 1978!

‘The News’ was a much more natural Lindisfarne ‘band’ project, right down to the folk-rock ‘raw’ sound and the poor marketing that meant it sank without trace the first time round. Though another uneven record not up to the ones before ‘Back and Fourth’ or after this one (follow-up ‘Sleepless Nights’ is super!) there are some cracking moments on here, especially Rod Clements’ return to writing ‘When Friday Comes Along’ and Hull’s wistful nightmarish vision of his death on ‘Good To Be Here?’, one of the most moving songs he ever wrote, a deeply serious coda to Lindisfarne’s most jokey of albums seems to sit outside it as if coming through from another dimension. Alas the problem with CD re-issues means that instead of drifting away on an eerie doleful string refrain the CD closes with the cute but frivolous single mix of ‘Easy and Free’ and a much bootlegged but never officially released ten-track nine-song mini concert taped back in Newcastle City Hall from Christmas 1979 with a particularly lovely ‘Home’ that sounds much better without the production gloss and a really groovy version of ‘People Say’, though it’s clearly nowhere near up to the 1977 ‘Magic’ gig. Overall, then, some nice material that’s been long missing from CD gathered together in one place and which gives me hope that the next batch of even better and overlooked Lindisfarne albums released on their own label might get their time in the sun soon. You have to say, though, that the usually reliable Cherry Red Records have been oddly sloppy: as well as the errors listed the single mix of ‘easy and Free’ and the album version from ‘The News’ are actually the ‘wrong’ way round, Charlie Harcourt gets renamed ‘Keith’ for some reason and spelling mistakes are littered across the otherwise excellent packaging (‘Dingley Dell’ for instance). You can tell, I think, that this wasn’t put together by a Lindisfan the way that last year’s colossal ‘Radio Times’ box of BBC recordings was, even though as ever there’s a lot to keep fans like us who thought we’d never get to see this stuff again without paying a fortune for 45-year-old vinyl happy.

17) George Harrison “Wonderwall Music” and “Electronic Sounds”

At last, after years of watching other (and sometimes lesser) albums get the deluxe re-issue treatment George’s first and rarest solo projects were re-issued as special vinyl editions for record store day and as very pretty picture discs too, this decade’s big discovery ‘zoetropes’ that seem to ‘move’ when they’re played – very clever and all but a bit bland, given they’re just red circles (‘Wonderwall’ adding a touch of black and ‘Electronic’ a bit of blue). As for the music though it doesn’t matter how it t looks, it’s terrific; well half of it anyway. Forget ‘Dark Horse’ it’s Wonderwall that’s running on a dark race course to be the unheralded gem of the Harrisongbook. A soundtrack for a pioneering psychedelic film about an elderly professor getting down wi da kids via a rather charming hallucinatory experience watching the hippies in the next door flat, it says much about the growing divide between generations in the late 1960s but in a kindly, benign and rather poignant sort of a way (everyone is deserving of peace, love and psychedelia, even fuddy duddy professors set in their ways). Flattered to be singled out to write the score, at a time when he was very much the Beatles’ junior writing partner, George took to the project with gusto making most of the free hand he’d been given to work with old friends (including a whole bunch of people who’ll end upon his future solo albums like Eric Clapton – who, being under contract with another label, becomes ‘Eddie Clayton’ in the credits; ‘Ski-Ing’ is the only place you can hear him and George play together) and allows George to pursue his interest in Indian music, even spending most of the budget on recording half of the sessions in Bombay. The meeting of generations on film is matched on audio by the meeting of Western and Eastern cultures until the two finally combine in the second half for some truly beautiful music – all of it instrumental (though Beatles B-side ‘The Inner Light’ started life in these sessions and will give you a good idea of how the rest sounds). Impeccably played and hauntingly beautiful highlights include the groovy ‘Party Seacombe’ (the Beatles song that never was), the lush orchestral title track, the funky rock instrumental ‘Ski-Ing’, the Indian musicians playing rock and roll ‘Drilling A Home’ and the urgent love scene accompaniment ‘On The Bed’, one of the greatest little bits of Indian music of them all. Admittedly not everything is a masterpiece: ‘Microbes’ is an oddly un-tuneful opening (sensibly replaced on the DVD with an intended theme song performed by The Remo Four), ‘Crying’ is a sitar trying to sound like tears and ‘Love Scene’ is very of its time, complete with trippy harp, sitar and Indian singing, though even this becomes hypnotically beautiful by the end. Our advice: buy it; more than just the inspiration for Oasis ‘Wonderwall’ is a wonderful little album that deserves to be heard by more fans who’ve long dismissed it as ‘not a proper album’. It is – and how!

Less vital is ‘Electronic Sound’ however, two twenty-minute tracks of George plugging in his new synthesiser and finding out how it works, in real time. Clue: I’m not sure he ever does find out how it works, even after forty minutes of messing around and making it do weird beeping noises. By and large it’s the sort of thing to play once out of curiosity and then file away never to play again – given the nature of the material, all squeals and funny noises, there are none of George’s musical trademarks and certainly no conventional guitars or vocals. That said I’ve always loved the cover (a self portrait painting by George which proves that Paul isn’t the only Beatle who could draw proper), the sheer courageousness of it all (which proved that John isn’t the only Beatle to go for avant garde) and the knowledge that one day George will get to grips with his new equipment and use it properly on a Beatles session (the wind effect on ‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy)’ which you can hear in places in prototype form here; the white noise effect also ended up on ‘I Remember Jeep’ on ‘All Things Must Pass’). Who would have thought, though, that one Beatle could record two such different albums just a year apart, then follow it all up with ‘Pass’ just a year later?

18) The Beatles “The Capitol Albums”

What Beatles present are we all getting under the Christmas tree this year? Erm, possibly not the one you’re expecting! Instead of the expected ‘deluxe Rubber Soul’ or a proper DVD set that includes ‘Let It Be’ and ‘Get Back’ together we get yet another re-issue of the pesky American versions of the first seven albums on vinyl. If you didn’t know Capitol Records, who were the American partners of EMI in Britain, saw The Beatles very differently to the way people did back home in the UK. Unlike EMI they didn’t view The Beatles as a serious band, just a commodity to be exploited and instead of the George Martin-agreed final mixes or Beatle approved front covers and running orders they mucked around with the original albums left right and centre, pulling them apart and remixing them with ugly fake stereo that’s left more than a few fans scratching their heads (these are the more official mono mixes, I’m pleased to say). Mostly it was out of pure greed: they got seven albums to our six thanks to having less songs per album (while still charging the same price) and filling up the gaps with A and B sides and EP tracks. The front covers are cruder, the mixes weirder (why did they insist on remixing them?) and the track listing seems to have been pulled at random, with songs appearing years away from the ones they were recorded in sessions with.

Even so all Americans who were around in the first half of the 1960s grew up on the albums sounding and looking like this and there’s a real nostalgia for them, especially as the first CD re-issues in the States were all the British versions and so you couldn’t get hold of these actually bigger selling versions of the albums for decades. These records have been out before though (admittedly on CD not vinyl), with two box sets of the things back in 2009 which even though the years are getting shorter all the time really wasn’t that long ago to deserve another re-issue; there’s not much here that wasn’t on the ‘volume one’ or ‘volume two’ box sets, only you get six albums not four and four and a lot more packaging (which does look nice, but not enough to fork out for the extra money). As for the sound quality which has taken a lot of that nasty echo away and is much more in keeping with the sound of last year’s ‘red’ and ‘blue’ remixes. You still have to ask yourself what the point is though – they none of them sound that different to the last set of mono remixes of the early albums (2012); the one big selling point is that they’re back out on vinyl for the first time in sixty years. While true vinyl lovers will just want the original mixes as it is and because the Beatle albums sold so well in the US they’re really not that hard to track down (though admittedly good luck finding a mint copy that hasn’t been written on/kissed/fondled/hung up on a wall/used by somebody’s younger brother as a Frisbee and all those other charms of collecting life).

The one big thing in this set’s favour is that the cheapo cash-in double-vinyl documentary ‘The Beatles’ Story’ is included this time (they skipped it last time around and so it hasn’t been out since 1964): a cheap and grubby bit of inaccurate filler for which The Beatles weren’t consulted at all and which is actually of far more interest to Beach Boys fans (it’s produced by the only hip people free on the Capitol staff, Brian Wilson’s early collaborators Gary ‘Lonely Sea’ Usher and Roger ‘Little Deuce Coupe’ Christian). The interviewer (John Babcock, announcer at a local radio station, though Roger can be heard too) has clearly never been around a ‘real’ Beatle or indeed anyone under thirty: John talks - in the interviewer’s words - about ‘wanting to give his wife financial security’, George ‘has a deadpan expression that would make the Sphinx jealous’, the interviewer gets Paul and George muddled up frequently and there’s the famous line that ‘after Ringo joined lady luck increased the membership to five’ (!) The album’s most quoted line ‘are they a band big on hair but short on talent?’ sadly rather sums it up, while the album doesn’t even feature Beatle music, bar a whole 48 seconds of ‘Twist and Shout’ recorded at the Hollywood Bowl in ’64 (and included complete on the 1977 concert compilation mixing the 1964 and 1965 shows) and some godawful ‘easy listening’ re-arrangements of Beatle tunes (the orchestral ‘Long Tall sally’ has to be heard to be believed). However ignore it at your peril because there are some great moments dotted around this fifty minute double set: this was where most fans first learned of the importance of Brian Epstein and George Martin to the Beatles story and the actual quotes from actual Beatles in their actual voices are really good, such as Paul still astonished about success because it’s ‘something you never actually think about’ despite dreaming of it since childhood and the impact of the death of his mum (Paul will never be as candid on that subject ever again). Here’s the rather bombastic opening, narrated in a pompous voice by old-school narrator John Babcock with the disdain of a generation who just doesn’t get it: ‘It started in Liverpool, England, a sound of feeling and emotion, and swept up the youth of the world. And while adults in many foreign speaking languages looked on in awe, four young boys from a poor British seaport slum-town, their hairstyle a harmless defiance of convention, their musical style brash, earned renown which they had never dreamed of and perhaps never really wanted. The Beatles had even picked a name which defied and challenged acceptance. Their very success ironically seems to defeat their 'I-don't-care' philosophy. But through it all, confused at times, perhaps a little frightened at times, they clinged to their identity and grown closer to one other’. If you say so. For all its howlers nothing gives you a flavour of Beatlemania better than ‘The Beatles’ Story’ and it is indeed all part of the story, long overdue for a re-issue and enjoyable in a fun, sensationalist overblown teen magazine kind of a way, a reminder of the days when The Beatles were mostly the prerogative of teenage girls not aging male collectors and who still had 80 odd % of that amazing career ahead of them. Now get Veejay (or whoever owns the rights these days) to put out their earlier and sillier but far more Beatley cash-in ‘Hear The Beatles Tell All!’ out and I’ll be happy.

19) Pete Townshend “Live 1985-2001”

The Who guitarist never played all that many solo shows in the 1980s and 1990s: after endless touring with his main band the ‘Orrible ‘Oo he tended to stick to the odd tiny tour or one-off charity events. So it’s rather a surprise to report that there’s a mammoth £100 fourteen disc set of the things out containing seven complete shows – none of them new but a lot of them extended and all of them fairly rare. Heard individually they’re a treasure trove as Pete often takes a different approach to his arrangements, alternating between a softer jazzier backing group and intense acoustic solo shows that still nicely captures the anarchic raging spirit of The Who even without the roar of a rock band behind him. Pete also finds the time to throw in a few surprises: who listening to The Who in 1965 would have guessed at Pete doing covers of Elvis (‘That’s Alright Mama’), Nina Simone (‘I Put A Spell On You’), Robert Parker (‘Barefootin’), The Beat (‘Save It For Later’) or Willie Nelson (‘On The Road Again’)? Or offering up such self-written rarities as Who debut song ‘A Legal Matter (even The Who never did it live!), ‘Who Sell Out’ classic ‘Mary Anne With The Shakey Hands’ (ditto), the hard-to-find 1990s update to Lifehouse the ‘original’ version of ‘Who’s Next’ ‘Gridlife’ or a long line of thoughtful hymns written for his spiritual guru Meher Baba last heard on an obscure fundraising debut LP? All six shows are impressively different and even though many of the same Who classics keep re-appearing it’s a neat way of cataloguing the ebbs and flows of Pete’s solo career which is a lot more interesting and varied than casual fans might think.

The Brixton Academy show from 1985 has been around a few times under different names (like ‘The Deep End’ last time it was on CD) and was big news at the time: the first big concert any of The Who had done since their split in 1982. Pete’s on great form on his first big step into the solo spotlight as he plus his under-rated if patchy ‘White City’ album but it’s a rather dull and bloated set all in all, complete with gospel backing singers and way too many musicians on stage that just sound wrong doing Who songs. It does take off intermittently though, especially the powerful emotional reading of ‘I Put A Spell On You’ and ‘After The Fire’, a song given away to Roger Daltrey for his solo album ‘Under A Raging Moon’ and sung by Pete for the only time in public here, plus special guest David Gilmour singing lead on one of the songs the pair co-wrote together (the under-rated ‘Love On The Air’). A swing jazz rendition of Tommy blues cover ‘Eyesight To The Blind’ is not for the faint-hearted though and nor are the big production numbers on such normally sensitive songs as ‘Behind Blue Eyes’.

Much better is the Psychoderelict tour of 1993 that sees Pete perform at Brooklyn’s Academy Of Music in 1993. The band are tighter, the song selection much stronger (and less weird) and Pete’s found his feet as a lead act a bit more. The album he’s promoting – still his last full album to date– is another under-rated gem too, one that sounds surprisingly good in concert, especially the gorgeous tale of age gap love ‘Now and Then’. Best are the moments when Pete revisits old storming youthful Who songs with an acoustic folk bent, like an aging troubadour with a lovely, gentle ‘Behind Blue Eyes’ and a really moving nostalgic rendition of ‘The Kids Are Alright’. Some of it, though, is atrocious: ‘Eminence Front’ once a daring a state of the art synth song about hiding behind characters is re-arranged as a middle of the road singalong while ‘Rough Boys’ written to match the new wavers of the early 1980s, has turned into a bloated pub rocker.

Sensibly realising that the acoustic part of the show had gone down best it became a longer part of Pete’s live shows by the time of the third show at The Filmore in 1996. Pete performs half solo and half in a double act with Jon Carin on keyboards and it gives the show a much more intimate feel, highlighted by a lovely ‘Heart To Hang On To’ (with Carin filling in for Ronnie Lane the year before The Small Face’s death when he was too ill to perform himself) and Pete himself playing piano unusually for a gorgeous rendition of his Meher Baba ‘don’t worry be happy’ tribute song ‘All Will Be Well’. It’s probably a disappointment if you come to the show expecting The Who, given that most songs are slow and warm rather than fast and furious, but it’s a gem and a show I wish had been re-issued separately as it’s the hardest of the six to find.

Pete’s back with a full band for a gig at The Empire in 1998. It’s great in that he’s gone back to improvising again after the compactness of his earlier gigs and there’s a fine rawness to most of the performances here but it does just sound like a bad Who covers act at times with some really awful decisions like the modernisation of the synths on ‘Who Are You’ and only gets worse when special guest star Hame, a freestyle rapper, joins in at random.

The best is saved till last with a pair of very different but brilliant shows a year apart. The Sadler’s Wells show from 2000 has about the best balance between acoustic realness and a full band sound, an enjoyable gig that’s probably the closest here to what fans might be expecting: a Who-style show only with a different lead singer and all the songs you would expect present and correct. ‘Bargain’ is particularly good, with a mournful horn part filling in for the fire and power of old while the rarest song by far is ‘Mary’, a song written for ‘Lifehouse’ that got cut when it became trimmed down to make ‘Who’s Next’ that’s hauntingly pretty. A second really good show.

The one from La Jolla Playhouse in 2001 might well be the best of all though, another intimate show with a half-band and lots of rarities including maybe half of ‘Quadrophenia’ via some dazzling no-frills re-workings that suit this tough little album about loneliness and growing up really well. A bluesy acoustic ‘Drowned’ is dazzling as is a thrilling anthemic ‘I’m One’ and a desperate ‘Cut My Hair’, the intensity of the Quadrophenia mini-set matched by Pete’s solo song of addiction ‘The Sea Reuses No River’ which sees him more laid bare than ever, laying all his demons to rest with no synths or overdubs to hide behind. Pete’s in a chatty mood too, offering up fascinating anecdotes (about The Who, life on the road and his receding – sorry receded – hairline) between nearly every song and proves to be quite the comedian. Magnificent.

Three great sets then and four iffy ones – whether that’s enough to fork out for what’s still quite a pricey set, especially if you own some of these shows already, is up to you and you will get mighty sick of some of the songs here (there are six different versions of ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’ for a start!) It’s all nicely packaged though, with a fun interview of memories from Pete and a full twenty-eight pages of photographs. My only real regret is that a ninth truly cracking show, Pete’s solo acoustic 1998 benefit for Maryland Academy, isn’t here as that might just be the best Pete gig of them all (to be fair that night well be down to licensing rights as it was a fundraising gig).

20) Pete Townshend “All The Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes”/“White City/Iron Man/Psychoderelict”

A welcome vinyl re-issue for The Who guitarist’s solo albums #3 -#6, released in two batches at the start and end of the year, LPs generally overshadowed by ‘Who’s First’ and ‘Empty Glass’ (the latter got its own vinyl re-issue last year, alongside Ronnie lane collaboration ‘Rough Mix’). No bonus tracks or fancy packaging, but Pete’s brother-in-law and longtime Who engineer Jon Astley has done a good job with the half-mastering which makes all four albums sound crisper than they ever have before. ‘Chinese Cowboys’ (1982, named for a newspaper review description of John Wayne!), recorded back to back with The Who’s farewell ‘It’s Hard’, might well be Pete’s most personal album as he reels from the collapse of his first marriage and the end of his band and starts questioning his faith. ‘The Sea Refuses No River’, the moment he realised he’d finally become an addict, is one of his greatest most moving songs, with the sarcastic ‘Somebody Saved Me’ – a song originally tried out for penultimate Who LP ‘Face Dances' – not far behind as Pete thanks fate for saving him from a romance that couldn’t possibly be as good as the one in his head, with finale ‘Slit Skirts’ one of his most under-rated tracks (a five minute diatribe about faith and hope and looking for answers, Pete keeps interrupting himself with a chorus about fashion and sex because he needs it to sell). Alas the rest are all pretty average by Pete’s high standards. ‘White City’ (1985) doesn’t have as many highlights but is far more consistent, his first ‘concept album’ outside the Who (and first anywhere since ‘Quadrophenia’) using the characters Pete knew from his youth growing up in a poverty-stricken London suburb in the early 1960s as the basis for a Kinks like album asking what happened to them all, which also doubles for a tale of what he sees happening now a generation or two on as he hits his fortieth birthday and sees the same old problems of disconnect and gang warfare rising up again under Thatcher. The pulsating ‘Give Blood’ is way hipper and contemporary than anyone was expecting, an exciting vibrant song with a power-pop chorus on the old Who themes of identity and belonging and the title track a sweet bit of nostalgia as millionaire Pete who saw all his dreams come true now longs for a place he hated growing up because he misses his friends. Skip ‘Face The Face’, though, an arch mod song that mixes 1920s vaudeville and new wave to incomprehensible effect.

In the following batch ‘Iron Man’ (1989) is the tale of a mysterious metal robot who comes to Earth to help a boy defeat a dragon, the sort of thing that makes you think everyone from the 1960s is still on drugs. A lot of fans swear by it but for me it’s Pete’s weakest project, a bitty silly inconsequential story that never really goes anywhere with Pete not bothering to fill out Ted Hughes’ bizarre original story. Like most Ted Hughes things it just seems borrowed and crude, just a re-telling of ‘ET’ made out of metal with a bit of environmentalism thrown in. There are several special guests who get in the way too, though Roger turning up as Pete’s character’s dad is worth a laugh! ‘Dig;’ features a Who reunion, which the band also played on their 1989 reunion tour, but the fact that this stupid song suited the mullet-haired dry-ice filled stage show when the band were at their weakest ebb an only doing it for the money tells you everything you need to know. Still the best thing here by a country mile, the music coming as close to being uninspired as Pete ever gets. Much more successful is Pete’s most obscure solo album and his last studio solo to date, ‘Psychoderelict’ (1993) a semi-autobiographical, slightly unsavoury tale of a rock star being tempted out of retirement by an underage fan that wouldn’t go down at all well today. The talking between groupie and rocker in between every song gets old quickly and most of the music, while superior to ‘Iron Man’, is nothing special. However there’s one moment of genius, the moving age gap romance tale ‘Now and Then’ the prettiest love song Peter ever wrote and true to live as he falls in love with Rachel Fuller despite their decades difference in age. It’s beautiful, real and heartfelt, as good as anything else in his canon. Even if little on these four albums’ contents rank amongst Pete’s best work, however, all are more than overdue a re-issue and have spent the past twenty-thirty years in limbo, only heard scattered across various compilation albums and not heard complete for decades (‘Psychoderelict’, especially, needs to be heard whole). If you’re a fan then three out of four of these records fill in a big part of the jigsaw puzzle of Pete’s identity that’s lasted his whole career through and offer insight too important to be left behind the way they have been in favour of the higher profile ‘Empty Glass’ (though if you’re new to Pete’s solo career ignore all four and head straight there for the best Who album The Who never made).

21) John Entwistle “The Ox”

At last The Who’s bass player gets a full box set reissue of all six of his mainstream solo albums released in his lifetime (so no film soundtracks, unfinished pieces released after his death or some of the odds and ends that have come out on compilations since, but everything else), with some of these albums available for the first time in nineteen years. It’s a bumpy yet exhilarating ride, full of dark humour and songs about skeletons and death, unexpected touching fragile love songs, quirky novelty pieces utterly unlike anything else you’ll ever hear and lots and lots of proto heavy metal noise. Sadly pretty much none of it is up to John’s songs for The Who: unlike his bandmate Pete Townshend The Ox finds it really hard to sustain a full album’s worth of inspiration and the six albums here are patchy beyond belief and closer to tuneless heavy metal than rock and roll. All of these records have their moments though and are worthy of re-issue, especially the first two albums ‘Smash Your Head Against The Wall’ (John’s equivalent of Pete’s suicide confessional ‘Who By Numbers’ albeit with more laughs and twice as much booze) and ‘Whistle Rhymes’ (the most Who-like album here, not least because Moony turns up on drums for a lot of it). John was, however, a great spotter of talent and all sorts of people turn up on his records either before or right at the very start of their fame: Joe Walsh, Peter Frampton and Eddie Jobson amongst others, while Jimmy McCulloch was so keen to work with John he quit his lucrative gig with Wings to take part in his band and John gave Ringo’s son Zak Starkey his big break long before his dad did (Zak is the Who’s drummer to this day, most of the time anyway; it might have something to do with the fact that Keith Moon was his godfather – a job traditionally given to respectable adults designed to keep youngsters on the straight and narrow!) Highlights include two songs better known done by The Who, the afterlife pondering ‘Heaven and Hell’ (released as B-side to the band’s cover of Summertime Blues’ and the rocking opener of the full edition of their classic ‘Live At Leeds’ concert), a remake of ‘My Wife’ made two years after ‘Who’s Next’ that’s grittier yet sillier, the dark night of the soul ‘What Are We Doing Here?’ that finds John stuck on tour for so long he’s forgotten who he is and the agonising song about unwanted independence ‘Apron Strings’.

Frustratingly, even though all the advertising talks about the rare and unreleased bonus tracks there’s nothing here that didn’t already come out in 2005; luckily they were generous indeed with the vaults back then so if you missed these albums last time round there’s still a lot to hear. That advertising gimmick is something of a cheat it has to be said and, well, the vast majority of them aren’t much cop anyway to be honest (most of the demos are just shakier yet still heavy versions of the album tracks, the advert jingles don’t compare to ‘Who Sell Out’ and there’s a cover of Neil Young’s ‘Cinnamon Girl’ that’s pure torture!) but it’s nice to have them all back again without having to pay a fortune for them. I would never call this a must-have, even for the biggest fans of The Who, but what with the 28 page booklet, the cute replica sleeves and the relatively decent price (£45 at the time of writing) there has never been a better way to buy these rare albums. The first three records are out on coloured vinyl too, by the way, but sadly not the last three (a shame in particular for final album ‘The Rock’ which, being a 1990s baby, has never come out on vinyl).

22) The Who “The Story Of The Who”

This compilation, released to plug the gap between ‘Who By Numbers’ and ‘Who Are You?’ is well regarded by British fans (it was only ever available elsewhere on import) and at twenty-six songs and a ninety minute running time it was one of the better Who compilations around in the pre-digital age, even if it suffered from licensing issues over some of the early songs on Brunswick (‘My Generation’, for instance, is the ‘Live At Leeds’ version with the improvisations at the end snipped out, while this is a rare compilation not to feature debut single ‘I Can’t Explain’). Everything else is there though – well everything up to ‘Squeeze Box’ anyway and the Who’s run of 1960s and early 1970s hits are as great as they come. Alas this loved set still hasn’t quite made it to the digital age sadly, but at least you can buy a re-issue on vinyl a mere forty-eight years after it first came out, specially re-created for this year’s Record Store Day. Regrettably it’s exactly the same as the original, complete with rather suspect packaging (taken from a TV advertisement, quite revolutionary in its day, featuring a pinball machine being smashed with a guitar) and the same live edits of songs even though The Who sorted out the rights to those a long time ago. To be honest you’re better off with ‘The Who Hits 50’ or ‘Then and Now’ if you’re after your first Who compilation, but if you wanted to own a beloved old friend again in re-mastered sound then this Who is for you!

23) The Who “Live At Shea Stadium 1982”

Already released on DVD and blu-ray in 2015, this is the audio version of the band’s final American gig from October 1982, released on CD and vinyl as well as digital downloads for the first time complete. Considering how much most fans hate that final tour The Who’s original final farewell hasn’t half had a lot of revivals. The very final show in Canada in December 1982 was transmitted internationally as one of the first American pay-per-view telecasts and released (with other gigs interspersed) in an hour highlight form as ‘Who’s Last’ and regularly ever since, one of the most viewed/heard Who live shows despite being one of the worst. This lesser spotted Shea Stadium gig is a little better, if only because the band are earlier in the tour and that bit fresher, but not by much: the days when arrangements changed between gigs is long gone by now and the last shows are more or less interchangeable. By now the band have becoming some of a mockery of themselves, morale damaged by the death of Keith Moon (Small Face Kenney Jones is a great drummer but he’s not a natural Who drummer, too on-the-beat to play like Moony), slowing sales and the gig at Ohio that year where eleven people died in the crush due to a misunderstanding about the concert doors being opened early. Pete is by now very sick and turning into an alcoholic that treats the Who like an oldies act while keeping his more interesting groundbreaking songs for his solo albums, Roger is too busy acting to give the band his full attention and John hates every second but tours to keep the bailiffs off his house for another week or two. This is the one tour the band did for the money not the music and, alas, it shows. The big echoey arenas the band play are designed to make them the most money in one go possible and really doesn’t suit their sound, which sounds empty and artificial and even Rabbit Brundrick on keyboards – the one musician giving it his absolute best - can’t fill in that hole in the sound. The old warhorses have never sounded sicker, most of them rumbling to a full stop rather than pouncing as in the days of old. In short, if you’re a Who fan, it’s depressingly average, like seeing an old friend who used to be so full of life (‘The Ace Face?) struggling on a life support machine. Even so, the gig isn’t a complete disaster. I’m one of those fans who quite likes final album ‘It’s Hard’ and the Who play four songs off it rather well: ‘Eminence Front’ is a jazzy joy, John’s ‘Dangerous’ really rocks, the title track is a complex song that means the band have to pay closer attention to it than normal and the self-loathing too-tough-to-blub ‘Cry If You Want’ sounds magnificent, Pete’s angry guitar solo getting ever more and more out of tune as he uses Roger as his voice to condemn all macho men as wimps who are too scared to face their true feelings. Forget the final live albums, what a way to end a discography that was! All four of those songs already appear in Canadian form as bonus tracks on the ‘It’s Hard’ CD re-issue and you really want that rather than this, however. Curiously every edition of this show to date omits ‘5:15’ even though it’s no better or worse than anything else on the set (presumably it’s been dropped from the CDs as the running time would have pushed it over to three discs, but that’s no reason for it to be omitted from the DVD or Blu-ray).

24) Neil Young “Dume”

After waiting twenty years from the first official announcement of the first ‘Archives’ box set we fans only had a mere eleven years before the release of volume two in 2020, a typically sprawling Young epic that featured the great the good and the ghastly all nestling shoulders with each other. One of the more interesting discs for newbies was the one christened ‘Dume’, an alternative version of the ‘Zuma’ album from 1975 featuring (marginally) different mixes and songs from the sessions that were dropped at the time and returned to later (most notably on ‘Rust Never Sleeps’ in 1979). Four years after fans gave in waiting and caved in buying the full version on the epic box set that disc (number eight in the box) has been released as a standalone release and very good it is too. If you don’t already own ‘Zuma’ itself and ‘Rust Never Sleeps’ and don’t have the Archives box either (but if you already own all three, as the vast majority of people likely to buy this release, then of course you’ll be spitting feathers at having paid £300 odd for a box set that gets less and less special every year).

‘Zuma’ is an interesting LP with one foot still in the darkness of the ‘doom’ trilogy and the other half coming up for air and wanting fun. Frank ‘Poncho’ Sampedro is the new boy in town, a natural replacement for the much missed Danny Whitten, and he gives Crazy Horse new life and bounce. The new-look Horse got on so well that the takes piled up at speed and most of the best ones made the album: the epic majesty of ‘Cortez The Killer’, the sassy bite of ‘Bar-Stool Blues’ and my favourite ever Neil song, the musical nervous breakdown that is ‘Dangerbird’, the last of his doom and gloom songs and in so many ways the greatest. Really though the rest of the album isn’t up to the same high standard and would have been better still had Neil thrown in some of the outtakes as he does here: a spiky and less playful ‘Ride My Llama’ which sounds great with a full-on horse attack rather than just Neil and his acoustic as per the released version (on ‘Rust’), the rebellious free-spirited ‘Born To Run’ (not the Springsteen song but a much scarier, less confident ride and a paranoid riff that sounds as if it’s stalking Neil, the one fully unreleased albeit much bootlegged song here), ‘Kansas’, a song about feeling lost and helpless, Neil waking from a nightmare only to discover that the reality is worse and that his girl really has left him, with the realisation that he’s not in Kansas anymore (though this pretty song sounded far better in piano solo form on the archive two set’s other highlight disc ‘Homegrown’), a rather timid and slow early version of future anti-war classic ‘Powderfinger’ (also on ‘Rust’), ‘Hawaii’ another song about feeling lost that was better heard as a whispered shimmery solo cut on ‘Homegrown’, an early version of cute breakup song ‘Too Far Gone’ which sounds a lot prettier than the countrified version that ended up on ‘Freedom’; a scrappy first go at ‘Pocahontas’ that’s hopeless with a boom-chicka Crazy Horse accompaniment (‘Rust’ again) and finally the completely unreleased bootleg favourite ‘No One Seems To Know’, an aching longing ballad full of sighs over missed opportunities and gaping wounds that haven’t yet healed.

Taken as a whole it’s a magnificent set, a double album’s worth of prime Horse with several songs up to Neil’s best that would have made an even bigger splash with ‘Zuma’ had it come out this way at the time, as a real tour de force at a time when Neil’s reputation was lagging a little after three awkward records on the bounce. However there are a few qualms: it would have been even more scatter-brained than usual covering everything from drunken debauchery to depression and regret. You have to say, too, that if this set ever got as far as this being an originally planned track listing then it doesn’t work very well, lurching from one extreme to the other rather than slowly burning its way out of defiant bravado the way the finished ‘Zuma’ did (even though it is technically every bit as scattershot, with the heartfelt ‘Dangerbird’ coming between two drunken misogynistic songs somehow it works really well the finished order). As for the ‘remixes’ of songs from Zuma they’re minimal at best if they’re there at all. The record is also missing two of the best ‘Zuma’ songs that were recorded at different sessions, the earlier 1974 CSNY reunion outtake ‘Through My Sais’ (included elsewhere on archives two) and another of my all time favourite Neil songs the aching ballad with wonky Horse harmonies ‘Pardon My Heart’. Even if released ahead of the box set in 2020 it would have made quite a heavy splash. Releasing it now though, just four years after we bought it as part of the box set, just seems unnecessarily money-grabbing. After all, we’ve all moved on to archives three already. But then that’s Neil for you: time doesn’t seem to work for him the same way it does for us mere mortals and songs from his past present and future all seem to end up in a jumbled order.

25) Neil Young “On The Beach” (50^th Anniversary)

I remember the good/bad old days when you couldn’t get hold of this album, the finale of Neil’s ‘doom trilogy’, for love or money – Neil refused to re-issue it on vinyl or put it out on CD until as late as 2003, by which point it was nearly thirty years old and had never been re-issued in the whole of that time. The vinyl copies were wearing thin and going for hundreds while the vast majority of collectors in the 20^th century who heard it knew it from bootleg editions made to plug the gap. Nowadays most fans are more likely to sigh ‘Really? Again?’ You see it’s only been eight years since the last time this album was out and yet such is the tide of commerce that it’s come round again already, with a half-century anniversary re-release in clear vinyl. It’s a decent enough album as Neil stares into the abyss as he mourns the end of his relationships to second wife Carrie, deceased Crazy Horse guitarist Danny Whitten and most of all The American Dream, with several potshots at Nixon that nowadays work as well if not better about Trump (‘I never knew a man who told so many lies – he had a different story for every set of eyes’). A timely reissue then, with the release on November 8^th – a week before this year’s US election – a bit of fortune telling you might say, especially the haunting second side which is one long twenty minute moan at slow speeds, which sums up the (inter)national depressed mood of most left-leaning Young fans rather well (and unlike Neil’s support for Ronald Reagan there’s not a lot of love lost between him and Trump; not for nothing did Neil prevent Trump from using his song ‘Rockin’ In the Free World’ at his rallies and blasting him as a conman in several of his more recent songs of which ‘Already Great’, a put-down of MAGA ideology from ‘The Visitor’ album in 2017, is the most obvious and best). Modern fans might find he record a bit slow and unmoving, especially if they don’t have firsthand knowledge of the Watergate-referencing asides once lovingly added to the lyrics and scratched into the vinyl and I have to say it’s my least favourite of the ‘Doom Trilogy’, without the emotion and in many ways the songs of ‘Time Fades Away’ or ‘Tonight’s The Night’. However it remains a tough, important and courageously personal album from a man whose never been afraid to stare darkness in the face. Goodness knows we need a bit of that right now it feels the world is turning. I only hope it don’t turn away as we see the sky start to rain, history repeating itself all over again fifty years on.

26) Cat Stevens “Numbers”/“Izitso?”

A welcome re-issue too to Cat’s comparatively rare ninth and tenth solo albums, both released on vinyl through George Harrison’s ‘Dark Horse’ label. It’s a welcome chance to hear ‘Numbers’ again in particular, another record that always gets overlooked surrounded by bigger, better-selling albums despite being one of Cat’s best and – if you read it that way – one of his most revealing. A ‘Pythagorean Theory Tale’ limited to 2000 copies, it’s the George-ish fable of the number Zero coming to visit a town filed with numbers. The others think this homeless traveller with nothing is’ less’ than they are but he shows them all a new dimension and a higher plain of mathematics their brains were closed off to before in the same way that adding a zero to a number makes them bigger even though on its own it means adds up to nothing at all. Alas we still get just an extract from the story by Allan Scott and Chris Bryant that started it all off, although it is re-created in a big thick booklet that looks far better vinyl-size than it does in the CD format and which is too often missing from secondhand copies these days. Not every track is a ten but the ones that are (the sweet ‘Land O’Free Love and Goodbye’, the charming ‘Jzero’, the sour ‘Drywood’ and the powerful ‘Majik Of Majiks’) are classic songs that do more than just make up the numbers. ‘Izitso?’ is less focussed and emptier, the first album made after Cat’s decision to leave the music business at the end of his contract the following year and fully committing himself to Islam. Weirdly though it’s his most ‘surface level’ pop album since his 1960s debut, perhaps because he didn’t think music was the right place to think deep thoughts anymore. Some of it still works a treat though, such as the reflective ‘Life’ (about as good as synths ever sounded) and the autobiographical career retrospective ‘I Never Wanted To Be A Star’ with references to all sorts of old musical friends as a lost man is slowly found verse by verse. The re-mastered sound is pretty good too, though alas there are no bonus tracks on either and the ‘lenticular artwork’ (which looks like one of those photos you can view from different angles) is just plain weird.

27) The Monkees “Changes” (1970)

At last the most obscure and overlooked Monkee-related album of them all gets a re-issue. Admittedly not much of a one – no deluxe or super deluxe reissues for the poor runt of the Monkees litter even though there are no end of outtakes from this brief bubblegum goodbye sitting in the vaults and every other album in their original catalogue has been given that treatment, some of them three times already. Instead it’s just a basic vinyl re-issue, on bright red vinyl, the first time this album has been out for record players since its release in 1970 (when only about three people bought it). Although a lost opportunity to add a bunch of the Andy Kim demo songs and the period outtakes that have come to light since the last re-issue thirty years ago it’s still a great collection filler and if you’ve never got round to owning this album, put off by the cover songs and the fact only Micky and Davy were left in the band, then you’re in for a treat. ‘Oh My My’ is an impressively tough pop song, ’99 Pounds’ a raucous dip into the vault to the earliest days of the first album, ‘Midnight Train’ is one last original - a classy pre-Monkees bit of Dolenz blues and ‘Do You Feel It Too?’ is one of the finest of the Davy pop songs they ever did. Is it as great as ‘Headquarters’, as groundbreaking as ‘Head’ or as timeless as ‘The Monkees’? Hell no. It isn’t even as groundbreaking as ‘More Of The Monkees’, the album which had so little input the quartet didn’t even know was out and had to buy while out on tour. But it is proof that, in the original run at least, there’s no such thing as bad ‘Monkees’ and a lot of love and care still went into these albums even when nobody was buying them anymore. The outtakes are even better though so let’s hope we get at least a two CD version one day.

28) “Davy Jones”

This year’s Monkeefest from professional Monkee fan label 7A Records is another worthy re-issue, a Davy Jones solo album that didn’t sell too well the year after ‘Changes’ in 1971. If it rings a Bell then that’s because it’s Davy’s only record on Bell which didn’t do all that well last time it was out on CD as a limited edition in 2012 either, long since deleted. Though less stuffed with rarities than some of the label’s other re-issues lately by the four Monkees solo and together and not worth buying if you did own the last edition from twelve years ago its nevertheless welcome to have out again, on CD and - for the first time in over fifty years - on vinyl, with a new thirty-six page booklet. Last year 7A Records, the Monkees fan label, concentrated on Micky. The year before, following his death, it was Mike. Not long ago we had a re-release of Peter’s one and only 20^th century album. And now it’s Davy’s turn. His first post-Monkees album is a good place to start, a record which was at one time the easiest solo record of the lot to get hold of. Davy still had enough loyal fans in 1971 for Bell Records to sign him even in an era when The Monkees were at their least fashionable and he even scored a minor hit single with the sweet sunny catchy pop of Neil Sedaka’s ‘Rainy Jane’, the last time any of The Monkees would chart with anything until Papa Nez and ‘Rio’ six years later. It’s a nice record, closer in feel to final Monkees album ‘Changes’ which drove in the middle of the road than anything that adventurous and Davy is back to being a singer ‘cast’ on certain songs rather than a composer (some of his songs on the later period Monkee recordings are amongst the best things the band ever did). I rather like the pop bubblegum of ‘Changes’ though and this album has a much bigger budget with a full blown orchestra, even if it doesn’t have quite as many passable songs. David Gates, whose career was kick-started when The Monkees covered ‘Saturdays Child’ on their first album, repays the debt with spooky album highlight ‘Look At Me’, a dramatic song that makes good use of Davy’s older, growlier voice and his acting skills. ‘Pretty Little Girl’ is worth hearing too, a more grown-up take on the usual Davy Jones Monkee songs as Davy realises the girl he’s secretly had a crush on all these years is all woman now. ‘I can’t believe time has flown’ sings Davy with a sigh, on a record that’s much older and sadder than you might expect, despite being all of 25! You might want to skip most of the rest of the record, though, which errs towards the twee and is trying a bit too hard to make Davy an all-round entertainer. The CD also includes the six bonus tracks from the 2012 edition: the three mono mixes really aren’t that different, but post-album single ‘Girl’ (the one Davy sang in ‘The Brady Bunch’ which won him a new bunch of fans) is worth having as is the catchy B-side ‘The Road To Love’. Best of the lot might just be the outtake, James Stover’s ‘I’ll Believe In You’, an orchestral ballad about realising that the love of your life might not love you the same way back. Older, deeper yet full of bubblegum pop it’s a decent buy if you didn’t buy it the first or second times round, just don’t expect a masterpiece.

29) Davy Jones “Incredible”

For an album that used to be impossible to find back in 1986 (reports still differ as to whether it was officially released in some countries or all countries or whether all the versions kicking around are all glorified bootlegs) ‘Incredible’ hasn’t half had a long shelf life: there are no less than five versions of it in existence, the most recent being 2008 so not exactly in the prehistoric era. Recorded by Davy at a low ebb, just before the 1986 Monkees reunion ‘Pool It!’, this is a half-hearted collection of originals and cover songs, recorded on the cheap in a number of studios in between solo tours. Even the original album cover, shot as a spoof of Jim Morrison’s famous Doors’ pose, seems like an afterthought (and very much isn’t how Davy looked in 1986 – this new one, of Davy in a white polo shirt against a white background, is no classic either but it is an improvement). Jones doesn’t really have his heart in much of this project and the cheap tinny 1980s digital keyboards and drums are enough to put off all but the most loyal of fans. There are, however, some truly lovely moments here that get a bit lost amongst so much dross: I can see why Davy revived his yearning ballad ‘I’ll Love You Forever’ for The Monkees reunion as it’s a sweet gentle love song but whereas The Monkees turned it into a full budget production number this more lowkey, more heartfelt version beats it in every way, ‘Look Inside Yourself’ is a great little song darker than normal with an edgy riff and a lyric about embracing your inner demons and the energetic re-make of Monkees classic ‘Valleri’ isn’t too shabby either. A lot of the rest is more ‘Forgettable’ than ‘Incredible’ though. The definitive version of the record remains ‘Incredible Revisited’ if you can get it (the set is deeply pricey nowadays) with the two bonus tracks ‘Secret Love’ and ‘Greatest Story Ever Told’, decent songs both. This 2024 edition skips both of those in favour of six different outtakes: ‘Don’t Go’, sounding like a Manchester Eurovision entry, plus the lovely regretful lyrics but uneasy musical mix of timeless Celtic strains and 1980s tech ‘Hangin’ By A Thread’ (also released as a tie-in single) are worth hearing; not so sure about the rest. Like everything 7A, though, the packaging is tremendous, with a thick heavy booklet full of unseen photos and a general sense of class all round.

30) The Kinks “Sleepwalker” and Misfits” (1977/78)

The good news: at last The Kinks’ overlooked Arista albums are getting their turn in the spotlight with a CD re-issue, after years of being overlooked in favour of the Pye and RCA Victor albums. They deserve it, especially ‘Sleepwalker’ which is the dark horse of the Kinks’ Katalogue, a powerful emotional return-to-basics set covering Ray Davies’ nervous breakdown and suicide attempts, wrapped up in a production so warm and snuggly it still makes you feel uplifted and hopeful for the future. Every track is at least a minor gem with the insomniac title track and black humour of ‘Life Goes On’ (where Ray’s narrator tries to top himself only to find his gas has been cut off for unpaid bills, his poverty breaking him then saving him) the highlights amongst many. ‘Misfits’ is a lesser album, perhaps the worst Kinks album up to this point, but even that has the beautiful title track, as poignant as any Ray ever wrote, a tribute to life’s failures ‘lost without a crowd, while you go your own way’ and the powerful ‘Rock and Roll Fantasy’ about a fan who lives for music as the only thing that makes his life worth living (and I can guarantee everyone reading this will identify with this lovely song). The rest is a bit odd though, novelty songs about Black Jesuses and hayfever. The bad news? Most of the best stuff from the fairly rare mid 2000s CD re-issues came in the form of the bonus tracks, the trans ‘Lola’ sequel ‘Out Of The Wardrobe’, the gorgeous ‘On The Outside’ about the dangers of hiding yourself away when you have so much to offer the world and a longer edit of ‘Live Life’ that turns a short and silly song into a tour de force. They’re all missing. Why? The albums feel half-dressed without them. A real lost opportunity for the fandom to rediscover a couple of albums that are long overdue some love and attention.

31) The Beach Boys “All Summer Long”

Happy 60^th birthday to the last of The Beach Boys’ summery surfing style albums, re-issued on ‘sunshiney’ bright orange vinyl, which is very colourful (and way better than the ‘urine’ coloured one for ‘Pet Sounds last year) but doesn’t half show up fingerprints. You know the deal with these re-issues by now: no new tracks or artwork and not even any re-mastering that I can tell, but it’s nice to have this under-valued record out again and it still sounds good. The Boys’ reaction to the Beatles’ coming along and stealing their thunder as top dog on home terf (surf?) it’s an intriguing mixture of competitive and ear-grabbing on the one hand (the breathless rush of ‘I Get Around’ and it’s close cousin ‘Little Honda’, designed to show off) and delightfully laidback on the other (the charming lullaby ‘Hushabye’ and young love ballad ‘We’ll Run Away’, songs more subtle than anything anyone else was writing for the pop teen market in 1964), interrupted by moments of autobiographical angst (‘Don’t Back Down’), the first strains of a future Beach Boys strand of nostalgia (‘Do You Remember?’ and the last Beach Boys ‘teenage’ song ‘Drive-In’) along with obvious filler (because it had been just four months since previous album ‘Shut Down Volume Two’, hence ‘Carl’s Big Chance’ which is one long guitar instrumental and the ‘fakeumentary ‘Our Favourite Recording Sessions’). Not the best album the band did – heck it’s not even the best album the band released in 1964 - but a minor classic and hugely under-appreciated record all the same.

32) The Beach Boys “The Christmas Album”

Christmas seems to come round faster every year – and so do the re-issues of The Beach Boy’s Christmas album! Not content with multiple CD reissues and last year’s vinyl re-issue in a very Christmassey red or green here comes another re-issue using Capitol’s new favourite toy: the zoetrope. That means you see red wavy lines forming a pattern while you play the record. Which y’know, is fun if you like that sort of thing and sure to be a collector’s item (and is way better than the urine-coloured ‘Pet Sounds’ vinyl last year) but what does it have to do with Christmas? I’m confused. As to the album it’s a perennial festive favourite, a lot better than it has any right to be given the haste with which it was written and recorded, but something of a mixed naughty and nice gift: the first beach Boysy side of new songs is good harmless teenage fun with the joy of ‘Little Saint Nick’ and the fun rocky makeup song ‘Merry Christmas Baby’ (aha!) stuck together with the more ‘traditional’ Four Freshmen style second side whose full-on orchestral and long earnest takes on Christmas Carols is the single heaviest going side of a Beach Boys record in the 1960s. At least you get a 7” single (on red vinyl) of the single version of ‘Little Saint Nick’ and exclusive B-side ‘Auld Lang Syne’ that’s nice to have but of course the price reflects that too. Bah humbug!

33) Robert Hunter “Tales Of The Great Rum Runners”

Arrr! Ever wondered how the Grateful Dead might have sounded if they’d been an 18^th century band led by a pirate? Then look no further than this eccentric oddity, unseen since a low-key CD release in 1990, starring the Dead’s non-performing non-singing lyricist which is celebrating its half century today. To be honest this album could have been recorded at any point during the last three centuries (give or take, you know, recording technology): it has absolutely nothing to do with any other music being made in 1974 and is a collection of original folk songs and sea shanties played on the sort of things you’d commonly find on a pirate ship (plus the odd honky tonk piano from a pirate bar on the mainland and bagpipes from a stopover in the Highlands) with Hunter’s vocals over the top in a manner best described as ‘gruff’. I spent a long time searching for this record before I finally tracked one down (in a rare secondhand shop in Blackpool, by the sea very fittingly) and honestly I’m still not quite sure what to make of it twenty years after I first heard it. I mean, Bob Hunter remains one of my very favourite wordsmiths for a reason: he’s a master storyteller and a true poet and there are lots of the sort of casual brilliance that made his songs with Jerry Garcia so special sprinkled across this album. There’s a fun backing band too, with Jerry Garcia, Mickey Hart (the album was recorded in his barn!) and Keith and Donna Godchaux adding a nicely faux-Dead folk-jazziness alongside a squealing brass section the parent band would never have afforded. In its own way there’s a lot more imagination across this album than the rather tired ‘Mars Hotel’ from the same year – the very Dylan/Dead-style ‘outlaw’ feel of ‘That Train Don’t Run Here Anymore’ (a duet with Donna), the wisftulness of ‘Standing At Your Door’ (an un-characteristically personal, vulnerable song of wondering how to make up with a loved one) and the one song that the Dead performed themselves, the long slow sighing ballad ‘It Must Have Been The Roses’. But by his own admission Hunter is not a singer and to say his atonal strangled croak is an acquired taste would be an insult to tastebuds. Not that the rest of the band are much better: the Dead have never sounded more collectively drunk than they do across this album. It’s a real struggle to get through this album all in one go even in this re-mix (which is the best it’s ever sounded, with Bob at last sounding as if he’s singing in the same postal code as the rest of the band, rather than in an echoey bathroom across the hall) and hearing it once every twenty years is probably about right as it did sound better than I remembered. Do I love the fact that it’s so unhinged and weird? Yes I do. Do I love the fact that it’s so relentlessly tuneless? Oddly I love that as well. Do I consider it a long lost classic? Erm, not that either. You could say that this album is a buried treasure, but boy are the treasures buried deep. Bring a sturdy spade. For the real masochists amongst you the re-issue adds an impressive sixteen additional bonus tracks (albeit some of them just a few seconds long), each of them as heavy going as the album, with alternate versions of ‘Roses’ and pretty album closer ‘Keys To The Rain’ the best.

34) Paul McCartney “McCartney III: The Remixes”

Oh no here we go again! Released just too late for last year’s review of the year (on December 15^th2023) here is yet another variation on the album that just won’t die, Macca’s 2020 lockdown record that was, well, not one of his best (though at least a little bit better than ‘Egypt Station’). We have had so many variations it’s ridiculous, each one with a different coloured cover/vinyl and any one of multiple ‘bonus’ tracks/bits of packaging (though you have to buy them all to own the full set and at considerable expense I might add). Just when our bank balances were beginning to recover here’s a ‘third anniversary’ edition, available exclusively from the McCartney website. This time the record comes with a sleeve with a photo of Paul, one that’s far more interesting than staring at dice, while the gimmick is that the vinyl could be any of multiple colours and also features one of the following: copies of Paul’s handwritten lyrics for the album’s worst song ‘Pretty Boys’, best song ‘The Kiss Of Venus’ or Paul’s home-made sketch of the album cover. If you keep buying them maybe you could own them all, just like I used to do with McDonalds happy meal toys when I was seven; that’s clearly the thinking behind this release anyway. Or did they just find another warehouse full of the things they wanted to get rid of? Anyway, very weird. Please say that’s it now Paul. I can’t take much more of this record.

Songs Of The Year:

1) Mark Knopfler “Before My Train Comes”

This is the last stop, but the moment has been prepared for. A lovely, lilting ballad about growing old and getting nearer to death, this is Mark’s most moving work in years, maybe decades, a song very in keeping with the whispered, acoustic blues that makes up most of his solo catalogue yet one that goes another stop beyond anywhere we’ve travelled before. There’s some delightful Knopfler guitar over a basic and rickety yet delightful percussive backing from Ian Thomas that really does sound like a train, fellow Dire Straitser Guy Fletcher coming up with his best production on the album, sparse yet moving, with washes of colour from the three musicians. So much of Mark’s career, Dire Straits and solo, finds him taking a journey to somewhere new, not knowing what he’ll find, but this is the ultimate journey into the afterlife as he stares out the rear view windows looking afresh at everything behind him. This song finds Mark waving goodbye to fans on the platform too, offering us what might be one last message of hope and love and respect, telling us that wherever he goes he’ll think about us often and fondly. While there aren’t many lyrics those that we have are sweet and touching and the closing instrumental extends the song to full length most delightfully, with more room for Mark’s soulful guitar to play unimpeded than we’ve had in years too. They really missed a trick not making this song the final destination on the album though – it gets rather left behind as track ten surrounded by similar half-ballads.

2) Liam Gallagher/John Squire “Just Another Rainbow”

By and large the Gallagher-Squire album is quite an upbeat little record, one that captures the Britpop spirit partly by capturing that feeling that anything is possible and things are gonna be alright and we’re gonna live forever. The first album single, though, is the one song that doesn’t do that. ‘Just Another Rainbow’ is the track that sounds most like a continuation of Liam’s solo albums and his long journey from a bitter angry man going through a divorce with wife and band both to being older, wiser and more grateful, with a new wife and a solo career that’s really taken off. There once was hope but it’s long gone now, on as bitter an Oasis track as you’ll ever hear, the bright colours in the sky turning out to be just another mirage, ‘no pot of gold here for me’, no satisfaction just a pile of bills that need paying and dues to be set to rights. Liam’s back to full menacing sneer on this glorious song, the single most psychedelic thing he’s worked on since Oasis’ ‘Who Feels Love?’ in 2000, a beaten up cynical punk cast adrift in a sea of naïve prancing hippies. Liam might not have written this song but it’s very much at one with his first (and best) solo, 2015’s ‘As You Were’, released right in the middle of the long dark night of the soul. The engineering on this song is fabulous: Squire plays his trippy heart out on a fluid yet faster variation of The Stone Roses style, all motion, traction, pushing forward. Liam’s vocal, though is removed from it all and static, sitting in a little box of its own and seemingly playing in another dimension at another speed, psychedelic Beatles style. Squire keeps enticing Gallagher to come out and embrace the sunshine, but he can’t see it through his hurt and anger, lamenting that he tried it last time and got bitterly hurt, that any time he tries again in the future the good times will be a myth, ‘just another rainbow hanging over me’. Yes the ‘I Can See A Rainbow’ lyrics get old in the middle but till then oh the feels! Fabulous.

3) Noel Gallagher “In A Little While”

Just as he did in 2021-2022 Noel has teased fans with a preview of what his next record might sound like, with a demo that may or may not end up on his next album (editor’s note: probably not, unless it turns up on the promised oasis reunion next year as a ‘Noel B-side’ moment). Once again the demo bodes very well indeed, a soft fragile song very much in the same place as last year’s excellent ‘Council Skies’ in which a post-divorce Noel finds, for perhaps the first time in his life, that his future isn’t as certain or as guaranteed as he thought it was. After all, divorce is never part of the masterplan when you get married. What’s been an awful time for Noel personally has been great for his art, shaking him out of the ‘Who Built The Moon?’ era need to make music an intellectual exercise and make him write from the heart. That’s the same here as Noel’s still in shock: ‘You say it’s all over but I still can’t believe it, you say it’s gone but that can’t be true’ he sings so sweetly, as if by singing warmly he can feel the warmth he used to feel, even whilst the echoey surroundings are so cold. Noel next tells his ex-missus that what she says is ‘lost’ between them can be found again somewhere, honest, he knows it can. That optimism that’s kept Noel’s writing running all this time kicks in even at this saddest of times, as he resolves to do everything in his power to make things right, because that’s always walked for him before. The song ends ambiguously: ‘In a little while we’ll all be free’. But does Noel mean when they get back together and he can unburden this heavy load, or because they’ll be leading two separate lives? Though written with the same confidence and swagger and certainty of days old, with a chorus that sounds as if it could be a real anthem with a full band behind it, the best thing about this song is how uncertain and unsure it sounds, the very feeling of love hanging by a tentative thread. That aspect really lends itself well to the low-fi demo form and, if this song ever makes it to a full album (as it fully deserves to) I hope Noel manages to keep that aspect of the song intact. Like a third of ‘Council Skies’ a must-hear that ranks as Noel’s best work in a decade, maybe two.

4) Neil Young “Raining In Paradise”

I’m so glad this pretty song from 1982 has finally seen the light of day officially as it’s haunted me since I first heard it on bootleg a quarter century ago. Recorded during the ‘Island In The Sun’ sessions (where the prettier, more ‘normal’ songs on Trans originally came from) it offers yet more insight into the troubled period in Neil’s life when he and wife Pegi were part of an intense twelve-hour daily programme trying to encourage their son Ben to talk and walk after his diagnosis of severe cerebral palsy. Whereas most of Trans is about courage and resilience though, of how brilliant it is that something made out of wires and plugs can enable a father and son to bond and communicate as sung by robots in a soundscape that keeps the listener at a distance, ‘Raining In Paradise’ is pure simple emotion with no translation needed, a sad and frustrated song that –not unlike ‘Just Another Rainbow’ – thought good times were on the way but they just turned out to be yet more problems. Neil feels guilty for ‘sleeping past dawn’, not used to this new life of hustle and bustle and everyday rainclouds after spending his career ‘chasing the sun’ out in the big wide world. He tries to hold on though, knowing full well that ‘the rainbow comes when you least expect it to’. The backing band of lots of old friends from Crazy Horse, Nils Lofgren before he was in Crazy Horse and regular friend Ben Keith) add some lovely melancholy harmonies while Neil plays an inversion of his usual ‘happy’ guitar chords (the ones from ‘Harvest Moon’) in a song that keeps falling into a pit of despair before wearily climbing its way out again. The instrumental break when the sun finally comes out is truly beautiful, while Neil’s lead playing is the epitome of laidback yet intense, soaring over the top apparently at random but played with real guts, like a swan’s legs flapping underwater in an attempt to look serene. Then the topper: a massed choir of old friends singing with such warmth and beauty singing the same sad phrase over and over again for over a minute: ‘Sun won’t come’, sung over and over like a mantra, perhaps Neil’s beloved Aztecs praying to their sun God and wondering why yet another sacrifice had to be made just when things seemed to be working out. The song needs another verse to be an absolute top tier classic but it’s still one of Neil’s prettiest songs in a shimmery beautiful way. Just please put the whole of ‘Island In The Sun’ out as an Archives spin-off Neil, I beg you – I want to hear if it all sounds like this!

5) David Gilmour “The Piper’s Call”

By far the highlight on a patchy record, full marks if you recognise the title’s reference to the first Syd-Barrett heavy Pink Floyd album ‘The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn’. I don’t think that’s a coincidence either: this tale of either death. celebrity or madness, whichever way you look at it, is surely about Syd in there somewhere. Nearly fifty years after co- writing ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’ for his fallen friend, David is still haunted by what happened to Syd, a talent once led astray by the promise that ‘the roads are paved with Gold’, a ‘promise of eternal youth’ that was never realistically going to be the prize. Though you’re clearly meant to think the piper leading people on a merry dance is Syd, it turns out he’s just the one who hears the call the clearest, a sound that’s actually the lure of his drug dealer. The drugs are a shortcut to help Syd get to the special place he hears in his head but it becomes so easy to end up there he stays, trapped. Gilmour is in two minds, angry of people so easily led astray and the harm it does and acknowledging that there are some people who are always going to hear the call more than most. It’s not just about drugs, though, but fame: the thought of fans and people hanging on your every word and actually being somebody is intoxicating to lonely misunderstood souls, leading to the record’s one lone middle eight (‘The flames are high, the piper’s call contagious!’) while a drug dealer lurks at the side waiting to take advantage and take hot young things into oblivion, a ‘fixer’ who in reality undoes people and takes them apart so they can’t function. A glorious cod-psychedelic guitar solo really ratchets the mood up no end too in a burst of wild fury and passion, played as if it’s still 1967. Gilmour has seen that flame burn too many good friends including Syd. By the end of the song he’s older now, wiser, waiting for a different piper call to the next world, aware that riches and fame were never meant to be part of his journey in this world, undoing the knots that bind him to this life so that he can die peacefully, that burning candle left to die. It’s a powerful song about different paths taken and how the human race isn’t a competition but takes place for all of us at different speeds, the musician who once seemed to have it all while Gilmour was a starving busker ended up in an early grave while Dave gets to live into old age, lessons learned.

6) Paul Simon and Eddie Brickell “Bad Dream”

The werewolf came – and gobbled us right up. Released in the time period of late October that was the run-up to the US election when we still had some hope that sense would prevail (and which seems like a million years ago already) Paul wrote this rare duet for him and his wife to sing, a sequel of sorts to the lycanthropic Trump warning from the ‘Stranger To Stranger’ album about a politician who pretends to be something he isn’t, released just in time for the 2016 election. That song inspires a rare sequel (when did Paul last write a second song on the same subject? ‘America’ and ‘American Tune’?) that I predict will only seem truer as the years tick by, as Paul wakes from a ‘bad dream, a violent dream’ of what happens in the future to the America he was once searching for on that bus all those years ago. Like much of last year’s album ‘7 Psalms’ it’s a throbbing bluesy acoustic number with Paul’s guitar picking finer than ever and the extra wobble in his voice from his hearing difficulties all the more poignant. Paul is too subtle a writer to mention Trump by name but he’s in every line of this song, from the shady man selling a ‘basket full of Bibles’ no doubt with his face on to them and references to the most important job in the land as a ‘rodeo’. A first verse recounts what this ominous feeling reminds Paul of most, a dark shadow that fell across his childhood bed and scared him with premonitions that something bad was coming when he was little. There’s even a verse from the ‘woman’s perspective’, as Edie sings about how she doesn’t feel safe outside in a ‘hungry, dangerous world’ and it’s only worse now a known rapist and convicted felon is coming to The White House to make such awful outrageous things normal. The song ends suddenly and violently as Paul and Edie sing in harmony ‘what has become of the country I promised my children?’ It was just a dream. This time. But we didn’t heed the warning. And now it’s reality. God help us all for what’s coming next.

7) Isobel Campbell “Keep Calm and Carry On”

‘Rain falling down and down, my old town is lost on me’ sighs the one time Belle and Sebastian singer and cellist during a rare trip home – a home that once seemed so glamorous when out on the road and living the high life but now seems tiny and disappointing up close. Isobel urges us to ‘go back to where we came from’, to put back the clock so we can align ourselves with our true paths again, but at the same time knows that we can’t go back forever, that the future doesn’t lie behind us. A second verse has everyone she meets ‘lost at sea’ while she aims potshots at the government to ‘get back’, to put the high street back to what it was before they meddled. A choir of ghostly Isobels chirp in, all overlapping, as if multiple versions of her future self have come back to visit too because only in her past can she find direction while a sluggish yet pretty guitar part struggles to remember how it used to dance back when life was carefree. A gorgeous song, whose bite and venom still sings despite the trippy dreamy way with which everything is played.

8) Alan Hull “Sometimes I Wonder”

My pick of the unheard Alan Hull demos, this sighing philosophical song would have slotted right at home on ‘Pipedream’, with similar chords to ‘Picture A Little Girl’, another early pre-Lindisfarne demo re-recorded for second solo set ‘Squire’ but much more interesting lyrics. You only need to listen to a portion of the new demos disc to hear what a big heart and open eyes Alan had, how much he cared about humanity and how much it hurt him to see others struggling. He knows with his brain that it’s a fact of life that ‘some men must lie and some must die’ but his heart still refuses to believe it or accept it. Next he sees a tramp, perhaps the same one as in ‘Winter Song’, struggling to get a bite to eat and wondering ‘that could be you or I’. Another verse has him jealous of friends who do so well out of nowhere, how ‘when they move they go’, leaving behind the slum they grew up in and forgetting all about the people left behind, something Hull never ever did despite his later fame. By the end he reckons there’s no point in wondering at all when it gets him nowhere except ‘round in circles’ but still he can’t stop himself, because to wonder is to be human and to be properly fully human is to care. Though it lasts a fraction under two minutes this song tells you everything you need to know about the composer and the man.

9) Roger Waters “Under The Rubble”

Wars, famine, genocide, nuclear arsenals…There’s been a lot of politics for Roger to get his teeth and his bleeding heart into lately. ‘Under The Rubble’ sums up the despair and hopelessness of the past twelve months well, a desperate plea for humanity in a year when we have become so used to mass suffering that we’ve become somewhat numb to the pain and need writers like Roger to remind us. So far we’ve only had the demo, which features some mighty questionable vocals and microphone-popping, but the idea is moving, Roger acting out the part of a child calling out for its mama after their family house has been blown up and left them trapped underneath. In another sense, though, the narrator is all of us, trapped under a failing planet and a collapsing democracy, helpless to do anything more than survive as best we can and pleading for someone in authority to put things right. The song fades before it really gets going and is more like one of those preludes we used to get on albums like ‘The Wall’ and ‘The Final Cut’ rather than a track in its own right, but as ever with Roger his bleeding heart is in the right place.

10) Graham Gouldman “Couldn’t Love You More”

‘Couldn’t Love You More’ is way more Beatley than last year’s actual Beatles reunion. It starts off like one of Ringo’s solo albums, all peace and love and big open chords, part-Beatles part-Rutles. Then it turns all McCartneyesque with one of those long sighing melody earworms on the chorus and a lyric that recalls ‘Maybe I’m Amazed’. Then there’s an instrumental that’s pure George Harrison all Hawaiian guitars, mellotrons and the 1980s vocal production effects from ‘Cloud Nine’. It even has Ringo himself playing some characteristically shaky drums. All it needs is a stinging Lennon barb and I wouldn’t have been able to love this song anymore. As for the lyric it’s a simple tale about pre-destiny and fate that’s really sweet, the 10cc bassist trying to remember the moment seconds before he met his partner to be and all the great things younger him has in store that he just doesn’t see coming. Like the best Gouldman songs it sounds so natural that it feels as if it should have been around for at least a century.

11) Belle and Sebastian “What Happened To You, Son?”

No new album for B and S this year but then we have been spoilt with one for each of the last couple of years and the band continue to be busy – as well as constant touring Stuart Murdoch wrote a semi-autobiographical semi-fictional book ‘Nobody’s Empire’ about his early days with m.e. (more to follow when I’ve had a chance to read it!) and as a band they also launched their own hangout space ‘The Herbaceous Border’ where, for a fee, you can chat to the band, watch rare footage, listen to exclusive concerts and soundchecks and natter to other fans: such a B and S idea I’m amazed they hadn’t done it during the early years of the internet (when they were pioneers); back then they’d have probably charged 50p for a lifetime membership – alas these days hanging out with the band who more than most socked it to the man and stayed away from the mainstream costs a whopping £7.99 a month (I would join but the ex-Beatles between them have rather put paid to my finances this year). To promote the new site the band even released a new song, an outtake from the sessions for ‘A Little Bit Of Previous’ and ‘Late Developers’. Given those sessions already resulted in 26 songs I wasn’t expecting much and sadly I was right: this is an oddly noisy song for Belle and Sebastian, not up to even the weakest on the two records, messy but in a modern digital clinical way rather than the charming days of old, with Mick Cooke trying to play jazz with his freeform trumpet while everyone else plays by computer. The lyrics are worth a listen though and play to the generation gap: a father tells his son he doesn’t understand him or what makes him tick. It’s not that the boy’s badly behaved though: if anything the father would like him to be rebellious more - he’s taken a vow of celibacy when his friends are off having sex, writing poetry when his pals are hanging round the shops and he’s ‘holier than Jesus’. It’s tempting to see this as a Stuart Murdoch personal tale, or perhaps a memory inspired by writing his book or watching his son grow up to be the age he remembers well, but I reckon this is mostly a song of solidarity with generation Z, the newbies who are growing up in a world that’s falling apart and far more seriously reverential and above all sober than their elders: far from chuntering about how the young aren’t like they were in his day Stuart has finally found his tribe, albeit born forty years too early to join them! I so wish the melody was better though and wasn’t drowned out by off-key jazz (although even this fits the theme of being out of place, I guess).

12) Al Jardine “Wish”

Well, this is a surprise. A full fourteen years after his one and only so-so solo album ‘A Postcard From California’ the ‘forgotten’ Beach Boy is at it again with a new single. It’s been a bumpy decade and a half for the one who used to be seen as the peacemaker in the band, jumping ship from the official Mike Love Beach Boys to work with Brian Wilson’s touring band once the anniversary tour of 2013 died. Only that’s now gone wrong too, Al effectively be made redundant by the news that Brian is taking a hiatus from touring, possibly for good, following the death of his wife-come-manager Melinda and Brian’s placing, back in May, under a conservatorship due to his ailing mental health (basically to stop any more Dr Landys getting their muddy paws on his millions). Al’s seen the decline up close and is in reflective mood, with a simple and very circa 1965 Beach Boys nostalgia song about wishing that it was like the old days when they were all good buddies and young and healthy and singing to Brian ‘I wish I might have you back again’. It’s a tough listen despite Al still being able to sing falsetto (the slight wobble in his voice gives it away this isn’t the 1960s but is also so much better than the digitised nonsense of Beach Boy reunion record ‘That’s Why God Made The Radio’ which tried so hard to pretend everyone was in the first flush of youth), it’s aching sadness the opposite to the old days of looking to the future with hope in songs like ‘When I Grow Up To Be A Man’. It’s a cute little song, with a home-made feel (it’s the first time I’ve seen a ‘Barn Production’ credit for a while, Al’s home studio used on a few of the latter-day Beach Boys albums), let down by the oddly retro and decidedly treacle panpipe synths and one too many clumsy rhymes. It’s heartfelt though and a sentiment we fans can all share, happy that Brian has ‘been set free’(the elder Wilson really didn’t seem happy at all those last few concerts with Melinda pushing him on, heartbreakingly out of it and unaware of his surroundings on the 2022 tour) but sorry that two great men’s careers effectively end here, not with a bang but an obscure tribute song.

13) Mark Knopfler’s Guitar Heroes “Theme From Local Hero”

Now that Roger Daltrey is hanging up his microphone after a decades-long stint as ambassador for the Teenage Cancer Trust a lot of big name friends have stepped in to help fill the void. One of them is Mark Knopfler who got hold of as many guitar-playing mates as he could, getting them to play those familiar haunting chords from Mark’s hit instrumental theme from the ‘Local Hero’ soundtrack. A ridiculous amount turned up: a full 79, which is more than played on ‘We Are The World’ and ‘Rockestra’ combined and by my count might just be the most musicians ever heard playing the same instrument on a single song. Having them play the same guitar lines over and over means you get to compare and contrast and it’s like a parallel world where different guitarists got to make that film score: we start off with Jeff Beck’s moving solo which turned out to be the last piece of music the Yardbird played on before his death in January this year, move on to the headbanded one himself and along the way hear Pete Townshend, Ronnie Wood, Eric Clapton, Sting, Brian May, Tony Iommi, Bruce Springsteen, Joe Brown, Hank Marvin, Mike Rutherford, Ry Cooder, Joan Armatrading, Joan Jett, Joe Walsh, Sam Fender and lots of others that would take me into the new year to list. The rhythm section is no slouch either: that’s Ringo on drums alongside son Zak (making this, I think, the first time since Live Aid where you can see founding members of the three biggest 1960s bands The Beatles, Rolling Stones and The Who in one place). Dire Straits’ keyboardist Guy Fletcher edited the song together (which must have been a nightmare) and Peter Blake designed the collage cover and a lot of money was raised for a good cause triumphantly. I have to say, though, that while the choice of song makes perfect sense in that it gives all the musicians room to provide their own unique interpretations, hearing this sleepy song carry on for a full nine minutes is quite a slog. The whole point of the original was that sudden switch from quiet opening to instant anthem. That impact is decidedly lessened by three minutes of fairly quiet playing and a full seven minute repeat of that haunting tune over and over again. The best cover songs make you fall in love with either the new version or the original but this is a rare one that made me never want to play either ever again! That’s form a purely music point of view though you understand: as a big charity event its wonderful and as the only place to hear legends from different eras playing alongside each other (and some of them in tandem) it’s a triumph.

14) McDonald’s Farm “Time To Hide- A Denny Laine Tribute”

The Moody Blue and Wingsman’s sad death at the very end of last year was marked on what would have been his 80th birthday in October by a gathering of old friends and admirers for a re-mix/re-recording of one of Laine’s best songs, first released on ‘Wings At the Speed Of Sound’ in 1976. The band, made up of Denny’s bandmates past (Steve Holley, drummer from the ‘Back To The Egg’ line-up of Wings) and recent (guitarist and backing singer Steve McDonald and bass player Grant Roberts) had originally formed at the end of 2023 to play a charity gig raising money for Denny’s medical costs but, after his sad death, played at a tribute concert to Denny in February to raise money instead. Wanting to play with their friend one last time they were inspired by the wretched Beatles single from last year ‘Now and Then’ to mix their performance with Denny himself, lifting a typically passionate bluesy harmonica solo from what turned out to be Denny’s last gig and namechecking him in the solo. All proceeds for the single go to Denny’s estate (the guitarist always had a real love-hate relationship with money over the years and left a lot of debts, especially medical bills) and while it’s a bit pub bandy compared to the might of Wings it’s a much better song and way more heartfelt a ‘reunion’ than ‘Now and Then’ ever was. A moving tribute to a great talent who didn’t get nearly enough fuss when he died. Now if only there'd been a Moody Blues reunion on the B-side from the beginning of Denny's career!

15) Paul McCartney “Love My Baby”

That McCartney – just when we think we’ve heard everything one man could possible record in a (very) busy lifetime it turns out that there’s a song even he’d forgotten about, made up on the spot during a break between takes filming ‘One Hand Clapping’ and played on what sounds like a toy piano (the McCartney children always had a lot of musical instruments lying around the house and a lot of Wings songs started life on them – including ‘Old Siam Sir’ when, so the story goes, dad had wrapped it up for Christmas and put it under the tree only to get a song in his head and realise that he had no other instruments with him, so had to unwrap it, play it onto a tape recorder and wrap it up again!) ‘Love My Baby’, a pretty song clearly with Linda in mind that starts off like ‘Maybe I’m Amazed’ before going a whole different way and turning into a happy bouncy joyous but of fun, it’s silly and empty like the worst of McCartney u also clever and cute, like the best. ‘I love my baby and I want to shout, I don’t know what she’s talking about – and that’s good enough for me’ Paul sings before going through the ‘morning’ evening’ routine from ‘Wings At The Speed Of Sounds’ ‘She’s My Baby’ from a couple of years later, a song which this track might very well have morphed into. I much prefer this snippet though: it’s more real and carefree and not trying anywhere near as hard.

Documentaries and DVD/Blu-Rays:

1) “Paul Simon: In Restless Dreams” (Netflix/Blu-Ray)

‘Guitarists spend half their life tuning – and the other half playing out of tune!’ This is the definitive Paul Simon documentary. I don’t say that lightly. I’ve seen (or heard) them all, loved most of them, appreciated the little nuggets of new details that come to light in each of them, enjoyed the light they all cast on a different aspect of Paul’s life, learned more about the man from the bits of wisdom provided by friend and foes alike. But all of them, with the possible exception of the 1990s radio series ‘The Paul Simon Songbook’, were lacking something. Some perspective, some balance, some insight. This lengthy two parter, streamed on MGM across two weeks in March this year, is best not because it does anything the others don’t do but because it does all of them so well across three-and-a-half hours, managing the difficult triumvirate of taking its time without rushing, not getting bogged down in smaller details that take away from the bigger picture or ever for a minute becoming boring. Framing this biography mostly told in flashback, is Paul and Edie hard at work on his new album ‘7 Psalms’, with access no cameras have ever been allowed before (he admits he’s nervous in front of the cameras at the start then seems to forget all about them and be as natural as we’ve ever seen him). There are lots of really lovely poignant and moving moments here, with new insights into what an uphill struggle that record was, Paul talking about the unique way it came to him as a vision in his head, picking up the pieces of what he was writing every night for multiple days in a row, with as close to divine inspiration as he has ever had, and the uphill struggle of fighting against his deteriorating hearing and health as he tried to make it against the odds and in the middle of a pandemic. Though Paul is often withdrawn and thoughtful, sometimes visibly struggling for breath, he remains a force of nature throughout, quietly taking charge and pushing to get things done his way.

That’s a characteristic that turns up a lot in the archive footage too, which includes pretty much all the familiar bits of footage you’d expect to see in a documentary like this, making the story easy to follow for newcomers. You also get to see little nuggets from the archives that even as big a fan as me have never seen or heard before: the bits of discussion in between takes of the album ‘Wednesday Morning 3Am’ back in 1964 when Paul and Arty were eager wannabes in their early twenties, news footage of Simon and Garfunkel rehearsing ‘At the Zoo’ in 1968, oodles of clips from Paul’s many appearances hosting ‘Saturday Night Live’ most of which have been firmly under lock and key since then, rare footage from the ill-fated 1982 Simon and Garfunkel reunion tour (where the two men mess up ‘Think Too Much’ by coming in on different verses), most interesting of all an audio tape diary Paul taped during a trip home in 1965 when he mentions Arty being late ‘because he was having trouble getting his motorbike license plates’, audibly excited to catch up with old friends but also a little scared at how they are all moving on with their lives and he’s still living the unlikely unstable dream he’s had since childhood, Even ‘Graceland’, an album which has been featured in so many documentaries by now I feel I’ve seen the making of all of it in more or less real time, is well served with more footage of Paul and African musicians in the studio jamming that hasn’t surfaced before as they slowly shape familiar riffs into familiar songs (this time around it’s ‘I Know What I Know’).

You get most of the story told from Paul’s perspective, with little bits of insight I’ve never heard him say before now and in archive footage, such as old footage of him returning to the house he grew up in and wistfully looking up at his bedroom window or telling the camera now that ‘maybe’ he had an oedipal hangup over Art because his own mum once said to him ‘Paul, you have a nice voice but that Arthur has a fine voice’. Rather than just being the Paul show, though, there’s also just enough insight from other musicians and especially from Art (mostly audio taken from ‘The Paul Simon Songbook’ I think), the two trading negotiations, love songs and no holds barred stinging barbs about the other that come from the heart both ways (sample from Paul on Art: ‘It was a really good friendship, the first friendship I ever had of somebody who got it, who got me…To turn into someone that I hope I never see again, that’s a long way’). This isn’t a lovefest, though film-maker Alex Gibney clearly adores his subject, his respect shining through in most every scene and there are lots of extracts from contemporary reviews and even exes claiming that Paul is cruel, egotistical, emotionless, ambitious, all of which Paul meekly tries to answer. It’s what a documentary about Paul Simon should always be: an attempt to tell the truth, as closely as possible, with all shades of the man: his seriousness, his obsessive side, his perfectionism, but also his humour, his insight, his curiosity (especially in other musical cultures), his lack of prejudice or elitism and his occasional kindness. It’s also quite a brave documentary at times, as we keep cutting Johnny Cash style, between Paul as he was then (youthful energetic charismatic and bursting with ideas) to how he is now in his eighties, shuffling along and his voice all husky, undergoing torturous therapy to be able to sing and struggling to hold onto his notes. There’s no attempt to make it look as if Paul is still firing on all cylinders like the old days: we very much see an artist in his eighties and the looks of concern on the face of those who love him as he talks about another sleepless night spent coughing for hours are perhaps the most revealing shots of all, without anyone saying a word.

It’s cleverly put together, though, this documentary because you don’t linger there feeling sorry as you also see what a full and busy life Paul has led. There’s even quite a neat series of jumpcuts, as Paul as he is now is asked similar questions to Paul as he was then and we get similar answers, while there’s a particular clever moment when Paul recounts his therapist telling him to overcome his physical ailments by remembering a time when he was young and healthy and strong, just as the edit comes back to a tale from the past. There are some really revealing moments on difficult times from the past when Paul was at crossroads, particularly the metaphorical ‘catch 22’ of the single biggest decision of Paul’s life back in 1964, of whether to stay in England where Paul’s happy and safe and in love but unknown, or whether he gives it all up to come back to make more music in the wake of ‘Sound Of Silence’ becoming a hit and leave behind everything he loves. Not to mention the ‘real’ ‘Catch 22’ movie filming in the middle of ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ LP that broke the duo up (Arty was forced to stay on for extra filming even though the album deadline was looming and Paul considered that a priority; it didn’t help that Paul’s cameo was cut from the film early on). This is in fact the best analysis yet of why Simon and Garfunkel broke up (the time everyone remembers in 1969 anyway: they also broke up twice in the 1950s, and once each in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s); we hear things from both Paul’s side and Arty’s side equally. In archive footage Garfunkel thinks they’ll get back together, everyone around Paul demands he carry on the partnership because solo he’s an unknown quantity; only Paul seems to know the split is for good (at least for fourteen years, when Paul at his lowest ebb realises almost immediately, on rehearsals for the Central Park reunion in 1983, that he’s made a terrible mistake and landed himself back in a trap he’d fought so hard to escape once). Life has a funny way of catching Paul out just when he thinks he’s settled and happy, a theme that repeats itself a lot across the documentary, a musical rollercoaster ride of highs and lows, that spends a nice amount of time analysing both. Throughout we get to see things more or less complete, thanks to rare TV broadcasts, concert extracts or home movies even the biggest of us fans never knew existed and which must have been an absolute nightmare to license. Even if you own everything else, even if you’re tracked down every last thing you could possibly imagine about Paul Simon and then some there will be a large handful of things in this documentary to take your breath away. One day I hope they’ll release an even longer edit of this film, with all of those rarities utterly intact and complete; even used here sparingly, however, it’s a thrill.

If there’s a problem is the balance of the programme: it’s divided into two parts, the Simon and Garfunkel and solo years with the making of ‘7 Psalms’ linking both, and though that’s a natural divide it’s an uneven one, with five years of full-on music making in part one and over fifty of admittedly slightly slower music making in part two; even with a longer half hour for the second episode that just feels wrong. The last thirty odd years and four albums of Paul’s career don’t even get a mention (everything post ‘Rhythm Of The Saints’ and even that brilliant album is reduced to about five minutes, a fraction of the often lesser albums before it). While I can understand Paul groaning at being asked about the failure of ‘The Capeman’ all over again (the point at which we switch off – there was a full documentary on that at the time anyway, designed to capture a success that instead caught the agonising live footage of a very fractious show, a documentary that hasn’t been seen since) the rest of this era is largely uncharted: I’d love to know what was running through Paul’s head when he made ‘You’re The One’ ‘Surprise’ and ‘So Beautiful Or So What’ especially, albums that don’t feel like anything else he’s ever written. It’s almost as if the film-maker ran out of time, despite the fact they could have wrapped those stories up in an extra hour’s filming or two. I would have loved more on the early years as well, the struggle post ‘Hey Schoolgirl’ when the success that seemed to come so easily to a teenage Simon and Garfunkel first time round eluded them together and apart for the best part of a decade of missed opportunities and failures. Not to mention the one big omission the documentary isn’t brave enough to go near: the very first Simon and Garfunkel split, when Paul cut a flop single on the side on his own without telling Arty, hoping to quit the partnership if it had become a success, resulting in a row that meant they didn’t talk in months and which flared up again so many times across the next sixty five odd years. How does Paul feel about that now, with the benefit of those extra years of insight?

Also, I fully get why the leaping from the present day to the past is there (it’s much easier and more interesting to tell the story that way, rather than giving us forty odd minutes on ‘7 Psalms’ in one go) but there are times when it’s way wonkier than it needs to be: for instance towards the end of part one we jump from the making of ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ in 1969 to ‘The Graduate’ film in 1968 to The Monterey Pop festival in 1967, all of it bookended by the making of ‘7 Psalms’ in 2019-2021, when it would have been a relatively easy job to tell that story chronologically. The emphasis is also firmly on the music, not the life, so the many women in the Paul Simon story come and go with only a passing reference to the relationships and no mention at all of the breakups with Kathy Chitty, Peggy Harper and Shelley Duvall, with only a little on Carrie Fisher. At least we heard wife Edie’s comments in the last fifteen minutes of the film which were some of my favourite in the whole thing, shots of what seems to be their genuine adoration for each other and Edie’s super sweet private interview where she gives her tale of how she fell for Paul which I’ve not heard before – spotting the title-less ‘Paul Simon’ debut record from 1972 in her friend’s collection(the one where he’s wrapped in a fur hood) and fell for him before she even heard a note, later falling even further in love when she heard his music and the time they first met, when as host he watched her perform on Saturday Night Live in 1990 and she got so tongue-tied she forgot the words to a song she’d been performing for years. The documentary isn’t quite brave enough to go near the accusations of domestic violence after Paul was seen strangling her in public, but then they have answered those issues enough times and it would have unbalanced the cosy feeling of the last part of the documentary. I could have done without the rather creepy AI photographs that ‘move’ too (something common to a lot of documentaries being made right now which is going to make the whole lot of the look horribly dated in a few years’ time. Unless of course AI has turned sentient and taken over the world by then). It’s odd, too which songs get so much space devoted to them (‘Cecilia’ ‘Bridge’ ‘Mrs Robinson’ ‘At the Zoo’) when others don’t (‘Homeward Bound’ and ‘The Boxer’ are both represented by the S and G Central Park reunion but the stories behind them, of Paul sitting at Widnes train station wondering if he did the right thing in coming to England and his angry defiance at critics on his back is never discussed). Even ‘The Sound Of Silence’ is heard a few times but never really spoken about. ‘Rhymin’ Simon is represented by just a TV performance of ‘American Tune’ too which is weird, with no mentions of the musicians at Muscle Shoals and no ‘Loves Me Like A Rock’ ‘Kodachrome’ or ‘St Judy’s Comet’, all popular songs with key stories. There’s no ‘Me and Julio Down By The Schoolyard’ either come to that.

That’s just the Paul Simon-like perfectionist in me though. Roughly 90% perfect, this film is still a revelation: you really get a sense of Paul as a person, a musician and a songwriter and even if he cheekily says that he doesn’t like talking about himself or his music in case it spoils the ‘mystery’ there’s a lot more lifting of the veil than I was expecting, certainly from the other documentaries. It feels as if Paul is telling the whole truth this time, not just the parts that make him look good, or what is on his mind at any one time, but the whole perspective. Along with the quite troubling scenes of him having to rest in between takes and struggling to keep going, it really does feel as if this documentary might be his last will and testament, much like ‘7 Psalms’ itself. I really hope not, but there’s something final about this project, as if it’s a confessional – which given the religious flavour of the album Paul’s making, as he sets off to face his maker, makes a lot of sense. ‘Time has changed all of these songs’ admits Paul halfway through ‘and in a very interesting way too’; that change of perspective is what makes this documentary one of the most important AAA documentaries of the decade so far as Paul only now realises what he was writing in some cases, a work every bit as brave and insightful as the new album that went with it last year. Highly recommended to newcomers and old time fans alike and perhaps the best AAA documentary in a decade (since the ‘Reelin’ In the Years’ DVDs went quiet).

2) “The Rise and Fall Of Oasis” (Radio - BBC6 Music)

‘What do Oasis mean to you in one word?’ ‘Trousers’. I’d been really disappointed with BBC6’s 30th anniversary Britpop retrospective ‘The Rise and Fall’, mostly because they’d skirted round the elephant in the room without which it would never have happened - the brothers Gallagher who got only the briefest of mentions, only for them to surprise me with not one episode at the end dedicated to the band but an eight-part spin off series. Against all odds it’s rather spiffing, especially once you get past the well-worn stories of superstardom between 1994-1997 and onto the less worn tracks of 1998-2000. All the stories of boozing and drugging and alternating brotherly love and hate from all other documentaries are there but they’re backed up by little-heard moments from the copious BBC vaults (honestly after years researching bands from the 1960s who hated giving interviews it’s a joy to cover a band who did so much talking in such a short space of time in an era when practically every word they ever said in front of a microphone has been kept – including the infamous 1997 broadcast when they swore so hard and so often at each other that Radio One was nearly shut down). In between, too, there are fascinating little snippets of insight we’ve not had before, about just how lost the band was behind all their bravado, with new detail about their big Wembley show of 2000 (when both brothers had just split up with their longterm partners but Noel had gone sober and Liam had gone on a drinking binge and had never felt more out of synch with each other), the troubled sessions for ‘Standing On The Shoulders Of Giants’ (Bonehead and Guigsy lasted longer than I thought, Bonehead quitting late on after a fight with Noel and getting fed up with having to ‘ask permission’ to go out drinking), the press intrusion on their lives (the first lineup might well have stayed together longer if not for the News of the World phone hacking scandal and accusations of betrayal from several quarters) and that final plum-filled fight in Paris in 2009 that ended it all (and the differing brother accounts of what happened). Jo Whiley and Steve Lamacq are excellent, knowledgeable presenters who add their own perspectives on the whirlwind of Oasis from the inside out and there are some fascinating new clips from the archives I’d forgotten all about (such as Noel being replaced for a couple of 2000 gigs by Len Deighton, presumably not the spy) but it’s new interviews with Liam and Noel, still an edgy combination of defensive and proud of their achievements, that are the most revealing.

It is a shame, mind you, that the 2002-09 years are dismissed in a single sentence (there’s a lot of great revealing music on ‘Heathen Chemistry’ and ‘Don’t Believe The Truth’) while there’s not much on any of the actual songs. I would have liked to have heard from more band members beyond the brothers too for a sense of how it felt to be in the middle of a permanent civil war. What you do get instead though is a really strong sense of what Oasis stood for and what they were all about, both the surface (the drinking) and beneath (the thoughtfulness behind their best songs) and if you are new to the band (as surely many of the fans seeing them for the first time in concert next year will be) then you will get a pretty decent sense of what it felt like to live through the Oasis years in real time. Another point in this documentary’s favour, too, is that unlike some others that try to be pro-Liam or up Noel this one is pretty fair all the way through, giving both brothers space to speak and without an agenda, not blaming either brother more than the other. The series ends with a quick run through the Beady Eye and solo years before the inevitable question about a reunion: both brothers are interested but unwilling to make the first move. ‘Get him to call me himself and I’ll think about it’ says Noel. ‘I don’t have his number so he’ll have to ring me – but the universe will make him’ Liam says, summing up their brotherly feud by complimenting his brother’s gorgeous new song ‘Dead To The World’ as a beautiful song, before wondering why a person so ugly inside could ever come up with it. Though broadcast several months before the reunion you can almost hear the defrosting of the vibes between them going on real time here.

3) The Beatles “Let It Be/Get Back” (Disney+)

And just like that, on a quiet Wednesday in May, ‘Let It Be’ - the final ‘missing’ film in the Beatles movie collection - was finally made legally available to purchase on an official Apple product, a mere fifty-four years after its premiere, alongside its extended companion piece ‘Get Back’. A lot of Beatle fans have grown up and had children, some even grandchildren, without ever having seen this film. I’ve always been thankful to say that I’m never been one of them: my dad stayed off work that awful night and morning in 1980 when John Lennon was murdered and the BBC showed the first ever UK screenings of ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ ‘Help!’ and ‘Let It Be’, but unlike the others that film has never been seen since; I was also lucky enough to nab the DVD when it was made semi-legally available in parts of Europe due to ‘thirty year copyright laws’, before Apple clamped down and killed that as well. So whilst I still don’t do streaming (which still sounds to me like a nasty side effect from a cold) I can review this film because to me it’s an old friend not a giant missing piece of the puzzle.

Over the half century since release this poor film has been dissected, criticised, attacked and abandoned – and that was just by the four Beatles themselves. Shot in January 1969, a mere two months after the release of ‘The White Album’, it finds The Beatles busy rehearsing their new album, one they wanted to play live, without any of their usual overdubs or guest musicians. A much criticised decision, not least because the film starts off in the cold and drafty soundstage of Twickenham with the night owl Beatles having to fit the film schedules of working in the mornings because that’s what the film unions dictated, never mind the fact that the band are playing all new songs they’ve never heard before I front of cameras and inevitably playing lots of mistakes and falling out along the way. Actually it makes a lot of sense in context: The Beatles were fragmenting badly during 1968 but the highlight for them by far was the sessions for ‘Happiness Is A Warm Gun’, recorded in the broom cupboard at Abbey Road, where The Beatles were eyeball to eyeball and playing with more intimacy than they had been since their days at the Cavern Club. Realising the band was on the verge of going wrong Paul McCartney pushed for the band to do more of the same, hoping to recapture a similar sort of magic and bonhomie, of pushing them beyond their comfort zone to what he knew they were capable of. He was sort of right: the tight rehearsal time (because Ringo was booked to make the film ‘The Magic Christian’ with Peter Sellers) means that the band spent more time together across three intense weeks of rehearsal than they had since they quit touring in 1966. At first they constantly get on each other’s nerves: these are the famous shots when George quits the band and goes home to write ‘Wah Wah’ about the size of Paul McCartney’s ego and the others seriously talk about replacing him with Eric Clapton (a moment that seems to come out of nowhere in the final edit of the film before George is suddenly back again without explanation). By the second half however, when the band move to the cosier surroundings of Apple headquarters at Saville Row and keep their own hours (a very sensible condition of George’s return) and a passing Billy Preston, a friend from their Hamburg days signed to the Apple label, turns up to say hello from the airport following a tour and gets roped into staying for ten days, the band are really tight again and enjoying themselves. By the time The Beatles take to the roof for one final concert (after throwing around various ideas like playing in amphitheatres and on the QE2; the roof seemed like less work) they’re playing as well together as they ever played. Honestly nobody watching that performance up close in real time in January 1969 could see the split coming: it seemed as if The Beatles were secure after the bumps in the road of the previous year and might go on forever.

Alas what happened in the following three months (before the sessions for ‘Abbey Road’ officially started) coloured the way the project and the collected footage was perceived forever. Never ones to look back when they could look forward, The Beatles left the editing and mixing of the album with de facto producer Glyn Johns, in charge of his first Beatle production (though the ‘Get Back’ film reveals that George Martin was much more than the occasional visitor we thought he was and is there almost as often). The Beatles didn’t like Glyn’s final mixes (even though they’re atmospheric and at any rate better than the final LP- they’re on the ‘Let It Be’ super deluxe box if you want to hear them) and scrapped the project outright. There’s a moment in ‘Get Back’ too, just as things are going well, when Lennon takes an ominous phonecall from a guy named Allen Klein who once managed The Rolling Stones and asks the cameramen not to mention it to Paul whose just walked out the door while to his credit director Michael is aghast (‘Isn’t he a bit…weird?’) and to his discredit Ringo is enthusiastic (‘Nice to have a conman on our side for a change’ he deadpans); following the sessions this divide will grow and grow and grow as John (and Yoko) are flattered by this crude young man whose been through the school of hard knocks and promises them the Earth; Paul meanwhile is scared of Klein’s method bruising people up in a very ‘anti-Epstein’ way and prefers his new in-laws the Eastmans, Linda’s family. While the fanbase was rocked by George splitting the band for me it was this footage, which we never had a clue existed, that really go to me, the first mention of, for me, the single biggest divide between members of the biggest most important band the world has ever seen (and there were several niggling divisions of course but this was the insurmountable one) play out in real time, a nexus point where history took a separate path, like seeing footage of the Titanic sinking or how the Normans mean there was one in the eye for King Harold.

By the time the film footage of ‘Let It Be’ is edited, post ‘Abbey Road’, it’s clear that he Beatles are over for good. Had they been left to their own devices they would no doubt have abandoned the film project altogether, but they were under a license with United Artists to release something as their fourth film and it was the closest thing they had, so director Michael Lindsay-Hogg duly hit the editing suite. While the original idea had been for a warts and all documentary, with as close to real as possible what the sessions were like, the Beatles’ split coloured how it was edited: the mood is dark and sombre, there are lots of shots of an unhappy band, frequent bouts of British sulking and passive-aggressive sniping and the only time the fab four ever put on a united front is for that rooftop finale (which comes out of nowhere in the film). The reality wasn’t like that at all of course, as the ‘Get Back’ documentary shows, and the film’s taken on a sort of reputation of being an uncomfortable watch as our heroes break up and has been much criticised for it. But what else could Lindsay-Hogg do? To show a smiling, laughing Beatles would have seemed at odds with the announcement they’d just broken up. Just look at the difference between how this film starts and how Peter Jackson’s 2022 documentary cut from the same footage ‘Get Back’ begins: both feature roadie Mal Evans setting up the drums, but one is full of joking and laughing and the other features Paul (taped on another day) improvising a mournful piano piece before we cut into a bossy Paul leading a rebellious looking group through his silliest song ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’ (and if looks could kill the one John is giving Paul would have meant it was them instead of us). And then a microphone nearly electrified George as Paul warns the technicians sternly not to electrocute a Beatle. This is not a fun film. It’s like Eeyore edited the Winnie-The-Pooh books and turned a comedy full of much laughter into a tragedy.

There are, despite the film’s reputations, many great moments: ‘Two Of Us’ played at high manic speed; the blistering Anthology 3 take of ‘I’ve Got A Feeling’ I much prefer to the rooftop one that made the album (‘Good morning!’); George has only just written ‘I Me Mine’ and he’s busy teaching it to Paul and Ringo when John, with nothing to do, picks up on its triple time signature and starts waltzing with Yoko; Ringo shyly introducing a new song ‘Octopuses Garden’, written during the week he quit the band in 1968, which George picks up on and embellishes immediately; Paul talking about the home movies he shot of the band in Rishikesh with The Maharishi (footage actually accompanied by his home movies in the 2022 version); lots of fun rock and roll jams where The Beatles are blowing away the cobwebs; poignant performances of ‘Let It Be’ and ‘The Long and Winding Road’ that are note-perfect despite the ticking clock on the last day of sessions and the rooftop performance itself, twenty minutes of sheer unbridled joy. Yes there are some things that really shouldn’t be in an 80 minute ‘highlights’ edition (the weakest improv from the sessions ‘Suzy Parker’, the mangled take of ‘Across The Universe’, the larking around with ‘Besame Mucho’ all tests for even the biggest Beatlefan) and a lot missing that really should be here as part of musical history and which it seems Lindsay-Hogg was nuts for missing out (the shots used in ‘Get Back’ of John and Paul working on the title song, George demoing ‘Something’, lots and lots of chatter). By and large though the chance to see so many great songs played in full (something that ‘Get Back’ is painfully low on) is a highly moving experience, with or without the manipulation of this being an ‘ending’.

Of course to understand the full story you need ‘Get Back’ as well – and given that it’s taken me flipping two years to get hold of a DVD copy that actually works (long story) here’s my much belated review for that too. Eight extra hours of sessions in strict chronological order, fabulous! I’m one of those dotty fans who actually sat through all sixty hours of the ‘Let It Be’ session tapes on audio so the chance to actually see the footage that went along with it (and hear it in decent sound, without the camera rolls being called and the technicians bleeping every time they start a tape every five minutes) is a delight. I wouldn’t say you learn much about the band you wouldn’t already know – there are no great revelations and you don’t necessarily hear the songs taking shape as promised, ‘Get Back’ aside, while there are some truly appallingly sloppy renditions of songs we know and love, especially during ‘episode one’ filmed in Twickenham. However you do get a better sense of the band dynamics in this version. Far from being the bossy one who broke up the band (something that seemed to be backed up in 1970 by the final edit of the film, combined with John’s bitter remarks in the press) Paul is The Beatles’ greatest supporter, desperate to recapture the magic he knows they’re capable of if only everyone starts trying. While he can be dismissive of George and Ringo and treads on eggshells around a newly acerbic John, mostly Paul spends the film laughing and smiling, supporting the others at least as much as he (tactfully, sometimes) puts them down. In the film John looks as if he really doesn’t want to be there, but by parts two and three of the series he really does – he’s as enthusiastic about the project as anyone. He’s effortlessly funny too, making quips that the others don’t even seem to hear half the time but which are hysterical (‘How can I perfect ‘Maggie Mae’ if we keep recording this?’ he deadpans at one point). George, too, really finds his groove and the famous bustup is less the sudden row over an arrangement, the way it seems in the film, but more a general sense of malaise that he’s got better things to do with his time than jam a load of 1950s oldies over and over again (though, shockingly, John and Paul both dismiss one of his all time great songs ‘All Things Must pas’ with a truly terrible series of performances, while they don’t care much for ‘Something’ either, John suggesting he add the words ‘attracts me like a cauliflower’ rather than offer a serious suggestion for the rogue missing lyric). Ringo is the true ‘quiet Beatle’ for most of the film: barely anyone talks to him and he hardly says a word, even when Peter Sellers turns up to see how his friend and co-star is getting on (given that the others don’t know each other, except by reputation, and the Goon is stoned as a newt the result is some of the most awkward and stilted conversation you’ll ever hear The Beatles utter; it’s even more toe-cringing complete on bootleg). Thank goodness Linda and Yoko are both shown in better light than the film: Yoko is always there but in a supportive-to-John way rather than a rude-to-everyone-else manner as she’s often portrayed and she spends much of the film nattering to Linda. Far from the one who broke up the band she’s the one who encourages John to stay there. S for Linda herself even though she’d been going out with Paul for – what – eighteen months she is already Paul’s rock in so many ways, always rushing to his side when she picks up on some bad vibe in the room or senses the others are ganging upon her new hubby. Maureen Starkey, too, is having a whale of a time at the rooftop gig with several extra shots of her easily the most enthusiastic person involved (and if you’re wondering where Patti Harrison is, she’s just found out George had a brief affair with Maureen and is keeping well out the way, another untold reason George is so grumpy!)

While the performances are frustratingly cut to ribbons, where ‘Get Back’ surpasses ‘Let It Be’ is how everything is shown in context. We get a real sense of momentum as the dates pile up and the deadline gets nearer and a far better understanding of what was really going on with everything shown chronologically and an explanation for why we move from Twickenham to Saville Row. There’s a lot more around George’s departure, including the infamous time John and Paul didn’t know they were being recorded, discussing whether to split the band up or carry on (not wanting to miss a single moment Lindsay-Hogg had microphones placed in the flower pots in the Twickenham canteen; the sound is muddy but it’s listenable and it’s extraordinary it still exists after all these years – and to the best of my memory is the only bit that has never been bootlegged). That’s the part of the series that got the fanbase talking but for me the really poignant moment comes the next morning, when Paul and Ringo are sitting around wondering if the others will show up at all. They’ve just heard that George is refusing to come back and Mal can’t get hold of John as his phone keeps ringing out. ‘Is that it then? The end of The Beatles?’ asks Paul and he really looks as if he’s starting to cry as he stares into space with the look of someone grieving, Linda wordlessly putting her hand in his to comfort him; his smile a few seconds later when Mal comes back in to say John and Yoko merely slept in and took their phone off the hook so they could get some sleep and will be there in an hour is a moment of magic worth ploughing through the eight hours for alone. Another moment that really got to me is when Linda brings her daughter Heather (born before she met Paul) out to Saville Row where she’s warned to ‘behave’. ‘Let It Be’ shows her running around and teasing Ringo by smashing his cymbals and ‘waking him up’, but ‘Get Back’ adds so much more: there’s a point where she escapes Linda’s arms and runs over to John’s microphone and starts singing along with him, with the gusto only seven year olds can manage, clearly not realising who her backing band really are. There’s a shot where Paul freezes as he stares at John, aghast, worried that either he’s going to shout at his adopted daughter and make her really upset with one of his cutting remarks, or that Lennon - already on the fence about carrying on – will get up and walk. Instead John flashes a smile at Yoko, jokes that ‘she’s a mini you!’ and everyone laughs. ‘Phew’ goes Paul, visibly, at back of shot, crisis averted.

Actually most of this film is little crisis like that being averted as The Beatles sit around waiting for the magic to happen, which should make people in all bands feel a little better – if even the best band in the world can’t always get it together than no wonder we all have trouble. Above all ‘Get Back’ feels like an honest account: there are highs and lows like the film, but also mediums, when the band are playing well but know they can do better, when their perfectionism won’t let them settle for nearly there. It’s all there lovingly restored, properly catalogued, gorgeously rendered. Elsewhere there are some fine performances of ‘Dig A Pony’ ‘Get Back’ and ‘I’ve Got A Feeling’ that sound more than decent enough to make a final record to me, despite Glynn calling for more, music publisher Dick James – back in 1963 a huge figure in show business given his music industry links and money – treated like an irritant, with only Paul listening to him (and then not much), Paul testing out the rooftop to see if it’s strong enough to take a drum-kit and amplifiers by jumping up and down on the wooden stats on the roof (what would they have done if it wasn’t strong enough?! The mind boggles) and the utterly brilliant take of ‘Two Of Us’ where John and Paul are mucking around with different accents, the noo. By the time you reach the end you really feel what a journey the band have been on, rather than simply the simple walk up the stairs it seems in the film.

That said, I still have issues with this ‘Get back’ version. I’ve heard some fans complain that the film is too long and others that it’s too short; somehow it’s both all at once. Weirdly enough, despite the extended running time, it feels way more rushed than the film does: we’re just settling into a groove when the scene is cut. It’s a travesty that we don’t get full performances of key songs (especially the takes that made the ‘Let It Be’ album) and that so many are shoved on to the closing credits (including the entire final day, when Paul’s ballads – two of the most famous songs in history – were recorded, treated as a coda to the rooftop performance and segregated to a tiny box beyond the credits). There are way too many dreary jams that should have got the cut and yet far too little of bits that deserve to be longer, like the jams of ‘Watching Rainbows’ ‘Gone Gone Gone’ or a prototype ‘Mean Mr Mustard’. Sadly there’s no sign of two of my favourite moments from bootleg: Lennon trying to perform a solo rendition of ‘A Quick One While He’s Away’, the song he’s just seen The Who play the month before at The Rolling Stones’ similarly chequered and unscreened-for-thirty-years ‘Rock and Roll Circus’ TV special (how director Lindsay-Hogg got this gig in the first place) or the band, scifi fans all, sitting round discussing ‘Out Of The Unknown’, safe in the knowledge that all four would have been watching BBC2 the night before and Paul trying to recall how the tune to one of his favourite childhood TV shows goes (‘Torchy The Battery Boy’, what Gerry Anderson was doing years before ‘Thunderbirds’). I also wish they’d spent more time explaining where the brief infamous ‘racist’ version of ‘Get Back’ came from so modern audiences don’t get the wrong idea (they’ve just been reading about Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of blood’ speech damning immigrants and are appalled and sending him up; thankfully Billy Preston isn’t around at the time they did this) I’m also really not keen on how they’ve done episode three, the one pretty much all dedicated to the rooftop, shown with splitscreen rendition of the rooftop concert: yes it’s great to have different camera angles and the snippets cut out from the film (the band are asked to tune to something and play ‘God save The Queen’ at one point!) but they’re in tiny boxes again and the public on the ground keep flipping talking over it and won’t shut up! A swift edit could have easily moved their comments to the between song moments.

One day, too, I dream that there will be a ‘music only’ version where you can play all the album recording footage together, in order, as a seamless whole; it seems ridiculous to me that a project about the making of a Beatles album features such very little of the finished album itself, given that all the footage exists (albeit ‘Across The Universe’ and ‘I Me Mine’ are special cases, taped before and after the sessions respectively). For all that, though, it’s fabulous: it’s the closest any of us will ever get to be a fly on the wall at an actual Beatles session and the fact this footage exists in such pristine condition and has been cut together by a director (Peter Jackson: I love the statistic that this series runs as long as all three ‘Lord Of the Reins’ films!) whose clearly a besotted fan like us, with captions to fill us in on what’s going on but no sop to modern day graphics or effects that will date the film and yank us out of it, is absolutely the right way to handle this footage. Superb. I only wish we could get an even longer edit one day, preferably with the ‘Let It be’ material inserted back into its rightful chronological place.

4) “Have You Got It Yet? The Story Of Pink Floyd’s Syd Barrett” (Sky Arts)

Films about the Floyd’s original leading man and crazy diamond are two a penny, but this documentary promised to be something special. The director is Storm Thorgerson, longtime band friend and one half of the founding members of Hipgnosis, the art collective that designed most of the band’s record covers. He’s one of the few people that both Roger Waters and David Gilmour are still speaking to and both are here alongside the generally more affable Nick Mason and Syd’s sister Rosemary, who was his chief caretaker the last few years of his life after his mum died. Storm also, of course, knew Syd well himself. The perfect scenario after fifty years of guesswork then – the people who really did know Syd given the space to speak about him at length. A great idea, but alas nobody really says anything new and you don’t get any real idea why Syd was special from this, just that he was: everyone recalls him being a bright imaginative spark who filled every room he walked in but nobody can quite pin down why; the closest they can come is Syd’s unique walk on his tippy-toes that was utterly unlike anybody else’s. You don’t really get any idea how Syd took up music for instance: he was just one of life’s creatives always drawing something and then suddenly he’s got a guitar. Nor do you get any sense about why the ending comes the way it does, with Syd’s failing mental health coming at the peak of his fame, possibly because he was at the peak of his fame, or possibly from drugs, or possibly because of a breakup with his girlfriend, or possibly because his dad died when he was in his teens and he became the de facto breadwinner and felt too much pressure to quit; nobody quite seems to quite know. It’ a mystery, a conundrum, which is fair enough in many ways – a better way to end than the final shots of an elderly frail portly bald Syd snapped by paparazzi on one of his few times outside his Cambridge house. But we already knew that from no end of biographies and documentary films already.

I could have forgiven it all had the surviving Floyd members at least spoken about the music, had they talked at length about the things they did know about, such as the making of those first three singles and ‘Piper At The Gates Of Dawn’ or had David Gilmour talked more about helping Syd make a solo album. But they don’t: the music’s mostly an after-thought secondary to the mystique. Instead the time is filled up with fans talking about how marvellous Syd is, what an enigma he is, etc etc (everyone from Noel Fielding to Tom Stoppard, showing just what a range of influence Syd had for just eighteen odd months of making music). This isn’t even a particularly rounded view of Syd from all angles either: the decision was taken to only use footage recorded now (music videos and TV clips aside) so, for instance, there’s no archive footage from the other lost Floyd Rick Wright, other family members or Iggy The Eskimo (Syd’s last girlfriend, the one posing nude on Syd’s orange floorboards on the cover of his second solo LP, who gets rather short shrift here for perhaps the only key figure in his life in between the Floyd and reclusive years). There are, however, parts that suddenly surprise you: photos of Syd turning up at Abbey Road in 1975 the day his old band were recording ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’ their song about Syd (and not just the famous one from Nick’s autobiography either but lots of them), an interview with Syd’s old university lecturer and an interview with one time girlfriend Jenny who hardly ever talks and certainly not on camera (she’s the ‘Jennifer gentle’ of ‘Lucifer Sam’ here recalling Syd’s love letters to her). That’s about it though: everything else we’ve seen countless times before or there are stories we’ve heard in other anecdotes generally better told than here. Syd deserved better and, despite the generous 90 minute running time, he’s treated less well here than he is as a chapter in some general Pink Floyd documentaries.

5) “Beatles ‘64” (Disney+)

Released to promote the ‘Capitol Albums’ set and make good use of some rare footage shot by the Masyles Brothers for the intended 1964 UK theatrical film short ‘What’s Happening: The Beatles In The USA’ (scuppered by conflicting contracts a naïve Brian Epstein had got himself into a muddle with), this 60th anniversary film seeks to tell the story of how four lads from Liverpool conquered America. Produced by Martin Scorcese it’s been much ballyhooed as the ‘definitive’ account of the story of how The Beatles turned on Ed Sullivan then all the little beatniks that tuned in, then set off on a recording breaking world tour, becoming the first British band in a decade to top the American charts and get five songs in the American top 100 in a single week (a feat that’s still never been bettered). The new footage is certainly fun, as The Beatles play up for the cameras in a sort of reality TV version of ‘A Hard Day’s Night’, trapped inside hotel rooms and trains. Having a modern day Paul and Ringo not just voices or talking heads but actually there on film is a welcome improvement on the two previous documentaries that covered similar ground too, ‘Eight Days A Week’ and ‘Beatles USA’. However in every other way this documentary falls flat, unwilling to tell the same exact same story again so it tells some less interesting anecdotes that were right to be cut from the other films. It’s all so chaotic too, rushing from TV gigs to concerts and zigzagging across America without the sensible artistic licensed but still generally accurate chronology of the other two documentaries. Nowhere in this documentary do you get the sense, too, of how hard the band worked (as per ‘8 Days’) or what a ridiculously huge phenomenon The Beatles were (as per ‘USA’). Even the music and the ever-funny interview clips just aren’t as good this time around (although bonus marks for clearing up the quality of one of my favourite Beatle gigs, in Washington DC, so low budget that the band have to physically turn round every few songs so the packed stadium crowd can see them, the same poor stage hands beavering away at Ringo’s ricketty drumkit). One of the reasons The Beatles stood out in 1964 was that they cared for fans and never gave them the same thing twice. Alas this glorified DVD extra is near enough the same. Worth seeing once, if you already have a subscription, but hardly deserving of shelf space alongside the other two films even if we eventually get a physical copy (which is far from certain: it took years to get ‘Get Back’ after all). Frankly they’d have been better off putting the original unscreened 1964 film on complete and the full complete Washington show and leaving it at that, as a time capsule.

And that is finally that. Thankyou for reading, thankyou for buying me books across the year (it was very handy), thankyou for keeping the light of music and beauty and art flickering in a world that keeps threatening to snuff it and most of all thankyou for being you in a world that keeps trying to force us to be something we’re not. Have the very loveliest of Christmases dear readers, hopefully with lots of these releases under your tree, and may 2025 be a wonderful year full of justice compassion music and love! See you next year!