Dr Simon Reads...

  Now I enjoy a bit of guitar-based rock as much as the next middle-aged white man, but it’s nice to have a change of pace after the full-on assault of the last album. Although the band and album name suggest we’re in for some country or country-rock again, this is more jazz-based psychedelic rock. The whole of the first “side” of the album is 27 minutes of a lengthy jam around Bo Diddley’s Who Do You Love, broken down in the track listings as Who Do You Love (Parts 1 and 2) which sandwich When You Love, Where You Love, How You Love and Which Do You Love, which are more live movements within a large piece. The jazz inspirations are clear from the soloing going on, and I had to have a think about why this seemed good to me whereas the sax soloing on jazz records got on my nerves. And I think it’s partly because of the greater range. I looked it up – saxophones cover two and a half octaves, guitars can cover four (particularly electric guitars with the cutaway to allow you to rea...

  Although this is a live album, it’s one of those ones where the “live” elements – crowd sounds, banter, etc. have been removed to leave some raw performance footage. MC5 are very punky – fast, hard guitars and aggressive vocals with iconoclastic lyrics. Counterculture has moved from polite hippy dreams of peace to angry imprecations about the people in power. If this lot didn’t inspire The Ramones, I’d be very surprised.  The first half of the album is a lot more “punk”, especially the opener Ramblin’ Rose and the storming Kick Out The Jams. The second half becomes more bluesy, and is closer to the kind of blues-based hard rock of Led Zeppelin or Hendrix. Motor City Burning, about race riots in Chicago, is a chunky blues rhythm with squealing guitar solos over the top. The album closer Starship is a psychedelic odyssey into space, something like early Hawkwind, fading away to gentleness. Lead singer Rob Tyner leans fully into the almost sexualised vocal utterances and rock...

Time for a bit of Motown soul now, with what is the ninth studio album for The Temptations. This is apparently a bit of a departure for them sound-wise, heading into more funky territory on the advice of their producer Norman Whitfield, despite lead singer Otis Williams’ doubts on the matter. To some extent, perhaps Williams was right. The funkier tracks, mostly front-loaded on the album, like Cloud Nine or the extended jam Runaway Child, Running Wild, sound much more of a time (to me, early Seventies) with their wicky-wocky wah-wah guitars and congo beats, compared to the later tracks on the album like the Goffin/King Hey Girl or Don't Let Him Take Your Love From Me. These sound a lot more like “classic” soul. On the other hand, it’s the earlier tracks that to me are more interesting entirely because of that funk (and Runaway Child has, I assume Williams, doing some great vocal work by mimicking the wailing of a child, something that Ceelo Greene will come to later on). I have...

  Gram Parsons returns with his continuing quest to update country music, having fallen out with The Byrds because they were touring South Africa. Boo! Apartheid enablers! Parsons may not have played Sun City, but he did play a track called Sin City on this album (see what I did there?). Some of this album is fairly traditional – steel guitars twang and slide over waltz-time tunes about losing one’s girl and finding one’s religion (e.g. Juanita), there are other elements mixed in. Parsons covers soul classic Do Right Woman in a country style. The track Hot Burrito #1 sounds from the title like it ought to be a funky instrumental, in fact it’s more country rock in a clear evolutionary step towards the sound that The Eagles will give us. Meanwhile Hot Burrito #2 is more R&B influenced and sounds like something Carole King would have written. Of the more country-sounding songs, I liked Wheels, which is again a little Eagles-esque, and the final track Hippie Boy, which is a lit...

  After the serious workout of Led Zeppelin, now for a bit of soothing Dusty. My researches uncovered a surprising connection here, as well. John Paul Jones had played backing for Springfield and it was her suggestion that Atlantic Records sign up Led Zeppelin. How marvelous that the two are connected. Since I noticed how great her voice was on A Girl Called Dusty, it remains so on this album thankfully. I was expecting that it would maybe be some country covers, but actually it’s R&B, apart from a cover of the more chanson-style Windmills of Your Mind. (For context, The Thomas Crown Affair which heavily featured the Noel Harrison version of Windmills had been released in 1968). A large number of these tracks are Goffin/King compositions, with a couple of Randy Newnams and a Bacharach/David, so she’s got some big guns behind her. The best known track, selling well at the time and revived by Quentin Tarantino, is Son of A Preacher Man, a gloriously laid-back soulful piece back...

  Hold onto your hats, the first wave of British Heavy Metal is on its way. Although, for their first album, there’s only really the driving down-stroke power chords of Communication Breakdown that are truly heavy metal, the rest is hard rock at best, and this particular Led Zep album is the most bluesy, especially You Shook Me and Dazed and Confused. Although Jimi Hendrix and Blue Cheer got there first, the Zep put the stamp on the hard rock sound. Robert Plant’s rock wail of a voice, Jimmy Page’s frenetic guitar soloing, John Bonham’s hard and heavy drumming. But by gum are they a tight unit. This is fully on display with the start-stop composition of the album opener, Good Times/Bad Times, but is present throughout, with every part placed exactly where it needs to go. Some tracks, notably Babe I’m Gonna Leave You and Dazed and Confused, develop into rock fantasia. Listening to it as part of the 1001 Albums in context, I can hear how some of the elements of jazz informs many ...

  Ugh, that cover induces motion sickness. Despite coming from California, this album is very much themed around New Orleans and Louisiana. Opening with the country-rock track Born to the Bayou, and also featuring a more R&B track that Tina Turner took and ran away with – Proud Mary, the name of a Mississippi river boat. The rest of the album is some crunchy blues-rock including the extended jams of Graveyard Train (the most bluesiest title there ever was and, yes, it does include that blues staple of a harmonica mimicking a train whistle), and Keep on Chooglin’. I’m not sure how one choogles, but the jump-blues bass line to this I guess encourages that particular action. You can draw a through-line from BB King through John Mayall, to Creedance Clearwater Revival, possibly diverting en route to Cream, and you can see how the blues form has become more loose and more rocky as time has gone on. Singer John Fogerty’s voice (another one of those that invokes laryngitis just hearin...

  Ignoramuses such as myself may wonder who Caetono Veloso is. He’s kind of the “Brazilian Bob Dylan”, a singer-songwriter and activist against what was at the time a fascistic government in place in Brazil. A friend of fellow 1001-listers Gilberto Gil, and Os Mutantes, Veloso was (is) part of the Tropicalia movement of Brazilian musicians. There are elements of bossa nova and samba to the beats of these tunes, almost inevitably, but with rockier overtones, and a touch of raga (on the track Eles) and psychedelia. So although it’s a bit like some of the samba albums of the 1950s, it has a more late-Sixties feel to the music – it's the same kind of thing otherwise, with hypnotic Latin American rhythms driving the rest of the song forwards and inspiring imaginations of dancing the samba. I’m presuming it’s in Portuguese, but it sounded more Spanish than Portuguese usually does; whichever it is, my language skills aren’t up to much to be able to fully understand the lyrics. Ah – so...

  Since I’m going into these albums blind, with no notion of why they were included in the 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die, sometimes it’s a fun guessing game as to why they were included. Some are obviously examples of a well-known artist, or an early form of a particular genre, sometimes I think the compilers just liked it and felt it was overlooked. And so it was a bit of a guessing game for this one. The Pretty Things, when I looked them up, are another of those bands that are pretty much still around with constant changes in personnel, although off the top of my head I couldn’t name what their biggest chart hit was (if any). This album feels like what is by now standard, if pretty good, raga-rock/psychedelia/baroque pop kind of a mix such as we’ve seen on many prior albums. There’s a throughline concerning the character SF Sorrow, from his birth, through experiences in war (with a very moving piece where the names of the fallen are spoken underneath the music), an...

  There’s a bit of everything on this album – classical, jazz, blues, rock, gospel, soul. Sometimes in the same track. But for all that, it doesn’t feel kitchen sink prog-rock, but a glorious fusion of sounds. If you look the band up, they’ve had about a billion members over the years (only a slight exaggeration) and are still going. Al Kooper (formerly of The Band) had left by the time of this, their second album, and this is the era of soul-voiced David Clayton-Thomas on lead vocals. Founder members Dick Halligan on keyboards and flute, and Steve Katz on guitar bring the melodies and there’s a substantial horns section as well. Overall the sound mix is very rich, but not overwhelming – each contributor can be picked out rather than muddy into the mix. There were two tracks on here that I recognised but wasn’t sure if it was the Blood, Sweat, and Tears version or not. These are the Motown track You’ve Made Me Very Happy, and the funky Spinning Wheel (“ what goes up, must come ...

  Pondering the title, I suppose a “beggar’s banquet” would be a crust of old bread or something like that, but this album is much better than that. Starting with the classic Sympathy For The Devil, which I think kind of gives away the question “ can’t you guess my name? ” asked in the song, where the Devil basically says, hey, spreading human misery is just my job, don’t hate me for it. Probably pretty daring for the time and sure to make some conservative-types' heads explode, especially coupled with its driving Afro-beat rhythm. I do like a song that gradually builds in the instruments (see also Jethro Tull’s Skating Away on the Thin Ice of a New Day), and that’s what this does, although there aren’t many layers. The conga rhythm, the piano, the woo-woos, and some bass (plus a scratchy guitar break). The other famous track is Street Fighting Man, probably the rockiest number on here. Most of the rest are a return to the Stones’ bluesy roots, with a bit of country as well e.g. ...

  Given the contribution that Ireland has made to music, from Christy Marx to Denise Chaila by way of U2, Thin Lizzy, Sinead O’Connor, The Pogues etc. etc., punching way above its weight as a relatively small country, it’s a surprise that this is the first Irish artist on this list (that I’m aware of). And Van Morrison is one of that pantheon. The fact that he’s from Northern Ireland, part of the UK, and not Republic of Ireland is probably overlooked when it comes to claiming him as “Irish”, although having lived through the Seventies I know how prickly *that* topic is. He’s still as Irish as Tom Jones is Welsh, being in a non-England part of the UK doesn’t erase that identity. Anyway, on to this album itself. The tracks on it are all pretty much along the same lines, with ethereal backing music provided by acoustic guitar, flute, violin, I think I detected vibrophone in there at one point. Over the top of this, which is mixed quite low, Morrison explores free-form sounding fli...

  When I last heard this, some billion years ago, I remember it feeling like a bunch of good tracks held together with filler in order to justify it being a double album, but this time around I’ve revised my opinion of the other tracks, as it’s a real smorgasbord of different musical genres and subjects – like the previous Kinks album ramped up to eleven. Yes, the album is absolutely chock-full of Beatles classics, from Revolution and Back In The USSR, which sound like Revolver-era, through more psychedelia such as Glass Onion, Savoy Truffle, or Helter Skelter (approaching the genre from different directions), a typical McCartney ballad in Blackbird, a typical Lennon reverie in Dear Prudence, and arguably Harrison’s finest composition, While My Guitar Gently Weeps. There’s even a Ringo composition that is completely straight – Don't Pass Me By. Other bits that I probably saw as filler are often more music-hall or Twenties jazz themed, like Honey Pie, Bungalow Bill, or Rocky Rac...

  This album is run through with nostalgia for a by-gone age that may never have existed. The title track (gorgeously covered by Kate Rusby) is all about “ protecting the old ways from being abused ”, as well as “ preserving the new ways for me and for you ”, an eclectic mix of things from strawberry jam to Sherlock Holmes, but also weirdly laced through with Americanisms like Donald Duck. The theme is revisited in Village Green, which is a more direct paeon to a simpler way of life. Do You Remember Walter is about an old friend, Last of the Steam-Powered Trains is again about a vanishing facet of life, but also feels like a metaphor. Told from the point of view of the train, the narrator feels abandoned by the modern world, a relic of a bygone age. Musically, this album is more varied compared to earlier Kinks, heading more to their music-hall style songs (All of My Friends Were There), a calypso number (Monica), and the weird mix of psychedelia and a children’s story that is Th...

  Wikipedia labels this album as “folk rock”, but it’s really not very folky. More funky, to be honest. Maybe it gets classed as folk rock because it features some acoustic instruments like flute and piano, but it also has some of the old psychedelic ingredients, notably organ. The sound is more melodic though, and less grungy, than most psychedelic stuff. In fact, this is the most Seventies sounding album yet, much more lightly mixed and sophisticated in sound, which is probably why it defies an easy pigeon-holing. I really didn’t write very much about this album at all, so this is me trying to rectify that by going back and listening again as I feel I at least ought to highlight a couple of tracks or be a bit more specific about the album or the band. It feels like a contest between Dave Mason and the writing team of Steve Winwood and Jim Capaldi, with Mason not really appearing much on the Winwood/Capaldi tracks. You Can All Join In is a pop-country tune of Mason’s that soun...

Sorry, I didn't use the cover with the naked women. I'm probably obscure enough to escape notice from any censorial types in the Google-verse, but I'm playing it safe. Although the best known tracks from this album are Crosstown Traffic, All Along The Watchtower (where Hendrix shows the Byrds how a Dylan cover *should* be done), and Voodoo Chile (Slight Return), which are all similar in sound to tracks on Are You Experienced, overall this album has a much more mellow sound to it. Some tracks, notably those parenthesised by Rainy Day, Dream Away and Still Raining, Still Dreaming (muses about becoming a merman) are more like an extended jazz jam that anything Hendrix has done before, while the first Voodoo Chile (not the Slight Return) is a lengthy blues jam (with a drum solo by Mitch Mitchell that just manages to stay within the time boundaries of drum solos before they get merely indulgent and annoying). Little Miss Strange is more like a pop song.  But within all of that...

  The Byrds lean almost completely into the country side of their occasional country-rock sound, and apart from the track One Hundred Years From Now (with McGuinn/Parsons joint vocals), this is more of a Gram Parsons album.  Mostly lots of picky steel guitar, but with a few tracks that are a bit more bluegrass banjo (I Am A Pilgrim), this is a collection of Parsons tunes, with some typical Bob Dylan covers, from Dylan’s own forays into country with You Ain’t Going Nowhere (not as good as the version on Basement Tapes) and Nothing Was Delivered. There’s a bit of Louvin Brothers (The Christian Life) and Woody Guthrie (Pretty Boy Floyd), but mostly the tracks tend to sound a bit samey.  It’s interesting that The Byrds are choosing to step away from the Sixties sounds, but odd in a way that they’ve stepped back in time to the likes of Buck Owens. I think this is kind of their waning days, and the newer country sound is emerging out this album like a chrysalis, but we shall se...

  I tend to listen to these albums without doing any prior research, nor knowing why they were included in the list, and so it was partway through the first track that I thought “That sounds like Janis Joplin”. And, indeed, it is; the second of two albums she did with Big Brother before going solo, before sadly joining the 27 Club a couple of years later. Like Jeff Beck’s album last time, this is largely blues-rock, with an added dash of psychedelia (because it’s 1968 and therefore almost compulsory), bits of soul, R&B and even a bit of Gershwin, but sounds a lot more visceral and real compared to Beck. A big part of this is due to Joplin’s emotive vocals with a voice like an angel made of sandpaper. She’s a lot better at sounding authentic.  Many of the songs are funkier than Beck as well, with a groovy bassline from Pete Aldrin, and the double guitars of Sam Andrew and James Gurley. I listened to the re-release version, and all of the tracks are good – for Joplin the s...

  Jeff Beck, previously seen in this list as part of the Yardbirds, brings some bluesy rock, with a dash of Oscar Hammerstein (Ol’ Man River) and an acoustic guitar version of Tudor classic Greensleeves. Vocals are provided by certain Mr Rod Stewart, which I didn’t know until after listening to the album; what I thought was “Jeff Beck’s singing voice sounds a lot like Rod Stewart”. Ah. Well... Also present on the album are members of Led Zeppelin and The Who. It’s very crunchy and technically accomplished, as you’d expect from that line-up, but there’s something a bit “Dad Rock” about the whole thing – probably for the same reasons, since most of the personnel are now old geezers pulling out the same stuff they’ve been doing for decades. Partly, also, because it does sound more technical than emotional, so for some reason the music only manages to move me so far. It’s an interesting artifact too because of the star-studded line-up, many of whom are not yet stars in their own ri...

  Bob Dylan’s backing band, formerly known as The Hawks, are here unleashed and allowed to do their own thing. Although several tracks are written by Dylan, and he provided the cover art (either charmingly naive or amateur rubbish depending on your point of view), Dylan decided in the end not to join the rest of The Band in the music recording, so that his presence didn’t become the focus and they were allowed to be their own act. Which was nice of him. Big Pink itself is the nickname for the house in New York county that Levon Helm, Rick Danko, and Garth Hudson shared for a while, and where many tracks were composed. The music is very Americana, feeling often like adaptations of spirituals or gospel tracks. This is probably helped along by, say, the various Biblical references in a track like The Weight, where the singer “pulled into Nazareth” and met characters such as “Carmen and the Devil” and “Old Luke, waiting on the Judgment Day”. I thought this might have been a Dylan tra...

  We’ve had heavy psychedelia, folk psychedelia, English whimsy psychedelia, Scottish prog psychedelia, jazzy psychedelia, country psychedelia. So why not Brazilian psychedelia, a fusion of psychedelic pop and rock with the likes of samba and bossa nova, to give a sound known as Tropicália. Most of the tracks on here are in Portuguese, apart from a cover of a French song Le Premier Bonheur Du Jour. It’s unusual, but good, especially when the Latin beats kick in on tracks like Bat Macumba and Trem Fantasma, with good vocals from singer Rita Lee. There are some fun electronica as well, with Cláudio Baptista credited with “electronics”. The only track I recognised is A Minha Menina, which I think has been used on an advert, although it is a cover and has itself been covered, so it may not have been the Os Mutantes version. I suspect maybe it was used for the 2016 Olympics in Brazil, but can’t be sure – Google betrays its Anglophone bias here and throws up nothing of much use when ...

  I knew the title track from a lengthy sequence in Michael Mann’s film Manhunter, an adaptation of Thomas Harris’ Red Dragon featuring Brian Cox as Hannibal Lecter and several years before Silence of the Lambs. The killer, Frances Dolarhyde, is besieged by FBI agents and there’s a long shoot-out with a version of the track In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida going on in the background. Not as long as the track In-A-Gadda-Da-Veda itself, which is another 17 minute monster, with a drum solo in the middle that goes on for longer than many songs. It’s good though. I have a feeling that we’ll keep seeing the 10-20 minute monster tracks for while now, probably at least into the mid-Eighties. Provided they don’t get padded out too much with prog-rock noise-noodling, I don’t mind them once in a while. Soundwise, Iron Butterfly are a little like a mid-way between The Doors (largely due to lead singer and writer Doug Ingle’s organ playing) and The Jimi Hendrix Experience. Quite a hard-edged Californian psyc...

  I’m most familiar with the Small Faces’ cheeky Cockney knees-up number Lazy Sunday (or as lead singer Steve Marriott styles it “Lazy Sundee h-afternoon-ah"), but there are only two other track on here that are of that ilk – Rene (about a lady who is the “ dockers’ delight ”) and the final track HappyDaysToyTown (that’s not a typo, it’s really strung together like one word) in which the meaning of life is revealed – apparently it's like a bowl of All-Bran; you wake up in the morning and there it is. Other tracks are more classic late-Sixties psychedelia/folk/rock, but done well, with some good thumping grooves going on. The second “side” is a great little surrealist rock opera, narrated by Stanley Unwin. Unwin was famous for his nonsense language Unwinese, a kind of tortured English that is close enough to be understandable and had a great rhythm to it. Oh deep joy in the highly mode! Unwin narrates the story of Happiness Stan, who sets out on a quest to discover why half...

  Cash is one of those artists where you kind of know what you’re going to get. A voice like a man who has drunk all of the bourbon, singing country songs about a hard life and an easy death. Having written Folsom Prison Blues (“ I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die ”), Cash was keen to actually play in the prison itself, and here, after dragging himself out of addiction and getting a new manager willing to take the risk, he does just that, accompanied by June Carter on a couple of songs (including a rip-roaring version of their famous duet Jackson). Plenty of songs about prison life (The Wall, Green Green Grass of Home) but a few comic turns as well like Dirty Old Egg-Suckin' Dog and the blackly comic 25 Minutes to Go where a condemned man counts down the minutes before his execution. Although he’s The Man in Black singing songs about prison, death, and murder, Cash has a wry sense of humour in the between-songs banter, and there are some interesting bits of prison life r...

  The Zombies are one of those bands where the name belies the kind of music they play. Named after flesh-eating undead, this album starts off with chirpy pop songs instead (see also Massive Attack, Savage Garden, and The Killers for bands with violent names and safe music). And the tracks aren’t bad, having something a bit more like Herman’s Hermits made a refreshing change from the experimental psychedelia and art-house stuff we’ve had recently. When some of the slower tracks started and there was some flute, I was worried we were back to Haight-Ashbury hippy noodlings, but thankfully not. We’re about as dangerous as Sgt. Pepper here. There’s a dip into folkiness with the anti-war Butcher’s Tale, which with its accordion accompaniment sounds more like Spiers and Boden/Bellowhead, and then the album finishes with the probably the most famous track, the almost impossibly laid-back Time of the Season. I think I first heard this as part of a film soundtrack – 1969, maybe. Anyway, t...

Paul and Art give us what we expect from them. There are some well-known tracks on here – America, Mrs Robinson, A Hazy Shade of Winter, and The Zoo. America once again shows Paul Simon’s combination of hope and melancholy, the young lovers taking a long-distance bus ride and laughing and joking, but then the singer also feels a sense of alienation (I’ve always assumed it was at a point in the journey where Kathy and everybody else on the bus is asleep, and he’s watching empty lands pass by in darkness). This track is followed by one called Overs, in which a couple have “ laughed all of their laughs ”, and it kind of feels like it is Kathy and the narrator from the last track, stuck in later life. I wish that I hadn’t looked this album up before listening (I normally research after listening to avoid prejudice), because I now don’t know if I would have spotted that the first half (doesn’t work to call it “Side 1” when streaming) between the Bookends tracks tells of stages of a life –...

  Here’s another album that belies expectations. Walker, ex of The Walker Brothers, sings songs that in his vocal style, and backing arrangement, feel a bit Andy Williams, a bit Englebert Humperdinck. But on closer inspection, the lyrics are quite dark, delving into a world of prostitution, drugs, and isolation. A couple of the songs I know as covers by other people, and it turns out they, in turn, are Walker’s interpretations of Jacques Brel songs. Jackie, which I’m most familiar with the Marc Almond cover, dreams of a louche and decadent libertine lifestyle where the singer can be “ cute, in a stupid-ass way ”. Next (best known to me from the Sensational Alex Harvey Band version) tells of the regimented and perfunctory experience of a “ mobile army whorehouse ”. The final Brel song, The Girls and the Dogs, is a comic turn about the difference between the changeability of women versus the reliability of dogs (and yet, at the end, the songs points out that it’s the dog that will ...

  Another album where the cover and title deceived me. I was expecting maybe a return to country music, but this is more avant-garde, early prog stuff (labelled on Wikipedia as acid folk). The Minotaur’s Song answers the never-asked question of what it would be like if Gilbert and Sullivan dropped acid (“ I’m the original discriminating buffalo-man/ I do what’s bad whenever I can ”). Other tracks are even stranger, wandering musings on life and spirituality, amoebas and water, played on a collection of odd assorted instruments among which are sitar, harpsichord, pan pipes and dulcimer. Lead singer and musician Robin Williamson (not to be confused with Robin Williams, but sharing a similar penchant for free-form maundering) has a bit of a droning, nasal voice which I found kind of wearing after a while; I think the songs might be better if sung by somebody else. It reminded me naggingly of somebody else, with Scottish chanted/spoken vocals over a harmonium, like a hippy Methodist ...

  From the album cover and the title, I was kind of expecting something folky, maybe a bit Joan Baez, a bit Joni Mitchell. What we actually get are some bright and breezy R&B tracks, with a few slow numbers (e.g. Lonely Women, Poverty Train), with some blues, soul, and jazz elements thrown in (when I came to proofread these I’d mistyped this as “jazzlements”, which also works). Often in the same song – Nyro likes a tempo change, but she makes them work. Several things stand out on further research – Nyro died far too young, aged 49. The whole album is an original composition. She worked with Barbara Streisand, was idolised by Elton John, and is claimed as an inspiration for artists such as Kate Bush and Tori Amos. To me, it sounded very close to Carole King, and Nyro’s biggest hit was with a King song. Her voice is gorgeous, although I’ve noticed that listening with ear-buds sometimes when female singers belt out the high notes it can be quite a painful experience. Fortunat...

  Whenever this list hands me a group I’ve never heard of, I always go into it wondering why they are included – is it the first instance of a particular genre, perhaps? Or did a young future superstar sing backing vocals? Sometimes they seem to be put in as an exemplar of a particular musical sound of the time. This one is very much an encapsulation of the late Sixties San Francisco sound, and since the opening track, The American Metaphysical Circus, is a blend of calliope and marching music played over the top of each other, coming off the back of Zappa’s The Chrome Plated Megaphone of Destiny, another noise collision, I was worried it was going to be entirely terrible prog nonsense throughout, but then it turns into the track Hard Coming Love, with vocalist Dorothy Moskowitz sounding like a more melodic Grace Slick. It turns out that the reason this album was included was because of its heavy use of electronic instrumentation. Sometimes this is obvious, other times less so....

Although I do like Frank Zappa, I have to say that sometimes his humour gets a bit grating; it’s like early Steve Martin stand-up, or Rowan And Martin’s Laugh-In, too knowingly “zany” (cue *Honk* *Cuckoo* *Swanee-whistle* sound effects, mugging at the camera, etc.) Zappa is at his best when he’s not trying to make the songs sound weird, but just lets the lyrics carry the message instead. With this album, the Mothers skewer the hippy culture, from the naivete of thinking that prancing around Haight-Ashbury in a kaftan will bring about world peace, through bourgeois “weekend hippies”, to the corporations cashing in with commercialised psychedelia. And at its best, with tracks like Absolutely Free and Take Your Clothes Off When You Dance, it works as a nicely cynical antidote to all of the Summer of Love stuff. Other times, what we get are just soundscapes of noise, like The Chrome Plated Megaphone of Destiny or Nasal Retentive Calliope Music, which take the kind of Syd Barratt sound ...

  No longer attached to Nico or Andy Warhol, the Velvets are free to create an album with a much more grungy sound throughout. Having gone through so many prior albums, I can see how the tracks on here take elements from folk (the repeating musical motif with storytelling overlaid) and jazz (free-form improvisation away from the main motif), but rather than clean-sounding nylon-stringed acoustic guitar or brushed drums and double bass, here the music of the tracks is fuzzed and distorted to within an inch of its life, feedback screams, and the backing is a pounding industrial wasteland of dirty noise. The title track suggests the rush from drugs, The Gift is a spoken word story told over music, of an obsessive man posting himself to the object of his unwanted affections, Lady Godiva’s Surgery is a similar concept but more musical, of a nightmarish possibly gender-reassignment surgery – the band, and Lou Reed especially, were inspired by William Burroughs, and there’s a Burroughs-...

I think on the last Aretha Franklin album I said that she set the bar for all other female soul vocalists to aspire to. Here, I think she takes that bar and puts it just a little bit further out of reach (contemporaneously, though, I’d say RAYE and Lady Blackbird are taking it turns to vault over that bar). Overall this album is bit more funky than the last one, with more energetic and fewer soulful tracks, such as the glorious Chain of Fools or the lively Niki Hoeky. That’s not to say that there aren’t some slow numbers as well, not least of which is a cover of People Get Ready, but the gold standard from this album has to be the soaring Goffin-King composition You Make Me Feel Like A Natural Woman. I want to know what that walk down the stairs of the scale is called in music theory – I wanted to say it’s “treppe”, but came up short. Anyway. That. You         Make              ...

How do I classify this? Voodoo Jazz? Creole Funk? New Orleans Blues? Dr John is a stage persona of New Orleans-born musician Mac Rebennack, and this whole album feels like a kind of voodoo ceremony. As Dr John, Rebennack growls and whispers entreatments in Creole, invoking the Lwa and selling us gris-gris and potions. The music oftentimes becomes an extended funky jam with shrieks and wild drumming mixed in, particularly Croker Courtbullion and I Walked On Golden Splinters, which become almost trance-like in their sounds. I loved it, this is definitely one that I’d return to, it’s so unlike anything else. My one complaint would be that the mix is very unbalanced at times. Because I’m currently listening on one ear-bud, I wondered if it had been mixed in hard stereo and the bits that were quiet for me were actually meant for the other ear, but when I put it through the car speakers, it turns out, no some bits are mixed very quietly. Take the track Danse Kalinda Da Boom; there are back...