Time for a list!

This couldn't be a 'blokes talking about music' sort of thing if there wasn't a list in it.

Probably several lists. And we haven't had one yet.

So it must be time for My Top Ten Favourite Albums!

Top five would be pretty easy - top ten I'm not sure about. We'll get going and see what happens...

1. Mike Oldfield - Five Miles Out

Simply no contest. My favourite album since I first got it back in 1982. The perfect combination of the side-long 'Taurus II', and the four songs on side 2. Helps that the title track is my favourite song ever.

2. Rush - Power Windows

My favourite album by my favourite band. Only eight songs, but every one of them is top drawer. A lot of Rush fans are a bit sniffy about the 80's 'synths and pushed-up jacket sleeves' phase, but this, for me is superlative stuff. Also contains my second favourite song ever, Marathon.

3. Marillion - Seasons End

Getting a bit tricky now. Three - Six could conceivably be in any order, depending on what day of the week it is. This was a slow grower. Steve Hogarth's first album with Marillion after Fish's departure, and for me, never bettered.

4. Jennifer Warnes - Famous Blue Raincoat

A lot of people like Leonard Cohen - he's in the midst of a bit of a revival at the moment. Other people consider him a miserable old bloke that you shouldn't listen to if you're feeling a bit depressed. Me, I think he's great. This, however, is a collection of nine Cohen songs covered by Jennifer Warnes, (best known for 'Up Where We Belong' with Joe Cocker) and to my mind, everyone of them is better than the original.

And the originals are pretty good.

5. Laurie Anderson - Strange Angels

I remember this as clear as if it were yesterday. I used to work up near Oxford St in central London, and one evening after work in 1989 I was walking down Carnaby St. There was a small, bijou record shop (long gone now), and the first thing that struck me was that it was the only time I'd been in a 'record' shop that only sold CDs. No vinyl, no tapes. (This was 1989, remember.)

The second thing that struck me was that whatever they were playing, I had to have it. I marched straight up to the counter, pointed at the ceiling (as you do when indicating music, wherever it may be emanating from), and said 'Whatever this is, I'll take a copy please.'

It turned out to be 'Hiawatha' from 'Strange Angels'.

To Be Continued...

Schadenfreude...

We'll get to the schadenfreude in a minute. First off, some classic rock.

I don't remember which day this was (at the moment I'm writing this retrospectively - I keep a list of what Shuffleman throws up, but I'm a few weeks behind at the moment), but I can only hope it wasn't an early start.

I like easing into my day, and great though it is, I think I would have had a hard time at 8.00 in the morning, faced with Meat Loaf - Hits Out Of Hell.

Hits... consists of roughly half of the epic 'Bat Out Of Hell', half of 'Dead Ringer', plus a couple of others from later albums. They're written, produced and partly performed by one man - Jim Steinman. Mr Steinman takes a similar view of production to Phil Spector : start with two of everything, turn them up to full volume and then start adding things.

Over the top is just a starting point.

With a couple of exceptions (Modern Girl and Razor's Edge are ok, but they'll never be classics), this album is packed full of the stuff of legend. Bat Out Of Hell, Dead Ringer For Love, Read 'Em And Weep and the baseball-as-sex metaphor that is Paradise By The Dashboard Light.

Assuming that this was sometime after 11.00am, then it would have been great, so gets:

DSP rating - 8

Next up, a bit of an unknown quantity.

Quite often, if I find a good album by a new (to me) artist, I'll go and track down some of their other stuff. And this was the case here. I can't remember what made me buy 'Your Little Secret', maybe a good magazine review, maybe heard it playing in shop, but I bought it. And it was great. So I picked up a couple of earlier albums by the same artist, which was how, courtesy of Mr Holmes, I came to be listening to 'Melissa Etheridge - Yes I Am'.

Whereas I'd played Your Little Secret to death, I'd never really got round to listening to the other two, so this was new(ish) to me.

And just goes to prove what great taste I've got!

It rocked! Ms Etheridge plays a solid, no-nonsense style of music, with a combination of balls-to-the-wall rockers and moody vignettes of small town life.

This is the sort of thing that makes Shuffleman work. I probably wouldn't have deliberately picked this one out of the rack before, but I certainly will now.

DSP rating - 7

Now. The aforementioned schadenfreude.

I don't know if you've ever seen the musical 'Avenue Q' (if you haven't I can highly recommend it, it's an adult 'Sesame St', and hilarious to boot - just leave the kids at home), but one of the songs in it is called 'Schadenfreude'. There's some dialogue, mid-song, that goes:

Oh. Schadenfreude, huh? What's that? Some kind of Nazi word?

Yup. It's German for 'happiness at the misfortune of others.'

Happiness at the misfortune of others. That is German!

Now I'm not saying that Matt's a Nazi. But he would have had a choice of five albums. And if I remember rightly, he checked with me to make sure that this was what he thought it was.

And it was.

Brass To The Fore is another one of those boxed sets, like the previously mentioned Irish Folk Collection, where I'd bought it for Hospital Radio so I could play the odd track.

42 songs and two and half hours...

It took a while to get through.

DSP rating - 3

A good day! Mostly...

I like big, serious rock music, made by big, serious artists. Groups of men, often with beards and serious expressions, who spend three weeks in the studio getting just the right bass drum sound. Or more likely, sitting around drinking coffee while an engineer gets just the right bass drum sound. These are people who make albums that need to be listened to properly. I spent many years putting my hi-fi system together, and I would make sure that I was sitting up straight on the sofa, because my head needed to be in exactly the right spot for perfect stereo reproduction.

So what did I start of with when I got I to work on this particular morning?

Kylie Minogue - Greatest Hits

And not even a good Greatest Hits...

This was one of those £3.99-in-a-sale things that contained, for the most part, the sort of stuff that she churned out when she was working with Stock, Aitken & Waterman. If 'Locomotion' popped up at a party, you'd jig around for a couple of minutes. If you were at a wedding and the DJ put 'Step Back In Time' on, you'd probably dance around in an ironic fashion.

But this was an hour and twenty minutes of the same song over and over again. SAW must have gone through about three drum machines a week...

DSP rating - 3

But then things picked up.

Marillion aren't everybody's cup of tea. Prog-rockers with a Genesis fixation. A band who holds three day gigs at off-season holiday camps. A bunch that have funded recent albums by getting the fans to stump up the cash before the band have been anywhere near a studio.

They're an easy target for ridicule.

But I'm in the 'Really quite like them' camp. As Marillion enthusiasts go, this means that I barely register on the fan-o-meter. Marillion fans are dedicated to the cause in a big way.

The other thing that makes Marillion stand out, apart from their extraordinarily zealous fans, is the fact that they survived the loss of their lead singer.

To say that Fish was a larger than life character would have been putting it mildly, and he sang and wrote for the band from their formation in 1979 until he left, after four albums, in 1988.

He was replaced in 1989 by Steve Hogarth, who has been with them for 21 years and eleven albums.

It is a mark of the impact that Fish had, that despite the above statistics, many people, myself included, still think of Steve Hogarth as 'the new guy'.

So what had Matt picked out? Old Marillion or new Marillion?

As it turned out, it was Fish's swansong, 'Clutching At Straws'.

This has always been overshadowed by the album that came before it - Misplaced Childhood. Ask most people to name a Marillion song - and assuming that they're not a fan (who will promptly reel off everything they've ever done), most people will either look at you blankly, or say 'Kayleigh', the huge hit from Misplaced Childhood.

Interesting trivia note : 'Kayleigh' wasn't simply a girl's name that Fish used for a song title - he actually created it. There are a number of 20-something girls out there who have Derek Dick to thank for their name...

Anyway, back to Clutching At Straws.

It's one of those albums that I hadn't listened to much. I was familiar with the single, Incommunicado (which contains one of my favourite Marillion lines "I've got an allergy to Perrier, daylight and responsibility") but not really much else.

Something of a revelation! A good, solid album full of great songs and proper musicianship, and topped off by finishing with an absolute corker - 'The Last Straw : Happy Ending".

Fish clearly went out on a high note!

DSP rating - 8

And we were clearly on a roll on this particularly day! A million miles away from prog, but great all the same...

One-Hit Wonders Vol. 5 (1977-1979)

This was a bargain! An eight CD set of 160 one-hit wonders, stretching from 1960 to 1993 - all originals, and mostly great. I think I paid about £6.00 for it.

(Crikey! I've just checked it on Amazon - it's out of print and used copies are going for £40!)

Vol 5 had some gems. 'Dancing In The City' by Marshall Hain? Cheesy? Hell yes, but great pop. 'My Sharona' by the Knack! Slightly dodgy sentiment, but a classic tune. 'Baker Street' by Gerry Rafferty, with one of the greatest sax breaks ever.

But the pick of the bunch? Not the most well known song, but one of my all time favourites...

'Substitute' by Clout.

If you don't know it, go and get yourself a copy, now!

DSP rating - 8

And the last album of the day...

I'm not sure whether this would make it into my top 10 favourite albums of all time, but it would certainly be in with a shout.

A bunch of West Coast session musicians who decided to put a band together. One of my (and indeed most drummers) favourite drummers - the late, lamented Jeff Porcaro.

Basically a bunch of guys who have sold millions of records, but could walk past you on the street unrecognised.

Figured it out yet?

Toto - Toto IV

Plenty of people would write them off as middle-of-the-road and bland. People who know music though, know just how good they were. And IV was probably their finest moment.

There were two big hit singles - 'Africa', and the song that a thousand drummers listened to, to try and work out just how that shuffle went - 'Rosanna'.

Truth be told, there isn't a duff track on here. I had this album on vinyl when it first came out in 1982, I've bought another copy on CD, and when I moved in with Katie, it was one of the few albums that we both had a copy of.

I can listen to this album at any time - it's great driving music, it's great party music, it's just great music.

Good way to finish the day.

DSP rating - 10

Blues, Rock 'n' Reggae...

Another day, another few pickles out of the jar.

Sometimes, when Matt and I pick an album, we'll see something popular and avoid it, in favour of something more obscure. This doesn't always work out as desired, as what's obscure to him isn't necessarily obscure to me, and vice-versa.

But occasionally you see a title pop up and think 'Yes! You're not missing out on that.' And (if memory serves correctly), that's how I ended up with the soundtrack to 'Things To Do In Denver When You're Dead'. A great film, with a dirty blues soundtrack.

Which reminds me...

When Katie & I started seeing each other, one of the things that we had in common was a love of music, and a track that we both liked was 'One Foot On The Path' by Kenny Wayne Shepherd, a sickeningly talented young blues guitarist from the States. Katie asked me to make her up a CD of 'stuff like that', which I did. And one of the tracks I put on the CD was from this soundtrack. It was 'Get Out Of Denver' by Blues Traveler (yes, they do spell it with just one 'l').

She hated it.

Well, that track anyway. No accounting for taste...

But as a soundtrack, it's great. Anything with Tom Waits on is going to be pretty good, but other highlights are 'Thrill Is Gone' by Dishwalla, the lazy riff of Jimmy Reed's 'Take Some Insurance Out On Me Baby' and the title track by the late, great and sorely underrated Warren Zevon.

It also has 'Folsom Prison Blues' by Johnny Cash. I need say no more.

DSP rating - 8

Well that was a good rocking start to the day! What's next?

Oh yes!

I introduced Matt to this lot a while back and he recognised class when he saw it. 'Mouthful Of Love' by Young Heart Attack.

YHA hail from Austin, Texas, were formed in 2001 and clearly have never heard any records made after 1975. This is old-school, screaming, guitar-thrashing rock. Short and sweet, the whole album clocks in at just over half an hour.

And you get knackered just listening to it.

It rocks!

DSP rating - 9

There's a line from the late-lamented Douglas Adams in one of the Hitch Hikers Guide books that seems quite appropriate at this point. It goes something like...

'You're driving along, feeling pretty good about yourself. You pass a few hard-driving cars when suddenly you change down from fourth to first instead of third and the engine leaps out of the bonnet in an ugly manner.'

This was that sort of abrupt.

As previously mentioned, I've got some... odd stuff on the iPod. Ages ago, one December, I heard Jonathan Ross playing a reggae version of a Christmas song - I don't remember which. But I did note that it was from 'The Trojan Christmas Box Set'.

And I found it. And it was a bargain. And so I bought it.

Matt seems drawn to this stuff. It's like 'that sounds bizarre / odd / awful - I'm going to make you listen to it'.

Fortunately it was December, and I'm a bit partial to Christmas music.

But even so.

50 songs...

Three hours, eight minutes...

It did get a bit much by the end.

DSP rating - 5