Despite the passing of time, Van Morrison’s album has lost none of its elusive mysticism, its lyrics open to as many interpretations as there are listeners.
Dark Side Of The Moon became the inevitable breakthrough Pink Floyd had been heading towards for some time, but none could have predicted either its runaway commercial success or its claim to a permanent place in the pantheon of great rock albums of all time.
The album Nevermind would knock Michael Jackson off his chart pedestal and give the boys of Nirvana unforgettable praise in the music world, even after the loss of the gifted Kurt Cobain.
In 1994 Radiohead were unliked and unlikely Oxford outcasts (Radiohead? Crazyhead? Birdland?) who’d scored a flukey hit stateside with ‘Creep’. A year later they were the indie nerd’s answer to Oasis as the best band to come out of the UK since The Smiths.
Regarded by many as The Beatles’ finest work, and coming a mere eight months after the superb Rubber Soul, their seventh album Revolver was light years further on in terms of musical innovation, paving the way for the acid- and meditation-fuelled psychedelia to come, and pioneering lyrical invention that thrashed the conventions of the pop song.
Although their previous studio album Revolver is now the more acclaimed, Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is arguably The Beatles' most famous work and the one that had most influence on the music and society of its time.
This graphically personal and confessional album is reputed to be about the agonising and acrimonious break-up of Dylan’s marriage to Sara Lowndes, and it sees him alternately at his most vicious and his most vulnerable.
Having stopped touring with the band two years previously, head Boy Brian Wilson set about creating what could really be his solo masterpiece, provoked by The Beatles’ most recent works to go beyond the formulaic limitations of your average pop song.
In ‘The Ninth Wave’, the dreamy second side of the original vinyl release of Hounds Of Love, Kate Bush borrows a title from Tennyson, only to spin out an entirely unrelated macabre folk tale of a woman lost at sea.
Few records are brass-necked enough to proclaim their genius from the very beginning. But then, few records are so audaciously beautiful as The Stone Roses.
A new year zero, cultural revolution, coup d’etat and night of the long knives all rolled into one. The Pistols' one and only album (let’s forget The Great Rock ‘N’ Roll Swindle shall we?) arrived at a point when the band had gone through two record labels and already announced themselves to the middlebrows as the first bona fide folk devils the UK had seen since The Stones did their Alex and The Droogs routine in ‘65.
Blonde On Blonde revival tent. Dylan’s raucously entertaining melodrama swaggers and swoons between costumed surrealism, poppy field interludes and pot shots at John Lennon, but mostly he’s preaching about love.
Officially the Beatles’ recorded swansong, Abbey Road reflected the growing rift between McCartney and Lennon, proving that the Beatles as a collaborative unit were over. Ironically, it made for some of the most beautiful and harmonically accomplished music of the band’s career.
Sleaze, needles, leather and neon – these are a few of Lou Reed’s favourite things. This album foreshadowed Scorsese’s Taxi Driver by a decade – Reid wanders the squalid lane-ways of the Bowery, chronicling the filth, the debauchery, the sense of freedom and possibility.
The overall air of heat, decadence and general malaise that pervades this double album can best be summed up by a stray line from ‘Tumbling Dice’: “There’s fever in the funkhouse now”.
Matters would rarely be as good again for Thin Lizzy, but Live And Dangerous is permanent proof that for a couple of glorious nights in London, they were just what it says on the tin.
Rumours worked, both commercially and artistically, because the mature rock audience of the time, especially in the USA, craved a more sophisticated sound than they’d grown up with.
This immaculate 1973 debut remains, for casual fans, his most complete (and by far most accessible) album: Waits doled out his stories of love, regret and heartbreak like those emotions had just been discovered for the first time.
The first Fab Four record to be written and recorded under the influence of marijuana. The weed certainly worked wonders, as for many it’s their greatest, most enduring collection of songs.
With the split of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young following the live Four Way Street album in 1971, Neil Young was free to make a commercial-sounding album. This platinum blockbuster contained the number one hit ‘Heart Of Gold’ which sat neatly alongside such other fragile classics as 'Old Man', 'The Needle And The Damage Done' and 'Out Of The Weekend'.
After three years, 18 engineers and £250,000, Kevin Shields emerged from behind the sandbags with an alchemist’s elixir that went no wave, new wave, everywhere and nowhere.
In 1991, Guns N' Roses, lip-curled graduates of Sunset Strip’s hair-rock scene, released one of heavy rock’s defining records. Spilling over with gloriously dumb riffola and classic choruses, Appetite was as much a litmus test as an LP: if this didn’t rock your bollocks off, you were clinically deceased.
The Pixies' sound was always special – the aural equivalent of being punched in the face by a beautiful, shrieking alien woman dressed like a prostitute – and Doolittle was probably the tightest, sharpest take on it.
With Master of Puppets, Metallica pushed their taste for the epic to the ultimate with what is their finest moment, that once-in-a-career phase when all members of a band seem to peak at the same time. It was their last album before the tragic death of bassist Cliff Burton, and also the album on which James Hetfield came into his true voice, as on ‘Battery’. With layers of grinding guitars creating a truly dark, sinister sound, Kirk Hammet peeled off riff after limitless riff.
Master Of Puppets proved that Metallica were one of the most important metal bands of all time.
Shouting and snarling about corpses, unbirthday host Frank Black sounded like a nutter on a street corner with a knack for associative wordplay (check out the extraordinary verbal dexterity of ‘Brick Is Red’). Kim Deal, then posing as Mrs. John Murphy, pounded close by, before freaking out the guests with primal scene anthem 'Gigantic', a childhood tale pervy enough to recall the films of Brian De Palma.
Released just five months after the death of vocalist Bon Scott, Back In Black went on to become one of the most celebrated hard rock albums of all time.
Dylan would recreate Highway 61 in his own image, a spooky fairground of lost souls, freaks and Americana where Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot rumble and John The Baptist tortures at the behest of the Commander-in-Chief.
Greeted with some puzzlement on release, Kid A’s stock has accumulated steadily in the years that followed. Warp-flavoured doodles like the title track and ‘Treefingers’ felt disappointingly slight at first, but revealed more hidden charms with every listen. My, has it grown.
It seemed inconceivable a few years back that a nine-piece orchestral-pop outfit from Canada could become more relevant than The Strokes, but Funeral’s devastating blend of songcraft and sonic ambition made it all possible.
Recorded at the height of Layne Staley's heroin addiction, Dirt proved that Alice In Chains had a lot more depth than most acts ploughing the grunge furrow at the time.
Bjork proved with this dazzling effort that she possessed the talent and personality to go it alone. Hard to understand how tracks as innovative and edgy as 'Violently Happy', 'Big Time Sensuality' and 'Human Behaviour' made such a mainstream splash, but her rich, gorgeous vocals may well have been the key.
Martyn, a Scottish-born folk singer-songwriter, had been absorbing more and more disparate influences as his career had progressed. A lot of blues, rock and jazz touches had begun to appear in his sound, and this sense of musical adventure reached its peak on Solid Air.
Zep’s usual trademarks are here in force – Plant’s magnificently melancholic wail, Page’s mammoth guitar riffs, and that ferociously muscular rhythm section.
Post-industrial Manchester provided a fittingly bleak setting for a regional aftershock and punk’s death rattle. You can hear Ian Curtis' world collapsing – the epilepsy, the drugs, the bizarre love triangle – in every stentorian plea.
Produced and co-written by Brian Eno, the New Yorkers’ fourth album found them replacing the angular rhythms of yore with a fuller, funkier sound that brought the Studio 54 crowd on board. Leading the way was ‘Once In A Lifetime’, a glorious howl of adult disaffection.
Though it would be a while before the purist folk fascists lost patience, Freewheelin’ (Dylan’s second) already hinted at his move away from political commentary towards soul-searching introspection.
Kind Of Blue was the sound of an album whose time had come, an expression of musical genius that has influenced subsequent generations since it was recorded in 1959, but which could have been made yesterday.
From the opening bars of ‘So What’, Miles Davis takes the listener on a complete musical journey, through a series of improvisations based around simple melody lines, that is as accessible for the novice as for the professional.
Its strength lies in its serenity and its simplicity. Kind Of Blue is the definitive jazz album. It is living musical history and a true American masterpiece.
Not as popular with casual fans as the band’s two self-titled records, but Pinkerton seems to be the Weezer album that played the biggest part in building the group’s fervent following.
Rivers Cuomo’s gift for metal-flavoured power-pop gems remained intact, but the band's cute, geek-y demeanour was noticeably played down.
His reputation as a human being may have been tarnished somewhat, but the commercial and musical monster that was Thriller insures that his status as an artist can never be questioned.
Stories From The City… saw Polly Harvey abandoning her tendency towards bruising electronica and post-rock atmospherics, in favour of rich melodies and fat classic rock riffs.
The thing that stands out most – apart from the confessional quality of the songwriting – is Antony's remarkable voice, which is a masculine growl one moment, and shrill opera singer the next.
