Choosing a top twenty album selection, as you’re doubtless told by everyone else in these ages is not without its problems. In terms of merit/priority for example, how can you asses and contrast Ry Cooder and the Radiators , or the Gang Of Four. Or Stiff Little Fingers and Joe Jackson. Do you prize tarnished ambition over limited success? Flawed innovation over masterful orthodoxy? Vision over aural levitation. Questions of age, experience and environment need to be answered too. Yikes! Gimme a hat!!

Fortunately, my choice for the album of 1979 unlike the placement of the successive nineteen, was simple. and so obvious. Released when the infant ’79 was still in the grip of winter, Graham Parker’s ‘Squeezing Out Sparks’ stood the test of time and defeated the heaviest competition.

Anchored to a nearly always exhilarating musical base, the intensity of its emotional power is overwhelming. More space that I have here would be needed to fully convey its impact and anyway that would still only be secondary to the experience itself. Fittingly, Graham Parker closed the seventies with an album that fully confirmed his position as a late addition to the decades pantheon of greats.

Meanwhile … talking Heads were out highways for the eighties with ‘Fear Of Music’; dangerous visions allied to an unstoppable electric momentum … Elvis Costello said mostly the wrong things, but got it absolutely right for ‘Armed Forces’ … ‘The Only Ones’ with ‘Even Serpents Shine’ produced intoxicating magic … Tom verlaine helped compensate for the sad absence of Television with a stunning first album.

The Gang Of Four proved always stimulating, sometimes monotonous and occasionally potent with entertainment” … Ry Cooder with ‘Bop Til You Drop’ was Ry Cooder in overdrive (nuff said) … The Radiators ‘Ghostown’, although flawed was far and away the best Irish contribution to ’79, a handful of the racks bear favourable comparison with the year’s best anywhere and the Clash with ‘London Calling’, tottered a little, but emphatically landed on their feet. They will stand.

There was so much more too, and simultaneously I’m kicking myself for not having heard Joy Division, the Jam and P.I.L. Thankfully albums endure better than charts and selections.