38. Simple Minds - Sons and Fascination (1981)

I confess. Simple Minds may be my favourite band of all time. Their album ‘New Gold Dream 81-82-83-84’ is the benchmark that all albums from the ‘New Pop’ era of 1981-85 are measured against. ‘New Gold Dream’ is the destination, the end of the rainbow, the alchemist’s dream, the moment where it all comes together. ‘Sons and Fascination’ is the journey.

Bowie is to blame. In the mid 1970’s, fleeing LA, cocaine, the occult and a diet of milk and Gitanes, David returned to ‘Europe’ (more precisely France, Switzerland and Berlin) to record without doubt the best work of his career. Back in Glasgow punk band Johnny and the Self Abusers listened to ‘Low’ and laid down their weapons. Europe was where their heart lay, modernists to a fault, embracing elements of punk but at the same time adoring the very same figureheads that punk was turning itself inside out to erase (Kerr was a big fan of ‘The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway’ era Genesis’)

With the post-punk passport to pick and choose the tinsel and baubles from the 1970’s Christmas Tree, Simple Minds plundered with the eye of an assassin. Motorik rhythms of Can and Faust are blended with Kerr’s reflections from their first European Tour in 1980, a young Glaswegian thrust into a land of the Baader-Meinhof gang, Red Army Faction kidnappings and a sense of otherness that today is hard to comprehend in this era of cheap travel and globalisation, a sound crystallised on the album ‘Empires and Dance’. Kerr himself was endearingly honest in interviews at the time and in song; confusion in modern music has never been as wondrously expressed as in his lament on the opening track  ‘In Trance As Mission’  - ‘… just what is going on?

The album is much bulkier than ‘New Gold Dream', which skims across the listener like a pondskater. In contrast, ‘Sons and Fascination’ leaves huge footprints in snow layered streets in Dusseldorf. ’70 Cities as Love Brings the Fall’ booms out, chaotic and pristine at the same time, ‘Boys from Brazil’ is all latent energy. ‘Love Song’ rattles along like it was written yesterday and gives glimpses of a Kerr, tired of driving his band mates insane by playing Kraftwerk’s ‘Neon Lights’ on arriving in every new European destination, looking west as on later tracks ‘The American’ and ‘20th Century Promised Land’.

‘Empires and Dance’ is more brutal, ‘New Gold Dream’ fleeter of foot and perhaps the most perfect new pop ever made but ‘Sons and Fascination’ has a grandeur that is only equalled by the band’s sense of wonder at Old Europe and the New World.

39. Echo and the Bunnymen - Porcupine (1983)

My house was a good fifteen minute walk to the nearest shop - twenty if I took our lazy dog. The dog’s penance for being disproportionately out of shape for a mammal who appeared to eat only once a day was to be made to spend at least half an hour in the tiny record shop next door to the newsagent’s. The newsagent’s that sold papers, milk and other things that parents are interested in when you are a teenager with legs and an inherent need to get out the house. I didn’t like milk or read the Daily Mirror. Instead, I liked pop music.

I was from Liverpool, Echo and the Bunnymen were from Liverpool but they might as well have been from Akron, Ohio. McCulloch used Coca-Cola to make his hair spiky, Les Pattinson wore Aran jumpers, Will Sergeant had a fringe and, most shockingly of all, drummer Pete de Freitas frequently appeared in public in a leather jacket. I don’t think they even knew who Sergio Tacchini was. But they made pop music, pop music that got them on to ‘Top of the Pops’ and that got me and the dog down to the local record shop to buy ‘The Cutter’ on 12 inch. Despite their fluffy moniker, there was nothing soft about the Bunnymen.

‘Porcupine’ was released with the band at their most commercially successful. ‘The Back of Love’ dented the Top 20 and the follow up ‘The Cutter’ went one better by breaking the Top 10, allowing McCulloch to put in a decidedly odd performance on ‘Top of the Pops’ which he may or may not recall. Ironically, ‘Porcupine’ was their least commercial album, full of multi-tracked weirdness exemplified by the funereal title track. The cover art was shot in Iceland and only helped to amplify the album’s cold aloofness with ‘Gods Will Be Gods’ the aural equivalent of being caught in an avalanche. I loved it - it was arty, difficult but not inaccessible and McCulloch and DeFreitas were two Scouse Fonzies, cooler than anything I could even dare imagine to be. I went to see them live a couple of years later and it is still to this day the best fucking concert I have ever been to.

40. David Crosby - If I could only remember my name... (1971)

Forget The Byrds. Forget driving down the LA freeway with a gun in your lap and enough drugs in the glove compartment to fuel a 1990's professional cycling team for a whole season. Forget the setbacks and the comebacks.

If I could remember David Crosby for just one thing then it would be for this solo album from '71 that is so of its time that I feel almost obliged to listen to it cross legged on Malibu Beach around a camp fire bitching about Nixon and Vietnam. The whole thing is a sprawling buddyfest with the likes of Joni Mitchell, Carlos Santana, Neil Young, Grace Slick, Jerry Garcia and Graham Nash involved. However, unlike other supergroup monstrosities of the era, this is very much Crosby's show as he leads from the front on the spectacular 'Cowboy Movie' which jams its way from the late '60's into the early '70's in less than 8 minutes. The rest of the album is shambolicly majestic, its flaws camouflaged by Crosby's wonderful voice and the whole joyousness of the ensemble's performance.

41. The Durutti Column - Vini Reilly (1989)

My favourite scene in Micheal Winterbottom’s ’24 Hour Party People’ is the rather touching moment between Tony Wilson/Steve Coogan and Vini Reilly/The Durutti Column that may or may not have actually happened. It is the early days of the ill fated Hacienda and Wilson is showcasing some of the talent signed to his recently created Factory label. Unfortunately, in the Manchester of the early 1980’s there is not much of an audience for talent and a crestfallen Reilly seeks consolation after a performance witnessed by a crowd who number less than the band themselves. Wilson, with that mixture of unquestioning belief and self-preservation that seemed to characterise him, puts his arm around Reilly and tells him something like ‘...none of this matters Vini, the crowd (or lack of it), the critics, the other bands. All that matters is that you make incredibly beautiful music.’ Of course it all mattered but that was not what Vini wanted to hear - nor was it what I wanted to hear either.

42. Kraftwerk - The Man Machine (1978)

You don't always have to start at the beginning. I started with OMD, The Human League, Ultravox, Simple Minds and New Order at a time when there was no beginning and no end. Only later did I realise that all these bands shared a professed love of all things Kraftwerk, subscribing to the Big Bang Theory of Electronic Music; before Kraftwerk there was not even nothing, just an emptiness that was disturbed one day in Dusseldorf, Germany in 1970 by the collision of Ralf Hutter and Florian Schneider.

That's how I came to Kraftwerk, via the hero of your heroes route. I once came across Andy McCluskey of OMD at Euston Station, and high on lager I asked him about Kraftwerk. He said meeting Ralf Hutter was one of the high points of his life. I said, 'Why did it all go wrong after Dazzle Ships?' Man Machine is my favourite album for the simple reason that it was the Kraftwerk album that I heard first, sucked in by the early 80's re-release of 'The Model' that made it to number 1, as unlikely as that seems today.

While the previous year's Trans Europe Express was a rapturous paen to a Europe reborn after the schisms of the Second World War and brought closer together by advances in transport, Man Machine flirts with a sense of the future seen from the past - the 'Metropolis' of Fritz Lang and the forays of Bauhaus - that were crushed by fascism and conflict. At other moments Man Machine delves into charming self parody with 'The Robots' and 'The Man Machine', and into the nerd-fantasy of 'The Model'. The best is saved for the wonderous 'Neon Lights', a melody drenched hommage to the phenomenon of urbanisation. Simultaneously capturing the sensation of travelling and arriving, 'Neon Lights' spreads the city before you in all its nocturnal glory, the glow of humanity slowly getting brighter and brighter. Jim Kerr drove his band mates insane by playing it constantly as they pulled into every new destination on Simple Minds' fateful 1980 European tour. More of that story later.

Kraftwerk - The Man Machine

43. Television - Marquee Moon (1977)

"What I want, I want now" - See No Evil

Nobody told me. I didn't know. Punk. No thanks. God didn't invent synthersizers, David Sylvian and the 1980's for me to go around listening to the snot and snakebite of The Sex Pistols.

1988, a Saturday, in Liverpool, a record fair in the Adelphi Hotel, in the days when you went to record fairs just to look at records. I have enough money to buy something, but not just anything, get it wrong and I have to live with the consequences, and no-one wants to live with consequences. 'Marquee Moon', the name rang a bell -'seminal' - Melody Maker speak for 'important'; Television, New York, Tom Verlaine, the man had the name of a poet, not a Vicious or Rotten in sight, surely there will be no snot and snakebite from a man with a poet's name. Ok, this is it, the only other thing I have seen is a Magazine album which is supposed to be their worst; fuck that, if I have the best what's the point of having the worst.

The train home takes so long. Another 15 minutes from the station to my house. 4.00pm, good I can listen to it once all the way through before the results come in...'What I want, I want now"


Televison - Marquee Moon (1977)