My All-Time Top 50 albums - Part 1: 50-41

A few months ago now I was asked by Graham Harfleet from Progzilla Radio to put together my all-time Top 50 albums for him to broadcast on his show. After some deliberation I agreed, and set about trying to whittle down my collection to the required number - not an easy task!

The list finally coalesced, and then came the task of explaining why I had chosen these particular discs, and why they were placed where they were - an even harder task!

One thing that will be obvious from this collection of albums is that my musical taste is not particularly monochrome. Although this list was put together for a Progressive Rock station there is much here that is outside that genre (if genre distinction is important to you), although I hope much of it could be seen as ‘progressive’ in a broad sense. This is music that has made me; that has stayed with me over many years and many changes; and that at times resonates with key moments in my life’s journey. There are, I think, 43 separate acts in this Top 50, which either shows my breadth of taste or my inability to leave groups out. There may be what some consider to be some glaring omissions in this list, but this is as fair as I could get to demonstrate what makes me tick musically over a long period. I have to confess that I haven’t in a lot of cases found it easy to explain why I like a particular album, or what in particular I like about it, probably because music is essentially a ‘heart’ thing rather than a ‘head’ thing.

Anyway, here we go with the first 10 albums on my list.

50. Tom Waits – Small Change

By his fourth album, Tom Waits’s lifestyle had taken a toll on his voice, but had given it a unique feel that added to his appeal as a songwriter and singer. This is a collection of songs about drinking, lost (and found) love, the dodgier side of advertising and the seedier side of being a performer, sung in a kind of louche lounge bar style. I find all of his first four albums wonderful, but Small Change just tips it with its honesty, simplicity and alcoholic haze!

49. The Beatles – Rubber Soul

For me, this album is where the Beatles as a band started to really develop as songwriters and began to take the band a little off the ‘pop’ route. George develops well as a songwriter, and even Ringo gets a writing credit. But this album sees some of Lennon & McCartney’s best sub-3-minute songs – ‘Michelle’, and ‘In My Life’ – and the start of their experimentation with a more psychedelic sound in ‘Nowhere Man’. This was their turning point album, which led to Sergeant Pepper and beyond.

48. Todd Rundgren – Hermit of Mink Hollow

I had the great joy of seeing Todd Rundgren play at Knebworth in 1979, on the same bill as Led Zeppelin, and had been aware of his music for a few years before that event. Todd is a great versatile musician, and this album is a wonderful mix of rock, pop, soul, prog, lunacy, social comment and apocalyptic love song, thoughtfully written and excellently played. There’s a wonderful depth to this album, which repays repeated listens, which is why I go back to it often.

47. David Bowie – Hunky Dory

The thing with Bowie is that, from album to album one was never sure who he was going to be. This added to the interest, of course, and affected the music that he made. Perhaps the start of his ‘chameleon’ years, Hunky Dory has some of his most enduring songs on it: Changes & Life on Mars were hits for him; Oh! You Pretty Things for Peter Noone; but Fill Your Heart is just as catchy, and Quicksand & Queen Bitch are wonderful examples of his song-writing prowess. And there’s the added attraction for some of Rick Wakeman’s piano playing throughout the album.

46. Marvin Gaye – What’s Going On

An album that shows that the idea of ‘concept albums’ isn’t just a Prog thing. Coming from the depths of the civil rights movement in America in the 60s but also in the heat of the Vietnam conflict and the protests surrounding that war, this strikes at the heart of the problems felt by many then – and sadly still now. Just a beautiful piece of work!

45. Rainbow – Rising

This is an album that takes me back to those days in my youth when my musical taste was developing, and I was pushing a number of doors trying to find what connected with me. Rainbow, with Richie Blackmore at the helm, took me back to Deep Purple, but Cozy Powell’s powerful drumming and those bellows of Ronnie James Dio connected me to the other heavy rock that was part of my musical life. But this is music with depth, and Tony Carey’s keyboards brought that to the fore. This is hard rock but with a progressive edge: not a long album – it would probably be classed as an EP these days! – but it packs so much into 36 minutes!

44. Bob Dylan – Blood on the Tracks

Dylan has always been a poet, and at times a prophet, but always a song-writer – even if his singing voice can be a little marmite for many. One thing he does, particularly on this album, is tell a good story, and it’s probably this aspect that appeals to me in this collection. ‘Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts’ takes me back to Sunday afternoons in my teens listening to Annie Nightingale, as she played it often and it was this, I think, that turned me on to Dylan more than anything else.

43. Neil Young – After the Goldrush

Neil Young’s mixture of country, hard rock and good old-fashioned song writing and story telling is perhaps perfectly epitomised on this his 3^rd solo album. He does have a penchant for downright maudlin – ‘O Lonesome Me’ and ‘Don’t Let it Bring You Down’ (as he described it on 4 Way Street: ‘it kinda starts off real slow, and then just fizzles out altogether…’) – but also for good hard rocking anthems, in ‘When You Dance You Can Really Love’ and the timeless ‘Southern Man’. But it’s the title track, with its Sci-Fi, spaced-out hippie-ness, that stays with me.

42. Annie Haslam – Annie in Wonderland

This was an album that I discovered through the Tuesday night rock night at our local ‘disco’ back in the 70s. The DJ used to throw the odd curve ball in every now and then, alongside the usual Quo, AC/DC, Sabbath, Stairway to Heaven, Freebird etc, and one week he played ‘Rockalise’ from this debut solo album from Renaissance vocalist, Annie Haslam. The combination of her voice and Roy Wood’s production, playing and song-writing in places just amazed me, and I go back to this album often to have my soul lifted.

41. Alan Parsons Project – Tales of Mystery & Imagination

I remember, back in the days of the 5^th form, someone bringing this album into school with a certain excitement. ‘You must hear this’, they said, and proceeded to put it on the common room record player. I was first struck by the album artwork, straight out of the Hipgnosis stable, with a wonderful linear starkness to it, and then by Orson Welles’ stentorian tones in the opening narration. The music moves from rock to funk to classical and is all that Progressive music should be for me.