Speaker 1would you like another mince pie tim yes please all right and welcome back to the album years and it's christmas and because it's christmas we thought we'd do something a bit different especially as we've recently relaunched the uh the album years podcast with new levels of professionalism tim i think it's fair to say we've taken it up several notches it's just gone into the stratosphere in terms of the professionalism hasn't it yeah so we thought we'd do something special for christmas and we're going to harvest i think it's the right word harvest some questions from the from the listenership and in fact you've you've been doing that through your i have yeah facebook page
Speaker 2my facebook and twitter of questions and they came in by the dozen like mince pies quality high quality quality
Speaker 1intelligent yeah insightful questing questing questions so articulate yeah so you're going to be today you are going to be asking you're going to be posing you're going to be posing the questions that have been harvested there's some good words in this podcast already certainly harvested
Speaker 2harvesting the organs of our listeners i think that's what you're
Speaker 1trying to yes yeah obviously
Speaker 2obviously what i'm going to do is i'm just going to go through certain questions i'll ask them some really need one line answers some of them might be quite detailed some of them might in a way just take us off on a few tangents and my guess is that we'll get through about a tenth of the
Speaker 1question that that would be true to form it would be fair to say that some of the questions will require not only one sentence answers but perhaps one word answers i would actually say one grunt one grunt yeah okay okay without further ado let's get cracking okay well without further ado i'll just say this we three kings of orient are is that supposed to be the ham yeah that's the ham merry christmas to the ham he does listen to the show doesn't he yeah this is the show we always we always try and discuss the ham at least at least three times in
Speaker 2every episode in this because people have asked us what christmas album would you like to hear and i'm thinking peter hamill sings the carols has he never done it he's never done a christmas he's never done that i've never done one either of you have you have you have you ever done a christmas uh christmas i've not but again a lot of people were asking us what are our favorite christmas tracks i liked i believe in father christmas by i liked even slade's christmas here is merry christmas partly because there was a tremendous slade's christmas sadness there's a minor key in well the melancholy
Speaker 1yeah well i was going to say my favorite christmas album there's two this is the firstly the hilton ayers and the tony mansell singers swinging in a winter wonderland from the early 70s my favorite other christmas album is the low one which of course is incredibly melancholic but as you say a lot of these great christmas songs the sentiment is sometimes quite sad isn't it loneliness at christmas you know obviously the famous the greatest christmas song of all time fact yeah pokes you know fairy tale of new york it's a kind of tragedy isn't
Speaker 2it i think a lot of them are one exception to this actually it's a band that we both love and it's all right it's not a great christmas album that's the beach boys do a christmas album i quite like it i quite like it but the problem is it's this sunny summer harmony in christmas time and it actually doesn't quite have the melancholy it doesn't quite capture the summer or the winter or the boys at their best but it's good it's a good album but i agree i think the low christmas album is fantastic yeah um i can never pronounce his name but sujan or sufjan stevens he did a sort of yeah he did a series of eps yeah which was released as a box set and that was really sweet yeah those were
Speaker 1pretty good yeah vince garaldi of course the charlie brown
Speaker 2christmas album um and and the great electric to be fair is one of the most cynical and actually brilliant analyses of the christmas season i think i believe in father christmas thing it's one of those remarkable singles that was huge while in a sense pissing on the public from a great height without further ado
Speaker 1tim let's have some christmas questions not christmas themed just questions we've answered
Speaker 2to what christmas album would be like oh okay somebody also said and this can be answered with would you consider doing a christmas album well
Speaker 1now the funny thing is that my friend jonathan a couple of weeks ago i was out with him and he challenged me to writing a christmas song because he said you've never done one why have you not done one and i said well i wouldn't know where to go with the lyrics and he said no problem and he got his phone out and he got on chat gpt the ai thing and he said write me lyrics for a stephen wilson a christmas themed song and of course it instantly came up with all of the but but interesting you know we talked about how a lot of christmas songs are actually not necessarily joyous they're quite yeah sad and of course the stephen wilson one inevitably the artificial intelligence decided it all had to be miserable melancholic so be careful what you wish for i might be i might be doing it
Speaker 2beautiful scarecrow with a head full of snow yeah exactly something like that yeah or perhaps it would be snow in the cocaine sense obviously the harmony
Speaker 1snow decks yeah see what i did there i think i did what have you done your album funny enough well we're going to be talking about the best albums of 2023 obviously the best album of 2023 we can discuss that if you want should we do it well
Speaker 2is that one of the questions actually several people did ask what we thought of music in 2023 and whether we had any favorites this year and um and i do mean oddly enough quite a few of them though are by artists who are um older than i'm because i think you know and that's not easy these days to find artists that are older than i am but it's always great to have people who are because you've got a lot of something to look up to you know it's like my role models used to be younger now it's mel brooks age 96 still writing a sitcom yeah that's my new role model you know it's dick van dyke on america's perhaps got talent doing a tap dance that's what i'm aiming at he's about 98 or something i think he did die
Speaker 1in 2023 didn't he dick van dyke i
Speaker 2think he's still alive is he really i mean you can check if i am going to check because i'm pretty sure van dyke was on a program doing tap dancing and i an amazing thing to do for a 98 year old who was in chitty chitty bang bang with perhaps the best english accent outside of oceans 11 right oh
Speaker 1my god you're right he's still
Speaker 2alive yeah 90 97 oh 97 okay i'm out by goodness me goodness me but he's still doing um television appearances and still moving i think he still plays five-a-side football as well every week no way really well i do so i'm just i'm throwing him in made
Speaker 1that up i'm throwing him in okay so so the album let me guess let me guess let me guess let me guess so the the albums you like from this year with people older than you paul simon peter gabriel paul simon how much i've only
Speaker 2listened to once and i really loved the idea of it and it's a beautifully recorded album and it isn't like anything he's done before so i appreciate it and approve of it i'm not sure it would be necessarily in my top five i didn't dislike it i liked it yeah peter gabriel album i've not listened to enough in fact i've only heard it i've got a copy i've got the the two cd blu-ray edition limited edition with ob strip with the ob strip of course if it's not got the ob strip i'm throwing it out of the door yeah but that's due to arrive so i've only ever heard the tracks live so i saw him live this year and he was very good actually his voice is still yeah tremendous the show was fantastic and it was quite a brave show because he did the entirety of the new album and a couple of tracks i thought were were very special from that performance and i think it's a really good album i think it's a really good i think i'd have to listen to it it's excellent it's excellent i'm so i'm gonna i'm gonna talk
Speaker 1about this because it's one of my favorite albums of 23 it's an excellent album the worst you can say about it is why didn't he release it 18 years ago two years after his last sound because it feels very much like it's cut from the same cloth there's there's not anything that would would blow you away in terms of wow i wasn't expecting that or it wouldn't surprise you necessarily but the quality is extremely high in the songwriting the sonics the mixing the production he's still he's still got it and as you say the voice is still it's still
Speaker 2there and it's still it's still affecting you know he's still a sort of conscientious artist who's producing great work i think i agree with your assessment in the sense of what i've heard from the album i didn't listen to the tracks that were coming out so i wanted to hear it as an album me too yeah me too you know but what i heard there were definitely echoes of what we've done before you know what was interesting is that you're right that 21 years have passed since the album and actually it sounded like maybe two years it hadn't necessarily embraced yes a lot of what's happened but he doesn't need to because he's still producing work of value and quality that was maybe my only criticism of what i'd heard but you know i'm looking forward to hearing
Speaker 1mine too yeah i mean i say i'm not even sure that is a criticism it's just an observation i suppose we got so used to people like peter goebel and kate bush blowing our minds every time they came out with a new record that it's it's disappointing is the wrong word but perhaps slightly less seismic that this album sounds like a follow-up to up and i loved up and i like this record very much and there's definitely no sense that he's lost his ability singing creativity songwriting production but at the same time he hasn't necessarily innovated on this record
Speaker 2yeah no and i think that you know another album i like this year the sparks album was similar in like bush they have had seismic changes you know they've massively shifted whereas this it's just a really good sparks album you know it's great fun it's very inventive but there's not anything that couldn't have been on another sparks album which you know if you listen to little beethoven or you listen to number one song in heaven or you listen to kimono my house they were absolute you know scorched earth new starts for the band and this isn't but it's a good album and it's a lot of fun um yeah the albums i really liked i mean it's strange you know you probably disagree but one um is a bit of a left field one which was um charles haywood who was in quiet and this heat he's formed a new band called abstract concrete and he's in his 70s and it's just one of the most kind of playful art rock albums he's ever made musically it's fantastic it's one of the more luscious albums he's done but it's equally experimental you know there's a lot of dissonance a lot of electronics a lot of production techniques from dub but he seems to be having a lot of fun with it and it's it's the sort of album i guess that if robert wyatt was still on form it's what he might release if he was still making music and on form in 2023 this could be his album so that was a really good album i really like the everything but the girl album this year as well i think tracy thorn's voice has matured and changed and she's almost got a second voice now it's very different from how it was in the 80s and 90s uh has this beautiful husky quality and um it's a kind of melancholy electronica dance album with you know two or three songs that i think are incredibly special and affecting so that's kind of pretty high up for me um virginia astley someone who we both like she's released a 27 minute piece on bandcamp and it's a continuous piece of music that has several movements and weirdly it's like she's gone right back to from gardens okay one of our favorites on the show so it's really pretty really delicate and it's a really good album i think it's a really good album a lot of found sounds a lot of birds a lot of running water and i think her daughter is on harp so the soundscape's slightly different but you've got the piano you've got the flute and a bit like we're saying about the gabriel she's not lost any of what she had on her early work so it was kind of an unexpected um album in some respects and i think she's got a full album coming out pretty soon as well okay great i'll check that out trying to think what else do you want me to tell well unless you're gonna say
Speaker 1i i mentioned a couple of other ones that i really liked from this i mean i didn't i didn't listen like the harmony codex didn't you the harmony codex of course is a fantastic right no um the the only other albums i've heard of this year that you haven't already mentioned i i did really like the one of tricks point never album
Speaker 2again i love the single from i've not heard the album but the single was amazing yeah the single
Speaker 1was amazing so the single barely lit path i remember playing that to you um and i said and i said to you with not some degree of raising high expectations i said to you you've never heard anything like this before and that wasn't just rhetoric was it it is quite a unique extraordinary take on mixing electronic sound acoustic sound orchestral sound and it's one of the few things i've heard this year where there wasn't a sense of deja vu you know we talk about the gabriel album of very high quality but nothing that really is going to sort of shock you in the sense i wasn't expecting that at least with the one of tricks point never um track and the album pretty much overall there is a sense that you never know where this music is going to go next and i and i still love to hear albums like that it was quite an intense album to listen to from beginning to end there's so much going on sometimes that you almost you get to a point where almost information overload at least i do i almost have to listen to the album in little chunks like three tracks at a time yeah and you know you remember that track a barely lit path even within that five minutes there's so much that happens so the whole album is a bit like that it's almost information overload but it's brilliant and he's obviously a brilliant producer um and he's obviously doing a lot of work in the world of music soundtrack and movie soundtracks which seems to be a perfect sort of logical place for him to go i also really loved an album by a younger group called benefits who i describe as like the jethro tull
Speaker 2album benefits no i
Speaker 1describe benefits as like a miserablest northern version of the sleaford mods okay and sleaford mods are quite miserable already obviously um but they're very kind of london cockney and benefits are like the kind of northern equivalent i mean there's a there's a track on their album called shit britain okay and the guy basically he he does the kind of you know poet poetry thing what markie smith star john cooper more john cooper because he's got that northern thing going on except he sounds it's not northern he sound well he's i'll tell you the thing he's got with market well mark at least tries to sing at least the thing he's got in common with markie smith is he sounds pissed off all the time yeah yeah all the time he sounds pissed off but that is life in modern britain and in particularly in the north and also the sound of the band has got much more noise aesthetics industrial noise aesthetics so there's this kind of sense of a barrage of noise which this guy will be ranting angrily about how shit britain is and of course that's something they have a lot in common with sleaford mods because a lot of sleaford mod songs is about how crap britain is and there's that kind of humor sort of black humor going on as well so i really like the benefits album called nails uh it's their first album it came out on um jeff barrow's label oh okay i pulled his head yeah so that's a great record and i noticed that somebody else picked us their album of the year the other day um anyway those are the only other two records i i mean i don't know if you've heard of them i don't know if you've heard of them i really like matt berry's sort of homage to library music he released an album on the kpm label this year which is a famous library music okay label from the 70s and he did a record for them again nothing revolutionary about it very nostalgic but i really kind of just enjoyed it
Speaker 2you know i suppose i also like the bathers album sirensque which might be their best i mean if you've not heard the bathers it's a bit like if you imagine van morrison meets sinatra but with a kind of precious atmospheric poetic quality and i think it's a really good album i think it's a and they're still as good as they ever are and chris thompson the singer has got a remarkable grizzled voice um he started off being quite influenced by bowie in a band called friends again and they were great and um they split off into various bands including another scottish band called starless who are really good but this is um just a very beautiful ambitious singer-songwriter album with great arrangements string arrangements and so on um in terms of northern miserablism um obviously took an interest in the warrington runcorn newtown development plan i don't know if you know that i've
Speaker 1heard the name it's a brilliant name yeah
Speaker 2well for me it's kind of a really weird one if we're going to get personal so basically my mum worked for the warrington runcorn newtown development corporation and um you know to take it down she was killed in march 1979 in a car crash and the band's first album or it's one electronic artist really is called interim report march actually taking reports from the building that my mum walked oh i love the i love the idea of this so um which is very odd so that's why i can have an added interest and they've had two releases this year and i it's really difficult to describe in a way because it's sort of electronic almost old school german with a more pared down contemporary production so you can hear they've got you know craft work tangerine dream ashraa in the mix but there's maybe more john carpenter film soundtrack as well okay so to me
Speaker 1it's the name also would lead me to conclude this it sounds like it's part of that kind of whole hauntological scene the ghost box very nostalgic for the 70s very nostalgic for things like public information films exactly those kind of things the kind of post boards of canada kind of style of electronic music essentially which i like very much so and i love the name of this band so much that obviously
Speaker 2it drew me to them yeah of course and the artwork as well i think that you know a bit like the caretaker they've got a theme and they play with the theme and it's a combination of title artwork and music so it's not just the one thing that kind of grips you so you know that was um another one sounds like this year yeah obviously you had an album this year which i personally thought was my favorite of your albums alongside the raven actually no i'm really
Speaker 1proud of it and of course you're quite right to point out it is the best the best album that is exactly what i said you know of all of them anyway let's have another uh listeners question and readers wives i was going to say let's have some more readers wives somebody
Speaker 2had said here but i mean this will be a maybe a grunt i did answer them actually in um email but there's a question are you both influenced by classical music i don't remember hearing you discussing any classical music albums and i said well actually we do you know in terms of what the album years does we've discussed contemporary classical and mainly minimalism homely music holy minimalism so you know philip glass steve reich um arvo pett etc goretzky we'll discuss because it falls within the i think we made einstein on the beach our favorite album of
Speaker 1one episode indeed we did
Speaker 2yeah yeah but he then said and i said but yeah we are aware of um the likes of vaughn williams marla stravinsky stockhouse and he said yes that's what i'm interested in you know debussy revel but obviously i don't remember the debussy album from 1977 you you might be able that is that is a bit of a
Speaker 1flaw in in the in the concept there yeah we can't that's why we've not
Speaker 2discussed it but there
Speaker 1was stockhouse now i mean in 1977 diarra's life oh yeah he says being i'm going to answer another question with
Speaker 2this yes because somebody asked and i think i can get away with this because obviously all the people are dead somebody asked whether there was music that we loved that you know absolutely um defined us at one point or we adored that we then went off and have no connection with anymore and i'm going to say that you know to a certain extent i can i can give you two things and one is i did have an awful lot more interest in classical music when i was younger you know late teens especially so debussy ravel marla vaughan williams uh delius etc and i don't feel a connection with it anymore it seems too big too distant too cold whereas you know minimalism honey mimism i still like as much as i ever did similarly ecm i remember you know my late teens absolutely adoring a lot of the ecm albums whereas now i find them a little too pretty a little too cold a little too precise it doesn't really connect with me and you know i think that's the thing that i've been doing for a long time and i think that's the thing that i've been doing for a long time there are other things as well i mean and just to sort of almost interrupt you what i try and do with the album years is express my enthusiasm so if i'm discussing an ecm album from 1979 which i discovered in my teens i will discuss it with the enthusiasm i had for it then rather than the slightly distant cynicism i feel towards it now or not i
Speaker 1mean you can talk about both perspectives can't you i think there's some albums some albums we have talked about where we've talked about our kind of impressions at the time but we've also been very you know honest and said but it you know probably doesn't mean as much to me now as it did then i think the thing with classical music you you you've kind of hit the nail on the head really which is that the album shows the show is called the album years and specifically our remit was to focus on the golden age of the album now correct me if i'm wrong most of these classical composers never thought in terms of albums partly because a lot of the works were composed long before there was even you know recorded media yeah so the whole idea of talking about an album by bach or beethoven almost just doesn't work you know even some of the composers you mentioned the vaughan williams the debussy kind of who arguably were there at the beginning of the sort of golden age of recorded media they weren't thinking in terms of making albums and i think that's the exception when we talk about people like um the minimalists and maybe some of the 20th century composers is that they were beginning to think in terms of presenting their music i remember you know
Speaker 2he was as influenced by bark and jerry lee lewis so yeah it came from a completely different era and bark is one of the few old school classical composers i can listen to yes and like and and also you know in terms of thinking about how music's presented i was always fascinated by do you know alexander skryabin who's the russian composer already 20th century and he was one of the first people to introduce light shows and also smells so that you would actually have an overall experience where you'd have incense sticks and you'd have lights to accompany the orchestral versions of his work and and stravinsky's right of spring is something that i was fascinated by amazing early and i still really
Speaker 1like that well also i mean you're talking about these guys being ahead of their time stockhausen was experimenting with surround sound in the 50s right composed two pieces of music gruppen for three orchestras and carry for four four orchestras and four choirs positioned around the audience and he's playing a chord and then passing it to another orchestra in another corner of the hall and then they would pass it to i mean that's obviously to someone like myself where spatial audio and surround is very important to me blows my mind that some of these classical guys were composing spatial audio when bill haley and the comets were still the cutting edge of you know popular mainstream music so these guys way you know and in electronic music as well of course morton and it composed the first ever piece of electronic music for vinyl in 1960 silver apples of the moon and so a lot of these guys from the classical tradition were way ahead of the game but i think that's the point very few of them ever thought in terms of the album as a continuum as obviously not some of them did but but certainly the classic classical composers they were composing in in in terms of of performance weren't they concert theaters they weren't they weren't so i think that's a good answer to your your listeners our listeners question that these guys don't fit into the album years because they never thought in terms of albums
Speaker 2yeah i mean again we do get questions regularly and obviously the other
Speaker 1answer is that classical music is shying for pussies of course yeah i
Speaker 2concur that was jonathan marr who asked that question johnny marr johnny marr johnny marr asked that question he's a he's a regular listener um
Speaker 1it's a good
Speaker 2question um but i think as well album is a few people have asked kind of whether we're in 2002 or 2001 and so on and of course you know albums in terms of the album as a concept i think that kind of comes together in the early 50s so before people like billy holiday frank sinatra chet baker who did create sequenced albums and themed albums so you know that's certainly something both of us have been very aware of and actually take some inspiration from and and admire
Speaker 1it you know i think the answer to that question before 1967 i would personally i would struggle a bit um i would say probably 99 of the music in my collection that isn't jazz and isn't classical music would be post 67 yeah and i think there's something in that in fact i remember very early on we i think we talked in one of the early episodes about how the album kind of comes of age with things like sergeant pepper pet sounds and yes you're absolutely right sure was making concept albums before that but in terms of mainstream pop and rock music the album kind of comes of age around the middle of the 60s isn't it or the latter half of the 60s yeah and seems and not uncoincidentally seems to have fallen out of favor about the time of 2000 and whatever it was you just said yeah the early 20s i mean i still think
Speaker 2there's some amazing 25th century album and i think we will do that won't we we will do we will and some of my favorite albums have been this century as well you know i still think it's a great medium i still think some great art and music is being produced really so i've not gone back but agreed you know in terms of yeah early rock was very much collections of singles that are great tracks you know the first presley album has got some amazing stuff but it's recorded over a different period you know over a period of a few years in different studios i mean if you ever listen to the the debut presley album listen to his version of blue moon which is absolutely haunted and almost uh frightening piece of music so there's some great rock and roll stuff i suppose i have slightly more time for you partly because i love the economy of the production the sound a bit like i love the economy of the production on 50s jazz albums where in a sense some of those albums they've not been bettered in terms of microphone placement or quality of sure yeah vocal or trumpet sound well kind
Speaker 1of blue still sounds amazing so sounds like you're in the room with you know with the musicians but i think that's just just the risk of repeating myself here i think that's the point here that we consider the golden era of the album to be roughly from around about the middle of the 60s through to the beginning of the 21st century and there's a you know there's so there's a good 35 years there for us to to discuss to go over yeah and we've still got a lot of work to do and just in that in that kind of time frame
Speaker 2well i think the thing is as well we always kind of we create a long list and we beat it down to things that we both know and can talk about and luckily it's a fairly eclectic way of doing it and i think that's the thing that's the thing that's the thing that's the thing that's the thing that's the thing that's the thing that's the thing that's the thing that's the thing that we'd have time for or could discuss so you know we've discussed the idea of maybe going back sometimes to certain years or
Speaker 1i think early on we were much more brutalist and ruthless about the editing weren't we yeah we've become we've become a little bit more you know incontinent as time gone on witness the fact that the 1977 uh year covers eight episodes and probably early on we would have tried to cram that all into one 45 minute episode and we would have probably we would have not been able to talk about you know 70 80 percent of the albums that we have talked about so i definitely feel like we could go back and rediscuss a lot of those early early years and we probably will you know because there will come a point if we carry on doing this we're going to have to start going over some of the years again we're going to run out of years to talk about yeah let's have another question from okay
Speaker 2this is going to be a brief one mark conroy here so steven listened to any of the records tim has put on the list that you
Speaker 1never heard if so did he sample i did i listened to i listened to pictures you'd listen to that wouldn't you pictures i listened to very strange i like that i like that i did go and listen to um not sure if we've talked about it yet and chronologically speaking in terms of the way these episodes are rolling out but on the 1997 uh sorry 1977 episodes tim talks about an album by the beach boys called beach boys love you yeah and we may not have got to that in terms of the order we're rolling in i didn't know that record it sounded mad and i went and listened to listen to it and yes indeed it was mad and i suppose
Speaker 2from my side in terms of because people have asked me the same question as well as anything that you've raved about rubbed off on me if i then gone okay i'm going to listen to this and one case for me was actually nine inch nails because i was very familiar with the downward spiral and the downward spiral and i thought that's all i kind of need to know i like it i really like the down it's amazing um and you'd raved about the fragile i think And so I bought about four or five Nine Inch Nails albums after you've mentioned this and yes some of them really really like even the stuff that the band were putting out in 2018 you know that had been slightly influenced by bowie's black star he's
Speaker 1using the eps bad witch eps yeah great fantastic great stuff yeah so
Speaker 2yeah that made me kind of think okay perhaps i always kind of felt that down spiral had everything you needed to know about the band and to a certain extent it does but they do progress and they do shift and i was glad i did that so you know yeah of course i'll listen to what you say if you say that that isn't the be-all and end-all of did you did you
Speaker 1did you get a nine inch nails album called um with teeth yeah i love that one
Speaker 2is that's the one with the two sides of it or maybe i'm getting confused with the fragile now i think i'm not sure no fragile is the two sides
Speaker 1fragile is the double with teeth starts off with this gorgeous ballad i think it's called all the love in the world or something yes it's very it's not what you expect it's almost like a soulful well trent resna style anyway okay let's let's have another question tim okay
Speaker 2see now a few people will say but you've never talked about this band or that band i'm sure now okay well let's quickly rattle off a few so like one person i'll give you two yes in a second so one person we know what with this one but so one person jake louis or morrissey i think it's actually understood obviously he's a fan so i haven't heard every episode yet so i'm not sure if i missed it but you mentioned arena rock but i've never heard you give specific shout outs for journey deaf leopard van halen etc i can't imagine you've forgotten them entirely so i'm wondering if it doesn't fit your tastes or there's another reason another person similar kind of says but totally different bands um i've never listened to you or steven ever referring to the afghan wigs you know gentlemen's a colossal album of the 90s and so on and i guess in these cases some of these albums we have heard some of the artists we've heard but they've never really um made much impact i mean actually i quite like escape as i've mentioned a couple of episodes and then edited out not for fashion reasons i hasten to add i've just never expressed it well but actually escape i do think is a great pop rock fm album uh from the early 80s but um i'm guessing it's just a lot of this stuff we're either not quite as familiar with as we are with others and it just doesn't has never really gripped us i think
Speaker 1that's the thing and we're very honest about the fact that obviously it has to be well but is by definition a very personal perspective and we don't know we don't know all the music that's been made we you know we've heard a lot of it yeah we're not ai some of we're not ai we haven't listened to some of it just has never been on my radar has never appealed to me personally it's not like i have anything against it it's just i don't you know it's like we don't talk a lot about hip-hop music we know a few hip-hop records but we would be very soon out of our depth if we tried to talk about you know intelligently about say that the great hip-hop music released in 2023 or 1993 for that matter i would know a few records i'd know an odd day la sola an old tribe an odd tribe called quest or a public enemy but i'm sure there are loads of other hip-hop records that came out that year that i wouldn't have the faintest idea about i don't know a lot about um the kind of music you're talking about i have i can honestly say i've never bought an album in my life by journey sticks ario speedwagon um kansas and i'm sorry if i'm lumping all these together because in my mind they do toto they do kind of all go together and i'm sure they're all very distinctive and very different but in my mind i kind of think of them all in the same sort of bubble boston as well similar i've never bought a record by any of these artists occasionally i'll hear a song on the radio i think that's nicely put together pop song um but i couldn't speak to you with any knowledge or any insight about any of those artists well i think you've got a lot of music in there i think you've got a lot of music in there and if neither of us can yeah then we shouldn't be covering it i mean that's you know i think that
Speaker 2the thing is that we have got eclectic taste but there are limits to those eclectic tastes and also we've got to kind of go with our enthusiasm so you know i actually was familiar with the afghan wigs and did hear a few things and i couldn't say i disliked it because i didn't but whereas say from that same era red house painters and say mark eitzel with american music club really did grip me grabbed me and i bought the catalogs and absorbed them for whatever reason a few of those artists didn't you know afghan wigs amongst them but i could see the quality you know mark lanigan is another one from that sort of era yeah i read
Speaker 1his book i loved it i loved it i read his book and i loved it fascinating book i went and listened to some of the music as a consequence of reading the book and it didn't really appeal it just wasn't my kind of thing i was never really into american grunge music anyway you know which is kind of kind of comes from that that era at least um so yeah i think that's the point we try and talk about things that we can talk about um intelligently and with some degree of insight and some degree of of nerdiness because there's no point us just sort of churning what you could go and read on a wikipedia page of course so you know if people listen to us i'm guessing at least i like to think they're listening to us because of our personal perspective and our personal insight and our personal opinions uh good and bad about the records and so for me to talk about afghan wigs i all i would do is i would talk about the afghan wigs go to a wikipedia page jot down a few facts and and what's the point of that so um so it's not it's not meant as any you know kind of slight i think it's just where we personally feel we're on you know steady ground and can comfortably talk about and that tends to be a lot of post-punk um progressive rock um and you know singer songwriters that's what you and i have always
Speaker 2there are other areas because say vanessa ristie here says what are some albums not recorded in english that you like and actually there's a there's a whole load oh yeah i'm a huge fan of francoise hardy some of her late 60s yeah french and german stuff amazing um one of my favorites i've just temporarily forgotten the name of you love it so much i love it so much bridget fontaine bridget fontaine yeah i'm an amazing experimental interesting artist and again the there are a number of italian artists that i think are fascinating well one of our
Speaker 1favorite albums of all in fact i don't know if one of our favorite albums of all i don't know if we've actually talked about it because we may not have covered the year gansberg's histoire de melody yeah yeah i don't
Speaker 2think we discussed so so we wouldn't have discussed that so it says gansberg one of my favorite
Speaker 1progressive rock bands of all time is the french band ange yeah ange and i think we did talk a little bit about ange on one of the episodes didn't we um and obviously all the kraut rock stuff that's in german whether it's craft work and even you know i like rammstein and and so yeah i don't i've never i've never thought of language as a barrier to appreciating something and enjoying something i mean magma is a band that is a band that is a band that is you know it's a band that's a band that's a band that's a band that's a band that's a band that's a band that's a band that's a band that's a band that's a band that's a band that's a band in fact in some ways it's almost better that you you know you don't know what they're saying it's it's it becomes almost something even more even more of a sense of otherness to it doesn't it it's
Speaker 2fascinating for me that you know certain cultures i think it's less the case now but you know certainly in the sort of 60s 70s 80s certain cultures develop their own artists that were completely outside of that kind of american british chart success that were only big in italy or switzerland and say you know batty art is a great example of somebody who who's considered a poet and a great artist in italy and his early 70s stuff is astonishing where he kind of starts off as an experimental cross between like bowie hamill with a bit of tangerine drink then goes off at a really weird stockhouse and eno tangent and by the end of the decade he's producing euro pop yeah and it's such a career trajectory that you don't get with a lot of british or american artists and so yeah some of these artists i find quite fascinating there's
Speaker 1actually a there's actually a very similar artist from germany called achim reichel who also ended up creating the most mainstream housewife's choice pop you could possibly imagine housewife
Speaker 2shite then in fact
Speaker 1you before and after but in the early 70s he makes this string of about five or six records where he's experimenting with echoplex on his guitar right and it's it's the epitome of of you know classic kraut rock and then he goes back to making these you know this very kind of housewife friendly portly that seems to be
Speaker 2a big thing in it because i know he's a portuguese artist i know his name i'll look it up on wikipedia later but i've heard heard the album and in 1978 he has this album which is huge in portugal and it's called something like the land of a thousand melatrons and it's about a planet of melatrons and it's basically a progressive rock album it's enormous in portugal by the mid-80s i think he's representing them at eurovision song contest you know which again i'd really like the idea of the land of a thousand melatrons at a eurovision song contest with bucks fizz could have done well you know you could see that just kind of the melatron chords blowing the box and also with
Speaker 1the skirt ripping off the skirt routine with that yeah and the melatrons with the melatron whipping off the front of the melatron to reveal the tape mechanism within you know but there's
Speaker 2some great stuff and you know say brigitte fontaine i really recommend people listen to her because she's a french artist who kind of has an aspect of folk and singer songwriter but she was experimenting with world music way before a lot of um now was she the one sorry to
Speaker 1interrupt was she the one that that covered some nick drake songs early on in her career that was francoise huddy francoise huddy and that's beautiful you know she
Speaker 2did a couple of albums that are absolutely gorgeous right um i say especially late 60s early 70s whereas brigitte fontaine remained interesting you know her 90s and 2000s stuff she was again you know pretty much experimenting with trip hop as it's happening you know she's working with some interesting artists because she's a big deal in france but pretty much our known in britain you know let's have another question tim from the listeners let's have one i mean again a couple of people asked us about our opinion of the band jellyfish bizarrely they come up a few times
Speaker 1i don't have an opinion i can't say i've ever listened to jellyfish
Speaker 2have you i've listened to a couple of tracks and i oh again it's one of those bands where i thought okay this is good this is well done let me put on my mark heitzel album okay it was that you know it's that where i thought yep because obviously there's a lot of music i think you know i don't know somebody they didn't ask us about our collections this time but i kind of always have my interests split because i like a lot of things and that's what will be on my iphone in effect my old ipod library i've got an enormous library of music very eclectic but then i don't love a lot so i like an awful lot but in terms of what i love which will then be my physical collection on cd and vinyl it becomes more
Speaker 1streamlined but you not find that the albums that you love you listen to less because you're almost over familiar with them i can't think of the last time i played you know kind of blue or bitches brew yeah um they're amazing they're albums i absolutely love but if i find myself reaching for my miles collection i'm probably more likely to go for one of the albums i'm less familiar with like sorcerer or you know or uh or on the corner or something because i i feel like it's less familiar territory and so therefore do you know what i'm getting at no totally i mean i
Speaker 2think i spend you know i can't i can't think of the last time i listened to a nick drake album that is interesting yeah i do listen to pink moon at least once a year and again with my favorite joni mitchell albums i will always go through a period of a year where i'll listen to them again because i think that i spend a lot of time as you do sometimes listening to music that i don't necessarily like or fully understand but i do listen to a lot of music that i don't necessarily like or fully understand but i do listen to a lot of music that i don't necessarily like or fully listen to a lot of music that i don't necessarily like or fully understand but i do listen to listen to a lot of music that i don't necessarily like or fully understand because i want to get to like it or fully and and also what it
Speaker 1is and also because it's fresher to you it's something about it that you're you're kind of you're you're allowing yourself to be surprised whereas an old album that you love and you've loved for years it's not going to surprise you is it it's not going to surprise you and i suppose you know
Speaker 2with say brian eno who's a favorite um and bowie probably the albums i've played the most of theirs would be the albums they released in the later years you know obviously bowie's last album black star which might be my favorite bowie which i still play quite regularly whereas low will not get the attention that gets um and and similarly you know i think eno's been on on a rare vein of form of late so i've really enjoyed a lot of his later work and whereas i will get out you know his album with cluster maybe once every two years the more recent albums i'll listen to so yeah i i think it is interesting you know some of the all-time favorites or albums that i assume are all-time favorites i don't listen to as a but yeah usually i'll go back if we're doing them in an album years partly to see okay does that still feel the same really so to me it's
Speaker 1it's almost like watching a movie that you already know you already know what's going to happen yeah you know and so yeah and of course yes you do do with favorite movies you do enjoy watching movies over and over even though you know the story there's nothing going to surprise you you do still get a lot of comfort from from watching a movie that you've watched maybe 10 15 20 times before that you really love and obviously i do have that you know i still listen to tangerine tangerine dream zeit at least every two three months i would say but but i think a lot of my favorite albums do sit on the shelf gathering dust because i know i like them i've heard them so many times it's that whole thing you know we i think we talked about in one of the early episodes dark side of the moon i've heard it so many times in my life i don't need to hear it ever again yeah i do not need to hear that it's a masterpiece i'd argue it's probably the greatest piece of conceptual rock music ever made i don't want to hear it ever again yeah it's because i've heard it so many times it's not even that i want i don't need to i'll i'll always reach for something that maybe is less familiar will be fresher will maybe have the possibility to surprise me then i will to go for the old sort of comfort zone thing yeah and maybe i'm different uh maybe we're different to a lot of people in that yeah and again you know if i
Speaker 2think flaming lips i mean soft bulletins the album i fell in love with but probably american head the album from 2020 is the one that i've played over the last few years and i think it's i mean i do go back to certain things i mean obviously when we did 1977 i went back to one world because i assumed it was my favorite album from that age and it and it was but also i go back because i think okay have my opinions about this changed because sometimes they do you know sometimes we say but like with ecm or certain classical music your opinions of the music change because you've changed i'm always fascinated by this thing that music doesn't change but we do and with it our opinions you know i've never suffered from the reminiscence bump if i go back to albums that i loved in the 70s 80s 90s there's as good a chance that i don't connect with them and don't like them as there is that i will connect with them and like them and that fascinates me as much thinking okay that now seems to me too overstated too overwritten um it's eking out the laptop when i was younger so you know certain things change you
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