Speaker 1so let's move on to um someone who in many respects um has had a very similar career trajectory or had a very similar career trajectory because he's passed away now john martin who you could probably say there was a certain point in the history in history where roy harper and john martin were pretty much in the same place the late 60s when they were playing uh le cousin the club in in soho they they were both kind of these folky troubadours who had some extra kind of elements they were bringing into their music whether it was jazz in the case of john martin um or roy harper had more of the sort of psychedelia thing going on but they certainly careers certainly diversified didn't they but but john martin's album from this year one world is a masterpiece isn't it it's an absolute masterpiece well this i
Speaker 2think we're getting to the point of the albums that you know i would consider amongst my favorite of all time at this stage and and one world is definitely there i yeah there's a similar trajectory in the sense that they both emerge from the british the small british folk clubs or i think harper was slightly before martin a couple of years yeah a little bit older maybe and the other thing that's interesting is that both of them very subtly were quite innovative and imaginative in their use of say guitar effects and so on both of them used echoplex echoplex on a christian guitar yeah but you're right that the big difference to a certain extent is that harper i think felt more comfortable with the psychedelic underground and the progressive underground to come whereas martin you can hear drawing from soul and jazz music to a certain extent and and even kind of traditional love ballads you know there's almost kind of classic 40s jazz ballads there's something in his work this is a great album because i suppose it's it's transitional in that it's still a very organic album but he's experimenting with quite vibrant jazz funk in the way almost of mars davis on the corner there are a couple of tracks that seem like vocal versions of of mars davis on the corner a couple of his most exquisite tender ballads um danny thompson is still with him at this stage so it goes from electric funk outs to very beautiful ballads to experiments with echoplex volume pedals and drum machines which are quite unusual for singer-songwriters at that time and i suppose the title track one world and of course you know the small hours the small yeah small
Speaker 1hours for me that's that's the precedent for for spirit of eden talk talk but it's interesting you mentioned on the corner mars davis i i always hear in a silent way as being the big influence okay on this record in fact there are tracks on this album sunday's child that i would something like root love off sunday's child is more on the corner to me than the tracks this is a very luminous kind of the the sound of the roads the production the echo but i can see what you mean also big muff is on this record isn't it but the songs that i come away with at least i remember most in my mind couldn't love you more so simple just it's just acoustic guitar and voice and in many respects it's the kind of material you've been doing for years before this but somehow it's invested with a little bit more on this record um a little bit more soul a little bit more feel a little bit more of someone that's lived through something um he's no longer the young man he's more i mean how old was he here like 30 maybe he was wasn't old at all but he sounds suddenly grizzled reflective was he going through his divorce at this time that was more i think the next record following but this must be the beginning of of feeling that and then a track like small hours which in its conception is so simple and so stripped back this to me is is like what miles did with zavinol's theme on in a silent way taking out in a sense all of the meat just to leave the skeleton of the music and the genius of of i think they the story i heard is that they recorded it somewhere where there was a big lake yeah and they put a pair of speakers on one side of the lake and they played the track through these speakers and they they put the microphones on the other side of the lake so they captured this space yeah and these birds well you can hear the birds you can hear the birds yeah and you can hear just the little ripples of water as the birds and they recorded this at dawn or something and it's just this sense of space and the sense of sound in air um the sound of the guitar in air and is this the beginning of the john martin it's very easy to caricature in a way it's the john martin where he's not even trying to enunciate the words or had he been had been doing this before he's kind of always had a little bit of
Speaker 2that he certainly had a little bit of it but this is more pronounced it's very slurred yeah um i mean there's an amorphous quality i think where it comes back you know you're right in a silent way or sunrise liquidity or the first weather report album have that similar amorphousness there's a kind of wonderfully airy atmosphere to this but what also makes it interesting is that for a singer songwriter album it shifts from song to song every song has a different soundscape sweet
Speaker 1little mystery great pop song and but small hours for me is the is the is the moment on this record the eight minute track with the stevie winwood moog so yes it's it's almost like it's like a painting it's like a painter that's just putting the tiniest of brush strokes on the canvas and saying that's all it needs which again get your drinks ready folks is a very mark hollis thing isn't it that that seems to me what i think of when i think of spirit of eden and laughing well i
Speaker 2think it's significant isn't it that phil brown was the engineer was
Speaker 1he oh i didn't know that
Speaker 2the john martin ah interesting and the
Speaker 1talk talk absolutely yeah so he knew what he was talking about when it came to brush strokes musical brush strokes yeah there's there's that that sense that it's almost like um it's almost like a demo it's almost like it's incomplete somehow you can barely understand what he's saying he's it sounds like he's not even on mic he's off mic he's singing these words and he's like almost off mic yeah if i remember rightly it also the track starts mid-flow doesn't it the tape sort of as if the performance has been happening even before the tape started rolling and the tape just starts rolling and it sounds like they're in the middle of something and i love that it's almost like capturing lightning in a bottle capturing that moment this has been going on before we've started the tapes and it's going to carry on after we stop the tapes and he was
Speaker 2great live during that period as well he did a lot of gigs with acoustic guitar through echo plex with drum machine it's such an interesting sound and that to a certain extent was explored by jurity column and ben watt in different ways in the 80s really i mean obviously jurity was slightly earlier um and i do like winwood's contribution that that moog sorry so so sublime and i see i really like steve winwood's album this
Speaker 1is probably the only well let's talk about that because that's the next one on the list steve winwood's i'm guessing it's his debut solo record yes but
Speaker 2it's probably the only solo work of his i like in some ways it's a companion piece to um john barleycorn in it's six quite long pieces and there's a very organic sound and he's just on great form the only problem perhaps with the album is that there's nothing spectacularly memorable it is it's an album as an experience to an extent it's six quite long tracks with winwood in great voice lovely organic keyboard sounds and grooves and he's pretty much doing you know most of it
Speaker 1as well i mean i don't know this record but what the way you're describing him is the way i feel about some of the later traffic records yes that they're there it's a wonderful sound but there's nothing terrible the pop sensibility doesn't seem to be there there's nothing terribly memorable about them um but it's very nice place to visit while you're
Speaker 2listening to it yeah i mean ark of a diver is undoubtedly um in some ways better arranged and more memorable but i just much prefer this album as an experience to lose myself i need to listen to in the way that i do late traffic and of course you know john barleycorn which i think is a it's a marvelous well that that is a very memorable
Speaker 1record yeah so just to conclude on on this uh this category singer sorry kevin coin's beautiful extremes which was a collection of outtakes from the mid-70s kevin coin we've talked about also on this show before neil young's american stars and bars not commonly considered to be one of neil young's best records of the 70s but it does have obviously like a hurricane on it which has become such a sort of standard um for neil young i really like the record i really
Speaker 2well i think will to love is
Speaker 1great as well so it's great i mean neil young didn't make a bad record in in the 70s uh basically now here's an interesting one um you've put this on the list tim i don't know this record obviously i'm very familiar with some of the songs he wrote as recorded by other people but jack brell uh brell you say you've made a point to say say that this was his final album so i'm assuming he passed away this year or soon after the
Speaker 2album that he wrote as he was dying of cancer and it has for us it's significant probably more in the momus version of it it's got see a friend in tears oh wow
Speaker 1i love my missus
Speaker 2version of that and the brell version it is equally heartbreaking it's the identical uh melody i mean yeah i just think he's you know to a certain extent for an artist who produced so many timeless classics he's sort of forgotten in a way his own album his own music isn't listened to that frequently it seems and is that because his voice is quite a difficult thing to enjoy i think it's probably because of the language more than his voice really
Speaker 1yeah fair enough yeah that's probably true i should have thought of that yeah um so let's move on to um well you know one let's let's move on to some meat here quite literally north american chart busting sophisticates yeah now what do you mean by
Speaker 2that tim well again it's something that is the antithesis of punk that while you've got that clash album you've got the brutal sex pistols album you have these enormous american hits which are just full of beautiful production every sound every detail you know the bass notes john mcvee on rumors the chord voicings on asia these albums sound amazing they're beautifully constructed and they are just the opposite you know they're this wonderful wonderfully painted surface yeah i mean you don't get
Speaker 1much bigger than rumors do you no one of the biggest selling records of all time but also on this list another record that it's hard to think of anything many records that are bigger bat out of hell meatloaf yeah perhaps not as beautifully produced as as um there's a todd rungren production
Speaker 2production bat out of hell is really interesting because in some ways it mines bruce springsteen and it exaggerates a certain operatic element because there is a melodramatic operatic and opera of the streets in springsteen and this takes it to the nth level and it's quite funny as well you know there are some
Speaker 1there are some funny lines yeah some very misogynistic sexist lines but uh you know but but also i think what's interesting about them is that there's a there's a there's definitely the tradition of musicals here i mean some of these shows are constructed like a horror show yeah very very much and of course me was in the original movie adaptation of rocky horror show but the the title track for example uh paradise by the dashboard light these are almost like little mini the little mini short stories yeah and musically they they go through several different quote-unquote scenes as well to kind of accentuate that sort of music musical aspect to them but phenomenally successful i think it's one of the most successful biggest selling records of all time isn't it still to this day i have to i don't particularly like the record i mean i've i've i heard it at the time i've occasionally listened to it over the the intervening years because it is such a it is so it is part of the canon of of you know 70s rock music well i
Speaker 2think as well you know meatloaf was a great performer and was very likable in interview and jim steinman was always very bright and very engaging in interview so i think they were quite unique characters and i guess if you're working with todd rungren to a certain extent you have to have a certain level of wit and sophistication so i think that they were very unfairly done down because you know meatloaf in a way was as much an actor as he was a singer and was very good at it and i think that you know there's kind of they're unfairly dismissed as being dumb when i think they're far from done oh i don't think it's dumb i don't think it's dumb
Speaker 1it's very hammy yeah i don't mean ham as in the ham i mean hammy in the sense that it's very like a bat out of hell yeah he could have done that actually he could do no it's very hammy in the sense it's very dramatic very over and i think that's the bit i don't like i've never liked musicals but when i listen to it i'm like you know what this i can see i can hear how this would have really stood out at the time as something really fresh really different so let's talk about rumors tim so specifically about rumors because this is a phenomenon this record i have to be honest and say i've never quite understood why it has been as massive as it's been because it is is it the best-selling album of all time it must be up there in the top
Speaker 2five it's got to be up there in the top five and it's one of the only albums i think dark side of the moon possibly is there as well what it's just continually been in the charts since it's been released it's insane i mean it isn't saying that people don't know about it but it's insane people are still discovering it this week as it will appear and young
Speaker 1kids i mean a very good friend of mine brian who runs a record store in steven's revolution records he said he can't keep copies of rumors in stock long enough and it's kids coming in to buy as much as old geezers like me and it's still appealing and i have to say i've never quite understood quite listen i think it's a brilliant record don't get me wrong although personally i'd say i'd take you're saying it's
Speaker 2a pacific ocean blue aren't you no i'm not and of course lindsey mcvee was going out with dennis wilson i think during who's lindsey who's lindsey
Speaker 1lindsey mcvee what a schoolboy era that's terrible oh my god we can't edit that in i've got to leave that in christine mcvee lindsey mcvee christine mcvee anyway i personally would take tusk over rumors and i suspect you probably would be the same but i can see why rumors would have been the more you know mainstream the bigger mainstream success because he hasn't got the the angles and the curve balls that tusk has it's a very slick very smooth descendant of laurel canyon singer songwriter sensibility another record on this list here john joni mitchell's don juan's reckless daughter which interestingly was seen as a bit of a creative misfire and a commercial uh failure for joni what fleetwood maca doing on rumors isn't that different to what she was doing on caught and spark no really it's a bit of a creative misfire is it i mean that is to me that's the precedent or perhaps the previous fleet would make but why rumors why this record suddenly becomes the biggest record in history i don't know it's got
Speaker 2to be you know timing to a degree i mean i really like fleetwood maca through the years in the sense that again like the bgs they're one of these bands that completely transform themselves and in the case of fleetwood maca unrecognizably transform themselves the peter green era is fascinating the bob welsh yeah i love it it's fascinating and the very first album with lindsey buckingham and stevie nicks is great and he's only a couple of degrees different from this i mean that did do phenomenally well too but not on the scale of this but then so did the world i think the thing is that it's always seen that they were actually doing quite badly but the green albums were successes and actually the bob welsh albums were getting in the top 40 in the states it wasn't like this was a wasted band these they were having some degree of success with two of the best albums in the world and they were doing quite well because you know there's even wasn't there an imitation fleetwood mac around the same time there's a i've heard about that yeah like there was an imitation deep purple as well you know these bands were so successful they were spawning um imitations um it's difficult i think it's i think it's a really good album it's a great sounding album it's even quite adventurous you know when you're talking about you know the chain um for this laurel canyon singer-songwriter album it does try a few different things the rhythm section is really good i mean one of the things really underrated is the fleetwood mac you know themselves mick fleetwood john mcv they're a great rhythm section and they're great to me because they're so appropriate they work to the song and and every note every detail is right for the song and they've got a great sound and as tusk proves when the song demands it they're good musicians it's it's the ringo
Speaker 1nick mason thing isn't it is that you would never say they're they're you know technically they're they're not the most incredible drummers but they always played exactly what they needed to play and what the song demanded and it wasn't always the obvious thing either there's a great video if you can see on instagram of this guy basically he's talking about nick mason strumming on many of the classic floyd tracks and he's saying basically this is what most drummers would have done and he plays and you say oh yeah that's what you know if you heard that piece of music that's what most drummers would do this is what nick mason actually did yeah and you see or you hear how important nick mason's approach to the drums on those songs was for defining how they sound and it's something you would it would never occur to you unless you had it kind of demonstrated to you in that way this is what most drummers would do this is the the standard thing to do presented with a song like money or shine on you crazy diamond or this is what a drummer would do a proper quote-unquote trained drummer this is what nick mason did fucking jim genius and I think you're right and it's the same with Mick Fleetwood
Speaker 2And I think it's on rumours in abundance, really, that as much as it is this smooth, beautifully produced, mainstream, post-Laurel Canyon, singer-songwriter album, it's quite imaginative. There are still surprises. There's a lovely organic sound. And of course, you know, I suppose the psychodrama surrounding the album is part of the reason for its enduring success as well.
Speaker 1Would that really have mattered to most people buying rumours in 1977? Not at the time. They wouldn't have been aware of it anyway. I was aware of it in 77, but I was aware of it. Yeah, but you're a music nerd, Tim. You're a music nerd. We're talking about the kind of people who couldn't tell you the name of any member of Fleetwood Mac.
Speaker 2When they'd call someone Lindsay McVie, something like that. Someone that would call them Lindsay McVie.
Speaker 1Someone as ignorant as that. Roger Gilmore. No, but you know what I mean? 99% of the people buying rumours in 1977 wouldn't have had a clue who Lindsay Buckingham were, or Lindsay McVie for that matter.
Speaker 2Do you know what I think Fleetwood Mac have also got that I think Floyd have? Massive Attack have? For a band that were so big, there's a mystique. And I remember that when I first heard them, and it was 77, and it was rumours, it was a disco. I was on holiday in Devon, and the DJ was playing rumours. And he was playing Hotel California and rumours. This was the cutting edge of Devon disco. Wow, cutting edge. And I was kind of intrigued. And I remember being, with both covers, but certainly with Fleetwood Mac rumours. ELO was still a bit too rare.
Speaker 1Racy for Devon at that time. It was a little too racy. Too racy, yeah.
Speaker 2Racy were obviously too racy.
Speaker 1Too racy for Racy.
Speaker 2For Devon. But the cover, there was something quite enigmatic. There was a mystique. Again, certainly, there are a number of Fleetwood Mac covers that have the same level of atmosphere and mystery that you get with Hypnosis's artwork, with Peter Savile's artwork for Factory, Vaughan Oliver's work for 4AD. I think they had that, as well as the mainstream. There was a really nice sense of design. So the artwork, the look of them. There was something quite compelling and otherworldly, as well as being rooted and accessible in Fleetwood Mac. There was also a kind of maturity with Fleetwood Mac, bizarrely, given that they were quite chaotic in their personal lives. There was certainly a sense of them having lived quite different, sophisticated lives. They had adult lives, certainly for me as a 13-year-old observing Fleetwood Mac.
Speaker 1There's certainly, I mean, it's a fascinating soap opera, the whole Fleetwood Mac story. Let's talk about an album I mentioned a moment ago, the Joni album from this year, because this is an album, as I mentioned, that was seen as a bit of a commercial misfire for Joni Mitchell. I love it. It's the combination of the sort of world music, pieces like The Tenth Planet, which is just a percussion piece, and then The Sixteenth. It's a 15-minute long orchestral piano ballad. For me, I tell you what the best comparison I have for this record is Elton John's album from the previous year, Blue Moves, which again was a double album, which was seen as a bit of a commercial misfire for him. And the double album has allowed her to be more indulgent in a way that I personally love. You know, I think if I'd been a Joni fan at the time, I would have been probably bored if she'd just made Hijira Part 2 or Court and Spark Part 3 or whatever. And she comes out with, this record, which isn't that at all. And as I say, the side-long piece, Paprika Plains, which is kind of the centrepiece of the record, of which the 10 minutes in the middle is instrumental. I mean, this is a very brave and strange move for her to make at this point in her career, isn't it? But probably an essential one as well.
Speaker 2Yeah, and very brave given the era, although obviously she would not be surrounded necessarily by the cultural and musical currents of the UK. We were. It's certainly one of my favourites. I mean, it's a great run of albums. And my favourite Joni albums are probably His Singer Summer Lawns and Hijira, but this is really close. And His Singer Summer Lawns is very eclectic and also involves African rhythms, electronic experiments. That's true, yeah.
Speaker 1So there has been precedent in this.
Speaker 2I think that, weirdly, Hijira's the odd one out, isn't it? That His Singer Summer Lawns is all over the place. Again, a lot of jazz. A lot of jazz influence. So it's similarly eclectic to Don Juan. And then in the middle, you get this very consistent album in Hijira, which, to a certain extent, in a very, and I mean this in a complimentary way, it's a mono mood.
Speaker 1No, no, I know what you mean, yeah. The musical palette is quite similar from one track to the next. Very much. Whereas on Don Juan and His Singer Summer Lawns, it's all over the place. From track to track.
Speaker 2I think Don Juan, part of its poor reputation, is because a couple of the tracks, if you remember, I think they're on her live Miles of Isles album, but at least one of them is. One of them is also a kind of, it's coyote with different lyrics and a slightly different tempo. So there's a sense of her recycling and reusing ideas. I don't think it makes the album any weaker. Paprika Plains is and was a remarkable piece of music and it's got some of her best acoustic ballads, and experiments. So for me, it's a really satisfying and strong album, but perhaps there's a sense that maybe some of this material is slightly recycled. Odd that it never seems to hamper Animals, because as we said, you know, half of Animals, maybe over half of Animals, was written before Wish You Were Here, but nobody ever refers to that as a recycled, exhausted Pink Floyd album. But with Mitchell, there was this sense of throwing, throwing everything against the wall and not having a sense of focus.
Speaker 1I think you and I both, because we're both music nerds and students of music, and we love, you know, we love to sort of step back in a way and observe the trajectory of an artist's career. We do tend to be, I suppose, more sympathetic than most people would. The more casual music lover, we're more sympathetic to the, the folly that artists would throw into their catalogue, you know, the album that is almost willfully uncommercial, that is shooting off in all sorts of directions, some of which is successful and some of which isn't. And I would be the first to admit that not everything on this record is successful, but I love the fact that she did it anyway. But as misfires go,
Speaker 2it's still pretty amazing. Yeah, this pretty amazing has got some of her best lyrics. And Paprika Plains, is totally unique in her catalogue. You know, it has this kind of Copeland sweep. It's kind of American classical music meets singer songwriter, and she never did it again. And there are a couple of elements on it. I think Ricky Lee Jones, the magazine where she almost reclaimed some of the spirit of Paprika Plains, but you don't really hear it, you know, for such a unique and ambitious piece of music and in, in an influential artist's career, it's like a dead end creatively.
Speaker 1Yeah. But that's great. Cotton Avenue, talk to me, Jerry Gray, some great Silky Veils of Arda, beautiful, beautiful songs.
Speaker 2I mean, again, Pistorius, his bass playing on this album. Yeah, he definitely elevated. As he did with Hijira and a bit like John Martin, Roy Harper, she again is using a lot of kind of echo effects on the guitar, doing some quite interesting cross rhythms on guitar.
Speaker 1And she's, I guess what I'm getting at, with here with this talking about this record is it would have been so easy for her to do, and probably commercially would have been massive for her to have made in 1977, caught and spark part two. And she could have had a record as big as rumors, potentially, potentially. This is all,
Speaker 2this is all sort of, I mean, blue is her rumors to an extent. Colton spark is almost her.
Speaker 1Well, blue is, but blue is still very straight back. Court and spark has got that smooth kind of West coast production.
Speaker 2Sorry. I meant in terms of sort of in the public perception. Oh yes. Yeah.
Speaker 1Yeah. But I think if she'd made a record with a sort of sound palette of court and spark and those kind of economy in terms of the hooks and the songs and the songwriting she'd made that record in 1977, she may have been able to run. And again, this is all, you know, this is all just luck being right place, right time. Who knew that rumors was going to be so perfectly timed in 1977 and caught and spark maybe kept coming out three years earlier. It was still, a very successful record, of course, but it wasn't as successful perhaps as it might have been. Had it been recent 77? Yeah. No, I think you're right. Let's talk about some of these other records. Uh, Billy Joel's, the stranger again, another artist that has never been particularly fashionable, but you just kept to admire the sheer quality of, of the songs and the songwriting and the work.
Speaker 2Don't you? Well, a bit like Elton John, he's a fantastic vocalist, fantastic piano player, instrumentalist, and a great songwriter. He's got all the skills. And I quite like the Billy Joel origins because wasn't he in some kind of rock band or something? It was more like a sort of vanilla fudge heavy organ dominated rock band is how he kind of made his debut in the industry. But yeah, he is, he's a real talent and this has got some of his strongest songs. And again, he doesn't shy away from ambitious arrangements and mini suites.
Speaker 1He's also got that sort of story again that's a blue collar storytelling thing going on hasn't he through you know scenes from an italian restaurant and moving on but then at the same time he can cut all that out and just write the most beautiful you know sentimental song like just
Speaker 2the way you are i mean i wrote that as another one like nobody does it better that i bought at the time and i realized in retrospect one of the things that i was probably drawn to was one of joel's intentions because you know the big influence behind just the way you are no i'm not in love and i'm not in love was one of my favorite songs of all time and it's that gentle electric piano and those looped voices the choral voices which you hear on just the way you are so it's slightly cheesy that i'm not i'm not in love has the sense of irony and it's slightly more epic but it's it's a almost equal to it i think it's a great song
Speaker 1it's to me it's it's this it's the same thing as how deep is your love by the bee gees yeah yeah it's it's just so good it's so good that it doesn't matter about the cheesiness of it yeah look i even like just like a woman it's a great song it's a great song also yeah she's always a woman you mean she's a woman to
Speaker 2me yeah just like i'm going there actually on the bob lindsey mcvee lindsey mcvee just like a woman by bob joe so many
Speaker 1errors on this blimey so a few other records on this list uh let's let's try and move through these uh jackson brown's running on empty i know nothing about this record that
Speaker 2was one of his big breakthroughs had huge god you sound bored
Speaker 1with it already you said i said jackson brown's right yeah it's one of his albums well you remember stay the big hit no i don't know anything about jackson except didn't he go out with nico at one point yes he did no you're right he did go with
Speaker 2nico so did john cooper didn't he write some songs he wrote some songs on the brilliant chelsea girls yeah i love that i love that record
Speaker 1too but that's not 1977 that's
Speaker 21967 jackson brown's one of those artists i suppose that i've always felt i should like because he's clearly gifted he's got the sound in the era i like he's just passed me by i've listened to
Speaker 1should i tell you should i tell you who else sorry to interrupt should i tell you who else is like that for me james taylor exactly same for me i think i should like him great songwriting went out with jenny mitchell and both of them went out joining maybe that's the thing maybe maybe that's the secret maybe that's why we don't like him because we're jealous because they both went out with jenny but then david crosby also went with jenny and graham nash and we love the cross they're brilliant and the nash but we don't like jackson i don't dislike it but i mean everything i've ever heard jackson brown is just yeah i mean
Speaker 2i mean fire and rain all right so but yeah yeah there's there's nothing in their music i can personally get a grip on or lose myself in is it just a little bit
Speaker 1i mean certainly i feel this with james taylor it's a little bit too middle of the road for me i always feel this with the eagles as well it's like for me the eagles are the band that took neil young's harvest whereas neil headed for the ditch the eagles kind of took that and it's just a little bit too slick and and there's not enough for me to
Speaker 2grab onto i tightly understand although with the eagles the slightly more because i think don henley had quite a characterful voice and they have a couple of boys of summer is a great song it's brilliant thing yeah but i think as well there's a kind of bitterness and an epic quality to say hotel california i'd be quite happy if i
Speaker 1never hear hotel california again as long as i live okay i just want to put that out there i'm not saying it's bad yeah but it goes into the same category for me as free bird and i would say don't fear the reaper except i still like don't fear the reaper when i hear it it goes in the same category as as free bird for me as yes it's brilliant but it's not as good as free bird yes it's epic yes it's classic rock at its best i don't want to hear it ever again thank you very
Speaker 2much okay no i like a few eagles pieces and also quite like the fact that i don't want to hear
Speaker 1smoke on the water ever again they did a
Speaker 2piece called the disco strangler i'd
Speaker 1prefer to hear that in 1979 yeah okay so you know i don't want to hear smoke on the water ever again yeah i don't want to hear hotel california ever again not because they're bad you understand what i'm saying yeah they're just too ubiquitous for me i cannot hear hotel california ever again sorry but when would you have been exposed to it you hear it in every single restaurant you go to in america okay any bar you're going you'll hear hotel california within about 20 minutes well
Speaker 2i remember being in america for a prolonged period and hearing fly like an eagle in supermarkets a
Speaker 1lot yeah um no so and another another band that kind of fall into this although you really like them and you've mentioned them about 47 times already um in these episodes on 97 in fact you seem to shoehorn them in at every available opportunity mark hollis and talk steely dan oh yeah steely dan explain to me the appeal of steely
Speaker 2dan tim well one of the appeals and apparently the kids love the dan at the moment do they there's a danaisance going on it's happening okay the kids don't dislike
Speaker 1them don't get me wrong i don't dislike them yeah i've got a couple of their albums i've got those they're quite nice they're very clever bit jazzy i like babylon sisters i love that song babylon sisters is amazing that's the only song i can get really excited about with steely dan um but there are some to some people they are like a religion explain to me tim asia is their most popular album isn't it or it's their most highly
Speaker 2rated it is the most highly rated and arguably their commercial peak as well my favorite albums are asia and gaucho which are the most studio oriented especially gaucho where they even have drum machine right built for the album and i think they're great records gaucho i think roxy music's avalon owes a lot to gaucho as well in terms of its lushness and lushness and precision and space yeah uh gaucho is an album apart in many ways because although it has the complicated jazz chord voicings there's a lot of space and i really liked uh the title track of the royal scam um there's some great songs there's some great songs there's some great songs there's some great songs earlier pieces but asia to me is where it comes together we're talking about in 77 how a lot of you know out of the blue being an example where suddenly perhaps it hits at the right time and i think asia is one of those albums for steely dan where they've sort of eliminated any of the rough edges that existed beforehand in any of the naivety and of course the tales of the making of the album are legendary with the number of guitar soloists and instrumentalists that they use to get the sound they wanted and i think that one of the reasons for the popularity of the band is partly that they are quite gruff scruffy new yorkers making this pristine yacht rock there's a kind of in this case the image works for them because it's such a non-image that is almost antithetical to the music itself to the beautiful pristine music you have these ragged new york beatniks and the one thing i've always found quite curious about steely dan is that they loved beat poetry and beat literature and they love jazz music and although you can hear jazz harmonies in their music and you hear how they've listened to certain key blue notes or miles albums their music is as far from the raw spirit of beat and jazz as you can get
Speaker 1right it's very finely chiseled and yeah
Speaker 2it's not spontaneous at all not remotely it's the opposite it's really interesting to me that yeah how their raison d'etre their core influences what they worship they miss on every level but they create their own unique smooth vocabulary in asia you know the title track which is always seen as their kind of jazz fusion masterpiece with a brilliant steve gad drum track i know the song
Speaker 1yeah i mean it is amazing yeah
Speaker 2absolutely yeah yeah um there's a certain similarity to joni mitchell you know when joni mitchell delved into jazz voicings on hissing of summer lawns you know the title track for example i think it's that i think there's a level of sophistication but there's also a cynicism undercutting the clean surfaces of the music so they're a band of contradictions you know is is one of the only ways i can explain some of the appeal perhaps
Speaker 1i mean i definitely admire it i don't want to give you the idea i don't like it when i listen to the records i definitely admire it because it is very clever in in some ways i almost seem it almost like the equivalent of 10 cc yeah very clever but a little bit arch and a little bit detached from what they're doing which kind of as you say kind of works for it in a way but there's a the the level of sonic excellence is just through the ceiling i mean it's just sounds sonically phenomenal i've just never personally been able to connect as deeply as some people do with i mean i have i have a few of the records um and i enjoy them when i listen to but but they're not records i reach for very i
Speaker 2think i always preferred 10 cc and still do and partly it's because 10 cc like the beatles and as you explained with the yellow as well every song was a different sonic world every song was a very different story and every song in certain cases could have been by a different band although there was an overall 10 cc or beatles sound you take an average album by them whether it's sergeant peppers or how dare you these could have been songs by 10 different bands in some ways whereas steely down have got a much more uniform sound they don't really deviate they might sing in character and have short stories tennessee c enacted they almost become audio plays
Speaker 1okay okay great so um just a couple of other entries on this list and then maybe we should wrap up this third episode so we've also got this year santana's moonflower which was a sort of two-thirds live third new material crosby stills nash uh csn came out this year grateful dead's terrapin station i love terrapin station okay do you want to talk a little bit
Speaker 2about that well terrapin station i suppose is um one of the albums where they do sort of become almost a progressive rock band although there's disco on this as well i think it's all this funk i don't know the record so i can't um but yeah terrapin station the second side is a 16 17 minute epic with orchestra it's their paprika plains really interesting and i really like the album before this blues for allah as well to my favorite grateful dead no i love and this again it's a grateful dead album apart and god knows you know again like with paprika planes for joni why they're making a 17 minute multi-sectioned epic with orchestra that's got some of their their best music they're an interesting band
Speaker 1because ultimately they were a kind of you know and i don't say this as a criticism they were essentially a bar and blues band who had absorbed all of these other things to create this really fascinating hybrid you know some ways the albums are really just just sort of punctuation points in what was a career being a live act and the whole jam band mentality was really at the core of what they did but yeah they made some fascinating records and i think it's a really good example of that yeah i think it's a good example of that yeah i think it's a good example of that i don't know this particular record but i'm a big fan of blues for allah so there's a kind of hole in my knowledge i should go and check that out yeah yeah great okay tim so we've still got we're going to get through the rest in part four i can tell you that we're getting close to the final straight one more episode should should tie things up nicely so please join us on episode four for 1977 as we finally attempt to put a lid on this fascinating inspiring year for music for now goodbye from me and goodbye from tim bye-bye you
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