Speaker 1so let's do the drinking game favorites okay so having analyzed all 50 episodes which artists do you think we mention most of all on the podcast okay now i'll give you a few bubbling under first bubbling under these didn't make the top 10 david sylvan yeah kate bush i'm surprised rupert hein again kevin kevin coin neil young todd todd rundgren swans not the swans as you keep incorrectly pronouncing it on the podcast there's no definite article swan you
Speaker 2actually said cupid and sight don't start and i was going to correct you saying well it's actually psyche but don't
Speaker 1say that okay right dead can dance this is still bubbling under okay dead can dance uh tom waits xtc bill nelson miles davis prefab sprout slash paddy mccalloon and 10cc godly and cream okay more of them later when we get to the the uh quintessential album years albums okay right here is the top 10 of the most ubiquitous there's a word i've probably used a lot yeah ubiquitous artists on the album years podcast coming in at number 10 sleep sneaking in under the wire i'm probably the most obscure of all these but we mention him a lot yeah momus momus now has any one of you ever heard of him i've heard of him i've heard of him i've heard of him i don't know if you've ever heard of him but i don't know if you want to hear investigated moments as a result of us mentioning him too much on the podcast one person and you're now a massive fan right yeah i i loved the enthusiasm there yeah yeah number nine i've actually put these two together because they in some ways they are synonymous john martin and nick drake two of the greatest british singer-songwriters ever again neither of them what you would call ever artists that crossed over to the mainstream but they are synonymous with john martin and nick drake they're synonymous with john martin and nick drake they're synonymous with john martin and nick drake they're synonymous with john martin and nick drake their albums have become beloved because they are so spiritual so beautiful so pure and i think they they continue to be rediscovered generation after generation don't they nick drake i mean arguably more famous now than he's ever been yeah well
Speaker 2certainly during his lifetime
Speaker 1sold yeah um but john martin interesting one isn't it because this is a great example and we'll come on to another example in a minute where the music almost belies the the unpleasantness of the person that makes it yeah um you and i have both read books about john martin he wasn't a very nice man was that's putting it mildly isn't it number eight another perhaps person that is not known for their affability van morrison ah we talk about van a lot on the show don't we he's he's kind of a real outlier isn't he i mean he's still out there he's still doing he's more prolific than ever he just kind of has carved out this incredibly unique position for himself and
Speaker 2the music still has an amazing voice as well i mean the thing is he's late 70s and still and he's still raging against the world as well and it's still raging against the world yes in in controversial fashion as always so i think on the very
Speaker 1first episode that we ever did we deliberately picked it so that we could talk about van morrison's common one well this i think
Speaker 2was kind of picking an album that we both adored that was ignored by even van morrison fans i think every book i'd ever read on him detested this album this album was pretentious meandering an insult to the references he used whereas for us it was mystical spiritual ambitious and a kind of prelude to talk talks spirit of eden and laughingstock and coming out of something like miles davis in a silent way this was purely spiritually motivated music and it's interesting that i had a conversation with somebody who worked with van morrison and she managed a studio that he owned in in beckington and somerset and said that the best of him came out through his music that he realized how difficult he was but if you wanted to hear the soul of him just listen to the music and that was where he was more articulate and and i'm sure that some people you know music is this escape that life is difficult but the music is a cure one gig i did it with a copy of common one and made me sign it because they'd heard it mentioned on the album years and had liked van morrison but never bought the album absolutely fell in love with it and they got that it was this kind of missing link between in a silent way and spirit of eden that it was one of those albums there was a complete outlier you know this was 1980 at a time when a lot of music had become a lot more urban a lot more political a lot more produced but he's funny he's like
Speaker 1isn't it because he just is the antithesis he almost he kind of i mean he is obviously a big name everyone kind of knows van morrison everyone's heard of van morrison but he kind of exists in this little bubble in the mainstream doesn't he yeah where he's just out on his own and he's still he's never really made a bad record you know he just keeps making these records that sound like van um obviously we have our favorites this gentleman here mentioned veed and fleece you know obviously which is another for a lot of people they they wouldn't i think similarly they wouldn't know that record either we could we could have easily picked that one too yeah fantastic record yeah and a underrated unknown record certainly in terms of his catalog number seven my favorite band the greatest band of all time pink floyd yes thank you the greatest band of all time i have said many times for me pink floyd was my beatles i never really understood well that's not that's not fair i didn't understand the beatles i understand what's great about them i was never that much obsessive about the beatles pink floyd were my beatles they still are my favorite band i have so much of them in my dna whether i want it or not they come out i mean i can't tell you the amount of times i've written or made a new piece of music and i've played it to to my wife or to my friend i said listen to this you've never heard me do anything like this before and they'll say yeah very floydy no no because it's just i guess it's in my it's in my dna i can't i can't help it you know in much the same way that all your music ends up sounding like chicory tip it just comes out
Speaker 2you want it or not well it was you know sing chicory tip on top of the pops it was i know so pink floyd well pink floyd one of mine i mean one of the interesting things they say when we first knew each other we'd send each other very eclectic tapes with the swans amongst other things but you know pink floyd and donna summer were two influences that we both had when we were very very young and for me it was because i heard it i think a friend's dad had a cassette collection of tangerine dream mike oldfield pink floyd led zeppelin and we used to listen to this as we were playing sabutio games and um it just seeped in and certainly for me i think this wish you were here was the first album i heard that and atom hot mother in the same session and they were beguiling and it was it was a combination of the atmosphere of the music the intensity the emotions but also the cover artwork that kind of gave it a dimension of otherness to me
Speaker 1there's another aspect to it also which is that pink floyd were my gateway to experimental avant-garde music i heard i heard i was like 13 years old and the second record of that particularly i mean much like revolution nine would have maybe been uh you know a lot of people's introduction to you know experimental music in the context of that record amagama was that for me that was where i first hit experimental techniques and led me to this whole you know rabbit hole of carline stockhausen and you know noise music so pink floyd for me have been you know important in that respect too right number six tim and i think this i might be going out on a limb here but i'm going to say this is probably your number one artist of all time all things told which is david bowie would i be right would i say on balance it may well be yeah so we talk about bowie a lot and i think the important thing about bowie is that what we love about him is this sense of constantly confronting expectations of his audience yeah and that's why for us he's such a touchstone for the album is this idea that you don't simply give your audience more of the same you really don't reinvent yourself you change the people you work with you change the goal post you move the goal post all the time and yet he pulled it off almost every time at least for a long time he was pulling it off every every time yeah and i
Speaker 2think also there is a you know one of the things he was often dismissed as being is a kind of a fabrication which of course he himself refers to this but i think through these fabrications and through these masks there was a tremendous passion and intensity you know i think this was quite an emotional insecure intense person and however much he disguised that it came through the music and that communicated to an audience on a level i think it's the thing the music communicated on several levels both often as excellent commercial music or excellent music that had shifted in terms of its genre but equally i think there was a kind of a solid emotional core i mean my introduction was i think at school somebody was selling tapes they got from saudi arabia for about 12 and a half pence and the half pence was important and uh low i got from this because i thought the cover was intriguing and that but that's interesting
Speaker 1something else you touched on another thing about Bowie is that he was somebody that managed to pull off all the time this magic trick which very few artists in history really have ever pulled it off I'll tell you who does do it now is Radiohead is in maintaining a massive global success commercial level of success and yet making quite strange experimental music and I think that's something that he pulled off for almost the entirety of the 70s that you get these albums which are really I mean ashes to ashes it's a very strange fashion very strange pop single so he's kind of walk a sound of vision he's kind of walking that tight rope between being an experimental artist but still being able to maintain the popular sort of vote if you like and I can I can count on one hand you know artists have done that over the years really Prince probably did it in the 80s Taylor Swift again I mean you know albums like I know you're not a big fan Tim but Folklore you know the albums that she put out during Covid they endeared her to the sort of hipster alternative crowd and that is something that very few artists have ever managed to pull off and still maintain their status as the biggest pop star in the world I am a Taylor fan guys you can probably tell I really got a lot of time for her number five the Bowser's old buddy Mr Eno he's got his finger in a lot of pies Mr Eno to be fair so it's hard not to reference Eno he's produced everything that he's done and he's got a lot of music he's worked with everyone including David Bowie of course so we do mention the Eno a fair bit on the
Speaker 2show well I think one of the things that links a lot of the artists that we're drawn to people like Eno Bowie Fripp The Ham and so on you know these are people that were at home in the 1960s the early 1970s and managed to very naturally transfer punk new wave without compromise and I think it's partly because there's something in their character that was there even in the 60s well I'll tell you what I think it translates because he's not he's not a musician he's an idea he's a conceptualist Fripp's a musician and I think he managed to also true navigate you
Speaker 1know but also the thing about Eno was he was very quick to align himself with the the punk movement the new wave movement so he kind of rode that whole
Speaker 2thing but during the time of punk of course you know one of his most important albums that became more important afterwards is Ambient One. So you know in some ways during the time of punk he'd already gone beyond that and the same with Bowie I think that he'd anticipated it and was actually slightly bored by what that music was. And number four in
Speaker 1with a bullet Talk Talk we do talk about Talk Talk we talk about Talk Talk we do quite a lot on the show don't we why do we talk about Talk Talk a lot what what is it about why do we talk about that?
Speaker 2Well we were we were actually managed by Talk Talk's manager as well. We don't need to go into that why do we talk about? Look people like a story an anecdote. Yeah a showbiz anecdote. A showbiz anecdote.
Speaker 1No but it's kind of rhetorical because I know why we talk about Talk Talk again they're another band they made five albums and every one of them is different isn't it it's like a reinvention maybe arguably the last two sort of two sides of the same coin isn't it?
Speaker 2Well I think like the Blue Nile Talk Talk are impressive in the sense that they seem to be aiming towards one particular sound one particular action almost silent. As well you know they always talk of Hollis moving towards silence and I think what I find particularly fascinating is beyond the music that there's very little there and it is almost reaching the logical conclusion you can hear this also with Paul Buchanan's solo work which takes the Blue Nile's blueprint that little bit further that they're always going towards this one perfect sound that seems very unaffected. But also that they've done very little you know four albums in the Blue Nile's case plus the Paul Buchanan solo album five albums in Talk Talks and actually the first two albums which were reflective of the times around them and yet the influence is massive it's such a small body of work that's had an
Speaker 1enormous impression. I think what's the Blue Nile is another one we should probably put in babbling under because we do mention them quite a lot on the show what's different between me the Blue Nile Talk Talk to me is that Talk Talk. Music is willfully quite ugly and experimental sometimes it's not slick and beautiful the whole time and I think that's what you're kind of referring to when you say they've been quite influential things like the post the whole post rock scene for me starts with listen to an album like Spirit of Eden you can see how all of those bands that came out they called themselves post rock bands that's kind of like their year zero isn't it it's more it's kind of angular aspect to it too. Number three Scott Walker so 95% of the mentions of Scott Walker came from him but I do I mean I love Scott we love Scott don't we we do and you know much like Mark Hollis I suppose he's he's kind of very released music very sporadically at least in the last 30 years he made one album a decade or something I mean he kind of upped it a little bit towards the end towards the end what two albums in a decade yeah woohoo. So it's but he's almost like it's almost like he's making music there's something about some of these artists that you feel when you listen to them they are making music only for themselves only for themselves they almost don't care if anyone else likes it and sometimes that's a very appealing
Speaker 2quality isn't it do you know what I mean by that? When it communicates yeah I mean Scott Walker's later albums were almost music as art projects and that can work and it can be. I think in the case of Walker he was so obsessive so willful and had these sounds in his head that he had to realize like I think it's the famous story in one of the albums where there's a piece that is about I think it's Mussolini and his wife being or girlfriend being hung and beaten Clara yeah and so he had to bring in slabs of beef for the percussionist to hit. And I kind of love that madness that sense of abandon to sort of fulfill your dream I'm always like the story with yes and topographic oceans that they wanted to record in the country but they couldn't go to the country so they decided to bring bales of hay and plastic cows into the studio and I kind of love the idea of that and and John Anderson wanted a particular sound with dripping water so recorded something in the toilets and it's that attention to detail and that willful following. Of your dream and I think it's one of the reasons why topographic is one of our favorite yes albums because you know
Speaker 1this is a band at the peak of
Speaker 2their popularity and what do you do at the peak of popularity do you produce that chicory tip single that I try and make no you produce a double album with one track per side about various eastern scriptures you know that'll get you talked about but it's still got to know but what is fascinating is it got to number one in America and Britain and probably other countries as well. Number two Mr. Fripp our bud
Speaker 1yeah our buddy Robert we love Robert don't we we do love him we love him he's a sweetie he's mad he's mad but he's like a classic English eccentric he's very eccentric I really like Robert he's great fun but what an extraordinary career what an extraordinary I was just listening the other day to the first Eno album here come the warm jets that solo he plays on babies on fire yeah that's amazing it's insane it's insane it's like I mean one of my favorite guitar solos of all time it's just him him turning up to do a guest spot on someone else's
Speaker 2record well I think he's kind of a thoroughly original guitarist in terms of his tone and in terms of his harmony and I think what's interesting is when he works with the likes of Eno Bowie or even on you know No Man's Flower Mouth there's a sense of abandon that I don't think he necessarily well he felt that he didn't necessarily bring as much to Incan Crimson which was a much more orchestrated composed I mean we both know there's chaos and abandon in Crimson but I remember him saying that you know when he's doing the sessions he has no preconception if you're thinking of the the Crimson pieces they are so complex so organized so difficult to play but he kind of relished this opportunity and when he worked with us it was how he worked with a lot of other people that he didn't want to listen to the track beforehand he wanted to respond to it and it was phenomenal being in the room with him because music poured out of him and you know we did a couple of things we did a thing where we'd created this obvious strategies and we showed him ridiculous photographs of what we wanted so you know we might show him Norman Collier we said we want a bit of this and then we'd show him a photograph of Robert Fripp from 1974 but we also want some of this and he took these cues usually he would actually go off into anecdotes about the people the photographs that we'd we'd shown him but it was such an instinctive performance but
Speaker 1the funny thing about is Robert Robert is and he'll admit this he's not a natural guitar player so his style has all come from application and discipline so he's kind of taught himself to play and he has this very unique vocabulary when he plays the guitar because he's not a natural guitar player he couldn't have sounded like Jimi Hendrix or Jimmy Page or Robin Trower even if he'd wanted to so he kind of developed this very which the style he plays in is much like his personality so it's it's fascinating from that point of view but you're right he's able to also respond in a very emotional way to music because his personality in a way number one who's number one Peter Hamill the ham yes we mentioned the ham at least at least five Prince should have been under should have been bubbling under but we're going to talk about princeton in in the albums later on um the ham we we try to mention the ham at least four times in every 60 seconds of of the podcast but part of the reason he's in the podcast so much is because he was very prolific over the years and he did so are you sure that isn't
Speaker 2the word you've used the most
Speaker 1prolific no it's not it's not so many quintessential sorry um into a syllable count definitely um in terms of uh artists we probably talked about on the show we probably covered more of his albums than any of us because they're every album is worth discussing in itself isn't it it's almost like every album has its own little unique kind of world and approach and aesthetic and again as i say
Speaker 2without compromise this is somebody who responds to the psychedelic revolution of the late 60s punk the underground revolution of the early 70s then songwriting yeah and does it in such an idiosyncratic way that shows no compromise and again i think it's why we're in a situation where we're in a situation where we're in a situation where we're in a we're drawn to it that this personality again weaves his way even into the electro pop world without losing an iota the hamminess of the ham the hamminess of the
Speaker 1hamminess of the ham
Speaker 2yeah but
Speaker 1he's also in a way isn't he the quintessential albemar's artist because most people don't don't know his work it
Speaker 2does even people even people that
Speaker 1know his band a lot of them don't know the solo work which for me is superior i mean i love the solo work but i love his band's albums too but that's part of the reason why he's such a a kind of a great artist and i think that's why he's so an artist that you want to evangelize about do you know what i mean because the work is so extraordinary so unique so distinctive and yet most people have never investigated it i don't know what his record sales have been like over the years but cult artist i think is i think vandergrift have always done better i'm not talking about vandergrift that's what i'm saying people know vandergrift but the the solo art the solo work even people that like vandergrift
Speaker 2don't know vandergrift that's you know think of porn hearts which is one of the most extraordinary albums ever released and if you're not a fan of vandergrift then you're not a fan of vandergrift stories are to be believed it was number one in italy for about a year yeah i think that's you can hear the influence on various italian underground bands and i think that album probably has sold very well yeah you know franco battiato um this east as well do you know the album east steven where should we start with peter hamill it depends you
Speaker 1see that's a very good question and it would i would need to know a little bit more about you before i could recommend because that's the point with peter hamill is that there are different gate doorways that you would walk into his world he made a punk rock album in 1975 he's done singer-songwriter a confessional singer-songwriter electro pop albums new wave albums progressive rock albums so i would need to know more about what you it's the same when people ask me what album should they check out of mine first i say well what kind of music do you like because i've done all these different kinds of music and i can recommend you one of my albums based on what i think you might like the best so i can't answer your question sir except they're all great
Speaker 2but also as well it depends because you know some of his music is really quite scary to listen to it's a dissonant it's extreme it's passionate some of it is glacially beautiful so it does you know cover quite a number of extremes in terms of genre but also mood and style so you know when i tend to do the joking violent ham impression you know on the episodes which i did in front of fish bizarrely in december when i met him you know very good he liked you do a good peter hamill impression i must say yeah
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