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Whether it’s a sentimental attachment owing to its familiarity from my childhood I don’t know, but Heartattack and Vine, an apparently lesser-known transitional album from 1980, is far and away my favourite Tom Waits record, and the one I turn to when times are hard. In 1980, so the official history goes, Waits was on the verge of a breakthrough: living in New York City for the first time in his career, having just scored the Coppola film One from the Heart (“Broken Bicycles” is a high point), and alone as he ever had been or would be, he was only months from meeting future wife and collaborator Kathleen Brennan, who turned him onto Beefheart, scorned his sentimental balladeer former persona, and kickstarted the creative explosion of Swordfishtrombones, Raindogs, Frank’s Wild Years and everything since. Now don’t get me wrong, I was raised on Raindogs, I must have seen the Frank’s-centric concert film Big Time 10 times, and I worshipped at the altar of Marc Ribot via the live version of “Sixteen Shells From a Thirty Ought Six” (a choice cut of Swordfish), but if it’s emotional investment you’re after I don’t think you can go past Heartattack. “Ruby’s Arms”, “On the Nickel”, “Jersey Girl” – when I’m in the mood there’s almost nothing that can reach that deep inside of me, that speaks to me so sadly yet reassures me I’m not alone. Add to that some of the filthiest, lowdown, stark minimal blues hollers of his career – “Downtown”, the title track, “Till the Money Runs Out” – and a crack, 100% on the money, ruthless set of collaborators (drummer John Thomassie, in particular, is a precision groove machine), and you’ve got the late-night-in-a-strange-room-with-no-one-to-call-a-friend album par excellence. “How do the angels get to sleep when the devil leaves his porchlight on?” They don’t, but records like Heartattack & Vine make insomnia all right.

Funny thing about the Chameleons―nowhere have I seen their story told beyond a mention (the mention is in John Robb’s The North Will Rise Again, to my mind the definitive Manchester music book), yet in Manchester they’re revered, despite never having infiltrated the Factory Records/Hacienda scene. Truth is, even in Manchester their audience is small, if passionate. But this is not an obscure “experimental” group. Think U2, Cure, the Church, “shoegaze” forerunners with northern soul―the soul of the Roses and Verve and Joy Division. These guys mean it. No, unlike Joy Division, they’re not sophisticated. No mad-hatter producer or Throbbing Gristle obsession for these lads. Not so much urban paranoia either; hailing from Middleton, a small former industrial town five miles north of Manchester, it’s just possible they felt more country/outer-suburban than city, and in their sad, spacious atmospherics there’s a romantic sense of forces massing at the edge of consciousness that pulls at my heart. Is it the land singing, against all odds, through the sheen of eighties production (mostly held in check), through the pop structure that the Chameleons (unlike Joy Division) still are constrained by? The melodies! Every note is rationed, thought-out, placed exactly, as if to waste colour is dangerous, but in the discipline of this limited pallette speaks the heartbreak of singer/bassist/everyman philosopher Mark Burgess, who laments: “It’s an easy thing to sell your skin”, “Every day you’re crucified”,
“You catch your blessings while they’re there”. No blasted, gothic eloquence here. The words are plain, heartfelt. Don’t get me wrong, there’s beauty here―lots of it―but it’s never florid or lavish. To this day, the Chameleons are the sound of Manchester to me. And What Does Anything Mean? Basically is their masterpiece. If Joy Division is the machines or the future singing, this is the blighted, near-beaten resilient earth. In urban gardens, in repurposed industrial spaces, in canals flushed of gunk and made picturesque, maybe, yes, the North Will Rise Again.

AC/DC man! Their genius is so close to idiocy it’s amazing. Malcolm Young especially—he’s got the lizard-mind. Maybe intellectually his riffs are nothing special, but backed by Phil Rudd and Cliff Burton or George Young they’re incendiary. To be fair, Powerage may be the smartest album of AC/DC’s career. “Down Payment Blues” is a minimalist epic, probably Malcolm’s finest five minutes, along with the incredible adrenalin-fuelled “Riff Raff” and the abstract “What’s Next to the Moon”, whose open-string arpeggio is so simple and beautiful you wonder how no-one else thought of it. Ditto “Gimme a Bullet”—now that is mindless, but pump-your-fists-in-the-air perfect, and not a guitar solo in earshot. (It doesn’t need one: George’s walking bass takes the lead, with once-in-a-career results.) “Sin City” ain’t half bad neither, and it’s where Bon Scott comes to the fore: “Bring on the dancing girls and put the champagne on ice.” (Though it’s “Down Payment Blues” that’s the message song, one of Bon’s most heartfelt moments: “No I ain’t doin’ much but doin’ nothing means a lot to me.”) If ever a band was more than the sum of its parts it was AC/DC: isolate any one of these performances—Malcolm’s blunt power-chords, Cliff’s droning bass, Phil’s utilitarian four-on-the-floor, Bon’s three-note melodies—and listeners could well be mystified. Of course there’s Angus, a stone-cold virtuoso, but those who think AC/DC is his show are missing the point. He’s the gravy. Malcolm and the boys are the meat. “Gone Shootin’”, now that is genius, the kind of groove you just know Keith Richards’d love to muscle in on. Oh, and “Rock ’n’ Roll Damnation”—about as Stonesy as they ever got. Apparently it was added last when the record company said there were no hits on the album, and it ain’t bad: great sound, even if the riff’s a little tired. But make no mistake, “Riff Raff” is the hit here. If a shuttle gets sent to space with an AC/DC song onboard and it ain’t “Riff Raff” I’m going after it. 100% brutal full-blooded groove rock’n’roll. Powerage is a dream you don’t wake up from. Career-defining genius. Pure gold.

What’s the best album of the nineties? Well it probably isn’t Nearly God, but at moments during its one-hour running time you’d be forgiven for thinking otherwise. Like when, in the semi-Akira-Kurosawan post-noir sci-fi soundtrack “I Be the Prophet”, Tricky (with Martine warbling counterpoint) mutters “My vibe’s just a fucking feeling” and “I’m already on the other side”; or when Alison Moyet—over the darkest, sparsest, most abstract of beats (a halftime five shuffle, so slow every snare-hit is a surprise)—belts “Gonna make the change fantastic” in “Make a Change”. Make no mistake, this is experimental to its core; no-one ever sounded like this before, and maybe no-one has sounded like it since. Tricky always had something messianic about him—it was one of the best things he took from hip-hop, in my opinion, because of the spin he gave it, far more cosmic than competitive, like a soothsayer in a waking trance. Nothing on Nearly God will reach out and grab you—this isn’t Rakim, Nas or Tupac—it’s not made to rev you up for a rumble, but to quell you and quietly blow your mind when you’re sedated, when you can’t see who to fight and you’re in danger of fighting yourself, when your mind turns cannibal, when you’re struggling. It’s got stars in it, and long corridors at the ends of which lurk demons or angels. It’s a trip—into darkness, sure, but sometimes you have to go there, and Tricky knows the terrain. As the man says, smiling, in “Black Coffee”, “Move over!” I bet they’ll still be making space for him several years hence. It’s a grower, Nearly God, and to some extent a game-changer.

J Dilla is everything I love about hip-hop. Dilla reminds us: anyone with a thorough knowledge of black American music in the 20th century has a great education in music. A golden age, which hip-hop, by recognising and celebrating it as such, manages to repurpose and perpetuate. Donuts is a genius curation: 1-2 minute potent edits, exquisite in themselves, that (a) suggest a future, and (b) send us back to the past. At it’s best (“Stop”, “People”, “Mash”, “Time: The Donut of the Heart”, “Lightworks”, “One Eleven”, “Two Can Win”, “Last Donut of the Night”) it’s thrilling, heartbreaking, exhilerating. This happened—the grassroots uprising of soulful virtuosity that brought us jazz, blues, soul, funk—it flourished and passed. But Donuts, a time machine, gives it back. I’ll admit to getting into Donuts kind of late. In England in 2010, someone I loved recommended it, but I never quite settled into it. Maybe my life was too slow; I preferred to luxuriate in Coltrane’s Crescent or Company Flow or outtakes from Bitches’ Brew on the endless-seeming busrides through suburban Wythenshawe to my job at Manchester Airport. But now, with new relationship, three stepkids, studies, writing, music all bubbling at once on the stove of my attention, the one- and two-minute salvos of Donuts suit me to the ground—little shots of love and adrenalin and wide-eyed possibility that, maybe, could only have come from a guy about to be dead. Check his plethora of other instrumentals, mostly released since his death, and see if you can find anything that breaks the rules like this does. It’s a bag of seeds, barely cultivated, whatever he could gather in a hurry, but worked with skilful vigor so it suggests near-infinite outgrowths. Composed for the most part—so legend has it—in a hospital bed with a turntable, a sampler and some 45s gifted by his friends, Donuts is state-of-the-art love of music and community. Dilla, Detroit son of an opera singer and a jazz bassist, with perfect pitch at two and his own turntable at four, is a musical appreciator of genius. Why did Dilla make Donuts? Love of music, plain and simple. A more authentic work of love, reverence and respect I doubt you’ll find.

There is music that suits the modern world and music that doesn’t. When a bandsaw is wailing nextdoor, or your neighbours are fighting, or you live by a dual carriageway and your life is the roar of one passing truck after another, Beethoven just ain’t gonna cut it—you need something fat, ugly and virtually without dynamics. Not only that, but if and when the metal machine noise breaks through, you need it to not dissolve the illusion, to fit as if it was meant to be there all along. That said, and groovy-as-f**k as this post-Sabbathian riffage is, it’d be nice if Sleep—who eat up trucks and power tools like so many protein bars—didn’t feel the need to grace this groove with vocals, especially as their singer sounds like a constipated orc. Other criticisms: the drum-sound is one-dimensional; the snare has less cut than woof and the whole kit sounds like a bunch of logs and a crash cymbal, played with not a lot of finesse. But I’m willing to accept that may be a side-effect of extreme volume, which both simplifies playing and challenges engineers... Agh, and now it’s that “Nazareth” line! WTF?! But he just spits it out, then shuts up for 64 bars or something. Meantime there’s a half-decent, restrained yet adrenalin-fuelled guitar solo, again kept incredibly brief given this is a one-hour track. Sleep are disciplined—it’s what redeems them. They mean business. Sure, in one sense they’re bombastic as hell, but in another they’re lean, shaved to the bone. If I hadn’t heard it myself I wouldn’t have believed it could be done. Funny thing too, whereas Sleep’s Holy Mountain bores me with overt-seeming repetition, Dopesmoker—by going deeper—holds my interest. Whereas Holy Mountain seems like Sabbath-by-numbers, not even Sabbath would have had the balls to put out Dopesmoker. (“Israel”? “Zion”? “Stoner caravan”? I’m gonna have to look up these lyrics. Yeah I wish the guy would shut up, but his band cooks. A common complaint with me.) Overall, maybe a 30-minute cut (minus vocals) would have suited me better, but this is some kind of achievement. A modern classic?

Contentious assertion: the JAMC, not the Smiths, were the Rolling Stones of the eighties. (Did Johnny Marr love Keith Richards? Sure. Did he play like him? Not at all.) Contentious assertion #2: Barbed Wire Kisses (the Mary Chain’s Hatful of Hollow) is their masterpiece, not Darklands (too fey, too by-the-numbers), not Psychocandy (too smothered in dirt). Contentious assertion #3: William Reid is king. Exhibit A: “Sidewalking”, peak of their pop/avant thing, and a more even balance of those ethoses than Sonic Youth, say, ever conceived. Made it to #8 on the UK charts in ’88. That’s some phenomenon. In terms of their benevolent/provocative effect on mass culture, you ask me, it’s their high-water mark. And yeah, Jim’s vocal is bitchin’, but check William’s feedback symphony on the 12-inch. Rarely if ever has pop been so brutal. Exhibit B: “Just Out of Reach”, as above. Abrasive surf-noise, set to propulsive Roland drumbeat. I’ve never heard this on a dancefloor, but if I did I’d be channelling my inner Lizard King. “Rider”, “Here it Comes Again”, “Who Do You Love?” continue in the vein, with William fronting 2-out-of-3 of ’em. But you don’t dig William’s Billy idol routine? Wanna taste of Darklands romanticism? “Don’t Ever Change”. Major-key pop? “Happy Place”. Slowcore proto Mazzy Star? “Psycho Candy”. Thing is, Barbed Wire Kisses has got some of everything—every trick, technique or mood the brothers would continue to use for all of four more (you ask me) lacklustre albums. Check out “Head” and its mutant brothers “Hit” and “Cracked” for Psychocandy’s dark shadows. Listen to ’em in that order and witness as rock gets deconstructed, melody and lyrics are discarded and William tests the bottom of his range. By “Cracked” we’re in the pink room from Fire Walk With Me, wishing for subtitles until William starts howling four-letter words over a whirlwind of guitar feedback. It’s wild! To top it, “On the Wall”, the analogue 4-track demo, shows another side of the man: heart-on-sleeve wordsmith and Cure/New Order fan. Hell, much as I dig Jim, William Reid could be the most lovable man in eighties pop. Yet where else do we hear so much of him? Conspiracy by Jim and WEA to keep the darker, less predictable brother down; or just that he’d conjure this shit on the spot as the clock rolled for the end of the session, the single cut already and only the b-side up for grabs? Whatever, its lucky they coralled so much William into one place, because he makes Barbed Wire Kisses. (Props to Jim for “Upside Down”, by the way, but I’ll take the demo version. These boys knew how to ride a 4-track!) To me, the Mary Chain burnt brightly and briefly—like Joy Division, like Slint, like Nirvana. Three albums were enough. If you don’t know Barbed Wire Kisses, you don’t know the story.

I’m not a jazz fan, far from it. And I’ll own that what, I imagine, most impresses some listeners about John Coltrane is the part I find least interesting: the wild solos, the near-manic virtuosity. Me, I like my virtuosity more considered. But on Crescent Coltrane’s got that too. The opener, “Wise One”, justifies him entirely in my eyes (or ears): the delicate playing, the haunting-asymmetric melody, the way pianist McCoy Tyner, previously buried in the mix, breaks out after the 3-minute mark, at first tentatively but soon taking flight, and somehow rendering his whole solo with a Major-inflection unhinted at in Coltrane’s heavy, dirge-like intro. The tone of the ride cymbal—how 2-3 soft taps at the start seem to fill the right speaker. And even Coltrane’s solo, much like a mathematical equation as it comes to sound at about 7 minutes, never gets crazy; just as it seems about to it pulls back to rueful self-questioning, while the cymbals swell. Piano could be higher, drums softer, but I love the panning, the spaciousness, the room-sound. Abrupt transition to “Bessie’s Blues” doesn’t do it for me—seems to undercut the gravity—and despite some tasty piano I generally skip it. “Lonnie’s Lament”, now that is beautiful—like Miles Davis’s “Circle”, it’s chamber music, virtually, might as well not be called jazz at all but for the instrumentation. Coltrane’s in his element: the slightest deft touch—the hint of a trill—seems to make the simple melody glow. The way Tyner uses chords to make a solo, again like a scribbled equation, like a mindgame, but with feeling. Yeah some of Tyner’s licks get a little too “Secret Squirrel” for me, and those flourishes are pure cocktail-lounge. Then again when Coltrane comes back in he’s on fire, if I can use that term for work of this much restraint: it’s like he’s been burned, he’s almost spent, but he can’t resist the most poignant meditations in the gaps in the melody. And “Drum Thing”—that is great! One-note bass, tom-hits like near-distant retorts ’Trane’s sax like a soldier whistling/humming as he surveys the empty battlefield. Then the drummer (Elvin Jones) cuts loose. Like I’m not a jazz fan, I’m not one for drum solos, but something about this one keeps it from offending me: for one thing the reverb, like I’m listening through an open window as I walk by; and it stays panned right, rises up briefly but never takes over. You can almost see Coltrane and bassist Jimmy Garrison waiting, watching. Blends back to toms so smoothly too, and one-note bass, and ’Trane humming his elegy. In a way it’s the most timeless track here: a postpunk drone, if Adrian Belew had done it, or Rhys Chatham. Verdict: classic, no doubt. Not quite my style, but I bow before the discipline, the technique, the revelation of what you can do with 3-4 instruments.

What is there to say about Loveless that hasn’t already been said? It never seemed, in the early nineties, that it would ever be so talked about. But the truth is I tuned out on the MBV talk long ago, even though in 1998 when a Bowie freak and an Elvis freak asked me which artist’s albums I’d take to a desert island I said My Bloody Valentine’s. Well, I was still mourning a lost love—the pivotal point of my young life—which had been born amid a Loveless and LSD haze. My girlfriend and I would sing along (or hum, since we couldn’t hear the words) while we made love, woman and man accorded equal spotlight on MBV’s stage. Soon enough we discovered Isn’t Anything and the early EPs. All are great—in some ways better (or more wildly inventive) than Loveless, but not as easy to get lost in. Given Kevin Shields himself seems to think Loveless was a misfire, I can see the flaws: its kind of flat, one-dimensional, lacking light and shade; it’s what it suggests that’s most powerful. Still, what a suggestion! To a degree, despite the copycats, I doubt there’s been a more futuristic record in rock, at least in this vein. And on reflection I don’t think it’s all about guitar technique. (After all, Brian Eno did the synoptic whammy-bar trick on Here Come the Warm Jets in 1973.) What was MBV’s secret weapon? Disingenuous as it may sound, the songs—the off-kilter melodies, beguiling chord-changes, sweet-and-sour disposition. (“You Never Should”, from Isn’t Anything, always struck me as their breakthrough, and I’d love to have heard it Loveless-ised.) Oh yeah, and of course the delicate balance of the sexes: the future of rock, after all, is part-female. There are caveats: Shields turned demagogue, and squeezed Loveless of band dynamics. (On the other hand, Colm Ó Cíosóig’s jerky garage-band drumming could never have cut through on this level.) From what I gather (I’ve barely listened to it), the 20-years-in-the-making M B V continues the trend. Me, I’ve got no time for an MBV that doesn’t reinvent the sound, and relegates the melodies to a supporting role. Truth is I rarely even spin Loveless these days—it’s too wound up in those days. But I know it to be solid gold. Along with Slint’s Spiderland, probably the last time guitar music truly blew me away. The sound of sensual overload. And one of four or five records that changed my life.

Wanna know why Raw Power kicks ass, despite shitty production, over forty years later? Two things: the songs, the performance. It sounds simple, but so many bands overbalance, fall either to one side or the other. Why’s it so hard? Cos songwriters don’t value bands, cos bands don’t value songs. The Rolling Stones, they valued both. And the Stooges, by the time of Raw Power, they did too, thanks in part to the influence of their English precursors. And in both cases, they built their way to song-mastery via hard grunt work – they learned to rock before they wrote. Now I’m a Stones fan, but the Stones are dated. Raw Power has something that doesn’t age. The attack is brutal, the conviction 100%; it’s adrenalin-fuelled and dark as pitch. Me, I love Barbed Wire Kisses, XTRMNTR, the Pistols’ darker moments, but in some kinda virtual shoulda-been way Raw Power tops them all. It sounds like shit, and though I just praised the performance that performance is all over the place. (Are they playing to a f**king click track – at Bowie’s or James Williamson’s insistence, maybe – or just on some cheep, heinous speed?) The Ashtons stutter and race to keep up. Williamson’s treble-encrusted bum notes slice through the murk. But they mean it, man. This ain’t just some backing band, this is the motherf**king Stooges. Take Raw Power, flawed as it is, and the “I’m Sick of You” demos they did in Detroit immediately prior (which demos Frank Black famously combined with the Mamas and the Papas to cook up his conception of the Pixies) and you have the recipe for the virtual late 20th Century rock band to end all late 20th Century rock bands. Hell, I’m willing to believe if they’d played this stuff in 2016 it’d have even more effect. Never did a band have their tongues less in their cheeks and get away with it. Maximum rock ’n’ roll.