In flagrant contravention of all-known rules of the list game, and in the spirit of Sunday’s really rather wonderful Ashes triumph, here’s my XI of the Week –
Fabbest Track 1 Side 1s
Todd Rundgren – I Saw The Light
He wanted to do it like they did at Motown and put the single first. So he did, igniting an album, Something/Anything?, that would serve as both encyclopedia of Pop Past and preview of Pop Future. Smokey meets the Fab Four in the Brill Building elevator. Used magnificently in the Farrellys’ fantabuloso bowling pic Kingpin.
June & The Exit Wounds – How Much I Really Loved You
Bittersweet but never sour: the best tune to bathe these ears in the 14 years separating Prince’s “The Most Beautiful Girl In The World” and the Fleet Foxes’ wondrous maiden CD. Todd Fletcher (the lousy cod-band name was his brief nom de plume) worshipped at the Todd-is-Godd altar and donated generously to the Get Well Brian fund – and boy, it shows. From the spangly intro onwards the opener to the delicious but scandalously ignored A Little More Haven Hamilton Please would by no means have been out of place on Something/Anything? yet somehow it still sounded remarkably fresh and frisky on its release in 1999. The boy shoulda bin a contender.
Bruce Springsteen – Thunder Road
Piano and mouth-organ evoke a saloon on a quiet day in Dodge City. In the corner sits the wannabe Boss, nursing a beer, badly smitten but tiring of Asbury Park. One slow-motion chuck of the kitchen sink later and you’ve just sat through an entire movie. It’s a town for losers/I’m pulling out of here to win: has there ever been a firmer statement of intent by a scrawny guitarist bent on universal affection?
Led Zeppelin – Black Dog
Hey, hey MAMA!
Steely Dan – Bodhisattva
Don ‘n’ Walt shake a tailfeather as they go all rockabilly. Never would they sound so young and joyous again.
Van Morrison – Astral Weeks
Blues meets jazz meets folk meets Mozart: the ultimate fusion and still utterly unique. The racy bass, the dancing guitar, the darting flute, the shimmering strings, that misty Irish glade of a voice, at once knowing and yearning. Oh yes, and the Most Poetic First Verse Ev-ah: If I ventured in the slipstream/Between the viaducts of your dream…
Bob Dylan – Like A Rolling Stone
A rallying-cry for a generation. More powerful than a turbo-charged cannonball covered in poison-tipped spikes.
The Doors – Break On Through
They may not have had a bassist but Jim and the boys still knew how to kick bottom. Has a debut ever kicked off this thrillingly, this winningly? Not from where these ears are sitting – unless it’s…
Rickie Lee Jones – Chuck E’s In Love
Or…
REM – Radio Free Europe
Or, come to think of it…
Aimee Mann – I Should Have Known
