| The alternative top 10Friday 29 January 1999 guardian.co.uk 1 Nick Drake
Bryter Layter (Island, 1970) Look at Nick Drake on the front cover of his second album, hunched over his acoustic guitar, half lost in his hair, unable to commit to the camera. Isn't it obvious? He wants to be left alone. Just because he makes tormented, elegant folk music, it doesn't mean he should have to communicate with the rest of the human race. Bryter Layter's belated acclaim might be accounted for by the haunting idea of the enigmatic Drake as much as its value as a consummate piece of art. His fellow folkie John Martyn once described him as "the most withdrawn person I've ever met," but that's about as deep as the average profile of Drake's character gets. Drake destested gigging, was known to spend weeks on end without seeing another soul, and only ever conducted one formal interview. Almost as soon as he was "discovered" by Fairport Convention bassist Ashley Hutchings, he was fading away. The "real" Nick has to be unravelled from the bleakest recesses of his three-album legacy: a bit like attempting to interrogate a ghost. Bookended by meandering, jazzy instrumental doodles, Bryter Later is far from perfect. But it's the flaws - Drake's desperately frail voice, the rice-paper fragility of his intricate guitar picking - which compel the listener to venture inside its melancholic, tubercular universe again and again. 1972's Pink Moon (which Drake left anonymously at the reception of his record company, Island, wrapped in a plastic bag) might be the most ghoulish and unlistenable Drake album, but Bryter Later is the work that so many of our voters have found themselves returning to most frequently, intrigued by the demons which lay just underneath its lavish topsoil. The myth that it's his "cheeriest" record lasts for approximately as long as it takes for you to crawl all the way inside it. The mental picture of its creator locked inside his dank, Gothic Chalk Farm bedsit wearing last week's clothes, without a telephone or central heating, the ultimate tortured artist, gets clearer and more disturbing with every listen, but the questions don't get any easier to answer. What was this man - who died on November 25, 1974 from an overdose of anti-depressants - all about? Why was he so fed up, when he could make music as flowery and graceful as Hazy Jane II (the blueprint for Belle And Sebastian's entire career thus far) and the self-questioning Poor Boy ("a poor boy - so sorry for himself so worried about his health") and, despite his lack of fame, secure the services of backing musicians as revered as Richard Thompson and John Cale? Why would nobody buy his records? Did he actually want anyone to buy his records? Juxtaposing a peculiarly urban, subterranean psychiatric darkness with gentle rivers, summer picnics and sunny meadows, Bryter Later - stately, precious, tragic - leaves a trail of mysteries in its wake and a recurring icy sensation in the bones of everyone who hears it. Next time someone tells you that white boys can't sing the blues, lend them a copy. 2 Tom Waits
What are Rain Dogs, anyway? More to the point, what is Tom Waits? Part lounge-lizard, part barfly, part Jabba The Hut, he lives in an underground, bourbon-soaked world, where millionaires shovel coal (Claphands) and the rain sounds like a round of applause. Not a flicker of daylight creeps in on this faultless, 18-track nightmare of rotting blues, last-orders boogie and low-life poetry. It works because the actual tunes - always low-pitched, somehow skeletal and dense at the same time - have an ugly-beautiful, nursery-rhyme quality to them; it's only the delivery which is smoky, scary and bleak. Hang Down Your Head is one of the most graceful songs ever written after swallowing a cigarette kiosk. Rain Dogs itself is a perfect example of how to make a mainstream album without being a mainstream artist. Rod Stewart has hits with Waits songs. The songwriter's last London appearance saw him croak much of his material through a megaphone. Waits also has a movie career. He did the soundtrack for his One From The Heart played a lead in Jim Jarmush's Down By Law and was a wonderfully unhinged Renfield in Interview With The Vampire. He also co-wrote his first play, Frank's Wild Years with his wife Kathleen Brennan. Waits is 50 this year. He has written his own epitaph. It reads: "I told you I was sick." Lyrics and sound clips from
Waits official site
3 The Band
The Band's second and greatest album tells the listener more about 1769 than it does about 1969. It's the tale of pilgrims (Across The Great Divide), farmers (King Harvest) and sailors (Rockin Chair), rather than fried egos and psychedelics. These five enthusiastically hirsute men sound as old as their homeland, centuries of toil and hard work evident in their voices, and combine to make a brand of roots rock as rich in texture as America's best-tended soil. "The album tells no lies," American critic Greil Marcus wrote in his legendary Mystery Train collection. It touches the size and age of the country, takes on its fabulous multiplicity. Busier than their debut, Music From Big Pink, The Band - which lingers in your head as a map as much as a record - was a testament to the strength of community and democracy, in both the manner it was created and the lives it celebrated. Their iconic American band status was, in fact, ironic as they came from Canada - hence the lumberjack beards. Lyrics and sound clips on a highly comprehensive, excellent fan page 4 Gene Clark
Clark, the most talented of the original Byrds line up by several miles, is praised for his ability to convey the universal language of love through stripped-down, simplistic folk-rock. No Other is widely considered to be his tour de force, but for different reasons altogether. This is Clark as cosmic glam warrior instead of recently dumped acoustic troubadour, overspending and overindulging in the studio, dressing up in drag for the sleeve photo, confronting his mortality through choral and gospel influences, and - on Life's Greatest Fool and The True One - revitalising the most clichéd philosophising with a disarming, eternal loftiness. Clark's record company virtually disowned No Other, and friends told him it was too far out - which can only bring one to the conclusion that he was living among a group of dead souls. You'd have to be made out of steel not to be moved by this. Fan page with lyrics and a chord chart for Gene Clark songs 5 Nick Drake
Drake, aged 20, emerged almost fully-formed with his debut album. But even fully-formed, Drake was a slight, painfully shy figure with a wispy, breathy voice that sounded like it was about to crumble to dust before your very ears. Like his nearest American counterpart, James Taylor, he was a brittle stick-insect of a man with a pastorally inclined acoustic guitar and a gentle voice; unlike Taylor, he could scare you as much as he soothed you. Time Has Told Me and Day Is Done are lush with a forgotten Englishness, but they could also be the score to a never-made pagan horror movie (a follow-up to The Wicker Man, perhaps). Fruit Tree - "Fame is but a fruit tree / so very unsung / you can never flourish until its stock is in the ground" - is terrifyingly prophetic: Drake seemed to sense that his success would be posthumous. Five Leaves Left was the record he left for the bedroom bohemians and wannabe romantic poets of the future. 6 The Beatles
The pre-drugs, pre-experimental Beatles at their best. A Hard Day's Night, often eaten up by the slipstream of excitement surrounding the film it accompanied and written off as only a soundtrack, is the pivotal Fabs album: the first to feature nothing but original compositions, the last to showcase a truly unified Lennon and McCartney, the first to hint at any sort of darkness beneath the cuddly exterior, the one which seemed to announce the real beginning of the sixties. Thematically, it doesn't get much further than variations on the timeless boy-meets-girl interface - boy-warns-girl-to-stop-flirting (You Can't Do That), boy-is-pleased-to-find-that-girl-is-good-cook-upon-returning-from-work (the title track) - but it still emerges as the Beatles' most consistent, uplifting and influential LP. A millon young Americans went out and formed a band after hearing it. Summary of the Hard Day's Night movie 7 Curtis Mayfield
A debut LP of cutting-edge bad taste (check out Curtis's yellow suit on the cover), good vibes (the durable feel-good funk marathon Move On Up, which opens the LP), and omnipotent social messages from the former Impression. Miss Black America is a cheesy indulgence (with Mayfield asking his daughter, "my little love child", what she wants to be when she grows up), but the rest is masterful, searing urban soul - angry, busy and righteous on the inside, smooth, serene and danceable on the outside. One of the most sampled records of all time, impossible to sit still to, preachy and conscientious without being cloying, realistic but ultimately optimistic - it doesn't matter what your destination happens to be, Curtis provides you with the impetus to move on up. Sound clips from "Curtis"
8 Todd Rundgren
Meatloaf got him to produce Bat Out Of Hell, Liv Tyler thought he was her dad for a while, and he made one of prog-rock's most reviled albums (1975's Initiation). The other Todd Rundgren, one of pop's most eccentric, experimental masterminds, exists beneath the bland terror of these facts, clandestine to the world. A Wizard... is the Rundgren obsessive's Rundgren album, his most complex work. Songs? They're in here somewhere, overlapping in a chaotic acid soup of guitar pyrotechnics, soul medleys, and spitting amplifiers - beautiful, baffling snatches which vanish into a lysergic black hole sooner than they've arrived, resembling the indecipherable thoughts which line the conscience of a day. A Wizard... is like being bombarded with three unmissable conversations whilst your TV, radio and dishwasher all do their stuff in the background. Todd Rundgren's own personal site
9 George Harrison
Let It Be's For You Blue and Abbey Road's Something, which Frank Sinatra described as the most beautiful love song ever written, hint at which Beatle was best able to keep focused in the midst of the petty squabbling which severed the group's alliance. All Things Must Pass, a triple album largely made up of material written at a similar time, suggests that Harrison hit a prolific peak in the late sixties and found his output strictly rationed by his curmudgeonly colleagues. The best, mellowest and most sophisticated of the Beatles' solo albums, it's chock full of Something's more developed, revelational brothers, levitating to greatness from the lotus position with the help of slide guitars, gospel backing vocals and Phil Spector's sweeping production. The third disc, however, is about as interesting as watching George tune his guitar for half an hour. But there is always the option of leaving it in its sleeve. Lyrics for All
Things Must Pass
10 Todd Rundgren
To hear Something/Anything? - one of the purest, prettiest and most complete albums ever made - is to understand why Todd Rundgren elected to follow it with his sprawling scream-of-consciousness concept LP, A Wizard, A True Star, in 1973. Over four equally astonishing sides, Rundgren - monster of rock, romantic balladeer and gadget-obsessed nerd all rolled into one - exhausts the possibilities of the conventional pop format via blue-eyed schmaltz (Cold Morning Light), power-pop (Couldn't I Just Tell You), white soul (Hello It's Me), and crotch-rock (Wolfman Jack). Imagine an enormous bag of life-affirming sweets which never make you sick. With three sides created entirely alone by Rundgren, Something/ Anything? is Pet Sounds' prodigal offspring, a DIY bedroom opera all about love and the infinite potential of the eight-track tape recorder. | |||||||||||