"The question of what
my favourite album is"
Manic Street Preachers - The Holy Bible
Even if I live to be a hundred, there will never be another answer to the question of what my favourite album is. The Holy Bible is the soundtrack to me, or rather the person I once strove to be - penetrating, laser-guided and uncompromising. It’s the record which made me realise that intelligence is aspirational, that language can shape a vessel as much as be shaped by one, and that grotesque things can and must be held to the light, even if they concern oneself.
The Holy Bible is so weighed down by its conception that it’s now difficult to review it without reference to guitarist Richey Edwards’ disintegration and subsequent disappearance. But this is no testament to self-pity - humanity itself comprises the vulgate, fully critiqued through the narrow filter of Edwards’ anorexic discipline. Richey’s fascination with ideas of order, authority, sin and retribution seemed a reaction to his documented problems with alcoholism and mental health, and this sense of mission (channelled visually via a growing obsession with Apocalypse Now) encouraged the rest of the band into his thematic headspace, styling themselves as a combat unit and isolating themselves from record company influence. Partly this was a conscious choice, to slough off their earlier hair metal pretensions, but it was mainly a consequence of being focussed by their friend’s purpose, determined to navigate the twentieth century’s heart of darkness and stare back at whatever they found.
Around three-quarters of The Holy Bible’s lyrical content belonged to Richey, those words set to the most relentless music singer James Dean Bradfield, bassist Nicky Wire and drummer Sean Moore could forge in a claustrophobic studio above the glow of Cardiff’s red-light district. What returned downriver was a truth (fortunately not this time carved into living flesh), one which also proved to act as final word for this incarnation of Manic Street Preachers. That was never the intention, nor a metaphorical sacrifice necessary, but it’s what happened, and with some disciples of the Cult of Richey it’s impossible to tell whether they’d rather have the man or the livid grooves he inspired in the vinyl.
I play this album at least once a month. I remain a big Manics fan, but they’ve never again been as vital or cohesive as they were with The Holy Bible, which nearly thirty years on retains the lean muscle needed to carry statements about the Holocaust, gun violence, prostitution and capital punishment. In its ferocity there are slabs of brutal beauty, but The Holy Bible eschews ambivalence about what it says and what it is, and that’s chiefly why I love and admire it above any other album I’ve heard.
Prince and The Revolution - Parade
I was a late convert to Prince, who when I was a kid was a signifier for a certain kind of star, a mono-name whose universal fame ensured his latest single was played on the radio regardless of its merits. More accurately, I knew him as a punchline, this ridiculous diminutive peacock who kept changing his name while uncomfortably rubbing up against the leg of your consciousness. Despite being aware of a larger discography, his output to me was represented by a handful of songs, which I could have equally claimed of Madness or The Police. I was still largely ignorant of Prince’s work by the time of his death in 2016, which is amazing considering I’d spent two years of my twenties editing the music section of a newspaper.
It took me researching a blog post about Prince’s patchy film output to see what all the fuss was about; Purple Rain, as for most people, was the straightforward springboard which allowed me to plunge into 1999, Around the World in a Day, Sign o’ the Times and deeper still. I’m not embarrassed to say I quickly fell for Prince in a huge way, but I do cringe like a man who was hitherto delighted by his visit to the Louvre’s gift shop only to realise later what it was attached to. For months his music was all I listened to, welcoming the small hours by devouring his live performances and bootlegs. I’m not entirely sure why I was consumed where before I was unmoved, but I suspect my ageing palate was just tempted to try something slightly exotic from the menu before it lost its capacity to taste. The teenage me, immersed in Britpop, was baffled by Prince, with the shenanigans with Warners and his unabashed sexuality. The fortysomething me is thrilled I discovered a gate into the vast roadhouse garden of a genius, where all his psyche’s art, colour and melody is preserved beyond physical life.
Of all the albums of his Imperial Period, Parade is the one I enjoy most, and the one where Prince seems to be having the most effortless fun. It sits directly on the cusp between his work with The Revolution and what evolved into Sign o’ the Times, crystallising the journey he had taken from syrupy soul and flirty electro into crossover stardom, and by the time he used this record to accompany his second movie Under the Cherry Moon, he was cheerfully paddling in shallow jazz waters whilst wearing psychedelic water wings. A naked listen to Parade barely suggests a soundtrack; it’s only when you watch the film you understand the plot was almost entirely built around the songs. That’s a ballsy move for a veteran; for a first-time director in Prince, it’s borderline insane. But Prince is at his most musically joyous when his contradictions, weaknesses and idiosyncrasies have free rein, as they happily do here, drenched in strawberry lemonade.
The Clash - Sandinista!
As a teenager the bitterest cultural battle I was caught in was between Blur and Oasis, a conflict which reached its ridiculous apex over the race for number one between two completely shit singles. It felt exciting to be part of history, but little did I realise these musical conflicts were already played out. Generations before me had mithered over T. Rex or Slade, Duran or Spandau. Are you a Ted or a Mod? God knows, mate, I only get a pound of pocket money on a Saturday.
I’m aware that these conflicts aren’t inherently ideological, but it still appears which side you’re on is a shorthand for your personal legitimacy (which must be a philosophical crock if you have to choose between ‘Roll With It’ or ‘Country House’). Later, as a nascent punk fan, I was taught that the orthodox position was that the Sex Pistols were from the right side of the bed: a motley collection of thieves and oiks destined to ignite and combust like the infinitesimal flash of anti-matter. The Clash, on the other hand, were a band led by a public schoolboy, who went on to play Shea Stadium and soundtrack a jeans advert. In other words, they sold out (in some eyes, the day they signed to a major), and by professing your preference to them, you are by extension as big a fraud as they. Someone I once knew labelled me naive for loving The Clash, and despite said person having the gall to say that while being a devotee of Depeche Mode, I still feel a little stung.
I used to think of The Clash as the Foo Fighters to the Pistols’ Nirvana, but really, they’re the Bon Jovi of punk, riding their outlaw imagery and Mick Jones’ swelling guitar ego all the way to the baseball bleachers. But they managed to snag my attention far faster than the Pistols did, because their hook was shaped exactly for my bite: Joe Strummer wrote about exciting stuff, like war and terrorists and Vietnam, but not too deeply, and that’s what I wanted as a seventeen-year-old introvert: to appear to know a lot more than I did, and The Clash reassured me I only needed to shout to cover the stuff I didn’t.
The album that’s stuck with me longest is Sandinista!, named after the Nicaraguan revolutionary group, because it’s stupidly ambitious, with its fiddles and kids’ choirs and backwards experiments. It’s got white hip-hop and rap and disco and crooner pastiches, all spritzed with the atmospherics of Strummer’s night-time walks around a Scorsese New York which both intoxicated and terrified me. Some segments of its six sides are so undercooked I make sure to wash my hands after removing the disc, but the band insisted on documenting exactly where they were in time and place, and it takes some balls to embrace the drag that’s bound to have on an album’s quality. The Clash were all about overreach, along with the continuation of their myth, both of which Sandinista! are emblematic of. I guess this is what that person referred to as naivety, but even today I’d rather be naive like The Clash were in 1980 than wearing a MAGA t-shirt and having my biography scrubbed clean by Disney.
Asian Dub Foundation - Community Music
I admit to a residual feeling of cultural appropriation in claiming this album as one of my favourites, which is utterly absurd: Community Music is no more an album designed to appeal to a particular colour, race or creed than is, say, Born in the USA. But whereas that latter’s dull Americana grates on me with each passing listen, Asian Dub Foundation’s third release remains pungent, wet to the touch and an essential document of late-twentieth century Britain, a country convinced it had solved itself and really didn’t know the half of it.
Named for the London-based project which brought the group together, Community Music may not have the coruscating anger of Mercury-nominated sophomore Rafi’s Revenge, but it’s a far more mature record, willing and able to let its ideas take a breath, quench the listener rather than choking them. Its twin totems, ‘Real Great Britain’ and ‘New Way, New Life’, are the LP’s approach in microcosm, the former a challenge for the United Kingdom to acknowledge its modern mix, while the latter is a frenetic celebration of cultural fusion, equating superstars like Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan with their own hardworking parents for giving performers like ADF a platform of security and confidence to thrive (“when we reach de glass ceiling, we will blow it sky high”).
It’s a record that’s difficult to pigeonhole, and I’d imagine a lot of passive consumers looked at the band’s name and pegged them as an ethnic conceit, but this is not some reductive guitars and sitars mash-up. Community Music is world music in the best possible sense; a collision of power chords, breakbeats, bhangra, dance, synth, extended samples, ululations and scattergun rap. It’s a brilliant collection, bursting with ideas and totally inclusive. You should become part of its community immediately.
"A record that's difficult
to pigeon hole"
Kraftwerk - The Mix
I first became aware of Kraftwerk on a BBC documentary called The Years That Rocked the Planet, which was broadcast for Earth Day, 1992. It took the same format as the superlative The Rock ‘n’ Roll Years, offering captioned news clips set to music. Amongst the footage of US bombers dumping Agent Orange to the strains of ‘What A Wonderful World’ came this bizarre, reedy, insistent riff, four notes over a loping beat. When the men from Düsseldorf revealed ‘Autobahn’ to the British public on 1975 edition of Tomorrow’s World, it doesn’t surprise me that everyone’s head fell off, because between that debut and my hearing stood nearly twenty years of synthetic music and it still sounded really bloody weird.
I’m not going to go into a potted history of Kraftwerk, because if you know, you know. What I want to say is that what gets lost about Kraftwerk now is the music itself: it wasn’t recorded to be distantly appreciated like a museum exhibit. The band may have later leaned hard into the robot imagery, but their work is meant for dancing, because they themselves were dancers: old Nordrhein scenesters whose chief considerations were house parties and discos. The best parts of their oeuvre are about movement: driving, cycling - hell, even shagging. They hung out with Iggy and Bowie and declined to let Michael Jackson sample their stuff. At their zenith, they were hilarious.
The Mix is my favourite Kraftwerk LP because, quite simply, it’s the most alive. After the traumatic process of recording the album which eventually emerged as Electric Café, what remained of the best-known incarnation of the band spent the back end of the 1980s updating their Kling Klang studios to digital and decided to test their new toys by reworking their hits into snappy alternatives. The results are a propulsive joy, and a group which had suffered its mid-life crisis suddenly sounded young and vibrant again. Key to it is the way that the innate rhythms and ideas of the classic material were now able to build and build, blocks of sound easily lifted and placed exactly where they were needed by digital audio workstations. ‘Autobahn’ and ‘Pocket Calculator/Dentaku’ in particular climb like ziggurats into sparkling, fizzing peaks before receding and beginning anew, a circularity which would more than satisfy de facto Kraftwerk leader and obsessive cyclist Ralf Hütter. The Mix, then, is Kraftwerk riding on a clear day; their robot doppelgängers at the wheel while they sit in the back seat and admire the view.
"I do in fact have an
album to sell that
nobody's heard of"
Alex Cornish - Until The Traffic Stops
Whenever I read articles like this, I feel like I’ve missed a symposium on the right records to listen to. They’re usually championing the third album by some bloke from Kentucky I’ve never heard of, while I’m rhapsodising about Prince and the Manics. What can I say? I grew up a Stock, Aitken and Waterman kid. I was far too poor to take a punt on albums other than compilations; most of my tapes were created in the time-honoured fashion of the Top 40 and a quick finger on the pause button.
But I do in fact have an album to sell that nobody’s heard of, and ironically, I’m somewhat gutted about that. As I mentioned, in a former life I was a music editor for my university newspaper, which gave me an idea that I must have known something about music. After quitting my job to become a full-time writer when I was 25, I stumbled back onto the exposure treadmill in desperation and began my reviewing life anew, being flooded with albums via a handful of indie websites. Most of them were terrible (sorry), some were very good (hello Domino State and Shaker Heights), but one album stood out like a vast tower in a murky, foggy sea. It was this record, by a young Scot called Alex Cornish.
Until The Traffic Stops is an album built around vulnerability, specifically self-reproach. Cornish was a BBC-promoted artist before the record’s creation, but from what I recall from his press release he returned home from a spirit-crushing time in London. The isolation and bleakness of that period is realised with Alex’s frail, melodic voice and the delightful, spare strings (played by Cornish himself in his flat’s box room). It’s an autumnal record, all scarves and coats and smoke against dark skies. It’s rain on windscreens, chills and long periods of thought, but it’s also hopeful, wise and sincere. I said at the time it was one of the best albums I’d ever heard, and I stand by that today. I put it on annually when the nights draw in and I’m warmed by its delicate honesty.
Libido - Killing Some Dead Time
There’s another group called Libido, who are Peruvian, who sell thousands of records, and who make information about the much superior Libido which released this album maddeningly hard to dig up. In truth, there’s little to be exhumed anyway; they were a Norwegian trio headed by Evan Johansen, who released a single album and a handful of ace B-sides before vanishing. I came across them when their song ‘Overthrown’ was repeatedly shown on the short-lived MTV vehicle Up 4 It, which also offered a British television debut to Zane Lowe. Even Homer nods.
Post-Britpop was a strange time for guitar music. There were two clear camps: Celtic blokes with aww-shucks Neil Young bollocks or intense people in eyeliner who for whatever reason decided being in Genesis must have been the tits. These groups were mostly signed in feeding frenzies so were desperate to appear too interesting to drop, but essentially shared the same problem - they were so dull. They were earnest, or the wrong kind of ridiculous, or convinced lowering the tempo meant you meant it, man. I saw all these bands, as this period covered my glory years as a journalist, and I’m still massaging my portfolio so somebody might pay me to be a critic again.
Libido avoided all of that. All they did was make a straightforward overdriven racket, sung by a pretty boy with blue eyes and a slight keen in his voice. Their lyrics were about hard-to-please, hard-to-keep unnamed shes, vengeful gods and worlds where everybody’s gay. I hesitate to patronise, but it seems obvious this lack of self-consciousness is rooted firmly in lyrics written in a second language, where there may not be much of a message but damn, if it doesn’t get into your head by virtue of its directness. I recall sneering when I was a budding teenage songwriter when I read that Cardigans’ frontwoman Nina Persson used a rhyming dictionary. What a pompous prick I was.
No, there’s nothing remotely special about Killing Some Dead Time, other than it’s fun rock with a butter-knife edge, which enraptured me around the time I picked up a third hand Strat and continues to be a go-to listen. It doesn’t insist on being anything: there’s no journey, no progression, aside from the gorgeous, shimmering ‘Revolving’. Libido came, got a record deal, recorded an album, and disappeared. This might not have gone platinum like its contemporaries, but it still shines to me.
Pet Shop Boys - Discography: The Complete Singles Collection
I mithered for quite some time before choosing to include this. After all, when you’ve got the whole of recorded history to choose from, why include a singles collection? Well, it’s very simple: it’s as close to a perfect ‘best of’ that I’ve come across, and if we have to ignore perfection because of an arbitrary rule, we might as well pack up and go home.
If I must outline my reasoning further, consider this: it’s got four UK number ones on it. It uses the 7” versions of their best-known hits, so the bold decision to make Introspective a remix album doesn’t alienate listeners who wanted to hear ‘Left to My Own Devices’ and ‘Always on My Mind’ in all their short-form glory. It has two tracks written especially for it, at least one of which is a stone-cold PSB banger. And…oh, come on, I shouldn’t have to explain. Discography is the essential overview of a duo who from 1985 spun pure gold around the UK charts, woven from the twin strands of that country’s stainless-steel braggadocio and neurotic disconnection. You know these songs, and if you like Pet Shop Boys, you adore each and every one of them.
Of course, this leads to some obvious questions: why not a later best of? Probably because much like singer Neil Tennant, I feel most of what follows ‘Domino Dancing’ is like watching them set out to climb K2 after already conquering Everest. And why not choose an album proper? Because (and this is about as spicy as my takes get) I think somehow entire albums weigh down PSB in a way their singles don’t. I mean, ‘It Couldn’t Happen Here’ and ‘King’s Cross’ break my bloody heart, but the instant I put this on and those footsteps fade in at the beginning of ‘West End Girls’, I’m contractually obliged to follow. Tennant’s former career in magazine editing bleeds into the decision to précis their career at this exact point: cut out the faff, keep it glossy and move to the next issue. Ironically though, listening to Discography is like viewing an artwork of timeless genius; you may be intimately familiar with it, sometimes even jaded by its lionisation, but it will always evoke something in you that lesser works can’t possibly manage.
Bio
Chris Stanley is 41 and lives in Worcester with his wife Kate. He has written professionally about music, sport and culture for over two decades and is currently in the initial stages of his latest novel, The Cold War Kid. His blog and extensive examples of his work can be read at Chris Stanley’s Bazaar (chrisstanleyis.blogspot.com), and he is the founder and main contributor to book review site Tales from the Bedroom Floor (bedroomfloortales.blogspot.com). Follow him on Twitter at @chrisstanley1 and on Mastodon at @chrisstanley1@home.social.
