Author: Quarkmonkey (page 5)

If only… There’s a sort of musical holy grail (at least for me) that becomes visible when I listen to,…

It must have taken some balls. For all the countercultural mood of the late sixties, it’s worth remembering that the…

It arrived on a massive wave of anticipation, launched the all-too-brief career of a legendary artist, and was still at…

Of course, being both an aspiring muso and a socially paranoid chump, one of the obstacles with this blog is…

Now things are getting interesting. It feels like only yesterday that I was writing about Sinatra and bossa nova albums,…

One of the big questions I ask myself when I do these reviews is “what constitutes listening to an album”?…

First off, I didn’t know shit about Laura Nyro before I listened to this one. When the book’s review talked…

“Hello I’m Johnny Cash” There was a period in about 2006 when I was massively into Johnny Cash. Maybe it…

“Give me Leonard Cohen afterworld, so I can sigh eternally” – Kurt Cobain, Penny Royal Tea Leonard Cohen has become…

If “Are you Experienced?” was the shining moment of Jimi Hendrix the rock musician, and “Axis: Bold of Love” the…

I listen to some weird shit on here. It wasn’t too long before that Brazil was the musical home of…

One of my favourite albums (sadly not in this list), is Ray Davies’ “The Storyteller”. On top of the fact…

It’s strange how many albums I listen to on this list where you hear them described as “it barely sold…

Me: Fucking hell, The Incredible String Band is next on the 1001 list. Why do I do this to myself?…

If rock and roll is an American invention, if even Britain’s greatest ambassadors got their careers started doing covers of…

In the days when I was just discovering the Stones, my first album (nicked from the old man) was the…

There’s no messing with Aretha’s position as the grand Imperial Empress of soul, and this is the album that solidified that place. Prior to this she’d spent years being messed about by Columbia Records, but once she found her way into the soul incubator that was Atlantic, she really began to stretch her abilities, and here she created a stunning ‘debut’ that stands up as an all-time soul classic.

I remember, about 20 years ago, Q Magazine did an article called “What if they’d lived?” – it was basically…

There’s a girl who works in my office. She’s not in my department and I barely speak to her, but…

Despite the slightly comical Nashville-esque title, it’s hard not to like this offering from country legend Loretta Lynn. This, her…

Well that was different. Covering 1001 albums*  was always going to mean exploring new territory, but while forays into jazz,…

A hundred albums in, and one of the things that bothers me is that, James Brown aside, every album has…

I’m a hundred albums into this project now, ten per cent of the way, and even after all that, I…

If Johnny Cash founded the link between country music and life behind bars, then Merle Haggard was right behind him…