Compiling My 100 Favourite Albums Ranked List
The first thing to say about the blog My 100 Favourite Albums Ranked is that it is not a list of my 100 favourite albums ranked.
Just think about it for a moment – how could it be?
Let’s start with the idea of rank order. How on earth can I assert with any degree of accuracy or certainty that the album I place at number 53 is indeed a tad better (in my opinion) than the one at 54 but a smidgen less good than the one at 52?
And second, a list of my actual 100 favourite albums – ranked or otherwise – would be even more limited in breadth and scope than this list because the top end in particular would be heavily weighted in favour of albums by my favourite bands and artists. The seven Genesis albums from Trespass to Wind and Wuthering, for example, would almost certainly all be in such a list. Hardly an interesting list..
(By the way, from this point on I will be using the term ‘band’ to refer to any group or artist, regardless of the number of members and what they play. David Bowie, Simon and Garfunkel, Queen and Electric Light Orchestra are henceforth all ‘bands’.)
So in reality the list is a brew diluted by more than a few drops of watery compromise. In particular, I have limited most bands to one entry, with a few permitted two and my absolute favourites three. I doubt you will have much difficulty working out who they are, by the way, even if you are new to my blogs.
That has meant making some tough choices, with plenty of fabulous albums being dumped from the list completely or – occasionally – selected as representative of a group of albums. I will try and make clear in the mini-commentaries when that is the case.
Note the future tense – “I will try…”. My plan is to publish the first part of the list – and this introductory article at the same time – and then keep adding to it over the coming days and weeks. That opens up time and space for some re-listening and re-assessing before updating the list and adjusting and tweaking what has already been published.
I began with a longlist of possibilities on a spreadsheet and assigned each album an indicative rating out of 1,000 (well, out of 10 but to two decimal places). A quick sort and then I started to focus on the assorted surprises and absurdities it threw back at me – blimey, no way is that album better than this one – before refining as required.
And that is what I will carry on doing until I get to number one. Wash – rinse – repeat.
It goes without saying that this is all highly subjective and to some extent impressionistic. And of course my thinking is changing all the time. Today’s favourite Yes album today is not necessarily tomorrow’s favourite Yes album. This list is a snapshot, my preferences at a particular moment in time, but I am hoping that the iterative process outlined above will produce something a little more considered and thought-through than many lists of this kind.
When I compiled my ranking of Queen songs a few years ago, I found it helpful to play every song before commenting on it, no matter how familiar it was. I challenged myself to listen with a genuinely open mind – and open ears – rather than relying on previously formed (and, as it panned out, often surprisingly erroneous) impressions and judgements.
As for the idea of ranking, it probably makes sense to think of the list in blocks – the albums from 41 to 50 are better than the ones from 51 to 60 – and not taking the actual order of albums overly seriously (though I expect to have a serious shortage of hair by the time we get to the final twenty).
The lazy days of August have been the perfect time for me to do the groundwork. This project started after a pub discussion with friends (fellow music fans) about a handwritten list I had found, dated August 1983, of my fifty favourite albums. I have written several blogs in the last few years about my interest in music as a child/teenager, and the idea of ‘updating’ the 1983 list immediately appealed.
The most surprising thing about that original list is that – despite my obsession with Queen in particular and rock music more generally – I had put a Simon and Garfunkel best-of collection at number one.
The Simon and Garfunkel Collection is indeed a solid set of classic songs written and performed by a truly outstanding duo, but I had almost certainly just bought the album. Our tendency, especially when we are younger, to overvalue fresh content is one of the reasons I avoid those ‘All-time 100 best songs – as voted by you’ programmes that seem to clog up the airwaves every bank holiday.
I remember one particularly egregious example from the early 2000s. There were maybe three Robbie Williams songs in the top twenty for no other reason than that he was the man of the moment. What a waste of time. I would stipulate that nothing can feature from the last ten years. That being said, I have included one album in this list that I actually only heard for the first time about three weeks ago. It is the debut album by the Vaccines. I think it is great and am still at that stage where it is getting better with every listen. But I thought long and hard about whether to include it in this list or not.
One very obvious limitation back in 1983 was my extremely limited knowledge base. I was 17 years old and had literally nothing other than a relatively modest record collection, financed largely from a poorly-paid paper round, to work with.
And, to be clear, I am not pretending that anything much has changed in that regard over the past forty or so years. I don’t claim to be a ‘professor of pop’ (Regius Professor of Rock?). I don’t obsess about music, I don’t have particularly eclectic tastes, and I don’t go out of my way to ‘discover’ new artists, though I occasionally get interested in newer stuff through recommendations from trusted friends. That’s how I came across Elbow, Arctic Monkeys and the Vaccines, for example.
I have my musical likes and dislikes – don’t we all? Not surprisingly, there are whole genres of music not represented in the list. Spoiler alert: country and western fans won’t find much to enthuse about.
And even within my relatively narrow area(s) of interest – basically, guitar-based rock and various offshoots, from 70s prog to indie – there are some glaring (and rather embarrassing) omissions. No Stones or Dylan, for example. Nothing much from the 60s, in fact, other than the Beatles. No Fleetwood Mac or The Who. No Jethro Tull or Wishbone Ash. No Steely Dan or Allman Brothers or Neil Young or Linda Ronstadt. Legendary artists, all of them – at least to ‘serious’ music fans.
So this list is not liberally sprinkled with obscure choices to pique the interest of the aficionado. With the exception of a handful of bands, my knowledge of music simply isn’t that wide or deep. I briefly toyed with the idea of trying to avoid the ‘classics’. But, well, there is usually a good reason why they are labelled classics. (And, yes, I know I just said no Fleetwood Mac.)
I commented in one of my Led Zeppelin blogs about the ‘curse’ of discovering bands through live albums, especially for someone of my generation who grew up in that genre’s golden age (if live albums can be described as a genre). I love Live and Dangerous, Made in Japan and Strangers in the Night, but I have never owned a Thin Lizzy, Deep Purple or UFO studio album.
The availability nowadays of streaming has changed everything. I was – as I usually am – late to the party, but it has enabled me in the last few years to fill at least a few of the many yawning chasms in my music knowledge.
I am fascinated by the connection between music and memory, and by how we come to ‘choose’ our favourite music. Two things quickly became apparent when I compiled my longlist: (1) how many of the albums I bought as a child/teenager remain favourites to this day and (2) how often the first album I bought by a band is still one of my favourites of theirs. Bowie’s Diamond Dogs, one of the very first non-Queen albums in my collection, is a good example. And yes, it’s in the list.
(More precisely, those two things quickly became apparent when I was writing the min-commentaries about each album. I have nothing original to say about the music. It made much more sense in most cases to talk about my personal history with the band and/or the album.)
Granted, this preponderance of albums from my teenage years in the list has much to do with the quality and timelessness of the music I was listening to back them. But are there other factors at work too?
This brings me back to streaming and how the way we consume music has changed across the years. I wrote this in a blog I wrote about my first ever album buys:
It’s very different nowadays, of course, especially for young people, most of whom access music largely or even exclusively online. And who would deny them the opportunity to listen to more or less anything – old or new – at relatively little cost other than their time? Who would argue against the convenience of simply pressing Play? Who would begrudge them the functionality of options like shuffle or curated playlists?
But convenience comes with a hidden cost. It’s the Stop button beside the Play button – that ability to just switch off a song or an album if we don’t immediately like what we hear. Just move on to the next track, the next album, the next group. We risk neglecting or rejecting the sort of music that perhaps needs a bit of time and effort to fully enjoy or appreciate, that doesn’t satisfy our need for instant gratification via a thumping riff, gorgeous melody or catchy chorus.
With a mere handful of records to my name, there really wasn’t much on those albums that I neglected or rejected. Cliché klaxon: I lived and breathed them. And not just the music. Everything about them – lyrics, artwork, even the sleeve notes. They’re (almost) all classics, of course – a much overused label, I admit, but useful nevertheless in that it doesn’t just signal quality but also evokes a sense of timelessness.
And time is indeed the key. My twelve-year-old self may not have realised it, but immersing myself in those albums meant that I had the time to dive beneath the surface and discover their hidden depths – learning to appreciate White Man as much as Somebody to Love, The Battle of Evermore as much as Stairway to Heaven, Fool’s Overture as much as Give a Little Bit, Awaken as much as Wonderous Stories.
One final point. Unlike in 1983, there are no live albums or collections in this new list. It is limited to studio albums. At the time of writing, I have not finally decided what the number-one album will actually be, but I know for sure that this time it won’t be The Simon and Garfunkel Collection.
I should also mention that – unless stated otherwise in the commentaries – I have based my judgements on the albums as they were originally released in the UK, not on a later re-release or overseas version with an alternative track listing.