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Spotlighting the impact of cultural landmarks
A concept album that transcended its concept, a stealth mix-CD, global disco, sampledelic exotica, yacht rock by other means: the Australian group’s debut was many things, writes David Bennun - and above all it was, and remains, a joy
Out of tragedy came triumph. But that didn’t shake AC/DC out of their state of arrested development – it simply cemented it to capture the joys of adolescence for generations of adolescents to come. Julian Marszalek gets his schoolboy shorts on
Because of the death of Ian Curtis and the nature of the band's last recordings, Joy Division's Closer is an album around which a stillness has settled. In truth, says Jonathan Wright as he talks to Peter Hook and Paul Morley, no band evolved so rapidly. All Joy Division portraits courtesy of Kevin Cummins
Compass Point Studios, and its house band the Compass Point All Stars, were going to be Chris Blackwell and Island Records’ defining statement to the world. Instead, they provided Grace Jones’s. And that, says David Bennun, looking back at the three extraordinary records she made there between 1980 and 1982, is more than enough
Forty years ago this month, two British bands released albums that would set the course for metal over the following decade. But it’s not the similarities between Iron Maiden and British Steel that are most telling, it’s the differences
In 1995, Polly Harvey reinvented herself as a pink catsuit-wearing vamp peddling an album of stormy gothic American blues. But was it really such a surprise? Ben Hewitt argues the transformation only put up in lights what Harvey had already shown: she was an actor as much as a singer
Yes they probably invented folk rock but also, on their landmark third album, Fairport Convention, presented a view of England that has now been lost... one of violent division along lines of class and gender but one that was also positive and questing, says Michael Hann
Rather than simply play acoustic versions of their hits, Nirvana treated MTV’s Unplugged show as an opportunity to turn their own music on its head, to connect it to American roots and European glam. 25 years on, the resulting album, MTV Unplugged In New York, stands as their finest work, says David Bennun
Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt’s final album together is a collection of songs “about going out” with a troubled mind at their core. When he recovered from a traumatising illness, Michael White fell hard for its blend of beats and brooding
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