Photograph courtesy of Tom Sheehan
This list isn’t necessarily my all-time favourite albums. Some of these are my all time favourites and all of them are great albums, but the worst thing you can ever do to me is ask me to compile a list because that list will probably change every single day. So when I was asked to do this I just got straight to it and jotted down some records. I can already see that I’ve made some glaring errors by not including Forever Changes by Love, Buffalo Springfield Again and other records that I hold in very high esteem. But looking at this list now I can see that these are go-to records for me and have been for most of my adult life. You could describe them as comfort records. I always find great joy in them. There’s a certain amount of emotion in them that reminds me of certain periods of my life.
I really like albums made by bands who are disintegrating: Buffalo Springfield Again, which was recorded as a number of solo albums, Forever Changes made after Arthur Lee had sacked a lot of the other members of the band and then brought them back in again. Big Star’s Radio City, they were beginning to fall apart, Chris Bell had left; obviously it’s not as destructive as they were during Third/Sister Lovers, but I’m very much taken by records that seem to be made by artists who are falling apart at the time. It’s not a conscious thing but I like the dishevelment and the experimentation too.
A lot of the albums I have chosen were critically neglected at the time or received quite poorly. They found their audience much later after they were conceived.
