I am listening to this now. I don’t play it often but when I do, I always go “My God this is really good” and i just said it again!
Quality will out … as they say. 
1 Like
One of my favourite albums
The the,Mind Bomb
Bought it around 1990 after a weed smoking friend was playing it every time I saw him.but it stuck with me,Matt Johnson,Johnny Marr and a appearance from Sinead O’Connor on Kingdom of rain.
Still an album I go back to after all these years and it still sounds fresh…Matts first few songs on side one (yes I had it on vinyl)are pretty much about Islam and God and even today are very current issues.
Although only eight songs long, there’s not any filler here from track 1 Good morning beautiful right through to track 8 Beyond love are all superb especially for me anyway The violence of truth and August and September…brilliant album.
7 Likes
Ah, yes. What an album!
So many, but keeping my choice to three: Choices sort of age me, but hey.
David Sylvian: Gone to Earth. transports me back to heady days of late teens. Still magical music to this day.
Tanita Tikarum: Ancient Heart
This last one is a relatively recent discovery but really made an impact on me. It’s v special indeed.
Mark Kozalek and Jimmy Lavalle: Perils from the Sea
2 Likes
Wonderful album - Traction in the Rain is a standout track
Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road album is a special album for me. I think it’s the catchy melodies which first attracted me to it, especially the title track. It’s the first album I ever got, initially as a Christmas present in the mid-70s from my parents on cassette. At the time I had an all in one Sony Cassette recorder which I played it on. A couple of years later, I bought it on vinyl.
More recently, I added a standard CD copy to my collection, then when the 40th anniversary CD box came out I acquired that as well.
I still play it regularly and love it just as much as I did on first hearing it.
11 Likes
With the blistering Rusty Squeezebox on guitar.
I’m going to have to break this up into a set of pieces as the albums are here for different reasons.
So first lest start with the Brandenburgs: specifically via the Dunedin Consort
Beautifully crafted music, an incredible mixture of multiple simplicities being added together into a wonderful complexity, and skilfully and delicately played; it’s also very well recorded.
I seem to have known the Brandedburgs ‘for ever’.
I also have the EC rendition
6 Likes
Still on the Baroque…
William Boyce: Eight Symphonies
Boyce was a genuinely nice guy (unlike Newton, Handel or Wagner!) and this comes across in his music: joyful and spirited, genuinely uplifting.
4 Likes
Moving on a bit…
Beethoven’s 7th
Beethoven’s musical answer to his deafness, some time after the Heiligenstadt Testament Beethoven put the feelings about the failure of his body countered by the indomitable nature of his spirit into this symphony; it’s perhaps best described as life affirming.
This recording is live, and technically OK rather than good, but the rendition is absolutely sublime, accurately conveying first the conflicting emotions and then moving on through the resolution and reflection.
1 Like
So many, but keeping my choice to three: Choices sort of age me, but hey.
David Sylvian: Gone to Earth. transports me back to heady days of late teens. Still magical music to this day.
That would be on my list too. Along with Dance - Gary Numan. Both of these albums have been consistently called into play for late night listening when louder music would have been frowned upon.
Oh, and Apollo Atmospheres and Soundtracks - Brian Eno
3 Likes
If I go back to when I first heard rock music and thought ‘wow’ (The Who came a few months later and took things to another level) then, and it probably lowers the quality of this thread for many…so be it!, it has to be Status Quo - On the Level c.1976, heard first on vinyl my mate’s Sony music centre (IIRC) - I think the LP was his older brother’s.
Coming from a family where the LP/cassette tape stock stock was primarily Frank Sinatra, Shirley Bassey MfP releases and Nat King Cole, hearing the Quo boys rip the guitars was mesmerising - and, like many, I regard this and Blue for You as the pinnacle of their output. For me, these are still good albums today and are pick-me-ups.
6 Likes
Entirely agree - nothing like The Mystery Song from Blue for You to get you awake for the day
I love Samuel Beckett’s description of the 7th, “the dearest of the 9”.
Replying to myself as an addendum:
And then in 1978 came this - Thin Lizzy Live & Dangerous. Stupendous music, with an offer to the ladies which cannot be repeated today! OK so it’s not all live but what a performance and unquestionably one of my desert island LPs. Just play it loud.
8 Likes
I’ve loved reading other people’s choices here, sharing love of and joy in music as a fantastic thing. I’ve got a huge list of albums I’d call lifetime, ones that have been with me since I first heard them and will not leave me, but I’ve whittled it down to three with some pain. One is a bit of a cheat, I’ll explain.
The Alban Berg Quartet’s recordings of the late Beethoven String Quartets. I find the late quartets among the most deeply moving music I have ever heard, wonderfully beautiful, and offering profound insights into human emotion and the human spirit. I saw the Bergs many times when they were resident at the South Bank, and this studio recording for me digs so deeply into the heart of the music. I’ve said before here that Op. 135 is to me is of the most deeply joyful things I know, struggle in the music resolving into a finale which brings a sense of spirituality and peace, and this is my favourite performance.
2 Likes
Joni Mitchell - Hejira
An album I discovered during my student days, and I’ve found new depths in it in the intervening decades. The beauty of the poetry resonates, at any time in my life I’ve found at least one of the poems (songs) speaks deeply to who I was at the time, the musicianship is sublime.
11 Likes
Cropredy Capers - A box set of the first 25 years of the Fairport Convention Cropredy Festival.
Fairport have also been a staple part of my life since staring to love them just before I went to college, 1980 was after the glory years, but they’ve made very fine music live and in record since as well. I could easily have chosen Liege and Lief which has been a vinyl staple for nearly 40 years, but Fairport live at gigs and especially at Cropredy has been a steady part of my life, I’ve been to Cropredy 32 times I think.
In 2001 I got chatting to a woman sitting beside me in the field at Cropredy, we had a goodnight kiss when Fairport finished off with the mass audience singalong of Meet on The Ledge, by 2016 when her lymphoma recurred for the final terminal time she was my wife, and Meet on the Ledge live was the final song at her funeral. So this music will be with me and core to my being as long as I am alive.
12 Likes
Xanthe, I don’t know that album, but I’ll try and find it. I really like the Brandenburg concertos, too, and Dunedin Consort / Butt’s version of Mozart’s Requiem is one of my favourite records.