Author: Pete Whelan

Neil Young’s improvised, unaccompanied soundtrack, channeled largely through his mythical Gibson Les Paul, “Old Black”, seems spiritually connected with the stark monochromatic landscape and visceral beauty of Dead Man, Jim Jarmusch’s cult psychedelic western. While writing Dead Man – a reimagining of the American Wild West interspersed with the metaphysical poetry of William Blake – Jarmusch reportedly spliced together cassettes of some of Neil Young’s instrumental passages to inspire him as he wrote, calling Young’s playing “masterfully, beautifully damaged rock-and-roll music—perfect imperfection.” With Young’s DNA already in the bedrock of Deadman, the film and his his style aligned perfectly, and the soundtrack finds his playing at its most pure. Unbeholden to traditional song structure and free from the constraints and expectations that would accompany a traditional studio album, Young watched the film with guitar in hand and played reactively to what he saw, using the guitar as a direct tool of expression. A concept so avant-garde yet so simple is classic Neil Young – the result is an ambient classic and some of his finest work.

Creedence Clearwater Revival are synonymous with summertime BBQ’s, Vietnam War movie soundtracks and last call at your local dive bar. They are so ubiquitous that perhaps to some degree they are taken for granted in the classic rock canon. Their sound is a marriage of the slap-back soaked honky tonk of Nashville’s Sun Records and the bluesy, guitar driven grind of Chicago’s Chess records. Their songs are stylised to sound as if they are drifting from the depths of a Louisiana swamp yet their sun-kissed California image and hook laden songs land a little closer to the Beach Boys. A truly American band, Creedence is a collage of all of these things and Cosmo’s factory stands as their crowning glory. It is also the beginning of the band’s implosion – chief writer and lead vocalist John Fogerty kept a tight leash on the band, insisting on being the band’s only singer/songwriter and business manager. Drummer Doug “Cosmo” Clifford dubbed his house the “Factory” as Fogerty made them rehearse there almost every day. Tensions simmered for years and rhythm guitarist Tom Fogerty, John’s brother, quit after the completion of this album. Most of the songs on this record ended up as hits in one way or another, each flawlessly executed by a band at the peak of their powers, somehow so perfectly polished in all their swagger and raggedness, leaving Cosmo’s Factory as a high water mark in Creedence’s impressive career.

Iron Maiden’s galloping, literary brand of heavy metal had been on a roll since the inclusion of pilot, olympic-level fencer, mystery novel writer and former Samson vocalist Bruce “the human air raid siren” Dickinson as their frontman. Moving away from the punk influenced sound they’d established with previous frontman Paul Di’Anno, Maiden moved from strength to strength with Dickinson at the helm, riding the wave of popularity that came with the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal spearheaded by Judas Priest and Motörhead. The third album featuring Dickinson, Powerslave positioned Iron Maiden at the very crest of heavy metal and the subsequent tour allowed Maiden, already wildly popular in the UK and Europe, to headline huge venues during their gruelling tour of the United States, adding world domination to their already impressive resume. The album begins with the one-two punch of album openers Aces High and 2 Minutes to Midnight (written about an RAF dogfight during the Battle of Britain and the doomsday clock respectively), and ends with 13-minute album closer Rime of the Ancient Mariner – an epic based on the Coleridge poem of the same name and favourite of college radio DJ’s who, due to its length, had ample time to smoke a joint whenever it was played. Chief songwriter and bassist Steve Harris’ ability to craft compelling, anthemic material from historical sources made Iron Maiden quite distinctive in the often tropey world of heavy metal and the band’s technical mastery of the form reached new heights on Powerslave, unquestionably cut during the band’s prime and ensuring their legacy for years to come.

You Am I hit the the top of the Aussie charts with their sophomoric record Hi Fi Way, seeing the band embellish the punk and grunge driven formula established on their debut with elements of the frantic rhythm guitar of the Kinks and dynamic arrangements of the Who. With help from Sonic Youth axe-man Lee Ranaldo on production, the band opts for a stripped down, four-to-the-floor approach with much of the material, save for the occasional string overdub during tender moments from vocalist Tim Rogers. The whole album seems built around Rogers’ lyricism and rightfully so – his writing is incredibly relatable for such introspective subject matter, whether he’s singing about “personality pills and something red to swill” or washing his hands four thousand times a day, Rogers’ ability to make a listener nostalgic or heartbroken over something that they’ve never experienced is both a rare gift and the mark of a true craftsman. It isn’t easy to look in the mirror and write what you see – his unflinching honesty as a writer is the lynchpin of these songs.

Roxy Music’s first record, shimmering with campy decadence and art-school ambition, is the sum of the chemistry between two of its principal creators – Bryan Ferry and Brian Eno. Ferry, Roxy Music’s chief songwriter and lead vocalist was a Humphrey Bogart obsessive who’s love of fine tailoring and supermodels had seen him dubbed “Byron Ferrari” by the rock press. Eno was to be an electronic music pioneer whose avant garde production style and synthetic electronic “treatments” for songs (which would notably become a centrepiece of David Bowie’s Heroes a few years later) would revolutionise pop music in the years to come. On Roxy Music, both men’s debut album, the wilful dissonance between Ferry’s pouting romanticism and Eno’s proto-ambient techniques really set the band apart from the rest of the early seventies glam rock pack. While the two are still discovering their chemistry, the moments where they connect are alchemical – the stutter of album opener Re-make/Re-model and the liquid velvet of Ladytron are “eureka” moments for the band. Unchecked, their ambitions carry them in different directions -the 7 minute, Eno driven synth jam “Sea Breezes” is an example. Eno would only stay with the band for one more record (the excellent For Your Pleasure) but this, Roxy Music’s debut, was the birth of a new kind of rock n’ roll: highly stylised and decadent but also world-weary and intelligent with tongue firmly planted in cheek.

King Gizzard’s sixth album, Quarters!, is a sprawling suite of four songs that sees the shapeshifting septet turn their focus to jazz-inflected acid rock. Each of the four tracks on Quarters! clocks in at exactly 10:10 – while the significance of this is unclear, the influences of LA Woman era Doors and Houses of the Holy era Zeppelin certainly inform these sprawling, proggy excursions. Album opener the River drifts along in an upbeat haze and the other three tracks follow suit – all easy, spacious jams over pulsating jazz rhythms that ebb and flow quite naturally. Each song finds an agreeable groove to inhabit and sticks to it, filling the space with intricately woven guitar textures and rhythmic interplay before drifting into the next jam as fluidly as a change of seasons. A hard left turn for the band which saw them nominated for Best Jazz Album at the 2015 Aria Music Awards, Quarters! is listless and meandering in the best way, 40:40 of pure psychedelic day-dream.

Willie Nelson’s rough and ready reputation as a country music outlaw was thrown into stark relief when the Red Headed Stranger reinvented himself as balladeer on 1978’s Stardust. A songwriter as gifted as Nelson doing a record of covers was considered unusual and perhaps Stardust was not intended to be the tour de force that it became but nevertheless this collection of standards produced by Stax Records legend Booker T Jones transformed Willie from country music icon to international pop-star overnight. Perfectly augmented by his band’s restrained presence, Nelson’s emotional reimaginings of classics like Georgia on my Mind and Unchained Melody helped to distinguish him as one of the finest musical interpreters of his generation. These days a standards album evokes the lounge-lizard croon of artists in their twilight years trying to reinvent themselves, but Nelson’s career was white hot when he made Stardust. It was a bold move, and a smart one too, allowing his smoky drawl to make an indelible mark on the American songbook.