Off The Tracks

Leo Sayer, Endless Flight (1976)

The Leo Sayer song of great annoyance is You Make Me Feel Like Dancing – and it’s here in all its Jackson 5-pastiche glory. And as a kid I really dug that song but it became revolting to me rather swiftly. I can’t say I ever thought too much about Leo Sayer but I’ve owned this album for a long time. A long time without ever listening to it – must have got it a) cheap and b) because I figured You Make Me Feel Like Dancing would be a handy DJ grab-bag thing to have. But then, for some weird reason – aka The Vinyl Countdown – I decide to give this is a spin. And it’s good. Like really good. So many great songs. When I Need You is one of the other really big, obvious hits. But there’s something about this album – great pop tunes with an incredible cast of session players: Jeff Porcaro, Steve Gadd, Chuck Rainey, Richard Tee, Lee Sklar, Bobbye Hall, Ray Parker Jr, Nigel Olsson, Larry Carlton. Funny that Elton John’s drummer should be there – some of this album feels a bit like vintage-era Elton John to me. I won’t feel shame for liking this record. No fucking chance. It’s a bit of a gem I reckon. Fairplay.

Sample Track: Hold On To My Love

The Vinyl Countdown is a document of every LP I listen to, brand new discoveries and old-old favourites; extremely pre-loved, previously abandoned or with the shrink-wrap having just been removed it’s all here at The Vinyl Countdown

Kenny Rogers  & The First Edition, Greatest Hits (1971)

I dig Kenny Rogers – it’s music I grew up with. Seen him live once – it was good. A bit boring after a while but he did a fine line in country-schmaltz. And before that there was the First Edition stuff – part psychedelic-pop, part outlaw-country-ish. But some cracking good songs. This is where that awful (horrific) but brilliant Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love To Town comes from. And the hit that everyone loves from this era is Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In). A great song. One of my favourite $2 records. My copy even still has the $2 sticker on it. And I hate keeping stickers – especially price-tags – on CDs or LPs. But for some reason I’ve kept that $2 sticker there with this. And I have no idea why.

Sample Track: Reuben James

The Vinyl Countdown is a document of every LP I listen to, brand new discoveries and old-old favourites; extremely pre-loved, previously abandoned or with the shrink-wrap having just been removed it’s all here at The Vinyl Countdown

Madness, Complete Madness (1982)

Any thought of Madness, any time I hear the music – and I wouldn’t call myself a huge fan or anything – I’m transported back to The Young Ones. Picked up on some cool music from that show – and in a before-my-time sort of way as I was addicted to watching The Young Ones when I was about eight years old, plenty of the jokes flying over my head perhaps; I watched every episode dozens of times, can still recite whole sequences from memory. So, yeah, Madness seems apt. They appeared in the show twice – and both times it was memorable, great songs, good scenes – especially when Rick asks Suggs if he knows Summer Holiday by Cliff And The Shadows and he replies, “you hum it son, I’ll smash ya face in”. I’ve really only ever been a Greatest Hits kind of guy with Madness. My bro had the Divine Madness CD and that got a thrashing. Loved it. Found this LP some time ago and it does the job (pretty much). Dug it out again recently because I was reading this book about the album One Step Beyond…

Sample Track: Baggy Trousers

The Vinyl Countdown is a document of every LP I listen to, brand new discoveries and old-old favourites; extremely pre-loved, previously abandoned or with the shrink-wrap having just been removed it’s all here at The Vinyl Countdown

Simon & Garfunkel, Wednesday Morning, 3AM (1964)

This is the first Simon & Garfunkel album. You listen to it now and it’s hard to believe that this duo that promised “exciting new sounds in the folk tradition” would go on to deliver that; would go on to create enduring classics. I rather enjoy the low-key debut now. But what would I have thought of it at the time? I guess we have one song to thank – and its revised version. Not much here that hints at stadium-rock reunions.

Sample Track: The Sound Of Silence

The Vinyl Countdown is a document of every LP I listen to, brand new discoveries and old-old favourites; extremely pre-loved, previously abandoned or with the shrink-wrap having just been removed it’s all here at The Vinyl Countdown

The Hollies, Their Twenty Greatest Hits (1974)

The Hollies – now here’s a singles band, my word. Went to their gig just the other year, expected it to be some oldies phoning it in – but they delivered. So many hits, pretty much everything on this album – just hit after hit. Immaculate pop songs. And then when you hear Long Cool Woman In A Black Dress there are shades of Creedence, T-Rex, The Bats and The Kinks all in one song. This record has been in my collection forever – and it’s had a hammering. The cover is falling apart, a bit of the LP is sticking out at the back as the bottom of the back-side of the sleeve is simply not there anymore. And I have at least two other Hollies hits collections. But I always loved this one the most. It got the hammering. And it still goes. Still works.

Sample Track: Just One Look

The Vinyl Countdown is a document of every LP I listen to, brand new discoveries and old-old favourites; extremely pre-loved, previously abandoned or with the shrink-wrap having just been removed it’s all here at The Vinyl Countdown

Neil Young, Hawks & Doves (1980)

It’s easy sometimes to agree with the conventional wisdom that Neil Young released/releases some filler. I’ve certainly always admired the way he just moves on, he keeps moving, almost ignoring the album as soon as it has dropped. If it resonates then so it does. If not then it’s still there – in some sense. Or it’s like it never was. But conventional wisdom is just that: conventional. And Neil Young isn’t just that. So I reckon if you’ve ignored Hawks & Doves you could/should give it another try. It never really worked for me when it was reissued on CD – in 2003. But I dug out the LP and gave it another go. Always loved his Little Wing. And I reckon that even on the crummiest Neil Young album you’ll find one or two gems. You find that here. Easily. It was a great Sunday afternoon LP. Sure, it was cobbled together and it includes some leftovers but Neil Young always has a gem or two. And this album – less than 30 minutes long – won’t trouble you too much if you don’t find something to dig.

Sample Track: The Old Homestead

The Vinyl Countdown is a document of every LP I listen to, brand new discoveries and old-old favourites; extremely pre-loved, previously abandoned or with the shrink-wrap having just been removed it’s all here at The Vinyl Countdown

Steely Dan, Pretzel Logic (1974)

A key album this – for both the band and me. It was the first Steely Dan LP I heard – the first album away from all the singles I knew and a couple of Greatest Hits-type compilations. It’s also the bridging album for the band between being an actual group and being whatever Walter Becker and Donald Fagen as musical-auteur types decide. They ran the show from here on (if they didn’t entirely beforehand also). And it’s the most overtly jazz-ish, it shows the connection to the jazz that Fagen (particularly) and Becker loved and listened to and researched. It’s in the tunes, it informs the tunes, it’s in the approach – that approach extending over from here to every other album: pick the best man for the job, that player that can deliver the best performance. Fuck, I love Steely Dan. There’s no one great album for me – well, beyond Aja I guess. They’re all great. I love them all. [Here’s the whole album]

Sample Track: Rikki Don’t Lose That Number

The Vinyl Countdown is a document of every LP I listen to, brand new discoveries and old-old favourites; extremely pre-loved, previously abandoned or with the shrink-wrap having just been removed it’s all here at The Vinyl Countdown

Jeff Beck, Flash (1985)

It’s the worst Jeff Beck album – I’m pretty sure of it – but I had probably the opposite reaction to it when compared with another album from the same year by a guitar hero struggling to be relevant in the 1980s – that being Eric Clapton’s Behind The Sun, which featured on The Vinyl Countdown just the other day. You see I bought Flash as a young, eager Jeff Beck fan and instantly hated it. Sure it was produced by Nile Rodgers and there was that duet with Rod Stewart but it was a nothing-album. With time I’ve grown to enjoy it more – it’s still way down there in terms of Jeff Beck albums but there’s something about Beck being out of his depth and offering these 1980s pop-rock songs. He’s all but disowned it but it was clearly a period he had to work through, I see it as the catalyst for where his career is at now – a final kiss-off to him as the guitarist-sidekick that needed to have vocalists to play off. He’s been soaring ever since. But if they were to have used these songs in a John Carpenter film from the time then they’d be perfect. And there’s some kitsch value about playing the record – as opposed to when I owned the tape and later the CD. There’s something fairly inexplicable at play but music such as this seems thoroughly acceptable when the LP is spinning. It’s allowed. On CD, Mp3 etc it just seems plain wrong.

Sample Track: Ambitious

The Vinyl Countdown is a document of every LP I listen to, brand new discoveries and old-old favourites; extremely pre-loved, previously abandoned or with the shrink-wrap having just been removed it’s all here at The Vinyl Countdown

Eric Clapton, Behind The Sun (1985)

So many of the big stars of the 1960s and 1970s really struggled to get to grips with where things were at in the 1980s. It’s as if they tried the same old tricks while being talked into the technology/recording techniques of the day – resulting, almost always, in something that wasn’t really quite fitting at the time and didn’t really sound like the artist in question. Eric Clapton’s Behind The Sun is an example of this – meant to be a “comeback” record, in a sense. And it features more of his guitar playing, solos – very much in a pepper-spray, splatter-painting approach – than anything from the decade beforehand. But does that make it good? I sat, horrified, listening to this record the other day. I loved this album at one time. I had it on tape – later I had it on CD. I don’t think I ever even listened to the CD. Now I have the LP. And I should have turned it off almost immediately, but I worked through She’s Waiting and decided that I could handle See What Love Can Do and Same Old Blues, a lurching plodder that features a bunch of the splatter-painting guitar solo squalls. Awful. Just awful. But it was like car-crash listening, I was a rubber-necker at the side of the road, this album playing on with its hackneyed attempts at tempestuous guitarishness and it was like I was powerless to turn it off. When all I really needed to do was get up and lift the needle. It became almost comical. And then I started to remember things: bad things. Very band things. Like how I hand-wrote the lyrics to the title song, play/pause/rewind/play/pause/rewind. They are not even good lyrics. It is not even a good song. But I was deep in the midst of my Clapton obsession. And, if it helps, I was about 14. There was a time when I had those lyrics on the wall in my bedroom. For shame. He (God) could not do wrong. I realise now that he not only could – he often did. This album is a weird clusterfuck with some occasional glimmers of hope, well, one song really – Forever Man – it’s far beyond anything else on the record. But that alone can’t quite recommend it. I didn’t really know that guitar playing could be overwrought but check out the sample-track below. Fucking ridiculous. What was I thinking?  

Sample Track: Just Like A Prisoner

The Vinyl Countdown is a document of every LP I listen to, brand new discoveries and old-old favourites; extremely pre-loved, previously abandoned or with the shrink-wrap having just been removed it’s all here at The Vinyl Countdown

Parliament, Greatest Hits (1984)

I’ll buy more Parliament on vinyl – but this is a handy thing to have in the collection. I’ve got plenty of George Clinton-fronted material on my iPod, in my CD collection but this has already been handy during DJ sets – and it’s a good starter-kit/sampler. My nearly six-month-old son has really started to dig music – to respond to it. He loves the funk. Or so I thought. Played this the other day and he just stared at me. We tried dancing around and he just stared me down. As if he was thinking “you are so white and this ain’t right”. And if that was the case then he is learning quicker than I even realised.

Sample Track: Up For The Down Stroke

The Vinyl Countdown is a document of every LP I listen to, brand new discoveries and old-old favourites; extremely pre-loved, previously abandoned or with the shrink-wrap having just been removed it’s all here at The Vinyl Countdown