Idiot's Guide Album Of The Noughties v.1.0

And so with the decade rapidly drawing to a close, I call upon all contributors to this blog (past & present) to nominate their Album of the Noughties. As individuals, none of us will have heard enough actual albums to even begin to have a properly informed opinion, but perhaps some universal truths will leak out if we all pull together just one last time and try to get our collective shit together, maaaan.

It's been a funny old decade. So much has changed, yet so much has stayed the same. I began the decade on the threshold of my thirties, the proud father of one 3-year-old son. I had never been online at this point (seriously! not once!! Ever!!). I am ending the decade at the beginning of my forties. I am still the proud father of a 3-year-old son, but now he has two older brothers, one of whom recently became a teenager. How the buggery-fuck did that happen?

Musically, I started the decade listening to American groups like Mercury Rev, The Flaming Lips and Bonnie Prince Billy, reading Mojo magazine and checking out loads of 'classic rock' and jazz albums. Wotta prick. Then somehow, thankfully, I got lured back to european electronic dance music. It was probably because I finally got online and started reading blogs instead of the music press - my salvation! That's how I found grime and dubstep, rediscovered minimal techno and ambient, got back into clubbing and djing again. But then I got all 'Haunted' and started wandering back into the past. These days I spend most of my time sifting through the vinyl debris of the 20th Century.

But I like to think I keep abreast of new developments. In fact the tastes of my kids are now becoming a useful navigational aid to the current pop climate. Thanks to them I know my Lady Gagas from my Lilly Allens, my Shakiras from my Alexandra Burkes, etc. In return, I have given them the gift of Toni Basil, Lene Lovich, Anita Ward and, somewhat improbably, The Flying Lizards. I'll admit I haven't really heard anywhere near enough albums to have a sensible opinion, but on balance, having weighed up the various factors, I have come to my decision.

My nominee has to be a popular album. I mean, it has to have been a critical and commercial success on a worldwide scale. It needs to be innovative and highly influential, totally plugged-in to the moment, a defining Noughties sound, but with respect and reference to the past, and also be future-proof enough to have aged well, so that it still sounds great today. Taking all things into account, the only possible album I can nominate with a straight face is one that came out early on in the decade, 2001 to be precise. It's an album that sounds cohesive and homogenised to the point of being obsessive yet at the same time all the tracks have a distinctive feel to them. It is an album that displays it's creators' gift for melody and understanding of composition and structure, yet also reveals a fetish for experimentation, textural detail, rhythm, repetition, etc. Its an album that works as a whole, yet each individual track is satisfying in its own right. In fact the only thing wrong with it is that it was made by the bloody French, and it spawned an awful lot of copycats (in both the dance and rock scenes) and a level of visibility that quickly wore away much of the goodwill bequeathed on it by the cognoscenti. I hadn't actually listened to the album myself for several years, only coming back to it this week whilst searching for potential nominees. I swear to God it sounded fucking great all over again. Brilliant. Genius. Timeless(?)

Okay, okay enough with the preamble. My nominee for Best Album Of The Noughties is.....

DAFT PUNK - DISCOVERY.



Stick that in yer pipe and smoke it.

The Hare And The Moon

The little ipod that runs my alarm clock - sets the tone for the day etc - keeps shuffling onto tracks from this album; my favourite sludgey, Wicker Man, experimental folk album of the year so far.



It's almost straight folk (at least compared to the Sunburned, American beardy weirdys, Four Tet, Music To Play In The Dark folk tangents ) but there's weird bits around all the edges and in all the corners... odd TV soundbites (Children Of The Stones? I'd have to check), Death In June drumming, frazzled guitar lines, odd angles... but all done with a lightness of touch uncommon in these fields... there's a hint of humour in amongst the sex and violence and a cackling, belladonna sense of darkness and light...

Unlike many claimants, this really could have been an alternative soundtrack to The Wicker Man...

This is not just Christmas...

...this is a Mutoid Waste Christmas.

I'll be doing all my Christmas shopping here, whether my Gran likes it or not...

The Execution of Gary Glitter

Well, Channel 4 can hardly say they're ducking the punches. This was a tiny scratch of insanity writ large (could they have stretched it to a mini series or a phone vote? - I'll bet anything that was on the cards at some point, just grab someone from Ofcom, feed them a few drinks, and make them tell all). It started many bombs ticking; made people think about the death of TV, the death of the remix (the moment where Gary bug-eyes at the crappy remix is seventeen times more funny than intended), the death of the News, almost anything except the death penalty itself.

You watched, kept watching, felt your mouth creep open and hang there. This was coke spritzer in television form, a head bigger than Nikolai Valuev's, a head designed to punch. Channel 4 used to court this kind of controversy all the time; they clearly felt the need for some more. They clearly felt the need for a good kicking. Maybe they watched that programme on Mary Whitehouse and got a burst of vanilla-scented nostalgia for the good old days, when people could be relied upon to care enough to march on things. When people would do their cardies right up to the top and storm the barricades.

(The crowd / protestor scenes btw: pitifully empty. The budget needed thousands of extras; without them it was just some spinning cameras and a few people wandering around aimlessly. If they were trying to portray a surge of emotion then...)

I'm guessing at some level I enjoyed this; it acted like a counterpoint to A Short Film About Killing, a comical flipside, a film about death that didn't feel like a film about death. But, at some level, I enjoyed this because it's nice to be offered fresh meat now and then, it'll be interesting to discuss in class, it'll be a worthy addition to the the end of year WTF? lists and talking heads; it'll be on New Year's Eve again, attempting to catch in the throats of the post-pub crowd.

The remix will be out before Christmas. Is probably out now. Chris Moyles will be playing it.

It made me think of how understated I was being when I suggested the Young Gods version of Did You Miss Me ought to be playing from huge speakers on the clifftops as he crawled back to Britain. It made me think how, as a child, I used to think the phrase 'fact is stranger than fiction' patently absurd. It made me think of a time when Brasseye and The Day Today were surreal and over the top. I've already heard people gossipping that maybe this was a Derren Brown stunt; the sun didn't really disappear, this really wasn't on TV last night.

Does it matter that he's not dead? Is there anything to be gained in the rhizomatic linkage that has the other major drama on TV last night feature a literal car crash?

That said the guy that played Gary, played a blinder; he must've known what a weird one this was going to be and he looked and sounded like Gary Glitter, threw himself into it (eye-popping remix moment notwithstanding); this was a performance worthy of a better stage, a better script... Gary Bushell and Anne Widdicome played similar blinders; you really believed them, every nuance, every bombshell... they might have been one of the 54% of British people who favour the death penalty (but then they wouldn't be allowed to act on TV, would they? Well, I guess once Nick Griffin gets on, anything can happen). Anne and Gary B's performance was a twin-set of evil; some of the great screen monsters of our time - pity they couldn't get Jedward on the screen, doing a pro-death dance, singing an amended version of John Barleycorn...

Gary Glitter Memorial Society

I'm looking through Gary Glit-ter's eyes, looking through Gary Glit-ter's eyes....

Paul Young's Love Will Tear Us Apart

...is (deep breath) still my favourite version of the song. Not only do I have the same confession as Liz (though why we feel the need to confess, I'm still working on); that Paul Young's version was the first I heard but also that when I heard the Joy Division version a few years later I thought it was a ropey Paul Young cover - and in fact, that's how I still see things now.

When No Parlez came out I was perhaps 11 or 12 and Love Will Tear Us Apart played a significant part in an early on-off relationship I had with a spectacularly endowed (for 12) girl who perhaps I ought to have been better off being mates with. The cruelty and despair of love wasn't really available to me then, I didn't understand yet how much of a gut-kicking emotion it could be but this song seemed to hint at other ways that love could take you; darker ways, paths only hinted at by my understanding of girls and passion and so on at that time.

There was a darkness here, a love that pulled you under, a love that could tear you apart.

This was all intensified by Paul Young. He had a clear, untainted voice and paired with these dark mysterious lyrical images, I can remember being very unsettled, an unusual feeling when mostly I was listening to stuff like Wham! or The Style Council or maybe at the indie top end The Jam (who, anyway, I liked for the same reason as I liked The Specials - you could dance to them without looking like a twat in School Disco's - the interest in social commentary came later).

When I hear Ian Curtis singing it, or later Michael Gira or Robert Smith or Nick Cave or whoever, they seemed to miss the point of the song; it didn't work for me coming from those kinds of mewled, blank, seen-it-all faces, the song couldn't be captured by people who already knew these paths. It was a dark light that Paul and me and her were discovering for ourselves.

I can remember me and her playing this in her bedroom and the feeling that somehow this was a wormhole into new, undiscovered, country was almost unbearable. It used to make her cry and it confused the hell out of me why she'd want to keep playing it. This was pre-sex, pre-understanding. I wasn't sure how things could ever turn out between a man and a woman, much less a girl and a boy who only a few before had been happily rolling in fields with no lingering sexual tension, no real understanding of gender at all...

This song, sung by Paul Young caught a frozen moment in our adolescence and meant that no songs would be the same again. I can still feel this song and no matter what anyone says: the Joy Division version is a lost and ropey cover.