Desert Island Discs

To begin this blog, to open the floodgates on what will hopefuly turn into something pretty good, we've each chosen five albums we could not live without, would not be the same without, or ones that just never get boring. This is not a greatest albums list, it is a glorious albums list.

Cee-Lo – Cee-Lo Green Is The Soul Machine

Straddles just about every great black musical art form in a single record – Stax horns collide with shuffling Neptunes hip-pop, creamy psyche-soul complements soapbox preacher sermons, loverboy crooning sits alongside gritty, greasy rap.



Van Morrison – Astral Weeks

Invokes Joycean impressionism to swooning effect, with linear songwriting forsaken in favour of a dappled canvas of lilting strings, optimistic guitars and observational lyrics. Turns even the most magma-scarred island to paradise.

Peter Gabriel – So

Songs of your childhood are essential, but I’ve passed over Pato Banton and Shakespeare’s Sister in favour of this white funk masterpiece. As a child I remember being scared of the towering Big Time – it conjured up an image of an ever expanding Gabriel bursting Hulk-like out of his clothes.

Kraftwerk – Minimum-Maximum

This double live album is a touchstone of electronic sound in its most enjoyable forms, in dialogue with its past (which they of course helped pioneer), its present (check the invocation of Francois K’s remixing within their own performance, geek fans) and future (restyling past hits with envelope-pushing sonics). And it’s completely danceable in its thrilling exactitude.

The Strokes – Is This It?

The first guitar album that me and a certain short generation could claim as our own, too young for Britpop, too bored in the years that followed. The disaffected vocals with their crucial core of unironic yearning, the rhythm section that drove somewhere fun, the guitars with ideas below their station – this is the sound of having fun when we were young, always.

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The Velvet Underground – The Velvet Underground

Sounds like a thousand hangovers the day after the night before, when the most I can do is to roll over and hit play. A live-giving reminder that once upon a time around 1969 people got more intoxicated and felt ten times more wrong upon waking. Soft hopeful guitars in 'I’m Beginning To See The Light' and 'I’m Set Free' let shafts of light creep through the cracks and give way to the back-looped twisted mutterings plaguing penultimate track 'Murder Mystery', then wrapped up and completed with the curative 'After Hours'.

Mississippi Fred McDowell – Amazing Grace

Part of the blues revival and only discovered therein, Amazing Grace features bluesman McDowell and his family, singing bare gospel blues accompanied only by an unassuming acoustic guitar. Haunting vocals reach in to permeate your very being, sinking heavy and beautiful to the depths of your soul. Nothing compares to this hidden treasure, the myriad glowing undulating vocals singing imperfect and awesome, shining dark gold in the dusty twilight of the Mississippi.

Terry Riley – A Rainbow In Curved Air

Riley is considered one of the godfathers of modern electronica. Classically trained, he builds many layered compositions from a pretty generic electronic sound - drawing a panoramic future landscape by cutting and looping the tape - something he often did on stage, his performances often lasting well into the night and carrying on until the next morning. A Rainbow in Curved Air is one of his most exclusively electronic albums, and still sounds brand new although it’s 36d.

David Bowie – Ziggy Stardust

I would not like music if I did not find this, I’d still be stuck in nu-metal purgatory. The distinct British swagger of this Bowie-era is slathered on thick on Ziggy Stardust, the spangly blue catsuit coupled with the distinctly dank British street scene add up to the comforting and exciting notion that all this glamorousness, surreal lyricism and make-up doesn’t exist in an exotic unreachable location, it’s all around you.

B. Fleischmann – Welcome Tourist

Welcome Tourist features what is perhaps the most beautiful piece of electronic music ever created. 'Take your Time' is a 45-minute long piece, centred around a simple piano melody. All Fleischmanns’ pieces feature outside noise, a little static, and the echoes of silence. These small things tarnish the recordings exquisitely, creating a presence - removing the isolation – to feel safe and warm and glowing; revelling in a quiet exaltation.

And finally... the one we both chose...

Candi Staton - His Hands

Candi Staton - His Hands

Cheers Candi.