The band started out in Long Island during the late 1960s, originally called Soft White Underbelly (the name inspired by a Winston Churchill speech), before changing to the Stalk Forrest Group, and by 1970 finally becoming the Blue Öyster Cult. The name has several possible origins, the most exotic being that it came from Pearlman’s term for a secret, fictional collective of aliens who guide the Earth’s destiny.

The classic Blue Öyster Cult line-up – vocalist/guitarist Eric Bloom, guitarist Donald ‘Buck Dharma’ Roeser, keyboard player/guitarist Allen Lanier, bassist Joe Bouchard and drummer Albert Bouchard – recorded a string of big-selling albums between 1970 and ’81.

Just before BÖC’s appearance at the Monsters Of Rock in 1981 the drumming Bouchard brother quit, leaving the rest of the band to scramble through a disjointed set at Donington with drum roadie Rick Downey filling in. Infamously, Bloom publicly jumped up and down on the commemorative plaque given to the band that day, and in many respects that metaphorically signaled a downturn in the band’s fortunes from
which they’ve never recovered.

During the past 25 years BÖC have soldiered on in various guises, occasionally hinting at past glories but rarely threatening a return to those peaks of old. Yet such is the potency of their first decade or so together that they still remain a major influence on the metal scene; there’s little doubt that, at their best, Blue Öyster Cult were among the metal elite. Indeed such is their importance to generations of Americans that they were affectionately parodied in a Saturday Night Live sketch in 2000. And let’s not forget that BÖC use the alchemical symbol for lead in their logo – now that’s heavy metal! (Malcolm Dome)

Essential – The Classics

AGENTS OF FORTUNE
Columbia, 1976
Well, it’s got (Don’t Fear) The Reaper on it, which is enough to put the record in the very highest class. But that track is just one of several outstanding moments on the band’s fourth studio album.
Refining their sound and sharpening lyrical bards, they also came up with This Ain’t The Summer Of Love, E.T.I. (Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) and Tattoo Vampire. There are also two songs co-written with punk poet Patti Smith: Debbie Denise and The Revenge Of Vera Gemini.
The album not only features some brilliant progressive/pomp moments, but also presages the advancing punk revolution. Blue Öyster Cult: right at the cutting edge.

FIRE OF UNKNOWN ORIGIN
Columbia, 1981
Many would regard this as the ultimate Blue Öyster Cult record, advancing boldly into the 80s with a collection of songs that has a sense of foreboding and SF loneliness (Veteran Of The Psychic Wars), ghoulish love (Burnin’ For You), strafing riffage (Heavy Metal: The Black And Silver) and B-movie histrionics (Joan Crawford). The album balances weighty musical passages with lighter, pop-rock touches.
At times BÖC seem to be taking the piss out of themselves, and their reputation for being The Thinking Man’s Metal Band . For the most part, though, it’s a monumental inferno.

Superior – The albums that built their reputation

CULTOSAURUS ERECTRUS
Columbia, 1980
A return to heavy music for the band, after a few years dabbling on the edges of pop-rock. With Martin Birch producing, the band let fly with tracks like The Marshall Plan, Black Blade and Unknown Tongue. The guitars marched again, and the whole record had the feel of BÖC getting back to their roots, ready to meet the challenge from a new, hungry generation of metal heroes.
Unfortunately, much of the ferment generated here was dissipated by a disastrous US tour with Black Sabbath, but the strength of purpose displayed throughout Cultosaurus Erectus proved Blue Öyster Cult still had the momentum to compete

MIRRORS
Columbia, 1979
For the first time, Blue Öyster Cult ditched Sandy Pearlman as producer, and instead used Tom Werman, who had made his name with the likes of Cheap Trick and Ted Nugent. As a result, Mirrors was a smoother, more AOR record than anything BÖC had done previously.
Against all the odds, this more pop-oriented approach worked. Thee and The Vigil were as good as almost anything the band had done before, while Doctor Music and You’re Not The One (I Was Looking For) sustained the quality. At the time, however, BÖC fans were loathe to accept the album’s more radio-friendly style, and Mirrors sold poorly. It deserved a better fate.

BLUE ÖYSTER CULT
Columbia, 1972
The album that started it all. Cast in the mould of biker rock, and inspired by a combination of Sabbath, Steppenwolf and Canned Heat – plus a healthy dose of esoteric lyrical slants – their debut quickly established the band’s credentials.
Stacked with immediate classics, the standout tracks are Workshop Of The Telescopes, Cities On Flame With Rock & Roll and Stairway To The Stars.
There’s a real menace about the sound, with Pearlman’s production outflanking their garage pretensions with something more distant and ephemeral. Not only could these guys play up a storm, but they also possessed an indefatigable charisma.

SECRET TREATIES
Columbia, 1974
The combination of speed-freak delusion and 1950s B-movie nostalgia lock horns here, cemented by the sound of a band really stretching into the heavier end of their considerably broad spectrum.
This is perhaps the most British-influenced of all BÖC’s albums: you can hear Hawkwind and the Pink Fairies vying for space, pushing out the riffs for Career Of Evil, Dominance And Submission, Astronomy and Flaming Telepaths. Inevitably, there’s also the unmistakable whiff of S&M, a subconscious theme for so much of the band’s best work. And the dark humour seeps through.
Fantasy metal with spray-on perversions.

Good – Worth Exploring

TYRANNY AND MUTATION
Columbia, 1973
The cover suggests mystery, and musically BÖC played that image up to the hilt. They even split the record: side one was dubbed The Black, with side two The Red. Some of the lyrics – the result of collaborations with people like Patti Smith (then dating guitarist/keyboardist Allen Lanier) – gave the songs an extra dimension.
It’s definitely The Black side that has the better songs, led by The Red And The Black and Hot Rails To Hell. Overall the band were on a roll.
Some see this album as a surprising bridge between the dense surges of the Velvet Underground and the party pizzazz of Kiss.

SPECTRES
Columbia, 1977
The last album produced by Sandy Pearlman before BÖC decided to explore other possibilities. And, indeed there are times when everything is a little too comfortable and cosy.
The problem with Spectres is that it followed Agents Of Fortune, and doesn’t have anything close to the magic of that album’s monster (Don’t Fear) The Reaper. But the ludicrous Godzilla is grin-worthy, especially when drummer Albert Bouchard would don a silly ’Zilla mask on stage. And Goin’ Through The Motions, R.U. Ready 2 Rock and Golden Age Of Leather strut with pride.
In many ways it was the blueprint for Mirrors, with a slicker style than before.

IMAGINOS
Columbia, 1988
The realisation of an idea that first reared its head 14 years before its release, Imaginos took almost six years to record, and as a result is bit patchy. It’s a concept album, said to have been originated by Albert Bouchard, with the storyline about a 19th-century malcontent who keeps getting involved with key moments in history, with negative results.
Astronomy turns up from Secret Treaties, although it was always intended for this project. I Am The One You Warned Me Of and Del Rio’s Song are musically strong, and Siege And Investiture Of Baron Von Frankenstein’s Castle At Wwisseria has a strong claim to being the silliest Blue Öyster Cult song title ever.

Avoid

BAD CHANNELS
Moonstone, 1992
The album’s sleeve claims (misleadingly) that this album contains ‘music composed and performed by Blue Öyster Cult’, for the film Bad Channels. Which makes the album sound almost upmarket and culturally significant.
What you actually get are two highly forgettable near-parodies in Demon’s Kiss and The Horsemen Arrive, a load of complete twaddle (19 tracks in all) masquerading as incidental music – none of which makes any bloody sense at all without the accompanying visuals – and nine utterly appalling songs from other bands, including Joker and Sykotik Sinfony.
What it all adds up to is a grotesque mistake from Blue Öyster Cult.

The band made from Sheffield steel who conquered America and became platinum-plated with their radio-friendly arena rock.

Words: Paul Elliot

If there’s one rock band that can truly be described as heroes, it’s Def Leppard. AC/DC overcame the death of singer Bon Scott to make the biggest-selling rock album of all time: Back In Black. Metallica recovered from the death of bassist Cliff Burton to become the most successful and influential metal band of the modern era. But Def Leppard have suffered two tragedies: the car crash in 1984 in which drummer Rick Allen lost his left arm, and the alcohol-related death of guitarist Steve Clark in 1991. The fact that Def Leppard are still together in 2008, still making great music and playing to audiences of 20,000 on their latest US tour, is testimony to the extraordinary courage and resolve of this great British rock band.

Having formed in Sheffield in 1977, Def Leppard were thinking big from the very start. Their name was inspired by Led Zeppelin, and the blueprint for their music was, as singer Joe Elliott has stated: “AC/DC meets Queen”. In 1979 Leppard rose to prominence alongside Iron Maiden in the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal, although Leppard’s glam-inspired hard rock was radically different from what most NWOBHM bands were about. “We wanted to be a pop-rock band,” Elliott says. “We wanted to do what Bowie and Bolan did. We had more in common with Duran Duran than with Iron Maiden!”

Leppard knew instinctively where their biggest audience was; they even wrote a song called Hello America. And when they teamed up with AC/DC producer Mutt Lange in the early 80s they hit the jackpot. With Lange’s creative input earning him unofficial status as the band’s sixth member, Leppard conquered America with 1983’s Pyromania and 1987’s Hysteria, the first back-to-back albums ever to each sell seven million copies. Hysteria even made Def Leppard a household name back in Britain – a proud achievement for a band that famously sported Union Jack T-shirts during their US tours.

Undoubtedly it’s the phenomenal success of Pyromania and Hysteria that has extended Def Leppard’s career over 20 years, through some lean times when their feelgood rock has fallen out of fashion. But this is one band that never thought about quitting, not even in the darkest times. And as they’ve proved once again with their latest album, Songs From The Sparkle Lounge, for Def Leppard a rock is never out of the question.

ESSENTIAL: Classics

Pyromania – Vertigo, 1983

When Def Leppard recorded this, the album that made them superstars, they were still each on wages of £40 a week. The serious money went into Pyromania’s production.

The result was state-of-the-art arena rock with the riff-power of AC/DC and the melodic sophistication of 80s pop.

Photograph was the key hit single, Die Hard The Hunter the epic set-piece (its riff nicked from Cliff Richard’s Devil Woman!), Rock Of Ages the stomping, We Will Rock You-style anthem, complete with joke faux-German intro from Mutt Lange.

“With Pyromania everything changed for us,” Elliott says.

Hysteria – Bludgeon Riffola, 1987

It was conceived as hard rock’s answer to Michael Jackson’s Thriller, an album on which every track is a potential hit single.

And so it proved. Six of Hysteria’s 12 tracks were Top 20 US hits, with power ballad Love Bites reaching No.1 and rap-rock hybrid Pour Some Sugar On Me hitting No.2.

With 18 million copies sold worldwide, Hysteria is the biggest album of Leppard’s career, and also their most experimental. “We wanted to push the envelope of what rock music was,” Elliott says. Rocket, with its extended, Burundi-inspired drum break-down, typified their anything-goes approach.

SUPERIOR: Reputation cementing

High ’N’ Dry – Vertigo, 1981

Leppard’s second album is the connoisseur’s choice, a hard rock tour de force that swept them out of the NWOBHM ghetto.

Working with Mutt Lange for the first time, Leppard made a huge leap forward from their debut, On Through The Night. Wisely, Mutt didn’t smooth off all of their rough edges.

Opening with the knockout one-two punch of Let It Go and Another Hit And Run, it’s the rowdiest and most balls-out, ass-kicking album the band have ever recorded. The pissed-up title track is Leppard’s Highway To Hell; the duelling guitars of Switch 625 had echoes of classic Thin Lizzy.

On Through The Night – Mercury, 1980

“We’ve never been heavy metal,” claims Joe Elliott. But for all his protestations, Leppard’s debut is a heavy metal album, plain and simple. In their youthful naivety, Leppard attacked their debut album with all the gusto of their NWOBHM peers.

No shame in that. The brutal Wasted has the streetwise appeal of early Iron Maiden, Rock Brigade and Rocks Off are the very definition of gonzoid, and the seven-minute Overture references 70s-vintage Rush and Kansas.

The true measure of Leppard’s ambitions was Hello America, with its polished vocal harmonies.

Adrenalize – Mercury, 1992

Grunge didn’t kill hair-metal with a single blow. In March 1992, two months after Nirvana’s Nevermind topped the US chart, Def Leppard hit the top spot in America with Adrenalize.

The album party vibe of lead single Let’s Get Rocked might have suggested it was business as usual for Leppard, but in reality the band were still in mourning for Steve Clark, to whom Adrenalize was dedicated.

Adrenalize featured six tracks co-written with Clark, but it was a new song, White Lightning, that served as the most fitting epitaph: a meditation on Clark’s death, it has a Zeppelin-inspired grandeur he would have loved.

Songs From The Sparkle Lounge – Bludgeon Riffola, 2008

2008 was a banner year for classic rock, with AC/DC, Metallica and even Guns N’ Fuckin’ Roses all back in business. And you can add to that the best Def Leppard album since Hysteria.

Rejuvenated by a succession of triumphant US enormo-dome tours, Leppard delivered an arena-rock master-class with Songs From The Sparkle Lounge.

Nine Lives is classic Leppard, C’mon C’mon recalls the glory of 70s glam rock. Most adventurously, the richly textured, left-field power ballad Love is bassist Rick Savage’s homage to Queen.

GOOD: Worth exploring

Retro Active – Bludgeon Riffola, 1993

For an odds ‘n’ sods album, Retro Active was both astonishingly good and an impressively strong seller, achieving platinum status in the US. Leppard’s first album with guitarist Vivian Campbell, it also includes the last work of his predecessor Steve Clark.

Clark’s signature riffing drives the album’s weighty epics Desert Song and Fractured Love, the former styled on Zeppelin’s Kashmir. Elsewhere Leppard acknowledged other key influences with covers of The Sweet’s Action and Mick Ronson’s Only After Dark. The ballads Miss You In A Heartbeat and Two Steps Behind proved that the band could flourish without Mutt Lange’s studio trickery.

Slang – Bludgeon Riffola, 1996

After grunge, hair-metal’s superstars had to rethink. Jon Bon Jovi had a bob and pulled off a smart reinvention. But when Mötley Crüe went ‘alternative’ and Bret Michaels grew a beard, they weren’t fooling anyone.

In these trying times Leppard knew they couldn’t make another Adrenalize. As Joe Elliott recalls: “We went heavier and darker. And it nearly killed us!”

Slang sold a disappointing half-a-million copies in the US. But it’s a bold album, with great songs in Work It Out and the monolithic Pearl Of Euphoria.

Joe Elliott calls Slang “our most honest record”. But a return to the classic Leppard sound wasn’t far away.

Euphoria – Bludgeon Riffola, 1999

The title spoke volumes: a nod to Pyromania and Hysteria, a signal that the old Def Leppard was back after Slang. Even Mutt Lange was back lending a hand on Euphoria, not as producer but as co-writer of two songs, including lead single Promises, a super-slick, harmony-laden track reminiscent of 1987’s Animal.

Leppard ticked all the right boxes with Euphoria. Back In Your Face is the guiltiest of pleasures, a throwback to Gary Glitter’s pomp. Goodbye is a deluxe power ballad. And there’s something of Steve Clark’s swagger in Paper Sun, a song that Brian May says blew him away.

“We like Brian,” says Joe Elliott. “He rocks.”

AVOID

X – Bludgeon Riffola, 2002

In 2006 Leppard’s covers album Yeah! suffered a terrible mauling from the press, most notably the one-word review: “No.”

Yeah! deserved better, certainly for Leppard’s inspired remakes of David Essex’s Rock On and ELO’s 10538 Overture. Certainly there are worse albums. Such as X.

Def Leppard have always embraced pop music. When making Hysteria, one of their key inspirations was Frankie Goes To Hollywood. But with X they went too far. By working with cheesy pop songwriters a great rock band lost its balls, albeit temporarily. Apart from one track, the beefy Four Letter Word, X is all pop and no rock. This really was a sell-out.

Words: Paul Elliot

It was all of 25 years ago that British writer Xavier Russell boldly stated: “The world is ready for Metallica. This is where the real future of heavy metal lies.” But in truth, few believed him. Incredible as it now seems, Metallica were initially dismissed as a bit of a joke. Based in San Francisco – they’d moved there from LA because the latter was full of big-haired poseurs – Metallica were four spotty, bum-fluffed heavy metal herberts whose stated mission was “to bang the head that does not bang”. They were nicknamed ‘Alcoholica’ and the mooted title for their first album was Metal Up Your Ass. Yet this gonzo mentality masked a revolutionary agenda.

As progenitors of thrash metal, the most extreme and influential underground rock phenomenon of the 1980s, Metallica changed the entire fabric of heavy music for generations to come. Moreover, like all true innovators, they were the first to transcend the scene they had created. Developing a classic rock sensibility on 1991’s Metallica, aka ‘The Black Album’, they became one of the biggest bands in the world.

There have been bad times as well as good. On September 27, 1986, bassist Cliff Burton was killed when the band’s tourbus crashed in Sweden. And in 2001, Metallica were demonised after suing online file-sharing service Napster for copyright infringement. The ensuing controversy jeopardised the credibility of a band that had prided itself on its anti-corporate ethos. But the biggest battle of Metallica’s career was fought from within: a power struggle between the group’s surviving founder members, drummer Lars Ulrich and guitarist/vocalist James Hetfield, who clashed in 2002 when Hetfield broke from recording St. Anger to enter rehab.

Employing ‘performance enhancing coach’ Phil Towle as mediator, Metallica engaged in a lengthy counselling period, much of it filmed for the documentary Some Kind Of Monster. The movie was at times painfully embarrassing, but the therapy worked. Ulrich and Hetfield resolved their differences. And while St. Anger was weak, the band’s latest, Death Magnetic, has put them back on track, hitting number one in over 20 countries.

Of course, Metallica are no longer “the future of heavy metal”. But their influence is still powerful, their legacy a mighty one. Metal up your ass? Nobody does it better.

ESSENTIAL: CLASSICS

Master Of Puppets
Vertigo, 1986

Just as Iron Maiden transcended the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal (NWOBHM) to achieve international success with their third album The Number Of The Beast, so Metallica’s third lifted them out of the thrash metal ghetto and into the big league. Master Of Puppets is the definitive Metallica album. The band stayed true to their thrash metal roots with the blitzkrieg attacks of Battery and Damage Inc. But the epic scale of this album – in its labyrinthine title track, the darkly atmospheric Welcome Home (Sanitarium) and the dense, filmic instrumental Orion – elevated their music to a new level. An all-time great heavy metal album.

Metallica
Vertigo, 1991

With 15 million copies sold in the US alone, Metallica’s fifth album is the one that made them superstars. Not by accident but by design. Metallica – commonly known as ‘The Black Album’ – was a bold move, a shift from thrash metal to mainstream rock, with shorter, slower, more direct songs, and most controversially, a slick production from Bob Rock, whose previous clients included Bon Jovi and Mötley Crüe. Hardcore fans feared Metallica had sold out, but the huge riffs of Enter Sandman and Sad But True proved they’d lost none of their power, while the two rock ballads, The Unforgiven and Nothing Else Matters, had genuine emotional weight. The gamble paid off.

SUPERIOR: REPUTATION CEMENTING

Kill ’Em All
Vertigo, 1983

The album that started a revolution. With its raw energy, brute force and white-knuckle riff speed, Metallica’s debut established them as the original thrash metal band. In their wake came Slayer, Megadeth, Anthrax et al, but Kill ’Em All is where it all began Inspired by NWOBHM, Motörhead and early 80s punk, Metallica created a new form of heavy metal, harder and faster than anything before. The frenetic Whiplash effectively defined thrash metal. Seek & Destroy was a defiantly old-school chugging metal anthem, and The Four Horsemen had the multi-riff dynamics of Lars Ulrich’s heroes Diamond Head.

Ride The Lightning
Vertigo, 1984

If Metallica’s first album set the template for thrash metal, their second redefined it. When James Hetfield called Ride The Lightning “the giant that Metallica produced”, he accurately conveyed the crushing power and huge reach of the album he still regards as the band’s masterpiece. According to lead guitarist Kirk Hammett, Metallica created Ride The Lightning with a single aim: “To prove that we were the heaviest band around.” They did so with the rumbling For Whom The Bell Tolls, the Biblical epic Creeping Death, and the frenzied thrash metal of Fight Fire With Fire.

…And Justice For All
Vertigo, 1988

Having broken in Cliff Burton’s replacement Jason Newsted on 1987’s The $5.98 EP – Garage Days Re-Revisited, Metallica did the strangest thing on their next album. Lars Ulrich’s drums and James Hetfield’s guitar were mixed so high that Newsted’s bass was virtually inaudible. But despite its thin sound, …AJFA is anything but lightweight. It’s their most complex work, the expansive title track betraying a strong prog rock influence, its dark lyrical themes illustrated by the anti-war protest One. From here, Metallica could go no deeper. The Black Album was their way out.

Load
Vertigo, 1996

Fame, money and cocaine can make a fool of anyone. Lars Ulrich and his drug buddy Kirk Hammett proved as much when they adopted a faux-gay image in Anton Corbijn’s photos for Load. Ever the stoic, James Hetfield left the guyliner to the poseurs and attended to more serious matters, reflecting upon his mother’s death in the southern rock ballad Mama Said, facing his demons on the portentous Bleeding Me, spitting pure vitriol on the Motörhead-inspired Ain’t My Bitch. Load marked a new era: where The Black Album had included a little token thrash metal, Load had none. Metallica put their own past behind them.

GOOD: WORTH EXPLORING

Garage Inc.
Vertigo, 1998

No major rock band has acknowledged its influences as openly as Metallica. Between 1984 and 1998, they covered many of the key songs that shaped their music, all of them collected on Garage Inc. Naturally, the bulk of that material is metal and punk. Four tracks by Motörhead and four by Diamond Head, including Am I Evil?, the model for so much of Metallica’s greatest work, plus the Anti-Nowhere League’s gleefully profane punk anthem So What and a surprise or two, such as Bob Seger’s Turn The Page, a perfect fit for James Hetfield. Incredibly, considering it’s just a covers album, Garage Inc. sold five million copies in America.

Death Magnetic
Vertigo, 2008

After the horrors of St. Anger and Some Kind Of Monster, Metallica needed a great album to restore their reputation. Death Magnetic did just that. Producer Rick Rubin was the catalyst, urging the band to readjust their mindset to the mid-80s, to find new inspiration in their classic early albums, to take one step back and two forward. “Rick made us feel okay about reconnecting with our past,” said Lars Ulrich. In essence, Death Magnetic is a modern thrash metal record, with a speed and complexity reminiscent of AJFA and Master Of Puppets. There’s even a Cliff Burton-style instrumental in Suicide & Redemption. In short, Metallica sounded like Metallica again.

S&M
Vertigo, 1999

31 years after Deep Purple recorded their Concerto For Group And Orchestra, Metallica attempted a similar feat with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra: S&M: Symphony & Metallica. There was, however, a basic difference between the two projects. Where Deep Purple created an original score, Metallica simply performed their classic songs with the orchestra adding what conductor Michael Kamen called “colour and texture”. In this context, some songs work better than others. Nothing Else Matters is beautiful, Master Of Puppets messy. Above all, it’s The Call Of Ktulu that best fits Kamen’s description of S&M as a “Wagnerian orgasm”.

AVOID

St. Anger
Vertigo, 2003

It may have sold six million copies worldwide, but St. Anger is nobody’s favourite Metallica album. During its making, band morale was at an all-time low, with Hetfield and Ulrich butting heads, and producer Bob Rock having to fill in on bass following Jason Newsted’s exit. Metallica attempted to re-bond via a back-to-basics album, even banishing guitar solos, as if by sounding like a garage band they could recapture their old us-against-the-world spirit. Equally, the lyrics read like a self-help manual: ‘My lifestyle determines my death style’ Hetfield sang on Frantic. Overall it was a mess: the production jarringly hollow, the songs ragged and half-formed.

America was largely unimpressed by the UK punk phenomenon; over there, rock behemoths still roamed loud and free: Aerosmith, Kiss, Ted Nugent… even Boston. These guys had mythical qualities us Brits couldn’t match.

This was before the ‘information age’, remember. News about these far-distant US bands was hard to come by, and lightweight American rock mags like Hit Parader were no good at all. So the American groups took on legendary, heroic status in the UK. And on their occasional forays over here they were greeted like conquering heroes. They had super-slick shows; their PAs were louder than fuck; their light shows made the aurora borealis look like a 40-watt bulb.

But in Britain suddenly it all changed. All-new heavy groups inspired by punk’s do-it-youself ethic began to meander out of the metalwork. Prior to punk it was inconceivable for a British rock act not to have A Major-Label Record Deal, A Stage Show On Ice, or A Country Mansion On A Ley Line. Sod all that. Because of punk, young long-hairs suddenly understood that they could record and press up their own singles, book their own gigs… and subvert people’s senses in a brand new way.

From Sheffield came Def Leppard with their Getcha Rocks Off EP on their own Bludgeon Riffola label. Iron Maiden made a self-financed start with The Soundhouse Tapes. And indie label Neat Records started signing bands left, right and centre: The Tygers Of Pan Tang, Venom, Raven, Fist and many, many more.

The NWOBHM was a remarkably fertile time in UK rock history. It’ll likely never be repeated. And while it’s true that the NWOBHM ultimately spawned only two truly world-class bands (Maiden and Leppard), the same could be said of thrash (Metallica and Slayer) or grunge (Nirvana and Pearl Jam). Whatever, more than 25 years after its inception, there is endless interest in the NWOBHM. It’s still coming on strong. (Geoff Barton)

ESSENTIAL – THE CLASSICS

IRON MAIDEN
Iron Maiden
EMI, 1980
Is Iron Maiden’s debut album also their best? Even today you could make a strong case for saying so. In comparison with the sleek prog-metal machine the band evolved into, Iron Maiden sees them as a bunch of scruffy East End herberts with a powerful point to prove. That signature Steve Harris bass sound is there from the start, and singer Paul Di’Anno is on prime form. Bruce Dickinson might try his damnedest, but songs such as Prowler and Charlotte The Harlot just aren’t the same without Di’Anno’s growl. Much has been made of Maiden’s punk influences, but in truth Iron Maiden is just an aggressive metal album, and as raw as an open wound.

VENOM
Welcome To Hell
Neat, 1981
The first – and possibly only – truly ground-breaking album to come out of the NWOBHM, no one had heard anything like Welcome To Hell before. And after a single listen, most people never wanted to hear anything like it again.
Flanked by his depraved and despicable helpers Mantas (guitar) and Abaddon (drums), Venom bassist/vocalist Cronos recreated the sound, smell and insufferable heat of Hades itself in a scabrous studio in north-east England. “We’re possessed by all that is evil,” they gargled. And no one argued with them. Songs like In League With Satan and Witching Hour defined the genres we know today as thrash and black metal.

SUPERIOR – THE ALBUMS THAT BUILT THE GENRE

SAXON
Saxon
Carrere, 1979
People used to accuse Saxon of jumping on board the NWOBHM battlewagon. Certainly they had been around for some years, touring under the name Son Of A Bitch, before it all kicked off. Indeed such was the lack of interest in the band that they were forced to release this album on an unknown French disco label.
A precursor to their career-defining Wheels Of Steel album, Saxon’s self-titled debut still has plenty to recommend it. Despite its occasional prog leanings, it’s a great initiation into the world of the NWOBHM. And singer Biff Byford’s call to arms – ‘Stallions of the HIGH-WAY-HEE-AAY!’ – remains utterly irresistible.

SAMSON
Survivors
Laser, 1979
Like the guys in Saxon, guitarist Paul Samson was an old stager. But there’s an argument to made that Mr Rock’N’Roll by Samson (the band) was the first bona fide NWOBHM single – it certainly predated Def Leppard’s Getcha Rocks Off EP.
Survivors is a sprawling record on which Samson were clearly trying to find their niche. Most people will point to their second record, Head On, as being better, but in terms of nascent NWOBHM-ness Survivors has the edge. It’s hard to resist an album that contains a song called I Wish I Was The Saddle Of A Schoolgirl’s Bike. The vocals of Bruce Bruce, later to become known as Bruce Dickinson, are very impressive.

DIAMOND HEAD
Lightning To The Nations
Happy Face, 1980
The original versions of this album are massively collectible: 12-inch vinyl records that came in plain white sleeves signed by members of the band. Some had all four signatures, others didn’t, so who knows how many variations there were.
Lightning To The Nations is a real tour de force, and is probably the most professional and well-rounded of all the early NWOBHM releases. Guitarist Brian Tatler nonchalantly plucks classic riff after classic riff out of the air, and vocalist Sean Harris sounds like Robert Plant with a Gro-Bag attached to his bollocks. The refrain ‘Am I evil? Yes I am!’ still resonates. Just ask Lars Ulric

WITCHFYNDE
Give ’Em Hell
Rondelet, 1980
“Satanic metal, right?” you might say. Well, you’d be wrong. Despite all the Devil-horned imagery, Witchfynde’s debut album presents a mature and musicianly take on the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal genre.
I remember being disappointed with this record the first time around, when I described it as being as scary as Casper The Friendly Ghost. But Give ’Em Hell has improved over the years. The quality of the mysteriously named Montalo’s guitar playing and songwriting is first class, and the band are as at home on epics such as The Divine Victim (about Joan Of Arc) as they are on sleazier stuff like Pay Now, Love Later.

GOOD – WORTH EXPLORING

TYGERS OF PAN TANG
Wild Cat
MCA, 1980
In line with Saxon and Survivors, Wild Cat may not be the Tygers’ best album. But if you want to explore the roots of the NWOBHM it’s a super place to start. (And let’s not forget that it reached the heady heights of No.18 in the UK chart.)
The Whitley Bay band released a series of fine singles on the independent label Neat Records before MCA snapped them up. Wild Cat was singer Jess Cox’s swansong for the band (he was replaced by ex-Persian Risk frontman Jon Deverill for ’81’s Spellbound). Unlike later years, when MCA emaciated the Tygers’ sound, Wild Cat is a raw but effective release that still leaves scars.

GIRL
Sheer Greed
Jet, 1980
Some might baulk at the inclusion of Girl under the ‘Worth Exploring’ banner, but what the hell. Girl bucked the trend by being preening poseurs from London instead of warty oafs from Wigan.
With not a hint of ‘dues paying’ they came outta nowhere and scooped a deal with Jet Records. Further disapproval followed when singer Phil Lewis (later of LA Guns) started shagging actress Britt Ekland when everyone else was shagging Motorcycle Irene. But Girl really upped the ante on Sheer Greed, and songs such as Hollywood Tease put them at the forefront of the NWOBHM (in this case meaning New Wave Of Big-Haired Metal).

RAVEN
Rock Until You Drop
Neat, 1981
Here’s another acronym for ya: Raven (along with Venom, The Tygers Of Pan Tang and no end of other bands from Newcastle and the surrounding area) were more than NWOBHM, they were part of the NENWOBHM (North East New Wave Of British Heavy Metal).
A classic power trio comprised of brothers Mark and John Gallagher (guitar and bass/vocals respectively) and Rob ‘Wacko’ Hunter on drums, Raven were so breathless and fast-paced they dubbed their music ‘athletic rock’. Rock Until You Drop storms along with tracks like Hell Patrol and Don’t Need Your Money, and it paved the way for a big-time deal with Megaforce Records in the US.

Avoid

DEF LEPPARD
On Through The Night
Vertigo, 1980
It may have got to No.15 in the UK chart but Def Leppard’s first album – which was hotly anticipated at the time – turned out to be a damp squib. On Through The Night gave no hint of the greatness to come in ’81, when producer Robert John ‘Mutt’ Lange coaxed the magnificent High’N’Dry out of the band. That’s not to say ‘Colonel’ Tom Allom, who produced On Through…, did a bad job, it’s just far too smooth and glossy. Leppard sound sanitised, and a lot of the songs (Hello America, Wasted, Getcha Rocks Off, Overture) had been available before the album’s release. Catchy tunes abound but they’re too watered down to make much of an impact.

Also Try:

The NWOBHM is a minefield. It spawned scores of bands and we’re sorry if we’ve omitted your favourite (even if your favourite is Toad The Wet Sprocket). It’s true to say that groups such as Jaguar, Trespass, Paralex and Holocaust, plus numerous others who sounded somewhat useless first time around, have grown in stature as the years have gone by. It’s equally true to say that for an authentic NWOBHM dose you should seek out the very early singles. But if you can’t afford bids on eBay, a compilation should do it. Avoid those creaking old Metal For Muthas albums in favour of Castle Music’s brand new Lightnin’ To The Nations: NWOBHM 25th Anniversary Collection. Or if you scour the bargain bins you might find New Wave Of British Heavy Metal: ’79 Revisited. This two-CD set (originally a double vinyl album) was assembled ages ago by Metallica’s Lars Ulrich and Classic Rock’s Geoff Barton. However, there’s no Silverwing on it. The compilers also failed to exhume Mythra, whose Death & Destiny EP is the NWOBHM at its finest.

UFO are the British band who, more than any other over the last 30 years, have defined hard rock as the fertile middle ground between metal and AOR. In their prime the band delivered a near perfect blend of melodies, choruses and air-guitar-heaven riffs.

Formed in London in 1969, UFO toured hard and developed followings in Germany and Japan as well as at home in the UK. Come the NWOBHM in the late 70s, they could pack the floor at any rock disco in the land. For a decade their career ran eerily parallel to Thin Lizzy’s, but UFO were never quite as cool or bathed in limelight.

They did, however, share Lizzy’s taste for drinkin’, druggin’ and the occasional fight. Had UFO been born a decade later they might have had hits like Whitesnake, gone platinum like Def Leppard or even been ushered into rehab and off the album/tour treadmill that crippled them in the mid-80s. Or they might have sold out and gone all transatlantic. Perhaps it was for the best, then, that their genuine flair for songwriting, built on what they knew a live audience would respond to, was never misdirected by the MTV era or some A&R guru.

Although the heart of the band has always been singer/lyricist Phil Mogg and bassist Pete Way, UFO have usually been defined by their lead guitarist. Their career has been patchy, but on record it divides into four phases: a false start with Mick Bolton (1970-72); a 10-year golden age begun by Michael Schenker and extended by Paul Chapman (1973-82); a slump caused by splintering, unfamiliar line-ups and short-lived re-formations (1983-2002); and the rebirth years with Vinnie Moore (2004-present).

Throughout their career UFO have remained peculiarly British. Which makes their star-crossed battle to mend fences with the German Schenker and their eventual consolidation with the American Moore all the more ironic.

UFO have always thrived on a dysfunctional nature, but now, happily reconciled with both keyboards/guitar man Paul Raymond and original drummer Andy Parker, they’re as strong as ever. Adored and respected by everyone from Iron Maiden to Rush, from Def Leppard to, er, Warrant, they are the house band for the great British rock knees-up. Bring two bottles.

ESSENTIAL: CLASSICS

LIGHTS OUT
Chrysalis, 1977

The killer–diller studio album. That three of the songs on here are among the four that close UFO’s live shows even today tells you all you need to know about not only the quality of, but also the staying power of the album.

The title track, opener Too Hot To Handle and the epic Love To Love (with its haunting ‘Misty green and blue’ refrain) are the three in question, and there’s quality throughout this album, the first they recorded with Paul Raymond on keyboards.

It was also the first to be produced by Ron Nevison, who wasn’t afraid to stir in acoustic guitars (Getting Ready) or a string section (for the soaring ballad Try Me and Just Another Suicide). Timeless.

OBSESSION
Chrysalis, 1978

On the final studio album of guitarist Michael Schenker’s first stay with the band he was at his peak, from the opening Only You Can Rock Me to the stunning solo on Born To Lose. Yet Mogg and Way overpower him in the writing, and even the sleeve hints at the isolation which would see him quit soon after.

With UFO decamping to the US to record in LA for the first time (with producer Nevison again, and future Guns N’ Roses producer Mike Clink engineering), Obsession has a streetwise edge despite the romantically string-laden Lookin’ Out For No. 1 and the recorder on Arbory Hill. Vocalist Mogg is cocksure, and One More For The Rodeo and Hot And Ready are as hard as nails.

SUPERIOR: THE ONES THAT HELPED CEMENT THEIR REPUTATION

PHENOMENON
Chrysalis, 1974

Having moved to Chrysalis Records the band took their time with this first album for them. They toured constantly, and shed original guitarist Mick Bolton, then replacements Larry Wallis and Bernie Marsden, before poaching 18-year-old Michael Schenker from the Scorpions in June 1973.

Phenomenon emerged 11 months later, by which time Schenker had helped transform UFO into an entirely different band. He took on the lion’s share of songwriting, and delivered demos backed by acoustic guitar – which is effectively how UFO re-recorded them for the album. So this may be one of UFO’s gentler records, but with Doctor Doctor and Rock Bottom it still packs quite a punch.

FORCE IT
Chrysalis, 1975

UFO’s second album with Schenker, still as a four-piece, saw the band really hit their stride. The material was mostly no-nonsense rockers (Let It Roll, Shoot Shoot, Love Lost Love, Mother Mary), but it also included an acoustic ballad (High Flyer) and the band’s first flirtation with keyboards (Out In The Street; played by guest Chick Churchill, former Ten Years After bandmate of producer Leo Lyons).

Dance Your Life Away is exactly the sort of track that set UFO apart from their contemporaries. It might even have provided them with a hit. And live favourite This Kid’s was never better than here, with Schenker’s Layla-style instrumental coda Between The Walls.

STRANGERS IN THE NIGHT
Chrysalis, 1979

The era’s obligatory double live album came after those by Peter Frampton, Kiss, Status Quo and Thin Lizzy, and proved just as big a watershed. It was UFO’s first UK Top 10, making No.8. In the US – where it was recorded – it cemented their growing popularity by reaching No.42.

Ironically, though, Strangers… marked the sudden departure of Michael Schenker with the confusing credit on the sleeve: “Special thanks to our friend and guitarist Paul Chapman”. No matter if that means Chapman did overdubs before replacing Schenker full-time, the results capture succinctly UFO’s powerful live act and make it a close-run thing with Obsession for the Essential category.

NO PLACE TO RUN
Chrysalis, 1980

After stints as Schenker’s touring deputy/rhythm guitarist, erstwhile Lone Star man Paul Chapman got to take Schenker’s place full-time.

If he was fazed that his recorded debut was with Beatles producer George Martin, it didn’t show. The sound is great, but otherwise the input from Martin (whose only other hard rock credits are with Jeff Beck) is uncertain. The songs are uniformly concise and the performances strong. Chapman’s guitar synth opener Alpha Centauri gives way to Lettin’ Go before a brilliantly rocked-up take on the Elvis standard Mystery Train. After that the album barely lets up, and closer Any Day is a criminally overlooked gem.

GOOD: WORTH EXPLORING

THE WILD, THE WILLING AND THE INNOCENT
Chrysalis, 1981

If the title was a play on a 1974 Springsteen album and suggested Mogg’s respect for The Boss, Long Gone (‘Summer rain kissed the streets that bleed like open wounds’) and the piano and sax solo on Lonely Heart (both played by Neil Carter, replacing Raymond) confirmed it.

In light of Springsteen’s contemporaneous double album The River, The Wild, The Willing And The Innocent was derided by many, but it nonetheless features some of Mogg’s finest lyrics and vocals. It’s also home to gems such as Couldn’t Get It Right and It’s Killing Me, plus Profession Of Violence that’s lifted by a brilliant Chapman guitar solo.

WALK ON WATER
Xero, 1995

After three somewhat iffy records with guitarists Atomik Tommy M or Laurence Archer alongside other sidemen, the supposed dream team – Mogg, Way, Schenker, Parker and Raymond plus producer Ron Nevison – reassembled.

Restricting themselves to just eight new songs was clever, and allowed time-honoured strengths to be revisted in some style. Dreaming Of Summer steered a little too close to Lights Out’s Electric Phase, but Pushed To The Limit, Stopped By A Bullet (Of Love) and Darker Days all sound fresh and powerful. Venus is top dog on the record, but opener A Self Made Man isn’t far behind and hints at what might have been. But first Parker then Schenker quit soon after.

THE MONKEY PUZZLE
SPV, 2006

UFO’s The Monkey Puzzle gets the nod ahead of its closely matched 2004 predecessor You Are Here. Both feature guitarist Vinnie Moore, long assumed to be a shredder but playing here with a subtlety that could only come from growing up with British blues rock imports (ironically, just like Schenker).

For The Monkey Puzzle original drummer Andy Parker replaced Jason Bonham (who’d moved on to Foreigner) and the friends-reunited vibes are almost audible. Parker is awesome on Hard Being Me, Moore shines on Who’s Fooling Who, Raymond excels on Some Other Guy, and Mogg and Way clinch it with Black And Blue and Drink Too Much. UFO are back!

AVOID

UFO
Beacon, 1971

Pete Way recommends that you give a wide birth to any UFO albums he didn’t play on. That rules out 1983’s Making Contact, Misdemeanour (’85) and the Ain’t Misbehavin’ EP (’88). None of the albums with Mick Bolton have stood the test of time, either.

Although this, their first, is the home of the first decent UFO original (Boogie For George) and their version of Eddie Cochran’s C’mon Everybody, much of the record is simply the sound of inexperienced musicians in search of an identity. Produced by the songwriting team of Guy Fletcher and Doug Flett (then best-known for their work with Cliff Richard) it’s one part pub rock, one part space rock. Whatever that was.

Formed in Pasadena, California in 1974 by four teenage kids from families that had migrated across the Atlantic in the pursuit of a better life, Van Halen were loud, brash, shamelessly ambitious, larger-than-life: classically all-American. And so was their pioneering spirit.

Van Halen revolutionised hard rock music. When the band’s debut album was released in 1978, punk had unsettled rock’s old order; giants such as Zeppelin and Sabbath were on their last legs. But VH had seen the future. “This is the 1980s!” declared singer David Lee Roth, boldly if prematurely. “And this is the new sound – it’s hyper, it’s energy, it’s urgent.”

The key to that new sound was Eddie Van Halen, whose innovative two-handed ‘tapping’ technique made him the most influential guitarist since Jimi Hendrix. But VH wasn’t a one-man show. Eddie’s brother Alex went at his drum kit like a prizefighter. Bassist Michael Anthony underpinned Eddie’s histrionics and provided killer backing vocals that had him rightly described as the band’s “secret weapon”. And then, of course, there was ‘Diamond Dave’, a wisecracking, split-jumping, super-toned blond Adonis, son of second-generation Jewish immigrants, and hard rock’s greatest showman. As Roth stated: “I once heard somebody say to the Van Halens: ‘You guys play the music, the Jew sells it.’ Well, you’re fucking right!”

With Roth as cheerleader, Van Halen were America’s favourite party band, their high-octane turbo-pop songs the soundtrack to the ‘me’ decade. But when Roth left the band in 1985 amid mutual hostility, much of the magic went with him, even if his replacement, Sammy Hagar, was a better singer.
Nevertheless, the new-look ‘Van Hagar’ proved just as successful as the former model, while Roth’s solo career stalled in the 90s.

Hagar lasted 10 years. His successor, former Extreme vocalist Gary Cherone, was out after one album. Hagar returned for a chaotic reunion tour in 2004, and two years later came the announcement that Roth was rejoining the band with, shockingly, Eddie’s 15-year-old son Wolfgang replacing Michael Anthony.

Whatever happens next, Van Halen’s place in the pantheon of classic rock acts is secure. With 56 million albums sold, they are 19th on the list of biggest-selling acts in the US. And at their best (with Roth) Van Halen ruled.

ESSENTIAL: CLASSICS

VAN HALEN
Warner Brothers, 1978

As one of the classic debut albums, this 10-million seller is up there with Zeppelin’s and Sabbath’s and Appetite For Destruction. Van Halen was like a bomb going off. With its short, punchy songs, technical flash, testosterone-charged swagger and sense of daring, it kick-started the 80s two years early. “We were not afraid of defying convention,” said DLR. “Everybody was ascending.”

Eruption was Eddie’s volcanic showpiece. And the orthodox songs were equally explosive, from Runnin’ With The Devil through to frenetic closer On Fire. Classic Rock’s Geoff Barton, then reviewing for Sounds, called the album “senses-shattering”. Van Halen had arrived – with an almighty bang.

1984
Warner Brothers, 1984

The last of the definitive Roth-era albums was also the one that made Van Halen a household name on this side of the Atlantic when its lead single, Jump, hit No.7 on the UK chart. In playing this simple rock song on a keyboard, guitar hero Eddie beat all those airy-fairy synth-pop acts at their own game.

I’ll Wait, the album’s other big pop crossover hit, was also powered by a keyboard riff, but the hard rock crunch of Panama and Hot For Teacher ensured that the band’s hairy fan base wasn’t alienated.

On 1984, Van Halen could do no wrong… But by 1985 Roth was gone, and the band, in whatever guise, would never be as great again.

SUPERIOR: THE ONES THAT HELPED CEMENT THEIR REPUTATION

VAN HALEN II
Warner Brothers, 1979

How do you follow a belter of a debut album? Many have dropped the ball, from Montrose to The Darkness. But Van Halen walked it, banging out their brilliant second album in just six days. It sounds like it, too: fresh, a little loose, fizzing with energy, its air of beer-fuelled spontaneity encapsulated in Roth’s fumbled lyric and giggles on Bottoms Up!

Shrewdly, Van Halen didn’t try to top the fire-power of Van Halen, opting instead for a lighter, more playful vibe, running from the jammed intro to You’re No Good (such chutzpah!) to Roth’s farewell kiss on the closing Beautiful Girls. And in Dance The Night Away they delivered the perfect pop-metal song.

DIVER DOWN
Warner Brothers, 1982

Possibly the laziest album ever made. There are just 18 minutes of original material on Diver Down. But no matter: despite the whiff of contractual obligation, the album is a blast.

Back in the mid-70s, when they were still a bar band named Mammoth, the boys had a repertoire of 300 cover tunes. Diver Down recalls that era with a stinging rendition of The Kinks’ Where Have All The Good Times Gone!, plus covers of Roy Orbison’s (Oh) Pretty Woman, the Tamla Motown classic Dancing In The Street and a jazz number featuring dad Jan Van Halen on clarinet.

The original songs on the album are all great too, especially Secrets, the sweetest thing Van Halen ever recorded.

FAIR WARNING
Warner Brothers, 1981

The cover illustration – details from Canadian artist William Kurelek’s The Maze, portraying scenes of urban madness and violence – was befitting of the most left-field VH album.

Fair Warning is tough, edgy, dark, and in places plain weird. ZZ Top aside, no other mainstream, multi-platinum hard rock band would have dared to record such bizarre tracks as Dirty Movies (a funky porno satire), Sunday Afternoon In The Park (a sinister, new wave-inspired instrumental), and One Foot Out The Door (a punky, half-finished throwaway).
However, the meat of the album lies in two straight-up rock songs: the bruising Mean Street, and Unchained, featuring Eddie’s chunkiest riff.

WOMEN AND CHILDREN FIRST
Warner Brothers, 1980

Van Halen’s third album included a poster of Roth in classic beefcake pose, photographed by the legendary Helmut Newton. Roth was rock’s leading pin-up boy, but VH hadn’t gone soft. The album is a hard rock tour de force, typified by Tora! Tora!.

And The Cradle Will Rock…, is Roth’s homage to teenage drop-outs. Fools and Everybody Wants Some!! are fluid jams built around crushing riffs. Romeo Delight threatens to run right off the rails. The only light relief comes with the drunken sea shanty Could This Be Magic?

Women And Children First is Van Halen’s true cult classic album. In Roth parlance: “Pure fuckin’ rock.”

GOOD: WORTH EXPLORING

5150
Warner Brothers, 1986

For many people, Van Halen just wasn’t Van Halen without Diamond Dave. Eddie saw it differently. “We lost a frontman,” he said, “but we gained a singer.” And with Sammy Hagar on board, the band’s career arc continued upwards.

5150, the first ‘Van Hagar’ album, was also the band’s first US No.1. With trusted producer Ted Templeman having defected to the now solo Roth camp, VH enlisted Foreigner’s Mick Jones to put a fine gloss on what became the album’s three keyboard-driven hit singles: Why Can’t This Be Love, Dreams and Love Walks In.

And yes, Sammy was a better singer than Dave. But 5150 didn’t have the spark of classic VH. And we all knew why.

FOR UNLAWFUL CARNAL KNOWLEDGE
Warner Brothers, 1991

All four studio albums that Van Halen recorded with Sammy Hagar topped the US chart, although the third of them might not have sold so well if it had been titled according to the singer’s wishes. “I wanted to name the album just Fuck,” Hagar said. Instead, they chose something more oblique.

The album – co-produced by an exonerated Ted Templeman – is patchy, but it has three songs as good as any from the Hagar era: Poundcake – heavy, grungy, with Eddie applying an electric drill to his fretboard; Top Of The World – vintage feelgood VH; and the piano-led Right Now – and arguably the best song the band have ever written.

OU812
Warner Brothers, 1988

Having proved with 5150 that there was life after Dave, Van Halen couldn’t resist a little dig at their former singer with the title of their eighth album, a cheeky reference to Roth’s Eat ‘Em And Smile.

OU812 did good business (current US sales: four million), but it’s a hit-and-miss affair. Lacking Dave’s levity, the heavier tracks are all bluster, but a lighter touch on the three hit singles works beautifully. Black And Blue is a funky boogie lit up by Michael Anthony’s doo-wop-influenced vocal harmonies, When It’s Love is a deluxe rock ballad, Finish What Ya Started is a genuine surprise, with Eddie twanging country-funk guitar licks and Hagar croaking soulfully.

AVOID

VAN HALEN III
Warner Brothers, 1998

Even the most partisan of Roth loyalists had to admit that Hagar could sing. What’s more, Hagar had starred on one of the greatest rock records of all time: Montrose’s legendary self-titled debut. But the same could not be said of Sammy’s replacement. Gary Cherone was the wuss who sang in Extreme – wearing a leotard.

Van Halen and Cherone was a disastrous mismatch, and produced just one album – that sold only 500,000 copies, when every other VH album had shifted at least two million. The reason is that Van Halen III stinks like a wet dog. Every song sucks, and Cherone sings them like a drowning man. It’s an album so bad, in fact, that Van Halen have never made another since.

It’s hard to believe that when Rush released their debut in 1974 everyone had them pegged as Led Zep copyists. Thirty-four years and a zillion albums later it’s harder to judge which is more unlikely: (a) that they’re still going, or (b) that they’ve done so on the strength of hiring drummer/lyricist Neil Peart to replace the long-forgotten (and recently deceased) John Rutsey.

Rush’s continued existence is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside the enigma that is the famously fan/limelight-avoiding and well-read Peart. Yet Rush are a three-piece band of equal parts, and similar attention is long overdue for Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson.

Although frequently derided for his occasional choice of high-register singing, Lee has a fine, folky voice; he’s no slouch on a synth, either. Moreover, as his excellent solo album My Favourite Headache (2000) proves, much of Rush’s often overlooked mastery of melody is down to him. And all that before the best bass playing you’ll find this side of Jack Bruce. Lifeson, too, is an underappreciated player, and deserves to be ranked alongside David Gilmour for his fluid soloing, and Jimmy Page for other-worldly riffs.

Lee and Lifeson’s qualities added to Peart’s prodigious talents for rhythms usually found outside the rock sphere have inspired a collective ambition to improve and expand their abilities, and to make music that is always evolving, never safe.

Rush’s first 25 years can be viewed in three (unplanned) cycles, each comprised of four studio albums then a double-live set which seemed to herald a change in direction. From 1974-76 they rocked like bastards while peddling sword, sorcery and sci-fi – often on side-long epics. From 1977-81 they entered a purple patch when they discovered synth bass pedals, keyboards, and songs lasting less than 10 minutes. Cycle three, 1982-89, began with more of the same, but is typified by an initially unsettling penchant for reggae-style rhythms. They also fully embraced the 80s vogue for electronica.

After the third double live album, the cycles ended and studio output became sporadic – just six albums, one set of covers, and two more live sets for good measure to date. Over these they’ve steadily stripped away the trimmings and gone back to basics, finding a way to grow older gracefully.
For those of us who’ve grown up with Rush, their later albums are friends we’ve chosen, but the older ones are like family members. Some are harder to love, but we remain loyal to all. Here, then, are some of the toughest choices I’ve ever had to make…

ESSENTIAL: CLASSICS

MOVING PICTURES
Mercury, 1981

The killer–diller. No question. And the benchmark album for Rush. And it sounds as fresh today as when, after five months of often fraught work, the band sat in a playback at Quebec’s Le Studios and declared it was finished.

Side one of the original vinyl featuring Tom Sawyer, Red Barchetta, the instrumental YYZ and Limelight was faultless. Flipping it over, we heard a newly matured Rush – each aged 27 or 28 at the time – rein in the epic The Camera Eye (inspired by a John Dos Passos novel) to 11 exhilarating minutes, terrify us with Witch Hunt, then set our techno pulses racing with Vital Signs.

Rush at the top of their game.

2112
Mercury, 1976

Rush did epics before 2112 (successfully with the nine-minute By-Tor And The Snow Dog on second album Fly By Night, and painfully with The Fountain Of Lamneth on follow-up Caress Of Steel), but with 2112’s title track they hit pay dirt. It’s almost 21 minutes of brilliance which runs the full musical gamut from acoustic picking (as the hero discovers the ‘ancient miracle’ of a six-string) to electric metal fury (the priests of the Temples Of Syrinx smash it, driving him to suicide as an apocalyptic battle rages).

It’s an uneven album, as the second half pales in comparison, but the drug-themed A Passage to Bangkok and Something For Nothing are cracking tunes, too.

SUPERIOR: THE ONES THAT HELPED CEMENT THEIR REPUTATION

PERMANENT WAVES
Mercury, 1980

The kid brother to Permanent Waves, and where Lee first properly explored vocal ranges that didn’t scare dogs.

Due to its unexpected hit single The Spirit Of Radio, this is perhaps the one Rush album bought by non-fans – many of them doubtless attracted by the Police-like reggae break in that track. For the rest of us, Free Will and the brooding Jacob’s Ladder reminded us of the old Rush of Ayn Rand and sci-fi. Then a pair of beautiful love songs – Entre Nous and Different Strings – hinted at a more romantic future. But rather than getting soppy, the album closes with a three-parter, Natural Science, that is both big and clever.

A FAREWELL TO KINGS
Mercury, 1977

Ground zero for the band that Rush became. Power-trio stylings were eclipsed as Peart added a plethora of bells and percussion to his drum kit, Lee and Lifeson used pedal synths and the singer also took charge of a Minimoog.

Recorded in Wales, it marked the beginning of the bond between Britain and the Canadian trio. Much of it had an almost medieval feel, with tales of ancient tyrants (the title track) and everyman wanderers (Closer To The Heart, Cinderella Man and Madrigal), but it was dominated by lengthier takes on Coleridge’s Kubla Khan poem (Xanadu) and a space flight into a black hole (Cygnus X-1).

HEMISPHERES
Mercury, 1978

On this album Peart, painted into a corner by his promise to continue the storyline of Cygnus X-1, devised the 18-minute title track based on classical philosophy and the intellectual battle between the heart and mind, romance and intellect, reason and emotion. Proper bonkers, but we loved it.

For Rush, though, it was a tipping point. No more side-long numbers! For light relief they added a pair of indicators to a simpler future – Circumstances and the acoustic guitar-laced The Trees (controversially assumed by some to be a comment on the Canadian separatist movement) – plus the stunning techno-rock instrumental La Villa Strangiato.

SIGNALS
Mercury, 1982

Following the live Exit… Stage Left, Dirk, Lerxst and Pratt (aka Lee, Lifeson and Peart) simply picked up from Moving Pictures and added more keyboards. Lots more. Subdivisions and The Analog Kid are awash with them, but never drowned.

More radical changes to the Rush soundscape, though, are in evidence on Chemistry and Digital Man, both of which further explore Police-style techno-reggae (this a full year ahead of The Police’s Synchronicity), and The Weapon, built on a dance music drum pattern. Then after a brilliant guest solo by electric violinist Ben Mink, Rush reach for the stars with Countdown, based on watching a shuttle launch as VIP guests of NASA.

GOOD: WORTH EXPLORING

POWER WINDOWS
Vertigo, 1985

Older fans may dismiss Rush’s 80s albums because they lack the drama of their 70s predecessors, but the playing is unquestionably tighter and the arrangements more concise. Grace Under Pressure (1984) was very good, but undermined because Lifeson also played synthesisers; Power Windows is purer because he sticks to what he does best.

Every song is a group effort, of course, but it’s impossible not to name him as the star of Big Money. Likewise, Manhattan Project seems like Peart’s showcase and Marathon Lee’s. Then they all come together on Middletown Dreams and the fabulously sparse and hypnotic Mystic Rhythms.

ROLL THE BONES
Atlantic, 1991

Rush had new label for 1989’s Presto, and they also switched to Howard Jones/Tina Turner producer Rupert Hine. That unlikely combination worked best on this second collaboration, as if to prove the theory that Rush are at their best in the studio when the album title ends in an ‘S’.

Like an old friend walking out of fog, …Bones emerges crisper and sharper. Synthesisers slip into the background, band and lyrics step forward; great choruses empower Dreamline, Bravado and Ghost Of A Chance; The Big Wheel is so stripped bare that it has an almost 60s feel. Geddy Lee even gets away with rap sections in the title track and You Bet Your Life. The album has a neat cover, too.

SNAKES AND ARROWS
Atlantic, 2007

Meet the new Rush, as good as the old Rush. The band cite co-producer Nick Raskulinecz (The Foo Fighters) for making the recording process more enjoyable than any in memory – and it shows. The synths have gone (just a Mellotron, used sparsely), and Far Cry, Working Them Angels and Spindrift rock like you’ve wished Rush would for years. It’s brilliantly paced and sequenced, mixing irresistible choruses (The Larger Bowl, The Way The Wind Blows) with instrumental brilliance (The Main Monkey Business) and arena-filling guitar, and when the riff to Armor And Sword kicks in we’re back in Moving Pictures land – it’s that good!

AVOID

FEEDBACK
Atlantic, 2004

Simply Rush’s way of paying tribute to the bands that inspired them in the first place, this album is nonetheless the sound of a band marking time by stepping back in it.

The songs the band chose to cover may surprise many veteran Rush fans – the likes of The Who’s The Seeker, Love’s Seven And Seven Is and The Yardbirds’ Heart Full Of Soul and Shapes Of Things all sound a world away from the Rush’s own work – and the whole thing plays like a guilty pleasure. Lee’s vocals add unique cadence to each classic covered, but fans of the originals who aren’t Rush fans will only deem them heretical. Great fun for the completists, but hardly essential.

Picking up the progressive rock baton from Genesis in the 80s, they’ve recorded one of prog’s most impressive catalogues.

If progressive rock bands are supposed to be boring, nobody told Marillion. The making of their classic album Misplaced Childhood – in early 1985, at Berlin’s Hansa Studios – was effectively one almighty bender. Singer Fish led the debauchery, blowing his wages on hookers, sampling heroin for the first (and last) time, stripping naked in a bar to win a bet, crashing a car in a race round the city, and throwing bricks over the Berlin Wall in an attempt to set off landmines. Marillion might have been inspired by the music of Genesis and Yes, but they could party like Guns N’ Roses.
Formed in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire in 1979, the band were originally named Silmarillion after a posthumously published work by JRR Tolkein. The name was shortened in 1981, the same year that charismatic Scotsman Fish (born Derek William Dick) joined the group. After signing to EMI the following year Marillion released four studio albums – all of them UK Top 10 hits – before Fish left for a solo career in 1988.
His replacement Steve Hogarth, formerly of The Europeans, this year celebrates 20 years as Marillion’s frontman. Yet Hogarth will always be considered ‘the new guy’, such was the impact of the music that Marillion made with Fish, especially Misplaced Childhood and its hit single Kayleigh, a song which had the singer credited for inventing an original name. As he recently commented: “I’ve got used to signing autographs for 13-year-old Kayleighs.”
In the Fish era, Marillion were standard bearers for progressive rock, but with Hogarth the band have been progressive in the broadest sense. Their music has evolved far beyond those primary influences, and after being dropped by EMI in 1996 Marillion created a new, internet-based business model that has seen them thrive as an independent cottage industry. Eight years before Radiohead sold In Rainbows exclusively online, Marillion financed their album marillion.com by inviting 30,000 fans on their database to pre-purchase the album before it was even recorded.
It’s ironic that a band once derided for sounding like the dinosaurs of 70s rock should prove to be pioneers of the internet age. But this forward thinking has secured Marillion’s future. A new, as yet untitled, double album is due for release in 2008. And having come this far, they’re comfortable with their past. On August 26, 2007 the band, minus Hogarth, joined Fish on stage in Aylesbury’s Market Square to perform the song they wrote about that very place – Marillion’s debut single, Market Square Heroes. It was just like the good old bad old days…
– Paul Elliott

ESSENTIAL: CLASSICS

MISPLACED CHILDHOOD
EMI, 1985
In the finest progressive rock tradition, Marillion’s greatest work is a concept album.
It started with an acid trip: an hallucinating Fish envisioned a child in soldier’s uniform, and from there flowed a narrative that ranged from the personal (old love affairs, rock star ennui) to the global concerns of the Cold War. It inspired a brilliant ensemble performance from the band. And, despite initial concerns from EMI over the dated ‘concept album’ format, Misplaced Childhood was a huge success. Their only No.1 album, it produced two hit singles in Kayleigh and Lavender.
Artistically and commercially, Misplaced Childhood is Marillion’s Dark Side Of The Moon.

CLUTCHING AT STRAWS
EMI, 1987
“All the songs were drawn from inspiration on the road or from bars,” said Fish of the album that proved to be his last with Marillion.
Consumed by booze and drugs, the singer became alienated from the rest of the band, no puritans themselves. But from his stated position – that lonely place “at the end of the bar” – Fish wrote the finest lyrics of his career.
The cocaine itch in Hotel Hobbies, the transparent revelry of Incommunicado, the desperate homesickness in Sugar Mice, all were brutally honest entries in the diary of a lost soul. The music was wonderfully atmospheric and beautifully weighted.

SUPERIOR: THE ONES THAT HELPED CEMENT THEIR REPUTATION

SCRIPT FOR A JESTER’S TEAR
EMI, 1983
Released at a time when Genesis were having mainstream pop hits, Marillion’s debut was a homage to the Genesis of old. Four of the six tracks stretched over eight minutes, incorporating smart-arse
time signatures, while Fish adopted the stagy mannerisms of Peter Gabriel to deliver his wordy poetry.
Garden Party was an uproarious satire of class snobbery, Forgotten Sons a searing indictment of the British army’s presence in Northern Ireland, the epic title track was a frank admission of romantic failure. At a stroke, Fish was a cult hero and Marillion were Top 10.

SEASONS END
EMI, 1989
Marillion without Fish? It didn’t seem right. Many diehard Marillion fans were sniffy about Steve Hogarth: he’d been in pop bands. But Seasons End put the doubts to rest.
Hogarth had his own style, more naturally melodic than Fish, and if his lyrics (co-written with friend John Helmer) lacked his predecessor’s idiosyncratic edge, there was a sly dig at Fish in The Uninvited Guest.
Musically, Seasons End was a subtle progression, peaking with the elegant Easter and a green-themed title track developed from Beaujolais Day, a song the band demoed with Fish in 1988. Seasons End charted at No.7.

BRAVE
EMI, 1994
After 1991’s pop-oriented Holidays In Eden alienated some long-standing fans, Marillion went back to their roots with Brave – a concept album, no less – inspired by a news story about a young woman who had been
picked up by police on the Severn Bridge and either did not know her identity or refused to reveal it. “I thought it was a great first page to a mystery story,” said Hogarth, who subsequently constructed a “fictional documentary” of the woman’s life.
This weighty subject matter was matched by some of the most complex and emotionally charged music of Marillion’s career.

MARBLES
Intact, 2004
The best of Marillion’s albums with Steve Hogarth, Marbles was conceived as a double album (and is available as such via www.marillion.com). But even as a single CD, minus four tracks, it’s stunning. Thirteen-minute opener The Invisible Man is a modern progressive rock classic, combining the lyricism of Wish You Were Here-period Floyd with the dark ambience of Massive Attack.
There are fine songs throughout, with You’re Gone and Fantastic Place both sounding like a subtler U2. The title track is full of quintessentially English black humour. And to finish, there’s another brilliant extended piece, Neverland.

GOOD: WORTH EXPLORING

B’SIDES THEMSELVES
EMI, 1988
With the noteable exception of Oasis’s The Masterplan, B-sides albums are mostly rubbish. Marillion’s, however, is mostly good, and includes two of the band’s best-loved cult-classics.
Market Square Heroes was actually an A-side, the debut single, left off the first album but always a live favourite. The B-side to it was Grendel, a 17-minute, Rush-style epic based on the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf. In honour of this song, the band invented the lethal ‘Grendel’ cocktail, coloured bright green by crème de menthe, heavily laced with various spirits, and – alarmingly – always served by the pint.

HOLIDAYS IN EDEN
EMI, 1991
Marillion went straight for the mainstream with the second album of the Steve Hogarth era, and in truth the results were mixed. The rockier songs – Holidays In Eden, This Town – were uninspired, and The Party, Hogarth’s study of lost innocence, lacked the incisive quality of Fish’s Warm Wet Circles.
On the plus side there were several fine songs that benefited from Christopher Neil’s slick production
Three singles were released – Dry Land, No One Can and the U2 rip-off Cover My Eyes (Pain And Heaven) – but none reached the Top 30. Clearly Marillion were not cut out to be pop stars.

SOMEWHERE ELSE
Intact, 2007
Not many bands can still cut it when they’re 25 years into their recording career. Marillion are one of the few who can. Their 14th album received widespread acclaim.
It was quite a turnaround for a band whose profile had slipped so low since the mid-90s that Steve Hogarth admitted, only half-jokingly: “Most people thought we’d split up in the 80s!”
Somewhere Else features some of the most beautiful songs the band has ever recorded: Faith, Thankyou Wherever You Are, and the expansive title track.
“Marillion deserve a fair hearing,” said one critic.
Oh, the irony!

AVOID

FUGAZI
EMI, 1984
According to Fish, Marillion’s second album was “aptly named”. ‘Fugazi’, meaning ‘all fucked up’, was an expression used by the US military in Vietnam. The wasted rock star on the cover accurately reflected Fish’s own lifestyle, and his lyrics documented a conflicted attitude towards women, from jealousies in a long on/off relationship (Emerald Lies) to the ‘who’s using who?’ question of groupies (She Chameleon).
Ultimately, Fugazi suffered from classic ‘difficult second album’ syndrome. The band had years to write the first album and weeks to write the second, and it shows. It’s the darkest, edgiest album of the band’s career.

For all the frequent brilliance of Neil Young’s recorded career, cherry-picking from it throws up its own set of problems. Distinctive, quixotic and, at times, downright infuriating, such is his uncompromising nature that even his own record company once threatened to sue him for deliberately making “unrepresentative” music. A truly restless artist, there are various kinds of Neil: lone wolf, supergroup icon, Canyon hippie, garage rocker, country boy, grunge forefather… Will the real one ever stand up? Whether or not the definitive Neil Young really exists, one thing is certain: during a career spanning 40-plus years, he’s never been averse to taking the odd risk.
Born in Toronto in 1945, Neil Percival Young played in various Winnipeg garage bands in his youth, before striking out for LA in the mid-60s.
In 1966 he formed Buffalo Springfield with his friend Stephen Stills, Richie Furay, Bruce Palmer and Dewey Martin. Three albums later, torn asunder by the rivalry with Stills, Young quit for a solo career in-between membership of CSNY, alongside Stills, ex-Byrd David Crosby and former Hollies man Graham Nash.
The financial freedom gave his solo work limitless possibilities. By the early 70s he was the golden child of the Topanga Canyon set, the moody troubadour with the shaky voice and the bitter-sweet melodies.
But as his record company began plotting out a lucrative career as sensitive singer-songwriter, Young was already headed for the ditch. His bleak post-Harvest albums and a renewed acquaintance with old buddies Crazy Horse, marked by howling guitars and distorted feedback, proved he was a force that was impossible to tame.
The 80s found Young in his own peculiar wilderness, producing a series of increasingly ‘difficult’ albums that tested the patience of diehard fans and confounded his record label, Geffen. In retrospect some of the bizarre experiments with electro-pop (Trans) could be forgiven once Young explained it was his way of communicating with his son, stricken with cerebral palsy. But it wasn’t until the early 90s, when he returned to the polarities of his best work (acoustic and raw electric) that he finally sealed the iconic status he enjoys today.
Young is as prolific now as he’s been at any time in his career. And as we anxiously await the first volume of his crate-digging Archives series, what better time to assess the legend?
– Rob Hughes

ESSENTIAL: CLASSICS

AFTER THE GOLDRUSH
Reprise/WEA, 1970
Young’s first solo album after hooking up with CS&N placed him somewhere between wistful acoustic balladeer and eco-mystic. Inspired by actor Dean Stockwell’s green-themed film script of the same name, After The Goldrush was evocative and achingly beautiful.
It was largely set to spare piano and strummed guitar, with Young’s disquieting lyrics echoing the uncertainties of a new decade. Don’t Let It Bring You Down and Only Love Can Break Your Heart were striking enough; Southern Man, an uncompromising, vitriolic put-down of extremism and prejudice everywhere, provoked a rebuke from Lynyrd Skynyrd with Sweet Home Alabama.

HARVEST
Reprise/WEA, 1972
Young’s biggest seller and the record that set him up as the new poster boy for the post-60s hippie crowd. Accessible and dreamy on the surface, Harvest was dark and claustrophobic underneath.
With backing from Nashville vets The Stray Gators, Old Man was near perfect, while Heart Of Gold gave Young his sole US No.1 But it was the unorthodox stuff that marked him down as least likely to cosy up to James Taylor (who, ironically enough, guests here). The Needle And The Damage Done lamented the heroin use of Crazy Horse’s Danny Whitten, among others, while the Jack Nitzsche-arranged There’s A World and A Man Needs A Maid were overblown orch-pop works of rare ambition.

SUPERIOR: THE ONES THAT HELPED CEMENT THEIR REPUTATION

ON THE BEACH
Reprise/WEA, 1974
“Probably the most depressing album I’ve made,” was Young’s assessment of the follow-up to the consumer-friendly Harvest. Certainly it polarised opinion enough for the NME to print two separate reviews, with Ian MacDonald defending it from charges of self-pity brought by fellow hack Steve Clarke.
With hindsight, it’s up there with anything Young has ever made, a kiss-off to the blind idealism of the 60s counter-culture at a time when Nixon still held sway. Bleak, scornful yet not without humour, it’s a bony collection of electric songs that vents spleen on Tricky Dicky (the stunning Ambulance Blues), corporate greed (Vampire Blues) and the hippie dream itself (Revolution Blues).

TONIGHT’S THE NIGHT
Reprise/WEA, 1975
Recorded before On The Beach but deemed too gloomy for an audience of fans eagerly awaiting the sequel to Harvest, the label sat on Tonight’s The Night for two years before they finally released it.
Informed by the deaths of Danny Whitten and roadie Bruce Berry – and unveiled in all its booze-sodden glory before bemused crowds later that year – it’s an unnerving record with the stoned air of a private wake. Emotionally racked and set to the sparest of piano arrangements, Young is at his most candid on the stumbling title track and the pained Roll Another Number. It sold poorly but remains a cornerstone of
the Young legend.

RUST NEVER SLEEPS
Reprise/WEA, 1979
Half acoustic, half electric (and part live, part studio), Rust Never Sleeps married the two dominant strands of Young’s career thus far: melodic troubadour and electric warrior. Nothing summed up its schizophrenic brilliance more than My My, Hey Hey, a paean to Johnny Rotten and Elvis both acoustic and in barn-burning glory at opposite ends of the album.
Pastoral delights include the exquisite Pocahontas and Thrasher, Young’s two-fingered salute to old cohorts CS&N. Cranking the amps high, Young and Crazy Horse have rarely rocked harder than on the proto-grunge of Powderfinger – a song first offered, believe it or not, to Lynyrd Skynyrd.

RAGGED GLORY
Reprise/WEA, 1990
The previous year’s Freedom may have rescued his spectacular 80s nosedive, but Young’s real return to form was Ragged Glory.
Back with Crazy Horse, and now fêted by Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr and a whole new generation of white-noise terrorists, he threw himself into a pot of boiling riffs, churning solos and disorienting 10-minute jams. But there was sharp lyrical insight and artful country rock too. Country Home and White Line were unrecorded live pleasers from the 70s, while obscure 60s nugget Farmer John revisited Young’s pre-Buffalo Springfield days with The Squires, who used to cover it. Most anthemic of all was F*!#in’ Up!, a scathing attack on self-destructiveness.

GOOD: WORTH EXPLORING

EVERYBODY KNOWS THIS IS NOWHERE
Reprise/WEA, 1969
Four months after his sensitive, self-titled debut, Young
re-emerged with a raw backing band introduced to him by old flame Robin Lane. Young and Crazy Horse had played together for just three weeks, but it was the start of a lifelong alliance.
Sure, there were still diversions into folksy pop and chugging country, but this album is known best for three fuzzed-up guitar blasts. With its tempo shifts and crunching riff, Cinnamon Girl became an instant classic, while Down By The River and Cowgirl In The Sand were epic, improvised forays into the kind of emotive, unfettered rock that has become a benchmark of Young’s electric sound ever since.

SLEEPS WITH ANGELS
Reprise/WEA, 1994
His career relit by Freedom (1989) and Ragged Glory, Young was more prolific than ever in the early 90s. Having had his My My, Hey Hey lyric (‘It’s better to burn out than to fade away’) quoted in Kurt Cobain’s suicide note, Young paid tribute by naming this album after his grunge progeny.
A dark, enigmatic set of
songs, the mood is largely melancholic except for the brusque swipe at consumerism that was Piece Of Crap. With Young backed by Crazy Horse, the 15-minute Change Your Mind went in dogged pursuit of fuzz-guitar heaven, but much of this rather fragile record (Trans Am, My Heart) felt like last orders
at the bar.

CHROME DREAMS II
Reprise/WEA, 2007
If both the elegiac Prairie Wind and the Bush-bothering Living With War were marked by a rare sentimentality, here was a return to the sly brilliance of Young’s mid-70s work. Which was hardly surprising, given that the title, and a handful of songs, were rescued from the original Chrome Dreams project aborted (or lost in a fire, depending on who you believe) in 1977.
A dazzling sweep of all his classic traits, from tender laments and rough-edged acoustic balladry to monumental guitar distortions lasting 18 minutes, and with great horns, this is Young at his raw best. Subsequent live dates confirmed he’d fully reconnected with his primal instincts.

AVOID

LANDING ON WATER
Reprise/WEA, 1986
As befits a career built on the principle of doing whatever the hell he wants, there are more than a few turkeys lurking in Young’s yard. Most date back to the 80s, a decade when he often seemed out to please no one but himself; certainly not his record company, Geffen, who, exasperated by servings of flaccid synth-pop, country and third-rate rockabilly, once slapped him with a $3m lawsuit for making albums not “characteristic of Neil Young”. Particularly cursed was 1983’s Everybody’s Rockin’, but Landing On Water, an awful mess of synths and drum-heavy stadium rock, might just be the nadir. Even Young himself called it “a piece of crap”.