Blade - The Lion Goes from Strength to Strength (1993)

Blade should require no introduction, but then we live in a far from perfect world and it's been nearly thirty years since this album, fifteen since his most recent - unless there's been one which nobody told me about. It's not that he was the first rapper with a British passport, but he was in on the ground floor and maintained enduring visibility back before anyone took UK rap seriously on any kind of scale. He achieved some mainstream success with The Unknown recorded with the late Mark B, even landing an appearance on Top of the Pops, but this was his second album, the one which apparently remains his own personal favourite; which itself reveals him to be a good judge of his own work because it really is his best, at least so far as I'm concerned.

This is a CD reissue I'm listening to, but I can still recall the moment when I lowered the needle onto the first white vinyl disc of the original double, and I recall that moment because what comes out of the speaker is as astonishing as a kick up the arse - the adrenaline rush of organised noise, musical information overload somehow tamed to a funky as fuck beat duplicating the intensity of the Bomb Squad without simply copying the moves; and while we're on the subject of Public Enemy, Blade himself betrays the influence of - guessing here - both Chuck D and Rakim, but his own personality overpowers the delivery to the point that you couldn't really mistake him for anyone else.

As with much of Blade's work, the whole thing was pulled together by the man himself - recorded, pressed, distributed, everything, and the sleeve notes describe our man picking the pockets of teenagers in arcades to finance the release of his debut, arguing that they would only have spunked the money away on nothing. Accordingly you can really feel the graft that's gone into this one, fueled by fried chicken, Lucozade, and sleepless nights sweating over the beats and rhymes - gritty as New Cross, posture free, angry and funny, and refreshingly outspoken in terms of authority and our man's refusal to jump through the usual music biz hoops. Were it not for the fried chicken, The Lion Goes from Strength to Strength is one of the few rap albums which would have made sense on the Crass label, which is no bad thing.

Jethro Tull - This Was (1968)

I'm still trying to work out how I feel about Jethro Tull. Having once been an agricultural youth, I was initially well disposed towards a  band who named their albums after shire horses and who presumably had some kind of affinity with soil, plus Stormwatch had a pleasantly ominous cover. I didn't actually encounter their music until the nineties when I chanced upon a boggle-eyed performance of Witch's Promise from that Top of the Pops repeat show, which I thought was great. My friend Carl gave me a copy of the Twenty Years of Jethro Tull triple CD thing on the grounds that he'd designed the artwork and had a spare knocking around; which was also great, or mostly great. I was in a sort of prog rock punk band at the time, albeit prog with a small p because funny time signatures definitely hadn't figured in the job description and were frankly proving a bit of a chore; but our glorious leader, somehow mistaking my polite enthusiasm for studious obsession, took it upon himself to advance my education despite that I was perfectly happy with my copy of Machine Gun Etiquette, thank you very much. Soon I was in possession of This Was, Living In the Past, Thick as a Brick, A Passion Play, Bursting Out, Stormwatch, A, Nightcap, The Jethro Tull Christmas Album and some greatest hits thing. Our glorious leader had written on the covers, giving tracks marks out of ten or adding notes about associated singles, then presumably copied those songs scoring above a certain rating of excellence onto a CDR which would take up less space in his collection and therefore be more efficient.

I've really tried with these albums but they just aren't for me. I didn't particularly enjoy playing guitar riffs which required that I count out an ostentatious thirteen beats before repeating the bar or launching into a chorus, and if I'm to listen to music as a mathematical exercise, then it really needs to do more than just showing off whilst a nice overachieving grammar school boy doth politely croon something about maidens fair; and but for the silly time signatures, Stormwatch wouldn't have sounded out of place on Radio 2 back in the days of Sing Something Simple.

And yet there's this.

This Was so named in acknowledgement of it having captured an era of Jethro Tull from which the band were moving on even as the record hit the stores. This Was dates from when they were worth listening to, when they sounded like a band rather than a series of twee equations scrawled upon a blackboard in between betwixt sips goodly swigs from a pewter tankard. What the fuck went wrong?

This Was is sixties blues rock as interpreted by educated white guys, but significantly influenced by the wilder end of jazz and with scant trace of either folky or psychedelic influence - possibly excepting certain parallels heard on the thoroughly gorgeous Move on Alone. What really differentiates this bunch from most later Tull - at least that I've heard - is the low recording budget having prevented too much pissing about, leaving us with a band so live and raw and at one with their own vibe as to foreshadow a Steve Albini production, albeit one without quite such menace. Song for Jeffrey and Love Story particularly seem to oblige the listener to crank it the fuck up and rock out, despite an otherwise relatively polite production; and I'm not suggesting Love Story sounds even remotely like anything from the first three albums by the Damned, but I can imagine what the Damned version would sound like without giving myself too much of a headache.

This Was a band who had a ton of fucking fun playing this stuff by the sound of it, as distinct from the subsequent entity which introduced live versions of its old standards with footnotes explaining how the lads had since added more twiddly bits to keep it interesting for themselves. My former musical boss presumably kept the decent albums to himself when passing on his cast offs, hence the absence of Aqualung and others in the above list; So there's doubtless much that I haven't heard and maybe should, but for the moment I prefer to remember them this way. Given that everything I like about this album seems to have been down to Mick Abrahams who left soon after, this leaves me with the peculiar realisation that I probably need to listen to Blodwyn Pig.

Hard-Fi - Stars of CCTV (2005)

Here's another one about which I've never bothered writing, having assumed I'd already done so at some point; the reason for the assumption being that I listen to it quite a lot and that it's probably one of the greatest albums of all time, at least to my ears.

At least based on what I recall hearing on the radio at work, rock music was pretty much a complete waste of time by 2005, a vast Glastonbury shaped sludgepit full of grinning NME-sponsored idiots channelling the Kinks through a fuzzbox in hope of landing a car insurance advert as Jo Whiley stood to one side pretending to be your mate. Somehow Hard-Fi couldn't fail to shine because they sounded like a real band rather than something which crops up during the closing credits of an edgy Channel 4 sitcom about teenagers smoking crack during a media studies degree.

Stars of CCTV sounds a little like it may have happened as a result of my generation having kids, kids which were then raised in houses featuring a dad who still listened to the Jam on a daily basis. It's not quite the Jam, but there's something of Down in the Tube Station at Midnight in there - the smells if not quite the sounds - a little power pop, maybe even a few old Motors records, and of course the name comes from Lee 'Scratch' Perry; so it's all those things and yet not quite any one of them, because it does something different which isn't reliant upon nostalgia.

The first time I heard Hard to Beat it seemed to suggest what the Jam would have sounded like had they formed two decades later as some filter disco act; and the rave, or possibly post-rave aspect is part of the wallpaper which nailed Stars of CCTV to the place it was coming from, and the place it was coming from wasn't much different to where I was living so I was seriously feeling this shit, as the saying goes. Stars of CCTV sounded like a genuinely working class voice in a world turned over to consumer satisfaction surveys and focus groups. I recognised the stench of south London fried chicken, hangovers, post-war housing, belches of beer past the sell by date from Weatherspoons, freezing your bollocks off outside some club in November, estuary English and bills which may or may not get paid on time. This is what it was like living in south-east London in 2005 but without the voyeuristic glamour of wobbly camcorder documentaries, and without even trying to sell the grime as an aesthetic. It's grim, and yet it's mostly a celebration with all the joy of forked fingers waved at a security camera. To be honest, it's actually similar to what many grime acts were doing at the time but for the fact that it's rock music, even mod in an absolutely literal sense. Stars of CCTV is not a happy album, but it's a long way from being a miserable one, and every last track packs a serious punch. This was what it was really like to be young.