Rocks In The Attic #151: The Rolling Stones - ‘The Rolling Stones No.2’ (1965)

The first three Stones album are very similar - in that they’re basically a run through of the band’s favourite R&B covers. They manage to inject a bit more of themselves into this, their second attempt, and unlike their debut which only has one original song, this features three Jagger / Richards compositions.

I now can’t listen to Time Is On My Side without thinking of the song’s focus in the Denzel Washington film Fallen. It’s a great song, and takes on a strange, other-worldly feel from its use as an identifier of evil in the film. If Fallen was a truly bad film, I’d be annoyed at its inclusion, but it’s one of those popcorn movies that I’m always glad to watch when it shows on TV.

The Stones pretty much drift through their first album, and most of this one, before putting a foot wrong. Their version of Under The Boardwalk on the second side of ...No.2 really stands out as a misstep, with a weak sound that doesn’t suit the band. This probably comes from an attempt to ape The Drifters’ version as closely as possible, but to me it sounds as wrong as The Beatles’ version of Gerry & The Pacemakers’ How Do You Do It?

Hit: Time Is On My Side

Hidden Gem: I Can’t Be Satisfied

Rocks In The Attic #147: Bee Gees - ‘Main Course’ (1975)

I’ve always had a soft spot for The Bee Gees (I know they don’t favour the definitive article in front of their name, but it’s grammatically annoying not to slide one in there). We used to live a couple of streets away from where they grew up in Chorlton, Manchester (between them being born on the Isle Of Man and being shipped out to Australia).  They seem to offend a lot of people by their very existence, but I think their early-falsetto output between Jive Talkin’ and the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack are notable enough to ignore their other crimes against music.

I almost went to see Robin Gibb when he played in New Zealand just before he died. I was all set to buy myself a ticket until I read an interview he did to promote the show, in which he claimed that the music of The Bee Gees was more relevant than The Beatles, and had stood the test of time better. By the time I had stopped laughing, the concert had been and gone. I then felt like I’d missed out because he died not long after. In a bizarre twist of fate, newspaper articles over the last couple of weeks have all but claimed that New Zealand killed Robin Gibb - by flying over to play in New Zealand, he missed medical scans which may have prolonged his life.

I recently watched a documentary on the band, and Maurice really comes across as the most affable of the three. Barry really is the alpha lion of the pride, and Robin speaks only when he is given chance, but Maurice actually sounds like a genuinely nice bloke.

Hit: Jive Talkin’

Hidden Gem: Wind Of Change

Rocks In The Attic #131: The Jam - ‘Snap!’ (1983)

Another greatest hits package purchased purely for its use in my DJ bag, this album takes me over the 100 hour mark on this blog. 100 hours of music - what a wonderful way to drown out the rest of life’s noises.

I’ve never been - and never will be - a fan of The Jam. I think this mainly stems from my dislike of Paul Weller, but as a band they’re more lyrical than musical (even though musically they’re fantastic) and that just doesn’t gel with me. With Weller’s scatter-gun lyrics, I always feel like I’m not in on the joke - he’ll cram a song with lyrics and I just get overwhelmed. Don’t get me wrong, I regard myself as being relatively literary - I always have a book or two on the go at any one time, and I’m not talking about Dan Brown or Fifty Shades Of Grey here - but when it comes to music, my ears are tuned to the sounds coming out of the instruments, not the words coming out of the singer’s mouth.

I can’t deny that there are some fantastic songs on this record. Going Underground, Town Called Malice, That’s Entertainment and the Beatles-stealing Start! are probably their biggest hits, and they would put a smile on my face any day of the week.

Hit: Town Called Malice

Hidden Gem: English Rose

Rocks In The Attic #129: Blur - ‘Blur: The Best Of’ (2000)

This was an unsurprising release by Food Records. With only one album left on their contract with Food, a greatest hits collection was assembled. This isn’t a new thing in the record industry - although diehard fans of the band may not rush out to buy a batch of songs they already own, the general public will always buy a compilation album in droves, and so it makes economic sense to bring out a ‘best of’ while the opportunity is ripe, rather than release studio album #452.

As a DJ - which I was at the time of this release - it’s always handy to have a collection of hit songs on one disc (or two, in this case), rather than lug a load of albums around for the sake of one or two songs. Still, saying that, this album did open my eyes to some of the other Blur material which I wasn’t familiar with at the time.

Much after the fact, I had discovered Parklife and, subsequently, The Great Escape, while at University. Blur and 13 sort of passed me by, although by this time they were sufficiently on my radar, enough for me to anticipate their singles as they were released.

I’ve been thinking about ‘90s music for a few weeks now, after somebody mentioning what a truly terrible decade for music it was. I guess it’s too early to tell, but will anybody be listening to this sort of thing in 40 or 50 years?

The reason I prefer to listen to older music - specifically from the ‘60s and ‘70s - is that most of the time you can listen to it without having to handle all of the other bullshit that comes with it. It’s almost impossible to listen to a Blur album without thinking about how much of a knobhead Damon Albarn is.

I remember being asked about Blur and Oasis by my sixth-form English teacher in the mid-‘90s. Their rivalry was all over the British press because of the chart race between Country House and Roll With It. He wanted to know who I thought were the better band. This was many years before I would start listening to “Indie” or Britpop music, and I was existing purely on a diet of hard rock and heavy metal at the time, so the question was sort of lost on me. I still stand behind my response back then, which was “Blur, of course, because they’re always doing something different.” The one thing I can always be sure of is that I can happily look back at Oasis’ entire career and proudly declare ‘not guilty’.

When I look back at Blur’s career alongside British bands which I’m sure they’d like to measured against - The Kinks, The Who, The Beatles, The Stones, etc - I’m not sure if they’ll ever be regarded in the same light. Oasis plumbed new depths of mediocrity in the ‘90s, but Blur were simply the best British band of the decade, and I guess that’s all that mattered at the time.

Hit: Song 2Hidden Gem: To The End



Rocks In The Attic #128: The Kinks - ‘Golden Hour Of The Kinks’ (1971)

Another compilation that exists solely in my record collection because it was handy to have in my record bag when DJing.

You have to love The Kinks though - they’re unfairly put to the side when ‘60s beat groups are mentioned. Usually, there’s The Beatles and The Stones, and nothing else. For me, The Kinks fit nicely in the middle between those two bands - they match the songwriting peaks of The Beatles (not as consistently as Lennon & McCartney, but certain songs are the arguably the equal of The Beatles’ singles), but they retain the rough edge (and murky production values) of The Stones.

This particular compilation is pretty poor, however. Their cover of Louie Louie is listed on the sleeve as ‘Lovie Lovie’, which makes you wonder what sort of moron put the sleeve together, when they can misspell one of rock and roll’s universal staples. Secondly, Lola is missing from the collection - even though this was put together a year after that single’s release. It is a budget release though, so Pye Records presumably only allowed the release of their older ‘60s output.

I think more than any other ‘60s band - The Beatles and The Stones included - the template for riff-driven guitar-based rock can be traced back to The Kinks. Dave Davies is a fantastic guitarist in this respect - coming up with short guitar hooks for his brother to write songs around.

During the formation of Led Zeppelin in 1968, Jimmy Page was undecided whether he should form a full-on heavy rock band, or a lighter folk rock band akin to Pentangle. Page played as a session musician on The Kinks’ debut album, and I don’t see it as a coincidence that he then went on to be the flag-bearer throughout the ‘70s for Dave Davies’ brand of riff-based heavy rock.

Hit: You Really Got Me

Hidden Gem: Victoria

Rocks In The Attic #127: Paul & Linda McCartney - ‘Ram’ (1971)

I’m with Moo on this one - mono is pretty pointless. It makes sense if the artist originally mixed it in mono, and intended its release in mono, but most of the time it’s a marketing ploy aimed at audiophiles.

Take this release for example - the limited edition release of McCartney’s second solo album in mono, complete with the most minimal sleeve I’ve ever seen (aside from the scrawl on the top left of the sleeve, the only mention of the album name and artist is on a small slip of paper inside the inner sleeve - it makes the packaging of The White Album look like Sgt. Pepper’s). There’s no reason for it to exist. Mono had been left behind by this point, and all releases were universally in stereo. It exists merely as a curiosity.

However, it’s by a Beatle, it’s a limited collection, and therefore it’s collectable - hence why I bought it. I have the stereo version, with its garish sleeve (possibly the reason this mono release is so minimalist?) and it’s always been a firm favourite. In fact, I swapped my CD copy of the album for the vinyl version back in the late 90s. My Huddersfield friend Dom Beresford had it on vinyl and wanted it on CD. I felt the opposite, so we did a fair trade. The record is forever marked by this transaction - a sticker on the label around the centre of the disc proudly declares it is the property of Kirklees Libraries & Arts.

There’s been a hell of a lot of love for this album of late. It is very good - about a million times better than his hotchpotch debut album; but as much as I love it, and regard it as my favourite McCartney album, it’s not as good as Band On The Run.  I don’t subscribe to the theory that his Wings material is more of a group offering - to me, they’re McCartney albums with a couple of hired hands to play some of the instruments so he didn’t have to play everything.

In terms of the quality of the songwriting here, he matches the strength of his output on Abbey Road. The melodies are strong enough to support an orchestral version of the album - something I’ve been listening to a lot recently. To me, Ram is as strong an album as Imagine - in fact they’d make a killer double album - but it’ll never be as loved by the public as Lennon’s album. There are no big hits, and definitely nothing close to the universality of Imagine’s titular track.

Hit: Uncle Albert / Admiral Halsey

Hidden Gem: Ram On

Rocks In The Attic #122: The Beatles - ‘Please Please Me’ (1963)

When I first listened to this, the debut album by The Beatles, I used to think it would have sounded pretty revolutionary at the time. In hindsight, you can hear that it’s still got one foot firmly planted in the 1950s. Dylan followed Please Please Me two months later with The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, and that’s like a futuristic text compared to the childlike nature of this album.

This album is notable for a few things. Firstly, the original compositions are attributed to ‘McCartney-Lennon’, not long before the decision was made to reverse the surnames. I heard a few years ago that McCartney was lobbying Yoko Ono to get the rest of their back catalogue changed back to this original song-writing credit. Thankfully it didn’t happen, and anyway, you never know if things like that are even true. I wouldn’t put it past McCartney to try something like this - he obviously waited until George Harrison died to release Let It Be...Naked - but you’d get the impression that after 40 or so years, he’d be content that his name comes last in 99% of their song-writing credits.

Secondly, the album was famously recorded in one day. I don’t really see that as being anything special though. This happens for a lot of bands - especially on their debut albums - and perhaps this should be a rite of passage for bands recording their first batch of songs.

In terms of their song choices though, I do think that there are a few mistakes. Their original songs really sound very good alongside some very odd covers, but maybe that was the intention. There were better covers recorded during the New Years Day 1962 Decca audition (available on Anthology 1), that would have fit better than some of the covers here, and are closer to the standard of covers they recorded on their second album.

Thirdly, Ringo Starr isn’t the only drummer on the album. He’d later be replaced by McCartney on the occasional track later in their career, but here he is replaced by session man Andy White on their prior single, Love Me Do / P.S. I Love You - both sides of which open the second side of the album. George Martin had expected them to turn up to the session with Pete Best (who had played on their first Parlophone session), had told Brian Epstein that he wouldn’t allow Best to play on another session and that he would supply the drummer next time. When The Beatles then arrived with their newly appointed drummer in tow, Ringo was relegated to tambourine. If nothing else, this story confirms that the band was right to fire Pete Best.

All in all, a very simple album that’s very hard not to like. Sometimes that simplicity turns me off, but I also think that’s where most of its charm comes from. The Beatles would produce works of much greater value and innovation, and it wouldn’t take them long.

Hit: Twist And Shout

Hidden Gem: Baby It’s You

Rocks In The Attic #121: John Lennon - ‘John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band’ (1970)

Although this album is starkly minimalist and deals with pain, anger and isolation, I find it to be a really chilled-out album. Of the four debut solo albums by the recently split Beatles in 1970, this is probably my favourite, closely followed by Ringo’s Sentimental Journey. McCartney’s debut is too childlike and home-made; and Harrison’s All Things Must Pass is too self-indulgent, warranting a lengthy amount of time to sit down and listen to it in full.

I can definitely imagine relaxing to this, with a joint, on its release - but like most people I would probably have been a little let down with its unBeatleness. All of the four albums are as removed from The Beatles as possible, with each member trying to escape from that shadow, but Lennon’s album sounds to me to be the furthest away.

Although McCartney’s album sounds like a hastily assembled bunch of demo recordings, Lennon’s album sounds more mature - and even though there is a very minimal arrangement and production, it doesn’t come off as sounding infantile like his former writing partner’s debut offering.

Hit: Working Class Hero

Hidden Gem: Look At Me

Rocks In The Attic #95: Cliff Richard - ‘Rock On With Cliff’ (1980)

This is a 1980 compilation of Cliff Richard’s early hits between 1958 and 1962 - I guess with 1962 being the year that The Beatles came along and took his British rock and roll crown from him. The album is credited to Cliff Richard, but essentially it’s Cliff Richard & The Drifters, who then morphed into The Shadows.

There’s a lot of forgettable material on here - which I’m sure was memorable back in the day (the number of Top-10 placings the tracklisting boasts is proof of that), but songs with names like Gee Whiz It’s You really date the record back to simpler times.

Having grown up in the 1980s, I now can’t listen to Living Doll without hearing The Young Ones, but thankfully Move It has remained untarnished and is truly a hidden gem of British rock music.

Hit: Living Doll

Hidden Gem: Move It

Rocks In The Attic #93: The Beach Boys - ‘Pet Sounds’ (1966)

Okay, stand back. It might not be easy to hear somebody actual say this, but this album is boring. Give me California Girls and Do It Again over this any time.

Supposedly this was influenced greatly by Brian Wilson’s desire to match Rubber Soul. This album then spurred The Beatles on in the recording of Revolver. Arguably the two Beatles albums sound more varied - but you’d expect them to be, being the compositions of three men. Pet Sounds, chiefly written by Brian Wilson with a few others sharing co-writing duties, doesn’t have the advantage of sounding so three-dimensional.

The other thing that really irks me about this album is that people who really love it tend to really hate Sloop John B - like how dare they tarnish such a classic album by daring to cover a traditional folk song? For me, Sloop John B is one of the highlights of the album. Unlike Rubber Soul and Revolver, once you get past Wouldn’t It Be Nice, Sloop John B and God Only Knows, all of the other songs tend to merge into one big melancholic ballad.

Which brings me to God Only Knows. Wilson may have failed with composing an album’s worth of material to challenge The Beatles’ dominance of the pop LP, but in God Only Knows he succeeded majorly in writing an enduring classic, superior to anything else coming over the Atlantic in that decade.

Does it excuse that LP cover though?

Hit: God Only Knows

Hidden Gem: Let’s Go Away For Awhile

Rocks In The Attic #78: David Bowie - ‘Space Oddity’ (1972)

This is a strange album - considered by many to be the first proper Bowie album, this was originally released as David Bowie in 1969, before being repackaged with a different title and released with a different cover in 1972. I have that version - the one with Bowie looking stoned with spiky orange hair on the cover.

I remember being taken to Rock Circus by my parents when I was 8 or 9. Rock Circus was a museum, in Picadilly Circus (hence the name), run by the same people who do Madame Tussauds. Alongside the usual eerie-looking waxworks was a room set up like a small theatre. We took our seats and the first act was Bowie himself doing Space Oddity. In a spacesuit. Revolving around the stage, going upside down and such. Obviously this was just a waxwork, but it looked pretty good - enough to forever stamp that song onto my brain. I think, if memory serves, that Bowie was then followed by The Beatles doing Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and maybe With A Little Help From My Friends. Or maybe The Beatles opened for Bowie, I can’t quite remember.

This isn’t a fantastic album. There are flashes of brilliance, but overall it’s full of hippie nonsense and only a tentative sign of things to come.

Hit: Space Oddity

Hidden Gem: Memory Of A Free Festival

Rocks In The Attic #67: The Beatles - ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ (1967)

...and the winner of the most overrated album in the history of pop music goes to...

When I first started listening to music exhaustively in the early 90s, it was widely agreed that Sgt. Pepper’s was the best Beatles album. It wasn’t even questionable. Then, as Britpop came along and prompted a revival of the Beatles and sixties music in general, Revolver quite rightly started to overtake its successor. Nowadays, every music magazine you pick up, or best album polls will proudly place Revolver at the top, with the same single-mindedness that was reserved for Sgt. Pepper’s a couple of decades ago. If this continues, perhaps in 100 years we’ll be seeing Please Please Me as the pinnacle of pop music achievement.

That’s not to say that Sgt. Pepper’s is a bad album, it’s just nowhere near the best of their work. Even the outtakes from these sessions - available on Anthology 2 - show that the band was essentially directionless at this point, and they were given all the time in the world to come up with a new album. Taking lyrics from a newspaper, or a fairground poster is not a stroke of genius, it’s a stroke of laziness. They may have conquered pop music, but I think this album suggests that perhaps they were not the best people to decide where music would turn next.

Also, for a lot of non-musos, this album may be the only Beatles album in their collection. This was true of a friend of mine I went to school and college with. So as far as he was aware, this is what all Beatles albums sounded like - a collection of mid-tempo songs with vaguely abstract lyrics and no real thematic cohesion. He’s probably a Coldplay fan these days...

Hit: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band

Hidden Gem: Lovely Rita

Rocks In The Attic #65: Paul McCartney - ‘Wingspan: Hits & History’ (2001)

I remember buying Wings Greatest on CD when I was at University, from Our Price (Our Price!) in Huddersfield town centre. Then, a few years later when I was building my vinyl collection, McCartney released this - a retrospective of (mainly) his work with Wings, even though the collection is credited to McCartney in name, as though it is purely a solo compilation.

This was an album I bought on vinyl and immediately transferred onto tape so I could play it in my crappy Nissan Sunny on drives over to Ireland. I’ve spent many a reggae-inspired middle-eight of Live And Let Die racing through the Welsh valleys on my way to the ferry port at Fishguard.

The Wings stuff across this double-LP set is essentially their greatest hits (their singles complimented by their better album tracks), and these are bookended by McCartney’s solo stuff both pre- and post-Wings. Thankfully, there’s not a great deal of McCartney’s solo cheese on here - the only real example is No More Lonely Nights, which gets two versions for some reason. The rest of his solo cheese - especially the likes of Ebony & Ivory and Wonderful Christmastime - is thankfully overlooked.

I’d have stuck Say Say Say on this if I had the opportunity, but given that none of his big duets appear on the album, it’s probably a simpler affair to keep it strictly a McCartney / Wings affair.

Hit: Band On The Run

Hidden Gem: Too Many People

Rocks In The Attic #49: The Beatles - ‘Beatles For Sale’ (1964)

The fourth Beatles album - also known as the ‘haphazardly-put-together-between-tours-to-get-it-out-in-time-for-Christmas’ album - and for me, just as good as the albums on either side of it.

I read somewhere that Eight Days A Week is notable as the first ever pop song with a faded-in intro. Now, I don’t know if that’s true - I’m sure whoever came up with that fact hadn’t listened to every pop song that came before this, but it does seem a little unlikely. Especially since the way recording had progressed from single takes into multitracking. With single takes, it’s far more likely that a song would be faded in at the start. Anyway, who knows? Or cares?

I sometime have great difficulty picking the ‘Hidden Gem’ on albums to detail at the foot of these blogs, but with Beatles For Sale it was too easy. The McCartney song What You’re Doing is so underrated - essentially unknown - that it’s almost criminal.

It’s also worth mentioning I Feel Fine (b/w She’s A Woman) which was released a week before this album - a great single, with a lead-guitar riff setting the template for rock music, and proof again that they were starting to get better and better at capturing the excitement of their live performances in the studio.

Hit: Eight Days A Week

Hidden Gem: What You’re Doing

Rocks In The Attic #44: The Byrds - ‘The Byrds’ Greatest Hits’ (1967)

I’ve never been a huge fan of The Byrds. I think it’s the heavy use of Roger McGuinn’s 12-string Rickenbacker. It’s funny that whenever you play a 12-string guitar - electric or acoustic - no matter what you play, it immediately sounds like you are playing something by The Byrds. Play a song written by Phil Collins and it sounds like The Byrds’ covering a Phil Collins song. Play a song by Lady Gaga...and so on.

I remember buying this record on CD first - and playing it over and over again - probably looking for a substitute Beatles, and I suppose they’re the closest thing to an American version of The Beatles, or at least the two bands’ sounds are very similar through the mix-sixties period (Lennon and Harrison would play 12-string Rickenbackers on many songs throughout 1964 and 1965).

I like the way 12-string Rickenbackers are designed.  The machine heads for the twelve strings are offset, so six are facing forwards, and the other six are facing backwards. Essentially it looks to the untrained eye like a standard 6-string guitar, as you can usually only see six machine-heads at a time. I think I read somewhere that this confused George Harrison when he originally saw The Byrds play live - how could McGuinn get such a rich jangly sound out of only six strings?

Hit: Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There Is A Season)

Hidden Gem: So You Want To Be A Rock ‘N’ Roll Star

Rocks In The Attic #38: Ringo Starr - ‘Sentimental Journey’ (1970)

I bought this recently, really as research for a piece of writing I’m working on, thinking it would be terrible, but it’s actually pretty good. This is Ringo’s first solo album - the first Beatles solo album in fact, not including live or avant-guarde releases - and is comprised of old standards arranged by the likes of Paul McCartney, George Martin, Maurice Gibb and Elmer Bernstein. Mostly it’s big band arrangements, with Ringo doing his best to croon over the top of them.

This might give me a bit of confidence to listen to his second album - Beaucoups Of Blues - again, although I’m not sure my initial opinion of that will change much. Maybe it will.

You have to wonder what teenybopper Beatles fans would have made of this, and its country follow-up. ‘Disappointed’ is a word that I’m sure would have been bandied about. Three weeks after this came McCartney and that’s so home-made it almost sounds like a demo recording. It wouldn’t be until much later in the year, when Harrison released All Things Must Pass that one of them released something that sounded vaguely Beatle-ly.

Hit: Have I Told You Lately That I Love You?

Hidden Gem: Dream

Rocks In The Attic #30: The Beatles - ‘Yellow Submarine Songtrack’ (1999)

It’s odd that they released this, as though admitting that the original Yellow Submarine soundtrack released in 1968 was a bit of a mistake. That album has four previously unreleased songs of varying quality on one side, bookended by the title song and All You Need Is Love; with the flipside covering George Martin’s orchestral score for the film. Of the studio albums in their official cannon, this has to be the weakest as half of it isn’t them playing, and the rest is half-hearted, at best.

Released in 1999 to promote the re-release of the animated film, the Yellow Submarine Songtrack tries to wrong those rights by removing the George Martin tracks and filling the album out with the other Beatles songs that appear in the movie.

Hey Bulldog takes pride of place as the first song on the album (after the title song), and this was released as the only single from the album. Of those 4 previously unreleased songs that appeared on the original soundtrack, it’s clearly the best one - a nice little riff-driven rocker by Lennon that wouldn’t have been out of place as a B-side around the time of The White Album when it was recorded.

This is a nice addition to my Beatles collection - the tracks are fully remixed from the original multitrack tapes (something that they didn’t even do for the 2009 remasters), making it a pretty unique release. And of course it’s on yellow vinyl, and who doesn’t like coloured vinyl?

Hit: Yellow Submarine

Hidden Gem: Hey Bulldog

Rocks In The Attic #21: Monty Norman - ‘Dr.No (O.S.T.)’ (1963)

Another gem in my record collection - an original copy of the soundtrack to the first James Bond film, Dr. No - released in 1963 to coincide with the American release of the film in June of that year (the film was originally released in the UK on the 5^th of October 1962, the same day as The Beatles’ first 7” single Love Me Do).

It’s a shame that John Barry’s work on this album is uncredited, given how vital he was to the music of 007 over the next three decades. He arranged the James Bond Theme, and orchestrated the final song on the album, but the rest of the soundtrack is credited to composer Monty Norman, writer of the James Bond Theme.

This soundtrack is very calypso-sounding, because of the film’s setting in the West Indies. It sounds quite fresh, and is probably the only time a Bond soundtrack has ever leant so much towards a specific genre of music - at least until the soundtrack for The Spy Who Loved Me goes all disco. Ugh.

Hit: James Bond Theme

Hidden Gem: Under The Mango Tree

Rocks In The Attic #16: Booker T. & The M.G.’s - ‘McLemore Avenue’ (1970)

I bought this only last Sunday, from Real Groovy in Auckland. Got it home, put in on the turntable and while it’s on its first listen I turn on the internet and find out that Duck Dunn has passed away.

The music world has lost a lot of good people in the last couple of weeks - Levon Helm, The Beastie Boys’ MCA, Duck Dunn, and as of the day before yesterday, Donna Summer. That’s be a nice little band right there - and odd band, but something worth listening to.

McElmore Avenue, as the front cover might suggest, is Booker T. & The M.G.’s doing Abbey Road. Released only a few months as The Beatles’ swansong, it’s missing a few songs (my favourite, Oh! Darling is noticeable absent), but this gives the M.G.’s a bit of room to improvise on the songs chosen.

It’s a great little album, with the band on top form, working their way through a largely instrumental and heavily re-ordered version of Abbey Road.

Hit: Come Together

Hidden Gem: I Want You (She’s So Heavy)

Rocks In The Attic #13: George Harrison - ‘All Things Must Pass’ (1970)

This is probably the most extravagant record in my collection - being the 2001 digitally remastered box-set. It’s a great album, and definitely the most 70’s rock-sounding of the debut albums by the three songwriting Beatles.

The first time I came across this album was when I was staying at my good friend Linsay’s house in Northern Ireland, and my other good friend, Kaj, and I were sleeping outside in the family caravan parked on the driveway. The only music we could find was the cassette album of All Things Must Pass, which we played all weekend, especially the jokey It’s Johnny’s Birthday­  - intended for John Lennon, but relevant to me also.

I don’t know what I like best - this, McCartney or John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band - but it probably depends on what mood I’m in. This album sounds the biggest of the three, no doubt due to Phil Spector’s heavy involvement (although he also co-produced John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, he wasn’t around for a lot of those sessions, whereas you can hear his input all over this).

The ‘informal jams’ that make up the third disc of this triple album are largely pointless - and self-indulgent tossery - given that it feels more like a chance for George to show off his best-friend Eric, rather than to provide anything of substance.

It’s a shame that My Sweet Lord got a lot of undue attention because of its “similarity” to The Chiffons’ He’s So Fine. A shame because it’s practically the same song. Different instruments and different lyrics, but melodically identical.

Hit: My Sweet Lord

Hidden Gem: Wah-Wah