The Who – Who’s Next
I acquired this wonderful album from a school friend – one of the bad girls, like me – in exchange for a pair of blue suede shoes. Really. Fast forward a few decades and I was in a bar in Brussels with two colleagues, both younger than me. We were the only people there and the owner apologised for the lack of music but said he had Bluetooth and offered to play anything from one of our phones. All I had on mine was Who’s Next. I got a lot of street cred when that incredible intro to Baba O’Riley cascaded out. The album’s been a firm favourite since I first listened to it after hearing Won’t Get Fooled Again when it was released as a single.
The Rolling Stones – Sticky Fingers
Again, the single hooked me. Well it would, wouldn’t it, problematic as the subject-matter is. The wonderfully informative David Hepworth recounts (in 1971 – Never a Dull Moment) that Jagger, who now says ‘I never would write that song. I would probably censor myself’, wrote it ‘while killing time between shots on the Australian set of Ned Kelly’ (a film I, an ardent Jagger fan, saw two and a half times, having arrived so early at the cinema that I went in halfway through the previous screening and stayed for the next two). And then who could resist that zippy cover? Again according to the invaluable Hepworth, Sticky Fingers was the first Stones album not to be priced in pounds, shillings and pence, and I begged my father to lend me the new money to buy it. He wrote me a cheque but it was crossed rather than open (it was a while ago …) and the bank refused to cash it. Too young to have my own account, I stood there arguing the toss for so long that they eventually did so just to get rid of me. My father later said he’d known there’d be a problem but thought I’d talk the bank round and the challenge would be good for my character. Shortly afterwards I saw The Stones at the Birmingham Odeon. Got the first bus at 5.30 a.m. and queued outside the box office for five hours. Unquestionably worth it (and doubtless also character-building). As a timely RIP, just listen to the mesmerising thread of the late, great Charlie Watts running along under Can’t You Hear Me Knocking?
Lou Reed – Transformer
Talkin’ ‘bout that zippy cover … the crotch is reportedly that of Joe Dallesandro, the very same Little Joe who ‘never once gave it away / Everybody had to pay and pay’ in Walk on the Wild Side. When the real Holly (Woodlawn), who ‘came from Miami, FLA / Hitchhiked her way across the USA’, died in 2015, Michael Hann ran a wonderful article in The Guardian chasing down the other characters in the song. Candy Darling who ‘never lost her head / Even when she was givin’ head’. Joe Campbell (Sugar Plum Fairy) who ‘came and hit the streets / Lookin’ for soul food and a place to eat.’ Jackie Curtis, the one ‘just speedin’ away / Thought she was James Dean for a day.’ I’ve loved Transformer since I bought it not long after it came out. And those falsetto echoes in the background of Satellite of Love are Bowie. Talking of whom …
David Bowie – Hunky Dory
I bought this album after Changes was released as a single and thought the sleeve was so beautiful that I wrote to RCA and begged for one to stick on my bedroom wall. They kindly sent me an empty cover and up it went. I did the same for Goat’s Head Soup and Aladdin Sane and probably others, but Hunky Dory was the first. And to add to the links that I keep discovering between my chosen albums, the penultimate song, Queen Bitch, is a tribute to Lou Reed and his pre-Transformer band, the Velvet Underground. Bowie’s biographer Nicholas Pegg described it as ‘a song that succeeds in making the phrase “bipperty-bopperty hat” sound raunchy and cool’.
Carly Simon – No Secrets
I’d been on a school trip to Florence. My first boyfriend met me off the coach and gave me this album as a welcome back present before dropping me home. My parents asked about the wonderful things I’d seen – the Uffizzi, the Ponte Vecchio, the Pitti Palace, Brunelleschi’s splendid Duomo, the side trips to Lucca and Sienna. I just waved No Secrets at them, said look what Bob’s given me and disappeared to my bedroom to listen to it. Did they regret the cost of the trip, I wonder? But I got a lot of joy from that album (as well as from Florence). It may be saccharine and underwhelming in part, but We Have No Secrets is a strong and thoughtful song and who can resist the jaunty chords and lyrics of You’re so Vain, with Mick Jagger among the background vocalists? Or Carly Simon’s bipperty-bopperty hat indeed.
Leonard Cohen – Songs of Leonard Cohen
I had an unshakeable crush on someone I’d met at a student disco (OK this was the ‘70s). It never went anywhere but at one point when I was trying to make it go somewhere, I turned up at his room in Balliol College, Oxford. He wasn’t there but I was allowed in to wait for him (olden days). There was an old typewriter (OK, ‘70s) on the desk and a sheet of paper in it with the words of Suzanne laboriously pecked out, missed letters and smudges and errors and all. I was entranced. Chased it down (without Google …), bought the album, and I was Cohen’s from then on. Sadly I was never Rupert’s.
Paul Simon – Graceland
I remember walking into a party at a friend’s house in Stoke Newington to the amplified blast of already familiar words – ‘She said, “Don’t I know you from the cinematographer’s party?”’ ‘Cool music,’ I said. My late husband was born and bred in Zimbabwe; by the time Graceland came out I’d had my first visit there and found vibrant echoes in the album’s lyrics and music. As Simon says, ‘These are the roots of rhythm / And the roots of rhythm remain.’ Of course his breach of the UN cultural boycott of apartheid South Africa was and still is controversial, but intuitively I feel that Graceland must have given many listeners their first taste of southern African music and perhaps sparked a lasting interest.
Bob Dylan – Desire
Did I buy this album because there was a track called Mozambique? I can’t recall now, and if so I would have been disappointed to find out that, according to a 2016 piece in The Daily Beast, the location was chosen because Dylan and co-writer Jacques Levy wanted to see how many words they could come up with that rhymed with it. But maybe I bought it simply because it followed Blood on the Tracks, which I’d loved. Either way, this album hit me like a train while Blood on the Tracks, ironically, was more of a slow burn. The lead song, Hurricane, with its dramatic narrative of a miscarriage of judgment, pulled me right in. I’ve come back to it many times since and neither it nor any of the later tracks have lost their lustre.
Bio
Vanessa Edwards lives in London with her border collie Elvis. A happily ex-lawyer, she now writes fiction when she’s not reading, drinking wine or listening to 70s music.
Follow Vanessa on Twitter @vcjemih or visit her website at www.vanessaedwardswriter.com
