Best / Worst Al*** Side Ever

Urban Hymns by The Verve.

This starts off superbly, the first 4 or 5 songs (Bittersweet Symphone, Sonnet etc.) are as good as many I've heard over the years. The second half tails off badly (apart from 'Lucky Man')

Side 1 is packed full of great songs, but for side 2 the quality drops right off.

Gavin

Three more

Iggy Pop: The idiot
Iggy Pop: New Values
David Bowie: Lodger

Three great A sides and very poor B sides.

My candidate: The idiot.

Gunnar

Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now
This Night Has Opened My Eyes
You've Got Everything Now
Accept Yourself
Girl Afraid
Back to the Old House
Reel Around the Fountain
Please Please Please Let Me Get What

OK - the first track is a little average ... but after that its classic after classic

Gunnar, in my current splurge on Bowie I picked up Lodger and in my opinion its total crap period.

Garyi

Give it a couple of more spins and it really grows on you. I really love the A side . The way the songs interlink with each other and the great musical performance of the musicians with really good songs. You also find one of the most ( or perhaps the most?) beatiful song Bowie ever made; fantastic voyage

Give it some more "airtime"

Greetings

Gunnar

Van Morrison - Moondance

Side 1 - Stinging
Side 2 - Minging

Side four of The White Album.

quote:

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Originally posted by Mike Sae:
Side four of The White Album.

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Who are White ??

Nana

I'm sure I should be able to think of lot's, but I can't get past greeny's Da Capo!

This reminds me of the trick they used to do with albums.

We'd go down to Frost's in Sutton Coldfield or Boots in Brum, and ask to listen to such-and-such LP in one of their listening booths. The assistant would then play you either the first or last track on side 1 - a trick not lost on the people responsible for ordering the tracks on albums...quite a few LPs bought that only had two good tracks on them!

Whats this old man talk you are on about?

Did they really stick you in a booth to listen to records, wern't you allowed to touch them?

Tactile purchasing and all that.

Waaaaaay back then (60's), they had the sleeves in browsers, but without the records in. And why would you want to look at the record itself? It was new and it was only when you played it that you'd find out whether it had a fault.

You hoped too that the one you bought hadn't been played too much in the shop - they (as did I) only had ceramic cartridges in arms that weighed several tons. That wasn't quite so bad when mono was the norm - when stereo became more prevelant you then had to worry about whether thay had a stereo-compatible cartridge....

The concept of the specialist record shop was pretty rare. Sutton had Frost's, which IIRC was basically a biggish chemists etc. And that was that. Wasn't until the big boom of the late 60's that more independants and the chains started and every town had one or two (or more)specialists.

Grandpa.

...The booths that mono records were played in [most of them] were like open public telephones, which you stood up in, and the average shop might have about six of these, whereas the one stereo booth [only the one, mind] had a glass door, a seat inside [4 people at a squash] and two tiny speakers set into the ceiling.

We, with our stereo-compatible cartridges and teak radiograms[or in my case a extra channel in the form of a sort of transistor radio arrangement that plugged into my HMV record player] were the elite record buyers, and so sat resplendant in all our glory behind the glass door, eyed suspiciously by the assistant [record departments, without fail, were staffed by unpleasant women of a certain age who had nylon overalls, lacquered beehives and the sort of glasses now ironically worn by Edna Everage, except in black. They were Very Strict, gathered from the furthest reaches of a store for their ability to deal with teenagers and their unpleasant music ] Any frivolity in the booth, and the arm would be lifted immediately.

Nick and I had Saturday jobs in the kitchen of a Birmingham department store, which paid £1 15s 0d a day [£1.75], and when work was over, there was just enough time to nip across to Boots to spend the lot on a new album. All labels cost 33/6 [£1.62 1/2] except Elektra, which for some reason took up our whole 35/- [£1.75]. Our record buying was governed by something:

a]having an attractive cover [we followed sleeve artists almost as much as the music]
b]being completely unknown [not difficult, as none of the stuff we bought was ever played on the radio] and
c]being on Elektra if at all possible.

Strangely, this policy enabled us to build up a pretty comprehensive collection of superb albums which I listen to to this day [now replaced by CD, but we won't go into that - it's still too painful]. In retrospect, it is probably rather odd to think of fifteen year olds galvanised into buying The Marble Index, Happy Trails or David Peel & The Lower East Side after 10mins in Boots, but I can testify that it did happen. We weren't remotely hip, just a bit strange.

If on your vinyl splurges, you spot sleeves with little 3cm creases down the left side, this is a sign of authenticity, caused by the aforementioned practice of displaying empty sleeves in browsers, restrained by a length of plastic-coated curtain wire.

Also bear in mind that the cost of a new needle for your cartridge [yes, you bought them separately, and they had a stylus for 78's welded on the back, accessed by flipping a bit of plastic, so all eventualities were covered] cost around 7/6 [thats 35p]. If it's a good album, that's probably why it sounds a little ...err.. crisp.

throb [just woken by matron with a nice bit of battenburg]

All the songs are smiths classics but I find this disc to be unlistenable because of the crappy recording quality. When I first bought it I thought "hatful" was a bootleg because the quality was so poor...I came to find out it was a legit release. I know that this point may not be in the spirit of this thread but I felt I had to sound off. Whew i feel better.

quote:

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Originally posted by Steve Catterall:
Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now
This Night Has Opened My Eyes
You've Got Everything Now
Accept Yourself
Girl Afraid
Back to the Old House
Reel Around the Fountain
Please Please Please Let Me Get What

OK - the first track is a little average ... but after that its classic after classic

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I tend to dismiss the Eagles on principle, but they have actually made quite a few good tracks in their time. Several of them can be found on Side 1 of Hotel California, but not on side 2. Not only is it at best a bit average, at worst it's got The Last Resort. Barf!

Pete.

(p.s., Hatful of Hollw drops off? What! I suppose anything that doesn't have How Soon Is Now on the same side will be relatively lacking, but in absolute terms it's still great)

Unfortunately in cronolgical order, so charts the Roxy's decline from raw genius to polished mediocrity.

And Ummagumma, the best live Floyd on record 1. The worst studio stuff on record 2*.

*Though Atom Heart Mother is probably even worse...

Atom Heart Mother is a National Treasure - I won't hear otherwise. With regard to UmmaGumma, it was fab at the time, although maybe passing years tend to confirm your view....

throb

AHM is fab (excepting Alan's Psychedelic Brekkie). The general dissing of this gem is only explicable by bovine subversion/conspiracy theory. Either the people who don't get this album are not drinking enough full-fat milk or haven't had enough to smoke.

Ummagumma studio OTOH is largely weak.

Richard your assesment of umma is spot on, infact as a kid, (which I must confess was 13 years ago) we would listen to ummagumma whilst playing 'headoverheels' on the ZX speccy (ok the nintendo was out by then but still we were skint)

Atom heart mother is not so much a treasure as a travesty.

Nick thanks for the trip down old mans memory age, in my entire life I have never seen a 'booth', to be honest I think they should be reinstalled because trying to hear a cd requested on them earphones in virgen is imposible over the bollocks they are playing on the main system

and i'm literally surrounded by fresians during the summer...

Nick, I've still got to copy that Max Webster for you...

quote:

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Atom heart mother is not so much a treasure as a travesty.

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I can't beleive this. I think this is an excellent album. The title track is superb (not far behind echos IMO). I agree with Nick that Alans psychidelic Brekie is poor, but I like everything else on there.

Ummagumma on the other hand is very poor. The studio stuff is only notable for the novelty of Several Special......... And the live bit doesn't manage to redeem the situation much.

I can think of at least 4 people who think AHM is a load of tosh. And their names are Roger Waters, Dave Gilmour, Nick Mason and Rick Wright. They're all on record as saying they think with hindsight that it's pretty hopeless meandering waffle.

Summer '68 isn't bad, and if that sounds like we're in "Damning with faint praise" territory, that's because we are. I mainly keep my copy because the cover's good fun (gatefold vinyl, natch).

Pete.

I can't see how anyone could find side 2 poor in any way. Reel Around The Fountain is maybe The Smiths finest moment for me (well until the next time I hear Still Ill / This Charming Man / The Boy With The Thorn In His Side etc...), and one cannot disregard This Night Has Opened My Eyes, You've got Everything Now or Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now.

Side One may be slightly better, but not by much. How Soon Is Now is maybe the ultimate Stadium Rock song (how unlikely!), but it is the contrast in listening to Handsome Devil straight after that makes the Smiths so interesting and entertaining, yet so challenging. Morrissey might be as close as we'll get to the second coming

J

Reel around the fountain
Slap me on the Patio
I'll take it now.

Back to the original subject of the thread...

Henry Cow, In Praise of Learning:

Side 1: Some of the best rock music ever recorded

Side 2: Did somebody leave the tape machine running while they tuned up?

Another contender:

Henry Cow (apparent masters of this art) Concerts:

Side 1 (originally recorded for the BBC) is very good, and Side 2 features a pretty decent rendition of "Ruins."

Side 3 makes me feel really sorry for the poor folks in the audience at the Hennie Onstad Center that night, and most of Side 4 sounds like pretty aimless noodling.

Best Side - Side 1 of "Never mind the Bollocks - Here's the Sex Pistols".

Sounds vital now - Lord knows what it sounded like 25 years ago.

Paul