Enjoy An Album with Liam Withnail & Christopher Macarthur-Boyd

While playing as a drummer for local Detroit bands such as Two Star Tabernacle and The Go, John Gillis took his ex-wife’s maiden name and retitled himself Jack White. He formed a two-piece with Meg, told everybody that he was her sister, and single-handedly reinvented electric American roots music in his own peppermint-bespoke image. Utilising the minimalistic principles he learned as an upholster...

After a turn as the bass player for obscure Liverpudlian rock ensemble The Beatles, Paul McCartney figuratively reinvented himself after an entirely amicable band break-up by moving to rural Scotland and actually-inventing the sounds and aesthetics of “indie-pop” at least a decade and a half before that term came into popular use. “Ram” was brutally dismissed by the superstar rock critics of the d...

The boys listen to Roberta Flacks powerful debut

In less than five years, Diana Ross went from living in the Frederick Douglass Housing Projects in Detroit to being the jewel in Motown’s crown as the lead singer of the only female band to match the Beatles in terms of international popularity. As well as songs written by her boyfriend (and Motown president) Berry Gordy like the suspiciously scrumptious Buttered Popcorn, this two-and-a-half-hour...

Trent Reznor’s debut album is a throbbing slab of horny midwestern industrial rock, halfway between the sexual dancefloor electronicism of Depeche Mode and the involuntarily celebate roar that would define American alternative rock in the nineties. Between the pitch perfect sadomasochism of opening track “Head Like A Hole” and the whining balladeering in “Something I Can Never Have”, Pretty Hate M...

British music journalists called the experimental wave of psychedelic rock that came out of West Germany in the late sixties and early seventies “krautrock”. Somewhere between the absurdist dissonant drone collages of Amon Duul and the worldbeating robot-pop of Kraftwerk sits “Ege Bamyasi” by Can - an essential slice of futuristic freak-funk fronted by a nomadic Japanese wanderer and recorded in t...

Bo Diddley transmuted the juba hambone beat into rock ‘n’ roll, inspired by blues legends like Howlin Wolf and then ruthlessly plagiarised and whitewashed by everybody from Buddy Holly, Elvis Presley and the Rolling Stones to George Michael, The Smiths and Guns ‘N’ Roses. ‘Bo Diddley’ and ‘Go Bo Diddley’ are his first and second albums, released in the late fifties and containing his biggest chart...

Kicked out of his childhood home by his religious father for the hideous crime of listening to Jackie Wilson, Al Green was hustling in a bordello when he was discovered by the bandleader Willie Mitchell. He went on to be inaccurately described as the Last of The Great Soul Singers, and defined the Memphis soul sound of the early seventies with the ten steamy hot slabs of utilitarian jamming that c...

Her powerful cover of Prince’s “Nothing Compares 2 U” made her a global superstar, but when Sinead O’Connor tore up a picture of The Pope during a musical performance on Saturday Night Live as a statement about child abuse within the Catholic Church, she became infamous. Abused by her family and by the nuns at the Magdelene Laundry she was sent to for shoplifting, she channeled the rage wrought by...

Born in a trailer park in rural Alabama, Jason Isbell was taught to play music by his family, then went on to become a guitarist and songwriter for the Southern rock band known as the Drive-By Truckers. However, the demon drink got the best of him and he lost both his band and his wife. After a pair of mediocre solo records, he gave up the booze and found love again before recording the modern cla...

Ella Marija Lani Yelich-O’Connor was a teenager when she released “Royals” as a single under the stagename Lorde. But where the Kiwi electro-popstar’s first album had a swaggering half-cut gait, her second record - 2017’s Melodrama - is an MDMA-inspired Greek tragedy of epic proportions: soaring ecstatic bassy highs and cripplingly self-criticising comedowns. It’s also the 460th Greatest Album of...

After collaborating with Kanye West on his cold electro-pop record 808s & Heartbreak, Kid Cudi followed up his megahit debut mixtape A Kid Named Cudi with this conceptual arena-rap sad-stoner magnum opus song-cycle. Beloved by the likes of Pete Davidson and Timothee Chalomet, this Common-narrated record went on to inspire a generation of Cudi devotees including Tyler The Creator, Travis Scott...

2006 was a bad year for Justin Vernon. His band broke up, his girlfriend left him, and he came down with a serious bout of mononucleosis hepatitis - a severe form of herpes that leaves your lungs inflamed. He spent the winter getting steamboats in his father’s cabin in rural Winsconsin, where he wrote almost all of ‘For Emma, Forever Ago’ on a laptop with a 1960s Silvertone guitar. It was a very s...

This week on Enjoy An Album, Christopher Macarthur-Boyd and Liam Withnail continue their break from listening to the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time to answer the rest of the listener-submitted questions in the Christmas mailbag. Featuring questions from the likes of Eriq a.k.a. Farump, Rory M. Spence and Alan Hazlie, including: Are there any songs you listen to before you perform to get you in th...

This week on Enjoy An Album, Christopher Macarthur-Boyd and Liam Withnail take a break from listening to the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time to answer a smorgasbord of listener-submitted questions. Featuring questions from the likes of Jay Lafferty, Shaun “Panda” Nicholson and Thomas Craven, including: What’s your go-to happy album when you’re sad? If you could only listen to one album for the res...

In 1968, Gram Parsons was the piano-player for The Byrds. In 1973, he overdosed on morphine and alcohol and then his body was stolen by his friends and set on fire. Between those two points he recorded The Gilded Palace of Sin as the lead-singer of the Flying Burrito Brothers. The album barely made a dent commercially, but it’s cosmic gumbo of genres inspired hundreds of bands from the Eagles and...

Discovered by David Geffen after a controversial performance at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, a 20-year-old Laura Nyro convinced Clive Davis to sign her to Columbia Records by inviting him to her flat, where she turned all the lights off and performed material from what would become ‘Eli and the Thirteenth Confession’. This darkly theatrical blue-eyed soul music made her and Geffen a milliona...

The Isley Brothers (pronounced “eyes-ly”) had existed as a vocal doo-wop trio since the late 50’s, playing live with the pre-fame likes of Jimi Hendrix and Elton John. But in 1973 they collaborated with their two much younger brothers (and a controversial cousin) to update their sound from classic R&B to ultra-crisp funky soul. Their kid brother Ernie Isley joins the dots between Maggot Brain and...

When Bob Marley died in 1981, Island Records wanted to repeat the success they found with the reggae star by marketing King Sunny Ade as ‘The African Bob Marley’. It didn’t really work, but the attempt brought Nigeria’s unique style of afrobeat - “juju music” - to the international spotlight. Compiled in 2003 by Shanachie Records, ‘The Best Of The Classic Years’ documents the pre-Island period of...

In 1964, Brian Wilson married a sixteen-year-old and smoked exactly one (1) marijuana cigarette before having a mental breakdown and deciding that the life of a rock star on-tour wasn’t for him - he holed up in L.A. to write and record music, while the rest of the band would travel around the world playing concerts. The next year, they released “The Beach Boys Today!” - a reimagining of the Beach...

Maxwell disappeared from the public eye in late 2001, seemingly disillusioned with the world after both the terrorist attacks of September 11th and the resignation of William Hague, the then-leader of the United Kingdom’s Conservative party. But from 9/11 until just after Obama’s inauguration, the neo-soul chart-topper in exile toiled on 2009’s “BLACK summers night”, the first in a planned trilogy...

In 1977 Keith Richards was getting busted in Toronto for heroin possession while Mick Jagger was spending his nights in New York partying in Studio 54 with the rich and the famous. Meanwhile, music moved on without them as new rock bands emerged, as well as the divergent births of disco and punk. The Rolling Stones absconded to Paris over new year, where they fused their classic transatlantic whit...

After spending ten years as the frontman of bands like the patchenka world fusion outfit Mano Negra and the Parisian pub-rock group Hot Pants, Manu Chao lost both his band and his long-term girlfriend. He then spent three years in suicidal exile trekking across South America and West Africa, before returning to music with “Clandestino” - his debut solo album recorded on a laptop with international...

Cash Money Records may have released albums by Drake, Nicki Minaj and Lil Wayne, but this searing quadruple-platinum slice of New Orleans bounce-inflected trap-predicting hip-hop outsold all of them. Largely produced by southern rap legend Mannie Fresh, Juvenile’s third album broke into the mainstream with mega-hits like “Ha” and “Back That Azz Up”. Not only that, but it’s #470 on the Rolling Ston...

Jefferson Airplane were iconic to dirty hippies across the world in the sixties, as the only band to headline Woodstock, Altamont and the Monterey Pop festivals. “Surrealistic Pillow” was saved from record company meddling by the spiritual advisory of Grateful Dead honcho Jerry Garcia, and went on to become the defining soundtrack to the Summer Of Love. Not only that, but it’s #471 on the Rolling...