A quick google unearths other magazines' 'greatest' lists, some of which included Greatest Hits compilations.
BEATLES AND THE MIGHTY VIKINGS ALBUM FREE
And this free and easy approach is far from unprecedented. "Anything you fancy", came the reply when I asked which would be eligible. The Harder They Come)? And what about compilations that aren't best ofs or studio albums but are seminal collections: Hatful of Hollow was the album that got me into the Smiths, and I prefer the radio session versions of the songs on it – so it remains the first album of theirs I'd listen to, long before the Queen Is Dead (the officially canonised Best Smiths Album, and as it turns out, NME writers' officially crowned Best Album Of All Time). Live albums? Soundtracks, even if they're composed of a bunch of singles from the title artist and a few others (eg. The problems kept coming though: I started questioning the rules of which albums were eligible, and which weren't. It didn't do me any harm, apart from puzzling over the appeal of Donald Fagen's The Nightfly for the next 25 years.Īnd without making this some sort of Channel 4-screened, laboratory conditions, demographically correct exercise, or a Mercury Awards-style judging-panel bunfight, you're always going to have the other problems mentioned above. Meanwhile, you do wonder: In this age of mass communication, do people still need to be told that It Takes A Nation Of Millions or Is This It? are classic albums that might be worthy of seeking out?īut then I remember scouring second-hand record shops seeking recommendations from the NME's top 100 all-time list from 1986. Do you really want to pay any heed to these people's recommendations?
BEATLES AND THE MIGHTY VIKINGS ALBUM PLUS
When you see readers' polls such as Q Readers' top 100 albums (as compiled in 1998, 20), you're ultimately looking at the choices of the kind of people who can actually be arsed to fill in a poll form and send it in, which tends to be those who really don't get out enough, plus members of a Muse fansite who have launched an online campaign to get their sorry arses in there. Yet the same problems arise when you get readers or radio listeners to vote on these things. Inevitably, with the whole thing being a bit last-minute and no-budget, the votes were also those of individuals who could be arsed to sweat over a difficult task in their free time for no financial reward. I and the rest of the NME alumni were simply told to vote for our 'favourite' albums – Ideally a top 50 but really anything we could rustle up by the following Monday.Īnd herein lies a flaw inherent in all such lists: The results are bound to be slanted towards the choices of the voters who they happen still to have contact details for, which will inevitably be the more recent contributors (Still, having first written for them over 20 years ago, they didn't do too badly tracking me down). My own contribution to it involved spending a weekend trying to compile my top 50 albums and singles of all time (from which lists, as you might expect, they compiled the final '500 Greatest' chart.) However, the experience did bring home to me just how hard it is to ensure these lists have much real meaning. It also makes perfect publishing sense for a magazine (sorry, media-neutral entertainment orb, international comment toaster and ever-rotating news sponge) to periodically publish something that will get it talked about beyond the dressing rooms at Leeds Cockpit. It's a perfectly healthy human pastime, if perhaps more so for an 11-year-old than a man in his 40s. I seem to remember spending much of my 11th year noting down which bands were "mods", which were "punks", which were "new wave" and which were "rockers", and which football teams they probably supported, based entirely on guesswork. I'm sure there's a cave somewhere on which our ancestors once took it upon themselves to rank "best Buffalo kills I done". And I don't really have a beef with the natural human inclination to make lists. A few weeks ago, I was proud and privileged to be among numerous current and former contributors to the New Musical Express asked to send in their votes to help decide the magazine's (sorry, multi-platform media brand, pop-up restaurant and cultural discourse hub) recently published list of 'The 500 greatest albums of all time'.Īnd why not? I'm not one of those tedious prigs who haughtily disapprove of the idea of judging or even ranking musical works' relative value as if it were tantamount to slapping price tags on renaissance statues.
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