Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not by Arctic Monkeys

After the musical doldrums of the early 2000’s this album was a breath of fresh Yorkshire air, with the tang of taxi exhaust, Lynx deodorant and chip shop vinegar. These lads are from just up the road from where I live and I’ve probably stood in the same queue outside the station waiting for a taxi to High Green via Hillsborough, please. Authentic Sheffield steel!

https://album.link/i/121522402

Station to Station by David Bowie

Another transitional album, opening with the ten minute title track that starts with the sound of a hissing train and toys with prog krautrock beats and icy electronica. At this time Bowie was deep in the middle of an extended period of cocaine addiction, burnt out and paranoid, and morphed into the new persona of The Thin White Duke, a repellent European aristocrat with some very troubling opinions to say the least.

Thankfully Bowie quickly clarified that this was just an act that did not reflect his actual beliefs and the Duke didn’t hang around. The rest of the tracks build on the previous soul sound, with the highlight for me being Golden Years, one of his best.

Off to Berlin next!

https://album.link/i/1195104858

Quiet

As I get older

A bit of peace and quiet

Is always welcome

Young Americans by David Bowie

Even in 1975, America wasn’t quite ready for an androgynous alien with wonky teeth, so Bowie transformed again into a matinee idol and took his love of American soul music into the studio with Luther Vandross and Carlos Alomar to produce this great album. We also get a great cover of Across the Universe and a sharply observed collaboration with John Lennon on the final track that once more points to where we are heading next, warning about the poisonous effects of fame and celebrity.

https://album.link/i/1195107061

Bare Trees

Skeletal branches

Waiting for the warm spring sun 

Leaves will bud again

Here’s Little Richard by Little Richard

Has there ever been a more thrilling two and a half minutes of music than Tutti Frutti? From the opening wop-bop-a-loo-mop to the raw power of Little Richard’s voice and suggestive lyrics that push all sorts of boundaries, this song has it all. Little Richard was a huge influence on the Beatles and taught them his trademark ‘wooo’, and they had Long Tall Sally as a regular part of their live sets, right up until their last gig at Candlestick Park.

https://album.link/i/1440936634

The Healer by John Lee Hooker

John Lee Hooker was one of the all time great blues musicians, without a doubt. However, this album featuring contributions from Carlos Santana, Bonnie Raitt and Los Lobos didn’t really grab me. It felt a little bit too polished and well produced, and left me yearning for the rough and ready sound of Hooker’s early recordings. However, he was in his 70s when this was released, so you can’t really begrudge the old fella his pension plan.

https://album.link/i/1720264601

Wolf Moon

An old dog dreaming
Of primordial forests
Under a Wolf Moon

Diamond Dogs by David Bowie

Another radical shift, with this album opening with a sci-fi introduction and going into a dystopian narrative inspired by George Orwell’s 1984. This was Bowie’s last glam album, and has some great examples of stomping rock to enjoy with Rebel Rebel being a highlight for me. It’s not quite up to the level of the previous ones, but you get the sense that Bowie is itching to move on again, and the funky guitar on 1984 gives us a clue where he’s heading next.

https://album.link/gb/i/1195107058

Crust

My mum always said
Eating crusts was good for you
With some extra jam

Music in Exile by Songhoy Blues

The Songhoy Blues band formed in Timbuktu in 2012 after being forced to leave their homes in the north of Mali due to political and religious turmoil. The music they make is full of joy as well longing for the lives they left behind. The highlight is probably the final track Mali that needs no translation to break your heart. This is Afro Beat with a rock edge and an unexpected gem on this list.

https://album.link/i/971619376

Pin Ups by David Bowie

A contractual obligation covers album of 60s music, six months after Aladdin Sane and coming off the back of an emotionally draining tour doesn’t sound promising. However, as the cover of Let’s Spend the Night Together proved, Bowie is the consummate chameleon and absolutely smashed this compilation of 60s R&B, psychedelia and Merseybeat numbers. Highlights are a Brechtian See Emily Play and a slowed down Can’t Explain.

https://album.link/i/1039794844

Time Out by The Dave Brubeck

In contrast to the wild free jazz of John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman from around this time, this is a measured and precise experiment with unusual time signatures played on the piano by Dave Brubeck while the alto sax of Paul Desmond swoops around like a big swoopy thing. Anyone listening to this is guaranteed to immediately become 100% cooler although wearing dark suits and spectacles may be a side effect.

https://album.link/i/193085545

The Terror Beneath by Scott Malthouse

After reading the Great God Pan recently for the Grognard Files book club, I picked up this role playing game inspired by the works of Arthur Machen. It’s an investigative game, based on the Gumshoe system, in which players will always find the clues they need to progress without needing a specific roll but they will face other challenges or possibly get more information by using the right skills at the right time. An adventuring party should have most, if not all, of the available skills between them so there is no point where the game will be halted by a failed investigation roll.

Combat is also dealt with in an interesting way too - each character involved gets one roll which they can add to by spending points from their resource pool and the number of successes against their opponents is totalled up to find the outcome with a range of possible results depending on what they were trying to do. Were they attempting to drive off the monster so they could escape, or subdue a cultist so they could capture them? Characters can also suffer a range of injuries or afflictions which are tracked using cards (helpfully provided as a print and cut out download). Needless to say that direct combat against some of the powerful entities in this setting is not advisable! 

There is a good amount of detail in the chapters about the setting, with sections on the London Metropolis and the Welsh Wilderness, and the various entities that the characters might face from mad scientists to corrupted soldiers to the Great God Pan itself. There are plenty of plot hooks and scenario ideas based on the stories given too. The advice on writing and running investigative scenarios, and building a sense of creeping terror as the tension mounts, is very useful too and applicable to other games like Vaesen and Cthulhu Hack.

One last thing to mention is that as well as printed and pdf versions, this book is available in indexed and resizable EPUB format which is perfect for e-readers like Kindle and accessible for my poor eyesight. I wish more publishers would offer this! Recommended!

Osprey Games - The Terror Beneath

Smoke

Smoke gets in your eyes
Crying for a burning world
All that’s left is ash

Aladdin Sane by David Bowie

Even while he was in the middle of a tour with the Spiders From Mars, Bowie was keen to move on from his Ziggy persona. This album saw him transform into Aladdin Sane with the iconic lightning bolt makeup and name alluding to his fear of the schizophrenia that his brother had suffered from. The sound also noticeably changed with the addition of pianist Mike Garson, giving this album a mix of hard rock, glam, soul, experimental avant-garde jazz and Brechtian opera. I was lucky enough to see Mike Garson playing this album in full a couple of years ago and he really is an astonishing pianist.

The lyrics also push the boundaries particularly the bit about falling wanking to the floor on Time. I remember being in our local Co-Op where they would allow the staff to play their own choices over the in store speakers and somebody picked this album - can’t go wrong with cuddly old David Bowie, right? - but they’d evidently forgotten about this one!

https://album.link/i/1039655668

Ziggy Stardust by David Bowie

I think that seeing David Bowie singing Starman on Top of the Pops is one of my earliest musical memories and was certainly the first time I thought that music could be transgressive and thrilling, even if I couldn’t have expressed it in those words at that age. I just knew that here was something new and different, and that it would be part of my life forever more. This album still moves me more than fifty years later and is still astonishingly prescient.

https://album.link/i/1039796877

Freeze

In tabloid headlines
A whole week of cold weather
Is called a "BIG FREEZE!!!"

Peace

She sang, A Little Peace
But now it seems we will have
Ein Bißchen Krieg

Hunky Dory by David Bowie

Another album that didn’t really sell much on first release - the record company really didn’t know how to cope with Bowie! So many classic tracks on this album, but the one I keep coming back to is Kooks, written shortly after the birth of his son. It’s just such a warm and lovely song, summing up how those early, chaotic days with a new born in the house feel. I also want a bipperty-boppity hat!

https://album.link/gb/i/1039798000