Wings, Constellation

Ten bright stars twinkling
Ptolomy saw an eagle
Soaring in heaven

Ogdens' Nut Gone Flake by Small Faces

I’m still not entirely sure how Small Faces went from being a well regarded mod band playing R&B and Soul covers, to producing one of the strangest and most psychedelic concept albums ever recorded, but I’m glad they did. The record was originally released in a circular metal tin but that had to be abandoned because it was expensive and they kept rolling off the shelves in record shops!

The first side opens with the title track, featuring a Hammond organ and string session, moving on to a varied selection of styles including hard rock, soul and a proper blinky-blimey-cockernee singalong that anticipated the Britpop of Blur et al by a good thirty years. Side two is even stranger, with a surreal concept story narrated by comedian Professor Stanley Unwin, famed for inventing his own mangled version of English.

I can imagine a sixties hippie, having rolled up a giant Camberwell carrot on the back of their record tin being transported by this tale of Happiness Stan, a giant fly and a quest for the missing half of the moon.

Genuinely enchanting and Engly Twenty Fido-tastic!

Pampas Grass, Nirvana

Suburban swingers
Subtle signposts softly sway
Seeking Nirvana

Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water by Limp Bizkit

Oh dear. As well as the usual embarrassing spectacle of white people rapping, this album features an overload of puerile swearing, as if Beavis and Butthead decided to copy the Beastie Boys with a side order of Nine Inch Nails. They even tried to get Rick Rubin to produce this, but he lasted a week before sensibly quitting.

The end result is simply tiresome, with mother-effin this and sniggering references to rude bits of anatomy-that. Even Apple Music thought that the name of this album was beyond the pale and asterisked it out. After listening to a couple of tracks, I looked up Fred Durst’s Wikipedia bio and it confirmed that he is, indeed, a massive arsehole who supports Vladimir Putin. Yikes.

I prefer my biscuits crunchy.

Waning Moon, Wild Rose

On the lone prairie
A wild rose grows free beneath
The pale waning moon

Hejira by Joni Mitchell

Imagine walking into a mid-western diner sometime in the mid 70s. There’s a woman by the counter with a red wig and sunglasses, who says her name is Joan Black, or was it Charlene Latimer? She tenses up every time a cop car cruises past, and then lets out a sigh of relief when it doesn’t stop. You get talking to her while the waitress is fetching your coffee, and she pulls out a dozen gas station road maps of different states from her purse.

She tells you about every stop on the journey, old lovers who let her down, and the ones that got away, and meeting an old blues musician on Beale Street in Memphis, and the sad details of his life. She’s looking for something that she can’t quite explain, and it’s like that famous aviator Amelia who went missing and nobody knew what had happened to her.

Somewhere in the background you can hear a band, noodling some jazz and setting her words to music that evokes wandering and wondering on an endless exodus - a Hejira if you will.

That’s what listening to this album is like. Your road trip mileage may vary.

Morning, Warbler

Deep in the wild reeds
A warbler greets the morning
With a merry tune