Three Records

 It's not that the greatest music ever made was all made before we turned 30, whenever that was. It's rather that no mere piece of art - be it music or drama or poetry or anything - that we encounter once we've passed a certain point in our lives can have the power to actually change what we are - to change the way we think, to change the way we perceive the world, to change the way we experience our lives. At a certain point, we've become what we are.

This is why the three most important albums in my life were released when I was 13, 19, and 25. I would not put these forward as the three greatest albums ever made. I would not even put them forward as my three favourites. But I know where they stand in my own mythology.

The Beatles - Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band 

I was a reasonably precocious adolescent, already obsessed with words and writing and ideas, besotted with Shakespeare and Shaw. This - this was mere pop music. But it was this music that first showed me how music would be the way forward, that it was capable of being a vehicle for any artistic ambition. It acknowledged no limitations, reached for whatever it wanted, and got there.

Bruce Springsteen - The Wild, The Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle 

I suppose this impossibly romantic music had much the same appeal for me as Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac - it suggests a way of seeing the world that one can only buy into at a certain age. I was also a musician myself by this time, writing my own songs, and this opened up a whole new way of approaching songwriting - there's an absolute freedom to this writing, to the song structures, to the very line structures, that would vanish completely from Springsteen's own work (as soon as his very next record.)

The Clash - London Calling

The way things are. This is what the world is like. This is what we're up against. You grow up and you calm down. Death or glory becomes just another story. And yet it's that very song - which is an anthem of defeat, a dismal catalogue of compromises and evasions - that tells us what has to come next. We're gonna fight a long time. 

You know, this one really might be the greatest album ever made.