Five albums from the year I left school

Merrick just tagged me with a meme thingy, which he evolved from the “an album for every year of your life” into “five albums from the year you left school”. “Not necessarily the five ‘greatest’,” he says wisely, “but five that really do it for you.” It seems clear he means those you got into at the time, released that year, not ones you got into retrospectively, or got into that year from other times. So…

Ritual de lo Habitual by Jane’s Addiction

Nothing’s Shocking is my preference when it comes to albums by this group that spent a long time as my favourite thing in music. But Ritual still stands head and shoulders for me above most rock in 1990. There’s a furious vitality on side one, a kind of near-nihilist sense of freedom and apocalyptic abandon. And that closes with the incomparable klepto-disco hit ‘Been Caught Stealing’. Side two opens with the stupendous prog-metal of ‘Three Days’, over ten minutes of incendiary awe, the last song they recorded before their first split, all in one take. The first song I heard on LSD. After I managed to get the cassette into the player, the intro’s ethereal “At this moment, you should be with us…” voices called my friends from their little worlds on the other side of the room. We looked at each other with wonder, and silently gathered, kneeling in front of the ghetto blaster. I also vividly recall reading out the lyrics to ‘Then She Did…’—a lament for the singer’s dead girlfriend and dead mother—to friends as we played music in the kitchen during an especially wonderful MDMA evening. There’s few more moving moments in modern rock.

Dead City Radio by William S. Burroughs

OK, no songs here (excepting Bill’s touching ramble through ‘Ich Bin Von Kopf Bis Fuss Auf Liebe Eingestellt’), but some excellent musical atmospherics, and great readings. ‘Where He Was Going’ is brilliantly evocative, a truly gripping little yarn of death and fate; ‘Apocalypse’ is a dominant root of my feeling for eschatology as a form of liberation.

Songs For Drella by Lou Reed & John Cale

I was just discovering the Velvets then, my first term at college. Of course. ‘Beginning To See The Light’ persuaded me that instead of using my high intelligence to excel in academia, I could use it to get by well academically, while delving deeper into extra-curricular activities. But this album, packed with wonderful songs, was right there too. ‘Small Town’ spoke to me, leaving home for college; ‘Open House’ described the beckoning potentials for freedom. But I also relished the dark, fragile atmosphere of ‘A Dream’. ‘Forever Changed’ still speaks to me in times of upheaval. A great album.

Repeater by Fugazi

Fugazi’s EPs Fugazi and Margin Walker had already shredded post-Minor Threat expectations to leave room for the full reality of Ian MacKaye’s vision of music “like the Stooges with reggae”. Add to that the political vitriol of Chomsky, the oblique lyricism of Michael Stipe, and song dynamics that make the Pixies look pancake flat and floppy. Their debut proper album is relentlessly intelligent and riotously energetic, and I find it very difficult to overrate it. They were just as stunning live, and I always remember that the pits down the front at their gigs were some of the very few where all was let loose in an atmosphere where girls weren’t generally excluded thanks to boorish masculinity.

Well I’m afraid that’s it for 1990 albums that really got me in 1990. It seems to have been a bit of a dud year, symbolized powerfully by Nirvana’s brilliant debut Bleach coming in 1989 and their storming breakthrough Nevermind coming in 1991. I’ll end with a 1990 album that I missed at the time:

Skellington by Julian Cope

I discovered Cope late, around 1995. It’s a shame I didn’t catch this playful collection of lysergic campfire poetry in time for it to soundtrack my descent into psychedelia. The opening ‘Doomed’ sets the tone, undercutting Brian Wilson confined-to-bed self-pity with lo-fi jauntiness and lyrics descending into delightful gibberish. Funny, touching, catchy and wry. I can’t think of another collection of such small ditties that can open up such spaces to get lost in.