OK, so I’ve got to 100 or so, two years so far, I believe, I’m going to need a system.  You may recall I’m on a musical journey to shake up my top 10 list of what can only be described as mainstream albums.  As a reminder they were, in Feb 2013, as follows:  The Joshua Tree, The Bends, Parachutes, Three Imaginary Boys (The Cure), Psychocandy (Jesus and Mary Chain), Closer (Joy Division), Waltz Darling (Malcolm McClaren), Definitely Maybe, Rattlesnakes (Lloyd Cole), Urban Hymns, Led Zeppelin II.  I’m sure I don’t need to fill in most of those artists.

Thing is, most of these albums are a moment, or moments rather, in my life; Parachutes for example came along when I had moved to London, just started earning some good money, and I was deliriously happy, yet upset about other matters (your imagination on that one).  Parachutes was that amazing thing, an instruction basically, from a friend at the Fire Station bar under Waterloo who just said to me, buy this and your life will change.  I bought it, went back to my flat in Wimbledon Village and it did, it was Coldplay’s finest moment (if you’ve heard Ghost Stories you’ll see what I mean and how far they’ve fallen).  I’ve just bought it again for the umteenth time on vinyl!

So my new current top 10 is as follows, I’ve only got to 1967 mind you.  I am very sad that Ella Fitzgerald’s Gershwin Songbook has just dropped out of the list, I still play this and ‘But Not For Me’ is my highlight of the journey so far.  I wonder if I underrated it?

I appreciate that there is a lot of Bob Dylan in here, but that’s the way it is, the number on the left is the listening order.  The good news is, for me, that I have a load of Led Zep to listen to, Bowie up and coming and stuff like that.  I just need to do one a day, somehow… I’ll still have 2 years to go though.