These are extracts from sleevenotes that were written for CD reissues and remasters. Some are penned by journalists, some by fans and some by the musicians or singers themselves.

ONE POINT for each album and ONE POINT for each artist.



1. While nothing immediately stupid springs to mind about Iceland, in honest commercial terms it is anything but the centre of the music industry, even a big hit in Iceland won’t make you the next Beatles. But Iceland can claim to be the only country on earth that can regenerate itself! At the time of the albums release the only cult icon from Iceland was Magnus Magnusson. Black And White - THE STRANGLERS (Cappuccino and a slice of quiche)

2. The album’s moods are multiple: brooding, joyous, humorous, serious. Its musical modes include flat-out rock’n’roll, pure blues, psychedelic extravaganzas, and within its own rules, elements of jazz and modernist music too. It is a marvel of recording, with layers of sound nevertheless resolving into songs that could, for the most part, be played live onstage. Are You Experienced? - JIMI HENDRIX EXPERIENCE (Cappuccino and a slice of quiche)

3. The album itself was more fractured than it’s predecessor and the band were considerably less united in making it. However, this shouldn’t take away from the fact that it boasted moments of an assured originality very few, if any, contemporaries were touching and some very strong tunes! 154 - WIRE (Mere Pseud.)

4. In the heat of creation, without denying the dark side, they got it right. They made the trivial sublime, the mere exertion of three-chord rock’n’roll power majestic, they enlisted the most ludicrous parts of rock culture in the service of what’s most sublime. Doing it on the spot, capturing the moment, making treasure from trash. Isn’t that what all of us who battled through the age of Aquarius (the one that never quite dawned) were really after. The Who Sell Out - THE WHO (Cappuccino and a slice of quiche/Audrey Wetherspoon)


5. Ken put me up in the Gramercy Park Hotel. The Rolling Thunder Revue was staying there ready to hit the road. But my Thunder had been muted. I wasn’t going anywhere but to the union, the lawyers and accountants to try to get me out of the classic mess I had let happen to me. I was amongst other things in contempt of court and had not had my taxes paid for the last 5 years. Coney Island Baby - LOU REED (Cappuccino and a slice of quiche)


6. … they never wore their intellects on their sleeves; their fascination was never with mere abstraction; if anything, it was with combining (not pastiching) realities to create a new reality such as had nr been seen before, a methodology with which one could encompass every theoretical concern of 20th century music and art. Spontaneous, yes, but with a lot of rational thought applied afterward – the best of both worlds. Future Days - CAN (Buy Kurious!/Cappuccino and a slice of quiche)

7. Perennial losers at the corporate game of Russian Roulette – there is little to be gained from dwelling here on what might have been – then. So I am going to focus upon the music, the sound and the truly original concept which created this album and the opportunity now, some 30 years later, to “set the record straight”. SF Sorrow - THE PRETTY THINGS (Cappuccino and a slice of quiche)

8. “I had certain parts of the streets and buildings where I would write about things that happened. No one is allowed guns but one of the characters in it has an old rifle, passed down secretly from generation to generation. He’s one of the people who fights against the machines and he goes underground to where the Crazies live. They aren’t actually crazy, they realise what is going on so hide where they can and fight back as best they can. The machine puts out propaganda against them to alarm other, more gullible citizens. Replicas - TUBEWAY ARMY (Audrey Wetherspoon)

9. Newman explained the method of working on side two: ‘Usually after dinner we would go to the Jolly Boatman, the local pub which was on the canal which ran by the bottom of the grounds. We would get drunk and walk back at closing time and go straight in to the studio and sometimes work all night.’ Tubular Bells - MIKE OLDFIELD (Hiccup Percy)

10. In the Sixties, according to both song and legend, nothing swung like England, and nowhere in England swung like London – and to continue focusing in, nowhere in London swung like Notting Hill, the slightly declassé area of West London in whose fading mansions and basement flats the UK branch of the global hippie counter-culture had blossomed. PERFORMANCE O.S.T. (Audrey Wetherspoon)

11. The joy that the creative process brought to us all, however, more than overshadowed all the pain, and when all was said and done we had survived to give our audience a musical album of intense depth and integrity. And we did it together. Just the seven of us. No record companies or managers or agents or wannabes interfering. It was sweet. We all knew it was good stuff. Parallel Lines - BLONDIE (Cappuccino and a slice of quiche)

12. We had a half hit, which we could have built on… but we were all in different worlds by the time it came to some sort of question, and then in different lives by the time that it became obvious to everyone that this was one of the best records of it’s time. Besides, (I sometimes tell myself), ‘I’m not a band member anyway, never was.’ Band members never seem to have enough independence. They do a bit of hiding behind each other. Well… that’s natural enough isn’t it. Timid spirits all, we all need some place to run to. But I always hung out for something else. HQ - ROY HARPER (Cappuccino and a slice of quiche)

13. “Our tour manager, Fred Munt, taught us how to whistle for sheep. We would drive across the Yorkshire Moors and Fred would ask the driver to slow down and he would open the door and whistle to the sheep and they would all come running alongside the bus. It was great not to be in a van, but in a coach with other musicians with whom we could socialise. I’d just acquired my famous hat just prior to that tour and a photograph of me wearing that hat was prominent on the front of the bus.” Pawn Hearts - VAN DER GRAAF GENERATOR (Fritter)

14. We like to think of rock & roll bands – the best rock & roll bands – as something special, as more than the mere sum of four or five musicians who live, eat, tour and make records together. Shocked and sobered by the tales of petty jealousy and ego warfare in the pop history books and tell-all biographies, we nevertheless cling to hopelessly romantic notions of what makes a great band tick: the spirit of reckless bohemian adventure; the bond of embattled fraternity; a shared aesthetic vision and a faith in eventual, incalculable reward. The Notorious Byrd Brothers - THE BYRDS (Cappuccino and a slice of quiche)


15. Another time, we sent David down to the echo room (a cellar in the basement of the studio) to record some vocals, and once he had recorded his part we moved on to other things in the heat of creativity… and left him there for three or four hours. He was screaming at the top of his voice for help, which we didn’t hear until we accidentally moved his vocal fader up on the mixing desk. The album does have some lovely moments, and I hope you enjoy this remastered version and the bonus tracks too. High And Mighty - URIAH HEEP (Cappuccino and a slice of quiche/Mere Pseud.)

16. “We did time changes, colors, and things that musically were very sophisticated. It was a perfect combination of Horace Silver and Big Black, with Aretha Franklin singing that Burt Bacharach song, ‘This Guy’s In Love You’. We’d just combine things we had a passion for. We didn’t consciously know what we were doing.” Abraxas - SANTANA (Fritter)

17. In effect, 1979 was the year when punk either died or flowered. On one hand, Sham 69 would sire offspring which defined the next 30 years’ clichés of what punk would be. On the other hand, those that had been through the birth of punk – Devoto, Lydon, Siouxsie, even Paul Weller – would always progress, searching for new modes of expression. Secondhand Daylight - MAGAZINE (Audrey Wetherspoon)

18. “I thought, If I’m going to build a special place and go in with the express intention of trying to divest myself of preconceived notions of what music should sound like, then I must divest myself of preconceived notions of what the subject matter should be. So I just opened up to the entire extreme. It was an aggressive outreach to see what the limits were, to push the limits as far as possible, and that included the target audience – the target audience was the universe at that point…” A Wizard, A True Star - TODD RUNDGREN (Fritter)


19. Veteran features writer Chris Welch of Melody Maker and long-time friend of the band, used the moment to avoid professional charges of being altogether too chummy with the likes of us and so, savaged the performance of a work he clearly didn’t like too much anyway. “Play Without Passion” hollered the front page story as it echoed its way around the known universe. One or two eminent US critics followed the example and we were on the back foot for the first time in our musical lives. A Passion Play - JETHRO TULL (Cappuccino and a slice of quiche)

20. I nearly peed in my pants when I saw the crowd. The promoter guy told us we could only play 5 or 6 songs, then “… get the hell off!” That was fine with us because we only knew 5 or 6 songs, so we played, and got the hell off and felt like we had managed to survive “the big one”. Then, the next day, when the newspapers came out, we were all over them. Silver Apples/Contact - SILVER APPLES (Mere Pseud.)

Points so far:

Cappuccino and a slice of quiche - 19
Audrey Wetherspoon - 7
Fritter - 6
Mere Pseud. - 5
Hiccup Percy - 2
Buy Kurious! - 1

13 is Genesis, no idea which.

1. The Sugarcubes -- Life's Too Good.

No correct answers so far.

17. Magazine -- Secondhand Daylight.

I'm guessing 19 must be A Passion Play by Jethro Tull.

19. Jethro Tull - Passion Play

[edit] You snuck in Capp!

CORRECT.

Well done. I thought that might fox people.

CORRECT.

I knew you were only pretending to like punk.

Never for a second did I consider that it might be Unknown Pleasures.

I love the line "either died or flowered".

Make your bloody mind up!

Too right.

Blodwyn Pig forever!

Sorry, you've lost me there.

In the sleevenotes.

8.

3. Wire - Pink Flag

9. Tubular Bells. Mike Oldfield?

CORRECT.

One point. I will give you another chance to get the correct album title (with only one guess!) or I'll throw it open to everyone else.

CORRECT.

Congratulations for steering clear of over-obvious Randy Newman pitfalls.

Sorry for being a bit confused. Of course Pink Flag was Wire's debut, so it doesn't have a predecessor. The correct answer should be 154.

13. Wasn't Fred Munt connected to the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band? :unsure: I don't own any Bonzos album, so I have no further idea.

CORRECT. You have won your second point.

It might be a fruitful line of inquiry to think about what sort of managers, record labels etc, the Bonzos were affiliated to.

20. Crosby, Stills, and Nash

Good reasoning, but nowhere near as famous.

Crosby, Stills and Jones?

15. Talking Heads

Nope.

This band comes from a previous era, and a different genre.

Is 18 a Peter Gabriel album? Number 3?

Am I warm apart from that?

Different nationality. American, quite frankly.

You guessed the correct number of words in their name. And the right letter that begins one of them.

Uriah Heep? :huh:

CORRECT

One point.

You have two guesses to get the album title.

These are pure guesses: either Demons and Wizards or The Magician's Birthday.

Alas, neither is correct.

2. beefheart - trout mask replica? :unsure:

Is 6 somebody like Henry Cow?

Not as cult-y. But you've got the nationality right, and the era.