Now That's What I Call All of British Music

My research through the twisting and turning corridors of British music continues. As promised when I wrote about listening to all of the Kinks' albums a few months ago, I went on to listen to the Rolling Stones' discography, then The Who, and on and on. I've explored how the blues and R&B fascination of the 60s turned into the hard rock of the 70s, and from there into the stadium rock of the 80s, a trajectory that encompassed all three bands, and might have included the Beatles, if they'd lasted that long.

I had a brief delve into folk, with the Small Faces (though not the Faces) and Fairport Convention, though there again I wasn't sure I wanted to continue through their discography which (impressively) continues to the present day. I might still be on Fairport Convention if I'd done that.

My other big takeaway so far from this whole business is that prog rock is not for me. I gave the albums of Jethro Tull a game stab, but didn't start very promisingly with This Was or Stand Up, and I gave up completely when I got to A Passion Play. Aqualung may be considered a high-water mark but with that in mind, why subject myself to the likes of 1999's J-Tull Dot Com?

The one exception to my "no-prog" rule is Pink Floyd, but I think they really only got good when they left behind the worst excesses of the genre with Dark Side of the Moon. And even they had a difficult decade in the 80s, when David Gilmour and Roger Waters decided they'd had enough of each other.

The Bee Gees are another band that I fail to see the charms of, now that I've listened to their whole oeuvre. They weren't very remarkable before they took up the whole disco thing, nor were they very remarkable after, when they opted for the same over-produced sounds that many a British rock band's career foundered on. Come to think of it, the disco years weren't particularly exciting either.

The most interesting thing about them, I'd say, is the late Robin Gibb's uncanny resemblance to former Tory leadership candidate Rory Stewart. The proof that we're in the darkest timeline is that a Google search for "Rory Stewart Robin Gibb" fails to throw up pictures of the two side by side for comparison (I'd do it myself, but I'm not that bothered, frankly, and I don't have loads of time for such bollocks tonight).

There are positives, of course. I really liked going through Elton John's back catalog. I loved his 70s albums when I was in middle school and high school, and revisiting them had the same effect as re-reading my old comics - being reminded of stuff I hadn't thought about in twenty years and revisiting what I liked about it then. Of course, he had a pretty difficult 80s too, a fact that comes to mind especially when I watch the video for Nikita and realize that Ethan Phillips based the character and look of Neelix in Star Trek: Voyager on Elton's get-up for that video, right down to the unfortunate mullet.

Slightly more seriously, it's interesting to see the similar trajectories, where these artists find out how the things that worked in the first decade of their career don't necessarily work in the second, only to find that a back-to-basics approach allows them to carve out a respectable third decade. It worked for the Kinks, the Rolling Stones and Elton John - the tragedy is that the Kinks broke up just as people started to recognize how good they'd been.

It's worth noting that there's a point to the whole enterprise, beyond muso credit. In a lot of cases, I knew about these less-heralded bits of favorite artists' careers, but only glancingly. It's been nice filling in the gaps in my knowledge, for instance by listening to Genesis and figuring out where both Peter Gabriel and Phil Collins came from.

There's loads more to go, of course. The 60s were easy because if you listen to The Beatles, the Kinks, The Who and the Rolling Stones, you've basically hit the high points (though I did go further and also listen to the Small Faces and the Zombies), but the 70s are when rock splintered into a number of sub-genres... and that's even before you get to punk.

Ironically I'm already a lot more conversant with the best bands of the 80s and 90s, but I'm sure both decades will throw up some interesting stuff. I'm also hoping that the 2000s will hold up as well, and that I'll be able to find some decent bands from the 2010s, though I may have to draw the line at Bastille...