o continues with our ongoing survey of my all-time favourite pop records. Remember that these aren't necessarily my twenty-first to thirtieth favourite records-- any of these titles have equal stature to any other titles that appeared on previous lists or any subsequent lists. Again, these records are not in order by preference; they are in chronological order by original release date.

21 NITTY GRITTY DIRT BAND, ET AL. - Will the Circle Be Unbroken (United Artists 1972)
Producer: Bill McEuen. Alternative country really started right here with this album. Gram Parsons and the Byrds' Sweetheart of the Rodeo may have got the ball rolling back in 1968, but this record bridged the gap between hippie hipsters and old-timers by having the Grand Ole Opry play on it; the line-up alone provides its raison d'ętre: Maybelle Carter, Earl Scruggs, Doc Watson, Roy Acuff, Merle Travis, Jimmy Martin, Vassar Clements, Junior Huskey, Norman Blake, Pete Oswald Kirby, and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band.

22 ROXY MUSIC - For Your Pleasure (Island 1973)
Producer: Chris Thomas and John Anthony. I could have picked any of the first four Roxy albums, but this one may be the best distillation of the first phase of their career—retro glamour pop from outer space, still backed by Eno.

23 DICK GAUGHAN - Handful of Earth (Topic 1981)
Producer: Robin Morton. I wasn't able to find a straightforward producer's credit on this record, which is telling considering that 95% of the time is just Dick and his guitar playing some of the best folk music from Scotland and Eire ever committed to tape.

24 BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN - Nebraska (Columbia 1982)
Producer: Bruce Springsteen. He's a bit schizophrenic. I usually loathe his loud rock records, but whenever he decides to go quiet and folkie like The Ghost of Tom Joad a few years ago, I pay attention. Nebraska represents the best of the latter. When the Boss really wants to get serious, he grabs his acoustic guitar and plays only by himself. The bleak, chilly, and gloriously desolate atmosphere of this record almost requires a coat. Marked by an indelible sense of loneliness, the mythic Nebraska on this record is a painfully beautiful place populated by troubled souls who may move some sensitive souls to tears. Recorded tactfully on a four-track, this hauntingly austere acoustic portrait paints a darker side of America rarely depicted with as much conviction. When he started making these types of records back in the late 70s, he was bleak before it was cool to be bleak. He's for real, and he's definitely not a poseur. Anyway, sorry for all these adjectives, so I'll turn it over to a rather insightful perspective on Springsteen's career, particularly more acoustic works like Nebraska, found in the CMJ New Music Monthly review of his great but neglected Tom Joad album:

First of all, let's recap the most important salient point in any discussion of Bruce Springsteen: "Born In The USA" was a sarcastic song, the lead character was a total loser, and most of the yahoos bellowing along in Giants Stadium on the Live 1975-85 box set never got it at all. If you follow Springsteen's career pattern closely, you find that after every major commercial stride, even after career milestones like Born To Run, The River or Born In The USA, he turns around and does something "darker" and overtly less mainstream, like Darkness On The Edge Of Town, Nebraska or Tunnel Of Love. It's either that every time he starts to get too big, he tries to turn and run the other way, or, more likely, he simply uses the freedom of success to flex his muscles and do what he wants to do, which means bypassing more commercial music to create a work of substance. The all-acoustic Nebraska is the album that's often cited as a favorite by people who don't consider themselves his fans, and The Ghost Of Tom Joad (coming after his immensely successful "Streets Of Philadelphia," remember) could well be a companion piece to that stark and desolate album of 1982. Since Springsteen moved to Los Angeles, his music has taken on a decidedly West Coast thematic sprawl: almost half of the songs here deal with issues such as immigration, drug smuggling and hoboing; these are songs full of wars, murders, dead-end jobs, drifters, hard luck stories, and people who for whatever reason just can't seem to win, or even just keep it together. At its best it's brilliant, as in "Youngstown." where a steelworker decides he'd rather go to hell than heaven because, given his usual working conditions, he'd feel more at home amidst the fire, sparks and smoke. Portions of Tom Joad strive to reach the land of Woody Guthrie, where one man surveys the American wasteland and paints vivid and resonant pictures of its most down-and-out inhabitants. Back in high school, there were some conspiracy theorists who said that if you looked at where his hand was in the photo, you'd see that Bruce was actually pissing on the flag on the cover of Born In The USA; while that may be a flight of fancy, there's certainly a little bit of that attitude to be found in the forlorn, forsaken and immensely critical landscape that Springsteen paints on The Ghost Of Tom Joad.

25 PRINCE - Sign o' the Times (Warner Bros. 1987)
Producer: Prince. There's a bit of everything on this sprawling set, but somehow the tracks here are generally more engaging tha the ones that appear on his subsequent multi-volume sets.

26 BRYAN FERRY - Bęte Noire (EG 1987)
Producer: Patrick Leonard and Bryan Ferry. Who else would name his album Bęte Noire? Reviewer Anthony DeCurtis once wrote that Ferry's records had been 'reduced to a Morse code of refined despair and his subjects recede into the mist.' He meant it derisively, but I take it as non entirely inaccurate compliment. Admittedly, the titles of some of his solo projects can be verging on laughably pretentious at times, but you can't help but admire their inherent aesthetic rigour. Although this record is darker but funkier and more percussion-oriented than Avalon, it still glows with essentially the latter's distinctive, lush, and elegant sound sonic aura that Ferry had perfected. I guess this recording feels like it has more of a patina. Somewhat overlooked, Bęte Noire may even be thematically more coherent than Avalon, and it features the brilliant collaboration with Johnny Marr, "The Right Stuff." It's a funky dance record that Ferry has not made since.

27 EVERYTHING BUT THE GIRL - Amplified Heart (Blanco y Negro 1994)
Producer: Ben Watt and Tracey Thorn. Spare but sparkling clarity mark the subtle and elegant production of this record. It's very accessible, but in a nice way. Play it for your mum; bet she'll like it too.

28 TEENAGE FANCLUB - Songs from Northern Britain (Creation 1997)
Producer: David Bianco and Teenage Fanclub. There have only been four times so far when I just have to call up my longtime music mate Robert solely to tell him how completely crazy I am about a particular new record upon hearing it only for a few times. It's not simply a matter of not being able to contain my enthusiasm. This would be a case where I am so completely knocked out by a record that I simply had to tell someone and share it, since there's absolutely nothing else left I can do to love it even more. (Hell, I've played it hundreds of times already. What else can I do to express my love for it?) If I didn't tell him, I would probably explode. Incidentally, the records in question were: Saint Etiennne's "Nothing Can Stop Us" 12" single; Björk’s Post; Radiohead's OK Computer; and this one by the Fannies. And why not? Sometimes, I really appreciate people who are able to follow rules precisely. In this case, it would be incorporating all the right ingredients into a clearly-defined pop music structure: verse, chorus (repeat), bridge, and chorus, played with plenty of hooks and harmonies. This record is a textbook example of (power) pop craftsmanship in the form of an album of the best songs that the sorely missed Big Star (and perhaps to a much lesser extent, the Byrds) never wrote, but is that really a bad thing? Pop music doesn't get any lovelier than this. Aching love and longing are everywhere here. It may feel cold and desolate sometimes up in Scotland, but this music can warm you up inside.

Lastly, the sleeves of all the singles released from this album are all quite gorgeous.

Incidentally, did anyone notice that Nick Hornby not only mentioned this record as one of his “favourite-ever albums,” but also that he actually selected two tracks from this record for his 31 Songs anthology?

29 TRAVIS - The Man Who (Independiente 1999)
Producer: Nigel Godrich. Yes, it's more Scottish pop, but you probably already know by now that I'm crazy about Travis. Think about it: Scotland probably produces more great pop bands per capita than any other country on earth. As in case of the aforementioned Fannies' record, the sleeves of all the singles released from this album are all quite gorgeous. Perhaps more meta-pertinent to the music on the record itself, Travis is the other great Glaswegian band (the other being the almighty Texas) who was inspired to name itself after Wim Wender’s perennially evocative film Paris, Texas. This act of naming can be construed to be a mission statement. However, its raucous first record did not quite fit the sublime milieu of loneliness that its name inevitably wants to cast. Consider this second record as destiny fulfilled, at least for having a band named after the Harry Dean Stanton character.

30 BRITNEY SPEARS - Blackout (Jive 2007)
Producer: 'Danja' Floyd Nathaniel Hills, Jim Beanz, Bloodshy & Avant, The Clutch, Kara DioGuardi, Corte Ellis, Freescha, Sean Garrett, Keri Hilson, Farid Nasser, The Neptunes, J.R. Rotem, and the legendary Miss Britney Spears. No, we're not taking the piss here. And that assumption is exactly the reason why this record's status as a classic needs to be defended. She may have been totally out-of-it when she recorded it, but this album is her magnum opus, produced during her annus horribilis. Rob Sheffield of Rolling Stone called it her 'punk masterpiece' and once compared it to Bowie's almighty Berlin-Eno trilogy as well as to Lou Reed's infamous Metal Machine Music. I can assure you that this is a zillion times more pleasure than that output from Reed, however much a justifiable rock god he may be. Since I'll never be able to match even a fraction of Sheffield's genius prose, here is his complete review of Blackout on the album's 10th anniversary on 30 October, 2017:

Happy tenth birthday to Blackout, which is not only the greatest of all Britney Spears albums, but one of the most innovative and influential pop albums of the past decade. It's where America's sweetheart changed her name to Mrs. Oh My God That Britney's Shameless and got real, real dark on us. On Tuesday, October 30th, 2007, when the world was trying to write her off as a joke – not for the first time, not for the last – Brit dropped music way too weird for the radio, all alien and distorted, warping her Southern drawl into a surly electro-punk sneer. Within a couple of years, everybody was trying to sound like this. It's Britney, bitch.

Blackout is an avant-disco concept album about getting famous, not giving a fuck, getting divorced, not giving a fuck, getting publicly mocked and despised and humiliated. It's an album about dancing on tables in a cloud of glitter and Cheeto dust. But mostly it's an album about not giving a fuck, which is why it sounds perfect for grim times like these. Especially since America in 2017 is less sane or stable than Britney was in 2007. If our girl could emerge from the wreckage with an album like Blackout, there’s hope for us all.

Every now and then, a pop queen delivers a masterpiece that stops in the world in its tracks and commands respect. Blackout was not one of these masterpieces. It got widely dismissed as a career-ending flop, in the wake of her disastrous performance of 'Gimme more' on the MTV Video Music Awards, stumbling through her dance moves, giving up halfway through. People decided Blackout was a pitiful crash-and-burn from a has-been skin job.

Yeah, well, people were pretty stupid in 2007... Blackout is where Britney vents all her raging party-girl hostility, from the way she snarls 'I'm Miss American dream since I was 17' in 'Piece of me' to the way she spits 'stupid freaking things' in 'Why should I be sad.' No wonder the radio got scared away–- this is her version of Lou Reed’s nihilistic noise opus Metal Machine Music. We'll never know if Lou listened to it, but surely he would have admired a statement like 'Get naked (I got a plan).'

Nobody has ever been able to explain how Blackout happened – how a star in mid-meltdown managed to document it all so vividly. It's not like anybody sat down and decided to make a great album, least of all the artist herself – out of twelve tracks, the only two she had a hand in writing were 'Freakshow' and 'Ooh Baby Baby.' There was no production mastermind pulling strings behind the scenes. Blackout had an all-star team of circa-2007 hitmakers: Danja, Jim Beanz, T-Pain, Bloodshy & Avant, Freescha, Fredwreck, Henri Jonback, the Neptunes, the Clutch. Yet they all outdid themselves. Sonically, the abrasive robo-screech was years ahead of its time. It's almost as if the producers and writers were using Blackout as a beta test, trying out their craziest ideas on the assumption that the album would bomb and nobody would listen.

At first, it looked like they were right. In the parlance of 2007, Britney was 'not in a good place.' She was all over the tabloids for head-shaving and windshield-smashing. A kid in Tennessee became a YouTube star for sobbing, 'Leave Britney alone!' Her marriage to Kevin Federline barely outlasted her first (which clocked in at 55 hours), leaving Brit with two babies and a warehouse full of unsold Britney and Kevin: Chaotic DVDs.

Her high-profile VMAs gig in September was eagerly awaited as her comeback – until about two seconds after she stepped onstage. She could barely move. Live-blogging for Rolling Stone that night, I'd saved up all my superlatives for the queen's conquering moment. Instead, I spent four minutes trading 'how is this happening' texts with my editor. As I typed sadly at 9.06 p.m., 'Oh, Britney. That was not a not-terrible idea.' Just a few weeks later, Jay-Z dropped the single 'Roc Boys,' boasting that his drugs 'got less steps than Britney / That means it ain't stepped on, dig me?' Never one to hold a grudge, Brit posted a Jay-Z song on Instagram last month: 'When this song came out, I lost my mind like a little kid!!! I fangirled and cried!!' And of course, Jay went to see her Vegas show in 2015, because that's what you do when Beyoncé runs the world.

By the time Blackout came out in October, everybody figured Brit was over. 'Gimme more' reached Number Three on career momentum, but it stopped the other singles cold; 'Piece of me' stalled at Number Eighteen, while 'Break the ice' missed the Top Forty. If you were in NYC for Halloween 2007, you probably remember the streets were crawling with Britneys serving the 'Gimme more' lewk; half the ladies on the L train that night kept screaming 'It's Britney, bitch!' (The other half were Amy Winehouse. That was quite a Halloween.)

But it's ironic that of all the turmoil Britney went through in 2007, the one thing people remember today, the thing that turned out to be lasting, is the music. As the lady once sang, she's got nine lives like a kitty cat. The trilogy of Blackout, Circus, and Femme Fatale is the summit of Britdom; in so many ways, it's comparable to Bowie's Berlin trilogy, with its electric-blue Euro-haze ambience, as well as the angst of a damaged fame junkie who's always crashing in the same car. Pop artists keep building whole careers on the Blackout sound – just to pick the most stellar example, Selena Gomez's 'Bad liar' is the best Britney song of 2017, just as 'Hands to myself' and 'Slow down' were the best of 2015 and 2013 respectively.

'Piece of me' is the peak of the album – and maybe Britney's career – produced by the Swedish duo Bloodshy & Avant, who also did 'Radar,' 'Toy soldier,' and 'Freakshow,' not to mention the 2003 classic 'Toxic.' Miss American Dream Since She Was 17 lists all the ways the TRL dream turned into her nightmare, so she punishes America by making us live it out with her. 'You wanna piece of me?' sounds like she's either pimping herself out, or taunting you into a bar brawl. Either way, it'll cost you. No wonder Taylor Swift quotes this song ('another day, another drama') in 'Look what you made me do.' 'Piece of me' remains the template for every pop girl who decides it's time to wreak her evil vengeance on a world that made the fatal mistake of pissing her off. Are you sure you want a piece of Britney? After ten years, Blackout still makes that sound like a thrillingly dangerous question.

orgotten about the first ten, or the second ten records, or the next ten records?

19 September 2003 (revised October 2020)

Reach us at 'bcbloke' on all the usual social media platforms