Battle of the heavyweights

Back in the DHSS - Half Man Half Biscuit
Bedtime for Democracy - Dead Kennedys
Bee Thousand - Guided By Voices
Bend Sinister - The Fall
Berlin - Lou Reed
Bitches Brew - Miles Davis

It almost reads like a fight bill: starting out with the verbal jabs and sarcastic uppercuts of the physically lightweight transatlantic Biscuit/Kennedy bout; moving onto meatier ground with the vastly different but equally effective styles of Smith and Pollard; before winding up with the heavyweight bout between two visionaries who each bestride their respective genres, generating awe, respect, and disdain in equal amounts. That's probably as far as I should stretch the boxing analogy for now because it's starting to look a bit dead on it's legs, but don't be surprised if it makes repeated Foreman-esque comebacks throughout this post.

I don't know if Lou and Miles would have been my chosen companions as I killed time wandering around bookshops and record shops in Shinjuku this afternoon, but they were what the gods of iPod fate dealt me so, like Job I just got on with it.

It took me a long time to buy my first jazz album, in fact almost as long as it took me to buy my first jazz mag, and I'm not sure which was more daunting. The first one I bought was Take Five, by the Dave Brubeck quartet when I was at college in the States (I'm not telling you what the first jazz mag I bought was - that would be revealing a little too much). The bloke that I shared a room with on the exchange trip was well into his jazz and over the course of the three months, Take Five really grew on me (thankfully his repeated playings of Cat Stevens had no effect).

Jazz is possibly the most intimidating musical genre, or at least it has the most intimidating fans. When I was younger most of the jazz fans I met were incredibly precious about the music they liked (I'm sure they would probably hate to be referred to as 'fans' - I think they thought they were connosieurs or afficianados, whereas most people thought that in the future when they introduced themselves as 'a banker' that would be closer to their core make-up than they'd ever realise). God help you if you don't know the difference between your free jazz and your avant-garde jazz, or your Dizzy from your Monk. Mind you, probably all genres are the same and it's just that I'm just more comfortable swimming around in the milieu of guitar-based music that makes up a huge part of my collection. Still, jazz FANS seem to take it a notch further.

Regardless of all of this I love Bitches Brew simply because it sounds like nothing else. I sometimes put it on as background music to read to, but a few minutes into it my book will be lying neglected in my lap as I stare into space and try and work out just what space Miles Davis and his band were occupying when they made this music. It's a futile endeavour - as Ralph Gleason says in his sleeve notes, "it doesn't make any difference what kind of brush picasso uses and if the art makes it we don't need to know and if the art doesn't make it knowing is the most useless thing in life." - but that doesn't mean you shouldn't lose yourself in the album. We'll never know what was going on in that studio, no matter how many boxsets containing every tune-up and fart are released, but we'll always have the album itself and surely that's what matters.

Lou Reed is another artist whose back catalogue is the musical equivalent of those ancient maps that state 'Here there be dragons'. The Velvet Underground are a much easier proposition - buy the first two albums, no questions asked, and cadge the other two of someone you know who's got them (it shouldn't be too difficult). Alternatively, splash out thirty five quid and get the Peel Slowly and See boxset - it's got everything you need to know. Mr. Reed, on the other hand, is a much more contrary bastard. Transformer is probably indispensable, Metal Machine Music is infamous and more talked about than listened to, but what about the other stuff? The straight answer is that I don't know because the only ones I own are Transformer and Berlin. I've heard bits of the others but I don't know enough to be able to say. Handily enough, Mojo magazine carried a 'How to buy Lou Reed' guide in a recent issue, but I couldn't find it online anywhere. Guess that means you're on your own.

What I can say is that Berlin is a great big dark bastard of an album. If you're already down it's best avoided, but if you need to be reminded of just how lucky you are or how shit life can be, this is the album for you. You'll reach the end of it and thank whoever/whatever you believe in that you're not one of the blighted characters that populate the Stygian depths of these songs. The story about the reasons for the children wailing in the background of The Kids may be nothing more than musical urban myth but regardless of that, it is still one of the most harrowing pieces of music ever recorded. To follow that with the twisted tour guide narrative of The Bed, where a widower describes in intimate detail the room in which his wife killed herself, is relentless. Sad Song closes the album with soaring choruses which, despite the title and subject matter of the song, seem to hint at the possibility of redemption, leaving you with the hope that something might be salvaged from all this.