It’s the end of 1984, the year of Band Aid, Wham!’s fake-tanned pop pleasures, and the glam, cocky greatness of Frankie Goes to Hollywood. Into this arena comes the NME’s record of the year. “It is indicative of the dramatic shift back from British to American music,” they write, “particularly the sound of black America, in the aftermath of punk and new pop.”
Come on down, Michael Jackson or Prince, surely, say you historians – but no. Collect your gong, Bobby Womack, for The Poet II, one of many forgotten records to top an end-of-year critics’ poll.
As end-of-year lists drift on to websites and feeds as December goes on, it’s easy to forget what they actually do. Yes, they’re memos for our iffy memories, catch-ups if we haven’t listened to as much as we’d like, and buyer’s guides for those of us with musically minded people to buy for. They’re also compilations of the tastes and thoughts of a peculiar breed, though – Ye Olde Pop Critic – for whom populism and chart placings don’t matter as much. They’re sometimes tethered to the specialist interests of that publication, as well, and based on short-term listening pleasures, rather than long-term effects. (And before you blame the critics on that latter point, commenters, how could they? They’ve only had 12 months or less with these records, like you.)
Looking through the end-of-year polls on Julian White’s lovingly compiled archive, rocklistmusic.co.uk, I enjoyed a nicely chewy alternative to contemporary music history. For the public, 1987 was the year of Whitney Houston, U2, and Rick Astley. The Melody Maker preferred a “firestorm, a total, catastrophic sweep across the scattered fragments of rock history and rock dilapidation”: the eponymous debut album by Swiss industrial experimentalists the Young Gods. “This is the future,” cried the Maker. (Sadly for them, the future wandered off, droning loudly, elsewhere.)
Then came records slipping through gaps in revisionist rock history. NME’s album of 1992 was Sugar’s Copper Blue (“the last word in love songs and the full stop after heartbreak”, gushed the editorial), a record that didn’t fit easily into the winds and trends of American guitar music at the time, and still sounds wonderful for it. The following year was also much more than a year in which American grunge gradually gave way to Britpop. Melody Maker’s favourite LP for these 12 months was “sprawling, ambitious, faltering, brilliant, romantic, spontaneous, spooky, flawed and delightful”, and featured strings, oboe, bassoon, clarinet and soprano saxophone. Behold the Tindersticks’ chamber-pop debut album, Tindersticks, still a stunning thing 22 – gulp – years on.
Other records found huge critical favour that surprised me in hindsight. Although I gobbled up magazines in my teenaged 1990s, I’d have thought the Manic Street Preachers’ critical appeal would have peaked around The Holy Bible, but no: 1996’s Everything Must Go did even better (it was No 1 for Vox, Select and Melody Maker, No 2 at the NME). The latter part of that decade also brought up some unlikely chart-toppers, which rung distant, mournful bells in my head. Catatonia’s International Velvet trumped Pulp’s This Is Hardcore (4) and Massive Attack’s Mezzanine (14) in 1998’s Melody Maker list, which seems, in retrospect, a bit of an error. A year after that, they plumped for Suede’s Head Music, which I bet not even Suede would consider particularly poll-topping. The year after that, Melody Maker was no more. No wonder.
And all that’s before we cross the Atlantic, over wild stormy seas, where Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation and Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back get trounced by Midnight Oil’s Deserts and Dust (Rolling Stone, 1988). So, count your chickens, Julia Holter (Mojo/Uncut), Grimes (NME) and Tame Impala (Q), and look to the future with caution. A record-of-the-year might not be for life, but just for Christmas, after all.
