In-Car Entertainment

This is another one of those mighty albums, made all the more mightier by its size, for it is one of those rare treats - a double album. I realised when I bought it (£10 in Fopp - mispriced, surely - bargain of a lifetime!) that Id' need more than my regular commute to work to give it a full listen. So it's sat waiting to be played until now: a journey back home to Durham.

There's a nice analogy here. The drive to Durham is nearly all on the A1, but it's one of those roads that varies from roaring four-lane motorway, through bustling urban dual-carriageway, through winding rural stretches. In the same way, this album is all The Beatles, but the number of bases covered is vast. Today, such genre-hopping is more common place; then, it was virtually unknown. The White Album certainly broke a few musical taboos.

The first disc presents 17 tracks, which even on its own was a huge number for a single album. This is permitted mainly because most of them are short pieces (I thought of the word 'vignettes' in the car) covering blues, Beach Boys parodies (the opening 'Back In The USSR') and Britain, mining the rich seam of song the Kinks visited so often. I was quite surprised: I'd actually never heard most of these tracks (you think you know it all...), and yet they still seem familiar because of that essential Beatles sound. You even get 'Glass Onion', a neat summary of several previous Beatles story songs.

So onto album two. With fewer tracks, there's more space to breath, and the jaunty pace is slackened somewhat. The pieces are more consistent in style, with the roomy 'Mother Nature's Son' given time to find its sound, and rock anthems 'Helter Skelter' and 'Revolution 1' extending over four minutes. Each of The Beatles contributes to the songwriting - although, of course, Lennon and McCartney's compositions are always co-credited. There's plenty been written on their writing talents that's far more authorative than anything I can say here, so suffice it to say that all four are on form, although you'll have to have an open mind to appreciate some of the more esoteric pieces.

And then we have 'Revolution 9'. This is a track that you'll either love or loath, consisting of over eight minutes of random 'found audio'. I thought I'd hate it, but having now heard it in context, it really is something of a revolution. Again, sound collages are now common (the Avalanches have made an entire career out of it), but this surely must stand as one of the earliest examples of such an audio composition reaching mainstream music. It's one of those things where even if you don't appreciate the content, you've got to respect the art.

As the album draws to a close with Ringo crooning his way through 'Goodnight' (I mean, come on - Ringo - whose idea was that?), you realise that The White Album is a truely great work. Not necessarily something you'll listen to often, not necessarily something you can sit back and enjoy, not even necessarily something you'll call music. But it is quite some achievement in itself, and well deserving of its classic status.

Readers (fans?) of my main web site will know that, back in my student days, I wrote a Classic Albums column for one of the uni papers. It was great fun: they entrusted me with selecting a choice cut each week, and providing the text and a scan landed on the music editor's inbox by midnight on Monday, no questions were asked. Hence I instantly picked out a handful of my favourite albums that no-one else seemed to care about much, and foisted them upon the unsuspecting student masses.

Tubeway Army's Replicas was the first to be featured, and to be honest, you might as well go and read the review on that page, because not much has changed in my opinion since. Oh, go on then - I'll bring you up to date a bit. Three years on, and now on a remastered CD (I originally reviewed from a vinyl copy), it's still sounding startlingly crisp. What's more, Gary Numan has been lauded by a whole host of dance and electronica artists, as well receiving more than a few praises from less synthesised genres. Can it be that this album is now cool?

Listening to it again for the umpteenth time, I tried to pin down what's so good about these early electronic sounds. The blend of traditional and new is key: it's a simplistic setup, with punky guitars and bass, a few layers of mono synths and real acoustic drumming. I think that's it, the real drumming - it blends you from new wave to electronic and keeps some soul and variability in the recording that a drum machine would lose.

I'm less sure about the instrumentals now. Are they there to help you reflect on what you've just heard, or to demonstrate the new exciting sounds, or merely to pad out Side 2? I'm surprised they've never appeared in an advert for, say home insurance. Or fridges. The remastered CD contains a host of bonus material, but I ignored that - I'm generally not a fan of extras on reissues (with the exception of including non-album singles so they can have an official CD issue).

There's some lovely moments on this album, as the Minimoogs drift out of tune as each track goes on, or a few wrong notes are hit (listen to the instrumental towards the end of the title track, Replicas). It suddenly gives all the talk of machines and electronics an unexpected edge - a fragile, human touch. A few years later, everything would be digital and precise, but for a brief moment in 1978, you could believe that the future was wobbly sine waves and white hair.

This daily reviewing lark isn't something to be taken lightly. Only a couple of weeks in and already I'm woefully behind with my vignettes of recent listenings. So, as Henry Kelly would say, I'm playing catch up, and my topic is reggae reworkings of soul classics.

Trojan was the mightiest of all the reggae labels that spread its releases from Jamaica to the UK in the late 60s and through the 70s. The label name and rights to their huge archive of recordings, many barely known since their release, are now owned by Sanctuary. Through a vast series of lovingly-crafted box sets, the Trojan catalogue is now showing its true depth, covering everything from mod classics to skinhead rock-steady.

This three-CD set looks at the soulful side of Trojan. I'm only covering the first CD here (daresay the latter two will work their way onto this page one day), as each disc is quite neatly a self-contained package of tunes around a theme. Here, we're treated to seventeen reggae-styled covers of Motown hits. You can play a fun game as you listen: as soon as the intro starts, try to guess what each one is. For any Motown fan worth their Funk Brothers instrumentals bootlegs will know every single one of these - but not quite as they sound here.

Particular treats include several tracks from The Chosen Few, most notably "I Second That Emotion", which lends itself superbly to the reggae sound of off-beat emphasis and shuffling guitar scratching. Ken Boothe does good work on Bill Withers' "Ain't No Sunshine" (which, hang on, wasn't a Motown track - hey, what's it doing here?), and Mike Dorane's "You Keep Me Hangin' On" takes all the pace out of the original, while leaving the soul intact.

Some of the reggae reworkings are amusing; a couple are plain bad, and should be left alone. Another problem is that the sound is quite similar from track to track, and an entire CD is quite a chunk to sit through; let alone three discs of the stuff. Still, if you like your Motown all sunshined up, and you don't mind exercising a bit of your own quality control, it's a fun set of covers that'll have you smiling and singing at the same time.

It's 1978, disco is booming and New York's Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards have worked out its secret. Like all classic pop trends, disco has a magic formula. There's one recipe for a floor-filler, one for a good-time party jam and another for a slow number. A good disco album has two of each, one on each side, forming two sets with the same emotional curve. Rodgers & Edwards realised that, and so they created C'est Chic.

This album is more than just disco-by-numbers, though. Chic's classic rhythm guitar, heavily-sampled bass lines and subtle string sections provide subtance to the structure. This wasn't lost on the record-buying public; the LP quickly went platinum, as it captured the perfect disco mood at exactly the right time. Dancers wanted to take home the essence of the club, and here they could do exactly that (much in the same way that Ibiza compilations sell today).

How does it sound today? You've got to push past the enormous hit of "Le Freak", with its pulsating groove and promises of cheap beef ("aahhhh, free cow!") - it sold over four million copies, making it Atlantic Record's biggest selling single ever. Also familiar is the Side 2 floor filler, "I Want Your Love", complete with tubular bells. That leaves the come-down ballads, which wouldn't sound much on their own, but work well against the upbeat tracks that precede them. The same can be said of the remaining tracks, which are more formulaic and less intrinsically exciting.

Nonetheless, this is the perfect example of a disco album; probably the best of its kind. Everything is there - just look at the cover, resplendant in faux European charm. Trashy but not tacky; exactly how disco should sound.

I remember a phase when I was at school, where everyone fell into two camps: Blur or Oasis. C'mon, which were you, and where was I? Correct answer - neither! I'd like to say I was following the Third Way, the One True Path, and listening to Pulp. However, I was still going through my Mike Oldfield/Pink Floyd/Fleetwood Mac/Dire Straits phase, and all three largely passed me by.

A big shame, really, because it meant that I missed out on Different Class the first time round. This is a truly excellent album. Jarvis Cocker's songwriting is top-drawer. His themes of teenage angst, the day-to-day worries of working class British life and hedonistic parties are ones which have been handed down through the ages, from The Kinks, to Ian Dury, through Billy Bragg, and thence to Jarvis. (It's why we can rightly hail The Kinks' Ray Davies as the Godfather of Britpop.)

Everyone knows 'Common People' and 'Disco 2000'; if anything, they're now a bit too well known and detract from the rest of the works on offer here. Instead, enjoy the other tracks. A few made it out as singles; others linger here. But they're all good. In particular, 'Something Changed' with its universally uplifting theme of finding love - plus it shows The Verve how violins and Britpop can mix tastefully.

You've got all the standard Pulp touches: tight backing, Jarvis' all-knowing voice and the litle notes in the sleeves banning you from reading the lyrics whilst listening to the recordings. The band's other albums are good, but this one must take pride of place as the foundation of the thinking man's Britpop collection. I'd forgotten just how good it is.