While most of the music icons who took part in Uncut’s 100th issue all star panel had albums or singles featured in our list, others didn’t quite make the final countdown.
Here we present a handful of those who just missed out, each talking about a record of their own which, as Brando might say, "Coulda been a contender"…
Noel Gallagher
Contender: Oasis - Definitely Maybe (1994)
It was a great record then and it's a great record now. So many people come up to me and say how much it means to them: most recently Johnny from Razorlight, Brandon from The Killers. I'm not surprised. Fuckin' hell, how can you argue with it? “Rock'N'Roll Star”, “Supersonic”, “Columbia”, “Bring It On Down”. If it gets any better than that I'll have a heart attack! Even “Digsy's Dinners” got its place. Did it change anything? Well I don't know about laddism or any of that but it took our music out of the NME and the Melody Maker and back into the tabloids where it belongs. It felt like we were on a mission. It 'de-indie-ed' everything. After that record no one could continue with this underachieving bollocks of getting to number 32 and pretending to be pleased about it. It was the real deal. We hadn't had a music lesson in our lives and that's why it sounds so fuckin' good. Definitely Maybe got real rock'n'roll back into the mainstream, and to this day it's still unsurpassed.
Ozzy Ozbourne
Contender: Black Sabbath – "Paranoid" (1971)
It’s my anthem. Every time I play it onstage they all love it. The Kinks have got “You Really Got Me” and I’ve got “Paranoid”. The song was an accident. The Paranoid album was going to be called War Pigs - the sleeve had been printed. We had three and a half minutes to finish the album. Tony came up with the riff for “Paranoid”, Geezer gave me the lyric, and that was that then. As a co-writer, you can sit there for months and come up with Jack shit and then somebody will spark something and in, like, half a minute you’ll write an album.
Adam Ant
Contender: Kings Of The Wild Frontier (1980)
Kings… is my greatest contribution, no question. I’d just lost my band and had to get a new one quickly so I had the bit between my teeth. I was like, “look out for THIS!”. I was a man possessed. Myself and Marco [Pirroni] wrote it really quickly and just got it out there. Was I the Bolan of the ‘80s? That’s a very flattering comparison. It’s true we had a similar attitude to our singles, and the glamour, but Bolan was untouchable. It’s not for me to say.
John Martyn
Contender: Solid Air (1973)
That period for me was very fresh. It’s interesting – but difficult - to try to keep that same freshness. I’ve always thought the mass public have been slightly behind what I’m doing. And I don’t blame them. I still get the feeling sometimes that people want me to go out and do pop music, which isn’t my thing at all. The record company tried to make a hit single out of "May You Never", but it was never going to work. Solid Air has a very warm and very big feeling about it. In some ways, it’s ahead of its time.
Robert Smith
Contender: The Cure – Pornography (1982)
It was an incredibly aggressive period for us, which got very manic towards the end. I suppose Pornography is kind of the culmination of that. But there was also so much fun and chaos I’d forgotten about. When the three of us [Smith, Simon Gallup and Lol Tolhurst] got on, we really did get along. We were playing together constantly for three years and really connected. But it just fell apart. And for a couple of months, it really did upset me. At the time, I thought it was the end of the Cure. I really couldn’t see how I’d ever set foot in a studio again and went into hiding for two months. But gradually, I began to see that I’d grown up.
Todd Rundgren
Contender: A Wizard, A True Star (1973)
I had hit singles off of Something/Anything. While all that’s happening, my head has moved to a different place. I discovered psychedelic drugs. The result was focusing more on the wider internal musical landscape I had. With Sergeant Pepper, The Beatles were still writing songs, hanging them round a concept. I took it a step further and said, ‘It doesn’t even have to be songs.’ I threw out the rules. It’s supposed to represent a stream of consciousness, disordered and colourful.
Grace Slick
Contender: Jefferson Airplane – Surrealistic Pillow (1967)
The Airplane had played those songs a lot live and I'd played the songs I brought like “Somebody To Love” and “White Rabbit” with Great Society. There was also a purity about the record which is almost childlike. We weren't governed by the record company, there were no preconceptions and we weren't trying to sound like anybody else. In fact, I didn't know shit from shine which is probably why “White Rabbit” doesn't even have a chorus.
Jarvis Cocker
Contender: Pulp – "Common People" (1995)
I heard William Shatner’s version and I suppose, in a weird way, it’s an honour. I’m still pretty happy with our original. It doesn’t seem to have dated much and I’m still impressed with the energy of it. The basic idea was very quick. I’d bought this Casio keyboard with vouchers from the Record & Tape Exchange in Notting Hill, then went home and wrote the riff on it. To begin with, I wanted to write a song like Stereolab, but it didn’t quite work out like that. The Teletubbies wanted to do a version too. They wanted to make it into “wanna live like tubby people”, but me being the killjoy, I refused to give them permission. It wasn’t long after ours had come out, which was supposed to be a slightly revolutionary call to arms. So to suddenly have the Teletubbies jumping about to it would have killed it stone dead.
Mark E Smith
Contender: The Fall – Hex Enduction Hour (1982)
I’m dead proud of it. It still stands up, doesn’t it? No doubt about it. We recorded some of it in a cinema in Hitchin and the rest of it in Iceland. At the time, I seriously thought it would be the last Fall album. So I thought we should just go for the lot and give a big fuck-off to the music business. We just threw everything in there. The amazing thing was that it worked. Of course, we had problems getting it in the shops ‘cos the shop-keepers couldn’t handle the sleeve. They found it offensive for some reason. Shows how little they know. The best Fall album? It’s right up there.
David Crosby
Contender: If I Could Only Remember My Name (1971)
We’d been recording [CSNY’s] Déjà Vu, the girl I’d been going out with [Christine Hinton] had gotten killed and I was totally depressed. The only place I felt safe – where I knew what to do with myself – was in the studio. It was the only place I got to stop crying. A lot of the sound of that record has to do with the way we tuned it. If you tune by ear – by harmonics – something extra happens. You start to generate overtone structures. I tuned all the guitars myself to each other, not to a machine.
Kevin Godley
Contender: 10cc – "I’m Not In Love" (1975)
Was it the ultimate ‘70s pop record? It was certainly our ultimate ‘70s pop record. I was talking about this with Graham [Gouldman, 10cc bassist] the other day. What really annoys me is the way, whenever you ask anybody about the ‘70s they say The Sex Pistols, Queen, Bowie – never 10cc. And that may be because we weren’t as hip culturally as we were musically. We were faceless; we had no image. But on a purely musical level, we were up there with Roxy Music.
Ian McCulloch
Contender: Echo And The Bunnymen - Crocodiles (1979)
It’s quite a short, sharp, to-the-point album, and it zings like a bastard. It’s got a real spikiness. It’s zippy and it sounds like a group that were already slightly off their heads. It was after punk, and it adhered to the kind of sound or attitude of punk, but it had other influences going on - Bowie, The Doors, the Velvets. The name of the album sounds hip and cool. I think people liked the whole mystique of the band then. I do remember sitting in Rockfield listening back to Crocodiles thinking, “This is the best thing ever made.”
Russell Mael (Sparks)
Contender: "This Town Ain’t Big Enough For Both Of Us" (1974)
It was so atypical of the time. It wasn’t your usual verse-chorus-verse song. We’re proud of that fact. A lot of bands seem to enjoy the status quo of things, but we’ve always gone for the more provocative approach. “This Town…” tries to challenge the listener, to show what pop music is capable of. We did try and recruit Brian May around that time. We met up a few times, just before Queen had really broken through in the States. We were looking for a guitar player for Sparks and he gave it some thought. He was ruminating on it, but it wasn’t to be.
Roddy Frame
Contender: High Land Hard Rain (1983)
Looking back, trying to be objective, it’s a funny sounding record but the fact that I was so young when I made it is still quite remarkable for a lot of people. Everything I was listening to or reading at the time went into that album, whether it was On The Road, Wes Montgomery or whatever. But I was super lucky to have producers like John Brand and Bernie Clarke. They never once asked if I was making a jazz record or an acoustic record or even an indie record. They let it be what it was.
Martin Fry
Contender: ABC - The Lexicon Of Love (1982)
With The Lexicon Of Love, we wanted to distance ourselves from our peer group and rock and roll. We went for a very cosmopolitan feel and explored the whole notion of what glamour was. We wanted to go out and make a record that people listen to in both Buenos Aires and Bournemouth. The lyrics on the album are wordy, yet the sentiment was pure. On “The Look Of Love”, we tried to pull off Chic’s elegant simplicity. It has a bewitching quality that is beyond my involvement with it – and “Good Times” is exactly like that, too.
Interviews by Rob Hughes, Carol Clerk, Jon Wilde, Simon Goddard, Paul Moody, Nigel Williamson and Paul Lester
WIN the Uncut 100!
So - You've read the Uncut 100, and checked out the ones that didn't make it. Now's your chance to win the Uncut 100, as seen in the September, Collector's Edition of Uncut, in its entirety. Uncut has teamed up with HMV to offer our readers the ultimate rock'n'roll hamper. Quite simply, the music, movies, TV shows and books that shook the world - from Dylan to Bowie, from Scorsese to Peckinpah, from The Prisoner to Python, from Burroughs to Kerouac - delivered straight to your door courtesy of HMV.
This unique prize consists of 74 CDs, 22 DVDs and all four books in paperback. To win the only complete set of the Uncut 100, just answer the question below:
Here we present a handful of those who just missed out, each talking about a record of their own which, as Brando might say, "Coulda been a contender"…
Noel Gallagher
Contender: Oasis - Definitely Maybe (1994)
It was a great record then and it's a great record now. So many people come up to me and say how much it means to them: most recently Johnny from Razorlight, Brandon from The Killers. I'm not surprised. Fuckin' hell, how can you argue with it? “Rock'N'Roll Star”, “Supersonic”, “Columbia”, “Bring It On Down”. If it gets any better than that I'll have a heart attack! Even “Digsy's Dinners” got its place. Did it change anything? Well I don't know about laddism or any of that but it took our music out of the NME and the Melody Maker and back into the tabloids where it belongs. It felt like we were on a mission. It 'de-indie-ed' everything. After that record no one could continue with this underachieving bollocks of getting to number 32 and pretending to be pleased about it. It was the real deal. We hadn't had a music lesson in our lives and that's why it sounds so fuckin' good. Definitely Maybe got real rock'n'roll back into the mainstream, and to this day it's still unsurpassed.
Ozzy Ozbourne
Contender: Black Sabbath – "Paranoid" (1971)
It’s my anthem. Every time I play it onstage they all love it. The Kinks have got “You Really Got Me” and I’ve got “Paranoid”. The song was an accident. The Paranoid album was going to be called War Pigs - the sleeve had been printed. We had three and a half minutes to finish the album. Tony came up with the riff for “Paranoid”, Geezer gave me the lyric, and that was that then. As a co-writer, you can sit there for months and come up with Jack shit and then somebody will spark something and in, like, half a minute you’ll write an album.
Adam Ant
Contender: Kings Of The Wild Frontier (1980)
Kings… is my greatest contribution, no question. I’d just lost my band and had to get a new one quickly so I had the bit between my teeth. I was like, “look out for THIS!”. I was a man possessed. Myself and Marco [Pirroni] wrote it really quickly and just got it out there. Was I the Bolan of the ‘80s? That’s a very flattering comparison. It’s true we had a similar attitude to our singles, and the glamour, but Bolan was untouchable. It’s not for me to say.
John Martyn
Contender: Solid Air (1973)
That period for me was very fresh. It’s interesting – but difficult - to try to keep that same freshness. I’ve always thought the mass public have been slightly behind what I’m doing. And I don’t blame them. I still get the feeling sometimes that people want me to go out and do pop music, which isn’t my thing at all. The record company tried to make a hit single out of "May You Never", but it was never going to work. Solid Air has a very warm and very big feeling about it. In some ways, it’s ahead of its time.
Robert Smith
Contender: The Cure – Pornography (1982)
It was an incredibly aggressive period for us, which got very manic towards the end. I suppose Pornography is kind of the culmination of that. But there was also so much fun and chaos I’d forgotten about. When the three of us [Smith, Simon Gallup and Lol Tolhurst] got on, we really did get along. We were playing together constantly for three years and really connected. But it just fell apart. And for a couple of months, it really did upset me. At the time, I thought it was the end of the Cure. I really couldn’t see how I’d ever set foot in a studio again and went into hiding for two months. But gradually, I began to see that I’d grown up.
Todd Rundgren
Contender: A Wizard, A True Star (1973)
I had hit singles off of Something/Anything. While all that’s happening, my head has moved to a different place. I discovered psychedelic drugs. The result was focusing more on the wider internal musical landscape I had. With Sergeant Pepper, The Beatles were still writing songs, hanging them round a concept. I took it a step further and said, ‘It doesn’t even have to be songs.’ I threw out the rules. It’s supposed to represent a stream of consciousness, disordered and colourful.
Grace Slick
Contender: Jefferson Airplane – Surrealistic Pillow (1967)
The Airplane had played those songs a lot live and I'd played the songs I brought like “Somebody To Love” and “White Rabbit” with Great Society. There was also a purity about the record which is almost childlike. We weren't governed by the record company, there were no preconceptions and we weren't trying to sound like anybody else. In fact, I didn't know shit from shine which is probably why “White Rabbit” doesn't even have a chorus.
Jarvis Cocker
Contender: Pulp – "Common People" (1995)
I heard William Shatner’s version and I suppose, in a weird way, it’s an honour. I’m still pretty happy with our original. It doesn’t seem to have dated much and I’m still impressed with the energy of it. The basic idea was very quick. I’d bought this Casio keyboard with vouchers from the Record & Tape Exchange in Notting Hill, then went home and wrote the riff on it. To begin with, I wanted to write a song like Stereolab, but it didn’t quite work out like that. The Teletubbies wanted to do a version too. They wanted to make it into “wanna live like tubby people”, but me being the killjoy, I refused to give them permission. It wasn’t long after ours had come out, which was supposed to be a slightly revolutionary call to arms. So to suddenly have the Teletubbies jumping about to it would have killed it stone dead.
Mark E Smith
Contender: The Fall – Hex Enduction Hour (1982)
I’m dead proud of it. It still stands up, doesn’t it? No doubt about it. We recorded some of it in a cinema in Hitchin and the rest of it in Iceland. At the time, I seriously thought it would be the last Fall album. So I thought we should just go for the lot and give a big fuck-off to the music business. We just threw everything in there. The amazing thing was that it worked. Of course, we had problems getting it in the shops ‘cos the shop-keepers couldn’t handle the sleeve. They found it offensive for some reason. Shows how little they know. The best Fall album? It’s right up there.
David Crosby
Contender: If I Could Only Remember My Name (1971)
We’d been recording [CSNY’s] Déjà Vu, the girl I’d been going out with [Christine Hinton] had gotten killed and I was totally depressed. The only place I felt safe – where I knew what to do with myself – was in the studio. It was the only place I got to stop crying. A lot of the sound of that record has to do with the way we tuned it. If you tune by ear – by harmonics – something extra happens. You start to generate overtone structures. I tuned all the guitars myself to each other, not to a machine.
Kevin Godley
Contender: 10cc – "I’m Not In Love" (1975)
Was it the ultimate ‘70s pop record? It was certainly our ultimate ‘70s pop record. I was talking about this with Graham [Gouldman, 10cc bassist] the other day. What really annoys me is the way, whenever you ask anybody about the ‘70s they say The Sex Pistols, Queen, Bowie – never 10cc. And that may be because we weren’t as hip culturally as we were musically. We were faceless; we had no image. But on a purely musical level, we were up there with Roxy Music.
Ian McCulloch
Contender: Echo And The Bunnymen - Crocodiles (1979)
It’s quite a short, sharp, to-the-point album, and it zings like a bastard. It’s got a real spikiness. It’s zippy and it sounds like a group that were already slightly off their heads. It was after punk, and it adhered to the kind of sound or attitude of punk, but it had other influences going on - Bowie, The Doors, the Velvets. The name of the album sounds hip and cool. I think people liked the whole mystique of the band then. I do remember sitting in Rockfield listening back to Crocodiles thinking, “This is the best thing ever made.”
Russell Mael (Sparks)
Contender: "This Town Ain’t Big Enough For Both Of Us" (1974)
It was so atypical of the time. It wasn’t your usual verse-chorus-verse song. We’re proud of that fact. A lot of bands seem to enjoy the status quo of things, but we’ve always gone for the more provocative approach. “This Town…” tries to challenge the listener, to show what pop music is capable of. We did try and recruit Brian May around that time. We met up a few times, just before Queen had really broken through in the States. We were looking for a guitar player for Sparks and he gave it some thought. He was ruminating on it, but it wasn’t to be.
Roddy Frame
Contender: High Land Hard Rain (1983)
Looking back, trying to be objective, it’s a funny sounding record but the fact that I was so young when I made it is still quite remarkable for a lot of people. Everything I was listening to or reading at the time went into that album, whether it was On The Road, Wes Montgomery or whatever. But I was super lucky to have producers like John Brand and Bernie Clarke. They never once asked if I was making a jazz record or an acoustic record or even an indie record. They let it be what it was.
Martin Fry
Contender: ABC - The Lexicon Of Love (1982)
With The Lexicon Of Love, we wanted to distance ourselves from our peer group and rock and roll. We went for a very cosmopolitan feel and explored the whole notion of what glamour was. We wanted to go out and make a record that people listen to in both Buenos Aires and Bournemouth. The lyrics on the album are wordy, yet the sentiment was pure. On “The Look Of Love”, we tried to pull off Chic’s elegant simplicity. It has a bewitching quality that is beyond my involvement with it – and “Good Times” is exactly like that, too.
Interviews by Rob Hughes, Carol Clerk, Jon Wilde, Simon Goddard, Paul Moody, Nigel Williamson and Paul Lester
WIN the Uncut 100!
So - You've read the Uncut 100, and checked out the ones that didn't make it. Now's your chance to win the Uncut 100, as seen in the September, Collector's Edition of Uncut, in its entirety. Uncut has teamed up with HMV to offer our readers the ultimate rock'n'roll hamper. Quite simply, the music, movies, TV shows and books that shook the world - from Dylan to Bowie, from Scorsese to Peckinpah, from The Prisoner to Python, from Burroughs to Kerouac - delivered straight to your door courtesy of HMV.
This unique prize consists of 74 CDs, 22 DVDs and all four books in paperback. To win the only complete set of the Uncut 100, just answer the question below:
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