While the global pandemic of 2020/21 was something of an inconvenience to the many people who have died, it did have some benefits for others of us. For example, like many people I learned I could do pretty much all of my job from my home with very little detriment to my productivity whatsoever, and therefore swap the couple of hours a day I spent sat in a queue of cars for other things, like ‘eating dinner with my family’. I could also make use of the fine audio gear I have in my house to properly enjoy some music while I am working, rather than sitting hunched over my laptop wearing a mediocre pair of headphones. I therefore decided to do something I had wanted to do for a long time, which was to work through, chronologically, every album in the excellent reference book ‘1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die‘. Back when I was younger I was keen to explore as much new music as possible, but I have very noticeably got set in my ways in my dotage. Spotify would have blown my mind when I was younger, and I’m sure I would have been using the curated playlists and so on to constantly expand my horizons. These days if I want to listen to something I generally just put Dark Side of the Moon on again. So the idea of going through the book here is to break that pattern and pick up on the genuinely great stuff which I have missed.

The version of 1001 Albums I will be working with is this one, from 2011:

This is the version on my bookshelf. There are earlier and later editions with slightly different lists of albums, with the majority of the changes coming at the back end of the book.

When I started this, I was doing a post per album, but I’m not a blogger at heart and so I found that tedious to maintain. I’ve therefore moved those posts into a table format. Let’s see if I do better with that.

• Albums 1 – 50
• Albums 51-101